I recently published an article on numerous Internet sites that I called the Seven Step Online Marketing Strategies Plan. In that article I detailed seven steps that should be included in when you are developing your own online marketing strategies. The first step is to start a blog. Why a blog? There are a lot of different reasons, but the biggest reason is that a blog usually provides more fresh and up to date information than a typical website. For many people, establishing their current website was a big deal that involved a lot of money and time and often required the services of a website development company. Once the website was set up, it was pretty much left alone and quickly became out dated.

With the arrival of some amazing blog software, all that has changed. It is now much less expensive to develop an Internet presence, and blogs can be set up to look like virtually any website you could imagine. The difference is that a blog is much easier to set up and maintain than the traditional website. Also, because the blogs are easier to work with, they tend to get updated more and are often ranked higher than sites that have not been updated. One of the first things I often do with my own online marketing clients is to change their existing websites into a blog environment.

There are many options for starting a blog on the Internet. There are some excellent free options like Blogger.com and WordPress.com. These are easy to use and most people should be able to go to either one of those options and have a blog up and running in less than hour. For most businesses, however, I recommend using WordPress.org in a self hosted environment. The WordPress software is free, but hosting a site and getting a domain name will cost around $60/year. I will be writing about getting a WordPress blog set up and hosted in future articles.

Until next time….

Steve