Why businesses should have a blog on their websites
Before I started my blog, I had my website www.jeffkee.com up for well over a year. It was more of a presentation site where I had my portfolio set up, and I would get my potential clients to visit my site to see my work. In any case, I didn’t even bother trying to beat all the other websites up there that are optimized to searches like “Web Design in Vancouver”. It’s such a tough competition that it’s not worth my time optimizing for it, especially when most of my business relies on referrals anyways. On average I had under 30 visits a day tops. And most of it was probably me going on there to change things or double check things. And I know that some of my clients go there to check other designs out to get ideas.
In any case. www.jeffkee.com was a website that relied on people to be pushed to visit, and I never expected to generate business solely through the website. I think I got 1 phonecall through my website alone, and that didn’t even go anywhere. But that all may change now.
However, since I started running my blog, the blog traffic was phenomenal (I average over 500 visitors now to my blog per day) and it had a domino effect on my generic website. Here is the screencap.
My traffic to www.jeffkee.com went from 28 visitors in January to 110 a day in February so far, and it will probably keep increasing at this moment.
Here’s how it works :
- You create a blog, and integrate it within your existing business site. You’re looking at an example right now.
- Optimize the blog. All of these posts talk about improving blog traffic through SEO optimization and good blogging practices.
- As people become active on your blog, you generate more traffic to your own site, which is integrated with the blog anyhow (I’ll write a future post regarding the usage of Wordpress as your CMS entirely on a website).
- Watch the traffic grow. More exposure is good, especially for certain types of businesses. Who knows? One of these people might call you and do some business, or buy your goods (whatever your website may be about…)
This is why I pitch having a blog as a great marketing tool for many types of websites.
Here is my course of action - as soon as I have some serious time to devote (right now I’m swamped with design jobs and website projects etc. for clients) I will re-do my entire web design to a brand-new fresh look with simplicity and clean looks in mind, and I will attempt to generate more business through my website as an example.
wow, everytime you post about your doings and accomplishments, I get inspired to work on seo. To tell you the truth my site gets almost 0 visitors from the search engines a day. On average I’ll get maybe 2.
What does that say? Yesterday I pulled in 243 unique visitors. All through links. Those have been the pipelines I’ve been working on but I really would like a good seo strategy to follow.
I’ve used my own tools to find keyword strengths and which keywords were getting a lot of traffic per month. One set of keywords seems very easy to climb to #1 but completely 100% not relevant to what I’m doing. Should I still capture this obscure market? It would be a kind of embarassing post to use those keywords.
What’s your advice?
Try my advice on SEQR perhaps? Focus on a niche you COULD achieve, as long as it doesn’t get too out of your directions.
The beauty of a blog is that there’s flexibility.. look at my posts, and look at John Chow’s blog. It ranges sooo much in topics, that you can sort of pull it off.
Also, ALWAYS digg your own articles. The first digg takes a lot more work to categorize/submit. So do it for people. Most others will not bother unless they feel they NEED to digg it, which is rare. Let your articles show up on Digg for at least 10 minutes (or less) under the “Upcoming” section and it will get more exposure.
Also try signing up with buzzbums (link is on my sidebar with the technorati/mybloglog bars).
one niche I’ve found are pizza toppings. I can hear laughter already, but the amount of searches done for pizza toppings is crazy. And the chances of getting #1 is great if not easy.
I didn’t think about that with the digg, you’re right about work, nobody wants to spend that time. They just want to click the button.
Buzzbums traffic has really dropped, the banner isn’t on Chows site anymore.
But I will have to venture out and capture some SE traffic.
Buzzbums, unfortunately, seemed to be the most poorly organized weblog link I’ve seen in a while. It appeared that they had to manually qualify you, and all it ever did was display the top 10.
Now that they’re not paying for the banner on John Chow’s site anymore, I guess they’re useless.
I think I mentioned in a previous post that I’m reviewing the buzzbums thing too.