Bill Caskey is a sales trainer. People pay his company good money to help them sell more. He advocates blogs as one tool to engage clients- his post has many gems- but I thought this part is something most people who think blogs aren’t for business should read:

BillCaskey: How Social Media Affects Sales People
While there are 40,000,000 blogs, most companies don’t see them for what they could be. If you have a website and not a blog, then you’re missing a great way to lead people to your website. But make your blog a rigorous conversation about the industry. DON’T make it about you and only you.

Ask questions. Pose opinions and ask for feedback. Create controversy by being honest. Blogs should be written by people–not by some faceless company PR person.

You can also use blogs to create Case Studies on ways you’ve solved problems for your customers. Have a new product? Take a pic of it and post about it. But be honest about it’s strengths and weaknesses. Don’t tell one side of the story. If you do, it’ll sound like it came from your marketing department–more blah-blah-blah.

People use the internet to solve problems- and the first thing they do is a search: if they come up with you as the expert on your subject- you will have the opportunity to make the sale. If they don’t find you- you may as well not exist.

WordPress 2.2.1 may be “required” – but on every install, I wasn’t getting the visual text editor, TinyMCE to display. After uploading, re-uploading, clearing cache, shutting off the “use visual editor”- turning off and on plugins- I finally gave up and loaded Dean’s FCKEditor– which gives you all kinds of cool tools that aren’t easily available in TinyMCE. (See picture above).

I’ve been through a ton of WordPress upgrades- and most have been painless. This has not.

After spending 6 hours -I was able to update 4 installs successfully with TinyMCE – but gave up on the fifth and went with Dean’s solution.

We’re not the only ones who believe WordPress is a great CMS for “non-blog” uses.

WordPress Makes Sense For Many Non-Blog Websites | iface thoughts
…justification for why WordPress makes a lot of sense for many simple web sites, including the non-blog ones. The shorter version is that WordPress provides good infrastructure of web publishing and gives you tools to build an interactive web site. And I think this is common knowledge in the WordPress community.

Click over to the link to see a whole bunch of his reasons why WordPress rocks- never mind it’s ability to get you to the top of Google fast and easy for free.

We’ve got a while list of our “graduates” who are using WordPress to maximize their business opportunities online here: http://websitetology.com/?page_id=9

Considering how important it is to be able to update a site and keep content fresh- the simple to use WordPress interface makes it possible for everyone in the company to work on keeping the company web site up to date.