the business of blogging

Quite often when I try to explain to people what’s involved in setting up a blog, (and why I charge to install WP when it’s “free” ) or with inbound marketing, I watch their eyes glaze over and their brains shut down. It’s not that what I’m going over is all that foreign or technical most of the time, it’s just that the typical business owner doesn’t see the relationship between the tactics, techniques, sites and details. Hopefully these images will help to clear it up a bit.

Blog set up
I offer a couple of different packages for clients for this service, but whether you do it yourself or not, don’t forget to allot the time and energy to creating that initial content (or the keyword research that should drive it — but that’s a different post) . The “hello world” post isn’t meant to be kept!

Click to view full size blog set up image

Inbound Marketing
No, it is not a good idea to select “one from column A” and no, I really can’t tell you which is “the best” technique because the answer really does depend on your audience and your goals. We’re trying to cast the widest possible net to be where your customers and potential customers can find you. Also, in real life they also all relate to one another as they do with your main site. I offer “packages” that are basically drawn on budgetary lines but include work in each area each month.

Click to view full size inbound marketing image

Posted under blog building, inbound marketing

I wish I could just fold my whole website into my blog. In my case though, the coding of the site itself (pure CSS layout) is part of my professional portfolio so I can’t.

But you probably could. And you probably should.

Blog is both a noun and a verb. Post is also used as both a noun and a verb in the blogosphere. That’s a bit of confusion that’s led a lot of people to think the mechanics behind blogging (the verb) and posting (the verb) are a lot harder than they really are. Such semantics don’t count with blogs (the noun) the same way they do for a post (the noun) on a website where the coding of a post (the noun) also makes up the structure of the website.

If you do know even a little bit of coding (specifically CSS or PHP), you can usually find and remove a little snippet of code from your blog’s main page and post templates that removes the automatic insertion of the date of the post. That, along with another tweak or two, makes your blog a full fledged and very robust content management system. Not too long ago, only enterprise sized companies could afford the powerful back-end programming that is a CMS.

Today, anyone can have a clearly and cleanly designed web home that consists of thousands of pages or posts of information. If you have the time to set it up and tweak it correctly yourself, you can have it all for free. If you don’t have that time, there are plenty of people (like me) who are happy to help.

So unless you need to show you control the technology behind your website, why let it weigh you down and take up one minute more of your time? With a blog you can update your content as quickly and easily as you can type an email. If typing is even a bit too much of a chore for you, you can also turn on your webcam (or microphone) and record a video, or audio, blog post.

You just concentrate on saying what you need to say as clearly and concisely as you can and both you and your readers will be happy.  The only people who are likely to care if your site is made up of webpages or blog posts are the IT people who helped build the engine you’re using to run it all, or the web designers who lost their jobs because of it.

Posted under Blog benefits, blog building

You may have noticed one thing that sets this blog apart from the majority right away. It wasn’t done as a mistake, though it is something I may change in the future.

Right now, there are no dates to indicate when I’ve posted an item to the blog. I’ve done this to show you how you can use a blog even if you don’t intend to provide a steady stream of new content to your site.

When you set up a blog you gain a lot of functionality on the back-end that makes maintaining your web presence very easy.  Every time you do write something to your site, all you need to do is type it in and hit the publish button. Wordpress programming — with a little help from the plugins we use — takes over to keep things neat and organized from that point on. Here are just some of the things that happen in the background:

• A permanent spot in your directory (or permalink/single post) url is assigned
• The story is published on top of your blog home page as most recent
• Internal links between all posts are established/adjusted
• Backend links are created within categories, page or post types so you can find and edit this post easily
• Navigation links are made, updated and displayed on every page of your blog
• Links between the category you select and the post itself are established
• Any images, video links, podcasts, or other audio links are automatically sorted to the right directories and stored for you
• Links between the post and any image or other asset file are created or adjusted as a the post is moved
• A notation on your sitemap is made and Google is pinged (along with other services)
• Your RSS feed is updated and subscribers notified that you have added content

…and so on and so on. It really is true that the blog you see is only the very tip of the iceberg that is all of your blog. It’a slso true that there can be no magic formula that will tell you when it makes sense for you to set up a static website and when it makes sense to set up a semi-static blog. The choice comes down to how much time or expertise you have to lavish on your website/blog.

Do you have time to go through and complete each of these tasks manually if you post infrequently?  Even if you only made two additions or two deletions to the content of your website each year, chances are good you would overlook one or more of these steps. That’s assuming you worked from a very good checklist that remembered them all for you in the first place. (Ahemm…of course you could also hire me to do it for you…)

On the other hand, dates do help. Human readers love fresh changing content as much as the search engine spiders. They want to see that they’re getting the up to date scoop on all the specials in your retail store, or know that you’re up on the latest judicial rulings relevant to the legal case they may want you to handle for them, etc.

I’m going to continue making entries to this blog without dates for a few months. Of course I’ll be watching my stats closely. It will be interesting to see if traffic to this blog does or doesn’t grow at roughly the rate I’ve come to expect using web 2.0 promotion methods. Benchmarking numbers on this point are the one thing I wasn’t able to find, so we’ll just have to grow some ourselves — along with your comments and observations of course.

Posted under blog building