Money Online

What should you begin with?

Ok, so you have decided upon the topic that you would like to approach in your “online adventure”, checked the competition and think you can handle it and you are ready to start… but there is a another that pops in the mind of every enthusiastic “online entrepreneur”wannabe… should you start with a regular website or a blog? In order to make a correct decision, you must first know what advantages and disadvantages one has over the other.

To blog or not to blog?
When they first appeared, blogs (initially named web logs) were a form of online journals. With time, they have lost their original purpose and evolved into more complex and most importantly interactive websites.
Nowadays, although there still are people who use it as an online journal, most of the blogs out there are focused on specific topics or niches with the intention of generating income (directly or indirectly). However, the main characteristic that has been kept from the beginning is the need to update as frequently as possible.

A website, on the other hand, can take many forms; from static HTML simple websites, flash websites, dynamic websites, depending on the actual purpose of it (personal website, corporate presentation, portal, etc.). The most common of these is the simple static site, due to the fact that it does not require special knowledge like php, mysql and things like that. However, complex dynamic sites are used either by experienced people or companies and not by beginners, so we will only take into consideration the static html site and throw it in a face to face confruntation with the blog and see which one can have more advantages over the over from several point of views.

Building the website (or blog)
Even if a regular site does not require very advanced knowledge of programing, you still need to know more htmls and css, or at least a WYSIWYG editor (such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage) than you do for a blog, assuming that you will take advantage of blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger etc., and don’t intend to do it from scratch. Keep in mind that you can even start blogging without knowing basicaly nothing regarding programing, but a little knowledge is required when it comes to personalize your template.

Promoting a website (or blog)
I think that no one can argue that promoting a blog is a lot easier than promoting a website. That is because a blog is a website itself + some specific features, so you can benefit from all the “classic” methods of promoting it but, in addition to that, you will have several options more. I will not go further into methods of promotion since I have already talked about them in a previous article (Increase traffic to your site); I will only remind you that there are several possibilities and services out there that are available only for blogs and not for regular websites ( such as specific blog directories, Technorati Tags, etc).

Flexibility
Web programing knowledge is in discussion here again, but from a slightly different angle. You will probably get more flexibility from a regular website than from a blog if you have only… let’s call it “decent” knowledge on the subject. If you are not a php guru and don’t intend to design your blog from scratch, you must accept the limitations of the template that you are using, or change it. The good news is that there are tons of wordpress templates or blogger templates available for free, but the bad news is that you will always need to do some things that you will not be able to do. This happens especially when you need to experiment more with the placement of contextual advertising ads… which brings us to the next subject:

Monetizing
For a beginner, contextual advertising is one of the best ways to start monetizing a website/blog. Some say that this does not perform well with blogs. Although I disagree with this statement (and strongly believe that it has more to do with the topic itself, as I have mentioned in this article), there may be some truth in it but only from the point of view less flexibility regarding placement, as I have said in the upper paragraph.
An advantage in the blog’s corner is that there are more methods of monetizing a blog than a regular website. Bloggers interact a lot more with each other, and advertisers seem to enjoy more and more the buzz that bloggers can create.

Maintenance
A blog is much more easier to maintain than a regular website. You can add content in pages, categories, post comments, edit content, without even touching the code.
Furthermore, there are plenty of plugins and widgets available for free, that will bring you interesting features (from voting to weather forecasts).
This is not the case with a website, unless it is a dynamic generated one, and even than, if you decide later to add more features to it, you may have problems with code.

Social interaction
Bloggers are well known to interact with their visitors than regular webmasters; they get feedback, engage in discussions, which will eventually raise the overall quality and attract incoming links. However, not all niches are suitable for a blog, because you always need to find new things to talk (blog) about. A blog that is not updated after a period of time, will loose interest faster than you can imagine, so if you choose to blog, make sure that you will choose a “dynamic” niche.
On the other hand, if your topic is “timeless” (the information that you provide will not be obsolete after a few years) or you are not prepared to commit to this kind of work on a regular basis, a “normal” mini-site would be the option for you.

SEO
Some say that search engines seem to like blogs more than usual sites. I would say that this has most probably nothing to do with the fact that they are blogs. They do however get indexed faster and a lot more often, because they are updated more frequently (so spiders come more often) and they usually get more inbound links than regular sites.

Conclusion
After having said all this, taking into consideration all the advantages and disadvantages, I think that a blog would be the right choice to start with, unless you are not ready to really commit to it, or if after a short period of time you will have nothing more to write about.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Niche websites

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