This study at the Hubspot Blog reported results that I found, on one hand, pretty astonishing and, on the other – considering what we’ve come to learn about business blogging – not totally unexpected.

The author, Rick Burnes, looked at just over 1500 business websites. 795 of had blogs, 736 didn’t. Here’s what he found: those that blogged had 55% more visits, 97% more inbound links and a mind-boggling 434% more indexed pages! From this study, done in August 2009, it’s pretty clear there are substantial marketing advantages to having a business blog.

But Who Has Time?

Even knowing there’s a big advantage, though, those of us with our energy already tapped out managing our businesses dismiss blogging as one more thing we don’t have time for. And blogging – in the short term, at least – does add some time to our work week. Looking at some specific benefits might help us take another look with an eye to placing it closer to the top of our ‘to do’ list.

With that in mind, I put together this list of eight ways blogging can help increase your market reach and attract new – or retain current – customers. It might even save some time over the long haul.

Establish Your Expertise

I’m going to assume you know about your business. When you write about it authoritatively, you go beyond offering products or services and show yourself to have in-depth knowledge of those products and services. This can help build trust and confidence in you and your business.

Differentiate Yourself from Your Competitors

While establishing your expertise, framing your knowledge about your products and services in certain ways can help show the difference between you and your competitors. Over time, visitors to your website and blog will see for themselves what makes you stand out from others engaged in the same business.

Build Your Brand

A blog offers an inexpensive and effective way to communicate your business’ value, vision and passion. Visitors who see your business logo presented consistently together with timely and useful information develop a sense of security, stability and trust and begin to associate those with the value you provide.

Build Community

The web today is all about building communities. A blog creates opportunities for us and our customers to interact in an informally professional way. By providing an avenue whereby customers can comment on your posts andengage with each other, a sense of community can build around your products and services. These built relationships tend to strengthen customer loyalty and introduce new, potential customers to you.People want to do business with people and your blog puts you, a real person, in a relatonship to your customer.

Attract Prospects and Develop New Business Opportunities

Blogs with useful and freshly-added, regularly updated information about products and services generate additional visitors and better search engine rankings. Remember, new visitors come to your site because they’re looking for your products or services. When you give them what they’re looking for, that’s an additional opportunity to generate more leads.

Improve Search Engine Ranking

Fresh and original web content is what search engine spiders feed on. Websites that are updated frequently get crawled by the search engine spiders more often. Your website earns more authority and better search engine ranking.

Cut Your Marketing Expense

Blogging is relatively inexpensive. Once your blog is setup, the expense to maintain it and keep it updated is measured in the time you put into it.

Manage Your Reputation

You are your reputation. A blog gives you the opportunity to interact directly with clients to address any problems or concerns they might have about you or your business. The ability to integrate other social media such as Facebook or Twitter increases your ability to develop positive customer relationships or monitor and address any negative or incorrect comments made by customers or competitors.

So, that’s some of the advantages of blogging that I’ve discovered. How about you? If you already blog, how has that helped you in your business? And if you’ve yet to begin, what is it that holds you back? What would help to get you going? Share your comments below.

{photo courtesy Flickr user sticky star fish}

One of the frustrations I have working with some clients – and a top one cited by other web developers I meet – is not having content on hand before beginning a design or adding new functionality to a site. So I always stress the importance of getting content together while we’re still in the discussion and planning stage of the development.

So, when I started to get excited about adding my portfolio to my site, I thought I’d take my own advice.  I knew that getting my content prepared first – the images I’d use, the text to include – was going to help a whole lot to determine the layout for the page.

Using my portfolio page as an example, let’s look at how deciding to prepare the content first saved me from a frustrating and potentially time-consuming process.

What’s the Plan?

I wanted to display the page with no sidebars. I also wanted to have a decent sized, readable, image floating to the right of a site description. The text block should have the name of the site, a brief description and the client’s requirements, a list of the skills I used, and a link to the live website. This closely followed the Ash Blue layout and that of other web portfolios I like.

After a bit of doodling, I settled on the following content requirements for the page: I’d use roughly 100 words for the text block and – given the styles set out in the main stylesheet for the rest of the site – that text would use 15 lines in the space I mapped out. Having this information allowed me to target the size of the images I’d use. I didn’t yet have the images, so I went to each site, took a screenshot and moved them into Photoshop to re-size and optimize. I then wrote the blurbs for the text blocks. Now, with content in hand, I was ready to move ahead with the page.

Of course, I could get a sense of how I want something to look, throw it together, and then tweak the design and content as I proceed. In fact, I’ve often had to do that to keep projects-sans-content moving forward. There can be drawbacks of that approach. What are some?

