While blogging on it's own is useful in attracting traffic to your website, it is better served in synergy with a several other marketing strategies.

This is certainly a much covered topic by now, but why not throw in my two cents.

It is surprising, just how fast Google will crawl and index new web pages and make them available for search, and Google seems to love unique blog content. As a matter of fact, I am blogging right now specifically for that reason (and here you thought it was to help YOU out? Hah!), well, if you learn something in the process that's cool too, but what I am doing right now is a business marketing strategy for my website.

While blogging on it's own (writing useful articles on a topic) can be useful in attracting traffic to your website, it is better served in synergy with a several other marketing strategies. We will get to that soon.

First let me explain, that when you write an article on a subject, you in essence, litter your website with a variety of new keyword variations. Keyword variations are spider food (spiders are search engine robots that crawl and index the word wide web) and while you might attempt to target some of the larger search phrases by using clever marketing techniques and Googles keyword suggestion tool, this is not something that is required to see your blog succeed in attracting traffic to your website.

Writing useful articles can gain you traffic in a number of ways which I will attempt to break down into a logical order:

1. Search engines find your article and add your article to their searchable index, providing direct search engine traffic to your website.
2. Other websites find your article useful and informative and decide that linking to your article may be useful to their visitors also. They link to your website which provides direct traffic from their website and also boosts your Google popularity (see Google Page Rank). The boost in your Google popularity has a communulative effect in boosting other pages on your website higher up in the search results, which provides more traffic from all of your other pages combined. Nice right?
3. Social media. People who like your article might choose to share it with their friends on Facebook, Digg or other form of social media. This can again provide direct traffic from these sources and additional, boost your search engine popularity.

In order to take full advantage of the power of blogging on your website, all you need is blogging software for your website. Good blogging software will preform valuable functions like, for one, making it easy to add new blog posts in an orderly way and it will improve search engine optimization.

There are many options, Wordpress & Blogger are by far the most popular, but require a great deal of technical knowledge to really customize well. They are also so robust and featured, that you may find yourself with way, way more then you need. Plus, your blog will look like everyone else's, which is fine, but instead you might instead try a lightweight, clutter-free, highly customizable alternative like our idev-Blog (we are actually using right now to write this article).

Now I mentioned something about marketing synergy earlier on and this is what I mean.

Share your article:

Content is inherently valuable on the Internet. Once you have an article written, you can gain even more traffic from it then by search results alone. Let your article saturate the search engines for a couple of weeks and then once it has been indexed, submit your article to an article website like Ezine. Ezine is a popular and highly trafficked article website that features many authors on many topics. A submission to Ezine might see as many as a few hundred views and potentially a handful of visits back to your website from those views, since each article is allowed to include a link back to your website.

There are many article websites like Ezine, some big, some small. And you can submit your article to all of them. Not only will you get some extra clicks from the articles that you submit, other websites may pick them up and post them on their websites as well (this is allowed, as long as your signature link remains intact, and your signature link contains the linking information back to your website). Also remember that those signature links also count in the popularity contest which is Google Page Rank. Sharing your article essentially creates additional votes for your website from all of the other websites that show your article. So whenever possible, link back to your website with thoughtful anchor text! Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms.

Create a Facebook page and keep your users involved.

By sharing your new blog articles on your Facebook page wall, you can effectively notify all of the people who follow your page every time you write a new article. This is a way to engage your users and interest them in more of your products.