Attorney Advertising - Personal Injury TV ads

Hello, and welcome back to the second part of my ongoing blog about topics related to social media and the Internet.

I was planning on posting a blog about how one sets up a blog and gets going with blogging for my second blog. However, I think a better place to start would be this great post I read from leading social marketer, Chris Brogan. He published a nice little piece on how to start using social media if you are a small business. It has some great pointers and further reinforces the fact that if you are standing still when it comes to using the Internet, you are falling behind.

Advertising on TV is not enough anymore. Competition during these tough economic times has only increased and more small businesses are looking for inexpensive alternatives to marketing on TV. One of these avenues is the Internet, and if your firm has not at least considered marketing on the Internet, you are doing yourselves a disservice.

Now that we got that out of the way, where do you set up a blog? Good question. Here are some options.

Blogger:

Google’s very own blog platform. We at Network Affiliates use Blogger and we think it works out quite well. It can be set up to match the look of your existing website and can even be posted on your existing website. Best of all, it’s free.

WordPress:

WordPress is a free, open source blogging platform. What does open source mean? It means anyone is free to make modifications or improvements to the program. This means that if you have a handy IT person who knows your business, they could potentially add functionality to your blog. Pretty cool, huh? You can also buy themes for WordPress if you want more sophisticated tracking, looks, and other things.

TypePad:

TypePad is the only non-free blogging platform I will mention in this post. It costs a $15 a month for a pro membership, which will give you all of the functionality you could possibly need. TypePad also provides a great mechanism for publishing your content on Facebook and Twitter.

All of these platforms, again, integrate seamlessly with your current website. And while these are just three examples of widely used and respected blogging platforms, there are hundreds of others out there. These three mentioned in this blog post are great benchmarks for comparison, though.

After you get your blog registered with a blog service, the tricky part begins: developing content. How do you develop content? That is the topic for another post. Until next time, take some time to visit the other posts on this blog or some from your colleagues. Visit them to see how you might use a blog. Thanks for reading. Be on the look out for another post in the near future.