Blogging – An Effective Way
to Grow Your Business

If you aren’t blogging, why aren’t you? If you don’t know what it means– or how to do it–it’s time to learn. And I’m here to teach you!

What is Blogging anyway?

Blogging is an amazing way for you to share information about your business (or any other subject), state your opinions, and best of all, increase traffic to your website or local store. Blogging for business is a very effective SEO technique and often helps with building your online business.

A blog can be anything you want it to be. What makes it different than a regular website is in the fact that blogs are more of an ongoing conversation with the internet public, that is updated regularly.

The first blogs started as a way for people to record their visits to different websites that they liked or disliked. The early blogs were people discussing the interesting things they found online and then linking to those sites. These evolved into a sort of personal diary for some people. Take a look at The Confessions of a Pioneer Woman  for someone who has done a great job of using her own personal experiences, photography, recipes, etc and is making money doing it.

She has a regular following of loyal readers. And you can too. Once people start enjoying or learning from what you write, the chances are good that they’ll return again and again. As you increase your content, and learn the few tricks necessary to optimize a blog for the search engines, you’ll begin getting higher and higher rankings.

And if you have advertisements on your blog, or links to products on another website, you can generate some good passive income. But what most e-commerce and gift company owners do when creating a blog is use it as a sales pitch for their own business. . . and this can be a waste of time.

How Can Blogging Help My Business?

Blogging is a way to build customer following and loyalty by personalizing your business and keeping the internet public informed about all the new and exciting things going on with your company. Blogs are also great marketing tools but only if the the content is designed to BENEFIT the reader, rather than solely to advertise a product or service. Blogging provides another opportunity for people to find your site. Often times when people are looking for a product or service, they will FIRST look for information concerning the subject.

Blogging isn’t difficult. And it isn’t expensive. As a matter of fact, there are websites that offer free blogs for you to set up. Blogger.com and WordPress.com are two of the most popular ones. If you’ve never blogged before, this might be a good way to get your feet wet but there are excellent reasons not to use the free blogging services if you’re really serious about using a blog to build your business. We’ll talk about those reasons in a later post.

Having said that, you might want to just go ahead and get your feet wet by starting your first blog on one of the free blogging platforms. This will help you learn the techniques and develop the ability to develop content on a regular basis. By regular, I mean at a minimum of two to three times a week.

This isn’t my first blog. I learned by developing several others that weren’t nearly as successful as this one. Then I got serious about it and decided that I would create one the right way and add content regularly. That’s when I went looking for resources that would teach me what I needed to know. There are some technical (not hard, just things you need to know) things that can make a big difference in how effective a blog will be. I’m not an expert by any means and am still learning.

But throughout the coming weeks and months, I’ll be sharing some of this information with you.

So, if you want to step up to the next level and build your business with blogging, come back regularly as we begin stacking the building blocks to blogging success. Shortly, I will be compiling all the information that I’ve learned into an ebook that will be available for download. And, if you want to really get that blogging horse out of the starting gate and get a head start towards the finish line, start that first blog today and learn as you go.