Ok, so you have decided that starting a blog would be an avenue for you to increase exposure to your business online and that you have the commitment it would take to start and maintain a blog . . . .
So, “how do I get started”, you ask.
Excellent question, and there are some important considerations to take into account before you do.
Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing have come a long way since the days of meta tags and banner ads. One of the newer and rapidly growing strategies for marketing your business online is blogging.
There is a lot of buzz about blogs these days – they are rapidly reshaping social and news networking, but awareness of how blogging can increase exposure for your business online – and thereby increase profits – is really emerging relatively recently. Most online businesses have not yet started to blog. I mean, heck . . . . we only just started poking our nose into the “blogosphere” in early 2008.
As we were looking at blogging as a new Internet Marketing vehicle/medium for our clients to take advantage of, we followed the rest of the SEO herd to WordPress. All of the SEO’s that are promoting blogging to their clients seem to prefer WordPress ( with what seems to be good reason, but that is a topic for another post ), and what’s more, pretty much every blog we looked at worth looking at had the tell-tale signs of a hosted WordPress application ( WordPress.org as opposed to the WordPress.com option ).
So, to make that long story short, we settled on WordPress as the blogging application we would recommend to our own clients.
However, WordPress is a PHP/MySQL application, and we know what that means . . . . it would be “happiest” in a “LAMP” ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) environment while we run Windows, IIS servers supporting MySQL & PHP . . . but even though WordPress is a pretty darned sophisticated application, we wanted to prove that we can run it just as well on a Windows servers.
And, of course, we hit some bumps.
Owners of new Blogspot or WordPress sites may worry that Google won’t index them. And we can’t guarantee that Google will do so quickly, or even that the search giant will do so at all. There’s a fair amount of evidence suggesting that things will be taken care of sooner rather than later, however.