How To Communicate Using A Business Blog

A blog (short for “web log”) is a web-based diary that represents frequently updated web site about any given topics in reverse chronological order. Several years ago, back in 2001. blogs were still a “buzz word” and now they are mainstream. Blogs are popular because blogger services offer content management system (CMS) so that even if you are without any technical knowledge you will be able to have your own site and to make posts.

Blogs are hot topic. There is even a name for the blogging community called a blogosphere. Blogs were one of the most read news sources about politics after September 11th and the war in Iraq. Many people read several political blogs because they are un-censored.

According to research made by Pew Internet & American Life Project more than 50 million Internet users read blogs regularly, every day 12,000 new blogs has been created and there are more than 10,000 blog updates per hour! You can see that blogs have quite a big importance.

All major Internet players have their own blog services. Google has Blogger, Microsoft has MSN Spaces and Yahoo has a service called Yahoo 360°. Also, the most famous computer magazine PC Magazine in their traditional election for “People of the Year” for 2004. chose founders of Blogger.com and Six Apart.

To start blogging you will need a blog service or application. There are several good free and fee-based blog software. In some of the next articles we will write in more details about blog software. In this article we will only make several recommendations. Good free services for blogging are Blogger (www.blogger.com), b2Evolution (www.b2evolution.net), NucleusCMS (www.nucleuscms.org), WordPress (www.wordpress.org). The most popular fee-based services are Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) and TypePad (www.typepad.com).

Business blogging

Business blogging can be very useful in establishing one company or individual as an expert in their industry. There are more and more business blogs written by high-level executives like marketing gurus Tom Peters and Seth Godin, Jonathan Schwarz COO of Sun Microsystems, Bob Lutz VP of General Motors, Bob Parsons President of GoDaddy.com, Alan Meckler CEO of internet.com and many more…

Blogs written by high-level executives are often very popular and their posts often get many comments from their readers. Business blogging is a better way to communicate than using classic Press Releases. People like to read posts from humans and not from some faceless entities like corporations.

If you want to become a business blogger you have to decide what will be your niche or target area. You have to take your business blogging seriously because your prospects and clients form opinion about you and your company reading your blog. You have to be aware that you will have to spend at least an hour per day to keep your content up-to-date and to have repeat visitors. Your blog posts should be short and concise because many people don’t have time to read lengthy articles.

You have to focus on needs and interests of your visitors and clients, to focus on your business. So you shouldn’t write about politics and religion in your blog unless your business is related to those areas. If your focus group are owners of small and medium businesses that want to use the power of the Internet for their business you should write about topics like Web and email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), web hosting, branding, current industry news and happenings from those fields. It is important to create your own personal style and to give your comments on latest news. Some high-level executives that have blogs make mistakes so they write about some personal topics or topics that are not related with their business.

One of the benefits of blogs is that search engines give better ranking to blogs. It is because of the fact that bloggers often make links to related blogs, refer to other posts in their posts or using a so called trackback feature so you can have a good link popularity that is one of the most important things in having a good placement on search engines. Also, one of the main reasons for good search engine placement is that blogs are usually often updated and search engines like sites with fresh content.

Some high-level executives have their links on hundred even thousand web sites. Also, many blog services automatically offer content syndication using RSS/Atom so your readers will be able to read your blog using news reader without having to visit your blog. Every time you add a new post they will know it. Syndication is very important because of promotion, too. Using content syndication and ping you will be indexed on major blog and feed search engines like Technorati, Feedburner, Feedster, Bloglines, Blog.gs, Weblogs.com and etc.

Happy blogging!