How can a blog help your main website? Setting up a blog to increase web traffic. |
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Ok, I know what you all are thinking: ‘oh no not another – why a web blog is great article’. In this article I am not trying to convince you to start a blog, rather to share my experience with my web hosting blog that I started 6 months ago.
When I first thought about adding a blog to my website, I was really skeptical. I noticed that everyone and his mother had a blog. How could a journal style website possibly help my business increase its sales? What’s so special about a blog that I can’t do with my website?
There is one myth that I want to clear up before we get into this: a blog is given no special advantage over a static website as far as search engines and search engine rankings are concerned.
Blogs tend to rank better for the following reasons:
- Blogs are updated more frequently than your main website – search engine bots love continuously updated content and websites. My new blog posts get indexed within 30 minutes.
- Blogs are typically programmed a lot better from a SEO perspective.
- They often can simulate a community within the blog itself through user comments and author response.
One thing that I am certain about is that blogs are a lot easier to build up traffic to than your standard corporate style website. In 6 months, I am generating the same amount of traffic to my blog as my main sales website that has been online for 6 years.
- I am able to write about broader topics on my blog compared to my sales pages where I can only write content that is to sell my product. This leads to more search engine traffic because I am able to write content with different keywords than my main site.
- I am also able to add content onto my blog that an average user will find helpful. For instance, I could write an article on how to setup a website a web hosting account. To someone new to building websites, this will be more helpful compared to a sales page that provides no usable or helpful information.
Blog posts are great for long tail search engine traffic
Long Tail Lizard
By adding a lot of related keywords to your blog posts, you can build up some really nice long tail keyword traffic. Also, whenever your readers comment they leave behind some more related keywords that you might have missed during your initial post. I often see search terms that look like this – ‘how to setup a a wordpress blog and monetize it’ while on my main sales site I will only get short tail terms like ‘wordpress blog hosting‘
Now for the two favorite things about my blog:
- Blogs are really easy to update. Static websites are often a pain to update because you have to go through and change every page to make the changes global. For my blog, all I need to do is add a post and BAM everything is nicely linked together and tied into the rest of the website with no additional work.
- Your blog can syndicate its content to other websites. Within your blog admin panel, there is a section where you can input a list of RSS syndication networks to ping. The next time you update your blog, your new post is syndicated out to thousands of different websites. This can bring in some nice traffic to your site because every post that is syndicated links back to the original source blog.
So how can my blog help my main sales pages?
With proper linking, it is really easy to filter the traffic within your blog to your desired sales/landing pages. Basically what I am trying to do is build my blog up so that it gets a large amounts of traffic, then filter this traffic to my main business website. It is often more expensive to get traffic to my sale pages than to get it to my blog. Blog traffic is much more…organic, if you will. One thing that you can do with your blog is show off your knowledge on a certain topic. This gives your readers/future clients the impression that you are knowledgeable on your topic and that you are the go to guy/gal for that product/service.
While a blog does take a little bit of time and a lot of writing, I truly believe it is a great way to increase web traffic to your sales pages. It can also be a great source of extra income for your main business if you advertise on your blog properly.
Sep 21st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Hi, Great post! I’m trying to start up a blog aswell. Originally it stared out as just a way to increase vistis to my main website, but now I’m really starting to enjoy writing for my blog!
Sep 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
Blogging is a disease, of course Content is king and Stats are a nightmare..
Sep 23rd, 2008 at 12:42 am
yeah! u r right. blogging gets more traffic & indexed more frequently only because its updated regularly. you can hav much more content & seo keywords in a blog than a static site can hav.
& for Ted blogging is not a disease its only addiction
Sep 23rd, 2008 at 9:05 am
Hey wonderful post, but I’s still looking for how to utilize most of my blog to benefit my website.
@ Ted : what a nice comparison lol
@ Ani : you are right blogging is addiction.., you just strive for more and more time to work and write for your blog.. like i’m striving
Sep 24th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I agree with you about blogs. Adding a blog to my website has been great for traffic, sales and business in general. Not to mention it is fun.
