~~Setting Up A Business BlogOnce you've decided that a blog is the perfect opportunity for your business, you will undoubtedly move your attention to the actual setting up of the blog. Questions commonly asked include whether it is best to integrate a blog into your existing site, what software to use, and how often you need to post for a blog to be effective – and these are just some of the more important business blog questions posed. Separate Domain? Generally speaking, a business blog that will be used to promote or complement a business should be included as part of that website and not hosted separately. The website and the blog will complement one another in many respects. Visitors to your site will enjoy having access to more information, and this in turn convinces them that you or your business are professionals in your given field. Also, you gain surprisingly little in the search engine's eyes by having hundreds of links pointing to your site from one blog. If the blog is brand new, as well, then you can multiply this ineffectiveness. A Blog Provides Linkable Content Another factor to consider with your search engine link profile is that your blog is likely to be one of the most linkable sections of your site. By gaining more links to a blog hosted on your main domain, you will be able to share some of the benefit from your collection of blog links. For these reasons we typically advise that you include your blog as a part of your main site. The only real exception is if your blog is either contradictory or unrelated to your business (in which case, it's not a business blog in this sense of the word). Inexpensive Online Marketing? One of the huge benefits that blog writing offers the small business, in particular, is the relatively inexpensive cost of setting one up and running it. If you integrate it into your own site then your existing hosting and domain will be used so no extra cost. There are also many blogging platforms that are free, or very inexpensive, to use. In fact, the single best package in our opinion is completely free and offers the greatest community support, plugins, and appearance options. Wordpress – It's Awesome And Free If you've done any research on blogging you will have probably come across the software known as Wordpress. This Open Source package can be downloaded free, installed easily, and personalized indiscriminately to match your precise requirements. We'll save all the talk about plugins for another article, but suffice to say, there are way more than you will ever get the opportunity to use. Oh, and did we mention that it's also free? What Frequency Is The Best Posting Frequency? Posting regularity is, to an extent, less of an important problem as posting quality. This is because there are so many factors that will reasonably determine the most appropriate posting frequency for any blog. If you operate within a popular industry that has a lot of relevant news then you can post several times a day, as long as the quality is good. We do advise trying to post at least once every day, or three times a week at the very least. Types Of Blog Posts The good thing about blogging is that there are many opportunities to create a valuable and informative post. Reviews of related products, services, and websites can be used as fillers. Personal, contemplative pieces can be used sparingly (although every post should have a small element of this). There are also a lot of specialist news wire sites on the net and there is almost certainly bound to be one or more for the industry in which you operate. Hopefully, you should already have a good idea of where these sites and this news can be found. Make the most of them. Even though blog posts are short and information is readily available for most industries and most businesses, the biggest commitment you will have to make to your new blog is time. Alternatively, use the inexpensive WebWiseWords blog writing service. We provide regular posts, added directly to your blog, and we can include images, links, and other content as required. |