Cost-Effective website using blogs and widget

Lets say you have purchased your domain name and have decided to host your website. The fundamental question you face is, what hosting package do you opt for? Is it worth paying for the monthly or quarterly hosting package? If so, what will be your ROI. Lots of users typically opt for the default starter page to test the market for their business before signing up for a package. This option works for a few businesses. What about the rest? they end up in a catch 22 situation waiting endlessly for their first customer .

I would also like to talk about website analytics. Do analytic tools really add value? My take is these tools cannot offer much value unless the user clearly understands the significance of site metrics that these tools provide. For eg; time spent on a site or no of hits or page views could mean anything. Time spent on a site could mean either that site navigation is complex or the site is interesting. The more the site pages, higher the permutation and combination of possibilities. Sometimes i feel that google and yahoo try to sell tools that solve the problems that these firms create in the first place.

I faced a similar situation a while back until i started using Google blogger to blog about my firm. Though blogging is a good option to market your firm, blogs are hosted under the blogging tools domain (for eg. blogspot.com). However if you obtain your own domain name (say at a cost of 4-5 $) or so, google blogger provides an option to host your blogs under your custom domain free of cost. This is a truly amazing feature !!! So when you use the custom domain feature of blogger, you can host all your blogs under your domain name and not under the .blogspot extension. If you spruce up your website further by adding widgets you have a fully functioning website free of cost. Infact very few visitors might be able to figure out that you are using blogger's custom domain option as your website. Here is a link to setting up the custom domain on blogger.

Now lets say you have set up your blogs under your domain name. So anyone clicking on your blogs would be re-directed to your custom domain. But in the hyper-competitive world of the internet, your blogs are just not enough to draw visitors. This is where firms like google and yahoo come into the picture, offering to host your businesses for a monthly or quarterly charge. They give you options to have multiple pages, folders and tabs on your site to display your content. As you start building content on your site, you realize you need analytics to get feedback on the quality of your content and thus improve your site traffic. Google and yahoo offer users enough memory to scatter their content across multiple pages and tabs and then sell analytics tools to analyze time spent on each of these tabs or pages?.Does this really solve your problem ? does it really help you improve your traffic?

Instead lets say you spruce up your blogs (under your custom domain) with widgets. Widgets are basically freely available HTML based applications that can be installed under your custom domain. You can check out my site 360 Inn to see how blogs and widgets can enhance the interactivity of your web site (using the custom domain option). Now coming back to analytics , if you look at my site closely, you can figure out that this a free blogger account under my custom domain. I have a single page where i have displayed all the information about my business including my contact info and my profile. By avoiding multiple tabs and pages, i have tried to simplify navigation for my visitors. Moreover, i dont need any metrics such as time spent on my page etc. All i need to know is, how many visitors came to my site (page) and how many converted ( meaning called me up or emailed me). The % of visitors who converted is enough information for me to decide whether i need to modify my site content or my pricing. Few more metrics that are important and freely available are no of inbound links and no of outbound links. These metrics tell you the number of visitors who came to your site from external links and no of visitors who clicked a link on your site. Basically visitors who find your site relevant and useful.

If you look at 360 Inn , i have used a linkedin widget to display my profile and a chat widget to talk to me. These widgets allow my visitors to view my profile information as well as speak to me from within the same page itself. Moreover, google blogger itself has various types of page elements to upload photos, slideshows and other interactive content within a single page so site navigation can be tremendously improved. If these capabilities are leveraged, a user might not really need analytics tools to enhence their sites

Finally. iam not saying that analytics tools do not serve any purpose. For small businesses that have limited budgets, buying a custom domain would be a great option. Blogger or other blogging tools have lots of options that small businesses can leverage to build their content. And dont forget widgets. I truly believe that blogs and widgets are the future of E-marketing as they are very personal and interactive. They talk to your customers and engage them in a dialog unlike traditional websites.

Here is a cool website that provides Free Widgets


Shyam Krishnamurthy