I think I’m going to write an ebook for small businesses… something inexpensive… on how to use blogger for a small business. Yesterday I was telling you about my recent exploits putting up a non profit website using blogger.com.
I’ve been tweaking it and I think it could be a great platform for a retail business to promote themselves locally and stay in touch with past customers (at least the ones who subscribe to the email updates or who return to visit). Maybe I’m just more familiar with blogger, but the I felt it was much easier to handle than creating google web pages.
Blog formats are ideal for most small businesses. Customers for the most part don’t want too many static pages. They want to know “what’s new today”. And you can still use blog pages for static pages and link to them from the sidebar.
The only ongoing expense is advertising the web domain. Usually businesses won’t do special advertising for just a website so it’s only a matter of getting adding the domain name to existing radio, Yellow Page (if that still works for you) or newspaper advertising.
I’m sure a huge retailer has the resources to have their own in house IT department.
But I think a well tweaked blogger blog would be great for most local businesses.
The only draw back with the new blogger is that - to my knowledge - you can’t write something today and have it post in the future.
There are ways to solve that by posting by email and timing when your email program sends the message.
The biggest expenses for a small business doing this will be the custom logo.
On the other hand, the Google web page service was a complete nightmare for me to set up (I finally switched back to just blogger). And I don’t think the web pages look that much better.
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