Blogs can be incredibly effective marketing tools for small businesses. There are two main ways to set one up, if you decide to take the plunge and introduce blogging to your marketing mix.

Self-hosted blogs

If you already have a website for your business, or are about to create one, the most obvious place to put a blog would be on your own website. Because you are hosting your blog on your site, this option is often referred to as a self-hosted blog.

To run a blog on your website, you need blogging software to power it. And the best blogging software out there is WordPress. I’m not just saying that because I’m a WordPress developer and set up websites for people using this software. Rather, it a case of me choosing to work with WordPress because it’s such an excellent product. WordPress has become very powerful over the years that it’s been around, and it can in fact power your entire website as a Content Management System, regardless of whether you have a blog on it or not. I often set up sites for people like this, with nary a blog in sight!

The WordPress software itself is free of charge, and to use it to set up a blog on your website, you will need to toddle along to WordPress.org to download and install it on your website. Some web hosts (like Hostgator) also offer an easy install of the WordPress software via Fantastico.

Either way, the process is fairly simple, although some technical knowledge can come in handy, particularly if you’re doing a manual install of the software. Please don’t let this put you off setting up a blog this way, though – as you’ll see in a second, having your blog on your own website has some very important benefits that far outweigh this small (possible) disadvantage.

Free blogging services

If you don’t have your own website, another way to set up a blog is to use one of the free services offered by the companies who develop blogging software. In this case, instead of your blog being hosted on your own website, it is hosted on the free services website.

WordPress offers this option at WordPress.com. The other biggie in this arena is Blogger. If you visit those sites, you’ll see that the process of setting up a blog there literally takes a few seconds: you fill in a brief form, and – voila! – you have a blog.

Now, in comparison to the first option with its extra technical knowledge requirements, this sounds like a Godsend. But… (why is there always a ‘but’?!)… because these services are free to use and so quick and easy to set up, they tend to attract two types of blogs: one is personal blogs, people’s online journals about what they get up to, and the second is spam blogs, also referred to as splogs (that’s probably the only funny thing about them!).

I’m a bit wary of throwing a business blog into that mix.

It’s fine if people already know you, like you and trust you, but for people who find your blog via a search engine query it can be difficult to distinguish your blog from the other thousands of blogs that all look exactly the same as yours – you’re all using the same free templates provided by the service for your blog design, so your business blog looks the same as a few thousand spam blogs and a few thousand personal blogs.

It’s not impossible to run a very professional business blog from one of these free services, but you’re sure starting off on the wrong foot and giving yourself a tad more work to do to convince your site visitors that you are, in fact, a genuine, legitimate business.

If you can, use the self-hosted option

All these disadvantages of the free blogging services fall away when you host your blog on your own website: you own your domain, and you can customise and brand the heck out of it (tastefully of course!).

In short, you’re in control over the impression that you provide to people finding your site via the search engines. It’s easier for you to demonstrate your integrity to them, and consequently easier for them to enter into a trust relationship with you.

[This blog post is based on a presentation I did for local businesses at the East Lothian Coffee Morning on 23 April 2010. You can download the slides from that presentation from the East Lothian Council.]