Good question and the answer will surprise you.  Blogging is the most affordable tool we have access to and what it can do to sell our products & services is rarely exhausted.  Content writing is affordable because you can do it yourself!  If you’re among the many who’d rather stab yourself to death with your pen than write with it, the healthy alternative may be to hire it done.

Hiring a professional content writer, like any other purchase, needs to be selective. It’s good to know what to look for.  Typically, professional content writers are affordable. They’ll know about the mechanics of the Internet and how to write content that is SEO ready and subject savvy.  The best of these writers have a flair in the skill of writing content that is entertaining and informative.  Another way to put that is to recall how much more fun it was to learn when a teacher made it fun by entertaining us with stories.  Those teachers let the stories do the heavy lifting.

Almost any blogging content is preferred over not having writing content at all.  There’s a good reason for this.  Your website, from the Internets standpoint, does not exists unless it has content that can be read (noticed/ seen), registered, (filed appropriately) and referenced (sends the info out anytime someone looks for it – think referral; the health of our business grows with referrals).  Pictures, photographs, all graphics, diagrams, etc. are not seen unless they are tagged with key word text.

How does it all work?

The internet reads blogs the same way it reads everything else – in a coded language that amounts to a very structured series of 1’s & 0’s .  You’ve probably seen those images or video clips of cascading ‘one’s and zeros’.   The ‘electronic readers’ are essentially Digital Robots that are programmed to do very specific jobs.  These are nicknamed ‘Bots’.  You’ve heard of how the Bots ‘crawl’ or ‘spider’ the Net – that’s ‘Geek speak’ for ‘reading’! LOL   Bots perform their job perfectly; they go out and read only what they’re sent out to find.  How does that happen?

What happens when we type in the search bar?

The key words you type into the search bar is a ‘job order’ for the Bots.  Now you know why it’s called the Net.  Remember the 1’s & 0’s  that is the language, or code that the Bots read…. there are millions of these coded constructs that are combed while the Bots crawl the web looking for what you’ve ask them to.  This is why the well-written Blog, the SEO savvy content, is like digital gold!  When that writing content is kept fresh, relevant, and fine-tuned so that it features very specific key words, then there is no better advertising to be had.

It’s best to think of content as a ‘gate keeper’.  It can pull the Bots in to read and refer to it, or push them away.  Having too many keywords can create an environment that’s called ‘key word stuffing’ and Google will penalize you for this.  The density of the key words, they placement of them on the page… the phrases that naturally belong to that key word have all got to be in their right place.

If I put out food for the Bots, will they come?

Absolutely! In a word – they won’t be able to resist your website.  That’s why Google’s most recent ‘algorithms’ are such good news for anyone who has a limited budget, limited knowledge on search engine marketing and limited time to spend trying to sell a warehouse full of product!  The ‘Bots’ also known as robotic readers, or the digital electronic readers, that search the net, crawl the web, only stop to read, register, file and refer to writing content when  something new is posted on the internet.  So think about it, in order to cultivate ‘page rank’ on Google, acquire it and maintain it, how else could you do this unless you have fresh, original, and relevant content.  It goes without saying, but while we humans love to see photos and videos, the bots are image, photo and graphic blind.  All they do is read code and writing content is the code they read.  This, to answer the questing this blog post opened with, “Why Blog?” –  this is why you blog!  You blog to be in the offing, to be read, referred to, noticed!

Stay in the conversation – blog and do so at least once a week.