Blogs continue to provide an incredible “bang for your buck” when it comes to Internet marketing. And for the most part, your “buck” is really just the value of your time since plenty of free blog hosting options exist.

Fundamentals
For those just getting up to speed, you’re reading a blog now. The term blog was derived from the term “web log.” The blog as an application or platform has evolved quickly over time, but the primary format continues to be a chronological arrangement of editorial articles. The software applications behind blogs serve as a content management system, allowing users to edit, contribute and customize the front-end or user-end of the blog via a simple web-based administration panel.

Blog Options
Internal blog - If you’re interested in hosting your own blog, the major blog software applications out there are free themselves (We recommend WordPress, the platform being used for this blog). If you aren’t a developer or aren’t comfortable with digging into the server side of things, having a professional set your blog up won’t break the bank either. Blogs are generally quite simple to install - it’s the customization of design and functionality that starts to expand a blog installation project. It is worth noting that specific hosting features and capabilities are required and depend on which blog software application you choose.

External blog - Conversely, going with a free hosted blog option, like Google’s Blogger, is a great way to reach a large audience. These greater communities consisting of thousands of other blogs, giving you instant exposure to highly searched and search engine indexed networks.

Internal & External - Concurrently, running both an internal and external blog will provide the best of all worlds. This broad Internet marketing mix will take advantage of the blogging community exposure as well as improving your own website. Keep in mind though, search engines provide little or no value to syndicated content that appears identically in multiple places on the web. Consider rewriting or even posting unique copy in each of your blog channels.

Benefits of a blog
Blogs offer a number of fantastic benefits to the small business.

  1. SEO: When operating a blog on your own website, the volume, relevance and frequency of content gives your site a shot of search engine optimization adrenaline. Search engines will increase the frequency at which they crawl your site for updates as you reciprocate with those updates. As your archive of blog articles—with relevant content—accumulate, so increases the relevance of your site for those keywords and terms that your articles are about.
  2. Reputation: Demonstrate your expertise by writing about your industry, market or product. At the same time, this self imposed regimen of copy writing will continually advance your knowledge in the field.
  3. Site Accessibility: If your site isn’t already built on a content management system, the built-in CMS functionality of blog software gives you quick and easy access to posting content on your site. Most blogs even come with the ability to post content by email - it doesn’t get any easier than that!

Start Blogging
Take one of the above recommendations and run with it—you’ll be glad that you did. You can’t make up for lost time, so get started!

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.