Now to the bad news. Just a decade ago, a great website was all you needed to establish your business online and to impress prospects. But things have changed dramatically over the past few years. Having a great, well-designed website isn’t enough anymore – you now need to have an interactive, social online presence. Customers, clients and prospects expect more these days from their online experience. They have come to expect interaction – they want to interact with you online, or at least have the option to do so.

To enable prospects to interact with you, you need to be active in social media, and one of the oldest forms of social media is also one of the best – blogging. Here are the three main reasons you should add a blog to your small business website – today.

1. Strengthening your brand. A well-written blog transforms your website from static to dynamic. It creates a vibrant website that keeps getting updated with fresh content, which gives visitors a reason to come back and also gives search engines a reason to crawl your website more often (more on SEO benefits in the next paragraph). You can use a blog to provide your visitors with new info, tips and ideas; to create a buzz around your website by posting contests and giveaways; and to give your customers and prospects a place where they can interact with you through voting, polls and comments.

2. SEO benefits. A blog gives you a wonderful opportunity to enrich your website with your main keywords. This is especially important for e-commerce websites that typically have very little content. When search engines are crawling your website, trying to index it correctly, they need to have something to work with – they need text that will tell them what your website is about and what are your main keywords. While your website’s URL and title tags provide search engines with the basic info, a blog reinforces that information and, overtime, can help you to rank better for many different keywords.

3. Your competitors are doing it. Even if you’re not convinced that your website needs a blog, but your competitors are adding blogs to their websites, this should be a good enough reason to add a blog too, especially if you know that customers in your space are participating in social media and reading blogs. If your competitors seem more up-to-date than you are, if their website is more fun and interesting, prospects will not hesitate to choose them over you.

Let’s take a look at each of the words and how they apply to blogging.

Content

Your website content needs to be relevant and interesting first of all. To keep people on your site long enough to pre-sell or monetize, your website content needs to appeal to your readers, so it needs to be relevant to the topic of your website. That’s what will keep people coming back and that’s what will get people to sign up on your mailing list or your RSS feed for more information. A blog is a great way to enhance your content because you can change it regularly, especially with regard to changing search engine entries. You should be analyzing traffic to your site regularly using analytics tools, and you should be checking on reverse seach engine keywords regularly too to make sure you are keeping up with what people are typing in the search engines.

Traffic

Generating traffic is possibly the hardest part of running a website, and this is where the science turns into art. Blogging is one of the most highly recommended ways to drive traffic to your site so it’s a very handy tool if used in accordance with the four principles. But it’s not the only thing you can do. Here are some of the things you must look at, understand and master to generate traffic to your site:

• Affiliate marketing – affiliate marketing is where you get other internet marketers to help market your business by offering them incentives or rewards. For example, if you sell a product, you can have an affiliate sell your product for you and then they get a percentage of the profit and you get a percentage. You generate the product, and they generate the sales.
• Blog carnivals – bloggers of similar topics unite and blog on similar topics. A blog carnival has an edition, like a magazine, centered on a theme. Links to all the contributors are created in the blog. You can look for carnivals being run by others or you can create your own and get others to join in. You can create a carnival edition in your own blog and invite other bloggers to send you articles. Look for experts with great blogs that you want to associate to your blog carnival.
• Advertising – Look into advertising revenue using things like Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Adwords is a program for people who wish to post ads based on relevant keywords. They pay Google to post the ads. Adsense is the program that picks up the keywords and looks for relevant sites to post them to. When you create your site builder template you build in placeholders for ads. Of course, you can rearrange the ads at any time, or remove them all together from your site builder template. It’s up to you.
• Social Media – blogging is one form of social media, but there are many others. Look for ways to get your site linked to from other sites; submit articles to sites like Ezine.

Pre-sell

Preselling your customer means getting them interested in your service or product by nurturing them as customers and giving more than they bargained for in the best possible way – lots of useful information, good service and so on. Your blog should specifically help your customers and is a great pre-selling tool.

Monetizing

Simply put, this is the part where you make money. It might be from advertising dollars, or selling your service or product. Ideally it’s a combination of both.

Using the four principles is just the beginning. For a successful and profitable website you need to be dedicated and determined to reach the top of the search engines. Of all of the above, traffic is probably the most important because without traffic it doesn’t matter how good your content is and you won’t make money.

When setting up your blog you want to be sure to buy a domain name and a hosting account. Having a blog on a subdomain on one of the free blogging platforms such as wordpress.com or blogger.com (yourblog.wordpress.com or yourblog.blogspot.com) gives all the search engine benefits to that blogging platform. All the hard work that you’re doing in creating great content for your visitors doesn’t help your website ranking for your business if you don’t have your own custom domain.