Developing Your Web Presence #4 - Do you need a Blog?

I've had a blog for a while now, but I remember thinking 'why do I need one?' and 'what on earth will I put in one?'.

Here are my thoughts on why you need a blog, and it follows along with building a presence for yourself on the web.

If you don't have a website a blog can be your central place on the internet. It's one address that you can use on your business cards and other marketing material that will drive people to a spot where they can link to all your other web places. If you have an Etsy shop you can put an Etsy mini in your blog, you can advertise your Ebay or Justbeads address, and you can use your Flickr or Photobucket (for example) accounts to create galleries and slideshows to add to your blog.

A blog can also let people know that you are out there and active! Blogs allow you to update very easily, you can keep people informed on what you are doing and show new items that you've created. This can be much more effective than a website. Unless you are able to update your own website, you might find that it becomes stale very quickly, yes, it links to all your other things but information on the site about you and what you are creating can soon get out of date, leaving visitors to wonder if you are serious about what you are doing.

The other real plus about a blog is that every time you make a post or add an image it is giving people another opportunity to find you! I've found that things in my blog posts that I thought were insignificant have actually led a lot of traffic to my blog, they show up in search engines with great success!

There are all kinds of free blogs out there - this being one of them! Have a search around and see what is offered. Blogger - www.blogspot.com and WordPress - www.wordpress.com are two of the most popular - which means they also have bigger communities of bloggers - another way to network! Blogger is very easy to use and you can customise by adding your own graphic to the top of many of the templates available.  I have to say WordPress is my favourite.  Why? Because it allows you to have multiple pages! It might not sound very exciting, but think about it - your Blog can become your website!! That is what I've done with this one.  You can have your blog, but also add pages that contain static information - i.e. a Gallery page, a Contact page, a page that explains how you do what you do, or anything else for that matter! These static pages are just as easy to update as your blog page.

If you've got a Blog the possibilities are almost limitless!