More visitors are probably getting to your site through the articles you publish there rather than coming directly to your homepage.

According to an article on the Neiman Lab website (an article I found through one of my news feeds, not from visiting their homepage, by the way), the so-called side door – meaning an article or blog – is becoming more important than a site’s front door.

Though this analysis focused on the journalism industry, the lessons learned can be applied to any business website.

Now, if you happen to be, say, the New York Times, you might still get more traffic through your homepage than anywhere else. Major brands with deep history can command that kind of attention.

Of course, we can’t all be that big. So a good way to draw traffic is to publish and publicize articles on your website.

The survey analysis found that much of the traffic to smaller news-related websites is generated from search engines (keywords, hooray!) and social media links to specific articles found within the website. News sites like The Atlantic, for example.

“The old mantra that every page needs to be a homepage has never been more true,” says Bob Cohn, the digital editor at Atlantic, as quoted in the Neiman article. “People come for the article, and the goal is to give them a clean and interesting reading experience for the article … and beyond that to make sure that we are giving the reader a sense of what else is on our site.”

As a result, it may be time to place “dramatically more focus on the story page,” Google’s Richard Gingras is quoted as saying.

Is this true for all businesses? Maybe a better question: Should this be true for all businesses?

Short answer: Yes. Whole answer: Yes, if you want your customers to be able to find you online.

Having articles or a blog doesn’t diminish the importance or necessity of a strong homepage. But a blog should be interesting and useful enough to show the nature of your business and encourage your visitors to browse the rest of your site and see what else your business can do for them.

It’s a way to show your audience how you can help them, and then invite them to see who you are and what you’re about in a more straightforward way.

After all, who wouldn’t want to discover the benefit of a relationship before putting in the time and effort to develop that relationship?