What You Must Know About Blogs

Apart from the chat rooms, instant messengers and e-mails created for communication and dialogue, beyond that turf are the emerging innovations that help men build opportunities for community interaction. There has been a need for a personalized and human face aspect of building online communities, and it is slowly changing the technological landscape of the Internet.

Blogs are the newest gift of Internet technology to people all over the world. These are updated posts, cropped up entries and personalized life snippets of mundane or bizarre natures. For most, a "blog" is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal meant to be shared in an online community. Blog sites are places where bloggers can write almost anything; his thoughts, feelings, share photos, special occasions, experiences, comments on issues, and so on. It is somewhat of an online diary with videos, links, documents, newsletters and opinions on just about any topic you are interested in.

Blogs were made to welcome the insights and opinions of all, and therefore, should not be written to sound intimidating and too formal. These kinds of blogs tend to put off more readers than it attracts. Whenever you're blogging, a conversational tone would be an ideal approach to reach your target audience.

Blogging is all about individuals reaching out to each other, and having one of your own has its own set of benefits:

Freedom of Expression- If you want people to hear you out and give their own opinions; this could quite possibly be the best way to create a line of communication;

Networking at its best- Having a blog is a good platform for exchanging genuine ideas from consumers to you as marketer of certain products you might be promoting. Sound opinions and point-of-view discussion is much better than just showing a price quote;

Excellent advertising platform- Blogging is the new way to advertise products, a much-needed change from the traditional advertising methods, and the cost is minimal.

Gauging public opinion on products and services- The key is nice, catchy titles with new ideas presented throughout your content. This is an assurance of quick and repeated responses from your viewers. Blogs have become an excellent place for the exchange of ideas between the sellers and consumers. Excellent for measuring public opinion regarding services and products, blogs are paving the way to the future of advertising.

Useful tools for internal communication- This will help your company build a knowledge-based community of employees. It's also great for harnessing employee relations and identifying human resource issues in before-hand.

Search engine optimization (SEO) - Will help your blogs be seen by as many people as you wish. This is very good exposure for your products or services, and they're also a great tool to get your website up and through the ranks quicker than anything else I can imagine, besides PPC of course - but that's a whole other story! :)

Many blog hosting services are available all around the Internet. But the basic question is which one of the services will be the best to start off your business blog program? Business people are usually clueless to recent technological advances, which would help them maximize their marketing potential. For these beginners, it is best to study first the services offered by free blog hosts. An ineffective business blogging program can quite possibly damage all marketing opportunities, instead of enriching them.

There are a variety of choices when it comes to creating your own blog, here are the main ones:

1. Host a blog on your own website/server

2. Use a free host to put your blog up

3. Have someone else do all the work for you, at your expense

Corporate blogs should have the latest blogging features available; if not, this will prevent them from maximizing their marketing, public relations and SEO potential.

Keep in mind that blogs should have the following basic essentials, without them, your business won't get too far:

COMMENTS- Welcoming comments on your blog provides opportunity for dialogue. In business blogs, they are a good customer feedback tool. This helps develop better customer relations based on loyalty and trust. Blogging is a truly innovative way to converse with your customers.

TRACKBACK- This helps in maximizing company and product exposure. Through this service, consumers can get back to you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of having to locate you. If your blog is popular in a specific online community, chances are links going back to your blog site are everywhere online, either on other blog sites or even regular websites.

CATEGORIES AND TAGS- These both help in classifying blog searches for ease of navigation and on-site search. Categories act as directories because it classifies posts by subject matter, such as business, education, e-commerce, auctions, etc. Tags help in the classification of your blog, especially in the blog search engine Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs about certain topics of interest by just clicking the tags.

RSS FEED- Really Simple Syndication is the feed from your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected through the various newsreaders programs spread out all over the world.

If your goal is to establish a business blogging system, consider options that are made available by the free hosting companies before anything else. Free blog hosting services are popular but they are more appropriate for individual online journals. Paid blog hosting services offer more benefits with an out-of-pocket expense, or you can have your own hosting account set up with your own blogs. You may want to check out some blogs that use the free hosts first, then read and examine their layouts and designs. Another important thing to consider is reliable technical support, which is also a critical part in choosing a blog host for your business.

After, choosing the blog host, you should be ready to plan the design and structure of the blog, here are a few basic steps:

1.) Create a style that matches the needs of your target audience;

2.) Establish an open, credible tone, try not to be too formal;

3.) Schedule weekly updates of your blog, ideally, a few times a week should suffice;

4.) Include links of other website and blogs in your target niche;

5.) Blog posts should written in the "first person" perspective;

6.) Focus on the business blog's objectives and goals;

7.) Maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.

The look, style, and design of your blog reflect you and your company. So make a great first impression, and don't ever forget - CONTENT IS KING!