Does Your Business Or Website Need A Blog?

There are many benefits to adding a blog to an existing website. Many people realize this, and there are hundreds of thousands of blogs, with many more being added daily. Whilst a good percentage of these may be personal blogs, many of them also belong to savvy webmasters.

So, here are the benefits of blogging:

• It's very easy to add fresh content to blogs. Most good blog platforms, such as Wordpress, even have a feature where you can email your blog post and it is automatically added! You don't have to log in to the admin area at all! This makes it easy to add content when you are on holidays, or away from home for any reason.
  
  
• You don't need any special website design knowledge to create a blog. There are templates available, and many services that will adjust them to give you a unique look and feel if you don't feel confident modifying the template yourself.
  
  
• Blogs provide another way of getting traffic to your website. Good blog platforms automatically create what is called an RSS feed to help distribute your blog content. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and this feed allows you the opportunity to post a link to your site (the feed address) on a high ranking, well-trafficked RSS or Blog Directory. Once you've done this, every time you update your blog, these directories are notified (by what is called a ping), and they update your feed on their site. If you update your blog regularly, it is given greater exposure. And many webmasters add RSS feeds to their site, so there's a chance you will benefit from that traffic as well.
  
  
• Each new blog post creates a new page of content. If you optimize your blog posts, and follow basic search engine optimization rules, you may get good traffic from the search engines too.
  
  
• Blogs help create 'stickiness' on your website. They are an interactive medium (if you allow comments), so people can give their feedback, share their thoughts, ask questions... Not only does this help create a sense of community and communication, but it means your content will grow! Search engines love updated content!
  
  
• You can add personality to your site easily with a blog. Blogs by nature are rather conversations. They're a great place for sharing your opinions and thoughts, and you can be more informal than you might be when you're sitting down to write a regular article.

Blogs do take a little bit of work and commitment, perhaps more so than a regular site. This is because it's important to update your content regularly. This is true though if you have an RSS feed of your regular site. They need to be kept fresh. It's good to write something at least once a week. They don't have to be long articles - a couple of hundred words is fine.

So, what are you waiting for! If you do want to get started, I highly recommend Wordpress. They have a good installation guide, many web host which have fantastico already have them waiting to be installed with a click of the button, and there is a lot of third party add-ons and help books for them. - And they're free!