Attributes such as:

• Targeting, attracting, and making yourself heard with an audience interested in a specific topic
• Making connections and sharing information with readers, followers and other bloggers
• Establishing your credibility and authority on a topic
• Attracting links that increase search engine results
• Segueing visitors to your website
• Track-ability (you can track subscriptions, comments, inbound links and  search engine results; and, since it is a website you can use web analytics to measure visitor traffic and on-site behavior)

To take advantage of its attributes and realize these objectives, your blog needs to meet some basic content criteria and incorporate certain “structural” elements.

Content criteria include:

• A topic that is related to your business and contains information that is useful, interesting and timely
• Use of an appropriate name related to your topic
• Content that is well written and easy to read
• Content that stimulates thought and encourages discussion
• Maintenance of a regular publishing frequency interval (e.g. – 1 post per week or every other week)

Additionally, one should leave thoughtful comments on related blogs (to make connections with other bloggers and attract links to your blog).

Structural elements that aid success include:

• Use of a search engine friendly blogging platform such as WordPress or TypePad
• Having the blog under your business’ domain name (url) to build equity in something you own, and to generate increased search engine traffic to your website
• Incorporating important keywords in the blog post title and body content
• Use of both RSS feed and email subscription options
• Options to share with others via email or by posting on various social media networks
• Utilization of categories and tags so that specific posts can be easily searched and located
• Linking to appropriate parts of your website

HubSpot (a marketing services provider) conducted a survey of 1,531 of its customers (mostly small and medium-sized businesses), comparing those that blogged with those that didn’t.  They found that, on average, the companies that blogged received:

• 55% more visitors*
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more search engine indexed pages

*I have a client whose blog is generating more than a 100% increase in visitors to their website.

Results of the study are available at Hubspot

I think you will agree that these kinds of results clearly demonstrate a blog’s ability to produce online synergy.

In our next post we will examine social media characteristics and how they can also contribute to producing online synergy.

Stay tuned….

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