To blog, or not to blog – that is the question.

With apologies for paraphrasing the famous opening line in William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, it seems apropos in debating the merits of blogging vis-à-vis hiring search-engine optimization (SEO) experts.

If you’re like most business owners, budgets are tight. So you have to make sure to get the best return on your marketing investment. That means a strong ROI from online and traditional marketing.

With all due respect, you’ll find millions of people online who have proclaimed themselves as SEO gurus. And every day, they contact me or my associates looking for work.

Many, possibly, are successful. But many can’t back up their claims. Why?

If you have to choose between hiring an SEO person or blogging, the former simply doesn’t lay a long-term foundation for Web prominence as well as good blogging.

To use a sports metaphor: If you launch a great blog, you won’t have to look over your shoulder as much, and worry about your online competition.

You can focus on aggressively running your race.

Blogging is a platform for content marketing, and there are valid reasons why savvy B2B marketers like content marketing. SEO should only complement a blog.

So if you have budgetary constraints, and you have to make a choice, your best branding bet is to budget time for a blog and to add it to your Web site.

The advantages:

  1. Ironically, regular blogging is inherently a SEO best practice, especially for B2B marketing. Meaningful blogging on a regular basis and promoted on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook serve as catalysts for highly prized links in business.  Links are an SEO objective.
  2. Frequency of change is an important criterion for search engines. After you post a blog, search-engine crawlers are all over your Web site noting the change. The crawlers along with choice keywords, generate valuable traffic and links. The more you write, the more links you get.
  3. Google, in particular as the No.1 search engine, places even a higher premium on quality content. In evaluating your Web site, Google asks 23 key questions about your Web site.
  4. Internet users crave information. They especially will appreciate your checklists, tips and strategies.
  5. A blog ties in well with press releases. If used correctly, they’re a great tool to promote blogs, and strategic press releases will help you beat your competition. However, don’t use the same verbiage in your blog as in your press release.
  6. Blogs are a platform to display rich media, eBooks, and white papers that you can sell. (For example, see the 11 best practices to profit from writing a business white paper.)
  7. You will be able to create opportunities to interact with your visitors — it’s a great idea to engage your potential customers or clients.

Further, blogging is easy if you can write. It will be a source of great satisfaction for you.

From the Coach’s Corner, for success in blogging, here are additional tips:

9 Content Traits of the Best Blogs — In blogging, it helps to be trustworthy and a great storyteller. My sense is that the best blogs share nine common traits in publishing quality content. Why do the best blogs share nine common traits? I base my conclusions on two factors: Information gleaned from Google and from my own journalism experience.

13 Tips to Develop the Best Content for a Top-Rated Blog — Content marketing has become an art form via blogs. Google the term, blog, and you’ll see millions of search results. At last count there were 190 million blogs. So you face serious competition for readers’ eyes. That’s especially true if you want to be known as a go-to informational site in your niche.

SEO and Other Strategic Tips for a No.1 Rated Blog — To own your blogging niche, you must understand the evolving process — important basics in search engine optimization (SEO) and other strategies.  If you’ve been blogging for awhile, you know success doesn’t keep come automatically. Blogging is arduous work. You must have a strategic blogging goal.

Worried Your Web Site Losing Visitors? Best Practices to Fix it — If your site’s visitor numbers are falling, there are five possible reasons. The key is to know what’s wrong before you start applying solutions. It used to be that Web-site owners only had to worry about losing traffic in the summer.

Make Your Blogging, Social Media and PR Work to Attract Fans — Businesspeople have discovered social media is a work in progress. It takes huge amounts of time, not only to implement innovations, but to succeed.

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”

-John Russell 

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Author Terry Corbell has written innumerable online business-enhancement articles, and is also a business-performance consultant and profit professional.Click here to see his management services. For a complimentary chat about your business situation or to schedule him as a speaker, consultant or author, please contact Terry.