By Wayne Davies - SEO Specialist.
This article is part 3 of a series. See part one. See part two.
Most blogs are nothing more than a platform to publish the owner's opinions. That's unlikely to send targeted traffic to a business website, though there are some expections to this rule (e.g. when generating traffic to a satirical site).
Starting your own blog is an excellent way to generate targeted traffic to your website. It's also an excellent way to pursue a top 3 spot in Google for a specific keyword phrase.
A blog can also be used to build a community of regular readers through services such as feedburner. These regular readers (a.k.a. subscribers) will be emailed every time a new article goes live, bringing people back to your blog on a regular basis.
Over time, as the number of regular readers grows, you'll find your blog is a powerful way to send targeted traffic to a landing page on your site.
As the number of articles in your blog increases, you'll also find the blog attracts an increasing number of inbound links to various articles you've written. As the number of links grows, so will the importance of your blog in the eyes of major search engines. This will ensure your articles get found on an increasingly frequent basis.
And as you'll see in part five, blog articles can be used in conjunction with Twitter to generate even more traffic.
A blog is an excellent way to generate highly targeted traffic to your site. The sort of traffic that goes on to buy your product or service. This may take several months to payoff, but once you get going you'll soon find it can become a major source of income.
It's also worth noting that a blog article you write today can continue to pay off for years to come.
For example, my most successful article to date was written back in 2007. As I write this, it averages 36 visitors per month. That's visitors to my site, not readers of the article.
In fact, this article has generated over 2,500 visitors over the last 3 years. That's a great return on 90 minutes work. Especially when you consider what I'd have had to pay Google for those visitors (thousands of pounds).
Blogging for traffic involves the following 4 component parts...
You start with the product you want to sell, and a very good idea about the target market you want to sell it to. For example, I offer a DIY SEO Training Course. One of my main target markets is owners of small businesses who can't afford to get locked into the ongoing monthly fee of a professional SEO Company.
The next step is to find a search term (i.e. keyword) the target market is likely to type into Google when looking for your product or service. My tool of choice is Google's Keyword Analysis Tool. I suggest you get familar with this tool (it's easy to use), as it's a fantastic way to home in the best keyword phrase in any given situation. You'll find more information about keyword research here.
Once you've chosen your keyword phrase, it's time to write a blog article. This article must...
The article should not be sales copy. It's purpose isn't to sell, but to attract and appeal to your target market. It must be an article about something of interest. It must offer some of value to the reader.
For example, I might write an introduction to search engine optimisation. This article would contain genuinely useful information that my target market for the DIY SEO course wants to know.
At the end of the article I might mention my DIY SEO course, and recommend it as a great way to find out everything the reader needs to know about SEO. I would then link to my landing page.
This approach to blogging generates highly targeted traffic. A person will only read the article if s/he is interested in its content. If such a person gets to the end of the article, is offered the chance to obtain more information, and clicks on the link, that person demonstrates genuine interest.
Next Instalment: Tweeting for Traffic.
Be notified as soon as each new installment in this article series goes live via Wayne's Twitter page. Click here.
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