I often advise my customers that the best way to add more content to their sites is to start a blog and/or a newsletter. Of course, most of these people are busy running their business and many don’t think they have enough time to do one let alone both both. So the question is which one is better.
In either one you need to find some actual content. Whether you write it yourself or get it from some other source it’s probably the same amount of work. It used to be that blogs needed to be updated more often to work well, but that doesn’t seem to be true any more. People can access so many blogs at the same time now you don’t need to post as often.
In terms of work I think the newsletter is less. If you have a good newsletter program like PHPList which will manage your names and bounces without having to get you involved, the newsletter can be less work. You write, send and then post your newsletter to your site to give you new content (spider food) for the search engines to index. After that you are done with it. You may want to do some occasional cleaning up of your menus maybe once a year, but there is not much else to do.
With a blog you have to manage comments (and comment spam) possibly for as long as you post is on your blog. Although there are many good tools to make this less work, you do have to keep an eye on the comments and pings so things don’t get out of hand. The benefit of this extra work is that other people are constantly adding new content to your site without you having to do much work to get it.
It would probably be best to do both, but that’s not always feasible so here’s more information by Web Marketer Rich Brooks in his post on flyteblog. He looks at things more from a marketing viewpoint.
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I think that one of the best promotional tools that a company can have of blog, provided they will play by the rules.
- Serve your visitor first (not your company)
- Provide something of value
- Use your own list
- Opt-In only
- No Spam
The Viral Garden keeps track of business blogs and it’s interesting to see how the big companies do it. Some just ignore the rules and don’t post much or are completely self serving. Here’s one that seems to get it.
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I was reading through a list of 12 things that you can do to improve the optimization of your site.
I read one through ten and I thought they were all good ideas, some I thought I might try.
Then I stopped when I got to number eleven.
“You can repurpose other’s copy for your site but be sure to give credit where due and do not ever straight duplicate copy. This is stealing and search engines will black list your site.”
I keep on reading this everywhere these days and I just don’t believe that’s true. If search engines banned sites for duplicate content they wouldn’t have any sites left to index.
Here’s what they do (according to me, take it for what you will) :
- The search engines will look for the author of the original content and if they can ID them will give them the credit.
- Other copies will not be counted as good or bad.
- They may or may not have the original content credited to the correct site.
That’s why I say that you should…
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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Supercycles. You know at first glance that this site is about Motorcycles. This is a business with the very first thing on the page is all of their contact information and store hours. The site navigation is right below and even though it is a dropdown list it’s still written as a plain text list (good for SEO).
There is a Flash animation, but it fits the site well and has nothing to do with the main navigation.
More…
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
The Amazing Real Time World Clock that shows current world statistics for time, population, diseases, and much more.
You have the option of displaying the stats by the year, month, day, or starting from the current time.
This clock is also available to embed in your own site for free.
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I don’t usually venture into the PPC arena because, as I tell my customers, buying clicks can work very well, but if you’re not willing to do the work to track and analyze all of the data you’re probably just wasting your money.
It’s pretty easy to see how much you are spending, but do you really know how much these ads are making? Which ads or which keywords are working and which ones are not? If you don’t know the answer to these questions the odds are good that you’re in the above category.
I found a very good blog called “The Adventures of PPC Hero” that has some very interesting and useful information. There are many good posts and comments, but I started with “Quick Fixes to Some of PPC’s Most Common Problems”.
I’m going to recommend this blog to my PPC customers.
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A new customer asked me the other day “Oh! One more question….so you’re doing my hosting and all that. What happens if you win the lottery and move to Tahiti? Do I only have to find a new host, or what?”
I often wonder why my customers don’t ask that question much more often. After all I am a one man shop. I replied to them.
You have the best!
A free open source platform that will always be available to everyone.
That’s why I insist on it.
This is your site. I suggest that you learn to back up the data yourself.
If you have a backup and you have control of your domain name you can easily move it somewhere else.
That’s one of the reasons that I recommend that all of my customers keep control of their own domain name, use open source software and keep their own backups. If something were to happen to me they could move their site somewhere else and there would be many other people who could easily step in and help them.
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I have written many times before about using tricks to get your site to the top of the search engines.
See this, or just search this blog for SEO.
I believe that it’s always harder, but better to do it right.
I read last week about the CEO of Traffic Power getting jail time and again today on Google’s Matt Cutts blog. Matt makes a very good point that if someone is willing to take any measure, including shady ones, to get you to the top of the search engine results pages who knows what other unscrupulous things they are willing to do.
There can be good money in SEO both for the site owner and the SEO company so there will probably always be snake oil salesmen. I think that I find fewer of the “bad guys” these days and that’s a good thing for everyone.
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I believe that email marketing is still one of the best lowest cost ways to reach your customers. If you don’t believe me have a look at your inbox and see just how many of the biggest retailers in the world are trying to reach you.
I believe that every business should have some kind of a newsletter even if it’s only sent once a month. Your own customer list is always the most valuable. These are people who know you and are much more willing to read your mail and even pass it on. I don’t ever recommend buying names.
Remember that these are your customers and you don’t want to make them mad, so do it right and play by the rules.
- Your own list
- Opt-In only
- No Spam
Pretty simple stuff, but very important.
You can send it out yourself, but remember that many ISP’s these days have a 100 emails per hour limit on their accounts. If your lists get big it may be best to outsource the actual mailing to one of the big email newsletter senders.
I have send many of my customers to read this post by Loren McDonald on the Email Insider blog.
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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called YouTube. Most everyone has heard of YouTube. I decided to use it now for one of my favorites because I’ve noticed that it looks more and more like Google every day. I don’t suppose that could be too bad. Simple and very functional.
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