I’m frequently asked if a business needs a blog if it already has a website. That really depends on what you are trying to accomplish. In this series on Beginning Blogging, I’ve discussed the benefits of having a business blog. If you already have a website, but would like to take advantage of these benefits you have three integration choices:

Use a subdomain of your existing site and create a blog in this directory.

This is easy to do from the technical standpoint of WordPress. It might not be very easy from the standpoint of your existing site and how it looks. You want the two sites to look integrated. You may need to hire a web designer to fully incorporate the look of the two sites and add functionality with linking from the traditional website to your blog. (You can add the links from the blog to your traditional website because they are so easy.)

Start a blog and link to it from your website.

If you don’t know if you really want a blog, this is the way to go. You can create a blog and if you decide blogging isn’t for you, then you can just stop. You can also create a different look and feel. Maybe your website is very professional with proper business language. This corporate website attracts a particular type of customer. If you want to reach out to a very different client, you could try blogging.

You don’t even have to link to your blog from your website at first. You could just start one and see how it goes. If this works, then you could incorporate some links from your website to your blog.

Recreate your website in WordPress.

Besides just having posts, WordPress also has a way to create pages. In fact most business blogs have several pages in addition to blog posts. These pages can increase the information about your business and let customers know how to contact you. They can help you sell things with shopping carts. These pages can be tabs on your site, or you can designate one as “sticky” so that it appears as your main page, with the blog as a tab.

If your website has become stale and not much fun, try this option. This lets you redesign your site at minimal cost. You can freshen up your information and really get going. (There is also the added perk that it’s easy to optimize WordPress blogs for SEO with a few tweaks and plugins. It will probably be much more spider friendly than your current site.)

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Many people start a blog and have a great deal of fun for the first two weeks. After that it becomes a drag to them as they try to decide what to write about. An editorial calendar can help overcome this tendency.

An Editorial Calendar is a calendar that lists the things you are going to write about. It is very helpful for listing specific topics that you want to talk about at specific times of the year. You can use any calendar you choose; an online calendar, a spreadsheet in Excel, or an old-fashioned wall calendar. Use whatever works for you.

Organizing Holiday and Seasonal Blog Posts

An editorial calendar can help you plan for holidays. (They do seem to really jump out at you if you don’t plan for them.) For instance, if you have a great idea for New Year’s Resolutions, it’s a good idea to post the article at the end of December. If you wait until the middle of January, you will have lost a lot of traffic because people are searching for articles about keeping New Year’s Resolutions around the holiday.

It’s also helpful when you get an idea that’s off season. For instance if in July you have a great idea for a New Year’s Resolution, you can go ahead and write the post and just note it on your calendar. The same thing goes for other topics. If you have a gardening site and you have some great ideas for spring planting, but it’s August, write your article and note it on your calendar for planting time (which is February or March where I live.)

Organizing Recurring Blog Posts

An editorial calendar helps you to organize posts. You may have different types of posts such as “tips,” “customer stories,” and “new FAQ’s” You can plan these posts so you are consistent in adding them to your website and you have different types of articles coming out all the time.

This can also help you keep on a consistent posting schedule so you don’t go several weeks without updating your blog. Most people stop adding posts because they are out of topic ideas. An hour spent with an editorial calendar each month can overcome this.

Organizing Blog Topics

Most blogs discuss more than one topic. Even niche blogs (blogs on very narrow topics) break these topics down into smaller subtopics. Having an editorial calendar can help you with a series of posts (like the series you are reading right now on beginning blogging). It can help you spread out your topics if desired. A great example is if you have a blog on desserts. On Mondays you could discuss cakes; Tuesdays healthy desserts; Wednesdays pies; Thursdays cookies; and reserve Fridays exclusively for chocolate (my favorite day and dessert).

An editorial calendar can actually help you think of ideas for articles as you sit down and ponder the upcoming month. Grab your calendar for January right now and think about what you want to write on. New Year’s Resolutions? Martin Luther King Jr.? Winter? If you can’t come up with any ideas, try Brownielocks a site that lists lots of holidays and other observances. You’re sure to find one that ties into your subject.
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In a previous article, Types of Blogs, I noted that business blogs are blogs that meet a business purpose. The purpose of your business blog is totally up to you, the business owner. There is really just one question to ask: does your blog fulfill the needs of your customers?

