So often a prospective clients approaches us for blog writing services as they have heard blogging is great for their website visitors; to provide value to readers and to build links for search engines. But, sometimes a prospective client may need a quick review on how not to use blogging. Here’s my short list to help demystify what blogging is and is not.
How Not to Use Blogging
1. Do not use blog posts as brochure content. Posts that are repetitive about your services or loaded with keywords about your services as seen by search engines as having no value and defeat the purpose of blogging which is to create slow natural link growth. Who will want to link to posts all about YOU when they may want to be selling their OWN services?
2. Blogging does not typically drive lead traffic. Read number one again. If a post is all about you and simply repeats content from your website, it is doubtful that a prospective client would have landed on your blog first or would find you in the search engine results and then convert from your blog. That client will typically first find your website and convert from there. If you are really looking for leads, blogging is really not the best fit for your investment rather Google AdWords would be a far better investment.
3. I do not recommend using blogging with the focus of picking up content from other sources and pasting that content into your blog post field. You unfortunately are not fooling search engines into thinking that your content is unique, of value, linkable, and for that matter index worthy. If you use Copyscape Premium and find your same content that you selected online for your blog post already at 20 or 30 sites you may actually damage your own organic placement. Blog post should be unique content created to provide value to your readers.
What Blogging Really Is
Blogging is great for building value for your readers, growing your website link numbers slowly and naturally, improving user time on your website, can lower your overall bounce rate, and to create authority as a subject matter expert for search engines. It is not really a great lead generator and when used inappropriately may even hurt you with search engine placement.