$5 million for a company blog(s)?
This one harks back a bit to last month’s post, Are You Blogging Yet?, where I talked about how slowly Big Companies are adopting blogs, and how quickly small businesses can (and should) take advantage of what a company blog offers.
There’s news today from Jupiter Research that almost contradicts that, saying that 35 percent of the “large corporations” plan to implement a blog by year’s end.
But that’s not the point of this post. The point comes from this sentence buried toward the end of the article:
Almost 6 percent of respondents say their companies have allotted $5 million or more to create and run one or more corporate Weblogs.
$5 million freakin’ dollars? For a corporate blog or three? Whoa.
My point: If you’re a small business owner, don’t read that and let it scare you. Adding a blog to your web site doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be, a huge expense.
1.) Contact your web host / web developer and ask about the costs of adding a blog. Depending on where you host and who you use for web development, adding a blog should be incredibly inexpensive. Heck, if you have an in-house developer/programmer and the right hosting setup, your costs may be nothing. WordPress is free, open source software that anyone can install and use.
2.) If your current host / developer can’t help, find another host or developer. 🙂 Well, in all seriousness, there’s nothing inherently wrong with setting up a second hosting account just for a blog. Even if it has a separate domain (yourcompanyblog.com), it’s okay. Domain registration and hosting can be had cheaply, and you don’t have to be a tech geek to install WordPress and get your blog up and running.
So don’t be afraid of the costs. Adding a blog to your existing web site has a very low barrier to entry, despite the talk of $5 million blog budgets at the Big Companies. But there is one good piece of advice in that article that applies to businesses of any size who are going down the blogging path. It comes from Paul Rand of the PR firm Ketchum:
“There’s an increasing recognition in the power and sustainability of blogs. There is also an obligation with having a blog and doing it correctly.”
