From home north of Belen, blogs being created for businesses around world
When Richard Mathiason installs a blog for a company, he will be the first to tell you this isn’t your granddaughter’s blog. “This isn’t for social networking or an online journal,” he says, sitting comfortably in his home office just north of Belen. “This is a serious and quite powerful marketing tool for businesses.”
A blog can be more beneficial to a business than a traditional static retail Webs site for several reasons, Mathiason says. The primary one being that once he creates and installs a blog for a customer, they then have complete control over the site.
- Julia M. Dendinger-News-Bulletin photo sitting in his home office in Belen, Richard Mathiason of E-Marketing Systems can set up blogs for customers around the world to help them build their businesses.
“With most Web sites, if a customer wants to make a change, they are kind of at the mercy of the Webmaster,” he said. “With a blog, they just log on to what’s called the ‘back office’, create an entry and post it.”
The program the back offices uses to write entries looks almost identical to the word processing programs most people are familiar with, complete with formatting options and the ability to insert images or videos.
Not only does this allow customers to change their sites in real time, it also helps the site get a better ranking on Internet search engines such as Google.
“The first thing Google likes to see is the content changing and being updated. A blog is a perfect way to do that,” Mathiason said. “The second is having what are called back links. Those are links from other sites that point to your page.”
A back link from another site that is considered an authority site is always a benefit for a business owner. “Linking to an authority site from your site doesn’t help your rating; the authority site doesn’t gain anything because they are already the authority,” he said with a laugh. “But getting a link to your site from them is a big benefit.”
When Mathiason sets up a blog site for a business, one of the behind-the-scenes technical aspects of his service is to set up the plug-ins that ensure that a customer’s site is being provided with valid back links.
He also assists with finding and purchasing a domain name, registering and either finding a hosting service or hosting it himself on his server. Mathiason will then help the customer select a theme for their blog site.
“There are literally thousands of them,” he said. “Everything from really basic with few bells and whistles to ones where you can edit and alter just about everything.”
Once everything is set up, Mathiason begins training the customer on things such as how to post entries and the utilization of keywords and keyword phrases. The training and technical support lasts 12 months with the option to pay for support on a month-to-month basis.
If a client already has an established retail Web site, Mathiason said, a blog is a great addition to their marketing strategy. “They can link to their retail site with the e-shopping cart from their blog,” he said. “It’s all about driving traffic to your site and your business.”
One trend Mathiason is seeing is local searches. “If people are looking for a specific business or type of business in their community, they aren’t picking up the phone book anymore,” he said. “Using the right keywords and getting a good ranking can put you at the top of or on the first page of a Google search. And once you get picked up by Google, the rest of the search engines will pick it up.”
To demonstrate, Mathiason types in the phrase “privacy doesn’t exist anymore.” More than 161 million hits are found and sitting at number one is a blog he developed for an author to promote his new book.
“It’s been at number one for three or four months,” he said. “Once this is set up, it’s just a matter of your time. Are you willing to sit down and write two or three articles a week? One a day? It really is up to the customer.”
Richard Mathiason can be contacted at:
webmaster@richardmathiason.com
skype id richforlife
twitter @iatpapog
505-861-1045
