A great way to manage the content for your portal is by using a blog as the CMS (Content Management System). This makes it very easy to add and organize content because once your blog is installed you dont have to mess with any HTML!
There are several ways to create a blog, but a lot of it depends on the amount of time you want to spend setting it up/configuring it, and what types of customizations you want for your blog. Here are several places you can either get a blog, or the scripts to build one yourself.
Blogger
http://www.blogger.com - This one is the easiest to learn and use. You can get set up in no time flat and do not even need to know any HTML. If you're more advanced and know what you're doing, you can use their phenomenal knowledge base, learn how to add to the template they give you when you sign up and personalize it. Bonus it's really search engine friendly.
Word Press
http://www.wordpress.org - Word Press is considered to be the most popular blog script on the Internet. It has a candy store of goodies for features, and is definitely search engine friendly.
Some of the features are plugins so you can create an mp3 player on your site so you can use it for podcasting. There are also Technorati tags, photos, sitemaps, and an outstanding collection of templates so you can change the look/feel of your blog.
Plug-ins for polls, calendars, tagging, "send to a friend," and "print this," are unique and well appreciated additions to WordPress blogs. Optimizing your pages and posts with unique page titles, meta tags, and page names is easy and manageable using plug-ins.
Video sharing/photo sharing is easy with a blog. Some plug-ins let you put a photo feed from Flickr on your Web site. You can even embed videos from YouTube or IFilm, into a post. This makes your blog look like a multimedia site, and the good news is you didn't spend much on it.
Nucleus CMS
http://www.nucleuscms.org - If you want to create an ezine from your posts on your blog and send them as email, this is the system for you. And get this, you can even automate the process and send your ezine out whenever you want. Great for subscription lists.
Although this CMS does have a lot of plugins to customize your blog, there aren't many themes to choose from. You can design one of your own or customize an existing one.
A very user friendly CMS, its code is search engine compatible and you can even use plugins to create a Google sitemap, add Technorati tags and keywords. If you want to have more than one blog, you can also create multiple blogs with this CMS.
You can also create multiple blogs from one installation.
Drupal
http://www.drupal.org - This isn't a blogging system. It's a true CMS. With it you can create a community of blogs, or a complete community, including forums, group meetings, and more. There is a rich text editor so you can code your posts.
It doesn't matter what system you pick to create your blog, just so long as you are happy with it and it does what you need it do. Blogs build relationships with your customers, as well as disseminate your site content. Building, writing and maintaining a blog shows your expertise on your topic. How much better could that get?
SO SAY YOU CHOOSE A BLOG, HOW DO YOU GET TRAFFIC TO IT?
Try these ten hints:
1. Use your targeted keyword in your blog post titles
2. Optimize blog categories use keywords in the titles, choose multiple categories on each post (if appropriate), default to a general category that's relevant no matter what the content of your post is about
3. Syndicate your blog make subscribing to your blog easy. Use a free service and create a syndication area on your site. (Try Feedburner)
4. Offer RSS (conversion) to email free services include FeedBlitz, Zookoda and Squeet
5. Ping blog search engines using blog software like Movable Type or WordPress (automatically) or do it manually if you're using Blogger.com with Pingomatic.com etc.
6. Comment on other blogs. Your name is linked to the blog URL you enter.
7. Submit your blog to directories with categories for blogs.
8. Have targeted ads on your site no this doesn't drive traffic to your blog/site, but it will make you money (see Google Adsense/Adwords etc)
9. Grab the latest and hottest keywords relevant to your site. Place ads relevant to those key words on your site. Want a good tool to find relevant high pay off keywords? Try Keyword Elite.
http://www.seojuice.com
10. Leave track backs on other blogs that are directly relevant to your site/portal/blog. A TrackBack is used in a blog to show, around an entry, a list of other blogs that refer to it.
Well, you may have it all together now, but having the blog itself is no substitute for the content. Content is indeed king. And that content must be quality, or you will not retain visitors. It's just that simple.
To learn more about content management and how to make it as user friendly on you as possible click here:
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