To Blog or Not To Blog?

Over the past four months I have been writing a bi-weekly blog for Appletree. When I started to write I was struggling to see the benefits of writing, apart from my own personal records. I struggled to see how a blog on your business activities could help your website. After writing for a few months I have learnt that blogs can be used for:

Broadcasting your knowledge From what I have learnt; blogs are one of the best, easiest and vast ways to broadcast relevant news and information about your business and the sector it?s in. Regular readers of your blog will visit your site to read so they can check up on what’s new and interesting. So keeping a consistent schedule is important.

Blogging is great for SEO. Every time you add new content to your website, Google will index the site again and again, so having a regular blog post will help your site climb the rankings. I think this must be one of the most important reasons for blogging.

Builds a relationship with readers.  Your blog helps you to create somewhere to talk about new services, comment on news topics trends, and share company activities. Its also a good place to let your personality shine and show the difference in character of staff your business may have.

Writing skills. One of the reasons I started blogging was to help me improve my writing skills. Blogging will not force me to become a best selling novelist, it will come with time. Writing a Blog gives me the opportunity to practise writing on a regular schedule, having someone check it over before I post makes me take notice of the errors I have made.

After doing a bit of research to see what the numbers are like for Blogs around the world, some very interesting facts and figures have come up:

• 59% of SEO professionals rate Blogging as one of their top inbound marketing activities, and have subsequently created a Blog or increased their Blogging efforts

• 82% of marketers who blog on a daily basis acquired a customer using their blog, as opposed to 57% of marketers who just blog monthly.
• 77% of Internet users read blogs.
• 23% of total Internet usage time is devoted to social networks or blogs.

All this has shown me that if used correctly blogs can and do work. At first i found it pretty difficult to write about myself and how I am getting on, I was used to writing fiction, but now my writing skills are improving with every Blog I write. Hopefully by the new year I will be much more confident in writing. Keep reading to see how I am getting.