I’ve been taking a little heat lately for not updating this blog on a timely (read daily) basis.
Until now, however, this blog existed for the sole purpose of showing a potential client what a blog is, what routinely appears in the sidebar, what sorts of things you can include for content, etc.
I set up this blog so people could get a taste of what a blog is and what they can do for their own businesses. I wanted it to look like the same stublet I would deliver to them with my premium set-up service.
But I’ve already gone a couple steps beyond that, so perhaps you’re right and it’s time to just dive in to regular blogging again and start using this space to fill some of my clients’ other needs beyond the launch. Perhaps I should talk more about building traffic over time and balancing SEO and PPC. Or where and how else you can build traffic. Or what to do with it once it’s come to your pages.
LOL, perhaps it’s even time to revisit the “you can do it yourself” streaming video and podcasting advice I went bankrupt trying to promote in 2004. I think the market has finally caught up with that one, though the local area still has not.
What do you think? Should I dive back in? And what would you like to see me cover? I can promise it won’t be a daily deluge, or a pitch fest, but if I do it, it will be for you.
How important is it to you that your blog/website rank highly in the search engines? For a few people the answer can honestly be “not at all.” When your blog is used to communicate internally among a closed group of people, you might actually be more concerned with keeping people out than helping them find a way in.
However, for most blogs built for commercial purposes, the ability for prospective customers to find you through the search engines is the whole ball game. If you want to avoid paying the rising PPC advertising costs, or if you want to supplement those ads, you need to do some work optimizing your blog to show up on the first two pages of results.
Sure, if yours is a local business, you may think you can do without all this online hassle. You may still think you’ll find all the customers you can handle if you’ve got a big enough ad in the yellow pages. But you’re only fooling yourself.
The yellow page shoppers have moved online. More than 90% of us turn to the Internet first—even if we’re looking for the closest pizza parlor. 67% of us will go on to buy something offline based on our online research.
Why wouldn’t you want to be the first business they see when they type “nail salons + Rockford” in Google or another search engine? It used to be that there were two ways you could get to that top position. You could buy it through a “pay per click” (PPC) ad, or you could do the “search engine optimization” that would eventually get you to the top of the “natural” unpaid results.
There is a third way to bypass all that expense, and all that time. Ask me what it is.
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.
