So, what are sitemaps? Sitemaps are just sets of links that help people or spiders to see the site more clearly. Now, there are, as I already alluded to, two main types of sitemaps – those that are geared toward people and those geared toward search engines. The type for people are usually done in html and make it easy to see how the site is structured. It’s a visual map. The other kind is usually an xml file.  It’s not pretty looking to humans typically, but search engine spiders love them.  This allows them to quickly update their listing of what is on your website.  Then you can use things like Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo Site Explorer to submit it.

“But aren’t blogs for whiny little teenagers who have nothing else to do?” Well, sure they are for whiny teenagers, but they can also be used for a ton of other things. This also goes for businesses. You see, businesses are horrendous at engaging customers. That’s because it’s hard to have a public/private space for a company. It’s hard to arrange a place where owners, executives, directors, and employees can interact with multitudes of customers. Well, blogs enable you to do this.

Building Business Relationships

Blogs excel at connecting people. And if there is one thing that any business would love more of – it’s building relationships. You can connect with current customers and also build new relationships with potential customers. But, and this is a big one, that relationship must be taken hand in hand with transparency.

Business Transparency

Before you launch a blog, you need to understand that doing so will open your business to a certain level of transparency. This means that your posting says and shows something about who you are, what you value, and what you provide. But, if you allow commenting, there is another level of transparency. As soon as you allow folks to provide positive and negative feedback, you have an opportunity. This opportunity is to build more trust and deepen the customer relationship. But this kind of transparency can be very unnerving for established “brick ‘n mortar” businesses. This means that you must be willing to take criticism and answer to your customer base at times. That’s the way it goes. But, the dividends for that type of transparency are invaluable. Now, let’s move onto how a blog can increase your visibility.

Search Engines Love Blogs

It’s true. They just love them. Blogs create a steady stream of fresh content. If you plan correctly, you can leverage this search engine love for your business. This does take time, but it is really helpful. You can set up link and marketing strategies that will increase your bottom line.

Say “NO” to Perfection

I know, I know – this sounds crazy. But in the current age, you must throw this idea right out the window. People are skeptical of institutions, businesses included. And people are especially skeptical of “happy, shiny people.” That means that they expect non-perfection. It’s good to shed that marketed image and be personal. Now, folks want you to deliver on your product. Just be willing to let your guard down a little.

If you see the value of this idea, head on over to our hosting plans to get your blog going today. I highly recommend signing up for Linux hosting plan and using the “value applications” to auto-install Wordpress. Wordpress is the blogging platform we use for this blog.

Spam Karma – Hands down one of the best plugins for Wordpress. One of the first things you will notice about Wordpress is comment spam. Comment spam racks up quickly. And this little plugin packs a wallop on that nasty stuff.

FireStats – A nice stats plugin that gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s going on for your blog. You need to know how people to your blog, where they go, and how they exit. This is a nice way for you to see that information right in your blog.

Sitemaps – If you don’t know the value of sitemaps, you need to look into it. This dandy of a plugin generates a sitemap for you and then pings search engines for you. Very, very nice plugin.

ShareThis – Again, if you don’t know the value of social network, boy – have you got some learning to do! But, don’t fret, it’s all good for your blog. This gem gives your users an easy way to submit your content to those social network.

Subscribe to Comments – A great way to keep people coming back to your blog is through comments. An even better way to keep them coming back is to enable way to subscribe to them. Now they can get an email notification when someone else comments.

Secure Form Mailer – Ever need a secure, easy way for folks to contact you? How about an easy to customize form? Dagon has created a plugin that does both. It’s super easy to use and very powerful. Did I mention that it will email you the results of the form – mmmm good.

Adsense Deluxe – So, you want to put ads on your blog?  Well, let me point you to this great plugin.  It will give you an easy way to insert Google Adsense, Yahoo Ads, etc. into your blog posts, sidebars, etc.

Related Entries – Wow, yet another wonderful plugin.  You want to keep your readers on your blog as long as possible.  This plugin offers up related posts to your readers.  They came there for a reason – give some others that may interest them.

Oh, I have more up my sleeve, but they can wait.  This should get you off to a nice blog experience.

Let me say right out the gate that I am a total Wordpress fan. I love this blogging platform through and through. Sure, there is room for improvement, but there is with anything in life I suppose. Let me give you an introduction into this software and why you might want to use it.

First, Wordpress is 100% free. That’s right, you don’t need to pay a penny to get, upload it to your server, and get it running. Also, most plugins are also 100% free. Yep, you can extend Wordpress with a ton of plugins. And, yet again, a ton of Wordpress Themes are 100% free. So, now you can skin your Wordpress blog and personalize it – all for nothing. How’s that for a good start?

Second, as a blogging platform, Wordpress is elegant. Wordpress offers you a very easy way to write, manage, categorize, and edit posts. And you can make your posts very search friendly in terms of the url. So, instead of your post pages being http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=40 you can have a nice search engine friendly name like http://www.yourdomain.com/great-site-names/.   You can easily moderate comments.  Heck, you can even turn comments on or off.  You can schedule posts.  This is nice if you want to write a bunch of posts at once and then have them appear each day during the week.   Just schedule them and forget about it.  Wordpress allows for easy blogroll managment.  You can add links and delete them very easily.  And a while ago, Wordpress added widget support for themes.  This means that you can drag and drop stuff to sidebars on a page and it will show up.  This could be things like recent comments, recent posts, archives, etc.  Blogger recently added something similar.  There is even some user management within Wordpress.  This will allow you to add authors for your blog with limited rights.

Wordpress also gives you a great way to adjust your theme on the fly.  I’ve already alluded to the widget support.  This has to be built into the theme you are using.  But you can even edit your theme from within Wordpress.  It has a theme editor built in.

And when it comes to doing actual posts within Wordpress, I find the editor simple enough for most anyone and powerful enough for 99% of posting needs.  I think they do a good job finding that middle road.  If you ever need that functionality extended, you can always get a plugin.  A good example is embedding things like youtube videos.  There are some good plugins that allow you to do that simply and easily.

So, Wordpress is free, easy to use, and easy to extend.  That sounds like a good thing for anyone interested in blogging.