Taking the Slog out of creating a Blog

Introduction

The Blog phenomenon has completely changed the Website promotion landscape. Nowadays it is important for all budding ecommerce entrepreneurs to incorporate a Blog into their on-line promotion strategy. A Blog can create 'natural' traffic to your site and is an excellent tool in your on-line marketing strategy.

After considerable time spent studying the different options out there and going through the installation exercise this article talks you through the steps of getting a business Blog up and running.

Getting a Business Blog Up and Running

(1)Choose which Blogging software you are going to use. As with all things that are successful more and more organisations are jumping on the Blogging bandwagon and there are now around 20 different types of Blogging software you can use. Rather than spending time researching each one, all I would say is that all you need is a piece of software that can rapidly generate pages, include images, allows for interaction via comments and is easy to manage. I think I can safely say that all the mainstream Blogging software tools do this - so why waste time studying them? One of the key selection criteria I used was which one had a wide and knowledgeable user base and I decided on Wordpress. All blog software is 'tweakable' in that you can go in and modify the PHP code, but if you've got a few hundred thousand people out there trying to do the same thing with the same software you've got - then, with shared experience, Wordpress starts to come at the top of the list.

(2)Install the Software. If you chose Wordpress then it's easy enough to follow the instructions on their website. If your host provider provides a service like the auto-installer Fantastico then use it, but following the Wordpress steps is nearly as quick and it should only take you a morning or so. After installation make a quick backup of everything in your Blog directory so if mistakes are made you don't have to go back and do everything again. Using 'tar' or a similar tool to make a backup is probably the easier option.

(3)Getting some 'post writing' software. The problem with software like Wordpress is that the on-line Wysiwyg editor is slow and cumbersome. They use the software from an organisation called Tinymce and you find that the Wordpress version is always quite a few versions behind. You have a number of options you can either upgrade to latest Tinymce editor over the top of your Wordpress version or find another piece of software. Personally I prefer to write my articles on my PC and upload them to the Blog later. If you're okay with writing raw HTML then it's easy enough to update on-line by turning off the Wysiwyg in the Wordpress options.

(4)Decide on a theme and install it. You can spend hours and hours browsing the web for themes and a lot of them are free. The thing is a lot of themes come with a link to the author's website or some other Spammy site they are promoting - no wonder they are free! All I suggest is that you want a theme that more or less matches your main site. There's no point having a futuristic looking homepage that links to a Blog that looks like the front page of a Sunday Broadsheet. What I decided to do was get one of the free themes and by tweaking the PHP code in the directory /wp-content/themes I converted some of the colours and fonts to match my main site. If you tweak enough the theme becomes your own and you feel far less guilty about removing the author's credit reference to their site from the PHP code.

(5)Decide on the Categories to archive posts. In promoting your website this is one of the most important steps and you must think about what URLs will be generated from the names you give the categories. In my case I was setting up a secured loans company so naturally called one of my categories 'secured loans' and some of the others things related to finance. One of the based ways to approach category naming is to start off with four or five and then after around a month go through all your posts and see if you got the categories correct. There is no point in creating categories that will hardly ever contain posts. One thing though is reorganising your posts into new categories is a complete pain because you have to go through each post individually.

(6)Get your website listed on the Blog Directories. Very few enable a live link to your site, but people out in the so called Blogosphere love bouncing around and reading sites - which is all traffic for you.

(7)Make sure you ping as many sites as you can after posting. This is all done automatically and the ping tells the receiving site you've updated your site. The glory of this is that some sites look for posts about relevant articles and may 'scrape' your site to scoop it up. In my case writing articles on secured loans causes my websites URL to bounce around the Internet, which is useful to please good old Googlebot and the other search spiders. It's easy enough to change the sites you ping in the Wordpress options and to get a list of sites to ping it's far easier for you to use one of the search engines to find them rather than me listing them here.

(8)Update your Blog often and with relevant information. This is the single most important thing for Small Business Blogging success. You must spend time researching articles relevant to the product or service you are selling and NEVER steal someone's article and call it your own. For example, ever since the Bigdaddy update to Google it is far more sophisticated in noticing such things as most think it is. Plus is you put some interesting articles on your Blog you'll be surprised by the number of direct hits to your site you get from the search engines. Also try to remember to keep a balance between 'personal' posts and on topic business posts, this is the area where I admit I have struggled with - it's easier to post about what you had for lunch on Sunday than post some complicated article about which regulatory bodies are investigating the secured loans industry. Just try to remember that it is the business element of your blogging that will ultimately get you traffic and help you in long term on-line success.

Adrian has a background in I.T Management. In 1997 he founded the I.T Consultancy Sprint Soft Ltd. who specialise in projects with a finance aspect. Earlier this year he started the secured loans specialist website We Introduce You. Adrian blogs about his day-to-day life and the secured loans industry at The Introducer. Which incidentally is the blog mentioned in the above article.