Want to attract more visitors to your website, more leads and more customers?

Start your own blog… Ed Rivis, the UK’s leading web marketing expert for small business owners, explains why a simple company blog can transform your business.

Best wishes,

Marie-Louise Cook
Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

Why Writing A Blog Will Build Your Business

Ed Rivis is the UK’s leading web marketing expert for small business owners looking to use the web to dramatically increase sales and maximise profits. He spoke with Jonathan Jay, SuccessTrack’s Founder, about what business owners can do to ensure their websites attract more visitors, more leads, and more customers.

Jonathan Jay: Is writing a blog a good way of getting traffic?

Ed Rivis: “In the past, you’d put up a website and change it every so often. People would visit your corporate website and read it and they might have responded.

“Blogging is interactive – it’s almost like a community website. You get visitors on your blog and you might be talking about your products or services, making comments about the industry you work in, quoting facts or figures or talking about third party research and so on. It’s really like an ongoing conversation.

“Blogs are fantastically powerful for building and increasing customer loyalty or customer retention – you’re involving customers and inviting their feedback.

“It might not be for everyone – you have to have time to blog or you might want to delegate it to someone who is very good at writing and who knows your industry inside out.”

Jonathan Jay: We’re always being told that we’ve got to refresh the content of our websites and it’s quite hard with a ‘corporate website’ to change that ‘welcome to our website’ bit at the beginning. With a blog, you can do that easily.

The great thing I found about blog software is that it is almost always free, it’s very easy to use, which means that the content is self-managed and you don’t need a web designer once it’s been set up for you.

I used to phone a web designer and say, ‘Could you please change the date on that piece there, could you add this, and put in a new photo’ and they’d say, ‘Of course we will and that will be £100 – send us the money and we’ll make the changes.’ But with blogging software it’s designed for everyone to use so you can do all that yourself – all the instructions are there – so that means it saves you money and it gets you better ranked in the search engines. It’s far more modern to have a blog website than it is to have a standard static site. And you can change it on an hourly or daily basis – you’re completely in control.

Ed Rivis: “One of the best ones is WordPress – it’s a superb piece of software. I should say this is something called Content Management and you can get Content Management Systems so you can edit corporate websites but with blog software you can have the best of both worlds.

“One of the best things about blogging is that it can fuse the front end marketing – the acquisition of new customers and clients with ongoing dialogue with back end customers and clients. Rather than email marketing which only goes out to people on your list, with blogging not only do your existing customers and clients get those communications but brand new customers and clients who haven’t yet done business with you can go to your blog and read about the latest special offers and innovations. It’s one of my favourite aspects of blogging.”

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