Brighter Marketing

As this is our ever first blog post, we thought we would discuss how important it is, especially given the challenging times to be motivated to market your company, products and services. It’s one thing to think about the marketing you should be doing to keep your existing clients and attract new ones, but it’s quite another to actually take some action and do it.

This blog is a good example, we talked about doing a blog, discussed the type of content that we were going to put on here, talked to some technical people about setting up a blog, but kind of stopped short of actually developing a blog for quite a few months.  There was always something more important to do and we kept putting it off, saying that we would launch it when our new marketing book – Brighter Marketing Bible for Small Businesses was due out in January 08. But last week we decided that we had procrastinated for too long and decided that we were going to take action and get our blog up and running.

So early this morning, we installed WordPress on our server using the free installation script provided by our web hosting company, 34sp, picked a basic design template available from WordPress and wrote this, our first blog post.  And here we are live with a blog set-up and running in less than 15 minutes. Yes the header might need some work to include our logo, but the main thing is that we have a blogging presence and it was much easier than we had ever anticipated.

In fact,  we realised if you wanted to have a web presence, but had very little marketing budget and limited technical knowledge you could have a blog up and running within 15 minutes, just like us. All you need to do is the following;

1. Find a web company such as 34sp or Godaddy that will allow you to register your domain name, host your site and install the blogging software free of charge
2. Find a domain name that you want to use and is available such as www.oursite.com, if it isn’t then you might have to be more imaginative and keep going until you find one that suits you. Then buy this, along with hosting for a year which will probably cost you around £30 in total.
3. Once the domain name and hosting are ready then go to their scripts page and find the blogging software that you want to install. It will probably be WordPress or Typepad or something similar. Install it and then you are ready to go.
4. And if all this is too difficult for you, then visit Ryan Deiss has a very useful little video which shows you how to set up a WordPress blog. You can find it at
   www.continuityblueprint.com/12minute.html
   
5. Finally, if you want to make it even easier, then you can always set up your blog directly on www.wordpress.com or www.typepad.com, for small sites this is free, but if you want a more complex blog then you will have to pay a small monthly fee.

So what are you waiting for, set up that blog, the search engines love them as new content is being added on regular basis and who knows the type of visitors that it could bring to you.