The reality of a business adding a blog is there is a very good ROI or return of investment on the time and money spent on adding a blog and keeping it updated. A business with a blog can use the blog as a tool for generating new business, keeping existing customers, improving their status on the web all at very little cost of time or assets to start and keep it running.
New Business
A blog can very easily bring in new customers. If you provide good blog content on your site, customers will visit your site, possibly more than once, then purchase from you because they like your blog content.
For example, Company X sells widgets as do a number of competitors. They create a blog that goes in depth into why their widgets are the best. The blogs are rich in search engine optimization which gets them top placement on the search engines. Their blogs truly have good content as well. They increase sales due to their top hits. More importantly, they also get customers that were hesitant about widgets in the first place due to the content contained in the blogs. Company X’s blog was able to turn what would have been tough sell customers without the normal budget or effort required to get to those customers.
Keeping Existing Customers
A blog also helps keep existing customers and helps keep them buying from the company. A site that provides new content on a daily or even weekly basis is going to get more traffic from people that have bookmarked that company’s site. Even if a site gets regular hits from returning customers, the blog is a way to keep them on the site longer and engaged in content related to the product.
By writing engaging but short articles about the product and including personal notes from the company’s leadership, the company that blogs creates a culture of openness, innovation and honesty with both new and existing customers. In other words, it helps make customers loyal to your company because you are being open and honest with them.
Improving Web Status
One of the most important things any business can do is strive to get the top non-advertised spot in the major search engines. When a potential customer wants widgets, most of the time they are going to click what is on their screen and not delve deeply into pages and pages of links to things widget related. A blog is a great way to improve a company’s status in the eyes of the search engines and get their company’s website to be the top listing which will improve the hits to the company’s web site.
There are many blogging platforms that can be used through your web hosting company to get content onto your site quickly and efficiently. That said, there really is only one best choice and that is WordPress. While their competitors may try to steer you away from WordPress, it truly is the best of the best when it comes to blogging and website creation. These are the main reasons why:
Free and Open Source
Open source software means that the source code or the actual programming is available for everyone to use. This allows developers of plug-ins to have free access to the code of the program so they can create an add-on easily.
Large software firms typically charge quite a bit of money and require extensive legal documents before allowing anyone outside of their company to see the source code. These costs, legal documents and even pre approval process for creating add-ons makes it prohibitive to small coding teams. By allowing anyone the ability to access the source code easily, a small upstart company or individual can craft a plug in that addresses a need. That need may be something tiny that most people won’t even want or need or it could be something that everyone ends up using.
Open source software also means that the software and the plug-ins are free to the end user. WordPress offers a GPL or General Public License for use that means they won’t charge and the plug-in creators cannot charge either. The support for WordPress comes from the coding community itself as well as donations from that community.
Easy to Use
Setting up and using WordPress is easy. The software is designed to be a full blown end user web based software application. What this means is that if you can use the basic functions of a word processing program, you should be able to easily use WordPress. Once you have created a theme for your site, adding content is simple. You just have to click “Write a New Post,” add your content and then click publish. The text editing can be done within WordPress, including adding formatting and multiple fonts or you can simply copy and paste from your word processing program to WordPress in your browser.
Completely Customizable
Through the use of theme’s, a user can setup their blog to look like a basic blog or a full-featured website. You are allowed to have columns for separate content aside from your blog posts and can have backgrounds, foregrounds. WordPress supports Java scripting, allowing your blog site to have a clean, professional look. This is all easily setup through WordPress once it is installed and active on your web server.
WordPress has been discussed in great detail as an excellent tool for making blogging sites. However, there are is so much functionality to WordPress that it is easy to rely on as your content manager and build an entire web site around a WordPress theme. There are many benefits to building an entire web site around WordPress and it is the easiest way to get a website setup.
WordPress allows the end user complete and immediate control over their website. It also eliminates a lot of the hassle that typical web coding requires. The typical process for crafting a web page has the web page creator do his or her work on a local machine. Once it is built, it is tested in web browsers then uploaded to the web host via FTP. If revisions are needed, a new page has to be uploaded and the old one deleted.
