Jan
3
Whether you already own a business or are thinking of starting one, you should consider building a business blog to bring in more customers as well as share your knowledge with potential customers, existing customers and other business professionals. Starting a business blog isn’t as hard as you may think, and if you choose the right blog host, you won’t have to pay a hosting fee.
Naturally, the first step to building your business blog is to find a blog host that you think would be right for you. Wordpress and Blogger are free and they’re the two most popular blog hosts. However, from those two blog hosts, you need to decide which one offers the features you want for your business blog. Since I have a blog with both of these hosts, I can give you a little insight on both.
Blogger was the host I chose for my first blog, which was more of a personal blog promoting my life as a writer. When I first began with Blogger in September 2005, they didn’t offer a lot of features, but they’ve added more since then. Blogger is great for those who don’t have much experience with web design (HTML, CSS, Javascript and etc.), and it’s simple to use. Nevertheless, they still lack in terms of features, plugins and templates. Therefore, if you don’t need a lot of extra features and don’t mind choosing from a small selection of templates, then Blogger might keep you satisfied. But if you’re looking for plugins, a good selection of features, many templates to choose from and a search engine friendly business blog, Wordpress would be a better choice.
What features your business blog will need depends a lot on what you want your blog to convey. Shall we explore some of the features of Wordpress and Blogger – features that can be beneficial to your business blog?
Create Categories for Your Posts
Both Wordpress and Blogger allow you to create a category for each post that you will write. Placing your posts in a category will allow your visitors to choose topics that interest them. You’ll definitely want to take advantage of this feature when creating your business blog.
Keep Your Business Blog Free of Spelling Mistakes
A business blog should look professional and a spell-checker will eliminate embarrassing spelling mistakes. Yes, we all make mistakes and sometimes typos, but if a professional blog is filled with spelling mistakes, you may lose your visitors for good. Both Blogger and Wordpress offer a spell-checker.
Planning Ahead
If you plan to take a vacation and/or your business keeps you busy during certain months or holidays, then you may want to write blog posts in advance and schedule them for publication on a date in the near future. Blogger doesn’t offer this feature, but Wordpress does.
Keeping Tabs on Your Stats
With the Wordpress Stats System you can keep track of the visitors to your business blog, see what URL they came from to discover your blog, find out which of your blog posts attracted the most attention, discover the number of subscribers to your business blog’s RSS feed, and find out what keywords people are typing in the search engines to find you. The only stats Blogger delivers is the number of people who have viewed your profile page. So which do you think would be a better fit for you?
Create Additional Pages to Introduce Your Business
Blogger will allow you to create a profile page that will tell your visitors a little more about you and your business, but this may not be enough. What if you want a page that displays information on some of the products and services you offer, or maybe you’d also like to have a page that lists your special offers and/or contests. In order to offer these extra web pages, you should choose Wordpress as your blog host; they will allow you to create “pages†to display information about your business as well as other pages that you may want.
There are many other features to help you create an attractive business blog, and you can explore all the features and read more about them at Wordpress and Blogger. After you read through the features and decide which ones will be a better fit for your blog, then you should be able to choose the blog host that’s right for your business blog.
If you have any questions or would like to add to this post, please leave a comment.
Next Wednesday (January 9, 2008): Create Content for Your Business Blog
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i have one rule – do not host you blog on free or virtual servers. dedicated servers are the first point to make your blog fast.
What I would add is to make sure that you get your own domain and do NOT go with Blogger, especially since you’re addressing those folks who want to promote their bricks and mortar business with a blog. In fact, they should already have their own website and they could just install wordpress on a sub-domain. And if they don’t already have a website, registering their own domain is the professional way to go.
Even if you simply want to blog (and don’t have a physical business location to promote) and have the tiniest thought that you’d like to do it full-time, then I’d say get your own domain.
Hi Jo!
Just wondering how one converts a wordblogger domain name to a regular domain name like you’re suggesting… is it possible? Or would I have to set up my blog as a regular website?
Cheers
Some pretty good stuff there. I have been struggling to make a choice.
2 JoLynn Braley:
“What I would add is to make sure that you get your own domain and do NOT go with Blogger…”
In general you right. But we have many examples of blogs with a lot of traffic and hosted on blogger or wordpress.