What Good is a Blog?

So what’s all this stuff about blogs, bloggers and blogging? And isn’t it just enough to have a website to promote your school, church, business or something else? Well, it’s not just enough anymore. In the past a website did well. (And it still does. Don’t get me wrong.) But now there’s the blog. Simply put, a blog does better than a website to attract viewers. And I’ll tell you why in just a moment. But before that, what you need to remember is a blog is basically an online information page. Anyone can create a blog. (The good news is you can create one for free at: http://www.blogger.com/.) And once you’ve created a blog, that’s when the fun begins. You post to it regularly (write articles). You invite others to come and read your posts (via email). You include relevant links on your blog so that viewers of your blog can go to other websites (and/or blogs). And so your blog becomes a portal. People will come to your blog because it has all the links right there in one place easy for them to find. Which brings me to the point of a blog’s ability to attract viewers (versus a website’s). Search engines (like Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, etc.) recognize blogs more than they do websites. The reason for this is blogs are “dynamic” (always changing) versus websites that are “static” (don’t change much). And search engines look for the dynamic sites! They want those that are visited often and updated regularly. And they’ll give a much higher search ranking status to those blogs which are (and these are my words for it) “living and breathing.” And so let’s just say someone is looking for a Christian school in the foothills of California. Well, if we do our homework correctly and we invite people (via email) to read the regularly updated blog posts and come to the blog as a portal to visit other sites, then guess which Christian school in the foothills of California appears when someone searches the internet? I don’t think I have to tell you.