Many small business owners have one main website which contains information about their company and their products. Sometimes it is an e-commerce site where customers can make purchases directly through the site. Obviously, having a website is useful, but what about a blog? Including a blog has many benefits. In fact, some online marketing studies have shown that sites which incorporate a blog get more traffic than a site without one. After all, who doesn’t want to attract more visitors to their website?

Besides the increased traffic, blogs can have many additional benefits for your site. Here are some of them:

• They can increase your search engine ranking

Search engines such as Google love high quality blogs and having one on your site can do wonders to increase your search engine ranking. It can also provide you with useful backlinks back to your main site as well as relevant parts of it, such as product descriptions.

• They can establish you as an authority in your niche

The purpose of a blog for a business is not really to sell anything, but rather to show you as an authority in your niche by providing content which your readers will find useful. You can give information about how to best use your products, news about your industry, as well as any advice or tips that your readers will appreciate.

• Blogs give you another place to interact with your visitors

When you post articles on your blog, you can allow readers to leave comments. This is a great way to get feedback about your blog and your business. It is also an excellent way to answer questions that a customer might have about a certain product. Blog comments give your visitor an easy way to get in touch with you should they be interested in something that you offer, but might not be ready to buy it just yet. Of course, with blog comments there is always the issue of comment spam. However, there are various WordPress plugins that you can use to limit the amount of spam comments that you get. Of course, you can always approve each comment manually, thus eliminating most of the spam. Putting a notice that comments are moderated and approved manually will also serve to deter spammers.

Getting the Most out of Your Blog

To get the most out of a blog, it needs to be updated on a regular basis with fresh new content. This will not only help you when it comes to SEO, but will also be very useful at keeping your readers interested. After all, nobody wants to read a blog that seems “dead” and hasn’t had an update in several months. A good thing about blogs is that you can now include multimedia content such as video on them as well, so if you have a video that you would like to share with your readers, you can put it up on your blog as well.

If you have a wordpress blog and want to make money from your blog then a very good plugin to install is the Google adsense plugin.  The plugin is free to install.  Simply do a search on Google for the “Google Adsense WordPress Plugin”.  Download and unzip the plugin then using your FTP software upload the plugin to the following directory within your hosting account:

Public_html/wp-contents/plugins

Login to your blog and under plugins you should see the Adsense plugin and activate it.

Once you have activated the plugin your ready to customise the plugin under “Settings” on the bottom left of the screen.  Under the Adsense ID this is where you put you Google adsense publisher id also known as your PUB Number.  This number can be found at the top right hand corner in your Google adsense account.

You can also setup Adsense channels if you use adsense for several other websites and want to track which site is generating your clicks.

You can also set what sizes you want the adds to be displayed on your blog under ad formats.  You can also decide if you want your ads to appear on articles, static pages, category pages, on your home page or any of your archive pages.

You can also change the colour of your ads to match the theme of your website and you can also set to show a number of adds per page depending on your preferences.

If you have a wordpress blog that you dont pay much attention to then you should install the wp-o-matic wordpress plugin which will turn your blog into an Autoblog.  What this plugin does is automatically adds articles to your blog via an autofeed that pulls feeds from website rss feeds you specify.  You can set it to run at specified times throughout the day adding as many articles as you like.  You will need to setup a cron job via your hosting account in order for it to work.

When you download the plugin simply extract the files locally to your computer and then FTP to your server and upload the plugin folder to the following directory in your hosting account:

Root/wp-content/plugins/

Login to wordpress and active at the plugin

Then under settings click on wp-o-matic and start the installation process.  Follow the onscreen instructions which asks you to setup a cron job.  If your not sure how to setup a cron job follow the following video which shows you how to install and setup the wp-o-matic plugin:

 You can add as many different campaigns as you like

Although if you can i still would recommend your own unique content as your blog will highly benefit from adding unique articles that aren’t duplicated from another blog.