In his book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust, Chris Brogan spends much oxgyen expounding upon the concept of "thought leadership" and how it applies to building up one's business. The term was coined by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the magazine Strategy & Business.

A thought leader is someone who has helpful information and makes it available to the public. This applies to small businesses and organizations in several ways:

• Sharing useful information helps your customers and/or readers and potential customers better use your products and services.
• Sharing useful information helps your business or organization by fostering trust.
• Sharing useful information helps your business or organization by fostering its credibility.

Blogging is a great and inexpensive means of providing one's thoughts to the public, but has other dividends as well:

• It increases traffic to websites via direct and indirect means such as a greater likelihood of being found in search engines, providing information that prompts people to share blog entries, and subscription to blog entries via tools such as feedburner.
• It provides a means of organizing the blogger's thoughts which can result in more focused, higher quality business practices.

Where to start

I recommend WordPress as a blogging platform. It's free and very versatile, and can be easily installed in a subdirectory on your existing website. It can be used to manage your entire website if you wish. It is completely customizable, so your web developer can create your own theme that has your own specific design without any technical constraints from WordPress's end other than the time to code the theme.

Many plugins are available for WordPress, including ones that can help you "get the word out" by facilitating social media sharing.

If possible, install WordPress on the same domain as your website because will help with your domain's informational footprint, or "domain authority." Also, it improves the amount of activity going on on your site. Both are good criteria that search engines such as Google can use to help determine a site's relevancy. (We are in the process of doing this ourselves.)

To be continued…

In my last post, I described how WordPress is a great tool that empowers small businesses and organizations to efficiently create a lot of content (information) that can be syndicated and shared. This is important. The volume of content on a website is one of the key factors in being able to find the site on the Internet because volume is an indicator of credibility to search engines. And the easier it is to share a site's content, the more likely it is that the content will be shared and help drive incoming traffic.

For a professional presence, WordPress works best in a collaborative relationship between business owner and professional web design firm with the design firm laying out the initial website infrastructure and assisting as needed throughout the lifespan of the site. WordPress gives the layman businessperson the ability to edit page content and add simple new pages, and it's an economical way to implement a robust website with a web design firm.

If you are a budget-oriented business person who has some technical skill, you be might be considering a DIY site. Assess your skills. Here are some factors to consider if you’d like to develop your own site without the aid of a professional web firm.

• Do you have graphic design skills, or can you use Photoshop or a similar program to edit your logo and process your photos to look good on your site?
• Do you know and understand the advantages of using one predeveloped WordPress theme over another?
• Do you know at least a little bit of html?
• Can you figure out how to navigate most websites and do what you need to do on them (like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)? Do you know how to upload photos or is it a frustrating process for you?
• Are you willing to spend a lot of time to learn about basic search engine optimization practices in WordPress? And are you at ease using Google to perform searches?
• Do you understand how to back up your website completely and can you figure out how to minimize comment spam and hackers in WordPress?
• Can you write well? Is your writing rife with spelling and grammatical errors?

If you are weak in any one of these areas, it is probably best to consult with a professional firm to fill in the gaps.

Part I: "The Perfect Website"
Part II: "A Great Budget Situation–WordPress"

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series. You can subscribe to this blog via email.

This is part one of a series of followup posts from our panel discussion at Lake Communicators, "When to DIY and When to Call the Pros." 

Can the layman create a perfect, small site with no experience?

The short answer is no. It's even difficult for a professional web firm to create a perfect site. Even if the perfect site exists today, it is sure to become obsolete over time based on changing design and useability trends.

Can the layman create a not-so-perfect, yet adequate and professional site?

This is possible; the basic constraints are time, ability, and money. 

Consider time and money. If you are pulling in a decent amount of income for your business, and you're busy, can you really afford to take time off to learn new skills and create a website yourself? Unless you have this time, you'll probably save money by outsourcing the work to a professional.

Assess your skills. Are you a good writer? Do you know how to upload files and navigate complex sites? Do you have basic graphic design skills, such as being able to create an appealing, professional-looking flyer in Word? Do you know any html? 

