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Auction Wally
Auctions and Antiques ExaminerAuctionWally has been an auctioneer and appraiser for 25 years. He runs an antiques appraisal blog where he writes about the value of antiques and how to sell them. You can find him at www.auctionwally.com.
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Showing entries for Category: blogging
Auctionwally asks - blog or website, which is better for bringing your business online?
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by Auction Wally, Auctions and Antiques Examiner
I
For years I had a static website for my appraisal & antiques business. I struggled with trying to learn code, uploading to a server via an FTP service and all the other usual tasks. My wife would often hear me ranting from the other room when things would go glithcy, then say, "why don't you try a blog". I'd ask, well can a blog do this? Yes. Can a blog do that? Yes, she'd say, but it's much easier with a blog. Then I would finish my web-page and ignore the her advice. My mistake. My reasoning was that I already had so much work into my website, I didn't want to change to a new format, sometimes it takes me a while to learn a lesson.
As my real world tasks got busier, I had less time to maintain my website. This was a big problem, see, if I didn't regularly maintain my website, my real world business would slow down again because so much of what I was doing was now intergrated with my online presence. In August of last year, I moved my content over to Google's Blogger. It was the smartest thing I've done online. My wife was right...again.
Some of you may be thinking that a blog is an online personal diary, after all that's the foundation of blogging, but while many people still do use a blog for that purpose, blogging has evolved into so much more, especially for businesses.
At Auctionwally.com, my site is anything but a personal diary. I have at this time, almost 500 self written antiques appraisals, articles, and how-to pieces about selling online and off. I write about my eBay endeavors, promote my eBooks, my auctioneering, consultation services, sell tangible products and more.
Yet all of these efforts have become a 2 way communication with my customers that I hadn't previously been able to achieve on my static site. Not to mention, if I was still using my old website rather than a blog format, I'd be lucky to have 100 entries available in a year's time, and good luck finding them.
It's the 1 year anniversary of Auctionwally.com and as I've said, I have almost 500 entries and have plans to up the production as my online appraisal service has gotten much busier. Below is a list of the best reasons I've found to use a blog rather than a static site. Come on over to the light and ditch that clunky old website. Or, if you don't want to get rid of what you have, it's simple to add a blog to your site. In this case you can have your cake and eat it too.
Here's my list of the best reasons to get a business blog.
- You can get a blog up and running in 5 minutes. Truth.
- A blog is generally seen as much fresher content by viewers and the search engines.
- It's free if you use Blogger. There are many other free blogging platforms, I've tried several and found Blogger to be the easiest to use.
- You can have a two way conversation with your customers and prospects.
- All of your entries are chronologically enterered. You can also make them available by tags, labels, order of importance etc., and this is a process you can put on automatic.
- It's simple to link to other sites that are relavant to yours.
- Uploading pictures is very easy.
- You don't have to know any code
- You can sell a product or service your blog just as you can on a static site.
- Every blog entry has a seperate URL! This is a huge factor in getting traffic to your pages. I can't stress the importance of this enough. For example, let's say all the content I now have on Auctionwally.com was instead on my former static website which was "Quickauctionservice.com". Each entry would be found by the search engines under the same URL or web address. With the blog format of Auctionwally.com, because each article and appraisal has it's own web address, it all falls under Auctionwally.com, yet is found individually as well. That's 500 chances for the search engines to find my website with the blogging format vs. 1 chance with the static site!
For more information on how a blogging for your business online check out The Auctionwally Show today 2pm EST. I'll be covering the topic with my co-host Mitzi Swisher of Vintagegoodness.com.
Click here to give a listen to the show. If you miss it as it airs live, no worry, it's archived indefinately and you can listen to it and all the back episodes at anytime or download it to an mp3 player.
If you've found any of this content useful, why not bookmark it to keep it at your fingertips?
Find out how easy it is to set up your own blog: www.blogger.com
Topics: the auctionwally show , blogging
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