New Year we are all looking forward, wondering what this year will bring, making plans and promising to get completed those outstanding projects. For those with big ambitions for their website and business, you are probably looking at 2016 as the year to make that big push online. But how?
One great way to improve you online reach and authority is to start a blog.
Blogging
Blogging is a big area and really started as an online journal or diary, but has grown to be so much more.
For business a blog is a great outlet to write and share content aimed at your target audience and industry influencers. You can promote what you do and show off your knowledge often in a way your existing website structure doesn’t allow.
Why Blog?
Blogging has been very popular over the past couple of years and is still a growth area. Online blogs are seen as a highly trusted source of information and as such have real power to influence customer’s decisions.
Blogs can also be used to provide content for your social media and email campaigns. How often do you struggle to find something good to post on social!
Blogs do need to be posted on frequently and the content needs to be:
- Useful
- Unique
- Quality
Ok so yes you want to start a blog, but:
Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?
Where to have your blog depends on what you want achieve.
Benefits of an On Site Blog
There are many benefits of having an onsite blog to your website, 3 of the main ones are:
Appeasing Google’s Love of Fresh Content
It can often be far easier to give Google the fresh content that it craves through the form of an onsite blog post than trying to add new pages to other sections.
So if you are struggling to put new content regular on your site a blog can help.
Helps Onsite SEO
With an onsite blog you can target keyword topics in more depth and build onsite keyword authority all under the one domain.
If you are struggling to get ranking positions on keyword areas for your website an onsite blog can give you a place to add the content, you need.
Attract Links to your Domain
Providing you put link worthy content on your blog you can use an onsite blog to help generate more back links to your website.
The key here is to add content people want to link to and to promote it well online.
Benefits of an Off Site Blog
There are also many benefits to having an offsite blog, the top 3 here include…
Tap into Existing Networks Audience
Blog sites like WordPress already have huge audiences and having a blog on one of these networks can help you reach a bigger audience than hosting it on your site.
The best way to gauge this is to do some research to see just how big the existing audience for your sector is on these Networks. This can also be useful in highlight good topics and other related tips like tagging.
Create Distance
If the topics and content, you want to cover doesn’t completely fit with your website then hosting it offsite can be a better solution.
You can then preserve the voice and feel of your website without compromising on exploring interesting topics that your audience want to know more about.
This can be good if you want to create more fun focused content that could jar with your domains SEO focus.
Trust Factor
An external blog can have a greater trust factor especially if it has more of an independent look and feel.
You can also invite industry experts and other suitable contributors to create content for the blog to further demonstrate its authority, which in turn will help build its readership.
That being said you should never mislead visitors into thinking they are reading content from an independent source if it is being produced internally.
To go with this content should be less about selling and more about helping and informing.
So Should I have an Onsite Blog or an Offsite Blog
If you’re in a small niche and struggle to find somewhere on your site to post fresh content, then an onsite blog will probably work best.
If you’re in a more competitive market and looking to explore topics and connect with a wider audience, then an external blog is probably a better option.
In some cases, you might even want to use both methods, which is fine providing both can be resourced and don’t use duplicated content.
Either way, get blogging and realise the full value for yourself today.
