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Home / Internet / Blogging
Got Blog?
By:Dawn Wentworth
In 1999 I asked my friends and colleagues if they blogged. The responses I received ranged from odd looks to questions about the blogging practice. The end results of my findings was “Blog” was a new term and not highly recognized. That was then, a half million blog users ago.
Blogs have become and I do believe will continue into their plight of greatness for sometime, until a new technology slides into place. For the time being, blogs are a great way to define who you are to your visitors and provide dynamic content that the search engines go nuts over.
Clogged email boxes and spam eaters have taken a dramatic effect on the once powerful email marketing tool. As email marketing loses its effect, marketers and small businesses are seeking ways to fulfill this lost art of communication between staff and customers. Blogging could be that much needed answer for you.
SO what is a blog?
Blogs are a time and date stamped, easy to search, web based journal or self publishing tool. Blogs can have a corporate style, but in most cases are written by one person in a relaxed, candid atmosphere. True personality usually shines threw in the opinions of the blog writer. You do not have to be a writer to produce a blog. Even so, many blogs owners become recognized as small journalists, as the writer speaks their mind or offers self analyzed materials on their preferred subject matters.
You may think at this point, that a blog does not sound like a business tool.
Let’s take blogging into a business approach and see how we can benefit.
Problem:
Many marketing methods and advertising spiels fall on blind eyes and deaf ears across the net today with such a medium we have created where advertising is abundant and often shoved at us in every direction.
Solution:
Visitors will come to your blog of their free will to read your newest content of choice, giving you a higher ratio of targeted visits.
Problem:
Email marketing is losing ground. Overflowing email inboxes and spam filters that don’t deliver your ezine.
Solution:
Using your blog as a web based area for your product and service announcements and updates. When someone subscribes to your blog or RSS feed, they will receive automatic updates that include the headline, summery and URL of your new entries.
Bonus:
Email gets deleted … Blogs get indexed in search engines!
Problem:
Internet marketing can be a non-personal medium, gaining trust becomes increasingly harder and more important to gain new customers.
Solution:
Blogging can give your visitors, existing and potential customers a great area to gain insight about the face you present to the world. If you’re a small business owner to a large corporate business, you can benefit by giving your company or web site personality via blog.
Now let’s take a look at blogs from another angle. Rss and/or live feed. You may be thinking, do I Really Need to Know About Rss?
Yes, but we are not going to give a full history of RSS here. What you need to know is that RSS is the “code” that underlies a blog. It includes a headline, a short summery of the entry and the URL of the page that the new story has been posted to. In order for users to subscribe to RSS feeds they will need to download a news aggregator. There are many available for free, we recommend NewsGator http://www.newsgator.com for its ease of use within Microsoft Outlook.
Visitors and other websites can syndicate your RSS feeds to their desktop, their email, newsreaders and on their own websites. Talk about getting the word around! Submitting your RSS feed, can get you listed in hundreds of new emerging RSS feed directories. Of course this will bring traffic to see what your feed is about to those looking to syndicate them to their own sites or readers. Also creating more links pointing to your site.
Let me touch on one of the most important features of a blog. Search engines love them. Most bots including google will visit and reindex blog pages daily. Yahoo will index your RSS free and quickly.
There are many ways and places you can begin your blogging journey. You should first decide if you want to house the blog on your site or let other sites manage your blog system. For this we recommend www.blogger.com, now owned by Google. The google toolbar has a one click Blog This button that can make blogging quick and painless. You can set the blogger.com blog files to ftp to your host for you so that your files are housed on your server. There are many blog services online today, and there are many free and low cost scripts that you can easily run your own blog from your site without the need of any other service provider.
If you would like to find out more about blogs and blog services we invite you to visit our resource section at http://www.masteradvertising.com.
We hope to provide many learning materials and resources for the online promoter using blogs and rss feeds for the online advertising medium.
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Article keywords: free advertising, free marketing, free promotion, free traffic, free resources
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com
About The Author
Dawn Wentworth has been providing insight to site promotion sense 1994. You can find her Marketing Resource Blog at blog.masteradvertising.com
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| Top Blogging Articles |
- 1). 5 ways to increase traffic to your blog By : Gasper Novak
Blogs are a very popular ways of promoting your product or service. They are easy to install, easy to administer and easy to update. And search engines love them too. But what is a blog without traffic?Exactly. Here are five quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and start seeing those big sales.
1.Build a list of blog services to ping
There are a lot of blog services you can ping.
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- 2). BLOGS! What They Are... And WHY They're Becoming A POWER TOOL For Internet Marketers By : styles98
BLOGS! What a crazy name for the "NEWEST" Internet marketing trend to hit the Internet.
But, I like it.
It makes this new form of communication kind of mysterious in a way, though, BLOGS have been around for quite some time and only recently have been recognized as a VERY valuable asset to Internet marketers.
Recently, I was visiting some Internet marketing related Forums and noticed many of the threads having similar "Subjects" saying.
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- 3). Blogging Going Forward By : V Scanlon
Blogging is your online diary of events, thoughts or for the business person a reserve of articles and comments directed toward your business. That definition is just the beginning of what blogging is becoming -- it's becoming much more.
