If your business doesn’t already have a blog, chances are you have at least entertained the idea. Blogs come with many benefits and responsibility. Blogging is not easy and successful blogs come with a certain level of commitment. The more you put into your blog the more you can expect to get out of it.

Try your hardest to get on a content schedule. What I mean by content schedule is to determine your goals and how many weekly posts you expect it will take to meet these goals. A content schedule is your commitment. If you determine that two new posts a week will help your cause, then put it on your calendar to do so.

If you develop a conscious blogging strategy, you can reap some of the benefits below.

Long tail keywords

If you’re somewhat familiar with search engine optimization, you might already be familiar with the long tail of search. What this is in a nutshell are specific, highly targeted keywords. These keywords may not send a ton of traffic, but the clicks they generate can be very relevant and convert well. Individually the keywords have a low search volume, but if you rank well for a lot of them the combined search volume can be well worth your while. Long tail keywords are often less competitive too.

Blogs are a great tool to help you cover a lot of ground for long tail searches. Each new blog post is a new opportunity to have content that supports long tail searches. The beauty of blogs is you can often get long tail traffic without really even optimizing for it. Of course if you have a list of keywords to use then by all means use them, but your content alone will open doors you may not have even thought about. If you have been blogging for a while you have probably already noticed the traffic your posts have garnered from the search engines, a lot of it is probably from keywords you now rank for that you didn’t really think about at the time you wrote the posts.

Search engines love content

You might be tired of hearing “content is king” but this phrase is coined for a reason. Content is powerful. Search engine spiders love crawling new content. New content keeps your site fresh and the search engines coming back often to index your new pages. Having new pages indexed regularly will have a positive impact on your SEO efforts. Think of it this way, each new page is a potential doorway to your website and another opportunity for your brand to be found.

More inbound links

Blogs are a great way to earn new inbound links. Write good content and the links will come. This can happen a couple different ways. Your readers and visitors can share your content for you as well as bookmark your pages. You can do the same. It is a good best practice to share your content throughout your social network. Submit your blog posts to social voting sites like Digg, Mixx, Reddit etc. Also submit your posts to other social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Each site your content is featured on is another opportunity for a new inbound link. As you might have heard, inbound links are kind of a big deal in SEO.

There are lots of benefits to blogging and blogging often. Look at what you have on your plate and work time into your schedule to site down and write new content on a weekly basis. Be consistent. If you commit to do a new post a week, then try your best to do so. Remember all the benefits of blogging. Encourage others in your organization to contribute as well. Having multiple contributing authors can really lighten everyone’s load and have a huge impact on the health of your blog and online marketing.