So why is a blog a good way to drive traffic to your website, and help you talk to your customers?

From a Search Engine Optimisation perspective, blogging helps to raise the relevancy of your website for your keywords - both with blog entries specific to your keywords and with links to pages on site.

Search engines are interested in the relevancy of your site against your main topics, such as books, so having a blog, with regular short posts will only help them see you are relevant to books.

Blog posts can be about any topic around your keywords, such as new books, book reviews and news from authors. Within these blogs you should include a link to products on your website, such as the new book you are writing about.

Blogs are also good for your users. Once you have built up traffic to your site, offering the ability to follow your blog will encourage users to come back to the site again. Using a Blog Feed Reader, users will be able to see when something is going on, such as a new release, or a special offer, and get the latest news. Following your blog will encourage them to follow up on these news pieces by visiting the site.

Recent research has shown that the current trend in users reading blogs on a weekly basis has increased dramatically with over half of the web users between 13 and 41 reading blogs this often. Blogs have also been proven to drive a large amount of traffic to sites as they are dynamically generated.

So if this profile fits your website users then why not set up a blog on your site and see what extra traffic and sales you can gain through your blog!