Should You Blog on Your Writer’s Website?

A blog — a regularly updated stream of updates about you and your writing — can be an important, maybe the most important, part of a writer’s website. While your portfolio and bio are useful, especially in getting new clients and supporting queries and proposals, they offer no reason for the passing reader (read: your audience) to come back.

If you update your site only when a new book is published, you’re asking a lot of your readers — it might be two years before there’s anything new to look at on your site. They certainly aren’t going to bookmark your site if they don’t expect anything to change for months or years.

A blog can be updated every week or so, several times a week, daily, or even throughout the day, depending on your schedule and how much you like doing it and what kind of material you’re posting. As it happens, the frequency with which your site is updated is one of the factors Google and other search engines look at to determine how highly to rank your site (and thus, how close to the first page it comes up when people search for topics covered on your site).

More importantly, blogging regularly gives your audience a reason to come back, and helps build a feeling of connection between you and your readers. People are genuinely interested in the lives of the authors they like, and letting them see into your creative mind a little will turn casual readers into life-long fans. Blogging also gives new readers a taste of your style before they invest their time and money into reading your work. And if you write for periodicals, you can announce where your latest pieces can be found for people who might not otherwise read those magazines or journals.

Blogging is also a chance to showcase your abilities if you’re a freelance copywriter. Having a regularly updated blog shows your ability to write within a fixed time-frame, and if it’s good, all the better. Blogging can also give potential clients an insight into what kind of person you are and whether you would be easy to work with given their particular personalities and workplace environments.

So the short answer is, if you’re a writer, you definitely want to keep a blog on your website.