Blogging started out as a sort of personal diary to record and report to friends all you were doing and thinking from day to day. It has evolved over the last few years to be a powerful business tool, the darling of search engines such as Google and an easy and less expensive way to set up an attractive and highly effective website.
Why does Google love blogs? Because they are based on sound and solid html coding and standard platforms such as Blogger and WordPress. And because they tend to be updated often, Google considers them fresh content. When you post daily or weekly, you are training Google to return often and update your site in their index. Traditional static websites can take weeks or months to be updated but a blog post can show up in Google in a matter of hours.
Blogs (short for “Weblogs”) are also a BIG part of what is called Web 2.0. Gone are the days of static “brochure ware” websites that just sit there with the same tired old sales copy. Web 2.0 ushers in a new world of interactivity between the site and the user: Leave your blog comment, upload your YouTube video, submit your Facebook profile. These are ways the web has evolved and I predict that within a few years ALL websites will be blog based sites, or at least interactive in the way of blogs. If you leave a comment below you have engaged in the Web 2.0 aspects of the “blogoshere”. And I have a easy way of learning what my readers are thinking, and what their concerns and needs are.
Also true of Blogs and other Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo and Hubpages is that a non-technical user can easily update their own content without knowledge of html or web design. This is a tremendous advantage over older static sites that required you to ask and pay your webmaster to make every little update to the site.
WordPress is by far the most flexible, powerful and customizable of the blog platforms and is totally free. There are 100′s of high quality “themes” or templates available and 100′s of brilliant plug-ins to provide all sorts of functions – all freely available through the Word Press community. For example, here’s a site I created recently based on the Word Press platform that contains a simple plug-in that allows users to review and rate their favorite weight loss program. See Weight Loss Product Reviews
Another creative use of WordPress is my latest site that allows visitors to purchase a beautiful gift bag that is designed to be given to and inspire a perfect stranger. The blog uses the comment function to request comments and stories from the givers of the bags as well as the receivers. See The Global Gift.
Another advantage of blogs is that they are generally less expensive to produce when you use and customize a standard theme. All my blogs listed below use freely available themes and are customized with appropriate branding for each site. Instead of $1000 on up for a standard site, a simple blog site can be set up for $500 on up, depending on level of complexity. I am also including for new clients a set of powerful SEO plugins for Word Press that will help get your pages indexed and ranking on the search engines. I will include some basic training as well in most effective use of this powerful tool.
See below for recent blog projects completed or in progress. Of course, the site you are viewing now is a recent blog as I just converted it over (finally) from a static site format. If you notice some common elements among my blogs, it is because I tend to like a handful of themes that I customize as needed.
Please contact me for a free evaluation of your needs regarding business blogging, SEO, information product creation and marketing, or sales process optimization for higher conversions. Happy Blogging!
Recent blog projects
I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.
It covers:
- The best blogging techniques.
- How to get traffic to your blog.
- How to turn your blog into money.
I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.
Tags: blogging, blogs, business blogging, internet marketing, santa barbara, SEO, web marketing, WordPress
Just finishing up a new blog site for my pal Mikhaila Stettler called the Destiny Project. This is another example of a WordPress site custom designed using the powerful and flexible Thesis theme. It does not currently even look like a blog but has all the powerful Content Management System (CMS) features that my clients love. And Mikhaila will start adding blog articles soon. Blogs and Thesis theme especially is VERY search engine friendly out of the box so our chances of high Google rankings with this site are good.
