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DQ News: 5 Reasons to Run a Blog Along with Your Website

Even if you are not a pro-blogger and have never dealt with running a web log, you may need to launch it one day. Although blogs are usually run as standalone personal or newsfeed websites, many people use them as additional channels that are hosted along with the key website – an on-line shop, a corporate page, a supporting resource of some project, etc.

If you host a website, you anyway interact with some public – followers, customers or anyone else – and if you are interested in grabbing their attention and building some relations with them, a blog may be a great tool for this, so keep reading.

Improved Visitors Engagement

The news is what drives the social processes and what makes people follow developments and events and discuss those with other people. Let your blog deliver news and attract people’s attention and watch your website popularity grow rapidly. Those news may cover limited niches or even one niche at all, those may be local or refer to a very narrow audience, but once you start posting those, you may expect more visits and more new visitors.

One of the strategies used by keepers of such blogs is posting not only news that are connected with their projects directly, but any news that may  fall into the same or related niches. For instance, if you hold an on-line motorcycle equipment shop,  it will be fine for your blog to share some news in latest 2-wheel technologies or motor sports.

Your Own Community

In fact, a nicely organized blog with original well-written content and open commenting policy may help you create a local social network – a friendly community of users and fans of your on-line project. If you post most recent and the most interesting news – those will become a word of mouth soon – your readers and social bookmarks will help you draw some new audience, who may later join your community as project followers or customers.

Your blog will work for community building purposes best if you start sharing some less official information there – some of your staff’s or workgroup members’ bio and life facts, stories and photos from your corporate or creative events – performances, exhibitions – depending on what you deal with, will help you draw a lot of attention and strengthen your community.

On-site Presence

Unlike social networks that are often used for creation of public and corporate profiles and actually serve the same community-building purposes, blogs are on-site, so your followers’ attention is never drawn away. This also allows you to easily link your posts not only between each other but also between other pages on  your website.

Also, being hosted within your on-line project your blog shares the navigation and the entire theme of the website which makes your blog look related directly to what you are doing and improves brand awareness of corporate and business websites. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should avoid using social networks, on the contrary – blogging tools can help you and your reader use them without even leaving your blog. All you need is install a correspondent plug-in on your blog and your Twitter or Facebook feed will be displayed somewhere on your blog – usually on the footer of sidebar.

SEO and SERM Booster

If you want your website to hold top positions in search engines results, a blog will help you a lot with that. Again, owing to the news and useful posts on relevant topics you will be able to keep and operate with a cloud of keywords that may help your website reach the top.

Content is the King, they say – and they are right, with the help of Google Adwords you will be able to create both interesting and search optimized posts that are not going to look spamvertized or stuffed with keywords which is always important. And of course it works the same for our search engines reputation – visitors’ comments and latest news that you will be actually posting by yourself will wipe out any negative reviews you may have, and again, this won’t look “black hat” or aggressive.

Monetization

This reason is definitely not the key one – blogging is not something to make money on. Nevertheless, even if your project is non-commercial, you may need some funds – simply to support it for instance – and here’s where you blog may become a great “donation box”. You should not monetize your blog in an aggressive manner, however – don’t sell all marketplace at once, don’t delegate too much space for adverts in general, find some partners who can offer you custom banners that would not look too sharp – this will let you both earn something with your blog and not have your readers scared away.

As far as you can see – launching a blog along with your on-line project is very important and may do you much good. All you need is set goals and decide what you expect from your blog and your target audience and how exactly you are going to interact with them – knowing this will let you work out your own strategy, create your niches list to cover and setup tools to manage everything easily.

Author’s Bio: Arkadij Shkolnik, PR Manager of SiteValley.com web hosting company, the provider of affordable and reliable Linux hosting for personal and small business web sites. Current administrator and author of the corporate blog – svhostingblog.com.

Follow SiteValley on Twitter: @sitevalley

Photo Credit: takomabibelot

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