One of the good online business lessons I’ve learned from publishing a blog is the increase in site traffic we get on a daily basis.

At DMK, our blog isn’t geared towards “hard selling” any products. In fact, if you look at our Rates page, you’ll find that with a pretty full schedule, we don’t generally take on too much new work at any time. As well, we’re really only running this blog in a one-way communication format, as we don’t currently open posts for comments. The anti-spam plugins are quite effective these days, but for this blog we’re still comment-free for now.

It’s been a bit over 2.5 years now since starting with blogs — nearly 12 months directly on this site, plus 30-odd posts from a previous blog now retired. Having the WordPress system well in-hand means we’ve got to the point where I can watch the blog stats quite closely on our daily visitors: we use a great (free, open source) plugin called Slim Stats to give us some great info on our site activity.

Blog posts definitely increase our site traffic. Sometimes, we start getting traffic to a blog post within an hour or two of publishing the post to the site. We can see the search terms of course that we rate highly for (we get lots of matches for “DMK” in various Google, Yahoo, Live.com and other search results from around the world, most often in the top handful of results).

In March, we had visitors from Australia, the US, Great Britain, China, Malaysia, France and 24 other countries to our site. That traffic was weighted slightly in favour of our blog posts and categories over our regular content pages, although not by much.

Case in point: last Friday-week, I posted the article “The Only Time To Bid Early on eBay” - today, on our stats, just over a week later, I can see that a US-visitor has typed in “why do people bid early on ebay” into the US Google, and we’re result number 4, after USA Today, Yahoo! Answers and eBay Forums. That’s a pretty good ranking and puts us in with some rather reputable publishers — and, here’s a lesson in itself — our blog post title is a big help in arousing curiosity for a web user to click on our link in the search results to read what we have to say.

Now, we’re not actually “monetizing” that post — it doesn’t link to an eBay information product, nor does it present a page with Adsense Google ads. For our purposes, we’ve kept away from that opportunity for now. But that post is definitely helping bring good traffic to our website.

I can nearly tell you every time when Ab King Pro run an infomercial ad on tv in Australia — because there are several times per day when people come to our site and read the post that refers to this exercise product — and their search terms indicate they’re online looking to buy the Ab King Pro machine. When I last looked, searching on “abkingpro.com.au” only resulted in 2 matches — one for our post and the other for the company selling the actual machine — and people visit our page after seeing that result list. (Marketing lesson there in testimonials, third-party reviews — although our post doesn’t actually talk about the machine, just one of the selling techniques in the infomercial).

Same for something like Microsoft’s Expression Web: on a search results page full of links positively reporting on the software was my lone post, that, in the brief text match on the results page, included the text:

“I see Microsoft have launched Expression Web, a web building tool stepped up from Frontpage (ugghh!) program. Here’s 2 reasons why I’ll never use it:”

That, of course, was relevant and interesting content for the person searching, so they clicked the link and came to my site to read my two reasons. Whether or not those reasons applied to them, I was able to get their click and their traffic. There are, of course, psychological marketing lessons in that activity to take note of!

I’m sure our ranking is rewarded by having blog entries and regularly updated content. That content starts to bring traffic from the day it is added.

I can see daily that our blog posts are definitely a traffic-building component of our website. There is plenty of opportunity to make sure you make the most of visitors arriving at your site this way, especially if you do have something to offer them (newsletter, product, consulting etc). We don’t yet capitalise on that kind of opportunity, but see how blogs are a powerful business tool in getting great search result rankings.