Where there’s a gap in information, use your blog to fill it

A subtle, but great benefit of blogging is that wherever you find annoyingly unanswered questions in your field, you can answer them – and in doing so, bring people to your site.

A week or so ago, I wrote about the struggle to find a common-sense guide to using Flash audio players in Wordpress. You know, something that a 45 year old could understand. Of course, I couldn’t find anything and I grumbled about it in the blog. A week later, I noticed that someone visited us via a Google search on ‘plugin flash audio player wordpress’.

I repeated the search in Google and was surprised to find this blog at the bottom of page 3.

So when you come across a knowledge-gap, why not use a blog to fill it – because if you’re looking for an answer you can be sure that other people are, too.

Hit the right spot and you’ll benefit from new traffic

I wrote here the other day about how Ecademy’s Thomas Power (though I didn’t mention him by name then) crashed my browser by switching on every possible widget on his Facebook profile. I blogged about it on Ecademy and someone checked out the post and then linked to this blog from inside the closed walls of their networking group. The result was about 90 new visitors to this blog yesterday. That means 90 people passing through our site and getting to see something of what we do.

Additionally, what you write in your posts on your blog is highly visible to Google. That means people will start to come to your blog / site as the result of Google searches on things they need or are interested in. Since I deliberately used Thomas Power’s name in the above paragraph, it’s now possible that people might find this blog when searching for phrases like ‘Thomas Power blog ecademy’.

The longer your blog exists, the more updated and current it is and the more ‘relevant’ Google considers it over time, the more likely that what you write will appear near the top of Google searches for the kinds of keywords you’re interested in.

Exposing your business to 90 new people isn’t a bad return for a few minutes planning and a few minutes writing each day.

Benefit from the speed and ease of blogging

Blogs are the fastest way to create a presence online. If you know your way around your PC / Mac, if you can get and tweak images and if you understand a few simple HTML tags then you can get a blog up and running in a couple of hours.

And free services like Blogger and Wordpress.com let you publish a blog and host it on their domain, so you don’t even have to worry about buying domain names and finding hosting services if you don’t want to.

Blogging is about doing it, not thinking about it.