Why your Business Website Needs a Blog
Blogs have had some staying power now for about 5 years. They aren’t going away. There’s a good reason for that. Actually, there are a few good reasons. Here are some reasons your business website should not be without a blog. Many businesses setup a WordPress blog and use that as their business website. Smart! We did too. Actually we have over 30 websites setup on WordPress and it has saved us countless hours of development and SEO optimization time.
If you have a traditional website for your business you can easily add a blog in a subdirectory like: www.yourbusiness.com/news/
News is a good way to name your blog subdirectory because it is probably a keyword that relates to your business. We have a blog at our original static website: www.Florida-Incorporation.com/news/ We’ll be adding content there as soon as we finish developing these other state incorporation websites. Google loves blogs. People love blogs.
Here are the reasons you should add a blog to your business website:
1. Blogs are dynamic. They are constantly changing – you can/should add content at least once per week to keep visitors up to date with what you’re doing and announcements. Each time you update your WordPress blog will ‘ping’ a blog feed service that will notify Google and other search engines and feed services. A static site will not.
Another fact about dynamic sites – sites that are updated with new information often… Google loves this. It sees the site as relevant and well-maintained.
2. Blogs are about 70 times easier to setup and get started than are websites designed from scratch using an HTML editor or even using a template for a website. You can start at 9am today and have a domain name, hosting, and a blog setup by 11am if you use Godaddy for the domain and hosting.
3. Blogs are free. WordPress is free – the entire content management system is free. WordPress themes (templates for your site) are free too. There are literally thousands of themes to choose from. The premium themes are best and they cost only about $70. We use premium themes for about half of our WOrdPress sites.
4. Blogs allow you to easily interact with your visitors. Comments are an integral part of blogs and it’s easy for visitors to your site to leave comments. It’s easy for you to manage them too. WordPress has “Plugins” that help you control spam to your comment section -removing most before you ever see them.
5. Plugins. I mentioned them in #4, but there is much more to them. Plugins allow you to add functionality to your business website. These plugins are created by developers that are hoping you’ll donate some money to them by Paypal or some other means. They design the plugins for free because WP is open-sourced – meaning it’s QUITE easy for developers to create programs that run within the WP CMS (Content Management System).
6. RSS feeds. Built into WordPress blogs are RSS feeds which enable visitors to add to their feed readers which brings all the newest posts from their favorite blogs to one place – their feed reader. We use Google Reader and it’s remarkable. This saves heaps of time and allows us all to stay up with more sites than we ever have before.
7. CSS – Cascading Style Sheets. This is how WP is setup. You can change one line of code to change everything about the titles in your entire blog, instead of change hundreds of lines of code like you’d need to with a tradtional website. Change font colors, sizes, and hundreds of things from editing it in one place, not hundreds or even thousands. Amazing time saver. CSS is not that difficult to learn and worth some study to enable you to make basic changes to your blog. OR, you can pick up THESIS theme, WOOThemes, or StudioPress themes which have a nice options page(s) to make it easy to change simple blog variables without getting into CSS.
8. Easy backups. You can backup your blog daily by means of a plugin that emails you a copy of your entire blog daily. There are database backups that occur regularly too. You can move your blog from one host to another easily. You can import blogs into WP that you had originally at another WOrdPress blog or Blogger, or any of about 15 different places. Mindless imports! Exports too!
9. SEO – Search engine optimization for your business website (blog) is about 19 times as easy as with a traditional site. Remember Plugins? There are many plugins that help you accomplish this too!
10. Write articles in advance, drip them anytime. One of the coolest things you can do with your business blog is create articles in advance of publication. You can schedule them to publish anytime you choose. Amazing help if you’re going on vacation or away from your computer for a while and need to publish a newsletter or some other articles while you’re away.
Blogs are perfect for business websites. If you have a catalog site – where you’re selling heaps of products or services you might not use a blog, but in my opinion – that’s about the only time to forego a blog. A large catalog site needs to be almost infinitely customizeable – and blogs are not so friendly with image placements and tables. You’re better off to go with traditional design in that case.
If you have any questions or want to know more about how to go about setting up your business website on a WordPress blog we’ll be having some ebusiness courses here shortly, showing you exactly how to do this on your own. You can save a lot of cash doing many things on your own. It pays you to learn it using our easy ebusiness online video courses too. Give them a try! Stay tuned…
Instant Business Website Traffic: Buy Live Websites
As you start your business you’ll consider a number of ways you can increase traffic to your site. Here are a few that most people try:
SEO – Usually business owners try themselves, fail miserably and then offer someone a few hundred dollars to optimize their site – an impossible task for less than a couple thousand, and again – they fail miserably.
