All too often I get asked, “How do I drive more traffic to my website?”  Without a doubt, this is a valid question, and one that deserves special attention because for many, the success or failure of your business depends on driving high quality traffic to your website. As a professional web design company, we build every website with the idea that people don’t need a website – they need more business. Unfortunately for many small business owners, this idea is often times an afterthought. In this two-part series, we'll discuss the most inexpensive, effective actions you can take to drive high quality traffic to your website.

1. Blogging – If you're not blogging on a regular basis, you're foregoing a very effective, low cost marketing strategy to attract prospects to your business. Marketing research shows that blogging, a type of inbound marketing, results in 60% lower cost per lead and a 58% success rate as compared to Outbound Marketing strategies such as direct mail, tradeshows and telemarketing. With such compelling figures, there's no reason why anyone with a web presence shouldn't make blogging a integral part of the company’s lead generation strategy.

Blogs offer the following benefits to small business owners:

• They make creating new content easy for anyone.
• They are looked at favorably by search engines.
• They engage your prospects on a personal level compared to other forms of marketing.
• Their content is automatically distributed to search engines and subscribers.
• Their content can be repurposed and reused for your newsletter or e-newsletter.

Finally, the best reason to have a blog is that it's one of the easiest, least expensive marketing strategies you can use to connect with your prospects in a meaningful way.