If you've answered no to any of these questions, then don't despair. You can still create an adequate site, but you'll probably need the assistance of a web design firm, writer or graphic designer. You can still save money by doing some of the work yourself. 

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series: "A great budget situation"

Consider the following:

What is the ideal situation for managing a web presence?

• You are a very large corporation with a huge budget for websites and you can afford to pay a team to implement your social media, have a huge website with multiple articles posted daily, and your website looks really interesting and professional and is easy to navigate.
• If reduced to a single person: the best person implementing a complete website would be an artist who can write well and does website development for a living…

A business owner who is cramped for cash might consider some DIY web strategies…

What it comes down to:

• CASH and TIME
• Expertise on-hand

Followup posts:

• The Perfect Website
• A Great Budget Situation

An individual can only have one personal Facebook account. Using multiple accounts violates Facebook’s terms of use, and may result in having one or more of your Facebook accounts shut down.

If you want to have two separate identities, one as a business person and the other as a friend and family member who wants to stay in touch, you are out of luck. You can create a Facebook “personal” account for your business, but then you can’t have a separate personal account.

There’s a bit of a way around this: set up a business fan page, which is different from a Facebook account. An individual Facebook user can set up multiple fan pages, one or more of which can relate to business concerns.

Businesses need to be choosy in who sets up their business fan pages. The key administrator for a business page cannot be reassigned. Until Facebook fixes this, the original administrator is permanent.

Recently we had a client whose employee set up a business page. When the employee left the company, there was no way to transfer administration of the page to the business owner. Luckily, the employee had left on good terms, so the owner was able to create a new fan page and work with the former employee to invite the old fans to the new page.

For this reason we recommend that the business owner initiates the business page setup with Facebook. Then, and only then, should the owner assign an employee to be an additional administrator for the page.

Do you want help setting up a Facebook fan page for your business or organization? Lakenetwork.net is offering a FREE workshop Tuesday, September 7, from 8:30 to 10 a.m. at our office in Eastlake, Ohio. The class size will be limited to 4 participants. We will be offering this workshop more than once. Click here to sign up for the workshop or register for information about our workshop series.

To find out more about Lakenetwork, visit our Web site at lakenetwork.net where you will find our online portfolio and links to sites we’ve designed.

http://www.lakenetwork.net/tutorials/outlook.html

How to set up an autoresponder in Dreamhost:

http://www.lakenetwork.net/tutorials/autoresponder.html

How to access webmail in Dreamhost:

http://www.lakenetwork.net/tutorials/webmail.html

1. Go to constantcontact.com (use Internet Explorer or Netscape browser rather than Google Chrome as Constant Contact doesn’t work within Google Chrome).

2. Login with your username and password.

3. This will bring you to a main dashboard. On the right hand side of the screen, there’s an area for contacts. Click Add/Import.

4. Select the list(s) to which you want to add the new contact, and click the “Next” button.

5. Select “Type my email addresses and contact details into Constant Contact” and click the “Next” button. (Or, if you just want to enter in email addresses without additional contact info, you could select “Type or copy my email addresses into Constant Contact.)  This will bring you to a screen that allows you to enter in multiple addresses at once. You can enter multiple fields–email address, first name, last name, and two selectable fields. I suggest selecting “Email Type” as one of the drop downs (and by default you could sign them up for HTML email), and perhaps the other useful field name you could select is “Company Name.” Or you could just leave all these blank, except for the email address field.

6. When you are done entering in addresses, click the “Submit Data” button. The next screen will tell you if you were successful in adding the address–something along the lines of “1 contact was successfully added.”

Lakenetwork

Lakenetwork has a number of clients who use Constant Contact for their enewsletter campaigns. Often, the templates provided by Constant Contact don’t exactly fit our customers’ needs. We are pleased to offer custom newsletter development and management. We can create newsletters that match the style of your website if desired.

Related reading

Constant Contact support blog

Constant Contact Learning Center