Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [201]
In addition, evaluate all the sources through which your site can reach visibility through the different channels:
Search (and the various keywords)
YouTube
Discussion forums
Customer reviews
Local search
Social news
Links from websites
Links from blogs
Links from news sources
Image search
Evaluate to see which may be bringing in the highest-quality visitors or converting visitors currently and which might be easier than others to develop and grow with your available resources.
The next few chapters will cover social media and growing your visibility in many of these channels, followed by using analytics to better measure the profitability of your work.
Chapter 17
Week 14: Add to Your Business with Blogs
Blogging has revolutionized the Internet and has added amazing dimension to business communications. Blogs directly contribute to increased visitors, increased search engine rankings, and more pages being included in the rankings. This is because of the architecture, the management of content, the additional marketing capabilities, and the enhanced communication of blogs.
Chapter Contents
Monday: Build a Business Case for Blogs
Tuesday: Understand the Architecture of a Blog
Wednesday: Develop Your Blogging Style
Thursday: Avoid Blog Design Pitfalls
Friday: Manage and Increase Subscribers
Monday: Build a Business Case for Blogs
Blogs are websites on steroids. Really, it’s not fair.
Blogs are built using the best of website architecture, and they are link-intensive, content-generating machines. Typical websites just can’t keep up, and it all comes down to the platform. Blogging software, such as WordPress, is free to the masses. With cheap hosting and free software, the accessibility to one of the most nimble, powerful content management systems creates a perfect storm of egalitarian competition on the Internet.
When used as part of a business marketing strategy, having a blog can attract more visitors, more links, and more pages indexed by the search engines—and that translates into more business! A recent survey by HubSpot found that businesses that blog attract 55 percent more visitors than their nonblogging counterparts (http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/Study-Shows-Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Get-55-More-Website-Visitors.aspx).
Blogs satisfy the basic needs of the search engine; they have clear architecture, links, and content (see Figure 17-1). Blogs take these three necessary components and use them to an extreme level when compared to websites.
Figure 17-1: The necessary components for getting good search engine visibility
Technical Advantage
Blogging software such as WordPress, TypePad, Moveable Type, and others is typically low cost or free. WordPress, at the time of this writing, dominates the market as open source, community-developed, free software. The plug-ins developed by the community extend the functionality of the software beyond the original code base. This powerful free software competes head to head with some of the most expensive and custom-developed content management systems on the market. As a result, people have been able to use blogging software to easily create a website and start publishing, usually without any technical know-how.
Blogging software is basic, stripped-down functionality. The sole purpose is to create an understandable interface that allows nontechnical people to add, edit, publish, and manage the content of their website. Because of this, the code “footprint” of the blog is very small, because the blog relies heavily upon CSS as the design and layout tool. If you remember Chapter 14, which was about technical issues and the advantages of CSS, you’ll know that CSS gives blogs the ability to change designs within minutes, without changing the code or the content in the site.
This light footprint allows the content to be the primary bulk of the code that is read by the search engines in each page. In addition,