What’s the best blogging platform?

There are a variety of blogging platforms available.  Some platforms like WordPress allow you to host the blog and integrate it into your website.  Others like Tumblr & Blogger host the blog on their site for you.  Determining which platform would work best for you really depends on what you’re looking to do with it.  If you are just starting out blogging, Blogger and Tumblr are much simpler.  Point, click and done…your blog is ready to go.  WordPress is a little more sophisticated, has a lot more options with design, function and thousands of plugins to play with.  If you would like some help setting up your companies blog, contact us.  We’re happy to help!

How does blogging help my business?

Blogs help your business in several ways:

• Shows current & prospective clients you are an expert in your niche
• A steady flow of new content to your website (if it’s hosted on your website)
• Providing additional content to your site will improve your SEO

What are some good WordPress apps to use on my blog?

• Google XML Sitemaps is an excellent app.  It automatically generates an XML sitemap for your blog allowing search engines to index it better.
• OnlyWire for WordPress is one of my favorite apps.  This amazing app gives you the ability to post to 48 social networks with the push of a button!  There are 3 different programs available – Free which allows you to make up to 300 submissions per month site however every time you submit you have to do a capthca solver which is a little time consuming but deciphering the captchas is probably the biggest issue as they aren’t always clear and it has ads.  It also has a 1 user & 1 website limitation.  The next level is Blogger, Publisher, Webmaster which is a great deal at $10 a month, no ads, no captchas but has the 1 website & 1 user limitations.  The enterprise level is Corporate & SEM which is the whole enchilada, no limitations, ads or captchas.
• Wibiya Toolbar is another super cool app that puts a bar at the bottom of your blog that gives visitors the ability to tweet, like, share, watch videos on your YouTube channel and much more.  You have tons of customization options to have the bar match your site and different items you can allow your visitors to see.
• Sexy Bookmarks is another sharing app (sharing is caring!).  This app puts sharing capabilities into the posts themselves.  It also has many options to customize where the sharing bar is placed and what bookmarking sites you’d like to have shown.
• Scribe SEO is a plugin from Copyblogger.  It’s unique qualities are what makes it one of our favorites.  The Keyword Research tool gives you info on how many searches are done annually on the keyword you searched helping you to choose the best keywords for your post. The Content Optimizer analyzes your title, meta description and content and gives you a score based on severl different factors that will help to improve your blog’s “findability”.  It then gives you a breakdown of the keyword analysis giving you the primary and secondary keywords based on use, advice on how to change your keywords, other keywords used in your blog post, suggested tags to use, what your post will look like in SERPs (search engine results pages) and SEO best practices.  The Scribe Link Building tool is super cool.  Based on your primary keyword, it does a search to find internal link building opportunities, external opportunities that give you detailed info on other blogs and websites you can get authoritative links from and it finds the most influential people in social media that talk about your topic.
• SEO – There are at least 100 different SEO plugins to use for WordPress but the SEO plugin that I’ve found works the best is actually included on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress.  If you don’t have one of the Genesis Themes, you can download the All in One SEO plugin which available through the plugin search on the left side of your WordPress admin page.  It has a lot of options for optimizing your blog posts for search engines.

How do I drive traffic to my blog?

Driving traffic to your blog can be done easily through integrating social media and social sharing into your blog.  Using an app like OnlyWire helps get the word out about your posts to many different social bookmarking sites giving you more opportunity to be seen.  Sexy Bookmarks & the Wibiya Toolbar help by making it easy for your current readers to share your posts.

Using social networking sites like Twitter & Facebook are also great ways to get your content out there and inspire new visitors to visit your blog.  Twitter in particular is a great traffic driver as you can make several different posts a day and not have to worry about crowding someone’s feed.  You can also use hashtags to extend your reach.  Facebook is a little more strict, not in policy but it you start posting 3+ posts per day on your page you’ll more than likely see a rapid decrease in likes depending on what your fans are used to.

Sub-Domain vs. Sub-Directory (sometimes called a folder)

blog.mywebsite.com vs www.mywebsite.com/blog

This is a controversial question in blogging.  Both have their advantages.  The advantage to using a sub-directory (www.mywebsite.com/blog) is the link juice and PR (PageRank) is sent to your main URL which helps in search engine ranking whereas with sub-domains the sub keeps its link juice and PR.  The advantage of using a sub-domain is they are considered unique from the main domain and can be used to separate content that is different than what your site is about.  If you’d like to learn more check out this post by Matt Cutts on Sub-Domains vs Sub-Directories.

Do you have questions about business blogging you’ve not had answered?  Please comment below!