BLOGGING?

If you haven't already, it's time to join the blogging revolution. On July 31, 2006, Technorati, the internet search engine focused on tracking the world of blogs, tracked the 50 millionth blog. It is reported that about 175,000 new weblogs are created each day. Wow!

Today's blogs don't just contain text, either. Blogs can contain photos, graphics, audio and video. And creating a blog has never been easier with many tools available to take you through the process of creating, hosting and maintaining your weblog.

Blogger.com is a free, automated weblog publishing tool. You can easily create a free account and their service takes you step by step through the process of creating and publishing your blog. Blogger is now owned by Google.

Wordpress.com is an easy, free, powerful way to start blogging.

Blogstream.com boasts creating a free blog is less than 5 minutes, with over 37,000 members and 17,700 blogs.

Just do a google or Yahoo search for free blogging and you'll find several to choose from.

There are also many ways to incorporate a blog into your existing website and adding a regularly updated, well executed blog is one of the best ingredients you need for site stickiness. Posts should be made frequently and your viewers can add comments, promoting a sense of community. A blog added to your already established, professional business site can be one of the best things you can do for your site. Talk to your web designer about adding a blog to your site! And if you are looking for a web designer to do this for you, August Affect Design can help (sorry, but I had to plug my own company, here).

Consider Your Content

To make blogging work for you, you have to carefully consider the content you're going to put out there. It should fit with the rest of your site subject. A stand-alone blog site can cover a wider range of topics, but to stand out among the rest, it should be narrowly focused around a single subject area. Your blog should provide information that's either useful or great writing that's very entertaining--or both!

Blogging Helps You to be Found

How does blogging help you to be found on the internet? A well constructed, often updated with good content can help your positioning in search engines such as Google and Yahoo!

"Blogs, if done properly, have a tremendous benefit vis-à-vis search engines," says Brad Fallon, president of SEO Research, a search engine marketing firm in Atlanta. "Search engines tend to prefer bigger Web sites, for several reasons beyond the scope. With blogs that allow comments, every new post and every new comment becomes an additional Web page filled with additional keywords to be picked up by the search engine spiders."

Blog software, like Wordpress, typically have built-in notification services that send out alerts when you post new content. With features such as "blogrolls" (a list of links to various blogs), "trackbacks", (notifies another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog), and "Pingbacks", (notifies the author of an article if you link to his article), helping you link to other blogs and helping them link to you.

Search engines look for and read content. The more content you have, the more it can read. A well-constructed site with good, clean code, great, frequently updated content, links into your site from other blogs and directories can all add to getting a lot of traffic to your site and getting your search engine rankings higher.

Interact with Your Customers

Through commenting features typically integrated with your blog, your prospects and customers can share their feedback, ideas and concerns with you.

You can incorporate feedback forms, polls, surveys and questionnaires into your site to gain valuable information about your customers. This feedback can be worth thousands of dollars to your business.

The Possibilities are Endless

Blogging can be fun and it can be used to save you time (and money) by keeping you and your customers in-touch and updated on new products and services. Blogging can enhance your credibility and help you achieve better marketing results.

Now, all you have to do is start one!

BLOGGING TIPS:

1. Blogging completely anonymously is not a good idea, because people reading your blog will feel disconnected from you and your writings- and with all of the bogus information on the internet today, gaining trust from you audience is a must if you want them to keep coming back. If privacy is a concern, consider blogging under only your first name, or for even more privacy, a pseudonym.

2. Update your blog often- posting new content regularly attracts readers and search engine spiders. If your blog contains fresh content on a regular basis, your readers will visit often. Search engines will visit and index a website or blog more often when it is updated constantly.

3. Allow and respond to comments. Allowing your readers to interact with your blog will boost it's popularity. Yes, there are spammers out there who are ready to pounce on your blog and post a spammy comment with a link to their website. But closing the comments can be equally as hurtful to your blog, and if you moderate your comments you can keep the trash outside, where it belongs.

4. Link building (trading links with other blogs with similar themes) is a pertinent factor in getting your blog seen. Search engines rank websites and blogs according to how many links there are pointing to them. Be sure you set up a link building program with each blog you maintain.

If you do these things, your odds of creating a successful blog will increase significantly. A good rule of thumb is to evaluate your blog from time to time, and ask yourself, "If I were browsing and came across this blog, would I want to read it or tell my friends about it?"