It has been going around that “blog visitors don’t click on ads”; blog visitors come for information, so they read your post (sometimes they just subscribe to your feeds!) and then off they go. I personally think this is true… to an extent. It all depends on what area you are blogging about. If your blog is very related to Internet Marketing, or is targeted at tech-savvy people, your ads will probably not perform well.

At least, that is what Problogger said, a couple of days back.

Why then, are there so many people blogging? Why don’t they just start a Joomla! site, or just upload some static pages?

Let me give you 3 great reasons, why I would prefer 30 visitors to my blog, than 300 visitors to a normal website.

1. Blogs invite participation

When you go to an informative website, you will probably be presented with an article. After your read the article what do you do? For myself, I would either (1) bookmark the article if it is bookmark worthy (2) click on a link that takes me elsewhere (3) leave the site altogether.

When people choose option 2, that is probably when an ad click is recorded.

Contrast that to what happens when you read a blog post. A powerful blog post is one that relates to your target audience, and often, it ends with a question! What is your first instinct when a question is posed to you?

You answer! Yes! Exactly!

Blogs invite readers to comment, critique, interact and clarify. When that happens, you have essentially engaged your reader in a conversation!

2. Blogs have more returning visitors

Let’s say you bump on a normal website with a very interesting article. Would you come back the next day, expecting more articles? Probably not.

What about a blog? The frequency of the posts presented on the front page of the blog shows how active the blog is. If the frequency shows that a post is made almost every single day, this will draw the reader back the next day, expecting a new post! So, then, you automatically get returning visitors for a blog!

In fact, this becomes even more interesting when the reader has previously left a comment. He will not only check the main page for new posts, but also get back into the previous posts to see if anyone else can added on to his comment!

3. Blogs let you get to know your readers

Very often, on a website, you don’t know who is the person behind the website… and you don’t really bother anyway.

The power of blogs are in building relationships. Because of the conversational style of writing in blogs, we intrinsically know that there is a person behind the blog.

Let me give an example using this blog! Over the last couple of months, I have made over a hundred and fifty posts on this blog, and in the process, I’ve also gotten to know quite a number of people – some very big names in the business blogging industry, and even several book authors! In fact, I’ve never gotten to know so many people outside my own country before!

I could have built this same information that I have published on this blog over into a website with over a 150 pages, but I’d bet I wouldn’t know as much people… because there will be no conversation!

When people think about online marketing – the first things that come up to mind is contextual ad system, affiliate links and selling your products online. Its true, blogs may not be the best platform to do that. However, I think blogs are the best tool so far for you to really build a relationship with people in your industry (whom you can collaborate with in the future), your customers (to give them the lastest updates) and your prospects.

Don’t limit yourself to just Adsense. Think wider. Think about business. Think about relationships.