PPC – Pay Per Click systems like Adwords. You can bid on specific keywords in the search engines and show up in the search results if you outbid enough other publishers looking to be seen there too.
Banner ads – putting graphics ads on other sites related to your site’s focus can be a good way to get some traffic to your busines website.
There is another way that not many business owners attempt, but it involves buying out websites that are currently up and running, but the owners aren’t very interested in continuing to run the site. They might not be making any money from the site at all – and in truth, if you’re just looking for new visitors for your business these are great sites to buy out. If there are ecommerce sales or advertising placements on the site that make the owner some income every month then you’ll pay a multiple of the monthly net to buy the site.
If there aren’t any sales you might be able to get the site for a discount, and just pay based on the amount of traffic coming to the site.
What to look for before you buy:
See if they have Google Analytics installed – you can check by looking at their source code and finding the Google code at the bottom before the </html> tag. If they have – see if they’ll give you either a login to see the stats over the life of the site, or maybe they’ll download the .csv files you can view in Excel.
Check the site’s Google PageRank. If none, see if it’s even indexed by Google at all. Anything at PR3 and above is probably seen as a quality site in Google’s eyes.
Check the way back machine… http://www.archive.org/web/web.php – enter the website address and click, “Take me back”.
This will show you various points throughout the life of the site if it has some history to it. Good for domains with a long life.
Check WHOIS to see when the domain was registered and for how long the current registrant has owned the domain.
Of course you’ll want to check unique visitors per day, page views per day, page views per person, bounce rate, and where the visitors are coming from. Having traffic from India to a USA site probably isn’t going to be worth all that much to your business.
Check to see if the owner of the site has a valid opt-in email list and whether he/she emailed this list on a regular basis.
These are a few things you’ll need to look at if considering buying a site to point it toward your new business website. Buying websites can be a profitable game that can grow your business very quickly if you can buy the right site(s).
If you don’t know much about buying websites and want to learn more we’ll have an ebusiness course offered here on site in a few weeks that you’ll want to check back for. Join our email newsletter list today to be sure you don’t miss the announcements for the new training as it comes out. We will offer some free and deeply discounted etraining through our ebusiness newsletter for many different ebusiness subjects. Don’t miss it – sign up today!
8 Advertising Ideas for Small Business
Even if you’re on eof those people that networks constantly and spreads news about your business far and wide through talking to others – and they in turn talk to others you’re still going to need to advertise with traditional means to get your new business started on the right path. Using other methods in conjuction with each other can speed up the time it takes for your business to get profitable.
Here are some advertising methods that you can try to see which have the greatest effect on your business and which are worth repeating
1. Newspapers are not dead yet. There are many that are going out of business, they’re not making the money they once were -so there may be some bargains in advertising in the print newspapers. Probably they also have an online version you can advertise your business in as well. Look for special interest newspapers that focus on one niche – yours. They are probably still a great channel for you to advertise in.
2. Print Yellow Pages. Yes, there still are some and some of them are doing quite well. Your grandma probably doesn’t fire up FireFox 3.5 to query Google or Bing about curtain places in her city. She uses Yellow Pages, no doubt. There is a huge section of America that does the same, not everyone’s online!
3. Direct mail. Sending postcards is still economically feasible, though not preferable to almost anything else you can do online – it still works to target specific neighborhoods if that’s what you need to do.
4. Business cards, Flyers, Brochures. Handing these out at every opportunity still works. Of course you’d want to have your website name on every card and brochure page you hand out.
5. Magazines. You should pick magazines that match your niche or it’s like picking numbers from a hat. If you can’t find a magazine that fits your niche closely maybe better to choose some other media.
6. Networking in local and regional business groups. Internet networking is great, but there’s a certain amount (a lot) of in-person appearances and pow-wows that you need to create so you can spread the word about your business. There’s nothing better than being there and talking to someone interested in hearing about your business.
7. Automobile advertisements. Peel off stickers, custom paint jobs or something as simple as a magnet with your business information can be very helpful for letting your local area know what business you do.
8. Including advertisements with invoices – snail mailed or emailed. You’re already contacting them, add something to the invoice like a freebie or another type of promotion.
These are some of the more traditional ways to advertise your business – there are hundreds more. The difference between traditional and new (internet) marketing is profound and you should really get up to speed on types of internet marketing that can work for your new business. We will have a number of training courses – some free, some paid to help you learn everything you need to know about one of the hardest pieces of the puzzle for success of your new business. Marketing!
