Recently I’ve made a committment to blog more consistently. Why, you ask? Well that’s a great question and a great blog topic for this week’s post. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of reasons to blog so, of course, the following list is by no means extensive but these are a few reasons that I blog:
- Blogs attract traffic, search engine and human.
Search engines, and the humans who use them, love content. A static website, one whose content changes infrequently, if at all, may be full of content but it quickly becomes old hat. After all, it’s the rare book that you read more than once. Blogging gives you an opportunity to continue to expand your content and reader’s awareness of your expertise on a continuous basis. 
It gives people a reason to return to your site on a regular basis.
Would you continue to subscribe to your daily newspaper or RSS feed if every day you opened it up to find the same news as yesterday or last week or last year? I didn’t think so. Unless the content on your website is updated on a regular basis there’s no reason for anybody to revisit.- Blogging allows you to continually display your expertise. It gives you the opportunity to brag on yourself without actually bragging. And you can do this ‘bragging’ by giving your readers useful, actionable information that will build their trust and their conviction that you’re the resource to turn to when they need someone who does what you do.
- It’s a conversation starter.
If I say this is why I blog and then ask, “why do you blog?”, as I will at the end of this post it gives you a reason to add your knowledge and experience to mine. We enrich each other and we enrich every other reader who’s interested in this topic. How often do you get a chance to talk back to a marketing brochure other than to say, “2 points. Score! As you bank it into the round file.” - Keywords, Baby!
Being found on the web is a function of the keywords you use and the content that supports them. Blogging gives you an opportunity to surround the keywords you employ to attract your ideal customer with rich, relevant content that tells the search engines that your site is worthy of a high ranking and your visitors that they’re definitely in the right place. 
It tells you what your customers are interested in.
By using analytics, like Google’s powerful and free Analytics program, you can tell what blog topics are resonating with your visitors and what’s not allowing you to better focus your efforts on your customers real needs rather than your best guesses.- It provides a hub to your social media spokes.
Content generated on your blog can be reposted to social media sites like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter either in whole or as teasers leading readers back to your primary site. You can also embed content from social sharing sites like YouTube.com or SlideShare.com into your blog posts. Your blog becomes the center and heart of your online publishing empire. Move over Rupert Murdoch! - Blogging is sexy! A recent poll conducted with my wife indicates that she finds me 20% more attractive as a result of my blogging. What more reason do you need to begin blogging today!
