Best for Blog

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Permalink Reply by Ray Gulick on April 3, 2009 at 7:58am

I'd suggest you start your blog in WordPress on an account you own (your current website account); then you own and control it. While the learning curve might be a little steeper than the Google option, there are tons of WP plugins and themes that can address your growing needs as you become more adept. Blog on!

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Permalink Reply by Mark Truman on April 3, 2009 at 8:01am

I would absolutely start a Wordpress blog. First, it's easier to update and grow with your business. Second, any work that you do that drives traffic to your blog will support your site instead of going to Google.

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Permalink Reply by Virginia on April 3, 2009 at 9:43am

I agree with the previous comments that WordPress is the better platform. However, if you want to run adSense ads, Blogger is the place to do it. If you don't care about that, go with WordPress.

I also suggest that you start a Twitter account for your business and when you create a new post on your blog, tweet a link to it. (Of course, you need to do more with Twitter than just advertise yourself, or no one will follow you.)

If you pick a WordPress theme with a customizable header image, you can put a photo of your B&B there.

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Permalink Reply by Noel on April 3, 2009 at 9:49am

Hey Virginia,

I'm still wondering why people use Twitter at all? David Pogue, the electronics/technology reviewer for the NY Times said it was a time-sucker that didn't seem to provide many benefits.

Can you explain a little why all the buzz? (My suspicion is that as soon as jobs are back, Twittering will recede.)

best,
Noel

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Permalink Reply by chantal on April 3, 2009 at 11:38am

Nice! I was hoping we'd have a Twitter throw-down one of these days soon. Can't wait to jump in...

Sarah, second the motion on WordPress. I use the hosted WP for my bee blog, but if you have server access, you can just download and host on your own space.

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Permalink Reply by Sarahjmd on April 3, 2009 at 12:23pm

Chantal - I do have server access. But I am not sure I have the knowledge needed to do it. I will muddle through it. I love a challenge, but I hope I will have the time. I see a few 3am nights in my future!

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Permalink Reply by Sarahjmd on April 3, 2009 at 12:12pm

My first inclination was wordpress. I just got back from a B&B convention and trade show. One of the web host venders is really pushing wordpress, but wants to set it up for me. The other pushes Google Blogger and says that Wordpress is always patching and my host would have to keep up with it. I do not host my own site. Anyone know about that?

Also...at the convention there was ALOT about the new trends in marketing for our industry. They where encouraging everyone to have a twitter account. I have had one for a month now, and can say without a doubt that Google Analytics shows it is driving people to my site. I tweet about Albuquerque and NM and include links to tourist stuff and interesting facts using cligs, http://cli.gs/b5SdP1. Then I track the click throughs to those links. It is awesome. It is only a time suck if you let it be. I spend 15 - 20 minutes a day doing it, and if I am busy I blow it off.

You can get anyone to follow you. They are all vain want their numbers to show they are popular. Getting the quality followers that will convert into guests that is the hard part. My new target market has switched from blue hairs to the 25-40 market. They Twitter, use Kayak, Yelp, Tripadvisor. So Twitter is somewhere I am willing to go, not to talk about the mundane, but to help me market.

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Permalink Reply by Noel on April 3, 2009 at 12:24pm

Hey Chantal, let's do it. A few years ago it was MySpace, then Facebook and now Twitter ... all fads, seems to me. LinkedIn has remained one of the most serious business-to-business sites out there -- second only to Duke City Fix. (sent you a LinkedIn invitation via my other persona.)

Sarahjmd, you kind of nailed it. It's highly un-targeted marketing. Truly shotgun approach vs. nailing your true audience, 100% of the time. However, how you're doing it and understanding it seems right on. It costs nothing but your time (hence the limited payoff?), and just maybe, possibly, might lead to clients at your B&B?

best, Noel

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Permalink Reply by Noel on April 8, 2009 at 11:51am

Here's David Pogue's column on Twitter that garnered admiration and outrage (last two paragraphs sum it up nicely):

New York Times, January 15, 2009
Twittering Tips for Beginners
By DAVID POGUE

As a tech columnist, I'm supposed to be on top of what's new in tech, but there's just too much, too fast; it's like drinking from a fire hose. I can only imagine how hopeless a task it must be for everyone else.

Which brings us to Twitter.

Twitter.com is all the rage among geeks, although it has more hype than users at this point. (When I speak at tech and education conferences, I routinely ask my audience how many are on Twitter. Usually, it's 1 in 500.)

Basically, you sign up for a free account at Twitter.com. Then you're supposed to return to that site periodically and type short messages that announce what you're doing. (Very short — 140 characters max.)

Then, you're supposed to persuade your friends and admirers to become your audience by subscribing to your utterances (called tweets). Big-name tech pundits amass tens of thousands of followers. Normal people may have five or six.

I'll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, "I'm now having lunch"? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?

Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, "Hasn't this project been tried before?"

Everyone looked blankly at each other.

Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.

The fellow judge had just harnessed the wisdom of his followers in real time. No e-mail, chat, Web page, phone call or FedEx package could have achieved the same thing.

I was impressed.

So I've been Twittering for a couple of months, and I've learned a lot. I'm still dubious about Twitter's prospects for becoming a tool for ordinary people (rather than early-adopter techie types).

