Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Blogs Made Simple

By Jason Pearson

Blogs are web-logs that function as personal diaries to be shared with family, friends or a wider community. These cyber-journals can be accounts of a person's daily life or discussions about issues a person is passionate about. While many people have experience reading or writing blogs, business owners can use them to further their company's success.

The question for business owners is "How can I use this to further my business?". Use blogs to inform customers and prospects about your industry, and more specifically about exciting new events in your company. In other words, it is easier to update a blog regularly than to construct new web pages every time you have news to share.

The speed with which new knowledge about your products and services can be transmitted to people is the biggest benefit of blogging for business. In no time at all, you can start the ball rolling and turn prospects into customers, simply through blogging. One way to boost your conversion rate is by putting a link to your website in your blog, leading them right to solutions they might be seeking.

Another feature to consider for your business blog is affiliate marketing. Using pay-per-click ads, you sign up for a service that places ads on your web page. Every time a visitor to your page clicks on one of those ads, you earn money. The amount you make is predetermined by the company and the rules can change.

The money made from pay-per-clicks is sometimes simply used to pay for one's own ads to be placed on other blogs. The service you hire will be responsible for picking the blogs. You simply plug information into a predetermined template in most cases.

While blogs are not longer rated highly among search engine listings that doesn't mean people will not find your blog. Since people began taking advantage of the fact that blogs are updated much more regularly than websites, large search engines demoted them in rank. You will just have to be more creative in getting the word out.

Another danger in blogging for business is the tendency to write as one would speak. This can lead to a very unprofessional looking blog, which can turn customers off in an instant. Blog readers also have come to expect new content often, which means you may end up devoting more time than you had originally planned to writing updates.

If you have the time to spend on creating new content on a regular basis, consider blogging for your business. Keep your name in front of clients, prospects, and industry contacts with well-written posts. If you have useful knowledge to share, it will help people remember you as a reliable person in your industry, and possibly lead to more business.

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