Business Blogs Have Come Of Age

Posted by Norm on March 2, 2009

Personal weblogs, known simply as blogs now, came on the the scene in 1999 when several developers built blogging software to ease web page updating.  It began with a mixture of personal journals & diaries, opinion posts and hobby interests. Since 1999, the number of English language blogs on the Internet has snowballed  to over 115 million.

Most of these blogs are on free blog services like Blogger.com (owned by Google), but a very large percentage of those have been abandoned or are seldom updated.  Maybe it’s “blogger block” or a lack of interest.  Let’s face it, not everybody can muster up the commitment to keep a blog going.  It takes some time and effort.

Despite the ups and downs of personal blogs, in the past couple of years blogging by professionals has become very popular. Some say that blogging was what put Barack Obama on the map and helped him raise record campaign contributions of $744 million, more than twice what McCain raised.

The  blog service sites are not a good fit for a business web site.  They are focused on the traditional personal journal postings and offer limited capabilities.  A business blog should be what’s referred to as self-hosted, the same as a normal business web site.

From a technical perspective it has only been in the past year that business web sites and blogs have successfully merged.  Wordpress.org is the home of the Wordpress blog software developers, the most popular blog engine available.  They have advanced Wordpress to include features that make it effective to merge  normal web site and a blog functions.

So why is blogging a good avenue for a business web site?  There are actually many reasons.

1. It is an easy way to offer fresh marketing info to your customers.
2. Search Engines like web sites with periodic fresh content.
3. Blogging can make you a recognized expert in your industry.
4. Recent blog technology advances make it much more flexible.

The overall advantage is that you have the ability to update your pages and add new pages yourself.  This capability is requested probably more than any other by prospective web site owners.

However, take this info with a grain of salt.  Updating a web site or adding a new page is more difficult than composing an email message.  If you are challenged to set-up your TV with a remote control, you may have problems working with a blog software engine.

Now back to the bright side… most people who can create an MS Word document can learn to work with Wordpress.  Adding photos is relatively easy, but requires you to know how to crop, re-size and compress photos before you upload them.  This too can be learned and performed with freely available software on your PC.

A combined web site and blog will not be for everyone.  It requires some effort on your part to keep it up to date.  Writers block is often the first problem that pops up.  But then there are people like myself that can help create articles and posts for your web site.  I’ll discuss that in a future post.