Is A Blog A Good Business Model
Every now and then I see someone giving the advice to start a blog and use the blog as a business website to attract new business. In essence, the blog is touted as a good business model. But is it?
I generally say that if you are planning to go in business then you shouldn’t start a blog and use that as your primary website. There are several reasons for this, the chief of which blogs make great marketing tools but rarely succeed as standalone business ventures.
There are a few, however, that work quite well as businesses. If you are going to make blogging your chief business interest then you need to have a plan and that plan includes a monetization plan. How will your blog make money? On the whole, however, most businesses would do better to use the blog as a marketing tool to drive traffic to another website. But there is one way you can start with a blog and build a static website later and be very successful.
In this model, you use your blog as an Elijah, a forerunner to your website. If you know that you are going to build a website to cover a particular niche, don’t build the website right away. Instead, put a blog on that domain name and start blogging to it every day with rich, keyword-focused content. After you have achieved respectable first page rankings for the key phrase that you are trying to capture you can then build your static website right there on that domain name. But don’t ditch the blog.
Move the blog to a folder on that site and keep blogging every day, but build your static website on the domain name itself. You’ll get all the traffic and SEO benefits that you’ve already built into the blog and you can keep the blog active to continue building fresh daily content.