Since Google Adsense has allowed Google Ads to occupy a place on your blog -- additional revenue, is at your disposal.
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- 4). Teens And Blogs - Internet Safety Wake-Up Call By : Rose DesRochers
In November of 2005, I read that a Roman Catholic high school in Sparta had ordered its students to remove personal blogs from the Internet, in the name of protecting them from cyberpredators. Which brings me to an important question, just how can you keep your child safe online?
The Internet is a "gateway" which leads the adult predator to your child.
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- 5). Handy-Dandy Guide To Automatically Reading Blogs By : Ian Griffin
I keep coming across people who are not familiar with RSS and how it can simplify your life if you’d like to keep current with a range of blogs.
When you open a morning newspaper you read stories from around the world assembled by editors from hundreds of sources (wire services, reporters). The paper prints the same news for every reader - you choose which stories to read.
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- 6). Get Ranked With Your Blog! By : Article Search
If you are currently frustrated with getting your website indexed let alone ranked you may find this article extremely useful. What we are about to share with you, won’t cost you a cent and it will get your site indexed if not ranked, a lot quicker than simply submitting your site to the major directories alone.
People use Blogs for all sorts of reasons, to include private thoughts, reminders, and advertising or simply to write something for the sake of writing.
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- 7). Blogs-Why Do People Blog? By : CD Mohatta
Blogs are becoming very popular. The rate at which the numbers are increasing is mind-boggling. Why is this happening? Why every body wants to create a blog? Who else will read that blog? If everyone is busy writing his/her blog why and when will they get time to search for other blogs and read them? Because of this over population and density, will blogging become another failure? Is it a fad, which will pass away? Let us examine?
Why do people blog? Most of the people write blogs to express themselves.
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- 10). The Future On SEO For Bloggers! By : Eddie SanMarco
You write a blog religiously every day or so. You provide informative, interesting content for your loyal readers. You’ve even got a couple of affiliate links in there, too. But is this enough to get great search engine results for your efforts?
Probably not. Sure, you’ll get listed with the search engines easily. But without a top twenty listing at one of the majors (Google, Yahoo! or MSN), you won’t have traffic, literally, banging down your door.
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- 2). Blog Design By : Mitch Ripke
It is great that the phrase blog floats around the net day in and day out, but what if you have no idea what a blog really is? Is this going to be helpful to your web site? No, not really. Here we will offer the skinny on the phrase blog, and you can decide for yourself if it may or may not be useful in your web pages. This way you will not be wasting your time on something you may not need, and the energy can be put to something you find more useful for yourself.
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- 3). Is Blogging Only For Money? By : CD Mohatta
When one gives a quick look at the articles written on blogging, the common theme seems to be making money from blogging. The authors invariably talk about adsense and how we can make money from blogs. Is blogging only for making money? Did blogs begin with that idea? Are we losing the direction somewhere?
A blog gives an opportunity to everyone to express himself/herself on the Internet.
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- 4). 10 Essential Blogging Tools By : John Jantsch
Copyright 2006 John Jantsch
So, you finally decided to take the blog leap. You’ve heard all about the marketing and search benefits so you stepped up to the plate and signed up for a TypePad, MovableType or WordPress blog software package and now you’re a blogger.
Okay, now what? Add the ten essential blogging tools listed below and you will also be well on your way to creating and promoting a blog that is a powerful marketing tool.
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- 5). The Future On SEO For Bloggers! By : Eddie SanMarco
You write a blog religiously every day or so. You provide informative, interesting content for your loyal readers. You’ve even got a couple of affiliate links in there, too. But is this enough to get great search engine results for your efforts?
Probably not. Sure, you’ll get listed with the search engines easily. But without a top twenty listing at one of the majors (Google, Yahoo! or MSN), you won’t have traffic, literally, banging down your door.
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- 6). How blogging can help your Search Engine Marketing By : Jahn
It is hardly believable when someone says they have not heard of blogging now-a-days. The continued rise of blogging and its importance in search engine marketing has been further reinforced by Google’s acquisition of a major blog tool. Google being the mother of all search engines, this step certainly proves a point in the direction the blogs are going.
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- 7). 7 Reasons You Need To Blog For Your Business By : Deanna Mascle
If you are not blogging for your business then you should be. While many people simply dismiss blogging because of its description as a web diary they are missing a lot of traffic and revenue generating opportunities every day. Are you one of those missing out?
In truth blogs are much more than a simple web diary. They are actually a content management system and/or an easy web site template.
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- 9). Are you Blogging Effectively? By : Joseph Pratt
Perhaps “blogging” isn’t such a graceful word. For me, personally, it sounds like a worded drudgery the way cereals can be soggy, skies can be foggy, and the way minds can be groggy. But for now, it’s too late to rename this shortened word for web-logging. Widespread blogging is nevertheless one of the most engaging Internet developments of the past few years.
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Currently there are over 30 million blogs on the internet and thousands more being created each week. Assuming ownership of one blog per person, that’s a minimum of 30 million people slinging around their personal opinions on all that exists under the sun. This is a good thing. The free exchange of thoughts and ideas is what prevents the world from becoming a stagnant pool of dictatorship with the appropriate green scum floating on top.
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