Since we seem to be on a roll with blogging topics, we'll continue today with another important blog discussion.
We frequently get asked what blogging software and blogging hosting service should be used to set up a jewelry store's website. There are obvious answers to that question, but they come with not so obvious consequences.
The apparent, obvious answer is to use a readily available blogging platform. According to TopTenReviews.com the top 5 blogging software platforms for 2012 (so far) are:
1. WordPress
2. Typepad
3. Squarespace
4. LiveJournal
5. Blogger
The popular blogging platforms amongst the jewelers we work with seem to be WordPress and Blogger. WordPress has a lot of features and can be used not only as a blog, but also to run the entire operations of your website. On the other hand, Blogger is not much more than a blog publishing site.
The purpose of a blog is to attract attention from the search engines. That attention translates into organic visitors that read your blog. The hope is that visitors will click the link from your blog to your website... the key word there is "hope."
Blogging is not something you might find intuitive, or even have the desire to do. If you're like most jewelers, you will be more focused on displaying products, designer information, and store information on your website; you might even be dabbling in e-commerce. For most jewelers it takes a long time to understand the true need for blogging for SEO results. In other words, blogging is an afterthought when in fact it's an important front line component in online marketing.
WordPress and Blogger have become the popular platforms to set up those "afterthought" blogs, when the jeweler's website should have been reprogrammed to include the blog within the site.
Google will gladly show your jewelry blog in the SERP if your topic is well written and provides value to readers. They have their own way of determining "adding value" which we're not covering in this Daily Golden Nugget. In any case, if you post 2 or 3 blog entries per month, your blog will eventually attract 30 to 70 visitors per day organically, i.e. without trying.
How many of those 30 or 70 visitors would you like to click from your blog to your regular store's website? 2%? 10%? 20%?
If you write a quality blog entry two or three times per month, you could get as many as 7 people per day clicking from the WordPress/Blogger site to your store's website. Of course you'd have to check your own Google Analytics account to see these numbers; you might also need a calculator to crunch them.
What if you there were a way to get 100% of all your blog visitors to visit your actual website? That would be 30 to 70 extra people per day that are lead to your website.
Isn't that worth something to you?
This is where the afterthought blog setup really hurts. Instead of creating an offsite blogging account with WordPress or Blogger, you should build the blog into your site. Google will still find the blog and still send you all that organic traffic. But now, instead of hoping they will click 1 more link to your website, you already have a captive audience to show some other creative marketing message to.
Let's bottom line this Daily Golden Nugget: Put your blog on your website, not off site; just ask your web programmer how to do this.
