Blogs have really taken off over the last 4 or 5 years and many online businesses have a blog as their main web site. Others still have their web site, perhaps dating back several years, but with a blog attached to it.
So which is best?
To answer that, you have to consider the main purpose of a blog. What do blogs give the visitor that a traditional web site does not? The answer is interactivity. A blog page will have comments at the bottom of each post, and an invitation at the bottom for the visitor to leave further comments – something a traditional web page cannot offer.
That’s not to say a web page cannot collect information from visitors. You can have a form on your site and as long as you have a sufficiently persuasive reason for signing up to it, such as a customer discount or a free gift of some sort, then you can grow your customer list and follow up with offers by way of an autoresponder.
And if your site is basically a one-page direct sales letter then that’s all you’ll probably want.
But if it’s a little more than that then you’ll probably welcome a little inter-activity with visitors, and a blog is the better choice.
The only trouble with a blog is that you’re generally restricted as to how it looks, with most themes, unless specially customised at some cost, being fairly inflexible.
Philip Gegan
I run several blogs, a “normal” website, and a sales letter site that has a few added articles and FAQ pages. It is interesting to note that most of the interactivity, like you said, happens on the blog. The sales letter links to a support desk for the product and I get a bit of traffic through that but mostly for product support, not chit-chat. The blog is the best source of connections, visitors and helps build up my online profile.