The 12 reasons why UK businesses don’t blog | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com

Although it’s written for the UK market- everything in the article applies here.

If you think your website is working for you- and you don’t have RSS, some form of live interaction (commenting) with your customers, and a way to update your site at will- you need to take the Blogosopher course and wake up.

Using a blog content management system like WordPress to manage your site is the best way to optimize your site for search engines- and to make things happen.

Last month www.thenextwave.biz had 6,243 visitors. 370 of them spent between 30 minutes and an hour with us and another 326 spent over an hour. Thats 696 cold calls- can your sales force do that?

If you are looking at having someone “Optimize your site for Search engines”- think again- we had 1496 different key phrases used to reach our site. Thinking about buying search terms? Google delivered 75.1% of the links to our site- while Yahoo only delivered 8.7% and MSN another 6%. That could be a function of how well WordPress notifies Google- or it could be that people use Google a lot more than other search tools when looking for sites about advertising.

Have you spent a lot of time designing your home page? Don’t- unless it’s WordPress- our conventional entry page: www.thenextwave.biz/tnw had 1279 enrtries, and our news section- run by WordPress: 16,613 with another 3,503 coming in through RSS.

WordPress is the most powerful tool you can use to build your business. Come to a seminar and learn how to get this kind of response for your business.

Blogs Perk Sales for High-Tech Coffee Mug

We’ve been saying blogs are serious business tools, and can help get your message out to more people faster than a traditional website. The story above is a case in point on how to use blogs to launch a new product by targeting the early adopters and influencers who are reading blogs now.

Build it and they will come?

The common mistake that so many people make is thinking “I’ll build a website and visitors will come.” That doesn’t work. Even if you optimize for search- it’s not enough to get you to the top- fresh content can help, but it’s really about building a network- links to other sites, communities, connections with your customers- that makes the traffic start to show up.

Think about who your target market is- and how to get them talking about your products or services- and then go out and make those connections. If your site is going to be your best salesperson- make it get out of the office- and network, network, network- and blogs are an excellent tool to accomplish that networking.

NewsForge | Choosing an open source CMS

The above link is an overview of the many Content Management Systems (CMS) that are available to run a website. All are open source software- meaning the source code is open to the public to tinker with and adapt for their particular use. Don’t think that open source just happens- there are huge communities of people sheparding the software to make sure it’s stable, secure and viable.

The key to these packages is that your site exists in a database- with the content extracted and formatted for display on the web as opposed to a hard coded site that is created one page at a time- and the pages don’t change.

We really like WordPress because of it’s simplicity. If you want to later move up to a more robust package- you can easily import your existing WordPress site into Drupal. The difference is, Drupal requires a geek to really make it sing- WordPress just works.

The article doesn’t really get into the main reasons we love the WordPress CMS so here are a few:

• Your site will automatically have RSS (Really Simple Synidication) so your readers can subscribe to your site and be notified any time you change or add material.
• Each time you post- WordPress automatically notifies Google that there is new information on your site and you get indexed.
• WordPress allows you to build 2-way communication via comments and trackbacks with people interested in your subject.
• Posting is as easy as writing a document in Microsoft Word- and that makes keeping your site up to date a snap.
• If you pay attention to your webstats, and use the Categories feature properly, you can end up on the front page of Google quite easily- at least it’s worked for us.

So- take a look at the article and it’s list of Content Management Systems- but, if you are new to having a database driven site- trust us- and start out with WordPress.