Fairy Blog Mother
This question arose from a friend of mine who appeared to be treading water digital communication wise. The recession can hit hard (I should know) and the poor thing had had to abandon her usual newsletter provider for a cheaper version. Unfortunately changing the sign-up form on her website also proved to be expensive, and she worried about what would happen to her old newsletters which were listed on her website.
Before I was able to reassure her that all her newsletters were safe on their server, I provided her with an alternative method: create a WordPress.com blog (the free version) and transfer her old newsletters onto it as posts. There they will always be accessible, increasingly attractive to search engines, and driving more traffic and therefore a bigger audience to read what she has to say.
Hence why the question in the title. She seemed keen to set up a blog, although this recent convert needed reassurance that regular posting was a good idea rather than publishing a newsletter only once a month. She was won over with the idea that each newsletter article could be divided up into a series of smaller posts, each encouraging her readers to look forward to the next installment.
I still maintain that a blog should be an alternative to a website for start-up businesses. Websites are expensive things to create, maintain and populate. They require specialists to design and build them, plus constant programming to keep on top of search engine optimisation, a process that also isn’t cheap. Not every website is self-editable, and if adapted only certain areas are made accessible to the owners, plus they are not interactive with their visitors.
Whereas a blog has been designed to overcome these problems. They are fully formulated for CMS (content management systems) so you can update them as much and as easily as you like. The designs are up-to-date, approachable and usable, and can be adapted to match your corporate identity. The very nature of blogs are that they are programmed to be as attractive as possible to search engines, who send out their spiders regularly to crawl over blogs before websites, as that is where they are more likely to find new content to index. And interactiveness is the name of the game, encouraging readers to respond, comment and participate in the discussions on their pages.
And newsletters can be compiled using the inexpensive versions available today, with or without autoresponders to provide incentivised gifts for subscriptions, to maintain a monthly presence with your present and prospective clients. The idea of repeating your message in different media should not be abhorrent or frowned upon, because each have their particular kind of audience, perfectly tuned to fit in with their lives and aspirations, without which the information you wish to share would have had much less impact or far reaching consequences.
