Many times, technology additions and changes can seem fairly expensive. When a company decides to go through a technology change it can carry a hefty price tag. Think about how much it costs to do a professional website redesign, the expense of running a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign in a competitive industry, or what it means to replace servers and computers for your business. Thousands of dollars are laid out, even for small businesses. This seems like a lot of money, but not when compared to traditional marketing (I’ll save that topic for another date).
Not so with blogging.
Free Solutions (commercial service)
Pros: Ease of setup, use and maintenance, plus no technology experience is generally required.
Cons: Few customization options and not scalable to a true professional level.
Free or Inexpensive Solutions (hosted service)
Pros: Easy setup with a lot more templating options. Feature-rich with tools to promote and export your blog.
Cons: Hosting and features are limited.
Free or Inexpensive Solutions (server-side)
Pros: Complete customization, plus it runs on a variety of platforms. Database driven, self-hosted, and scalable.
Cons: Requires technical knowledge for installation and customization. Comment spam prone.
WordPress (used on White African)
The truth is, if it wasn’t so easy there wouldn’t be over 31 Million blogs (Perseus report). The barriers are so low, they shouldn’t even be considered barriers. The choice to not do a business blog should be the odd argument to hear in an internal business or marketing meeting. The affect that it can have on your business has too much upside to not be considered, unless supported by a valid and strategic reason.