About 3 months ago I did a presentation to a small business network group in my local community about the benefits of starting a business blog vs. starting a business website.
After the presentation, I was approached by a local business owner who told me that his business was not attracting enough clients and offered to pay me to build him a business blog to help him better promote his business and generate more leads.
I spent a few days helping my new client set up a web hosting account and getting his business blog built, and even agreed to visit him on the weekend to show him how to manage his blog. When I arrived on Saturday morning for our training session as arranged, my client introduced me to a local neighborhood teenager and asked me to train this young person instead, telling me that she was going to run his blog as he found the whole “internet” thing too technical and overwhelming. He then left the room, and I spent the next half hour or so showing his young “assistant” how to post articles to his business blog and how to access and use the training area containing the step-by-step videos and tutorials.
This morning I received an email from my client. In the email, he conveyed his dissatisfaction at getting – and I quote him directly here, “ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSE/RESULT ! If I got even one or two inquiries/calls that would have been enough. But I got absolutely NOTHING !!!”
After going over his email a couple of times, I went to get myself a cup of coffee, then came back to my desk and thought about this. I have built over 70 blogs this year using the exact same system I used to set up my client’s blog and I have gotten very positive results (i.e. visitors, newsletter subscribers, sales, etc …) with every single blog I have set up.
So, I decided to investigate things a little bit further and take a look at the results my client’s blog was getting before sending him a reply.
As every blog-savvy internet marketer knows, you can actually start a business blog for around $15.
So why did I title this post “How To Start A Business Blog For Less Than $100″?
Well, for a start, many (if not most) small business owners are not internet marketers – they’re full-time business owners who don’t have the time to keep up with the growing volume of information on the web about internet marketing related topics like search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, opt-in list building, pay per click management, and so on. And they don’t want to learn technical stuff outside of their area of expertise.
So … although it’s true that anyone can start a business blog for around $15 (I explain how to do this further below), what most business owners would end up with if they did this, is a default blog that isn’t really going to do much at all to help them grow their business.
Let’s face it … it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, if you think the competition for your products or services is bad “offline”, try taking your business online with the aim of actually getting some of that “multibillion dollar” online share of the pie that everyone in your market space is fighting for.
The world wide web is littered with “brochureware” type websites that were built either as an afterthought for the business, or as a hopeful “big red button” solution that would somehow automagically deliver new customers without requiring any commitment of time and effort, without crafting an online marketing strategy with clear goals and objectives, and without a focused and consistent plan of action aimed at helping the business achieve specific results.
If all you want is to have a “me too” online presence so you can put a web address on your business card, letterbox flyers and the back of your car and then hope for the best, then none of what I’m going to say in the rest of this post matters to you.
If you are thinking of starting a business blog, or if you are a small business owner looking for a cost-effective way to create a web presence for your business, then check out some of the previous posts on this blog, which explains why setting up a blog using our step-by-step business blog video tutorials may be a smarter strategy for growing your business online than spending money on web site development.
In the video below, we look at the results we have achieved 60 days after setting up this business blog on a brand new domain name, simply by following the same instructions we provide to small business owners in our “how to start a business blog” tutorials.
The video above shows that, with only 16 posts made to this blog since we registered the domain name “selfpublishweb.com” 60 days ago, the number of pages indexed in Google as well as the number of visitors to this site has increased by over 400% since we made our previous video, documenting the growth of this blog.
Search Google for terms like “blogs”, “blogging”, “business blog”, “business blogging”, etc … and you’ll find tens of millions of competing pages. As stated in the video, gaining any kind of search engine traffic in a market as competitive as this one for a site that is barely 60 days old and that was set up on a brand new domain, therefore, is quite a challenge. Nonetheless, as the video shows, we are steadily increasing our exposure in the search engines, and attracting visitors to our blog, using the exact same methods and strategies we share with our customers in our videos and training emails.
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