Custom Blog Design & Development
Marketing your business on the Internet: Blogging for dollars
What is a blog?
A blog, short for "web log" is a simply website that has been formatted in such a way as to simplify the posting of articles, long or short, formal or informal, and which generally allows for comment streams to be added by visitors to the site. In addition, photos and other web content may be easily included in blog posts or pages, with capabilities and design options for blogs expanding all the time.
Why your business needs a blog.
Your business needs a blog for several reasons. Your customers and clients, like ours, come to you because you are the expert in your field. They turn to you for direction and a larger understanding of how your business will make their lives easier, or more entertaining, safer, whatever. Almost always, business websites (you do have a business website by now, right?) focus on the business, when in reality, they should be addressing the needs and desires of the potential client or customer. It is often said among sales professionals that customers appreciate features but they buy benefits.
A blog provides an opportunity, or forum for you to build a relationship with your customers in a human, non-salesy way. Beyond relationship building, blogs are consistantly high performers in search engines. Popular blog engines like WordPress have thousands of available plugins for features like e-commerce, image galleries, video, contact forms and just about anything you might dream of. They also are an ideal hub for all of your social media. And, the development costs are minimal.
Custom Blog Development
In general, we approach blog development in one of two ways; either as a branded version of a standard install, or a completely custom, purpose-built blog site. We sometimes develop blogs completely from scratch, but more often use one of the popular platforms like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. Most commonly, we use WordPress because it is a consistant top performer in search engines. Also, the architecture is completely open, allowing for total customization, and it has a large, global developer network.
Blog Hosting
You can get a blog free from blogspot.com or wordpress.com, but for a business website, it should be hosted independently.
Free blogs are better than no blog, but hosting and setup are so innexpensive that, for business, independent hosting is a much more powerful option. By hosting your blog at iPutty, we have limitless options for programming both the site and the server. The result is that we've acheived virtually real-time inclusion into Google's index. That means that any post you make can be at the top of Google searches within minutes!
Also, hosting your blog internally means that your business won't be subject changes in terms or policies. It happens. We had a client come to us recently that used a fairly well known company for sending out free email campaigns. Everything from their list, templates, user statistics, etc. were out there sitting on this company's servers. Then one day, poof! Gone. No warning; not about about what happened; no phone; no anything. Sadly, we couldn't help them. It's the same for you blog. If it's important, keep ownership of it. You'll thank us later.
See blogging in action. Give us 30 minutes and we'll change your entire wiew of what marketing on the web is all about.
We've been working with blogging as a major component of our client's online marketing mix for a long time. We'd like to show you how your business blog can act as a powerful hub for all of your marketing efforts, not just on the web. Our techniques and programs work to drive new clients and customers to your business, so don't hesitate. We'll look forward to meeting youin person.
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