Sure, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are growing like crazy!
But a recent study from Burst Media shows that the amount of time spent by Internet users on social networks is smaller than the amount of time spent on, and searching for, content sites.
Below is a graph showing online activity:
What does this mean for a business? It means if you want to connect to more prospects, generate more leads, and build a strong brand name, then you must start generating content!
And what’s the easiest and cheapest way for a business to generate content? Build a blog!
Blogging for business is, in my opinion, the most effective way to market your products and services. Content (blog postings) on the web have a unique way of atracting a niche audience.
Let’s say you’re a carpet cleaner in Orlando, Florida.
If you build a blog, and start writing about carpet cleaning – how to’s, best practices, customer experiences, mistakes to avoid, etc… – and you highlight your content with the fact that your business serves Orlando, Florida, then your blog will begin attracting people in the Orlando area that are interested in, or searching for way to best clean their carpets.
And since the study shows that more people are online pursuing content than hanging out on social networks, your content will, overtime, begin to attract a large audience of readers and customers.
Plus, the more content you generate, and the more frequent your blog posting, the more Google will come back to your blog to crawl and index your content.
This process of generating content and Google crawling your content, contributes to the PageRank of your blog. And the PageRank formula is this – the more you have, the higher your rankings in Google will be and the more traffic you’ll get.
So if you’re a business, large or small, then I strongly recommend you build a blog, start generating keyword targeted content, and do it on a consistent basis (daily, weekly).
The return on this effort, over time, will pay off handsomely for your business, and you’ll soon find that you’re getting more calls from people who are online searching for what you offer.
And the best reason of all to get started with blog is that your competitors are more than likely not doing it either! This leaves a huge opportunity for you to gain a competitive edge both now, and into the future.