With blogging being one of the hottest trends on the internet, why not add a blog to your website? A Blog is a weB Log, see the derivation for Blog? Blogs are a style of website that you can easily post your thoughts, ideas, comments or anything you want to write about any topic you feel compelled to write about and you nedd not know anything about website design and HTML to do it! Perhaps you want to blog about the latest and greatest loan program you have to offer you clients. Or maybe about the weeks trend in interest rates. Or even a tip of the day for mortgage borrowers.
You can setup a blog on a remote site like
http://www.blogger.com or you can host a blog on your own own domain. We've gone the on our own domain route thinking that the potential traffic our blog may bring will have a fallout effect on our overall website You can add links to your blog to allow visitors to easily access other pages of your site. Take a look at our
mortgage websites blog
Blogging is simple and inexpensive. Blogging software (essentially a complete website) is available for free from many suppliers we choose
WordPress who just released their latest version 1.5 about two weeks ago. You can also get free CSS style sheets that define how your blog will look including the color scheme. Have a look here for free theme style sheets:
http://www.alexking.org/index.php?co...ess/themes.php
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_The...oadable_Themes
The User interface of WordPress is simple, if you can use MS Word you'll be able to use and configure your blog.
Blogging software will require that your hosting account supports PHP and MySql databases, if these features aren't already included in your hosting account they should be avaialble for a modest upgrade. Once the blogging software is installed you can begin setting up the site. You can organize your articles by topic an build a simple menu structure to allow the topics to accessed by a click on the menu. You can have a category for rates, a category for programs, a category for residential, a category for commercial, a category for hard money lending... you get the idea!
Once you have a bit of content (articles) you can setup your blog so it pings (alerts) blog listing websites that you have fresh content every time you add a simple article. You can also visit
http://pingomatic.com/ to list your blog on 15 blog listing sites with one simple form. There are many more just search on Google or one of the other engines.
And your blog will offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so that anyone that wants to publish your articles can pick up a feed directly from your blog!
Today Blogging is the latest trend. If blogging continues to grow in strength and acceptance by the search engines you may not be able to do without a blog on your mortgage website tomorrow.
Mortgage Websites and Blogging - Why Not?
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