There are lots of new bloggers out there — we, at PhotoOne, have been at it for only six months. Maybe you’ve finally decided it’s time for you and your business to start blogging. Let me point out a couple of things that you should consider.
One of the best ways to increase your website’s presence with the search engines is to add a blog to your site. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gives high marks to new, rich content and inbound links that are usually the two big byproducts of a blog. Although this is a noble goal, I believe it’s secondary to the primary strength of a blog: connecting with your clients. Proceeding with a blog based on connectivity and conversation (posts and comments) will result in many more successes than failures. A blog requires constant attention and material. This will be so much easier if you have “above average” interest in the theme you’ve created for your blog.
You have lots of choices when it comes to blogging software including Movable Type, Blogger, Squarespace, etc. At PhotoOne, we chose WordPress because we found it to be easy to set-up and implement. The admin section of Wordpress is very intuitive and it offers lots of neat features that can enhance your blogging experience.
One thing I didn’t know before selecting WordPress is that it takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization. WOW, what a bonus! I recently subscribed to Matt Cutts’ blog. Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google and is one of the foremost “thought” leaders on SEO (I think that statement is slightly redundant). As I was scanning some of his older entries I came upon his presentation to WorldCamp 2009 and the bolded statement above was a slide from that presentation. SEO can be a full-time job, why not let your blog software do most of the work?
The blog has replaced our newsletter at PhotoOne. A couple of years ago the newsletter was a great way to get information to our photographer clients on a monthly or quarterly basis, but we believe the blog format is a more timely, interactive medium. Why wait to communicate with our clients about studio management software and closely linked topics? With a blog we can have real-time communication 2 to 3 times a week. As I mentioned in the blog titled “2 Things“, this blog has generated about 35,000 words in 6 months which is the equivalent of 2 to 3 years of newsletters.
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