Strategy

Sarah Worsham / Jan 12, 2009

Do You Have a Blogging Strategy?

thinkinghiimhmicheal Many businesses have blogs. Many businesses feel they should start blogs. Why? Because everyone else is doing it. This isn’t a really strong reason to do anything in business – unless you want to be just like everyone else.

If you have a business blog or are thinking of starting one, take a few minutes to ponder why you are blogging. Hopefully your reasons involve helping and connecting with your customers, which should increase revenue and savings. Using these reasons as goals to form a blogging strategy can really help direct your efforts and produce better results.

Once you have an endpoint (your goals), it will be much easier to work backwards to figure out how to achieve your goals. What will you write about? Who in your company will be blogging? What will you incorporate into the design of your blog? How will you connect with your customers? Where will you syndicate your blog content? Will you use social media to increase awareness of your blog?

Do you have a business blog? What is your blogging strategy?

(photo by hi I’m h micheal @ Flickr CC)

Sarah Worsham / Jan 6, 2009

What is an Internet Strategy?

strategycompujeramey You may have heard the term Internet Strategy thrown around recently. With the rise in popularity of the Internet, businesses have felt the need to get on the Web bandwagon. Most businesses have a website, but many are feeling the need for a more thorough look at how to use the Internet effectively. So, what exactly is an Internet Strategy?

Like any good strategy, an Internet strategy is a process of deciding upon a goal and then figuring out how to work towards that goal. An Internet strategy should be intimately tied to your business strategy. If you don’t have a business strategy, start there and incorporate the Internet into your planning. The goal should be a business goal, not just an Internet business goal. The Internet has matured enough to be able to assist in reaching most business goals.

Once you have your business goal, an Internet strategy is the process of figuring out how the Internet can help you reach that goal. Think about your business website. What functionality and information should be available to your customers to help you reach your goal? What other Internet technologies can help? It helps to think broadly – email, internet advertising, twitter, social networking, blogs – can all help you reach business goals.

To differentiate yourself from your competitors, think about what makes your business different. What are you good at? What is your core competency? How can you apply that to your Internet strategy?

Your customers are the reason why you’re in business. Don’t forget about them. What benefits will you offer them through your products and services? How can you leverage these benefits on the Internet? How can your customers help you reach your goals?

(photo by compujeramey @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: business, internet business, internet strategy, internet marketing, strategy, business strategy, internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Jan 5, 2009

Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider

Over the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server. Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results. We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.

If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:

Advantages

WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use

Disadvantages

Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains. They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to

Summary

After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality). But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it. We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.

We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com? What are your thoughts? If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?

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