Blogging My Way to More Customers

As a small business owner with an online site, I think it would be nice to have a blog that draws people to my online store. I have reviewed my options for writing, posting and displaying the blog and evaluating its performance. I want to incorporate the blog into my content marketing strategy and I’ve looked at both static site generators and help authoring tools.

Image Source: Pixabay

Evaluating these tools

• When I began looking at these two tools, I looked at Jekyll first, which is a static site generator. For an internet store owner with a few coding skills (okay I speak a bit of Perl), Jekyll’s pros and cons for me were:

1. Jekyll does not seem to do a default optimize for search engines. According to Brett Hardin it takes a bit of work to figure out how to get it to do the optimization.
2. Jekyll’s site does not tell me much about what I can do with the program.
3. With Jekyll, the ideal place to host it is on Github, which disables Jekyll’s plugins.
4. I would need to learn a whole lot more coding than I currently know before I could install or use Jekyll.
5. Jekyll says it is simple to use, but I find its instructions about as clear as mud and will probably need to take a course in programming in order to implement it properly.
6. I don’t seem to have found any pros about Jekyll.

• Next I looked at Madcap Flare, which is a great example of a help authoring tool and I got a bit excited because of its features and its descriptive web site:

1. Madcap Flare says it is content management, authoring and publishing software.
2. With Madcap Flare I can have topic-based authoring. This means I can create different versions of the same article, like a beginner version and an advanced version. I can create employee handbooks online for different types of employees.
3. With its project-based templates I can create an online Knowledge
   Base, e-Books, user guides, and slideshows.
4. Flare files are separate and can be opened in any editor, making changes easy to do. I can outsource the writing of my blogs to a writing company and they can upload directly to Flare with my password.
5. The contribution and review feature allows me to have oversight into the outsourced blogs so I can approve (or reject) them before they go live after they are uploaded.
6. The WYSIWYG editor is one of my favorite features. It lets me write without having to code everything into HTML. I can use regular programs like Microsoft Word and I don’t have to use my HTML editor.
7. Madcap Flare also offers a demo tailored to my needs.

Conclusions

After reviewing these two types of programs, I am definitely leaning toward implementing the help authoring tool over installing the static site generator. I am also thinking about getting some further training in coding so that I can be able to implement other technology on my site.

With the help authoring tool I can easily create help files that integrate into my site’s shopping cart, and I can create my blog, update it, and then take it to the search engines so that it can bring more traffic to my site.