Why Start Your Own WordPress Blog?

Why start your own WordPress blog when you can simply use a website? That is a question many marketers ask. The truth is that blogs are started for decidedly different reasons — some social, some ‘productive’, and some a combination of both. This post will attempt to talk about it from the point of view of a comparison between a WordPress site with comments enabled, vs., a more static html website. (And for the record, when I mention sites like Blogger, I am not suggesting you use them. Curious why? Read Switch Your Hosted Blog Site To Your Own.)

If you plan to start a blog for entirely social reasons, you may want to select a platform with high networking value, such as one of the networks that have large number of members and allow for high degrees of interactivity. These would be sites like Blogger.com or WordPress.com.

If your goal is to create a blog that is completely productive, the question of “why start your own blog?” may become even more crucial, as you probably see starting a blog as a potential time trap. If this is the case, you may want to bypass social networking altogether and instead create something with an easy-to-manage and easy-to-update template, such as http://sites.google.com/.

You may want to block comments altogether to prevent extended conversations between blog viewers. Even though comments can improve how fresh a blog appears to search engines – and can also add new content – they can be seriously abused if you do not have the time to monitor them closely. They can be the source of perpetual fights on your blog  – or a means for blog spammers to post their irrelevant and unrelated comments on your blog. You can read about Fake Blog Comments for more information about this topic. Additionally, if you’ve ever been involved in a heated forum debate, you can understand why allowing viewers to interact could seriously detract from time you could spend marketing. Keep in mind, although it takes time, this is actually a wonderful situation to be in! It helps increase the popularity of your site and helps attract visitors. What it does detract from, however, is the ‘set it and forget it’ mentality.

Your third option is to create a blog that combines both productive goals with social interaction. This might seem impossible, and seem as if  social interaction can only decrease the amount of time you can potentially spend working, but it actually isn’t.

If your goal is to position yourself as an industry leader for your topical (or niche) blog, then you will want to have some means of interacting with other industry leaders; and you will also want to prove your worth through responses to questions. Additionally, you can also use social controversy to market your product. For instance, if you own a dieting blog and you have a defensible, controversial stance on something like low carb diets, you could benefit significantly by stirring up controversy on low carb blogs — and then sending them your way. You can then use your blog to reel them in to your salespage.

So, to answer the question of “why start your own blog when you have a website?” — blogs can be created for completely social reasons, for completely productive reasons, or for something in between that involves both. In many cases, this simply isn’t substitutable for a website.