Should I have a blog or website?

Every blog is a website but not every website is a blog.

You can have a website but not have a blog. Blogs are fantastic for content creation and marketing but it’s another thing to work on.

Whats in a blog?

Blogs are essentially electronic journals available for everyone to see (unless you make them private). The posts are categorized into sections, have authours & timestamps for easy navigation.

Advantages of blogs

• Fantastic content marketing – according to Hubspot, websites with active blogs are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI than those websites that do not.
• Increase the engagement rate of your website. Having great shareworthy content is a huge plus for your website. Users are more likely to share your content on social media or blog about it themselves.
• Blog consistently and often. It’ll result in your website climbing up the search engine rankings. It’ll also increase your traffic & potential lead base. Which of course means = more sales.

Disadvantages of blogs

• The time involved. Blogs need to be maintained and new content created for them. Copy & pasting from other sections of your website won’t work as Google will penalise your website’s ranking. You can’t get away with copy and pasting other websites content either!
• You need to have a basic understanding of SEO otherwise you’ll be writing content for no one or having a very hard time climbing up rankings / reaching new traffic.
• A dead blog is worse than no blog. There are a few cardinal sins for any website for any new visiting user, seeing a copyright sign in the footer a few years out of date, a blog that hasn’t been updated in months/years gives a terrible first impression. Blogging should be done at the minimum – once a month.

The advantages of blogging actually outweigh the disadvantages as blogging is one of the best methods of content marketing in 2018.

Whats a website then?

Website is a much vaguer and general term. Website design, in particular, can be anything from a simple brochure-like website, with mostly pictures and descriptions. To a more functional website complete with databases, contact forms or a full membership / eCommerce store. Blogging, of course, is covered in this vague description. Any website with a blogging compatible CMS like WordPress can have a blog included on their website.