Over time, the internet has changed. People engage more with posts on social media platforms that they do with posts that you create on your own blog. Plus, blog posts tend to be much longer, typically 800 words or more. People have short attention spans and as a result, no one reads an entire post, much less a book. In fact, they don’t even read their emails. They just scan it to get the major ideas. Since blogs don’t have the traction they once did, the question is often asked, “Should I even bother writing blog posts anymore?”
It depends. Blogs are a great way to create fresh content that search engines find important. This in turn drives traffic to your website. So if you want to get quality, organic traffic to your website on a regular basis, then you absolutely MUST create new consistent content in the form of a blog.
On the other hand, if you don’t care about anyone ever finding your site, or you are willing to pay large sums of money for advertisements to drive people to your website, then by all means, don’t ever write another blog post.
OK, so I know thissounds condescending, but creating new content on consistent basis is one of the most important things you can do to keep your website up to date.
There are approximately 1.94 billion websites in existence now. The only way to get noticed is by having fresh new content that you publish on a regular (ie, at least weekly, if not daily) basis. Gary Vaynerchuk has even recommended posting 100 times per day. His pint isn’t really to create that much content, because quality does still matter, but the thing is, you MUST publish new, original content on a regular and consistent basis. This can quickly get you into the top 1% of all websites, or 1 out of 19 million, as shown by your Alexa.com score. That is still a lot of websites that you have to compete with, but now you stand a chance. Here is what has happened to WebStoresLtd.com since taking our own advice and consistently blogging on a weekly basis.
Google of course is #1, YouTube is #2, and Facebook is #3. There are still a lot of sites between #3 and #374,874. But notice the trend of the graph – the site has increased in popularity to where it is now one of the most popular websites both worldwide and within the United States (#47,850). Better yet, the average time on site per visitor is now 30:47. That’s over 30 minutes that people are spending on our site! Visit Alexa.com and see where your site stacks up (the lower the number the better). If Alexa doesn’t have any data on your site, it’s because it isn’t in the top 1%.
So, is it worth your time to blog? You decide, but I think you can see that new content on a regular basis does make a difference. If you would like more info about exactly how to accomplish this for your website, let me know and I may put together an online webinar showing you how to do this.
Images for Your Posts
One of the important things when creating content is to have some high quality images for your blog posts, newsletters, presentations, and even social media posts. I am often asked where you can get images that you can use that are royalty-free and legal to use. There are some sites out there that provide creative commons images, but once you start producing a lot of content you may find you need more than what these have to offer. My recommendation: Shutterstock. The image at the top of this post came from Shutterstock, a site that allows you to find graphics and photographs for your commercial applications. There are a variety of payment plans that make it easy to acquire as many images as you need. Follow this link for more info: //shutterstock.7eer.net/c/1270405/44350/1305 (affiliate link).
One More Day of “Prime Days”
If you’ve read this far, I am sure you are aware of Amazon Prime Day, a holiday made up by Amazon to drive more sales at a time when customers are thinking more about vacations than holiday spending. A couple of interesting things about Amazon:
My book, Amazon’s Dirty Little Secrets remains on the best-seller list 5 years later! This is all about the marketing tactics that Amazon has employed to become the top ecommerce company and how you can use these same methods to market your company. Grab a copy at: https://amzn.to/2l72vVv
About a week ago I was invited to participate as an “Amazon Influencer” which I thought was pretty cool since my other best-selling book, “The Influencer Effect,” is all about influencer marketing and how you can get others to market and sell for you. At the start of Prime Days this year, Amazon officially approved me as an influencer and even gave me my own URL: https://www.amazon.com/shop/webstoresltdÂ
Texting as a Marketing Tool
A few weeks ago I posted about the most effective marketing tool available to us as entrepreneurs today: Bulk Text Messages. The reason is that most people open text messages while only a few people open emails as I mentioned at the beginning of the post. Blogging is important as I explained, but for marketing messages, texting is much more effective. This is so important that I am providing the link again. Visit TextMagic to start your free trial.
Did you find this article useful or learn anything? If so, I’d love some feedback about what you thought.
Greg Jameson has been writing blog articles on ecommerce and internet marketing for over 10 years. Learn more about Greg at https://webstoresltd.com/about/
Guest Posting
