Advertising is expensive and it does a poor job of helping you develop a relationship with your market. If you advertise on Treehugger.com, even if you get a client or two, their primary relationship and bandwidth of loyalty still remains with Treehugger.com
Much like restaurant owners buying the land their eatery is sitting on, you'll greatly reduce you advertising spending and greatly increase the rapport you have with your market base if you simply own the blog that you advertise on.
So, now that you've decided to reroute your ad dollars into creating your own blog, which is best?
Well, there are several strong networks to consider:
1. Blogger
2. Wordpress
3. Tumblr
4. Posterous
5. More...
But let's address these in a the next blog post. There's a bigger picture to address first. Do you even want to pay bloggers or spend your own time generating blog post content to fill your blog? If no, you have a choice. All of the above requires that you pay writers or you have to write articles for yourself. Your alternative is to host a site where your users can submit their own mini posts.
Only a few organizations have chosen to adopt the User-Generated-Content model. But some of those who have are wildly successful. Take a look at multimillion dollar site http://digg.com and http://foodspotting.com/
The extra bonuses of hosting a user-generated-content site is that you are not responsible for any of the copyright infringement issues. Youtube just won that battle against Viacomm. Now the Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that your users cannot get you into a lawsuit. But the best part is, they do all the hard work of creating content.
Here's a feature by feature comparison:
| CMS/Features |
PLIGG (Digg Style CMS) |
Wordpress |
| WYSIWYG Editor |
No |
Yes |
| Requirement for Design Modification |
HTML; PHP |
HTML; PHP |
| Legal Copyright Liability |
No |
Yes |
| Admin Level Simple Widget Modification |
Yes |
Yes |
| Allows User Generated Content |
Yes |
No |
| Allows Users Moderator Privileges |
Yes |
Yes |
| Allows Public Voting Up Popular Topics |
Yes |
No |
| Allows Public to Choose Home Page Featured Posts |
Yes |
No |
| Allows Multi Paragraph Long Form Blog Posting |
No |
Yes |
| Guests to Post Automatically |
Yes |
No |
| Allows Other Guests to Flag and Hide Other Guest Posts |
Yes |
No |
| Allows Public Comments |
Yes |
Yes |
| Google Friendly |
Yes |
Depends of Theme Used |
So that was the good news. The bad news still applies for both. Even if you build it, they will not come. It's much easier to build readership traffic by assuming all the blogging production and copyright liability than by asking people to submit their stories to a site that has no traffic.
But there are ways to grow both -- rapidly. Contact me for help building your web branding and capturing your target market online. Say hello at 310 598 1606 and http://twitter.com/journik - Bob Wan Qi Kim
How to Get Into the News Media and Pull Big Bloggers Like Guy Kawasaki With 
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