Summary: Start a blog if…
- you want links to your site or want to engage your visitors;
- you have something relevant to say – information, advice, tips to share; and
- you have the time to keep your blog up to date.
A blog is a website started by an individual or business, which contains posts – ideas, thoughts, articles – which readers can usually rate and/or comment on. Ordinarily the most recent posts will appear at the top of the blog.
Blogs are different from websites because they’re generally more informal, and they include community type elements – like being able to comment on or rate posts, and an RSS feed allowing the content to be shared to other websites/publications.
Who are bloggers?
Based on 2009 figures:
- 72% of people blog for a hobby with about half of those saying that they blog ‘to express their personal musings’.
- 15% of people blog part time to supplement their income
- 9% are self employed – some blogging for their company or organisation
- 4% of people blog full time for a company or organisation
- Bloggers are high educated and affluent
- Two thirds are male
- 60% are between the age of 18 and 44
- Most have three or four blogs
You may be thinking of starting a blog because you have lots of interesting information or industry knowledge that you want to share with other people. Or perhaps you’re looking for quality links to your own website. The internet is playing an increasing role in providing people with information to help them make better choices. A blog is your opportunity to do just that. People are looking for advice, feedback and input into their decisions. You can engage your visitors and potential customers with relevant, interesting content in your business area of expertise. Blogs give you the opportunity to make your opinion heard and to get your knowledge out there for the benefit of other people.
It’s not surprising that top bloggers can be extremely influential. Further, it will come as no surprise that sometimes news hits blogs far quicker than it hits news sites. Newspapers and other traditional information sources often turn to blogs as a source of their information.
You can harness these trends by either creating a blog as a separate site for regularly updated content which perhaps links back to your main site, or creating a blog on your main site. The advantage of the former is the ability to get quality links with anchor text of your choice back to your website. The advantage of the latter is that you can attract people to your site to discuss wants and needs, and the open forum increases a trust and belief in your brand, product or service. It also demonstrates that you’re interested in what people have to say about your product and you welcome feedback.
How much time should I devote to my blog?
Most SEO experts will agree that 2-3 posts per week minimum is necessary to build up a decent blog. How long should the posts be? Well, to get peoples’ interest, naturally you need good content that they can read, enjoy and interact with. Viperchill did an assessment on the most popular posts across social media sites and here’s what they came up with: http://www.viperchill.com/blog-post-length/. There’s no hard and fast rule as to how long your posts should be but it would appear that the most popular posts are a little longer than you might expect. This is probably because it’s hard to engage someone with 200-300 words – a bit more is required to make good content! Having said that, you don’t want to fill your posts with waffle, and it’s natural (if you look at top blogs) for some to be quite short, some to be quite long.
If you use a system like Wordpress, you can write all your posts in one go and schedule them to be released over a period of time (e.g. a week or two weeks) without having to go back to your site and manually publish them.
So… should I blog?
There are millions of blogs – quite literally – which are set up and then ditched. There are more still where people just write any random thought that comes into their head. These kind of blogs don’t add any value to the web or to internet users’ experience. So yes, blog – if you want links to your site or want to engage your visitors, if you have something relevant to say – information, advice, tips to share for example – and you have the time to keep your blog up to date.
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