How a Blog Can Boost Your Website Traffic
In the first post of this series I showed you how blogs generate indirect profits, publicity and leads for businesses. Let’s take a look at how.
A primary motivation for anyone to set up a business website is to gain visibility. They want people to visit. Blogs are well suited to achieving this.
How Blogs Generate Traffic
Blogs develop more visitors through
- search visibility – blogs are usually right out of the box quite well organised to be search engine friendly. With some tweaks they rock 🙂 Plus the more content you have (well-linked) the more chances there are of attracting search traffic.
- click-through traffic – through posting interesting articles a blog gives a reason for other people to link to you. Think about the links you create, are you more likely to create links more often to a business homepage or an interesting blog post?
- social media – how many times do you see a company homepage linked on the front page of Digg? Then consider how many articles and blog posts you see …
- stickiness – regularly updated content and comments bring visitors back … and back … and back
- personality – create a blog in your own image and let your personality shine through and people will be attracted to you. People like to associate with people they like. It’s hard to make friends with a business but easy to warm to an individual with a welcoming personality.
- viral effects – you create something cool and visitors tell their friends, who tell their friends, who … well, you get the idea
- authority/credibility – we will go into this in the next post of this series, but consider this, what happens when everybody links to you when discussing a certain topic?
There is nothing to stop a plain old website from having any of these attributes, but blogs make it far easier. Why make life hard for yourself?
A single post on this blog generated over 20,000 visitors. This blog is not very old, how many visitors will it generate over a year, two years, five? All for free. A one-off piece of work that creates its own traffic every day forever. Nice, eh?
Once you have a steady flow of visitors then you really need to do something with this raised visibility. There are two things you will want to do, the first is grow your profile, trust and credibility. After that most people would want to sell them something.
Check back for the next part in this series to learn more about how your blog visibility can be used to create a greater and more magnetic “fame” for you and your business.
