A blog can make your life easier and boost traffic to you site, as long as you do it right.
I recommend a blog for every website that I build. Even if you don’t have the desire to blog yourself, setting up your site as a blog has some concrete benefits.
- Easily update and maintain your site: Many people categorize a blog as a CMS, or Content Management System. A CMS is a website that you can log into and update from anywhere, without needing access to the source files or any other software. For example, if you change your phone number or want to post a link on your site, you can log in and do that yourself in moments. Gone are the delays of calling your designer, pleading for the changes, paying their minimum hourly rate, and then going back and forth until they get it right. It’s also easier to make big changes to the site: you can give a blog a total facelift by simply changing the theme, whereas a redesign of most HTML sites often requires starting over from scratch. Even if today you think you’ll never need to update your site, I guarantee the time will come when you wish you could.
- Save money: Setting up your site as a blog may initially cost more money, but in the long term you’ll save many times that. The fact that you can make changes and additions so much more easily means that you can be your own webmaster, and hiring a designer on an ongoing basis is optional. If you do choose to retain a designer, it makes their job easier, again saving you money. A friend of mine spent thousands of dollars developing a site. After it had launched, he realized he needed to change some text. The designer of the site quoted him $400 to change three words! Since my bud couldn’t make those changes himself, the designer could hold the site hostage. Setting your site up as a blog from the beginning will minimize the chances of it happening to you.
- Expand for less: Many blogging packages give you the ability to add plugins. Plugins give you additional functionality: statistics, event calendars, contact forms, and many more features can be added quite easily. Imagine a feature, and chances are somebody has already written a plugin for it. All they usually ask for (if anything) is a small donation in return. Now you don’t have to hire an expensive designer to reinvent the wheel.
- Engage and interact with your visitors: A good web page causes a reaction in your reader. Maybe they agree, maybe they disagree, and oftentimes they’re ready to voice their opinion. Enabling commenting on your site lets your readers respond, creating a dialogue that will keep them on your site longer, and encourage them to come back more often. Just about all blogging software includes this feature out of the box.
- Improve your SEO: Like I said in my last post on SEO, regularly adding fresh content to your site is a great way to boost traffic. And having the code of your site structured properly also contributes to search engine traffic. Blogs can help you on both fronts, by making it easier to add content and by making sure new content is automatically formatted for the best search-ability.
One mistake I see a lot is that people tack on a blog to their site as an afterthought – even more egregious, this often happens in the design phase. You get a normal HTML site, and the blog section links off to another site like Blogger or Wordpress.com. Doing it this way negates most of the benefits we just discussed, and creates more work for you instead of less. In this upside-down scenario, you have to maintain a blog, in addition to your normal (hard to update) site. Your message and your audience is divided between two sites, and you’ve multiplied the amount of work necessary to keep everything up to date. Adding insult to injury, all the fresh content you post to your blog won’t drive much SEO juice to your main site.
But avoiding that common misstep is easy, as long as you plan ahead. Don’t be afraid of making your site a blog. Even if you don’t plan on blogging, you still get a lot of benefits from building your site on a blog framework. In my opinion, the best way to get started is with a self-hosted blog using Wordpress, and that’s exactly what I use on this site.