1. Content is king.  People have questions and you have answers.  Plus, the search engines love variety.  When you post frequently, your SEPR (search engine page results) will continue to rise.
2. Blogs are interactive.  When you have interesting, educational, entertaining, or inspiring posts, people will respond at length.  This creates conversation of a caliber that doesn’t happen anywhere else other than eye to eye networking.
3. As a blogger, you become an author. There’s no need to get a publishing house involved.  You publish your own material and your reach is just as far as any established author.  As people get to know you through what you write about, you’ll gain a fan base.
4. Blogging helps you to develop your reputation as an expert in the industry.  Why should your friends and family be the only ones to benefit from your deep knowledge of your trade? Share it with the world. We used to say that everyone is only separated by 6 degrees, now it’s 2 or 3.
5. Links are love.  Linking is when another site actually puts your URL on their site in some way.  Maybe another blogger links to something you wrote in their blog post or perhaps your blog shows up on another blog’s roll.  Also, whenever you comment on someone else’s blog that links you to them.  So, getting linked to high traffic, high quality sites improves your chances of being found too.

I hope this helps you make the decision to start blogging today.  What are your questions about getting started and developing strategy for blogging?

If you’re like me, I love some parts of my job while other parts I would rather not deal with.  Take the whole subject of search engine optimization or SEO for example.  As a marketer, I know that the internet has changed forever the way we find business.  Yes, we will still use more traditional methods such as print, TV, and radio, however, the traditional married the new media and now they can’t get divorced!  They are linked forever.

SEO has always been the toughest part of my job as a marketer.  Yet, I know that it is a part that I must master at least to the point of understanding the definition of such terms as search engine results page, meta tags, H1 headers, and link building, just to name a few. 

Why is this important to a marketer?

It’s important because when people are in search of a product or service the internet is the first place they’ll turn to find it.  Will they find my clients?

Being found online is simple but not as easy as it might seem.  The most important thing to remember is this:

 Online sites must be a friendly as possible to the bots and spiders that go hither and yonder all over the world wide web looking for information to give to those who keep asking for information.   This may be giving away my age but, do you remember a movie that was very popluar many years ago called Short Circuit?  The scenario is that the military creates these robot warriors and one gets fried by lightening causing it to dump all it’s input.  For the first part of the movie, the robot just goes over the city looking for input (information).  As it gets more input, it starts to sort it into relevant themes and blurts it out whenever it recognizes a relevant prompt.  That’s what a search engine does!

Now, search engine friendly sites have three major threads in common.

They use relevant keywords.

A keyword is a word or phrase that the person who is search for something online will use in the search engine browser in the hope that a list of relevant sites will be displayed for them to explore.  It’s important to remember that the use of keywords is an on the page and off the page effort.  On the page, keywords can be used in titles, headers, and links, and the body text.  Off the page, keywords can be found in meta tags, title tags, the URL, and other digital assests such as Micorsoft Word documents or YouTube video.  The biggest mistake when using keywords is just being random and stuffing the words on a page. 

A good quantity and quality of inbound links.

Inbound links are any other site that uses your URL on their site.  Having great inbound liknks is a way for one site to align itself with another one.  For example, an insurance company might want to have a link back from a major, well-respected car dealer.  Some one looking for a car online might need to have new insurance too and find it very convenient to use the links it finds associated with the dealer’s site.  Plus, if the car dealer is well-respected then the insurance is well-respected by defualt.

Fresh content on a regular basis.

Search engines thrive on change.  New content, links, videos, photos, or whatever is new will attract bots and spiders to crawl a particular site over and over and deliver that site in the search engine results list.

Now before I lose you as you drift off to sleep, go ahead and hit play on the video below.  This is one o f the most user friendly talks on the subject of SEO that I have heard.  It is part of a class that Lee Odden of Top Rank Marketing delivered through Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University.

SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102)