Electrical Association

Websites, Facebook, Blogging--What's Worth Your Time Online?

Written by Linda Grubish

With so much talk about Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and LinkedIn it's hard to know what online social medium is really worth the time.

Assuming you already have a website, I suggest your next step into the world of online marketing be through a blog.

The biggest benefit a contractor gets from a blog is the ability to establish yourself as an expert in your particular field. You want to be the answer person for your trade. Giving helpful tips and tricks in a weekly blog will help you establish this. A blog is a tool to drive your website higher in Google rankings. A higher ranking means you're more likely to get clicks and then customers. Doing a blog is designed to draw more clients, but it's part of a process.

Blogs are similar to websites in that they get indexed, like websites do, by search engines. The key words you want to be found for through your website are also phrases/words you want to be using on a blog. Search engines like blogs because the content they carry is usually very fresh, unlike websites that many businesses treat like an online brochure.

Blogs also offer the option to have consumers follow you. Search engines, like Google, have started using the number of people following you in social online networks as a ranking factor for your traditional website. The search engines recognize that a large following of people on a blog means something. Your information is relevant and interesting giving you expert level search engine ranking status.

Having the most power to deliver also comes with a price. Blogs are the most time consuming social networking device. Time investment to maintain will vary depending on the contractor. Giving a bulleted list of tips or tricks might only take a half hour weekly to update. If a business owner likes to write, a 3-5 paragraph post might take a few hours to research and publish.

To be effective, blogs should really be updated weekly. Deciding, even before your blog is set up, the topics you'd like to cover for the year will help the process run smoothly. Having a pre-defined list of topics will also help you pass off some of the blogging duties to others so it's not all resting on one person.

Many website providers offer a blog module as part of a website. Start with your web designer and see if there is a blogging option associated with your site.

Google offers a free blog service called Blogger that is very functional and easy to set up. It's very much like using a word processing program. Be sure you have a JPEG of your logo at the ready because you will want this in order to do at least the minimum level of branding on the blog.

WordPress is another free option for blogging. The set up for WordPress is more complicated, but it does "plug into" the social online networking world nicely.

You will want to be sure you let others know about your blog via your traditional marketing efforts as well as through your online presence. Be sure to provide a hot link to your blog on your website as well as in other online marketing tools like Facebook Fan Pages, Merchant Circle, Google Maps, and any email newsletters you may send.