Welcome to this beginning to blogging. Blogging is a very helpful marketing tool and the cost is nominal. With a blog, you can make a safe and sound place and build trust, branding and position yourself, build your list and build equity with network marketing articles.

Let's discuss each of these benefits in more detail.

Top 4 Benefits of Producing a Blog

• Provide "Safe" Place and Build Trust

So what do I mean by a "safe" place. It is a home where they (your target market) can:

• Read valuable content

• Read the "about me" and get to know more about you

• See pictures of you and/or your family

• Get a sense of who you are before filling out their contact information for your lead capture

Not to say you won't use your lead capture in your marketing. This is just a place for people who are riding the fence can get to know you better. Now you are building trust.

• Branding and Position

• Branding is basically the image that you put out to the market. It is the difference between looking professional and looking like a leader, knowing what you are doing and having a real business v.s. looking like you don't know what you are doing to put it nicely. Using your name as your blog domain name will brand you and not a company.Branding is the Key!

• Position yourself as an expert to your market. Think about going to a bookstore and you see people's reaction to the authors of books. They typically view those authors as experts. If you wrote a book then you must be an expert on that topic. That is our cultural assumption.It is pretty much the same when you land on a very good blog. Not just your average everyday blog, but when you land on a blog that really gets your attention, then it is just like reading a good book in term of respect for the author.

• Build Your List

Owning you own blog will amplify your list building efforts. This is because you are:

• providing a "safe" place and building trust

• possess a great professional branding and positioned yourself as an expert

You will get more leads into your list, particularly with social networking. Social networking sites like facebook and twitter, for example, you do not want to send people directly to your lead capture page. It is going to be more effective to send people to your blog first (a "safe" place, build trust and show what kind of a leader you are).

You will show your awesome web presence; and, they will want to join your list.

• Build Equity

When you provide all this content to your website and it builds up over time, let's say a post a week or even a post a day, you will have hundreds of posts on your blog that are valuable for people to read. This is a asset for you. More people will want to join your list and you can then monetize that list.

Your blog will be generating traffic, home based business leads, and have good google ranking. It is going to be a very real piece of virtual real estate that you own and it is going to provide benefits for your work from home company.

There are many sites that you can choose from to host your blog. However, there are precautions. You will need to set aside a small budge (no more than $10/month) for hosting of your blog.

You may think -- I'll just use a free service such as Blogger or WordPress. The problems with these types of free sites is that you do not own your blog. If for any reason these sites shuts down for good, you will lose all your content.

For a small budget, you can get your site hosted through GoDaddy or Hostgator. This will ensure that you own your own blog and if you chose to change hosting company, you will have access to all the files to be able to transfer to your new hosting site.

There are additional benefits for owning your own blog; however, I want to keep this as simple as possible. Master this concept and watch your traffic explode and your list increase.