1 Comment Written by Robert on August 22, 2008 – 3:59 am

Creating a community on your Web site is one of the most effective ways to keep your content fresh, and also helps establish your site as an authority for your area of business. Moreover, communities help build trust and provide a venue for your visitors to get interested and educated about your products or services. Two of the primary approaches to building online communities are blogs and forums.

Blogs provide an opportunity for you to position yourself as an authority, and also attract participation from your visitors by allowing them to comment and provide feedback on your blog posts. Forums provide an opportunity for multiple discussions to occur simultaneously around your area of business and stand as a meeting place for people who are interested in your products or services. Another very successful approach to building community on your Web site is to allow visitors to add reviews about your products.

sponsored reviews, blogs, and forums are exceptional ways to build user-generated contact on your Web site. Building large amounts of fresh content around your area of business is a prime strategy to build links and rank well in the search-engine results.

Create a Blog with WordPress

WordPress is a popular blog software service that allows you to quickly and easily create Weblogs. Aside from the fact that the product is easy to install and manage, it is also free to use. WordPress allows you to build a community by educating, entertaining, and providing useful information to the consumer through a blog. You can use your WordPress blog to educate your customers about the benefits of your products. Moreover, you can use your blog to share special offers and deals with your customers and to elicit feedback on how you can improve your business.

WordPress, located at www.WordPress.com, offers free blog software that allows you to quickly and easily create Weblogs. A Weblog, also known as a blog, is an online journal or diary that is frequently updated by an author and typically allows readers to interact by providing comments after each blog is published.

Although blogs have traditionally been used by individuals as a way of entertaining and sharing opinions and expertise, businesses also effectively use blogs as a way of building community through educating, entertaining, and providing useful information to the consumer. Hosting a blog through WordPress allows you to interact with your Web site visitors and customers.

A blog creates a community on your Web site that you can use for various purposes to increase Web site traffic and improve customer relations. For example, you can use your blog make money. Moreover, you can use your blog to share special offers and deals with your customers and to elicit feedback on how you can improve your business. By encouraging interaction and rewarding your readers, you can steadily build loyal readership and repeat customers. Hosting a blog through WordPress on your Web site is a highly effective approach to maintaining fresh content.

Because search engines favor Web sites with fresh content, hosting a blog not only allows you to build a community with interesting content, but also increases your chances of ranking well on the search engines. In addition, posting fresh content on your blog helps demonstrate to the search engines that you are an authority on a topic. Authoritative Web sites with fresh content rank higher in the search engines.

WordPress is used by more than one million bloggers from around the world. One of the primary reasons bloggers choose WordPress is because it is free and easy to use. In fact, WordPress can even host your blog for you, but that is not recommended because you can receive greater search-engine benefit by hosting your blog on your own Web site.

However, if you want to host your blog, you need to meet a few technical requirements before you can start posting content to it. To host your blog, your Web host must support the execution of PHP scripts. PHP is the programming language in which WordPress is written, and thus for WordPress to run at all, your Web host must support it.

Another technical requirement is that your Web host must also include a MySQL database engine, because WordPress stores its data and all your blog entries in a special file called a database, which allows easy and fast retrieval of content for your users. WordPress also allows you to install numerous plug-ins that you can use to enhance your blog usability and search-engine optimization. For example, a popular usability plug-in that reduces comment spam is Spam Karma, which can be downloaded at http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma. A useful search-engine-optimization plug-in is Optimal Title v3.0, located at http://downloads.wordpress.org/ plugin/optimal-title.3.0.zip.

Create a Blog with Blogger

Similar to WordPress, Blogger is a free blog software service that allows you to quickly and easily create Weblogs. There are pros and cons to using Blogger over WordPress. For example, with Blogger you can easily edit template layouts, styles, and colors, or install a third-party theme. With WordPress there is no template editing, and style sheet editing is available only as a paid upgrade. Blogger provides you with 300MB of image storage, and WordPress provides only 50MB for free. However, WordPress does offer more storage options for a fee. If you intend to use a lot of high-resolution images and want to minimize your cost, Blogger is a better option for you.

Blogger, located at www.blogger.com, is completely free blog software offered by Google that allows you to quickly and easily create Weblogs. Blogger is a competitor to WordPress, and there are pros and cons to using one over the other. With Blogger you can easily edit template layouts, styles, and colors, or install a third-party theme. With WordPress there is no template editing, and style sheet editing is available only as a paid upgrade. Keep in mind that you should host your own blog and customize it to fit the look and feel of your Web site. Therefore, using Blogger is free, but if you use WordPress you may have to pay an additional fee depending on exactly what customizations you want to make.

With Blogger you are unable to import blog entries from other blogs you may manage. WordPress allows you to import entries from Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Movable Type, or another WordPress blog. Therefore, if you have an existing blog, your best choice for blog software may be WordPress because you can easily import your content. Blogger provides you with 300MB of image storage, and WordPress provides only 50MB for free.

However, WordPress does offer more storage options for a fee. If you intend to use a lot of high-resolution images and want to minimize your cost, Blogger is a better option for you. One additional consideration between Blogger and WordPress deals with comment moderation and editing. With Blogger you can moderate comments, but you cannot edit them. In contrast, WordPress provides you with more flexibility by allowing you to both moderate and edit comments. If you expect your blog entries to generate a lot of comments, WordPress provides the better solution for moderating comments.

One of the biggest challenges with managing your own blog is limiting the amount of comment spam you receive. Although you can moderate and review comments prior to their being published, you may prefer a solution that automatically publishes comments but reduces or eliminates comment spam. If you want an automated solution, you can use a CAPTCHA, install anti-spam software, and require users who comment to log in. The term CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

A CAPTCHA is commonly displayed as an image showing warped or obscured letters and numbers and is used to reduce robotic comment spam by requiring the user to type in a series of letters and numbers prior to submitting a comment. Although the goal of using a CAPTCHA is to make sure that the entity leaving the comment is a human, several sophisticated comment spamming robots can crack the CAPTCHA and therefore bypass the fix.

Another approach to minimizing comment spam is to download software. One of the most popular pieces of software is Akismet, located at www.akismet.com. Another popular choice is Spam Karma, located at http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma. You can choose to accept comments only from people that have already logged in to a registration system that you run on your blog. Although requiring a login reduces comment spam, it cannot completely eliminate it because robots exist that can complete the required log-in steps and spoof you into believing the commenter is human.