Website or blog?

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Permalink Reply by Robert Dodge on January 27, 2009 at 4:56am

HI Ben,

I would agree to some degree that website design/hosting can be quite an expense when you are first starting out but after spending time testing differing ideas and understanding marketing a lot more I think " Content " is key !
This is where too many people fall down - take this for example...
A majority of homepages on websites say Hi I am Mr Smith Hypnotherapist, I have trained with X,Y & Z and I can offer you this,this and this - WRONG!

What the person viewing your website wants is an ANSWER to the question sat in their mind - so you need to niche your business in the first instance - so be a specialist in a certain area of hypnotherapy.
So you can then market and promote to a specific target area - and not be that jack of all trades and master of none.

Sorry a little digression there !

So website or Blog? - I would say now a blog can offer just as much as a website but without the cost as you say whether its videos,photos etc
I find it far easier to update a blog than a website so my personal opinion would be a blog but also have a single page website / squeeze page to get the prospective client hungry for what you have to offer - add something for them for free - for instance a report on the benefits of hypnosis for health and well being - something like that.

We all have to remember the customer is KEY without them we have no business - so turn your customer on so to speak!
use sexy text in your blog or your webpage - get their heart racing and make them want to call you or email you to find out more.

I hope this gives you a few thought - Sorry it included slight digressions but I am sure you will find them worthwhile being fairly new to the area of hypnosis and hypnotherapy.

Have a great day
Regards
Robert
Here is my blog for you to see what you can do....
http://hypnosmart.blogspot.com

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Johnston on January 27, 2009 at 6:10am

I'd vote for a blog, simply because you can make as simple or as complex a website as you want with blog software anymore. *And* you have the advantage of being able to update the appearance of your site instantly--no need to design and update each and every page; the template system blogs use allows you to just update the template and all the pages change.

Also, a blog site doesn't have to *look* like a blog. For example, if you visit my homepage at http://firegoldhypnosis.com, you're presented with a static page that doesn't look too much like a blog. There are links on the right to the actual blog posts so visitors can read the changing, dynamic pages I write (sporadically ;)).

Robert Dodge is right. Content is king. All the internet marketers I know of say that, too. And a blog is perfect for a content site. Blogs, after all, are minimal content management systems. Each post you publish is more content on the site. Content is king not only for the potential clients, but for Google and the other search engines, too; they tend to rank blogs higher than static content pages.

Am I biased toward blog sites? lol They have a lot of advantages and are a perfect solution for most small business, in my opinion, so yes, I am a bit biased toward them. ;)

Joshua

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Permalink Reply by Graham Old on January 27, 2009 at 9:31am

I don't think it really matters. If you're using something like Wordpress, you can have pages as well as posts, so the difference can be little more than semantic.

However, as a web designer, I do think it's worth paying for a better look.

Either way, I'd recommend getting your own domain, as it just seems more professional to me and allows you to have a decent email address as well. I hope it's not counted as advertising, if I let you know that I'd be happy to let you (or other hypnothoughts users) use my "mates rates" of £35 for hosting. I'm happy to install wordpress for you, as well, if you like.

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Permalink Reply by Craig Eubanks on January 27, 2009 at 9:38am

It's not website vs blog. A blog is a website. So you are asking the wrong question. Better questions are

1. What do I want my website to accomplish?

2. Do I want to pay a company to manage it, do it myself, or pay an assistant to do it.

3. Do I plan to update it regularly or mostly have it be static content?


Here's the problem... these days if you are in business, everyone tells you "you gotta have a website". Just like people used to tell you "You gotta have business cards and brochures."

But nobody tells you to think about HOW TO USE IT as part of your marketing system.

Just sticking up a website doesn't do squat if you don't have clearly defined goals of what purpose it serves in your marketing funnel.

Answer those questions first, and the question of whether to use a blog or Content Management System (CMS) or static html or a combination of these will answer itself.

Cheers,

Craig Eubanks
HypnosisMarketingTips.com

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Permalink Reply by the grumpy hypnotist on January 27, 2009 at 11:00am

Lettuce break it down this way:

Option 1: website using hosted blog engine at Wordpress.com - fast, free, easy. Can setup within a few minutes.

Option 2: website that uses blog engine downloaded from Wordpress.org but installed and hosted somewhere else of your choosing.

Option 3: website that uses "standard" HTML using one of many freely available templates and is hosted like typical website.

Option 4: handing it all off to a web designer who tells you that you need to pay for a professionally designed site.

