Isn’t a business website the same as a business blog?
Good question, the answer to which likely depends on whom you ask. I personally think business blogs completely eclipse traditional websites and here are the reasons why.
- Blogs draw more potential customers to your business, because blogs are the sweethearts of search engines. If you want your business to get noticed a blog is like a big spotlight helping attract the attention of google, yahoo, msn and other tools. When you consider that approximately 60 million American adults use search engines daily (according to Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys), being highly visible on these search engines is crucial to business success.
- Blogs will save your business money in the long run because you’re not dependent on web designers and other experts. Some individuals set up their business blogs all by themselves using free blogging tools like WordPress and the host of other no-cost plugins (additional features). If you work with a blog coach/advisor, chances are you’ll spend a few hundred dollars (depending on how much customization you want) to get your blog up and running. Compare that to a few thousand dollars to pay a marketing, branding, or graphic design firm to build a website AND maintain it and you can see that blogs are typically more cost-effective than traditional websites.
- Blogs help you build relationships with your customers, strengthening brand loyalty. Blogs are designed to allow for and facilitate two-way communication unlike most traditional websites that merely permit customers to talk back via a contact us page (whose messages may or may not get answered). So, especially if your business is service-oriented or you have a customer-centric business model, blogs are going to say to your customers, “We care about you. We want to interact with you and have a conversation.”
- Blogs make you a more knowledgeable business person because you need to regularly add new posts to draw people to you. With traditional websites, many companies post electronic versions of their print brochures and boilerplate copy that they rarely change. The result: they appear “out of date” or “out of touch.” As a business blogger, you want to stay abreast of new trends and know what others (companies and individuals) are writing about your company and your industry. So this investigative spirit helps you stay toward or on the leading edge because you’re out their looking for what’s new and what’s next.
So, there are four reasons why I believe that blogs run circles around there traditional website cousins. If you’d like to discuss how blogging can work for your business, drop me a line at shonnie (at) shonnielavender (dot com).
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2 comments. Thank you for sharing! »
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Thanks for this informative post! I do have a question/comment! I have the beginnings of a Blog as a part of my website. I like that concept. Is my blog just as visible to the search engines this way as it would be if it were “stand alone”? Actually, you can also get to my blog at blog.adoptiontriadcoach.com. So, do I have myself covered for optimum visibility?
Margot
Comment by Margot Wurst — April 9, 2007 @ 9:48 am
Great question Margot. Yes, blogs that are part of websites are as visible as stand-alone blogs. Remember, that your blog posts are what generate much of your traffic — both from search engines crawling your site and indexing what you’ve written so that people can easily find it later on and from other bloggers who might link to a post of interest or reference your post in their own writing.
Be sure to check that your blog is “pinging” blog services. This is basically like your blog sending a quick note out to blog services like feed readers/aggregators saying, “Hey we’ve got something new on our blog. Come take a look.” You can check to see if you’re pinging (in WordPress) by going to Options > Writing menus. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you’ll see a window labeled “Update Services.” Below is what I have listed in that box for my site:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Comment by Shonnie — April 9, 2007 @ 10:11 am