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If You Have A Website, Then You Need To Be Blogging Too

2007-09-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

If you conduct any business online or maintain a website to compliment your offline business, then blogging is quickly becoming a mandatory part of your future. And if you are not currently blogging, chances are after realizing the potential of these traffic-enhancing goldmines, you soon will be!

Blogs, derived from the words "web log" were originally thought of as simply online diaries a place for people to record their thoughts and inspirations. At first, no one took blogging very seriously and these collections of online thoughts were simply passed off by many as hobbies or creative outlets and nothing more.

But then Google came along and started to recognize the unique and original content that these trite little sites presented and the rules of the game suddenly changed. After all, unique content is what makes the Google world go round, and what better way to command the attention of Google than by creating a dynamic environment with content that is solely your own.

At this stage, a whole new SEO world emerged and in the process, brought with it traffic opportunities like never before. People began blogging on more than what they had for dinner last night. They started to blog about new products, exciting travel adventures and all things related to online commerce.

The evolution quickly continued and today, with RSS feeds, sites like pingoat and many other content clearinghouses, blogging is big business and not to be overlooked by hungry entrepreneurs looking to establish a web presence.

What currently makes blogging so attractive is the sheer speed with which blogs and blog posts are able to get indexed in the search engines. It is a simple matter of static versus dynamic and the search engines love the dynamic.

Let's take two different scenarios to see how traditional websites and blogs differ in their index-ability:

Scenario One:

One person creates a website to advertise gardening products and services. Each page of the site contains the traditional information about the company; it's founders, the services they offer and the products they sell. Maybe, at best, the site has articles and content that is updated with some small frequency that are relevant to the avid gardener. When visitors arrive at the site, they have the option of signing up for the company newsletter and receiving valuable tips and new offerings.

In this scenario, the Webmaster or business owner will need to tend to many SEO related tasks in order to get and maintain high search engine ranking for a tight list of selected keywords related to the gardening niche. Not only will this activity require great skill, it will also involve many hours to achieve the intended results.

Scenario Two:

The same business owner as above also creates a blog to supplement their company website. Now, instead of focusing on simply one set of tightly selected keywords, the blog itself remains a broad overview of the gardening niche, while each individual post reflects a drilled down topic within that same niche.

So when the business owner writes a blog post about the benefits of "organic vegetable gardening in backyard containers," this individual post becomes a keyword rich, targeted wonder and when indexed by the search engines has a far greater opportunity to bringing highly targeted traffic to the blog based upon that single post.

Through time, the blog expands with many similar posts that are targeted to sub niches within the broader gardening niche and can even be categorized from inside the blog structure itself. What has now been created in Google's eyes is an extremely dynamic, naturally evolving site that is content rich and niche specific.

When properly constructed and promoted, each time the business owner posts to the blog, that individual post can get indexed in anywhere from two to twenty four hours on average. This opportunity is far greater than any options available at the static website.

Additionally, when the business owner endeavors to have a visitor signup for a newsletter, further segmenting can occur and subscriber lists can be refined and targeted. And because the blog is the front-end showcase to the original website, each blog post has the opportunity to link back to specific and relevant products at the main site.

When properly structured, blogs are the biggest SEO asset to a website that currently exists. The wise business owner will recognize these benefits and when implemented, will enjoy many opportunities that do not currently exist with traditional websites alone.

About the Author: Discover Kevin Sinclair's system for making profits regardless of whether anyone joins your network marketing business.

Blogging And Adsense - The Simple Way To Make Money

2007-09-23T20:19:00.000-07:00

You can believe one of two things about making a significant income from Google AdSense.

1) If you believe the claims of those who are promoting AdSense with the products they are selling, then Google AdSense is the key to your early, as in nest year, retirement.

2) If you believe those who have spent the past year working with AdSense and received something in the neighborhood of $100 for their efforts, you will begin devising an alternative retirement strategy.

But is there a middle ground, a third option which will allow you to make a reasonable income from Google Adsense in return for a reasonable amount of works? There certainly is, if you don't keep looking for the magic tricks and resign yourself to repeating the same R&D over and over again.

Keywords are at the heart of any successful Google AdSense campaign, and you need to find the right ones. The right keywords will be determined by your source of traffic.

If you intend to use natural SEO, then your will need to get and Adwords account and use it to research the keywords with good PPC value, good bidder density, and not many competitors.

