Why You Should Have a Blog

(if you are an academic)

The vast majority of hits on my website that originate with Google are from people entering keywords closely related to my name. By contrast, Google Analytics shows that almost no-one looking for my name arrives at my blog. So the blog attracts an audience that would be unlikely to arrive at my website and check out my publications on all the topics that I write about on the blog. In the past I did have a bit more content on my website. But the blog now has more than 300 articles for search engines to hit on a wide range of topics. So I think it has been pretty successful in getting my opinions and expertise on that range of topics out to people who are interested and much more successful than I think the website would ever have been. There isn't as much crossover of visitors from one site to the other as I would have liked. But then most of the links about my research on both sites go to RePEc etc. rather than to the sister site.