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…