Any keywords which can supply you with all three are the ones on which you should build your niche, so use them to build a search engine optimized site, post your AdSense ads, and start looking for your traffic to arrive.

Then do it again, and again, and again, until you have enough sites built on enough smartly chosen keywords to make AdSense pay off for you.

There's one more way to build respectable revenue from Google AdSense. It's called arbitrage, and what it means is that you will buy PPC traffic directly from Google via AdWords, and then steer that traffic to your site displaying AdSense ads.

If you want to engage in arbitrage, look for high PPG value keyword for your websites, and low PPC costs for your ads.

While either of these strategies, if implemented correctly, can generate a reasonable and ongoing income from Google AdSense, the real keyword is patience: you'll almost certainly have to wait months before you see your first AdSense checks.

If done properly, either of these techniques can yield a consistent income, but more than likely, it will take months before this occurs.

About the Author: Matt Garrett © 2007 www.BlogTactics.com | Blog Tutorials & Videos Grab Your Free Step By Step Guide to Setting Up Your First Blog Now!! How to Start Blogging

Blogging Tips - Why Blogs Can Boost your Online Business Income

2007-09-23T20:16:00.000-07:00

WHY BLOGS CAN BOOST YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS INCOME

Its been quite a long while since the creation of blogs. Now, if you've been actively surfing the web, you should realized that the numbers of blogs are increasing drastically. Many sites that you've surfed are blogs. Did you wonder why is it that so many people are using blogs as their official site or platform for their business?

If you have a blog for whatever purposes, then you will know that blog is a very easy to create kind of website, and search engines like them. So why is this so? Suppose that a complicated website is much more important than a simple site like blogs. But then the search engine crawler likes blogs more. This is because blogs are constantly updated, all the information in the blog is updated often. Another good benefit of blogs over a website is that every post in a blog will becomes a page. Therefore, after some time, blogs can become a site which have more hundreds of pages, some can even grow into thousand of pages.

This is just one of the advantages of blogs over ordinary websites. Before this, blogs are just work as some kind of diaries. But with the advancement of technology and with enough time given, now blogs can be use for almost every purposes. Nowadays, a lot of marketers use blogs as a platform of their business. They can post and announce their updates on the products or services offer to their customers. Besides that, blog is very easy to use, and it is a very good platform to handle customer relationship. Since blog is more friendly, it can help marketers to build up their business relation more easily using blogs.

Besides that, if you really put effort on your blogs, it can convert sales better than websites. Why? Because blog is more friendly, and when you post something about some products, readers will tend to treat you as their friends and listen to your advice. This is also one of the reason why review sites can work so great when talking about giving reviews on a certain products or services. When we want to buy something, we will definitely ask for our friends and family advices first. If there are no comments from them, then we will look up on the internet for reviews. This is when your blogs come into play. Your blog will work as friend and give reviews to your readers. Just be sure that your advices given true and not simply for the sake of wanting to have better sales.

As you can see now, blogs really can works better than a website if it is fully developed. So, why don't you start a blog right now, and when the time comes, you can just follow the wave and make money out of your blog. You can create a blog in less than 3 minutes, it is easy and it is fast. But the problem is that many bloggers do not have a proper steps how they can make money from their blogs.

About the Author: Learn how to Make Money Online, live a Millionaire lifestyle in no time. Get all Free Tips Making Money Online here, themillionairesecrets.blogspot.com
If you don’t act on this information today you may never get the opportunity to take this life changing step again. Just follow the link and start your new life today!

The Death Of Blog Protection

2006-12-12T18:14:00.000-08:00

In today's world, a blog can be a company's lifeline to the world. It can be a persons sole income. It can be the center-point of an entire business model. It can also be ripped off in no-time-flat.

Why? Simple: Money.

If Joe Company has an interesting blog, all the other guy has to do is copy it into his own blog, and now he's got the content. That person runs some advertising on his blog, does some traffic building, and he gets paid.

Is it a problem? You bet. Is there a solution? Sort of, but I wouldn't trust them, and certainly wouldn't pay for them.

Here's the deal: Blog copy protection software looks for copies of your blog online. You tell it to look for "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy hound", and that's what it looks for. If it finds it, it lets you know. Seems pretty straight forward. The problem is that the guys copying the blogs will always keep themselves a step ahead of the people searching for them. How? Actually, that's pretty easy.

