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