But one thing's for sure: The whole thing would be a lot more palatable if somebody would explain the basics. Something like this:

* You don't have to open your Web browser and go to Twitter.com to send and receive tweets. In fact, that's just silly. Instead, people download little programs like Twitterific, Feedalizr or Twinkle, they get the updates on their cellphones as text messages, or they use something like PocketTweets, Tweetie or iTweet for the iPhone. I've been using Twitterific for the Mac, which is a tall, narrow window at the side of the screen. Incoming tweets scroll up without distracting you. Much.

* Your followers can respond to your tweets, either publicly or privately.

Suppose someone named Casey responds to one of your tweets. You can reply to Casey in one of two ways. First, you can send a Direct Message, which only Casey sees. Second, you can respond with another public tweet—but as you can imagine, everyone but Casey will be completely baffled. It's obvious from the number of completely incomprehensible tweets ("No, only in Lichtenstein!") that not all Twitter fans have yet grasped the difference between these reply types.

On the other hand, if you reply with a private Direct Message, Casey can't reply to IT—unless you've also subscribed to *Casey's* Twitter feeds. Seems like a pretty dumb design decision. Either you have to follow the whole world, or every conversation fizzles into silence after one exchange.

* It seems clear that you, as a tweet-sender, are not actually expected to respond to every reply. At least I sure HOPE that's the expectation. I mean, some popular Twitterers have 15,000 followers; you'd spend all day doing nothing but answering them all.

* The Web is full of "rules" about the proper way to Twitter, and a lot of them are just knowier-than-thou garbage: How many tweets a day to send out. How many people you should follow. What you should say. And so on. The first adopters are milking their early advantage for all it's worth.

I found one rule, though, that answered a long-standing question I had about Twitter: "Don't tweet about what you're doing right now." Which is weird, since that's precisely how the typing box at Twitter.com is labeled: "What are you doing?"

I've always wondered who the heck would be interested in the mundane details of your life. As it turns out, though, most people broadcast other stuff in their tweets. They pose questions. They send links to interesting stuff they've found online. They pass along breaking news (Barack Obama announced his running mate on Twitter).

* People can be just as snotty on Twitter as they are everywhere else on the Internet. At first, my own followers on Twitter were friendly and helpful. But I was having a bear of a time. For example, every time I tried to add a photo to appear by my name, it showed up fine on Twitter.com, but refused to appear in Twitterific. Also, if you searched for "Pogue" at Twitter.com, you would find my old, defunct account ("pogue"), but not my current, active one ("DavidPogue"), even though the search box says specifically that it will find people by their real names. (It's working now, but it was broken a couple weeks ago.)

So I posted these two problems to my 1,900 followers. Most tried to help troubleshoot, but there was the predictable backlash: "Stop asking these newbie questions," wrote one guy. "Makes you look like a moron."

* Another person criticized me for not following enough other Twitterers. The implication was that if you send out tweets but don't subscribe to a lot of other people, you're an egotist.

So I signed up to follow prominent tech gurus like Guy Kawasaki, Tim O'Reilly and CrunchGear. But then I was astonished to see Guy send out tweets literally *every three minutes.*

"Holy cow," I thought. "Does this guy do anything all day but sit in front of Twitter?"

I posed this question to my followers, too. They promptly informed me that some people, like Guy, use automated software robots to churn out tweets, largely to promote their own blogs, sites or other products. (That doesn't seem quite right to me.)

In the end, my impression of Twitter was right and wrong. Twitter IS a massive time drain. It IS yet another way to procrastinate, to make the hours fly by without getting work done, to battle for online status and massage your own ego.

But it's also a brilliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures you admire. No other communications channel can match its capacity for real-time, person-to-person broadcasting.

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Permalink Reply by Sarahjmd on April 9, 2009 at 9:07pm

ok, my local geeks and geekettes...I was reading through the requirements for WordPress and they advised me to consult with my web host, so I asked the requirement questions and got this reply...


So...is all this true? Are these real issues I will need to deal with or worry about?
Thanks for your input, folks.

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Permalink Reply by Noel on April 10, 2009 at 12:17pm

Hey Sarah,

Was something missing?

By the way Chantal, this WikiHow convinces me that Twitter is a vapid waste of time:

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Twitter-Celebrity

best,
Noel

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Permalink Reply by Sarahjmd on April 10, 2009 at 4:29pm

Thanks Noel. This was missing....he said
"As far as WordPress, we have not installed it yet and at this time have decide not to do so. There are quite a few reasons. There have been numerous security issues in the past and that means quite a few headaches for everyone including you if your blog gets hacked. You really would not want someone writing something bad on your own blog. And I would not want to jeopardize any of our customers sites because it would be installed on the same server where your web site is located. Also WordPress has problems with duplicate content. Their categories cause duplicate content which will cause the reverse of what you are trying to achieve. Google will lower you ranking when they see duplicate content. We have not seen any of our competitors setup WordPress correctly to address the duplicate content issue. From all our research we really thing Google Blogger is the way to go. It is actually easier to use and does not have the security and duplicate content issues that WordPress does. I really think you will be better off in the long run going this route."

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