Carol asked me recently whether she should include a blog with her website. Like many business owners, she didn’t really understand the powerful, business building (or strangling) differences between a website and a blogsite.
The first thing to understand is that a blogsite and website have the same appearance. They each have pages, links, ads, and other content. You can even make a website do the same things a blogsite does. The difference is this: Anyone can handle a blogsite, and it takes a programmer to handle a website.
Blogsites are dead-nuts easy to manage. You definitely want a self-hosted WordPress blogsite. (I’ll explain that at the end of the post.)
Let’s have a look at four ways a blogsite is better than a website.
The Power of Content
We all know the search engines like fresh content on a site. Posting new content to a blogsite is as simple as typing in MS Word. In fact, I write all my posts in Word then just copy and paste them into the blogs. It does all the coding for me. All I have to do is apply formatting to subheads, and text I want to highlight.
Oh, and every entry in a blogsite is automatically created as a new page for your site. That’s cool.
The Attraction of Convenience
There are tens of thousands of plugins for WordPress blogs. They allow you to do everything from set up a membership site or create your own social media platform, all the way to rotating ads between posts and submitting new posts to article banks.
Talk about convenient – anyone can have the basic framework of a blogsite ready to go in LESS THAN 60 seconds.
The Business of Blogging
As soon as business owners hear the word “blogging,” they start crying about being busy. They don’t have time to maintain a blog.
To me, there are two parts to this. First is whether your business needs an online presence at all. Contrary to popular opinion, being online is NOT necessary. In fact, remaining offline can be part of what makes your business unique. Amazon and eBay need an online presence, but Ben’s Custom Furniture might boast significant exclusivity by remaining offline.
The second part is knowing just how much time it takes to maintain. A blogsite is your dedicated advertising portal that incorporates online shopping, customer relations, social media and even A/R collections. And you can maintain it with as little as two hours each week.
If you already have a blogsite and want to make it better, check out Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. I have it and refer to it regularly.
The Ease of Content Creation
Being genuine trumps everything else. Be yourself – even if you’re a curmudgeon. My motto is Cranium Ex Rectum, and you see it come up often in posts. In fact, being a little bit abrasive or controversial is very good for engaging readers.
Forget about people telling you videos have to be two minutes, keep your audio short, or that people have shorter attention spans today.
Really? This is definitely a Cranium Ex Rectum moment!
When’s the last time you paid $12 to go see a two minute feature film? Do you see people getting up at football, basketball or baseball games after 10 minutes? Heck, people drive all the way to golf courses – and rent hotel rooms – to watch pro golfers smack their balls.
Long content works. Boring content (of any length) kills.
What is a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog?
This means you have a domain name and hosting account. You install WordPress to create the blogsite, and use that as your primary online presence. It is the online equivalent of your store or office.
Having a blog at WordPress.org, Blogger or any other site is a poor choice. They own that site – you’re just a tenant. And we haven’t even touched technical reasons for wanting to own your site.
If you have questions, I’d like to know what they are. In the last two weeks, four people asked me whether I have a course or book that shows them how to get their blogsite set up. So I’m asking you – is this something you want? I set up basic, five page sites with the legal pages all the time.
Which would you prefer: Having me set up the site for you? OR Hand you a course that shows you how to do it yourself?