Any reasonably intelligent yet completely non-technical individual can have an "Option 1" website up and running within a few minutes and start adding content. Get a domain for $9, choose a templates, start adding content and you are done. This is so easy that there is absolutely no reason to delay doing this, even if you plan to go with the other options later. Every day you lack web presence is another day where you are invisible to clients who need your help. And puts you further behind in SEO terms.

Option 2 is slightly more technically challenging but easily do-able for anyone who can follow the many step-by-step guides available on how to install and setup Wordpress blog. This allows more flexibility and tweaking of exactly how your site behaves, while preserving the very easy publishing model.

Option 3 is going to give you maximum flexibility but requires some basic knowledge of HTML and coding to get most benefit from it. You can still do well just by sticking to standard free templates. Sure you need to use FTP to upload files to the server that hosts the site --- but don't be intimidated by details that you don't need to know about... if you know how to copy-and-paste a file from one Windows folder to another, you know how to use FTP. You don't need to understand how servers or FTP work any more than you need to understand DNS or the HTTP protocol in order to use this site.

You can always setup a site that combines the control and flexibility of Option 3 for more static content, with Option 1 or 2 blog engine for more frequently updated content and a more "conversational" tone with your visitors.

Option 4 is the worst of all worlds in my opinion. Low control, relatively high cost, and totally dependent on the responsiveness and competence of the web person --- the only "benefit" would be it encourages the practitioner to ignore this very powerful marketing vehicle by handing it off to someone else, so that they can focus on working with what few clients they can get. This is not really a benefit of course but a classic example of the error of focusing on being the "technician" as described by Gerber's E-Myth. Handing off this super-important aspect of your marketing to the typical web designer (who usually has no background or understanding of how to create sites which convert visitors to clients, and in many cases simply reuses templates themselves) is nuts.

The most expensive part of Option 4 is not the cost of paying the web person, but the opportunity cost. Because one of the fundamental advantages of a website is that it allows you to be very agile in testing and analyzing results and constantly optimizing messages and presentation, exactly the opposite of something like the Yellow Pages for example. You can just come up with some idea or special offer or marketing message and publish it to "see what happens".

When you depend on an outsourced web designer, this advantage is gone because you will often be reluctant to have to pay them for testing different ideas, delays in execution, inevitable miscommunication about intent, etc... moreover any web person who really has a firm grasp of SEO, analytics, testing and the nature of your business is typically going to be much more expensive in the first place (or at least should be) compared to the usual freelancer who works with small local businesses. This lack of control over updates and inability to test and optimize will likely cause your content to be stagnant and unresponsive to market conditions... in other words the typical boring uninformative and generic hypnosis website that makes visitors go "blah".

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Permalink Reply by Andreas Tenhagen on January 27, 2009 at 11:23am

Maybe anybody can help me:

I ve got a wordpress.com Domain. I wanted to include an aweber- newsletter-formular.......that does not work, because of the commercial reason.

It is said it only works with wordpress.org. So think about it, also before you get aweber.

Maybe there is another possibility? I don´t know.

Would be great to hear about.

Thanks

Andreas

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Permalink Reply by Graham Old on January 27, 2009 at 1:02pm

You're extremely limited with wordpress.com, though it's fantastic for what it does.

I'd always recommend downloading the wordpress package from wordpress.org. If you've got webspace and a domain, I'd happily install it for you, free of charge. However, I'm sure that once you look at it you'll see that it's relatively easy.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Nongard - NLPBoard.com on January 27, 2009 at 3:39pm

Interesting to see Google is now in the website business, offering free web hosting and design at:

sites.google.com

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Permalink Reply by Ben Fillery on January 27, 2009 at 11:24pm

Thanks for your thoughts guys - very intersting and responsive.

It has certainly clarified my mind in the way to go.

Cheers,

Ben

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Johnston on January 28, 2009 at 4:50am

In addition to being easy to install, WordPress is often included for free with webhosting. For example, the host I use, Bluehost, uses the cPanel login and admin area and has a lot of free scripts and programs available for automatic installation. WordPress being one of them. All you have to do is press the button, fill in a couple fields, and voila! it's installed.

Joshua

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Permalink Reply by Graham Old on January 28, 2009 at 11:35pm

That's true. Additionally, the wordpress forums are great, so there's no need to let unfamiliarity put you off.

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Permalink Reply by Pattie Freeman CH.t, MST on February 21, 2009 at 10:00pm

Short an sweet not alot of info right to the point...blog/website have all the info needed for contact. you can add more later.

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