The online community is fast waking up to the power of blogs which have spread across the internet like wild fire. It seems everyone these days is talking about blogging. Whenever I go online to research about something, I find the results in the form of blog posts.
The term “blog” is short for “weblog”, which just means an online journal or “log”. You can write down your personal thoughts and notes, post articles you have written or keep track of interesting websites you find. The sky is the limit! A blog is something entirely of your own creation and you can use it to share your thoughts with the world, well….with anyone you can get to read it anyway!
Among the web 2.0. media, blogs are very popular as they are simple to use, easy to personalize and in most cases, free. Putting up a blog online does not require you to know a whole lot about bunch of html scripts.
Based on the 2007 data from Technorati (this is the information that I can find, that I think is reliable enough to post), there were 70 millions blogs (and growing) that were tracked by Technorati and about 120,000 blogs that were being created everyday. Now, these numbers are based on the 2007 data. Can you imagine what the numbers would be like today? I wouldn’t be surprised if its doubled!
If you’re new to the world of blogging, by now you should wonder WHY is the huge phenomenon? What’s so great about blogs anyways?
I can tell you why, from my personal opinion:
Freedom to express your opinion:
You can express your opinion openly and you just might be surprised by the number of people who would agree (or disagree) with you. Such communication channels also help build momentum for a particular line of thought.
Search Engine Friendly:
All search engines have a program known as a ’search engine bot’ which basically ’spiders’ or searches web sites and bring back the results they have to the search engines.
The ’search engine bots’ love content, especially pages with related keywords.
The more frequent you update your pages, the more frequent that search engines will spider your blog.
Awesome networking tool:
If you own a blog which has genuine exchange of ideas, it can evolve onto a good platform to network and grow your business. It is easier to impress potential customers with a strong and valid point of view on benefits and features of a product or service per say, rather than with a price quote.
Blogs can also be used to promote relationship building and trust with your readers (who can also turn into customers), as it allows you to interact with them by encouraging them to comment on your article or post. Your readers can refer your blog post to a friend (or friends). Imagine the traffic power that can be generated if each one of your reader make a referral.
For example, if you have 500 readers and each one makes a referral, that will be an additional 500 new subscribers, giving you a total of 1,000 subscribers/readers.
The referral process can be done by plain and simple emailing your post to their friends, or submitting your post to the top social bookmarking service such as Digg, Stumble Upon etc.
Excellent advertising and monetizing platform:
If there’s good number of traffic to your blog, you can make your blog as advertising platform for advertisers. With the never ending quest for businesses to find new advertising platforms which are both innovative and cost effective, it seems very reasonable for more and more companies to start incorporating putting advertising in blogs in their marketing campaign. Using your blog as an advertising platform is just one of the ways of monetizing your blog. The other ways to monetize your blog is through Google Adsense (I.e. Pay Per Click) and Affiliate Marketing. Blog monetization relies heavily on the number of traffic that goes to your blog has.
Measure public opinion on products and services:
Bloggers post comments at a fiery pace. It is not uncommon to see a couple of comments posted within a few minutes of the original post. The topic and title of the blog needs to be alluring enough to get such quick responses. Blogs thus become an excellent forum to gauge public opinion on products and services and even political and business events.
Now, the fact that I’ve chosen a blog as my online medium does not necessarily mean that I do not use the other social media like facebook, squidoo, youtube and so forth. In fact, I think, with good planning, using all of them systematically, can really boost your online presence and hence your marketing effort.
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