25 Reasons Why You Should Have a Blog Now

If you are hosting an ecommerce web site, a web site for an organization, or even a personal web site, creating a blog is the first thing you should be doing to get more traffic to your site, make more sales, and make your site more relevant. If you haven’t set up a blog for your website, and you aren’t getting the kind of response that you want, setting up a blog is the fastest and cheapest way to get results. Even if your web site is built using a free site builder from a cheap web hosting company, you can set up a blog.  Especially if you are new to the Internet, a blog is the fastest way that you create an Internet presence for yourself. Creating a blog is so important, in fact, there are at least twenty five reasons why you should have a blog now.

1. You don’t need any coding or technical skills to start a blog. If you don’t know anything about HTML, PHP, ASP, MySQL, or SEO, how are you going to do anything but publish your web site and hope for the best? By starting a blog, you get many of the benefits of dynamic web pages and linking, but without having to learn any computer languages or web technology.
   
2. Start a blog and stay relevant. If you have a blog, you have to write about something every day. This is a great way of forcing yourself to stay current with your industry or your cause.
3. Add content on a regular basis. New content in a blog on a continual basis encourages regular visitors to come to your site more often to see what is going on and what you have to say.
   
4. Having a blog humanizes your site. A blog let everyone know that there is a real person that works on the sight everyday and they identify with that.
5. Discuss your latest offerings. You can use your blog to talk about new services and products that you are providing, or if you are having a sale or special offers.
6. Search engines like fresh content. A blog with fresh content makes your site attractive to search engines, and more likely that when people look for services you offer that you will show up in their searches.
7. Blog content can be used in other places like press releases and article submissions sites. This saves you from hiring someone to write content for you when you are ready to get into Search Engine Optimization.
   
8. When you write a blog, you have to talk about the benefits of your product, not just give a continual sales pitch. This helps you and your site become an authority on what you sell, and other sites will want to link to you. Back links are the best way to improve your rankings.
   
9. Blogging everyday helps you remember about everything that you know on a subject. Until you write down everything that you about something in one place, you tend to forget about how much there is to know about what you sell or do.
10. Blogging is reflective of the new way that business is being done. New surveys suggest that more customers are finding their suppliers, not the other way around. Many more buyers are finding sellers through keyword searches than they are through the unsolicited emails they get. Fresh content with relevant keywords will keep you at the top of the search engines better than anything else.
11. A blog lets potential customers get to know you as a merchant better than any promises you might make on your web site. People are much more likely to do business with someone that shares their ideas than a web site with a generic sales pitch.
12. You don’t need to invest in any expensive software to blog. Even if you have to use the free sitebuilder from a cheap web hosting company because you can’t afford FrontPage, it will still have the software to set up a blog. This is why the blogging capabilities of the site builder are one of the features you should look for when you sign up for a low cost web hosting company.
13. Blogging helps set your web site apart from others through branding. If there are one hundred different sites selling the same thing you are, you have to let customers know why you are different. Blogging is the perfect way to develop your own brand and let customers know why they should buy from you.
14. You can turn your blog into a book. If you are a professional contractor like a florist, dog groomer, plumber, writer, web developer, teacher, or anyone who freelances, you can take a blog that you’ve been writing everyday and turn it into a book and make money selling it.
15. Interact with your customers directly. Blogs are a great place for potential customers to ask questions and for you to show off your expertise on the products you sell or the ideas that you are promoting.
16. Blogging is a great way to open up new possibilities. Many web developers and other professionals get job offers from the daily blogs they write. Remember, most people now use the search engines to find everything they are looking for, including new employees.
17. A blog establishes a written history of what you have accomplished. If your business becomes slow, turns sour, or you lose your way, you can always go back to your blog and look at where you went wrong and what you did right. A blog will help keep you on the correct path and get you back on track if you lose sight of your goals.
18. A blog can establish you as an industry leader. If you are always expressing your opinion and giving out advice, you can become an authority and a leader in your field. If you establish a loyal following, you become a voice for your industry, and eventually other industry leaders will seek you out for your opinions.
19. A blog is a natural linking device. Daily entries link to one another through key words and subject matter. They also can be linked to pages on your site. Even free site builders from the cheap web hosting companies allow you to link pages within your web site. Search engines love the organized, organic, and structured content that blogs naturally lend themselves to, and this is all done automatically, without organizing any site navigation or learning to write any HTML code.
20. Blogs are short and to the point, but they are great for turning into content that you can post to your web site. Hiring content writers can be expensive, and you never know what kind of content you are going to wind up with; and you may not have time to write content on your own. However, it is easy to turn blog posts into content, just by expanding on an idea. If you are diligent about blogging, you can turn your site into a massive resource with more than a hundred pages of content.
21. Get feedback from users by allowing comments. If you have a site where the theme is specific and you have loyal following, let your visitors start posting their opinions on your web site. People love to see their opinions in print and if you have a specific subject for your site – suggest a topic for visitors to write about with a few of your keywords in the questions. You’ll get other people to generate keyword-rich, fresh content for your site for free! Before you do this however, just make sure that the people you invite to write are sincere and have honorable intentions.
22. People like to link to blog posts if they are relevant to them. If you let others blog on your site, they will also probably want to point links to your site so that their viewers can read what they have said on other sites like yours, thus establishing themselves as an authority as well. This is a great way to get inbound links to your site and a wider audience.
23. Blogging can sharpen your writing skills. If you have never written before, you may have zero confidence as a writer. Paying professional writers to express you opinion for you is always going to sound ‘salesy’ and preplanned. Writing a blog is like a conversation. It doesn’t have to be anything prolific or incredibly formal. If you want to get started as a writer, blogging is the perfect forum. You might even surprise yourself at how professional you are or how much you know. Writing a blog will also help you develop your own voice and an authentic sales pitch.
24. Blogging puts you in touch with the people you work with. If you have employees, suppliers, fellow vendors, or even if you work for someone else, people will get a sense of what you are about and come to know firsthand what they can expect from you through your blog.
25. Blogging in and of itself can earn you money. There are many ways to do this, including getting paid to talk about other products in your blog. Some people even go on to become professional bloggers- getting paid to write their opinion on just about anything. This may not be your end goal with regards to using blogging as a marketing tool, but it just goes to show how powerful blogging is and how it can be used to promote almost anything.

These are just 25 reasons to think of blogging.  There are plenty of other reasons to to enter the blogoshpere.  Perhaps you can think of some others as you start working on your blog.