Have you considered using the power of blogging to attract more visitors to your website? Blogs can be a great way to generate web traffic, and are usually surprisingly easy to set up and get started.

Before we continue, let’s start with a definition of what a blog is.

Think of a Blog as simply a public online journal that you can write (post) to. These posts or posts can be seen by anyone who comes to your website. A good blog can have many thousands of daily readers, literally hanging on the authors of every word.

Not only can you use regular text, you can also enhance your blog with audio and video, making it a rich and engaging visitor experience.

The process of creating a blog is usually very quick and painless. There are blogging sites online that require no setup (other than registering on the website). One of the most popular blogging sites is http://www.blogger.com (recently acquired by Google). It is literally possible to post in a matter of minutes using this service.

Even better, most blog sites have the mechanism to “announce” your posts to many other blog sites automatically, which could drive visitors to your blog very quickly.

Having the mechanism to automatically inform other sites about your posts is a huge advantage, as you are getting it out there on the internet, without the need to manually submit your blog to a large number of sites, or use other methods to get your site . found.

If you plan to use your Blog as a sales vehicle, many experts would tell you not to. Instead, leave any “selling” on your regular website and sales pages, and instead let the visitor discover more about the real you on your blog.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you and form a relationship with a “real person” and not some nameless website or corporate identity, and this can only help you in future sales with these people, as that creates a level of trust

A blog also allows (and indeed encourages) the participation of visitors, who can post comments on your posts, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good blogging software will allow you to eliminate spam replies (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to your site) as well as moderate conversations that are appropriate or off-topic.

One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank high in search engines. Search engines love blogs, as long as they contain quality, relevant content. Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you on your journey to find true search engine success.

For example, if you have a website about software development, you might decide to make posts about programming in general, other posts about training software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It is vitally important that you do not group all posts together for several reasons. First, people who visit your blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training, for example) and may find it difficult and frustrating to easily find all the posts you’ve written about training if you don’t have clearly defined categories. Decent blogging software usually allows you to separate your posts by categories, making it easy for your visitors to find the information that interests them.

Search engines may see your blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together, so this is another good reason to make sure you categorize your posts correctly. Search engines highly prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorize correctly with a high search engine ranking.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress see:-

http://www.wordpress.org

This is a free blogging package (yes, no paying!) and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do too.

This software can be downloaded for free and installed on your web host. In fact, many web hosting companies offer a free automatic installation to do this for you.

I hope by now you have realized the power of using and maintaining a blog, it can be the best website promotion and give your visitors a glimpse of the real you, helping them to trust your products and services.