Thanks to Christina Hills for posting the following on her blog. I thought I would share it with my audience as well.
Here is a very short video clip from Seth Godin and Tom Peters (both best selling authors) on why you need to be blogging now. And you’ll be very surprised to hear what they say. It’s not the typical ‘Internet Marketing’ talk. Instead it sums up one of the reason’s why I feel it’s important for you to blog (and to be posting to Twitter)
Happy new year, everyone! Making any new year’s resolutions? Wondering if your business could benefit from a resolution for you to start blogging? Here’s a few questions to ask yourself.
Can I write once a week?
If you can’t blog at least once a week, don’t bother. One thing worse than no blog at all is a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. After all, if the last blog entry someone sees is six months old, how do they even know your business is still around?
Keep in mind that you can write several blog entries at once, then schedule them to be published once a week, or more often even.
Do I have something interesting to say?
You can write every day for a whole year, but if you aren’t interesting to your current and potential customers, there’s not much point. The ultimate point is to keep current customers and/or get new ones. So if they aren’t interested, don’t bother.
Can I stick with it with no encouragement whatsoever?
So you’re writing once a week and have some interesting things to say. But you’re getting no feedback. No one is posting comments, no one is emailing you to tell you they loved your latest blog post.
Cry me a river.
The general rule of thumb is that 1% of visitors to a website will be an active participant in some way. So you may have 99 readers, but no one is commenting. You may have 99 readers, but no one is telling you that they loved your great blog post. Just because you’re not getting many comments does not mean you should stop posting.
And when you do get that first comment or first email, celebrate! That means there are probably 99 other people thouroughly enjoying your blog posts that just haven’t bothered to tell you so.
So if you can write something interesting at least once a week and stick with it, you should be blogging for your business! It will allow your website visitors to feel like they know you, making them that much more likely to do business with you.
There are basically two ways to get listed in search engines. You can pay to be listed (sort of, I’ll explain in a bit), or you can optimize your website to appear higher in the listings.
One good analogy to explain the difference is to look at the websites like books in a bookstore.
Paid Listings
With the modern search engines, you can have a paid listing, though you’re technically don’t pay to be listed. Instead of paying every time your ad is shown, you only pay every time your ad is clicked on. This system is referred to as pay per click, or PPC. This does not involve ranking, but involves bidding on keywords and key phrases.
The image to the right shows some paid advertisements highlighted. You can see that they’re in a different position than the “normal” search engine listings.
This option is similar to a publisher paying a bookstore to have a display up front. In our hypothetical situation, a publisher could arrange with a bookstore for the store to be paid every time a book is sold, but not pay for the display itself.
Optimizing Your Website
The “natural” way to get your website listed in search engines is to just have good content that gets picked up for specific words and phrases. Maybe you set out with those specific phrases in mind and write your content with the goal of being listed for those phrases. That’s what we refer to as optimizing your website, though there’s a bit more to it than that. This is the option that involves search engine rankings.
You can see in the image to the left that the natural listings are highlighted. These make up the majority of the search results pages.
This option is similar to a book being written to be appealing to readers, and hitting the best seller list. It’s a self-feeding cycle. The more people that read it, the more people hear about it and want to read it. So they buy it and read it, and the cycle continues when they tell their friends.
Which Is Better?
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. However, you can do some optimizing yourself without spending a lot of money, simply by blogging. There are a couple of guidelines to keep in mind, though.
If you have the budget and it’s really important to you, you should probably try both of them. However, you should track which of the two produced more (and better) traffic, and then shift your spending so you spend more money there.