Blogging is one of the best things you can do for your business.

While most people think blogging is just about what you ate yesterday or how cute your baby is, there’s a lot more to it for business.  A lot more.

Beyond the Brochure

By now I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase Content is King more than once.  It’s definitely true – creating new content on a consistent basis is one of the best ways to gain the search engines’ attention.  And attention turns into ranking.  And ranking turns into customers.

But let’s be frank – your website probably sucks.  It’s a boring brochure, laden with the must-have’s such as an About Us page, a contact form, and of course a list of products or services.

Boring, unremarkable and unoriginal.

But this is where most businesses are.  Why? Business owners have a website simply because their competitors have a website.  It’s not looked upon as a marketing tool, a lead generation tool, heck it’s not even mentioned in their advertising or listed on their business cards.

It’s a brochure and that’s all.

You’re the Expert

But what you should realize is that blogging software is simply an extension of your website – a very easy publishing tool that lets you add new content by simply typing in your thoughts and pushing the Publish button.  Done. Out there. Online.

Do you want to start ranking for keywords in your industry? Start blogging about topics related to them.  You are in business because you are an expert at what you do.  And as an expert, you’ll naturally use these keywords when you explain your products or services.  You’ll listen to your customers, you’ll answer their questions, and you’ll be the expert (in their eyes).  Sure, there may be twenty people within twenty miles that could answer that question, but you’re the only one online answering it, so you’re the expert.

People will drive to buy from experts.  They’ll pass up five stores that sell your item just to buy from you.

Crashing Waterbeds and Money in the Bank

STLBeds is, by definition, supposed to be out of business.  They’re a simple Dad-and-son business, selling mattresses to people in their surrounding area.  Dave, the owner, has been doing it since 1986, jumping onto the waterbed craze in the 80′s and riding it for many years.  But now, well, not so many people want waterbeds.  Over the years they added bedroom furniture and ‘regular’ mattresses, but sales were declining.  They couldn’t compete with big box stores and were watching their numbers decrease every day.

In 2007, Dave’s son Doug wanted to learn a little more about getting the business online, so he took a local class on HTML and followed it up with an online marketing class.  Soon he was talking to his dad about starting an SEO campaign.  In November 2007 STLBeds launched a new SEO-friendly website, and Doug started blogging about everything related to mattresses, furniture and life as a salesman.

In January of 2008, Doug wrote an article called Will a Waterbed Crash Through my Floor? and he hit a home run.  He didn’t know at the time, but a lot of people were leery of purchasing a heavy waterbed and they were looking online for ways to remedy their problem.  Doug’s blog ranked right at the top, and thousands of visitors later, Doug is banking.

Problems are Gold

Doug did something that you can do, too.  Find a typical problem with your industry, product or service and take it head on.  Be honest, open and frank about the problem, and offer a solution.  People will – once again – think you’re an expert on the issue.  And they’ll trust you.  And they’ll buy from you.

What do people always ask you?  Are there stereotypes about what you do that make people nervous when they buy?  Are there typical objections to every sales pitch that you can debunk on your site?  These shouldn’t be avoided – they should be tackled.

By the Way, We Sell That

Lastly, don’t be afraid to mention in your blog posts that you sell the item you’re blogging about.  I recommend not being outright salesy, but there’s nothing wrong with saying “here’s the problem, we have the solution”.  Link back to your item or service in your post.

Build your internal links, build trust with your readers, and build your bank account.  I see nothing wrong with that.

As I meet new business owners and explain what I do, I’m constantly amazed at the amount of them that have no idea what a blog is, how it works, or how it can help them.

Blogging, by far (in my opinion) is one of the best things you can do for your business. Why? I’m glad you asked.

Blogging Brings New Content to a Stale Website

Most of the business owners I meet have a website, and it’s in what I call “stale” mode.  They fell for the old If you Build it, They Will Come routine.  Wrong!

