Sep 28, 2008 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Blogs vs. Websites

I recently released a short report called, “What Every Business Owner Needs to Know Before Building a Website” that has been getting tons of positive feedback. In it, I make some pretty bold statements about what a business site should do for you. It is free so if you haven’t downloaded your copy, feel free to do so here.

As I write these words, this blog is about three months old. I have worked nearly exclusively with websites (as opposed to blogs) in the past so this is a new experience for me.

Before I go off about blogs let’s begin with websites. Traditional websites are most often created in html. Some degree of programming skills and expensive software are both required if you want to create anything that looks professional. If you don’t have these skills or tools you need to pay someone to build your site for you. This usually means big $$.

On the other hand, html allows you to be more creative in the look and feel of your site. You really don’t have any limitations on where to set up your menus, etc. and you can make your site look very cool. But, again, if you want to change or update your site – which you definitely will want to do – you’re usually dependent on your web guy.

Blogs are a little diffent. The bad news is that they are a little less flexible than websites so you are more limited to how you can design a blog. I’m finding that this is really the only bad thing about blogs and even this point isn’t so bad. I am very happy with the look and feel of this site.

On the up-side, blogs can be updated very easily – by anyone and from anywhere. This is huge. Rather than being dependent on a programmer every time you wish to change your site you can do it yourself. More importantly, you can have any number of staff (your own or outsourcers) working on the site at any given time. Assigning specific sections of your blog to specific staff will allow you to add more content much faster than if everything needs to be funneled through one person.

Blogs are also more interactive than websites. Your visitors can leave comments on articles you’ve written right on your site. You may wonder why you would want to allow this so I’ll give you a couple of reasons. First, by making yourself more accessible to your prospects and in effect allowing dialogue to occur, you will develop a more personal relationship with them. Second, the search engines like to see websites that are updated often. Remember, they are in the business of finding the best information on each search term. Well, comments are new content and new content that requires zero effort on your part.

Finally, it was once rumored that the search engines prefered blogs over traditional sites. The logic being that blogs were originally designed to be updated often so Google and the other search engines would give them preferential treatment. I have definitely found this to be true.

While we’re on this topic I’ll like to make a note about search engine rankings. Regardless of what your web designer may tell you, a top ten ranking on Google is not the be-all and end-all. Yes, free traffic is nice but don’t depend on it. Build your site in a manner that Google likes, get as many in-bound links to it that you can and then don’t worry about it. Use other marketing tactics to get people to your site and you’ll do just fine.

To summarize, if you’re planning on having a static site and if you have the skills there is nothing wrong with going the traditional html route. However, if you’re not a programmer or if you want to more easily update your content, try a blog.