The people copying the blogs are now using a little more sophisticated method to copy blogs. They're converting them to PDFs and images. Why? Again, simple. In order to search for text, there actually has to be searchable text to search. You can't search an image for text easily. You'd have to do some heavy processing to search a PDF from a site... and even then, which of the files would the software search?

I myself have had my blogs and articles appear as PDFs on a few sites. I've gotten emails from readers alerting me to this, and then actually stumbled across one of my articles one night while doing research for another article. I said, "Hmm, I did something on that subject, I wonder what this person has to say about it?" Turns out they said exactly the same thing I did.

So, what are we to do? Who do we turn to? Where do we go? Is there a software answer out there that will open up PDFs, read images, and compare them to existing content?

Those answers are a little harder. The truth is that plagiarism has always existed, and will always exist. Large companies have lawyers to help them with that. The small guys like the rest of us can easily use a boiler plate "Cease and Desist" letter to attempt to contact the owner of the site.

There's software to protect ebooks, but it's requirements and setup leave a lot to be desired - turning html content into an executable file.

There are services that claim to have the answer, however, by the time they make it to market, they're behind the guys doing the copying.

A better system would be to categorize the "Sploggers" in the same manner we do Phishing attempts. After all, we're being duped into going to their sites, and they're costing advertisers money.

The bottom line is that there's nothing we can do to stop blogs or articles form being copied. The same mechanism that we rely on to distribute our content is what is being used to copy and distribute our content. The best we can do is keep our content fresh and relevant, and make sure our readers know where to find the originals.

Phil Foster

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Phil_Foster

Ten Reasons to Continue Blogging

2006-11-30T18:12:00.001-08:00

The last few months blogging has been great and have been a nightmare at the same time. I started at the beginning of August 2006, so I am in my 4th month of blogging.

The reason I started writing a blog was down to three people:

Jack Black is a Scottish motivational speaker and I went to see him in Glasgow 2 times in 1995 and again in 1996 and his seminars changed my thinking about my life. When I went the second time I said to my friend ‘That's what I want to do with my life'. I wanted to affect people's life so they would have the power to change themselves, give them the tools so to speak. So 10 years on I have started that dream and I am only in the beginning phase and writing a blog is helping the dream along.

Steve Pavlina Steve was the inspiration for the blog. I found Steve's site by accident and suddenly saw a way of reaching a potentially huge audience. His posts were also inspiring and I found he thought along the same lines as me, which I thought were quite ‘out there', it turned out I wasn't the only one. I then asked myself how I was going to devote time to blogging when I had a full time job, a part time web design business and a family. Steve's site gave some helpful tips.

Darren Rowse - Gave me the logistical information I needed to start up the blog and continue it. His site is chock full of helpful information for any blogger just starting out of for seasoned pro's.

It's been a tough 4 months as I wasn't getting anybody to the site, I was getting around 10-20 visitors per day in the first month which rose to around 50 per day in September, 100 per day in October and to around 200 per day in November. If it keeps going the way it's going I should be reaching my goal of 1000 visitors per day by February 2007.

I also noticed the lack of comments, which frustrated me for a while but when I let the need go they started commenting.

I also concentrated on making money from Google adsense and I have recently let that need go also and the money is starting to trickle in

August - $0.00

September - $5.80

October - $12.74

November - $4.81 (so far)

And about $28 from donations.

Also because of my blog I managed to secure the management of another blog at around $540 per month

So why do I keep going at this blog when there is seemingly so little in it for me? This is a question a lot of bloggers ask themselves and a lot of them give up and stop blogging altogether. I won't give up, I want to be talking about my blog in 2 years time and say ‘this is where my blog took me' like Steve Pavlina or Darren Rowse.

The top 10 reasons:

10) To make some money: admittedly not a lot of money is made unless you've been going for a while and you done all the right things and managed to get a good following.

9) To learn something new - I come across blogs, sites and people who teach me something new and it keeps me updated in the world of the blogosphere and the net itself. I love learning and I am constantly learning when I am blogging.

8) It can land you some extra work - I have managed to secure some extra work managing a blog which provides me with a bit extra money every month and I expect after doing this for a year or more there will be more work in the future.

7) Build connections - having a blog allows you to meet with a whole host of interesting people. It's good to have a group of people who have the same interests. They can often help provide ideas, help with professional services etc.

6) To help your business - If you have a business, blogging can make you seem more human and you can interact with your customers a lot easier and a lot quicker.