1. It can be expensive.

   Repeating Tasks Twice

   Using ‘dummy’ text as a placeholder takes as much time to paste in as would entering ‘real’ text. I’d just have to replace it later, so no need to do it twice!

   Unnecessary Re-design

   Some design tweaking is often necessary. But if my page is laid out to accommodate 100-125 words and the client delivers 180 words of content per section, it can mean costly hours of editing text and having it approved, and/or tweaking the design to accommodate re-sized text blocks. This lost time is easily avoided by planning. Having the content up front shows me the area I need to fit the text. In the case of my own page, I crafted the text as I needed it the first time.

   Unnecessary graphics work

   As with dummy text, I can put a ‘rough design’ together using placeholders for images. But why do it? With a design idea and the text content written, I know what size photo I need. No need to put in trial-and-error placeholder sizes that need to be replaced later.

2. It can be frustrating.

   Hair pulling for client and developer

   Wrestling text or images into a pre-determined design is annoying to a client who has already spent time writing content the first time.

   Redesigning portions of a page to accommodate longer or shorter text blocks is difficult for a designer concerned with how the design works visually in the context of the whole page or site.

3. It slows down the production schedule.

   Late launch dates can cost!

   Waiting for text or photos while the website is in production can push out the expected launch date. If that date is keyed to a marketing campaign or if the site is promoting an important upcoming event, a late launch can hurt.

   Picking up the thread breaks the development momentum for the client and the developer and often adds time to the overall budget.

So, it’s important to recognize that content is an integral part of the website design. There are ways to work around not having all of the content in place before getting underway. But each of those workarounds add unnecessary time and expense to the project.

By taking the advice I give my clients about having content prepared as early in the project as possible, I was able to put my portfolio together in half the time it would have taken otherwise. When considering the impact of having or not having content available as you begin a new project, I wonder what your thoughts are. Leave a comment below.

• limiting the number of entry points to your installation;
• containing the amount of damage that can be done if entry is achieved;
• having backups, documentation of any modifications you’ve made, and knowledge about your installation.

Checking for vulnerabilities

If we think about security at all, we tend to focus on the website itself and overlook other places we may be leaving ourselves open to attacks. Here are some things to consider:

• If you’re editing your WordPress site from your computer, how protected is that? Is it free of spyware, malware and viruses? Be sure you’re not infecting your server right from your own desktop!
• Posting from your favorite wi-fi cafe? How secure is their network? Don’t leave passwords or other sensitive data open to sniffers and other forms of interception.
• How reliable is the webserver where you’re hosted? Always use reliable, trusted hosting companies to call home.

How to beef up you WordPress security

The owner of a non-profit contacted me a few months ago after a pharma attack on his site. After cleaning it up, I noticed he hadn’t initiated any security measures on his installation and hadn’t installed any security plugins. He was lucky this time!

While nothing is 100% there are things you can do to minimize potential damage to your website and business. Michael Martin at Pro Blog Design has a comprehensive list of things to improve security of your WordPress site.

Some of these are simple things to do — keep your WordPress updates current and change your admin login information. Others are more advanced, so heed his advice and back up your site before moving forward.

I’ll write more in the future about plugins you can install to help address security issues. In the meantime, Jeff Starr in his article, Security Lockdown, after going through the myriad available security plugins for WordPress, provides us with what he considers the four essential plugins.

What security problems have you had with your site and how did you resolve them? I’d be interested to know! Please leave a comment below…

{photo via Flickr user carbonNYC}

But how will it help you?

Here are some features that may help you decide whether or not WordPress will work for you.

• First off, WordPress is flexible, extensible, and free for the taking. With thousands of free plugins and themes and a supportive community, the uses you find for WordPress is limited only by your imagination. Really! It can do just about anything.
• Because the core features of WordPress already exist in the downloaded software, the development cost is often lower than for either static sites or custom content management systems.
• Once set up, it’s easy to upgrade, expand, and self-manage your site as needed. If you’ve edited in any word processor, the built-in WordPress editor will be a breeze to use.
• Given that you’re less reliant on your web developer to make content changes to your site, overall maintenance costs can be much lower.
• The clean typography of WordPress gives a good first impression to your site visitors, and we know how important that is.
• It’s built using standards compliant code, optimized to be search engine friendly. You may or may not care or think about the code that runs your website, but modern web browsers and mobile devices notice! You’ll want to be found and, once found, you’ll want to look good.

Already using WordPress?

If you’ve been using WordPress a while, what made you decide to choose it? And if you’re on the fence about whether or not to go with it, I’d be interested to hear why. Just leave a comment below.