Why setup Business Blog for TLC-Trade.com?

When we first started to build our current web site, TLC-Trade.com, we did not anticipate much or any dynamic content to post on our web site. But however, as our business progress, we discovered that we need allow more channels of communication between us and our potential or new customers, suppliers, partners, associates, etc.

We need a very quick form communication mean to communicate to internal and external parties. There are many ways to do that, take for examples, using emails, newsletters or web forum. However, we discovered nowadays, others feel are rather intrusive to receive unsolicited emails or newsletter.

Moreover, at the moment we also could not know when and what information that others would be interested and like us to inform them, especially for our type of business nature. Although we could send out a broadcast to survey and ask but it is only applicable to those we know of their email contacts. Besides it will be a lot of administrative works on our parts and the time could not be immediate. Furthermore, email contacts could still be lost or emails being ignore too.

Although web forum could be a good alternative compare to Blog, since it can build a business community that could benefits us and certainly to those that join the forum. However, the forum will still need much efforts to setup, moderate, categorize, archive and increase of many other administrative and maintenance issues. But what we want is to quickly set up communication channel that allow us to disseminate information wide, quickly and with least minimum efforts. Moreover, we already have different communication channels for others to get in contact with us. So we decide to use Blog mean of communicate to the mass.

Using Blog we could inform others of our any upcoming business news, our works, how we handle some of our business problems, share our experiences and even could be electronic notice board for others to know what is going on with our business.

In view of these benefits of using Blog, we proceed to consider whether to setup our own Blog on our server or outsource to some kind of Blog services provider (BSP), like Blogger.com or Techno. We have to decide whether to get Free or Paid BSP, and we choose Free BSP for the time being to learn and find out how and what Blog will eventually lead us to. Moreover, we might consider hosting our own Blog at our own server which has resources that we still have not use.

So we decide to use Blogger.com versus other Free BSP likes, WordPress, Moveable Type, etc… since Blogger.com could allow the flexibility to use either their free hosted services at Blogspot or our web server. With in mind that we might use our server for our Business Blog, this could be a nice feature that we might consider in the future when we are ready to use our server for our Business Blog.

Moreover, it is very easy and certainly quick to set up for beginning bloggers and/or for those who don't wish to be bothered with technical know-how. Since we thought it is owned by Google.com, we should be worry much about reliability and professional services. However, this might not the case as we later found out. So we hope that the services provide by Blogger.com will improve soon in the areas of reliability and reduce downtime.

Others features that we consider it is good with Blogger.com was it ability to supports multi-author (group) blogs, which we could build community Blog when we required. Since it also allow blogging via email and supports unlimited number of blogs.

Nevertheless, we would still be ongoing efforts for us continue to review the performance and reliability of our business blog at Blogger.com. Therefore we would decide to continue staying with Blogger.com or migrate to better Blog software or services to serve our needs better.

Best regards,