With WordPress, the web page creator simply designs and implements everything from a web console in their browser. The web page creator selects a theme, inputs content for each of the parts of their site and then clicks to view what they have input. From there, they can make corrections or add content with ease simply by changing the text. WordPress does the rest.
WordPress will allow you to create multiple pages and handles all the linking between them as well. If you decide you need to add another page, that type of addition is only a few clicks away. Wordpress will handle the creation of the new page as well as adding a link to your front page so viewers of your website have access to the new page.
With typical web building, if you decide you want a new look for your website; you almost have to start from scratch to build it. Even if you use a template, you will have to do quite a bit of editing to make it work with your content. WordPress templates are so user friendly and easy to use that you could conceivably change themes on a daily basis if you chose to do so. Changing a theme requires only a few mouse clicks. Your content stays but your look changes with ease.
WordPress has several advantages as a blogging tool and content management system. However, one of the greatest advantages is the SEO considerations. Search engine optimization (SEO) is important so the website has a higher ranking in search results in the primary engines such as Google or Yahoo. Many webmasters spend a lot of time and even money in order to increase their web ranking but with WordPress there are many built in tools available to make the process more efficient.
New Content
Search engines place a premium on sites that have continual new content. Using WordPress makes it easy to update the site on a regular basis with new information. Each time the site is crawled by the search engine, new content is searched and the natural ranking of the site increases with very little effort.
Meta Tag Generation
With WordPress, meta tags are automatically generated which saves time and effort. Meta tags will help when users are searching for a particular term or phrase. Added to a naturally high search engine ranking, this can be highly beneficial. In addition to automatic generation, you also have the ability to add any tags you want.
Title Optimization
WordPress also automatically optimizes titles for SEO. So, when you create a blog article the titles work in conjunction with the tags and your SEO will increase. Whether a person is searching for a particular term or phrase, the post itself will show up high on the search results.
Permalinks
You can automatically change settings in WordPress to use permalinks. Permalinks are a URL that points to a specific post on the blog. So, instead of going to the main page and searching for a post, you can have a URL of http://yoursite.com/category/post-name. This makes it easier to find in search engines and the links do not become irrelevant.
Social Networking Sites
Social networking sites are an important part of increasing SEO. When you post new material to these sites you garner additional exposure to potential customers and you have the opportunity to increase SEO by having relevant incoming links. WordPress has a function that allows new posts to automatically post to various social networking sites such as Twitter, FaceBook and MySpace.
THE MAIN REASONS THAT BLOGS DO WELL IN THE SEARCH ENGINES
Blogs are a popular format for reaching people - whether you are simply putting your thoughts down for others to see, reviewing the latest electronic gadgets or trying to bring customers to your web site a blog is a great way to do all of these things. Because blogs offer such fresh content to the web and are able to do so efficiently, search engines give them more weight than typical web sites when giving results to an end user.
Google, for instance, rates a blog with twice as much weight compared to a typical web page. There are a lot of other factors but if everything else was equal, the blog would end up higher than the regular web page every time.
Another reason blogs do well is that the end user adds their own tags. It isn’t necessary to “key word stuff” a blog article because the search engine bases some of the search on the tagging. This allows for better content. The use of tags can be abused but most of the search engines have ways of determining this and will lower the page in the ratings or remove it completely if there is enough activity to warrant this type of punishment.
There are a couple free sites that allow end users to let the search engines know about their blog’s and updates to those blogs. This gives the person posting blog content the opportunity to proactively keep their content updated with the search engines. Typical web content requires more time and it is never immediate; with a blog, you can go to a site such as pingomatic.com and alert the search engines about your latest blog.
Finally, blogging has become a way to pass on information quickly and efficiently. There is a blog that focuses on almost any topic that can be imagined. The search engines know this and scour them so that they are included in the results. Blogging can be considered a great equalizer for the internet. A blog from an individual easily can get more traffic than a major news site, for instance. The unique perspective of that individual is valued by the search engines when someone is searching for information on the topic.
I’m not recommending that you shelve your traditional static Web Site for a blog (although Wordpress can do both simultaneously), but have both to maximize your online marketing efforts. This video explains the differences and advantages of each from the perspective of a business person.
