Blogs - Do you really read them?

I read my own before I hit the post to site button. I do occasionally read blogs. For example as a self confessed Bonsai enthusiast I regularly read blogs by masters of the subject.

Mike

Many good replies.

Essentially, I would say "Blog if:-

1) You enjoy it; or
2) You want to improve search rankings (just make sure your blogging is on the relevant topics).

Though hopefully if you want to improve search rankings you do enjoy it too otherwise you will find it a chore!

I really liked the discussion above. Very informative.

Thanks everyone for this interesting and very human insight into blogging. For the past year or so, I have been weighing up whether to start a blog in the natural health field. Gradually, I am becoming clearer in my mind about the type of content and tone I would want my blog to use.

I am a bit of a blog junky. I read all sorts SEO, tech, well being business blogs etc etc.

I'm not a blog person myself, but here in China quite some people got famous by blogging, especially in specific area they're good at. But since twitter or other quick ones come out, it's kind of getting out of history, but maybe it's just not good for lazy guys.

For the blogging used as SEO part, It's brand new to me. I'm still working on it, anyone could suggest some good blog sites for me?

I am a bit of a blog junky too! I read all sorts, for business and leisure. I think it requires discipline to incorporate a professional blog into an organisation, because you need to optimise it as well as populate it. If done well blogs can be a superb channel! Chris

I blog for SEO purposes but find it a time-consuming once-weekly chore.

If the blog item doesn't pay off in a Google pge 1 rating - at least for a short while - I really resent the amount of time I've spent writing it. It's also difficult - for career advice sites at least - to build a "community".

Being less negative for a moment, I've also found that blogging leads to you making potentially valuable contacts you might not otherwise have had. The contacts may come from comments on the blog or the writers of other blogs you stumbled across when trying to find out how well your own item performed in the search engines.

Contributing to other sites' blogs can be useful publicity, I think. As CareersPartnershipUK I contribute to many much bigger career, job search and general readers forums (eg the Guardian, Prospects, GraduateFog, etc). Using your company name as your screen name makes it easy for readers interested in what you've said to look you up - and they do. Obviously you do have to be careful to stay within the rules and not tout too obviously for business.

You need to be able to control / edit comments to your blog. I've had loads of incoming spam (some of it appearing as harmless generic statements along the lines of "great article -keep it up"). My bugbear at the moment is huge lumps of spam appearing in what seems to be one of the Eastern European languages.

Otherwise, I "approve" anything which seems relevant to the blog item itself, including those comments with links back to other sites (though I check those other sites first!!).

I think that most people commenting are in agreement that in general blogs are a good thing... the danger is to get excited about having a blog in the beginning and then letting it slide.

Blogs are wonderful for promoting your website... if you had a problem and found a solution, blog about it, because the chances are that others will have the same problem and search for it... Blogging is a wonderful way to start a conversation, which is what the web is all about...

I would agree with some other posts and say that start a blog if you can commit to updating it once or twice a week minimum and you are interested in the stuff you want to blog about... the more chatty and engaging you are in your blog, the more people will find you, respond and return to your website

Hope that helps!

Agree with you Zoe (and welcome!).

I think too many people get hung up on the keywords and if you're passionate about some things then the keywords should just follow naturally...