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Terri from By America For America posted a very good comment yesterday asking about, or rather, being confused about whether she should start a blog or build a web site.

What is best?

A blog and the individual posts get indexed much faster than a web site, but in many situations a web site is much better. So what should you do, build a blog or website? The answer of course is yes, you should.

What?

Both blogs and web sites both have their place and many times you will want to have a blog to highlight and feature things you have on your web site. The criteria I use to start a blog rather than a web site is to think about what I’m trying to accomplish. The most basic question is, do you want to carry on a conversation with your visitors or do you want to show products and explain what they do in the hope that your visitor will trust you enough to make a purchase or click through to your affiliate offer.

If your main objective is to sell or represent products through an affiliate program, then a web site is probably the way you want to go. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it is much easier to organize and navigate through a web site than it is through a blog. Many news and magazine type WordPress themes are changing this somewhat, but I wouldn’t want to try to organize my discount computers web site into a WordPress blog. There are just too many pages and I want visitors to the site to be able to go to the main page to see nearly everything featured on the site.

However, if you were trying to feature something like interesting and unique eBay auctions or keep a group of visitors informed of the latest deals in a particular niche, then a blog would be a great tool for that. In fact Buy.com has a great affiliate program that can help you do that very thing. Plus they send out weekly or every other week emails announcing the very latest deals. Those are perfect to blog about because you can explain the features of the product and mention how long the deal is for, be it a week, 2 weeks, a month or whatever. If your visitor found your blog via an expired deal, they are more likely to vist your home page and see what other deals you have going. This is perfect for a blog, not so perfect for a site when you have to update it constantly.

Many times a blog can complement a web site as well. We don’t do our healthy diet podcast very often any longer, but we do use the blog it originates from to update readers to new recipes and info on our healthy diet website. Terri could do the same by building a web site that features only American made products and then blog about each product page she features on her web site.

That’s what I do, but Terri also asked in her comments if other readers have a solution to the blog or web site issue, so please comment on your criteria for using either and let’s help Terri, and the rest of us, figure this out.

Alan