As previously mentioned, blogging software not only keeps up-to-date content on your website, but provides an unparalleled source of traffic as well. Search engines like Google thrive on it. Their bots (a software that collects information from the web) continuously check for new posts on your blog, and those updates keep them coming back for more.

What does this mean for you? More thorough indexing on Google, better SEO and higher rankings on search engines, especially for targeted keywords. Having up-to-date content will provide the optimal setting for your website to succeed. Well-written and researched material will not only give the professional feel that your readers have come to expect, but will also portray you as an expert in your field.

In addition, it creates an open environment for your company where past, present and future clients can communicate with you directly by utilizing blog post comments. This will help in accommodating the ever-changing needs of your customers. What more could you ask for? All of this is possible with the power of blogging—up-to-date content, professionalism and putting a human face on your company. The benefits of blogging are vital to increasing traffic to your website and retaining relevance in a new era of communication.

So what’s changed with WordPress 3.0? For starters, they’ve created a new default theme, Twenty Ten. It proves to be much more robust and eye pleasing than the previous default theme, Kubrick.

In addition, the interface is lighter and has over 1,200 bugs fixes and enhancements. That’s only the beginning of the myriad new features. Creating a custom theme for WordPress is now easier than ever before thanks to new API integrations. Customized backgrounds, menus, headings, and more are now simpler to implement in new designs.

Another notable feature is the ability to perform bulk updates with the internal upgrading system. You can upgrade 15 plugins at once!

Probably the most significant change is the integration of WordPress MU (multi-user). WordPress 3.0 offers the multi-user system built directly into its structure. You can now run millions of blogs from one dashboard. Some of our notable customers are already taking advantage of this functionality.

You can learn more about new features and changes, including an exceptional video about the latest and greatest WordPress 3.0 by clicking here.

We highly recommend you upgrade immediately or contact us for further assistance.

If you think about it, RSS feeds are very similar to email newsletters, but without all the fuss of collecting your visitors email addresses and manually sending them out. Now lets look at what we can do if we add Google’s FeedBurner to the mix.

By registering (also called burning) your blog RSS feed with FeedBurner, you’ll see how many subscribers you have; how may people click on your links to get to your blog posts; you can see what kind of tools your blog readers are using to read your blog updates; a geographic view of where your feed items were viewed in the most recent full day. You can even make some cash with your feeds by including Google Ads between the posts! So if you have a blog and are not using FeedBurner yet – I urge you to go ahead and sign up right now. You’re missing out!

Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.

This post however is not about consumer products and cheap cell phone plans, don’t worry. It is about taking payments online. If you have a personal website or a blog, you’ve probably heard about PayPal. If not, PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. Up until a year or so ago PayPal was pretty much the only choice for someone who wanted to accept payments online in a matter of minutes, without dealing with merchant banks, payment gateways etc.

Today, PayPal has a competition from Google with their Google Checkout service. It is just as easy to setup, and even faster (based on my experience) to pay for a product or a service. In fact, one of Google’s requirements is to let your visitors buy something on your site or pay for a service with one click of a button! We all know Google makes great, solid products and services, and you can rest assured Google Checkout is just as good as any other Google product. Again it’s all about choices, so if you’re already accepting PayPal on your site, why not add Google Checkout and present your visitors with a choice? Who knows, maybe you’ll increase your sales by gaining a share of Google Checkout fans.

Another benefit of Google Checkout is the ability to link it to your AdWords account, and any time you run your AdWords it will display Google Checkout logo making your Ad stand out from other sites that don’t accept Google payments on their website or a blog. It also adds trust and recognition to your site, which is a must for any e-commerce site.

So I don’t blame you if you are using (or wanting to use) Gmail as your business email — I do and I’m loving it. But my absolute pet peeve is when I get business cards that have someone@gmail.com or someone@freeservice.com — it doesn’t look professional, in fact, it kind of looks cheesy. Well you are in luck. Not too long ago Google started offering a service called Hosted Gmail. It’s now called Google Apps. It allows you to map your own domain name to a set of Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Videos and more.