Meeting the needs of your customers can be fun and rewarding as you develop better associations with those customers. Some reasons to have a business blog that will help your customers are:

• Show your expertise. You can express your authority, knowledge, and passion about your field. This helps customers gain confidence in using you. This can also have a secondary effect as you become a resource for others in your niche.
• Provide help. Many business blogs have tips on how to best use products or services. This is an excellent way to add value to what you already offer.
• Highlight customers. Blogs are a wonderful place to showcase how your products or services have helped real people. As you highlight different customers, other customers using the same products/services will respond with comments. Sometimes these comments will be about benefits you hadn’t realized existed.
• Release new info. News, updated information, and events are natural things to write about on your blog. Blogs are also a great place to build momentum when you are launching a new product or service.

More and more businesses have blogs for the above reasons. They realize the benefits to their customers. There are also benefits to you as a company from having a business blog. These include:

• Providing a place for existing customers to have access to relevant information. When you release an update on something, you don’t have to send out a ton of mail. You can send an email and link to the information on your blog.
• Gaining insight from customers as to why they like certain products and services.
• Spending less money on traditional marketing methods. Blogs are cheaper than other advertising methods and they are usually more effective as well because you can speak in your own voice.
• Increasing your company’s web presence.
• Attracting new customers.
• Creating a venue to put FAQ’s which will cut down on customer service calls.
• The last, best, and most fun benefit is that if you meet or exceed customer expectations, you will develop a following around your blog.

I know I haven’t listed all the benefits to customers or businesses of having a blog.
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The best answer is: everyone has one (peer pressure). Just kidding.

I’m not going to go into the benefits of having a website. Most people see the value of have a web presence on the great big WWW. It used to be that this was time-consuming, frustrating, and relatively expensive. Blogs have changed all that and they can actually do things better than a traditional website.

Blogs are Cheap.

You can’t get cheaper than free, and there are blogging platforms that are actually free. If you want a personal blog, then I recommend you use Blogger or Wordpress.com. However, if you want a business or professional blog, then it is best to have your own domain name and web hosting service. (To learn more on how to choose a web host, see my article: 6 Tips for Hosting a Blog.)

A good web hosting service can cost less than $10 per month and a domain name is only about $10 per year. So for about $130 per year you can have a web presence. After you have your domain name and host, you can upload WordPress for free. Many hosting services provide a one-click installation from within your hosting platform. But even if your hosting service doesn’t have this feature, WordPress has a famous 5-minute installation process. WordPress is also the standard in the blogging industry. (To learn more on why WordPress is a great choice, read my article: 7 Reasons to Use Wordpress.) When I talk about blogs and blogging, I will be referring to a WordPress blog hosted on your own server.

Blogs are Easy.

A huge advantage that blogs have over traditional websites is that they are super easy to work with. I just explained how easy it is to load WordPress onto your web server. Adding text, pictures, and video are just as easy. In fact, once you understand the mechanics of the blog, you will realize that it’s only a bit more complicated than your email provider!

All you do is: write your article, create a title, and press the publish button. That’s it. WordPress has a WSYWIG editor (what you see is what you get) as well as an HTML view. So whichever way you are most comfortable with is the way you can get your stuff done.

WordPress also allows you to upload pictures two ways: with a browser uploader or a flash uploader. They also have features for uploading video and audio.

Blogs can be Personalized with Themes.

There are free themes and there are themes that cost money. (Another name for theme is skin or template.) Most of the free themes can be found at WordPress Themes. Custom themes can usually be purchased for just a few hundred dollars.

Even free themes can be changed and modified to fit your personality or reflect the focus of your business. You can start with a free theme, and then upgrade to a custom theme if desired. The nice thing is that you can’t really make a huge mistake. You can always change one theme for another one. Themes are easy to upload into your blog. Last time I checked there were over one million free themes! That’s a lot of choices.

Blogs can have Different Features with Plugins.

