Blogs Versus Traditional Websites

Many Internet marketers have turned to the use of blogs as a way to post fresh content to the web. Blogs can be an easy cost effective way to get content onto the Internet. There are over 100 million blog based websites on the web today. Luckily for you, most are not well maintained and poorly focused.

What is a blog? Blogs can provide you an easy interface to publish 'posts' to the web. A post can be nothing more than a few sentences and can be as large as you like. Typically a new post will appear above older content and eventually the oldest content will roll off the homepage. Older content is still available via navigation links on every page.

The most popular blogging software is made by WordPress. It has the virtue of being free. You can customize the functionality by adding third party modules which are inexpensive or free. You need to find someone to host the site.

It is not hard to find hosting for less than twenty dollars a month that will include an automated WordPress installation. If you are not tech savvy, hire the smart kid from down the block. He'll get you going in no time for mowing the lawn wages.

Google tends to rank active blogs more kindly than traditional websites of equal age and size. I advise a combined strategy when it comes to blogs. If you can't get quick cheap tech support for your current website, adding a blog site is a good alternative.

I suggest making your blog a subdomain of your current domain. Blog.mysite.com is a common approach. A couple of years ago we created Brokercafe.AgentAchieve.com to accomplish this task. It allowed us to bring up a related blog without all the technology hassles involved trying to make it fit within the corporate standards. (Subdomains are created using DNS... Ask the smart kid how to do this.) By adding links between your website and blog, you can create a pain free transition for your visitor.

One bit of advice – when choosing a look and feel for the blog site, see if you can find a template that includes a block of permanent text at the top and the bottom of the page. This allows you to write introductory content once and keep it at the top of your blog. This will help new visitors understand what you are about and provided a consistent block of text for the search engines to index.

If you have a genuine desire to publish fresh content on a regular basis, a blog can be a good choice. Blogs tend to be inexpensive, quick to setup and easy to use.

To view the original article, visit the CoreLogic Broker Cafe blog.