Many businesses are looking at starting blogging, but they do not know where to start.  Starting a blog is quite simple, and can take as short as 5 minutes depending on the software you use.  The most popular installed platform is Wordpress, which is the software this very blog runs on.  Wordpress is available at http://www.wordpress.org, and they have simple installation instructions on the site.  But installing the software is only the first step, you must then begin the process of integrating the blog into your site. 

If you have a web developer on staff, it is extremely easy to customize Wordpress’ look, simply have them create a theme that matches your site and upload it to the themes folder.  If you do not have a developer you have regular access to, you may have to settle on a premade theme, so look for one that has everything you need.  Choose the number of columns carefully and also make sure the theme supports widgets, more on that later.  It is important to make sure the page is attractive and not overly crowded, as users want a pleasant experience reading your blog.

Once you have your blog’s look setup, you should set up a permalink structure in the .htaccess file that is easier to use than the default setup.  In order to do this, simply go to the options menu and select permalinks.  If your .htaccess file is writeable, Wordpress will take care of this for you, if not you will need to edit the file yourself.  With this taken care of you can move on to setting up some of the more useful plugins available for Wordpress.

Plugins provide your blog with advanced functionality.  By downloading a search engine optimization plugin, you will give yourself the ability to customize specific tags on the site, giving you significantly more control over your blog’s search engine performance.  Social bookmarking plugins provide links to social bookmarking sites like Digg at the bottom of each post, allowing you to easily get your blog more traffic through these sites.  Widgets, little applications that run on your blog, can be added to your sites sidebar, and often provide extra features to your blog.  These include such simple tasks as adding a picture slide show or a random youtube video from an rss feed.  Widgets are easy to use and with the drag and drop interface provided within wordpress, you can easily position them in such a way that your readers are more likely to use them.

By doing more than just adding content, and instead making your blog a page users want to visit, you can draw in further traffic to your site.  Add in the potential for advertising provided by Google for blogs, and you will find maintaining a blog on your site to be an easy way to draw traffic and provide more to your customers.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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