And if you didn’t recognize that obscure reference to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, well shame on you. Or shame on me for being what my blog pal Howard calls “punny”.
I was sitting here deciding how to proceed with the free traffic methods. I really had every intention of not bringing the topic of blogs up again until my newest book about them comes out next week. Because with all the research I’ve done on getting traffic to a blog, I’m plum sick of them.
But that doesn’t really matter. From monitoring my feed stats, I’m seeing that you are absolutely wild over more ways to get free traffic to your blog, finding out whether you should blog, and all that fun stuff. So I’m putting together a short reference guide today, for all my major posts about blogging that would be of interest to you.
Before we get into that, let’s talk turkey. Those of you who aren’t ready to wade into the Blog pool were originally taking your time for one reason and one reason only, according to my informal interviews with people before and after they blog.
But recently I’ve found that there are subsets of the cause, and that there are actually three reasons.
Reason # 1 that you aren’t blogging – You don’t realize how huge the benefits are, and how much they may outweigh any monetary or time cost.
I think that’s partly the fault of people like me, who have a foot in the marketing arena, and don’t explain the idea properly. We tend to tell you how great blogging is, but we don’t tell you why. We tell you how to get the best results with your blog, but don’t tell you where to start. It’s part of the reason I updated my book, but let’s just talk about some of the basic facts.
If you’ve ever dreamed of going from getting 10 hits a month to getting 100 visitors a month from search engines, blogging can make it possible, if you do it right. The structure of a blog, and the fact that most of them automatically generate news feeds, make them the best food for your friendly neighborhood search engine spider.
If you would like to have visitors come back to your site over and over again, until they buy, you may want to be a blogger. An informative blog that engages your audience shortens the sales cycle. It also creates a courtship period. They can subscribe to your thoughts, see if they like you, get to know you a little.
People buy from people they like. And that’s all there is to it.
If your visitors don’t feel like they are getting a personality vibe from you, they are less likely to buy. Vibe=buy. Remember that. Blogs make it easy for you to vibe.
If you’d like to create new targeted search engine pages for your site without needing to hand-code a new page, or fire up Dreamweaver every time, you may enjoy blogging. You log in to your blog admin panel, type your thoughts, proofread, press publish.
If you’d like free one-way links back to your site that contain your lucrative keywords, blogging helps with that too.
Even if you’ve made a mess of your SEO efforts, as long as you aren’t banned by a search engine, blogging can help bring you back into top results. Because they have a search-engine-friendly architecture, and make use of your keywords automatically, without being gratuitous, they are an easy way to get into a search engine and stay in.
Reason #2 That you aren’t blogging – You think it’s hard.
Granted, especially if you’re busy, or have a medium sized to large business, it may be in your best interest to hire one of the few consultants that works on these types of issues. But if you’re a small business owner or home business owner with an online element, you can get away with firing up a free blog and paying for an inexpensive custom template if you can’t install one on your own. Most blog consultants will do all the keyword research, etc for you, so all you’ll have to do is log in and blog.
And your blog posts don’t have to be long article-type entries like mine are. I’m used to writing articles, and I’m just naturally verbose. Your audience will be happy with a few paragraphs every day, particularly if you’re in an niche market.
Reason #3 That you aren’t blogging – You don’t think of yourself as a writer.
Not only can you get away with a few paragraphs, you don’t have to write in professional-speak, or use industry jargon to blog. By nature, blogging is done in a casual, conversational tone.
My next post will be the reference guide with links to most of the major blog Related Posts I’ve done.
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