5) Establish yourself as an authority on your subject - This is a big reason people start to blog and there are a lot of people out there blogging who are experts in their field and their knowledge can make them a great resource and also build up their following.

4) Traffic to your generic sites - By their very nature blogs are updated regularly and therefore have more food for search engines to digest. You can create more traffic to your generic websites as well as interacting directly with your customers.

3) It develops discipline and ability - Through natural selection a lot of bloggers will give up for many different reasons. Those who stay at it develop a discipline of writing which can have spin off effects in their own lives I have noticed I am more focused in general and I am more task oriented in my regular work. I know I need to write at least 3000 words per week to keep my blog updated and bringing in regular readers. If you write this much every week for 1 year you will have written around 150,000 words in 1 year. The average number of words per book written is 120,000 - 200,000. So you will, in effect, have written a books worth in 1 year. If you have aspirations of writing a book, blogging is a fantastic discipline to get into.

2) To know yourself - Strange one this but over the last few months I have come to know myself a lot better than before. I have figured out inner resources I didn't know I had. Intellectually and spiritually I have grown. It takes a child to write a blog, it takes a man to continue writing. When you see nobody is reading your blog, nobody is commenting on your blog and you don't even know if anybody has seen it, it takes guts to keep writing those 3000 words per week. Believe me in the dark hours of 5am you will get to know yourself.

1) Passion - At the end of the day you wouldn't continue blogging if you didn't have a passion for what you are writing about. I have a deep passion for giving people the tools to help themselves in their own lives. I know what it's like to have those tools given to you and how long it takes to change; I don't want to be someone who was here in 2006 and gone in 2007. This will be a lifelong quest for me. If you have the passion for what you are blogging about don't give up.

If you build it, they will come!

Change your thoughts and you will change your life.
http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog
http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk http://www.bradlewdesigns.co.uk

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steven_Aitchison

Choosing a Theme for Your WordPress Blog

2006-11-30T00:21:00.002-08:00

There are so many themes available at no charge for your WordPress blog that it can be overwhelming to choose. In almost all theme indexes you can narrow down your choices by choosing:

how many columns you want
your basic color scheme
fixed or fluid width
if plugins are required
if it's widget ready
if it has an options page
if it has rounded corners
if the sidebar is on the left or right

You can check any of these options to narrow your search but if you don't know what you want you can leave the options unchecked and every theme in that category will be displayed. If you are starting your blog from scratch, just pick the theme you like the best.

If you already have a WordPress blog and are changing themes you need to look for a compatible theme unless you are willing to make it compatible. If you know some basic HTML or PHP it isn't difficult to make your new theme compatible with the old. If your new theme has the same features as your old theme you won't need to do much.

Let's talk about columns first. You can choose from 1-column, 2-column, 3-column, and 4-column themes. If you want people to be able to subscribe to your blog or see a list of your pages or almost anything other than a post, you need at least two columns. This will provide you with the main posting area and a sidebar as well as the header and footer. If you want to incorporate a lot of 'stuff' in your blog page you might want a 3 or 4 column theme. This is particularly good if you are going to put AdSense on your blog.

There is a wide array of colors to choose from and I don't usually specify a certain color unless I absolutely know the color scheme I want. You will get many ideas by seeing many color schemes.

When you have made your decision about your search criteria you will usually see a button marked 'Show' or 'Go'. Click that button and your themes will appear with a thumbnail of the theme. These are difficult to see but you will get an overall idea of what it will look like. Now you can go through the themes and if there is one that you want to see, just click on the 'Test Drive' button. This will make the theme a full page so you can see exactly what it looks like.

When you find your theme, or even several that you like, you can click on download to download them to your computer. There will generally be instructions on where to put the various components of your theme when you upload it to your site.

After your theme is uploaded go to your blog's admin area and click on 'Presentation'. Your current theme will be listed first and the other themes you have available will be listed after that. Simply click on the theme you want an it will become your current theme.

Choosing your WordPress theme is the most difficult part of the entire process because there are so many to see. Installing it and making it your current theme are as simple as can be.

Now - start looking at themes and pick the one you like!

Cathy Perkins is a WordPress expert who lives in the beautiful northern foothills of North Carolina. Watch as she builds a WordPress blog from the ground up at http://www.WordPressGuru.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cathy_Perkins

4 Quick Tips for Coming up with Blogging Topics

2006-11-30T00:21:00.001-08:00

Do you blog on a regular or somewhat regular basis, but sometimes have trouble coming up with topics for your blog? Here's a few helpful hints to get you going when writer's block strikes.

