This post is actually a bit of a recap on a topic I’ve written about in the past, but it is something that is still one of the most common areas of questions from people when I give speeches.

In this post I want to start talking about how to blog, but more importantly to business, why to blog.

First let’s start a little bit with the WHY:

There are a lot of reasons to have a blog.

A blog can make your large business, or individuals in your business seem more personal… more “real”, and people like to do business with people they feel they know.

A blog can drive communication and feedback (though this happens less often that a lot of bloggers might have you believe.)

A blog can be a really easy way to get your small business on the web (It can easily be your whole website.) It can make you seem bigger.

More often than not however, people tend to use a blog to drive more traffic. This might happen due to a combination of the reasons stated above. But it also likely includes a plan for SEO.

Blogs are very powerful for SEO for a couple of key reasons. They first reason is that blog content is very conversational in tone. It uses a lot of words you may never use in your marketing web site. This provides for a “Long Tail.”

Here are a couple of examples of the concept of the Long Tail:

The first, shown in the graphic here (Thanks to the Hubspot Blog for this) shows a simple example of the fact that competition for distinct keywords like “logistics” may be very high, and indeed there are many people searching for those phrases, which is why everyone wants that traffic.

As the phrases become more complex (“e.g. logistics management software case studies”) there is less competition because it’s less likely that other competitors have exactly this same verbiage on their sites.

The key to this however, is that blogs allow you to say similar phrases in different ways, in more conversational tones more often than a typical website. So even though each of these phrases have fewer people looking for them, it is easy for you to have a lot of phrases that you are one of the top competitors for. Thus you can gain most of the traffic for each of those phrases with very little competition.

Another example I like to use to illustrate this long tail concept is:

Imagine you sell a diet pills that increases energy.

You make a web site that says “More energy” “Lose weight”, and things like that. You start to get traffic for these phrases (but a LOT of people are competing for them.)

Then you start to blog about successful customers. You write about “Susan”, who was heavy, and highly depressed. You write about how the product changed her life. Guess what happens… A few months later you are shocked to find that 7% of the traffic to your site is people coming in because they were looking for ways to deal with “depression.”

The Long tail means that if you can get enough of these types of people for phrases like “depression”, or other similar topics, that that traffic can actually combine, and begin to eclipse the traffic for “weight loss.”

But the long tail is only one aspect of SEO. As you start thinking about your blog, the first place you need to start is: Your domain name.

Unless you are a huge brand like Nike or Starbucks, people are probably not searching for your company name. They are likely searching for the product or service you provide (sports shoes, or coffee.)

One of the most important pieces of good SEO is your domain name. You need to ask yourself when you start our blog, “Will people search for my company, or my product or service?” Also, what will the customer really be searching for? Sometimes we choose very generic phrases like “Fitness Gym”, when a customer will never find what they want if the look for that… they will need to look for “Utah Fitness Gym”, or “Orem Fitness Gym.”

Once you decide what people will likely look for, seriously consider having your blog use that domain name, rather than your company name. UtahFitnessGymBlog.com will rank much better than blog.Fitnesscorp.com for a search for “Utah Fitness Gym.”

Also, think about how you and others search when deciding what you want to rank well for. Most people type a search in to google and get too many results. So they refine the search by adding a word or two. Then a bit more, and a bit more. It’s on that 3-5th search that ou have narrowed things enough to be useful. So who is your target customer, and what do they look for on that third, fourth, or fifth search?

Get a domain name that fits with that.

Lastly: HOW

It appears that this has become something of a lengthy post. I hope you’re still with me 🙂

I can’t tell you how many people I have walked through the subject matter above, and they get it. They really do. But then they run into the big hurdle of blogging: Time. It’s very common to hear, ” I don’t have time to write an online journal! I have a business to run for heaven’s sake.”

If you’re feeling like that right now, I’ll give you the advice I have given so many times: Go to your email sent items. Look over the emails you have sent over the last month. I am willing to bet that at least three of them are emails to someone about something cool that happened in your business. Find ones about people who have done great things, customer stories about how you filled their needs. Or even lessons you have learned and things your business will be doing different.

The content is already there. You’ve already written it. Those are your first three blog posts.

See, wasn’t that easy 🙂