Start Your Own Blog
Build Traffic, Improve Customer Awareness, Engage Your Viewers
Overview
What is a blog?
“A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.”
- Wikipedia
How can you use blogging in your business?
Many people still don’t associate blogs with business, but it can be a great asset. It gives you an informal platform to:
- provide news, announcements and useful information to your customers
- share opinions and engage customers to provide feedback
- enhance internal or customer communication
- allow your customers/viewers to comment or share their opinion
- market or promote a new product or service
These are just a few examples. Blogging is commonly used by businesses, policitians, clubs and organisations as a powerful communication and marketing tool.
Why add a blog to your website?
Even if your new to blogging, it’s not hard to find out that there is a huge number of free services that allow you to start your own blog. So why pay to integrate one into your website, or run your own ‘stand alone’ blogging website?
The main benefit is the traffic a blog can bring to your website through improved search engine rankings.
We use WordPress to build our blogs. Providing you have the right settings activated, it will automatically feed your latest posts through to google, so instead of waiting 1, 2 even 3 weeks for google to index a new page on your website, with a blog your latest post can be indexed in Google in a matter of hours.
Blogging has fast grown from social media to a great website marketing tool with many website owners using their blog to initally generate traffic to their site with visitors clicking through to other areas on their website.
We can install a blog on your existing website, customised to suit the style of your website. Or we can set-up a completely new website for you with a blogging section.
Software Features
WordPress has been a popular blogging and content management platform since it was established in 2003. You can run your blog or your entire website through WordPress (Our website is built using WordPress). It will provide you with many great features to create engaging content on your Blog.
Key Features
- Full standards compliance — The WordPress team have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
- Instant Updates — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site.
- Static Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, our entire website is built using WordPress.
- Links — Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of links through your administration interface.
- Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards.
- Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
- Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
- Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
Examples
We have created our entire website using WordPress. You can visit our blog.
We also have an Email Marketing blog set-up at http://www.emailmarketer.com.au/blog/.
Some other blogs we have created:
- Quantum Leadership Group (Blogging & Paid Membership website using WordPress)
from only
$660 (GST INC)