What is a blog

A blog is kind of like a news part of your website. And another way of thinking about it is that it’s information which is good to have on your website which you would like search engines to find and people to find but you don’t really want it within the navigation menus and the structure of your website.

What can a blog contain

A blog can have pretty much any kind of information on it that you can find on a webpage. A traditional style of blog is like a sort of story but you can write a blog that is technical, news, brief or lengthy, whatever suits you.

Your blog posts can include PowerPoint presentations, audio, video, pictures, text, excel spreadsheets, twitter quotes, facebook posts and lots of other media types.

Blog posts can bring people to your website

But every blog post that you put out there is like another little fishing hook in the ocean of the internet to get people back to your website. So if you write a blog post that helps people decide whether they’re going to pick between two products then there might be someone out there who’s seeking that comparison. If you provide a good comparison, there’s a possibility they’ll contact you.

Ideas to write about on your blog

If you’re not sure what to write about in your blog there are plenty of companies that can write blogs for you and you can read other blogs for ideas, check facebook to see what people are talking about, read discussion groups on linkedin, think about the questions that customers have for you or their concerns.

Emails as inspiration for blog posts

We provide blog writing as a service to some of our clients but you could have a friend write a guest blog post or a staff member. If you still get stuck for ideas, look through your past emails and find ones where you’ve answered questions or written a detailed response.

There are probably emails you write that are a bit more detailed than a typical one sentence answer which could provide a great starting point for a blog post, where you’ve tried to explain something about a product or allay a customer fear or concern. And that information with a little bit of tweaking may be easily suitable for a blog post.

Blog posts don’t have to be big slabs of text

Don’t think about blogs as being just like news or essay length texts. A blog post could be as simple as a few lines of text and a photo. If your business does garden renovations you might explain about a job that you did recently and share some photos and maybe even a video. Your blog post can have quotes or segments where you take excerpts from social media websites.

What else can you embed in a blog post

Twitter, Scribd, Flickr, Rdio, Instagram and Vimeo, plus a lot more, there is a full list of the default supported embeddable items here: codex.wordpress.org/Embeds

Many other websites provide some code that you can insert into your website as HTML to create a custom embed too even if it isn’t supported by default in the WordPress code.