Blog Blog Blog….once for each year this blog you are currently reading has been in existence. Yep I have been blogging for 3 years now. I don’t consider myself a “blogger” since my income is derived indirectly form my blog. Please keep in mind that there are many successful individuals who make a living from blogging. There are many different reasons for blogging. I blogcast to you this evening in order to push down some content I am tired of looking at on my website. Onsite SEO is only about a third of everything at most that goes into making your website rank higher on Google but I guarantee you will see higher rankings if you being to start blogging. There are some key rules that you need to follow first in order to gain maximum benefit form your digital composition efforts.

First make sure that your blog resides on the same domain as your current website. This mean no blogs hosted on a domain other than yours because you want all of the SEO benefit and potential links to go to your website and not someone else’s like blogspot or wordpress.

Second you want to make sure that you blog on a regular basis. Nothing is worse than a dead blog. Are you going to abandon me as well if I become your customer? It may be true that you become busy but you are never too busy to blog and grow or your business. If you are then you can easily afford to hire a ghost writer as your time is more valuable spent working on tasks related to managing your business than blogging.

Third make sure you write about topics that your customers are interested in.  Having interesting content on your blog will make it go VIRAL!!!  Ha Ha not really but it will mean that people are more likely to link to you, share your content with someone else, or become more involved with your brand. You don’t have to make every post strictly related to your industry but instead use this as an opportunity to provide helpful knowledge as well as give your brand a personality. Use StumbleUpon for blogging ideas if your industry is not that sexy.

Blogging on your website should be as easy as opening you web browser, navigating to you specific URL, logging in and typing. If it is not this easy to edit your website you may consider converting it over to a content management system, or having a web developer install a wordpress blog for you. The more difficult it is to update your website the less likely you are to update it. It will do you no good to leave up old stale content. Blog at least once a month to increase search engine rankings over time and improve your web metrics. Sooner or later you sill notice a payoff from you actions including more business.

I love my job as a website designer / seo consultant / joomla developer and the challenges it brings everyday, I love being in constantly changing industry as it gives those who easily adapt and adopt merging trends a clear advantage over organizations that embrace a corporate culture that revolves around a hierarchy where developers are dictated how their time is going to be spent. This always demoralizes web designers, developers, and programmers. As I frequent industry events and networking groups designers and developer are constantly griping about the policies of their superiors.

Its easy to forget the fact that web designers, programmers, developers, etc. are artists, and code is our clay. There are an infinitesimal array of things one could do with a little PHP and MySQL and while it is essential to focus on client projects, it is equally important to work on pet projects and experiment with new API’s, frameworks, languages, etc.

I remember a few years ago asking my former boss repeatedly why we couldn’t try a new open source content management system called “Joomla” At the time we were using this clunky outdated system called Dot Net Nuke and it never installed right and cost us many hours in productivity, hours that our clients were ultimately getting billed for. Is it really fair to the clients of these cube farms and web shops to pay extra for their inefficiencies?? And why shoot down your lead developer that eats, breathes, and sleeps in code when your just a number cruncher?

Fast forward to now and the largest blogging platform on the internet WordPress is an open source technology. The largest social network on the internet FaceBook, runs on servers powered by an open source operating system. The largest smartphone platform in the Unite States, Android. Is open source. Can anyone really deny the power of open source software any longer? A lot of these big agencies that once scoffed at the idea are scrambling to get up to speed now. Why? Because our Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress content management systems kill their proprietary sluggish, insecure, and outdated content management systems. In other words were digging in their pockets with a pick axe.

That’s what happens when we setup websites that are constantly updated with new features, has the ability to back itself up at regular intervals, ranks high on Google, and is easy and simple to update, and do it at a third of the cost.

It may be open source, but if it’s good enough for Harvard then its good enough for your business.

So what is open source anyway? Well according to Wikipedia…

“Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities.”

Sorry blog for neglecting you. I always tell clients the hardest part about a blog is updating it, unless blogging is your business. But it adds valuable content to your website and it can help you rank better. A wordpress blog, which is a commonly used open source solution is the fastest way to add a super functional and optimized blog to your domain. It’s pretty straight forward to maintain and with a few plugins and some great content it will surely help you rank better. Great content doesn’t mean sales pitches, or a journal. The most common misconception among business owners is that a blog is personal. Yes they give your company a personality, but they best used when giving relevant information to your visitors of your website. An example would be a Financial Services company maintaining a blog on useful ways to save money. A catering company blogging about event planning. Blogging relevant content may sometimes require research which could be the job of someone in the company or you can outsource it to a web company. There are many advantages to having a blog on your website, and I strongly encourage any business owner that is serious about the web to add this to their list of  thing to do.