The Advantages of Blogging
by Gene Muchanski
Executive Director, Dive Industry Association, Inc.

I’ve been blogging since July 28, 2013 and it has proven to be one of the best business decisions I ever made.  Blogging is a term we use for “Posting on the Internet” and it is really easy.   You simply write your post (your article) and click the “Publish” button to publish your post to the internet.   It can also be posted to social media pages.  It’s a way to create content that will reside on a landing page with its own URL address link so people can access it as needed.  I just finished reading the first blog I publish in 2013.

I want to introduce this article on blogging as the first step the Dive Industry Association is using to unify the diving industry.  This article will become a part of our “White Paper” on Unifying The Diving Industry.  I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of creating a blog post because I have references listed at the end of this article that show you how to do all that.  Let me just tell you why I blog and why I think you should too.

All Diving companies should be blogging because it’s easy and cost effective.  We all have a story to tell in our industry and using a software platform that can include texts and images, reach countless people on the internet and is free to use is just the ticket we need.

Dive Industry Association uses the free software program provided by WordPress.  When you decide to use WordPress, you have the option of picking a domain name or providing one that you already own.  You also can have it hosted by your current website host or WordPress will host it for free.  We chose the free hosting and picked the name www.diveindustrynews.wordpress.com

The next few steps were really easy.  I bought the book “WordPress For Dummies” by Lisa Sabin-Wilson and did my homework. (Lisa’s a Scuba Diver, by the way.)  Getting up and running on WordPress was very easy.  Even for an Old Dog, learning new tricks.  We chose a Theme for the Website and started to load it with Static Pages like; Home, About, Our Vision, Dive Directory, Show & Events, etc.  We even added static pages (children pages) to the main “Parents” pages.  Pages are static because they don’t move around like posts and stay in the place you put them.

Within minutes we were ready to start blogging.  Our first post was so simple I was amazed.  You click “New Post” and start typing.  You can add images and hotlinks for websites and e-mail addresses.  When you are done you click “Publish” and WordPress assigns a URL to it and publishes your post to the internet and lists it as the first article on your Home Page.  We also learned how to automatically publish our posts to our social media pages on Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In.

What Blogging has allowed us to do is create a Weekly Dive News column for the Association, using Constant Contact.  We now have a way to create a post on WordPress, with its own URL that we could link to in our Constant Contact Weekly Dive News Campaign.  It opened up a way to teach our Members how to create their own press releases on their own blog and send us the URL link.   In the old days, if you sent an email to 1,800 Dealers you reached 1,800 people.  Now if you show each Dealer how to e-mail your URL Link to their customers (On average, each Dealer has 5,000 customers), you are now reaching 9 Million people instead of 1,800 people with that press release !!!  Now that’s what I call going viral.

A great thing about WordPress Blog / Websites is that people can subscribe to, or follow them for free.   That’s what DIA wants the industry to do with our blog.  If you go to www.diveindustrynews.wordpress.com you can sign up to follow our blogs posts.  When we post an Editorial or an article about the diving industry you will get an e-mail message saying we wrote a new article that you could go to and read.  That is the best way to stay in touch with our dive industry reporting.  If the new post (article) does not interest you, simply delete the e-mail.

WordPress is now a permanent part of our DIA Business Tool Box.  Subscribe to our Blog today and we will bring you more tools like this to grow your business and unify the industry.

Editor’s Note:  There are many new updated books, videos and training for WordPress users; WordPress for Beginners 2018, WordPress All-In-One For Dummies Edition 8, etc.  WordPress is an interesting company.

REFERENCES WE USED:

WordPress
Date Launched: November 21, 2005
www.wordpress.com
www.wordpress.org

WordPress For Dummies
3rd Edition – Copyright 2010
by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
(check for latest edition)

WordPress All-In-One For Dummies
2nd Edition – Copyright 2013
by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
(check for latest edition)