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Do I need a Blog or a Website?

Posted on January 12, 2010 | 15 Comments

I asked myself this question over a 100 times -should I develop a website or a blog for my business, or both? Starting up my new marketing consulting business, I was soliciting different quotations from web agencies to develop a website that would allow me to share basic information, continuous updates, ability to upload videos, and I needed the ability for my customers to interact with me and provide me with their feedback. Little did I know, I was actually describing a blog!

If you actually look it up, a blog is a type of a website that is managed by an individual with regular postings (commentary, video, music, images, etc …). If the telltale used to be the extension of the URL like http://johnantonios.wordpress.com - well guess what, you can register your personalized URL, like I did, and drop the extension et voila – now it’s just http://johnantonios.com! You can’t really tell them apart anymore. So now that I’ve made the two even more fused, let me try to make it easier for you!

WARNING – this post is bias, but I’ll let you be the judge of that after you read my argument favoring blogs over websites.

Why Blog – operationally?

Up and running in less than 5 minutes – log onto wordpress.com, blogger.com, typepad.com and setup your account in minutes. Each of these services have their own pros and cons, you will have to be the judge of that. Try guessing how long it would take to have an aesthetically coherent website.
No special software needed – forget about complex web design programs like Dreamweaver – all you need is your web browser!
Little to No technical knowledge needed – trust me if I can do it, anybody can. Forget about complex HTML coding and other acronyms that I don’t even know of – it’s as easy as signing up for an email account with GMAIL!
Load different content types (hassle free) – whether you want to upload a video, a music file, an image, or simply a text it’s just as easy!
Write your content offline – Microsoft Office Word 2007 has this amazing feature – just like you open a new document, you can open a new blog post. The first time around, you need to sync Office Word 2007 with your blog provider (they have a drop down list). From there on end, you can type your blogs on Word and click the “Publish” button and you’re done!

Why Blog – strategically?

Make your pocket happy – you don’t need to pay heaps of money to setup a decent presentable blog, in fact you don’t need any! Unless you need to register your URL – even that costs peanuts. Unless you are an expert in designing website, you will have to resort to someone or some company to do it for your and that costs money, lots of money!
Naturally attract search engine traffic – blogs tend to be indexed much more often than traditional static websites and blogs show up 10 times more often in organic searches than static websites do. In addition, blogs already have optimized site architecture which makes it easier for search engines to navigate through.
Two way communication – forget about static websites with one way communication – those days are over! Now you can have your customers subscribe to your blog and newsletter. You can have them share their opinion and thoughts.
Develop loyalty – a website does not allow you to develop trust with your customers. A blog removes that wall – it will allow you to develop fans and find partners who are interested in what you have to say and offer.

Was I able to convince you why I am bias towards blog?

DISCLAIMER – there are beautiful websites out there – one of my favorites is Spades Casting – it’s an award winning website in the Middle East region. This website is flash based and limits customer feedback to inquiries about models – but it serves the purpose it was intended to perfectly and I love it!

This leads me to conclude by saying; it comes down to what you seek out of your online presence. Think About It!

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Posted in How-to, Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Tagged Blog, customer feedback, Marketing, Social Media, Trust, website, wordpress

How-to add Icons in Your Signature

Posted on January 10, 2010 | 14 Comments

A great source for blog posts is questions you encounter in your daily life – in your business, in a conversation with your friends, in an article, even in an email from a friend. This post in an answer the could have been simply sent in a reply email, but since everyone can benefit from it, i decided to respond to it publicly.

I was asked by a friend how to incorporate icons in my email signature when using webmail clients like Gmail or Yahoo. In theory, in order to have any image appear in your email it should be in html format – but if the only language you speak my language, I would assume you know about html as much as i know about osteology! I did my research and found a plugin that works on Google Chrome (web browser) – Autopen. The trick is that you must be running Google Chrome – by the way, I’ve tried all browser and I highly recommend Chrome – it’s light, fast, and practical. I personally love it.

After installing Google Chrome and the plugin Autopen – an icon will be added to your Chrome toolbar – click on that icon – From here you can add signatures using the rich text editor or switch to the html view for more power and control. Once you have added a signature set it to default and it will get inserted automatically when you compose, reply or forward a message from you Gmail or Yahoo account.

Here’s where it starts getting tricky – a small lesson in HTML coding – in laymen terms! I won’t worry about you when it comes to writing your name and contact info – but how do we insert an icon. Switch to HTML tab view on your Autopen panel – why? because you need to do two things: 1- enter the code to locate the icon images, 2-enter the code to link the images to your desired destination.

Upload the icon files onto your wordpress image library (What this does is give you a permanent online location of the image so you can add it to the HTML code)
Access your wordpress image library and get the URL address of that image (I recommend that you do that to all the icons – copy and paste the URL addresses onto a notepad or word for easier access)

HTML coding

HREF indicates the URL being linked to - replace the URL code underlined in red by the location of your Twitter account (or Facebook, etc …)
IMG SRC indicates the URL image source - replace the URL code underlined in green by the URL of the image you uploaded to your wordpress image library
now copy the whole completed code and paste it in the Autopen panel (HTML view)

Let me know if you found this post helpful. If you need any additional help, let me know!

Social Media is all about networking – so you have to make sure you are leveraging every opportunity to connect with others – and your email signature is one way. Think About It!