Using Blogs on Your Web Site

I have a cooking site that has begun to be a money maker. I added a blog a couple of years ago and have now developed a nice rhythm that lets me easily add to the site.

Basically, I blog as often as I can for the food blog, Chronicles of a Curious Cook (and now for a garden site I started as well). Periodically I take the best posts and turn them into more regular recipes or articles on the site. (I fear sometimes that Google might see it as duplicated content if I just cut and paste so I try to rewrite a bit.)

When I add them to the site, I manually update the "latest articles and recipes" section on the home page, since my site is not database-driven. When it's time for a newsletter, I look at the old one and see the last recipe I included and then go forward from there and pick my favorite posts, trying to give a variety of recipes (not all main dishes, for example) and one article. It means it only takes me an hour or less to get out a newsletter if I've done all the up-front work already.

The blogging I tend to do after dinner, which fits well for a food blog since what I just cooked is fresh in my mind. It almost doesn't seem like work since the blog is pretty casual. But of course, you do start to feel a bit of pressure to keep it fresh.

If you've been hesitant to start up a blog, I say jump into it. Revenue magazine has a good article on blogging for business this month. A couple of weeks or so ago I was down at an IABC lunch and heard a good talk on blogs from a PR perspective by Jennifer Stephens, Senior Director of Communications at Yahoo! Inc. I've not been involved in corporate blogs but I like the idea.