Besides choosing different themes, there are thousands of plugins to help you design your blog just the way you want. A plugin is a type of widget that does something specific. You can find most of them at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

There are plugins to help you with SEO, backup, spam control, and other back-end blog operations. There are plugins to help you with communicating to your audience, such as contact forms, commenting features, and subscriptions to RSS feeds. There are even plugins that are just for fun, such as ones that generate quotes, highlight clichés, or even post weird facts. Most of these plugins are free.

Blogs are Great for SEO.

A website’s design can either help or hinder your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One of the considerations is how frequently your content is updated. A blog is very easy to update, thus they are usually full of relevant information that search engines like. Another consideration of SEO is keywords. Keywords will be discussed later in this series.

Blogs Foster Understanding.

Blogs can help your business grow as you write articles and your customers, or potential customers, comment on your information. This interaction can help you better understand your customers and develop services and products that will better serve their needs.

Blogs are Fun.

If you don’t find updating your blog fun, then consider the reason why. It might be that you are in a business that is stale for you. Or it might just be that you don’t like to write.

If you love your business but don’t like to write, add content in another form. You can add all kinds of visual items. These include drawings, sketches, photos, screen shots, and PowerPoint presentations. You can also add video or MP3 audio. This means that if it’s easier for you to talk to people than write, you can just record your voice and those can be your blog entries!
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(Note this is the second post in a multi-post series. The first post is: Beginning Blogging: What is a blog?)

There are three main types of blogs; personal, professional, and business.

Personal blogs

Personal blogs are kept by people to inform family and friends about the things that are going on in their busy lives.Personal blogs are a great way for families who live far away from each other to share photos, cute stories, and other information. Personal blogs are also a great way for hobbyists to share with each other. (In case you are wondering, blogs can be made private by requiring all users to register and be approved by an administrator. This can create a very exclusive crowd if desired.)

Professional blogs

Professional blogs are blogs that make money from the blog itself. They have advertising and affiliate programs which are sold right on the site. Probably the best known professional blog is Problogger, which is a great place to network with people if you want to make money from your blog.

Business blogs

Business blogs are blogs that have a business purpose, such as selling a service or product, or posting updates for customers on solutions to problems. These are the kinds of blogs that I help people create. These are also the kinds of blogs that I will be discussing in the future.

Whichever type of blog you have, a blog is a great place to connect with others who have similar interests. The discussions that ensue because of blog posts are enlightening, bonding, and fun.
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You mean you don’t know what blogging is? That’s okay. All the time I am asked the question, “What’s a blog, anyway, and how does it differ from a regular website?”

A blog is a website

The word blog is short for web log, which is a type of website. A blog differs from a traditional website in two ways: First, a blog is not static. Second, blog entries usually provide a place for readers to leave comments. A blog is about the easiest way to have a website.

A blog contains articles called posts.

A blog is really an internet publishing platform that is very easy to use and update. Entries in a blog are called articles or blog posts. Blog posts are in reverse chronological order. This means that when someone lands on a blog page, they see the most current and relevant information first. New information is usually added to a blog from several times a day to once a week or so. A website, on the other hand, is usually only changed when needed. The information on a static website may be months, or even years, old. A blog is usually full of fresh information that is updated frequently.

Blog readers can leave comments

Blog Comments can be left by readers and the blog author can respond to these comments. This encourages a dialog between the person who owns the blog and the readers. Readers can also respond to other readers. This fosters discussions, which are fun and informative.

(Note: I’m often asked how to leave a comment on a blog when the comment box isn’t visible. Just click on the post title -not the title of the blog- but the title of the article. It will bring up the whole article and the comment section. This is a simple thing that many beginning bloggers don’t realize.)

Posts are kept in a database.

The fact that posts are in a database makes accessing them super easy. Most blogs classify the posts into categories and archives. This makes finding things simple because you can search by a topic or by a date. Categories are the way posts are organized by topic and archives are organized by date, usually grouped into months. An example is this post you are reading right now. It is in the category blogging tips and the archive December 2009.

Blogs have tags.

An element of blogs that is particularly confusing to people is tags. Blog tags are like micro-categories. They are like adding an index for a specific post. So when entering a tag, you don’t need to repeat the category you put the post in. People can search for a tag and all posts with the same tag will be linked.
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