So they build a site, and sure enough, nothing much changes.  They don’t promote the site, and soon it becomes just another expense that they wish they’d never spent money on.  They soon abandon the website, and other than the URL on their business cards, it’s rarely mentioned or visited.  It turns stale.

So there’s the thing.  Search engines are infatuated with content.  They can fall in love with your website if you consistently feed them industry-related articles, thoughts, tips, whatever.

The average spider visits a stale website once every 6 weeks or so.  If the spider visits your site, and sees that nothing has changed in the past 6 weeks, they will mark you off as indexed, and will put a note in their memory to come back in six weeks to see what (if anything) has changed.

Six weeks later, nothing’s changed, so they mark you off for another 6 week visit.  Meanwhile, you’re getting little or no organic rankings because of it.

If, however, you start blogging, say once a week, suddenly there is new content.  The spider visits, sees new stuff, and decides that it will come back in four weeks instead of six.  Four weeks later, there is more content, and the spider decides to come back in two weeks.

Soon, your posts are being indexed within 48 hours or less.  Your organic rankings increase because the search engines see you as a ‘player’ in your industry.

Blogging Brings Targeted Visitors

Probably one of the immediate advantages of blogging is that it brings you targeted leads.  If you are posting ideas, products, or industry-related news, those phrases may just end up ranking for what us SEOs like to call long tail phrases.  These long tail phrases are gold.  (For more info, read this wikipedia page)

A visitor to your website, which comes from a long tail search query, is usually highly targeted and willing to buy.  They are usually looking for just what your blog post addresses, and in their minds you are immediately the subject matter expert on that topic.  You’ve highly increased your chances of a sale because of it.

Blogging Separates Your From the Competition

By posting weekly articles, tips or whatever, your audience sees your business as “being run by real people”.  This may sound like a silly thing, but in reality humans like to see a non-corporate side of a business.  Even if it’s still targeted to the business, simply putting real world anecdotes into a blog post can give your visitor that warm and fuzzy feeling about your brand.  You win.

What are You Waiting For?

If your website doesn’t have a blog, you’re missing out on one of the best customer-driving forces available today.

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My regular readers know I’m a fan of Google alerts, and here’s another great usage.

First, a little background.  Yahoo! Answers is a great service that lets people ask questions about anything, and other users submit answers to their question.  And when I say questions about anything, I mean anything.  Which is great – there is lots of content there that we can use.

So in your Google alerts account, set up an alert for the following:

site:answers.yahoo.com keyword

keyword should be replaced with an industry-related word or phrase that people would use in their questions that applies to you.  For instance, if you are a Missour Wine Club (cheap plug), you’d likely use ‘wine’ or even ‘wine’ and ‘missouri’.  Now anytime a question is posted that uses the word ‘wine’ in it, Google will automatically email you a link to the question.

Watch over the questions, reword and use the appropriate ones for your site.  If one person is looking for an answer to that question, there are probably hundreds more looking, too.  Why not get those visitors to your website and show how much of an expert you really are?

If you’re worried about the economy, just put all zeros across your forecast sheet.  Any money made will be a bonus.

If you’re concerned about the new president – consider this.  Every inauguration year since the 70′s has been the worst for that president.

If your stocks are in the dumpster, plan on selling them for a loss and putting that money into a bag which you can then hide in a Folgers can.

In all seriousness, this really is time to sit down and look at last year’s goals.  Did you meet them? Exceed them? Did you set any goals?  It’s time you do for 2009.

When you set those goals, don’t forget to budget some money for online marketing.  Whether its a link building campaign, direct mail campaign that drives traffic or just some good ‘ol blogging, make sure you’ve got your ammunition stockpiled and ready.  2009 is looking bleak, so go into this war prepared.

As for me, I’ve already started looking at this year’s goals, forecasts and actual revenue which is helping me forecast (conservatively) next years’ returns.  It will be a good year for me, will it be for you?

