To blog or not to blog-that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler on the internet to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous SEO,
Or to take arms against a sea of traffic
And, by opposing end it.
To digg, to nofollow link
No More-and by nofollow link to say we end
The traffic and the thousands of natural pageviews…
OK I’m no shakespeare, but this is an important question nonetheless! Blogging is one of the most effective ways to drive your search engine optimization, but it comes at a price…
Like any monster, it needs to be fed and fed often…
To be most effective one should plan a daily blog post. Now that’s not to say that you have to start by jumping into the deep end of the pool. Start by blogging once a week and then increase as you become more fluent. But where do you begin?
Choose a Platform
There are a number of platforms you can use to blog: Blogger, WordPress, and Typepad are the 3 most popular. For the sake of this discussion I will be talking about WordPress. It is my favorite and I believe, the most versatile. WordPress is highly customizable and offers the best options for maximum SEO effectiveness.
Choose Topics YOU Enjoy
A lot of dealers make the mistake of writing only about the dealership. Let’s face it, unless you are running a circus in your showroom like the Chopper in Vegas, there probably aren’t enough interesting things going on to write about on a daily basis. And believe me no one wants to ready a story about your sales specials so stop doing that! You need to diversify!
Maybe your in a great sports city like, Boston. Or perhaps you are a master fly fisherman. Maybe you like to scuba dive. Whatever it is think of several un related topics of interest that you think might resonate with the general audience in your market. This way you can mix in some other content with your dealer news and people will be more likely to actually read your blog on a regular basis.
Take this Boston Nissan Dealer‘s blog for example (OK maybe I’m a little biased, LOL oh BTW just click the word blog): You can use a spin off of the website grader site called blog grader to measure your blog effectiveness and to make improvements. See my grade here.
A variety of categories exist. From dealership news to lifestyle articles for both men and women as well as just my own miscellaneous ramblings. There are posts for the people as well as for the search engines. In short, it is diverse and it is successful at enhancing our SEO strategy. This blog gets over 4,000 unique visitors/month. As a result it passes on great SEO juice.
It is important to keep in mind that these do not need to be great literary works. No english teacher is going to mark it up with red pen. Complete sentences, reasonable grammar, and proper spelling are important, but it should be simple. The easier it reads, the more people it will appeal to and the more people will read it.
Bottom line: Blog and blog often. The more you do it, the better you will become.
In the next article we’ll talk about some of the finer points of blogging. You want to blog with a purpose and there are things you can do to make sure what you are blogging about gets a maximum number of eyeballs. Thanks for taking the time to learn your craft. Please comment and REMEMBER: There are NO stupid questions!