This Ain’t Your Nephew’s Blog

Blogs, schmogs. My nephew blogs. They’re for kids. Why does my company website need a blog? This string of unfiltered comments is a realistic example of the response I receive when spewing the virtues of business blogs.

While many smart and intelligent businesspeople question the purpose of blogs, they do server a tangible purpose and they are important to the overall success of a corporate website. The most common misperception is that blogs are solely written and read by the teen set or worse, by unsocial computer nerds who blog about topics no one ever reads. This thought process is 100% incorrect.

Quality blogs provide information to website visitors. Such blogs help communicate a company’s brand, product, or service offering in a less formal manner that is very similar to a discussion or conversation. They are snippets of content that help educate and communicate to potential prospects or existing customers. They are extremely valuable to overall Internet marketing if written in the correct manner. That being said, they are not a platform to write unending examples of how your product or service or company is the best thing since sliced bread. If you do this, no reader will stay with your blog for more than a few seconds.

In addition to providing website visitors with relevant information, blogs help provide fresh website content for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Google likes blogs – plain and simple. Blogs help drive search engine traffic and they are worth every effort put forth into the writing and posting of content.

I have officially been a blogger for the last few years. I will admit, I was also skeptical of blogs. Not long after starting my humble blog, I was amazed at how quickly my subscribers (people who sign up for automatic updates on your blog entries) went from zero to thousands. I was even more amazed when I went to an industry event and someone I did not know, thought he knew me. He was positive he knew me actually. After a few hours of interaction, my new/old friend realized how he know me – or at least the virtual me. He was a faithful reader of my blog. Then to my complete and utter surprise, he then proceeded to inform me of his favorite blog posts. I was bewildered and baffled. And at that fateful moment, I became a true believer in blogging.

So for various reasons, I have continued to blog and continued to see the benefits of blogging. I have found prospects and true qualified leads through my blog. It has helped my Google ranking and it has helped create a virtual persona for me amongst my peers.