Some people hate blogging. They view it as some sort of medieval torture, designed solely to frustrate them and waste time that could have been spent on more productive endeavors. Of course, the implication of this mindset is that blogging is not productive. Are these people right? Is blogging just a waste of time? Or do they just refuse to blog because they thought that senior year English in high school was the last time they’d be writing anything longer than an email?
The fact is that if you keep your nose to the grindstone and crank out regular, quality blogs, your efforts will be rewarded. But how?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Quality blogs help your website improve its ranking on search engines.
- Keywords – If you are blogging on your website, chances are that even without a coherent SEO strategy, you are using the same keywords that you would want your website to rank for in your blogs. For example, if you are a high end clothing retailer, you probably are writing blogs about the various fashion weeks around the world and about the new styles for the upcoming season, all the while mentioning keywords like “high fashion,” “quality fabrics,” and “winter styles.” As these keywords accumulate, search engines will begin to recognize you as a relevant website for searches containing those terms.
- Fresh content – Blogging demonstrates to search engines that your website is consistently being updated with new content. Search engines are less likely to display pages that have not been updated recently because their content is probably not as relevant as a site that does receive regular updates. So you can enjoy skipping over your less web-savvy competition just by adding more quality content to your website.
- Sending social signals – If you are writing quality content, chances are that the people who read it will be more likely to share it on their social network(s) of choice. These shares are considered “social signals” by search engines, and the trend is that social signals carry more and more weight with each search engine update. Short version: quality content leads to social shares, which are social signals, which boost your rankings.
Social Growth
Quality content is one of the keys to tapping into your social audience. As I mentioned before, if people like your content (which they will if it is quality content), they will share it with their friends and comment on it, on your site and on social media. Forget the SEO implications; this engagement starts conversations on your social pages and leads to follower growth and increased conversions.
Continuing Education
Being an expert in your industry is not something that once attained, lasts forever. Expertise is an ongoing process of staying on top of your industry, hearing the latest news, and increasing your knowledge base. Blogging forces you to go out and research topics that you need to brush up on and helps keep you on top of your game. Without blogging, we can often become too caught up in the every day minutia to read the news and educate ourselves. Blogging gives you a reason to stay ahead of the curve.
Increased Authority
Even if you have neither received the traffic on your blogs, the boost in your search engine rankings, nor the growth and engagement on social networks, you still have a wealth of content that proves to anyone who sees it that you are an expert in your industry. Let’s say you hand out a few business cards at a networking event and a few of those people take the time to check out your website. If they read a few of your blogs, they will form their own opinions of you, regardless of what social networks and search engines think of you.
Blogs are a powerful tool and a worthwhile endeavor for almost any website, so the next time someone tells you that blogging is a waste of your time, just shoot them this link and I’d be happy to tell them otherwise.
