For website owners and even some webmasters, blogging may be a new idea or even something you’ve ignored. But if you are in business, you cannot afford to ignore them anymore. With over 100 million blogs on just about every conceivable topic, there are plenty of blogs in your niche. Infact, as trade magazines and journals lose their popularity, their writers and journalists are starting blogs and getting more readers than their old employers ever had.
And there are many good reasons for this trend. Blogs started out as internet diaries or journals. Now they are automated website publishing tools. With so many ways to publish a blog it’s very easy to start a new one. With Blogger or wordpress.com and a few clicks, you can start publishing. Even wordpress.org is easy to run once you have a hosting account with wordpress software installed. It’s easy to write and publish content - no HTML or CSS knowledge is required. Technophobes can and do run their own blogs. If you want to express yourself, you can.
But if you run a business, what can blogging do for you? You can start connecting with your customers by providing a support Q&A, then responding to comments and questions. You can publish product reviews. You can educate your prospects and customers about your niche. You can provide tutorials. Or you can simply express your opinions on a topic you and your customers are passionate about. The possibilities are endless.
If you want to get a feel for what you can do with blogging, open a google reader account. It’s free and easy to use. Use google blog search engine to find popular blogs in your niche. Subscribe to their RSS feed. New content is then delivered to your google reader account. Type the orange button on the blog. Go to google reader, hit subscribe, paste in the code. Read the daily stream of published content from your reader. Very soon, you’ll be hooked. Watch today’s video for a short tutorial on blogging.
Blog was Merriam-Websters word of the year in 2004. Blogging is now a mainstream activity.
