Note: This article is aimed at beginners who are in the process of considering whether or not to start a blog. If you are already a blogger and you know somebody who is considering a blog, please send them the link to this post!
Why should you have a blog? Because everybody else does, and you want to be cool, right?
Just kidding.
Many more people are blogging now than ever before, because there are real benefits to blogging. By this time, the benefits of having a website are undeniable. As a platform for websites, blogs magnify those benefits tremendously, delivering on them better than a non-blog website can.
Blogs are Easy
A major advantage blogs have over other forms of website is that they are so easy to work with! I’ve seen a few other Content Management Systems (CMSs) over the years, and nearly all of them are waaaaaaaay more complicated to work with than Blogger or WordPress (I know there are other blogging systems out there, but these two are the easiest I’ve seen). Blogs aren’t that much harder to work than your email once they’re set up. Write a title, write your post, hit the publish button. Lather, rinse, repeat. The more you want to customize your blog, the more complicated things can get, but blogs are nowhere near the complexity of CMSs like Joomla or Drupal .
Blogs are Cheap
Bang for your buck, blogs are cheap, cheap, cheap! How cheap? How ’bout free? Blogger and WordPress are both free, as are many other blogging platforms. Blogger and WordPress offer free hosted versions, and WordPress can be downloaded for free and then installed on your own web server using your own domain name. Domain names for the free hosted blog services are like this: http://yourblogname.blogservicename.com which isn’t as desirable as: http://yourblogname.com Domain names and web hosting are dirt cheap, anymore (often only a few dollars a month). The cost of entry is very, very low. Joomla and Drupal are free, but their complexity is often beyond the skills and experience of a beginner. If you need to hire help for your site, it can get expensive. While it’s usually better to host your own blog, if you are on the absolute tightest of budgets, then it might make you feel better to know that even though self-hosted blogs are preferable, there are plenty of great blogs that are hosted on free services. Both Blogger and WordPress feature them prominently. I’m not presuming what kind of endeavor you’re engaged in that’s causing you to consider blogging, but if you’re running a business, you should host your own blog and not use a free service. You need a professional image.
Choice of Designs
There is an incredible selection of freely available WordPress themes to choose from when deciding on a blog’s appearance. There also are themes that cost money. Custom WordPress themes can be purchased at very fair prices. The sheer magnitude of themes available out there just numbs the mind!
Blogs are Easily Extensible
Plugins, widgets, or gadgets… whatever you want to call ‘em, you can extend or add extra functionality to your blog, often quite easily. remarkablogger.com uses many plugins, such as the bookmark/email post feature at the bottom of each post, or the listing of recent comments in the sidebar. The contact form on my blog is powered by a plugin. Your ability to subscribe to follow-up comments via email when you leave a comment is also powered by a plugin. There are plugins doing things that you can’t see, such as helping my posts and pages be more search optimized and fight spam comments. Nearly all such extending functions are freely available. If you’re not a programmer, you could never hope to have functionality like this in non-dynamic website. There are free scripts for sites other than blogs, but the enormous selection and ease of use of plugins or widgets is another factor that makes blogs an ideal choice as a website platform. Extensibility makes your life as a content producer easier and more fruitful.
Wealth of Help and Resources
In addition to the official help documentation for WordPress or Blogger, you will find that bloggers like to help each other, and that there is a wealth of information in hundreds of well-written blogs. Sites that use other CMSs are often about subjects or commercial interests that aren’t as helpful to a blogger. There are strong communities around these other platforms, but help is more likely to be found in diverse discussion forums rather than blogs.
Better Search Findability
There is much about a website’s design that can either help or hinder that website’s search findability. Web designers must also be search engine optimizers at the design level. Optimizing your website so that it ranks higher in search results is known as search engine optimization, or SEO. The biggest factor in better SEO is better content—content that is naturally full of the same keywords that people would use to search online for related information. A blog about a single subject or niche is regularly pumping out new content that contains keywords, and that’s good for search ranking. There are a variety of add-ons or plugins for some blog platforms (WordPress, especially) that will help your SEO considerably, and there are some WordPress themes which have been carefully designed for better SEO.
Blogs Encourage Interaction
One of the primary features of blogs that sets them apart from other platforms is commenting. Blog comments are nowhere near as complex as a discussion forum. Readers can leave comments at the end of blog posts and pages. Often they respond to each other as well as to the post content. As the blog author, you can participate in and help foster the discussion.
What if You Already Have a Website?
Do you have to scrap your existing website in order to have a blog? Certainly not! You can integrate your blog into your existing website with either Blogger or WordPress (not the free hosted version of WordPress at wordpress.com, but the version you must install on your own server at wordpress.org). But here’s something to consider: why not bring the ease of blogging to your entire website? WordPress, for example, specifically lets you create pages. A particular page can be set as the site’s home page. It’s just as easy to create and edit pages in WordPress as it is to create and edit posts. In most WordPress themes, adding a new page automatically adds links to that page in the theme’s navigation. If it’s been a while since you last redesigned your website, you might want to freshen things up a bit by using WordPress as the CMS for your entire site.
One More Reason…
There is one more reason to have a blog: blogging is fun! I enjoy it tremendously! You may have heard people say that you can discover the right career by asking yourself: what would you do for free? I think a better question would be: what are you already doing now for free? For me, the answer is blogging. I always have several blogs going at once, and I have a bottomless hunger for more knowledge about being a better blogger and making my blogs more successful. For you, whatever the answer is might be the thing that you should be blogging about!
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Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, blogger, wordpress, better blogging, improve blogging
I would like to blog. Can anyone out there help me close to Madison, Wisconsin
I sent a comment and I hope someone received it.
Ooops I forgot the @ in my website. I am very new at this.
I’d be happy to help you if you’d like to e-mail me with your questions, Marilyn. I don’t want to write my e-mail due to spam but you can find it on the contact page of my site (click my name to go there).
Marilyn R. O’Brien, you should talk to a local hosting company or Internet café they would be the best ones to help you out and may be able to offer you some training.
Thank you. Now what do I do?