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The following is a transcript of a free podcast interview with Joel Williams, the BlogTech Guy interviewed by Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn (Nov 2009)

.Click here to access the free audio. The Creative Penn podcast has over 50 free audio interviewson writing, publishing options, internet marketing andpromotion for your book. It is aimed at authors, writers andpeople interested in books and publishing.You can see the fullbacklist of podcasts by clicking here. You can also Click here to subscribe on iTunes. Hi everyone. This is Joanna Penn for the Creative Penn podcast andtoday

I’m interviewing

Joel Williams.Joel is known as the Blog Tech Guy and is an expert on implementing and improving WordPress blogs. He is my technicalguru and I get so many questions about the more technical side of blogging, I thought an interview would help many people. So,welcome Joel.JW: Thank you.JP:

It’s great to have you on the show.

So, maybe you could start by telling us a bitabout yourself and about your business.

JW: Sure

. I’ve been doing blogging probably ten years now. It was probably before it

was actually called blogging in the old days, probably ninety nine I think I started,and so obviously technology moves on and evolves really quickly. I ended upsetting up a lot of blogs and web sites for friends and family and various people.So, about eighteen months ago really, when I just started my business, which isBlogTechGuy,I started setting up web sites for people and small businesses, andfixing web sites, customising web sites, just basically all the things people want todo to get an online presence. So

as I say it’s about eighteen months I started. I’ve

got just over two hundred clients now, I was actually just looking before this call,and on over five hundred different projects. It keeps me out of trouble!JP:

[Laughs] And I know you’re very busy, but it’s great to find someone you cantrust, and there’s so many blogging experts out there these days aren’t there? So,

t’s just get back to basics because I do get many questions about this. So,

what is a blog specifically and why should authors have one?

JW: There are various ways to describe it. I like to think of it just as another means of communication really, another way of promoting your services or what you do or

your brand just out to people. It’s another marketing channel. I mean a blog

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reall

y it’s just a web site.

People often get confused between thinking blogsare something completely different to a normal web site when in fact really

they’re just a web site.

It’s just blogs traditionally have content on the homepage in chronological order so you post an update of what you’ve been doing or a new product or whatever

and that appears at the top of your web site. And so, it probably started off in the

personal world of people’s hobbies or what people have been doing or posting

photographs, which is how I got started in it, and then it evolved into more of abusiness tool.I mean

authors are in a perfect position for blogging really as they’re already

writers.

They already know how to write, they probably already have lots of ideas or lots of content they can use. They might even have audiences already,p

eople who want to go and see what they’re doing and it’s a good way of getting

more interaction and more involved with your audience. You can speak to thempersonally, you can get ideas from them.

I’ve seen it on web sites where people

post their book ideas or the first chapter and get feedback and see what peoplethink. So, I mean a blog is just a web site, is the short answer to that question.JP:

You say that but some people when they’re told,

as an author you should have aweb site, they then get quoted like ten, twenty thousand dollars to create a staticweb site page.

Why is the static web site page gone now, and why is a blogstyle web site more important?

JW: There are a few reasons really. One is the cost and the ease of entry of bloggingand the WordPress software I use, which is wordpress.org,and that can be confused with wordpress.com

which I’ll probably talk about later. But the

software is actually free and you can install it on your hosting account, your webhost, which is just a computer, just somewhere your web site has to be stored.

So, it’s just free to get started really if you know how to do it and it has a veryeasy way of updating. So, it’s almost like using Word or a word

processing tool, just writing your content, formatting it, pressing publish. In the old days you hadto know HTML or had to know some sort of programming language. HTML was just really a formatting language but you had to know how to write different codeto write a bigger headline or put the code into red or add a picture you had toknow how to code.And then you had to know how to publish it on your web site,how to upload it. There was lots of complications with that and WordPress, andsome other blogging softwares have really simplified the whole process so peoplecan get started a lot easier and a lot more quickly.

There’s great benefits from using WordPress as well besides the fact that it’s a lot

easier to write. I mean the one you were talking about saying the static web sites,

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the old fashioned web sites are static so when your search engines, Google orBing, you want to be found in those search engines. But in the old static web siteyou had to wait for those search engines to come and visit you so you used tohave to put your content on there. With something like Yahoo you could submityour web site and wait for them to come and visit you but the blogs and a lot of different blogging software what happens is

when you post an update or youwrite your article or post it, it actually goes out and tells the search engines

,this is the url, this is where my new article is and please add me to your index.

So, I mean I’ve literally seen it with client

s, within ten minutes they appeared in

their search results after publishing a post and that’s just completely different to

what it was even maybe five years ago when you used to have to sit there andwait and see if the search engines indexed you.

So, that’s one of the big

advantages. I mean the big two advantages are the search engine advantage thereand the fact that you get this visual editor. You can easily make a text bold ormake it larger or change the colour of it rather than having to know coding orHTML.JP: And I

’

ll just pick up on that because although

I say you’re my tech gu

y, but weonly email occasionally a couple of times during the year

. I do my web sitemyself, I do my blog myself, I post videos, pictures, I move small thingsaround

and then I call you if I need something bigger done. And I think that’s

what the massive difference is between a blog and old style static site, is that you

don’t have to pay for a webmaster to change every single s

mall thing.

And I justwant the listeners to really grasp that, because it kind of changes theparadigm of having a web presence because it is so much cheaper. So, that is just fantastic.

JW:

Yeah, I’m stuck here nodding along naturally. It’s a very, ver

y good point. I

mean what we do together it’s more the large changes, changing colours of a

whole section or moving things around or

…

JP: The whole thing.JW:

Yeah. So, the actual day to day thing, it’s completely down to someone whodoesn’t re

ally need much technical knowledge. It helps if they have some, if they

want to do certain things but on a day to day basis you don’t really need any at all.

JP: No, exactly and I also wanted to go back on the search engine stuff because itseems that search engines are moving from like the old style static things to amore real time search and also video in search. So,

what do you think aboutthat? Is search engine optimization changing?

JW: Yeah. I mean its changing every

day and you’re kind

of a little foolish if you tryand follow it on a day to day basis because it changes so much and all these things