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Saturday, July 14, 2007

The Power of Blogging

I wrote earlier about how surprised I was that people actually can find and read my blog. I’ve been reading the book "What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People Who Successfully Leverage the Power of the Blogosphere" by Ted Demopoulos, which makes the point that search engines love blogs. Well, shortly thereafter I got a first hand lesson in just how much.

I got my weekly report about my site stats. The first thing I noticed was that over 100 people had read my blog. Now that’s probably no big deal for a celebrity blog with a focused subject, but this is a totally idiosyncratic personal blog a so-called “cat blog” that’s only been around a couple of months. I wasn’t sure anyone would ever read my blog. I’ve had a business website for years that is only just beginning to reach that level. Frankly, I rarely update the website because it is pain. It also seemed like there was a sudden jump in readership. Upon examining the referral pages, it seemed most of the jump was because I had reviewed the movie Live Free or Die Harder. In that review, I mentioned the F35 STOVL fighter jet. I guess a lot of people looked that up wondering if it really could hover. (It can.) TIP: If you want people to read your blog, write about a popular movie.

But the thing that really convinced me of the power of blogging and how much search engines love blogs was a referral page on which someone had searched for “ron john shops,” which is a misspelling of Ron Jon. In any event, my blog was number one on the page and ranked above Ron Jon’s own website! That’s nuts! That is when I decided that I had to add a blog to http://www.harryhackney.com/. By the way, if you search for “ron jon shops”, which is the correct spelling, my blog comes in at number 10. That’s still pretty crazy. I cannot explain the difference, but apparently search engines love recency as well as links.

If you’ve got a website to promote your business, you might want to consider adding a blog.

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