A blog is a great way to encourage communication between your company and its customers. That’s why just about all major corporations these days have a company blog, and many of them use my favorite blogging and content publishing system of choice, WordPress.
Why you need a blog!
As I mentioned, a blog fosters increased communication between you and your customers, which is always a good thing. Also, if your company’s blog gains a reputation as being a useful resource, it’s an excellent method of getting people to frequently visit your site and link to it! And inbound links to your website are a BIG factor in achieving a strong search engine position.
Contributing regularly to your blog by posting articles about new developments within your company and your industry also helps you to establish a reputation as an expert in your field.
Your company blog builds trust!
Studies have shown that the average person may visit a website numerous times before purchasing that company’s products and/or services. Those repeat visits to your site are one of the most important factors in increasing your conversion rate — i.e., your visits-to-purchases ratio (whether that purchase is made directly online or via a telephone call to your office).
Having a blog that features useful and current information about your products, services, and industry causes those prospective customers to want to return to your site and gives them an opportunity to get to know and trust your company. As you know, building trust is essential to the sales process, and, of course, one of the primary reasons for having a website!
What is WordPress and who uses it?
WordPress is a free, open-source software platform with a massive, worldwide community of devoted and talented developers.
Companies using WordPress for their blogging platform include such behemoths as Sony, Ford, Intel, and Ebay. Other large organizations and popular brands that are WordPress users: The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, Wired Magazine, The New York Times Blog, CNN, Ben & Jerry’s, Samsung, Playstation, and many more.
Two flavors of WordPress
I use the self-hosted version of WordPress for all my clients’ websites, meaning that I download all the required files from WordPress.org, then upload these files to the client’s web server, set up the database, install the software, and configure and customize it according to my client’s specifications and requirements.
WordPress development is a separate discipline in and of itself, and it takes a good amount of experience and knowledge of PHP, MySQL databases, and front-end coding technologies such as XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Custom WordPress development is what I do for my clients.
WordPress also offers a free service called WordPress.com that allows you to set up a WordPress blog in seconds, but has some limitations and is far less flexible than the self-hosted version of WordPress. One of the primary drawbacks to the WordPress.com service is that you can’t use your own domain name (or web address). Your blog’s web address would look something like this: http://xyzcorp.wordpress.com/.
For search engine purposes, you really want your blog to use your domain name, as such: http://www.xyzcorp.com/blog. Alternately, rather than having a blog section of your website, the site itself might be a blog, like http://www.xyzblog.com.
Having your site’s blog hosted elsewhere and carrying a different web address just draws traffic away from your main website and divides your efforts. Your blog or the blog portion of your corporate website should use your own domain name, as illustrated above.
Limitations of using a free, “non-self-hosted” blogging service
Other disadvantages to using WordPress.com or other “non-self-hosted” solutions, such as Google’s Blogger (which also has the handicap of not allowing you to use your own domain name), are:
- You cannot run a custom theme — Meaning that if I create design for your site, your blog will look nothing like your company’s website because custom designs can’t be transferred — and this does not help to establish your company’s brand! And that’s poor marketing.
- You can’t work directly with the blog’s PHP code — PHP is the programming language on which WordPress is built, and if I can’t work with it, the amount of customization we can make to your blog’s functionality is essentially nil.
- You can’t upload plug-ins! — Ouch, that one really hurts a lot, because there are tons of great plug-in apps for WordPress. Unfortunately, they can’t be used with the free version. Photo galleries, video and audio players, calendar systems — none of these are available to you. That alone is a good reason to go with the self-hosted version and have it set up by a professional like myself.
The customized, self-hosted version of WordPress is the right solution
I believe that setting up a blog using one of the free services available, such as WordPress.com or Blogger, is a reasonable choice for an individual amateur/hobbyist blogger or a student.
However, if your requirements are greater, you need more options and flexibility, and your budget allows (it doesn’t have to be very expensive, depending on what you want) a custom blog design offers the following advantages:
- Your company blog will be optimized for the search engines and part of your primary website address/domain.
- The blog’s performance and functionality will be customized to your individual needs.
- Your corporate site’s branding and layout will be seamlessly integrated with your blog.
- A tremendous choice of ready-made plug-in applications are available, allowing you to further extend your site’s functionality.
Static websites are out! Blogging is the way of the future
Yes, at the minimum you need an attractive and well-organized website that presents some basic information about your business. This would include your introductory Home Page, and perhaps an About Us page, a Contact page, and another page or two describing your Products and/or Services. A static website that includes your basic company info is what’s commonly known as a brochure site, and every business should at least have that (although you might be surprised to learn how many companies still don’t even have a basic brochure site).
The problem with a static site that’s rarely (if ever) updated, is that it doesn’t give people a reason to return to it and to get to know your company. Furthermore, most business owners want their site to perform well in the search engines, but that’s extremely difficult unless you’re adding fresh, keyword-rich content to your website on a regular basis.
For example, say you have a law practice specializing in employee rights and harassment suits. If you blog regularly about the subject, perhaps writing articles discussing changes to employee rights and harassment laws, case studies, etc., you have an opportunity to work a lot of relevant content into your website — content that contains valuable keywords and keyphrases.
Search engine crawlers absolutely love to find and use this content for the purpose of ranking your site, and Google (which commands about 75-80% of the search engine business) just eats this up. Thus, blogging is extremely helpful — in fact, it’s almost a requirement these days — in achieving a solid search engine position and driving potential clients to your website.
Go to a professional blog designer — Call Carlson!
I hope I’ve given you enough reasons to consider blogging and to consider having your blog designed professionally. Regardless of whether you plan to have a site that’s entirely a blog, or if you want to add a blog section within your existing corporate site, having it professionally designed and customized will benefit your business.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to learn more.