I get a lot of push back about blogging and most of it comes from my coworkers when I ask them to write up a little ditty to post to our website each week. Most don't have a vision of why it is important and admittedly, even I struggle with it when I am buried in work and know Monday's post hasn't been written yet. When meeting with clients I always talk about blogs and why their site should have fresh content, but when all is said and done the importance of the blog falls by the wayside in comparison to our busy lives and full schedules.

Even I hadn't fully internalized the importance of blogging until recently when I started to run the numbers and added up the results collected over a year's time. You see I have been blogging both professionally and personally for as long. At first it's fun, ideas are easy to come by and doing something different during the day can be a nice distraction from the normal work load. But next the realization that to be successful with your website, you really need a focus and theme in your blog. Highlighting various services and up in coming technologies can only go so far with limited knowledge. Thus the need to bring in the skill sets of others. Then the long process of asking, prodding and reminding everyone to write blog articles begins. It is easy to get bogged down and give up before reaping any benefits.

So what's the deal about blogging? Why should we do it, why should we care and what's the real payoff in comparison to the workload involved? I find myself answering these questions regularly when facing the pushback from coworkers and the management team. I also find that I need to verbalize it now and again to myself so that I remain true to the soap box I stand on... ‘Blogs are important to your website's success!'

So what's the big deal you ask? The first obvious reason to blog is that you set yourself apart as the expert. You know your business, you know the hot topics and you know what your clients and customers need to know. Why not announce it to the world and use your website as the platform.

Secondly, search engines and specifically Google deems blogs important. And if the search engine giant says to jump, your response should be ‘how high?' The reason they look to blogs as an important asset in a website is because they want to see fresh content. A static website that never changes is never going to place high in the results. Instead their goal is to provide the world with the most relevant, reliable and freshest information concerning the search topic at hand. This is why they rank you higher if your site has been updated recently. Plus, if you are writing for your vertical market then a topic focused website will yield higher search returns when those topics are requested.

Lastly and most importantly, blogs increase search engine traffic that was unreachable before. Perhaps the biggest payoff of a blog is the corresponding traffic from search engines. While it takes a while to build a following, faithfully blogging to an empty auditorium eventually turns into a full house. When I started blogging last May I averaged six to eight visitors per day with three of them being family and a few being friends. At that time roughly 45% of my traffic came from the search engine which means that 1-2 people per day found me by a search. Almost a year later that traffic has jumped to an average of 40 to 50 visits per day with 83% of traffic coming directly from search engines. Quite a drastic change when evaluated over the course of the year, but really the change was slow and steady until recently. When I reviewed the numbers for the year, most of the early months look similar. Small numbers of visits per day and average search return. But then I noticed that the more I wrote and published regularly (mostly daily) the more exponentially my traffic grew. After building the base faithfully for a year the small numbers gave way to larger numbers. In the last three months alone the traffic continues to grow and double. Visits doubling next month will yield lots more traffic causing visits to double again. That's SIGNIFICANT GROWTH. If this trend continues then my site will be a high traffic site in another year and a force to be reckoned with in the world of SEO and blogging. (Editor's note: Juli is referring to her site dedicated to the study of the book of Romans, soon to the study of Hebrews, too. Since we know cross-linking is also a vital SEO tool, here's your cross-link Juli. www.jcblog.net. I invite you to investigate Juli's site yourself.)

Given this example you can see how important a well executed blog can be for your overall success. Granted, it takes time, effort and patience but it will eventually pay off. After evaluating the numbers and giving it the global once over, I am again convinced that to have a successful website you must have a blog and dedicate resources to it. Even starting out slow, but steady is better than nothing. Try blogging once a week, a few paragraphs at a time and measuring the feedback and traffic you get. After you see the proven results, you will be a blogger advocate! Don't worry; there is always room on my soap box to join the noise! Happy Blogging!