Publish or Perish – Why You Need to Get Blogging, Now!

The Holy Grail of doing business online is to have the Number One search engine ranking for your category, or at least be on the first page of results. Millions, if not billions, of dollars have been spent by businesses trying to outfox Google, Yahoo! and the other big search engine operators using algorithmic alchemy.

For us non-comp-sci Ph.D.s, though, there’s a much simpler way to boost our search-engine standings. In fact it’s so simple as to almost be mindless. That method is, quite simply, to blog. While I’ve personally been sporadic over the years about my dedication to blogging, the other day I encountered a sobering statistic.

Blogging and Search Engines

As I listened to a Webcast for the MarketingProfs University certificate course in content marketing, the presenters revealed the following: The average company that blogs has 55% more customers than companies that don’t; 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages!

More indexed pages = better search engine rankings; More inbound links = better search engine rankings; and well, “more customers” speaks for itself.

What that all means is, by the simple act of posting to a blog two to three times per week, you gain an instant, appreciable advantage over your non-content producing competition. What’s more, if you’re on an optimized blogging platform such as WordPress, all the details like indexing your page to the search engines and making your keywords super-easy to find, get handled automagically.

As with any discipline, it can be tough at first to make blogging a habit. What if you have nothing to say? What if you’re just too darn busy with other stuff? Two answers:

• Make an editorial calendar that lists your topics in advance. Focus on creating value for your readers and visitors

• Make it a part of your job (or the job of someone in your organization). Just as you stay on top of accounts payables and receivables, prospecting, and other business aspects, publishing IS part of the work mix. It is, in effect, just another (very powerful) form of marketing.

Get Leverage

Remember too that you can integrate your blogging with other online marketing that you’re already doing. Tools exist that allow you to push your new blog posts to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts.

Blogging, of course, is just one aspect of your overall content-marketing mix. You can create eBooks (and use them to build your email list), videos, podcasts and other materials that will keep people coming back to your site time and time again. The beautiful thing is that all of this content is interrelated. Just because you’ve already written a blog post on a niche topic doesn’t mean you can’t create a quick and simple video on the same thing. In fact, you should, as the search engines love video.

Spider Food for Thought

In the arcane world of Search Engine Optimization, SEO geeks refer to awesome content as “spider food.” The programs that scour the Web on behalf of the search engines are called “spiders.” So you want to be nice to them – make their jobs easy by giving them plenty of nutritious sustenance. Blogging is one of the best ways to do it. Your generosity might take a while to pay off in terms of more visitors, inquiries and buyers – but it will eventually.