Why Wordpress and BlogSpot Fall Short
We have spent some time testing
the major blog editing software products over the last week to see if
any were appropriate to integrate into our own offerings. Our
conclusion from the analysis is that they are all quite good for the
prosumer type of individual blogger, but not very appropriate for small
businesses.
Business Blogging Benefits: A blog does two things for a small business.
- It helps you “attract” the prospects on the internet that are
searching/shopping in your niche. It does that because other
bloggers/journalists with similar content end up linking to you, so you
drive people who would otherwise not have “found” you to your site
through those other sites. Because those other people are linking to
your articles, your search engine rankings start to improve for
words/phrases that are important to your business (especially if you
are thoughtful about how you write your titles), so you drive more
people who would otherwise not have “found” you to your site through
the search engines.
- It helps you “convert” these new
prospects into qualified opportunities more efficiently. It is much
more likely that someone will return to a website that has a
blog “attached” to it with an RSS feed than if it is just a static
website because these newly attracted prospects assume the content will
change. A blog also invites these newly attracted prospects to engage
with your small business via the comments section.
If you
believe: Revenue = Attraction * Conversion, then a blog helps you
attract more prospects and convert a higher percentage of new (and
traditional) prospects to customers.
Blog Tool Issues: The problem with the major blog tools on the market is that they are
not really built from the ground up to support a business. They are
designed for an individual/solopreneur who wants to drive readership
and ultimately sell advertisements on the site. Here are some of the
shortcomings we discovered relative to small business blogging.
- Small businesses are short on time and want to make sure if they are
going to spend cycles on creating original content that they are going
to get more revenue. All of the blog tools can tell you if you are
driving additional readers to your blog, but none of them can tell you
whether any of that traffic is qualified prospects converting to
customers. In addition, none of them can tell you about the blog’s
impact on your regular/existing website because they are two separate
entities. In other words, their analytics are just limited to the
“attract” side of the revenue equation on the blog itself versus
looking top to bottom at the entire funnel and across the blog and the
existing website.
- Speaking of existing websites, most small
businesses already have spent considerable money designing and building
a website with a logo, design, and color scheme that matches their name
cards, trade show booths, etc. The blog vendors make it easy for you to
set up a blog with one of their templates and color schemes, but it is
relatively challenging for a small business to get their logo, color
scheme, and design on the blog itself. In addition, it can be a pain in
the backside for a small businesses to create the new navigation link
from their website to the blog itself. Also, the blog vendors use their
own naming convention for the blog’s domain (i.e.
yourbusiness.wordpress.com), so the SEO is building up in the wrong
place. The net result is that most small businesses have a blog that is
totally disconnected from their website which defeats the purpose of
the project (more customers) in the first place!
- The
existing blog tools do not provide “conversion” tools to help you
qualify the newly attracted prospects like surveys/forms for collecting
user interest. They also do not collect the list of self-selected
qualified customers for you to follow-up on and use that data to feed
the previously mentioned analytics tool.
I’m curious as to
what some of you think about this? Do you have some of these issues?
For those of you starting blogs, have you thought about these issues?
Posted by Brian Halligan on Fri, Nov 17 @ 02:49 PM