Blog Your Way to Web Success & Have Fun Doing It!

Author:  Amy Armitage

As you probably guess by now, I’m a huge blog fan.  I subscribe to a bunch of them, write on Lunartics as often as I can, and they have sooooooo many wonderful uses!  Blogs are a great way to create site stickiness, providing visitors with a reason to come back time after time. Blogs can be used for lots of different reasons but all of them help a site owner’s chances for web success… that’s what all webmasters want?  Right?

Blog: Build Your Site Community
In the age of Web 2.0, the interactive, personalized web site has become the norm. Visitors no longer sit passively in front of their flat screen monitors. They participate. They contribute. They personalize their on-line experiences. Don’t believe it? Check out myspace, facebook and any other large “me” site and you’ll see that blogs draw in people. Your site blog, updated regularly, provides visitors with the opportunity to learn and post their personal reactions and opinions regarding blog posts. It provides them with an opportunity to become a member of your site community and share with people who have similar interests.

Blog: Listen to Your Customers
Blogs also provide visitors with an opportunity to complain, make suggestions and offer advice on how to improve their on-site experiences. It’s one of the most effective means of collecting useful marketing data. After all, if a visitor took the time to write, that’s a visitor likely to return. Think of it as a suggestion box for site improvement.

Blog: User-Generated Content and Search Engines 
Search engines look for “green” content – fresh information, news and other features of use to search engine clients. Each time your site is spidered, a snapshot is taken and can be seen in the cached view within search engine results pages (SERPs). If a spider comes along (about every 48 hours) and sees that your site hasn’t changed content in weeks or months, you lose points. But new content is expensive when you hire professional writers to create it.

However, it’s free if users provide fresh content. Blogs provide the space for visitors to add content to your site, keeping it “green” all year long.

Blog: Keep Visitors Informed
Blogs are simple to add to an existing site. In fact, good web hosts (like Lunarpages) provide blogging software as part of their monthly subscription fee. All site owners have to do is download the blogging service, make a few posts and they’ve got an active blog completely under their control. We offer Fantastico with loads of options for our webmasters.

Posting to a blog is as simple as cut-and-paste which means you can post information of interest to your target market, announcing upcoming events, sales, new products and new site features as they’re developed.

You don’t have to add a blog to your site, but if you don’t, you’re missing out on a great marketing opportunity – one that will keep them coming back day after day just to see what’s new.

Blog today. See bottom line growth tomorrow. (And it’s uber fun too!)