The offer went straight to all 449 InBoxes, so I can safety assume that at least 85% of them were delivered successfully.  In fact, meetup.com probably has bounce measures in place to weed out the false members, so it’s possible that 100% of the members received my offer.

Yet not one took me up on it.

Not one of 449 entrepreneurs took advantage of a great marketing opportunity.  Why?  Could it be because they thought they’d be helping my client and not themselves? Perhaps.  Could it be because they didn’t understand what I was asking for? Perhaps.

But I think the answer is quite simple.  Small business owners still don’t understand the power of marketing on the Internet.  Not even close.

Two years ago I was hired by a local retail mattress store.  They had a website that wasn’t the greatest, and they were paying AT&T an outageous amount of money for traffic and marketing.  Yet their website wasn’t selling a damn thing.  It wasn’t generating leads, it wasn’t producing revenue, it was simply a train wreck.

It wasn’t necessarily their fault.  As with most SMB owners, when a big company like AT&T comes in, they may be overwhelmed with the statistics that are thrown at them.  They are promised ‘online marketing’ and ‘traffic’ with great generality and glazing over of details.  What kind of marketing? What kind of traffic?  They don’t know to ask, and they don’t even know what answer is the correct one.

On top of this, SMB owners aren’t web designers.  They are given archaic tools and expected to produce a customer-friendly website.  They aren’t given guidance, they aren’t even told how to create a simple contact form.  So it’s no wonder the money goes down the drain.  And most SMBs don’t exactly have money to just throw down the marketing drain.

Shortly after I was hired, we started rebuilding their entire website.  They weened off the phone book ads one at a time, canceled AT&T’s “marketing” and put all their efforts into the web.  It’s a good thing, too, as the business was slowly going downhill.  Downhill to the point that had they not made this bold move, they’d probably be out of business today.  (And this isn’t just me bragging, you can ask Doug yourself)

Once we launched the newly designed site, a (not so) amazing thing happened.  They started ranking.  They started getting quality traffic.  People started calling.  Customers started asking for prices and delivery.  Their website was actually generating a decent ROI.

Over time, you’ll learn that one of the best things you can do for a website is to provide new and relevant content often.  Search engines love the content, and if it’s on target with your industry, you’ll start to see rankings for long tail searches you never thought would bring you traffic (and sales!).  Providing this content gets more and more difficult over time, as you start to run out of things to say.

Now, my client still has plenty of content ammunition.  But he also knows that there are things that he doesn’t know, that are related to his industry, but he doesn’t know.  And these things are just what I was asking other SMB owners to write about.  But they didn’t.  Why?

The other huge part of getting more traffic to your website is links.  And in particular, links from industry-related websites are great ways to improve your over SERP rankings.  So writing an article for another website, that is willing to link back to yours, is an awesome opportunity.  One that 449 St. Louis entrepreneurs missed.

Since I’m sitting on an SEO panel tonight covering blogging, splogging and SEO, I thought I’d post a quick little ditty that you can do to keep track of who’s stealing your content (without permission).

When you blog, there are certain things that you have control over, besides the ‘meat’ of the post.  For most blogging software, you can modify other things, such as posted-by, date formatting and tagging. Somewhere you need to find something that you can make unique to your blog – a phrase, a set of random numbers, or a weird tag.  For this example I’ll use a number/letter combo: 68wcrada72

Once you’ve decided on something, make sure you incorporate it into every post as you write (as I just did).
Then head over to Google Alerts and set up your trap.

(Click to see larger image)

Make sure you add the -domain.com or else you’ll get an alert every time you post.

Now when someone steals your content and posts it on their website, you’ll get an email showing you the link to the splog.  Take appropriate action – ask the author to take down your content.  If they don’t, or won’t answer, take further steps such as flagging inappropriate/spam posts on Blogger or reporting the splog to WHOIS (if appropriate).

People are out there to steal your content.  Since we can’t stop a copy/paste, at least we can still keep tabs on what’s happening.  Don’t let people use your content freely!