By mapping your domain name to Gmail you can use you@yourdomain.com instead of you@gmail.com and you will be able to send and receive email using the familiar Gmail interface. The service is free, it comes with a web based control panel where you can create additional email accounts, adjust various email settings, and more. Each email account you create comes with a little over 7 GB of disk space. So if you’re hosting your blog on a shared hosting account with a limited amount of disk space, you can configure your domain name to use Gmail for your email, and get so much more disk space at no additional cost. In fact, if you need more disk space Gmail has a Premier Edition (for a fee) which gives you 25 GB of space and 99% SLA (reliability). The service is also redundant, which means if your hosting account is having some issues and your blog stops working — your email continues to work!

I’ve helped many customers with that kind of configuration, so if you have any questions post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them all.

WordPress was released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and it is being used by over 200 million websites and blogs wordwide. The company behind WordPress is Automattic. The software is open source – which means it is completely free, and you’re welcome to use it or modify however you want. If something happens to Automattic as a company, and they stop working on WordPress — the large WordPress community will take over, so you don’t have to worry about the longevity of the application and its existence 5 years from now. WordPress is easy to use, it’s lightweight, it is packed with some of the most amazing features you could find in a blog platform. There are over 7,500 free plugins that extend the functionality of WordPress, and over 1,100 themes (designs).

Movable Type was released in 2001 by the company called Six Apart. It is not an open source project like WordPress (although they do have an open source version, it’s not as feature-rich as the paid version). A couple of years ago Movable Type was the most recommended blog platform, and the platform of choice by many businesses and corporations. However, since Movable Type is not free for business-use, I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on licensing alone, and some go with WordPress for that reason alone. In other words licensing can be the deal breaker when choosing between Movable Type and WordPress. There are not as many plugins and themes comparing to WordPress. Software updates don’t come out as often, and many claim that it feels bloated and slow when working with or publishing your blog.

During the past 2 years I’ve seen a huge growth of WordPress (see chart below), many large corporations like TIME, Inc. switched from Movable Type to WordPress — which could either be because of the on-going licensing fees and the economy we are in, or the growing list of WordPress features. We’ve also seen the changes at Movable Type where they let go of some of their key people, then VP Anil Dash leaving the company a couple of months ago, and some other bitter things that I’m not going to discuss in this post.

Earlier in 2009 we converted our company site from Movable Type to WordPress, and helped many of our clients make the switch as well. As you might have guessed, our personal preference and recommendation is WordPress, however I will say it again — it all comes down to your specific needs, budget, and the situation you are in. If you are not sure on the platform you should be using — just shoot us an email and we’ll make a recommendation based on your scenario.

At first it’s somewhat difficult to see how something like Twitter can be useful, and especially how it can help you in your business. Right? So let me explain why I think it’s a must-have for anyone, and not just for business owners. As I mentioned before, Twitter lets you send a short message right from your phone to your own Twitter page, as well as all of your followers. The latter is the key – as well as all of your followers.

Just think about it for a moment. Let’s say you have a car repair business and there are 1,000 people following you on your Twitter page. In a matter of 5 seconds and one short text message from your cellphone, all 1,000 of your “potential customers” will receive your update as soon as it’s sent. You could send a message saying “Oil change special – just $10. Call this number.” Now all of a sudden 1,000 people received your message, and I bet some will surely give you a call to make an appointment. So if you think about it, it’s a really powerful tool, especially if you have a very large number of people following you.

Ashton Kutcher for example has over 4,000,000 people following him (hey, people like minding someone else’s business, that’s why all the reality TV shows are so popular). Oh, and did I mention it’s totally free? How much do you think it will cost you to send a text message to 4,000,000 people in a matter of seconds if there was no Twitter? How would you even do it? Good luck with that! With a little creativity you can move mountains with your Twitter account. Just sit down, and think how you can use it in your business, or even if you don’t have a business and just using it for personal reasons. The possibilities are endless! Don’t forget to follow me ;)

But then I found Ping.fm It is a free service that let’s you update all the social networks you are a part of from one dashboard. Simply sign up, select the networks you have an account with, and post away. The best of all – they assign a special email address for your account, so all you have to do is email them your status update, and it automatically posts it on all your social networks within minutes. It saves a tremendous amount of time, it’s very convenient, and it brings you social network account back to life — which means more friends and new connections! And as we all know, it’s not what you know but who you know that matters :)