Back to Basics: The Power of the Blog
September 15, 2010 by Lyn Mettler
Filed under seo, social media
When I first became interested in social media, all the focus was on blogs and bloggers, but soon came more fun social media tools like Facebook and Twitter and now Foursquare.
While you still see lots of people blogging, I think as a business social media tool, the focus has shifted away to the jazzier, hipper “new kids on the block” tools. But recently, after watching results for some of our clients and hearing and reading great case studies from others, I’m circling back to the immense power of the basic blog.
But let me clarify, blogging should not mean going to Blogger, setting up a template blog and posting something every month or so. If you want blogging to pay off for you, you need a professional looking blog, set up properly on your website, and, get ready folks, you probably need to blog a minimum of twice a week and maybe even 5, yes 5, times a week.
You see, with blogs, the more you post, the better they work. I promise!
It’s All About the Traffic
Why blog? Today I’m going to skip over all the stuff about how it positions you as an expert, is a place you can expand more in depth on a topic than Twitter and Facebook and gives you something to link to on other social media. I’m going to jump right into the biggie: website traffic.
We all want more people to come to our website, and of late, it seems to me blogging is one of the best ways to do it. On blogs we manage for clients, the blog pages are some of the top entrance pages for the entire website. Posting frequent content full of key words related to your industry is going to make Google happy and bring you up in their placement, thus, sending more traffic your way. Plus, listing your blog on social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Kirtsy can also send lots of visitors.
Case in Point
I recently heard the marketing manager at email marketing firm Delivra speak about a 5-day-a-week blogging program they set up within their company. Their blog has now become the hub of their website and main entrance point, even beyond the home page, with the rest of the site as spokes off that hub. Oh, and they moved from page 30 to 7 in Google search results for “email marketing.” It was an inexpensive way to put them more on a level playing field with the big boys like iContact and ExactTarget.
Have I convinced you? If yes, but you’re thinking, how in the WORLD are we going to blog 5 days a week, don’t worry, I’ll tackle that in a future post. It’s not as hard as you might think.
AMA Lunch in Charleston
August 7, 2008 by Simon Ashton
Filed under All, seo
Kudos to the Charleston AMA, who continue to impress with their lunch time speakers. 
I just got back from Mt Pleasant after hearing Bill Leake of Apogee Search and it was certainly worth the 200+ mile round trip.
Bill did a great job of explaining in very simple terms the factors and processes involved in achieving good search engine visibility. He is (obviously) very knowledgeable, quite amusing without being corny, and comfortable with the mic. All in all, exactly what you would want in a speaker.
So, as the SIMS Agency is also in the field of SEO, why was I so pleased to hear someone do a better job of explaining things than I could? Well, a few reasons really:
- I am in no way a competitor of Apogee search. Whereas our clients our small-mid sized businesses, Bill works with the likes of Dell and Olive Garden.
- I often feel that one of the things I could most improve upon would be explaining things to clients in a non-technical (or not overly technical) way. Bill certainly did this, and I feel like I learned something from his presentation.
- Validation! At each step of the talk there was the confirmation that the way the SIMS Agency approaches things is the way he was recommending. This is a very comforting thing to know, especially for SEO where the topic is clouded by years of myths, lies, confusion and misinformation.
Many thanks to every one who helped organize this. I hope other people found it as helpful as I did.
