Web Site Woes: Why Can't I Just Kill It & Blog?

I get such dismal traffic to my Customized Newsletters website that I wake up with dreams of trashing it altogether. Why can't I just put it all on a blog? Blogging is something I know how to do and building traffic isn't such a problem with a blog.

Every time I go in to update or change something on my website, I feel insecure and frustrated. It's not a Dreamweaver problem either. No matter what I do, it doesn't attract more potential clients.

I even know what some of the problems are, but redesigning it from scratch is too expensive for the potential payoff. Each time I've tried major re-writes, well, the problem persists...not enough of the right kinds of eyeballs.

So Denise and I will more than likely convert it to a blog, especially now since Typepad now has stand alone pages that can serve as landing pages.

It seems I'm not the only one who struggles with websites, and home pages, and is considering moving to a blog platform instead. Tom Chandler of The Copywriter Underground talks about it here, and also tells about Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter's Crucible who both get more traffic to their blogs than their websites.

Tom and Matt ask, "Is the Home Page Dead?" in true copywriting style - it seems dead stuff attracts readers. So if I kill it, will they come? I bet they would if I blogged... stay tuned.

Let me know your thoughts on this by commenting. Good idea? Bad?

Here's what Michael Stelzner commented to Tom's post about his own web traffic:

On my website for my book, www.writingwhitepapers.com, I took a look at my stats for this month.

I wanted to know what pages people enter in on the most. I was surprised.

#1 was my feed for my blog (7 to 1 over anything else)
#2 was the blog
#8 was the home page

The difference between #1 and #8 was more than 5500 people.

I have noticed over the short year or so that I have been blogging, my blog has nearly caught up in traffic to the other sites I own.

There are some other interesting comments on these posts about home page traffic vs blog traffic.

Comments

[Bea]

I'm glad to see this subject come up finally because I have been thinking just this. If I scrap my website or just don't give it attention anymore, is it going to make any difference to my bottom line. While I'm not juggling half of what you do on blogs, I still feel a burden trying to keep up with it all and find TypePad much easier to navigate and do completely on my own. Am I just being lazy or feel the same wind blowing as others about moving to blog software versus continuing a time-consuming, energy-sucking, constant update challenging website?

[Tom Chandler]

For several of my small business clients I'm recommending a site built on WordPress simply because it's easy for them to update the content (via any Web browser). Several will never even use the blog, but the other benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

I think an overlooked facet of a blog is as an easy, one-way publishing pipeline for the "what's new" and client success kind of stories that many professionals should post to their site -- but never get around to doing because of the hassles of contacting their Webmaster.

[MT of MindTweaks]

It makes a lot of sense to use blog software to design/run a traditional site; they're easy to set up, easy to update/change, they're great content managers, and with the right plugins, there's almost nothing you can't do.

The trick is in setting up site navigation so that it really makes sense as something other than a straight blog - I've been to a few pages built around blogs that just didn't make a lot of sense to me - I couldnt find a FAQ or basic product list or a sitemap to tell me where I was.

A bit of thinking and mapping should solve this -- with pages, subpages, categories and tags available, there's plenty of organizational options.

Now I'm getting all excited about a redesign of my non Wordpress pages!

[Angela]

Blogs get more traffic because they're updated more often.

It depends on what your ultimate goals are, but why not just create a blog for the site, and then link to the appropriate pages on the site when you're blogging about something relevant?

Whenever I create a new site, I create a blog for the site at the same time.

Cheers

Angela