What is your opinion on whether you should use a sub domain or a sub folder for your blog?
Sep 25th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
LGR,
This is a really good question. Unfortunately I made the mistake of starting this blog on a sub domain rather than a sub folder. If I could go back in time, I would definitely have set it up as a sub folder because this would increase the overall search engine rank of my root directory as well as get a boost to the blog itself from the existing links to my main site.
The one advantage I can see with using a sub domain is that it might be slightly easier to brand – blog.readysetconnect.com looks more authoritative than http://www.readysetconnect.com/blog/ would. Also, I guess I could also get the same links to both sites and get the link juice passed to both instead of just one site.
But yes, if I could do it again, it would totally be http://www.readysetconnect.com/blog.
Oct 1st, 2008 at 3:58 am
Through trial and error I’ve found out the hard way what you point out here in a nicely written piece. I guess now I need to find ways of getting traffic to the blog and driving that to my main site.
Nice one!
Oct 7th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I use Google Alerts to keep track of my competition and noticed somebody who is a prolific writer doing a blog that so totally pushes the links to one particular company (who shall remain unnamed so as to not give them additional juice). The writer has peppered the blog with a couple of dummy distracting writings on soccer but the majority are industry specific with only links to one target company. Obviously Google notices because I get the alerts. However, all the blogs are PR0 so not sure how much juice gets passed. Each page can also feature several links which dilute the juice. He also lifted a photo from my site with no credit.
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Dec 24th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Great post. I totally agree. I used to add blogs to my website and it really works. It’s good, that now more people will learn about that.
Dec 28th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
I started blogging to keep my customers informed of the most recent industry information. And now, it has turned into an enjoyable hobby, and it helps keep me sharp.
I also have an eBook called SEO Made Easy that had a lot of useful information on how to increase website traffic.
Jan 3rd, 2009 at 6:42 am
I think blog is a good source of gaining traffic towards the site and a good blog can easily draw the attention of users.So I am really thankful to you for throwing light that how does this source work for increasing traffic.
Jan 28th, 2009 at 1:05 am
I find it interesting how many BLOG sites actually are nothing more than just posts from the author. No real commentary (like here!) and probably doomed to almost no traffic. Without dynamic fresh content, Google will eventually write off your BLOG and you will lose the value of the technology.
That being said, one of my new sites, http://www.corbinmarcuscompany.com just went live. My current blog is live, but it is weak at this point!
Feb 8th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I’m looking at setting up a BLOG for http://www.yourroth401k.com … aite I built for a customer. Any feedback on whether to use the default BLOG in Drupal, or perhaps try to leverage Wordpress or Typepad?
Feb 17th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Hello to all of you! How I can see all of you know better then me what to do with websites and blogs. I have a question for all of you or for someone who can answer: I have my website, the domain is since Jan 2008 and is live on net since Oct or Nov 2008 when the web site was finish. From that moment I start write articles submit them but still not enough traffic. Now I decided to go ahead with a blog and inside the blog to add couple of links to my website. This is a good way to increase the trafiic to my website or shell I do something else? (regarding blog and main website )Guys I am a builder and I try to expand my busines even on the net (I mean more traffic to my website and probably more new customers) . Finally how can a blog will increase the trafic to my main website? Do I have to use keywords from website? Do I have description of my website in blog? Do I have to give to my new blog the same name as my domaine name from the main website? this is the site http://www.londonrefurbishmentltd.co.uk
Sorry , is more then 1 question as I sad before. Thanks to all of you and maybe you can help me.
Feb 18th, 2009 at 1:32 am
You should take a look at this article I wrote it will help you get a better understanding at what it takes to get good traffic:
http://blog.readysetconnect.com/2009/02/how-to-make-a-successful-and-popular-website-or-blog-making-a-well-known-website/
You can increase the traffic of your main website by promoting your blog and filtering the traffic to your website sales pages. That is a great way to increase the traffic of your main site.
You can make your blog on a sub domain or an just a sub directory of your main website:
http://yoursite.com/blog or
http://blog.yoursite.com