1. Google is your friend

Search Google to see what questions people have about the field you're in. Try combining one of the following phrases with a keyword related to your field of expertise.

How do I
I'm having problems
Is it possible to
I need help
Quick question

For example, if a cartoonist who gave advice to other cartoonists were using this method, he might search for the following:

"How do I" cartoonist

or maybe...

"I'm having problems" cartoon

or even...

"Quick question" "comic strip"

Hopefully you get the idea.

2. Sign up for a forum

Sign up for a forum or even an email discussion group that's about the same topic your blog is about. That way you will always have a source of questions. People often drop into such forums with a question or two.

And don't worry if others have answered it on the forum. Your blog will likely have different readers. While you shouldn't plagiarize, you can certainly use their post as a jumping off point.

3. Read other blogs

Read the blogs others have on topics similar to your own. And again, while you shouldn't just copy their post, you can use it to spur yourself on. You might even mention that you were inspired by their post and put a link to it. Then say where you agree and disagree with them.

An added bonus to this is that you can email that blogger and let them know you linked to their post. They may even be willing to link back to your blog, giving you another source of readers.

4. Ask your readers!

This one is a no-brainer. Seek out input from those who know your readers best. Your readers! Occasionally (or frequently) ask them for topic suggestions. At the very least, make it easy for them to contact you with any questions if they already want to do so.

These tips are simple, but can be effective if you ever hit a brick wall when trying to start your blog post of the day.

While we're on the topic, feel free to let me know of any web-related topics you'd like me to cover.

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tim_Priebe

10 Big Benefits Of A Busy Business Blog (And How To take Advantage)

2006-11-29T17:28:00.001-08:00

10 Big Benefits Of A Busy Business Blog (And How To take Advantage)

The blog; what can be said that hasn’t been said before? In all truth, very little, but there is still a seeming lack of businesses willing to take up the “challenge” of running their own blog. Those that have done so often report their findings and invariably they are positive reviews of both the blogging process and the results of their business blog. In a bid to hammer the point home we’ve compiled a list of ten advantages to establishing and maintaining a business blog.

It is important to note the word “busy” in the title of this article. It isn’t there simply because it begins with a B and lends itself perfectly to the alliteration in the title. It’s meant to outline the fact that a blog is at its finest when it is regularly filled with quality content. A blog with no content is just a template.

1 - Quick And Easy

Two words that every business owner and manager loves. A blog is simple to set up even for the technologically challenged. There exist a number of free blogging services, and while these aren’t ideal for a business blog they do offer a way to start. Setting up a blog is not like setting up a website. In the worst case scenario you will need to install a software application on your website and tinker with a few settings.

2 - Inexpensive Setup

The only word more popular than quick and easy is inexpensive. To integrate a blog into the page of your site costs very little money, especially as somebody within your organization can usually do it. Even outsourcing the task will cost only a couple of hundred dollars. Remember that a blog could become one of the most powerful marketing weapons you have in your arsenal and consider that a couple of hundred dollars might just pay a salesperson for one day’s work.

3 - Provides Easy Access To Company News

A business blog can be written in one of numerous styles, or a combination of these. One huge benefit is the ability to inform your customers of any changes, new products, latest offers, and much more. This, in turn, can lead to direct sales. People love to frequent blogs and pass their time reading the same ones on a regular basis. Captivate your audience with compelling content and you will receive a growing list of market leads. Remember that individual blog readers generally prefer a personable style but if your operation is a business-to-business one then you will need to vary your style accordingly.

Typically, companies have used newsletter and e-newsletters to offer this kind of regular contact with their customers and potential customers. Using a blog is easier and it can be updated much more regularly than when offering a weekly or monthly newsletter.

4 - Search Engine Friendly

Search engine optimization is a particularly beneficial form of online marketing. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms. Your blog offers the opportunity to promote your website for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords. Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis.

5 - Appear Accessible

It doesn’t matter whether you are not, but you and your company will appear to be more accessible especially if you allow freedom for all your visitors to post comments. Accessibility is often a stumbling block for many potential customers that still prefer to deal with companies offline. A blog makes you more approachable and so alleviates this concern.

6 - Appear Authoritative

The appearance of authority is also important to online businesses. Customers will be much more likely to use your service or purchase your goods if they see you as an authority on a particular subject. Give your views on the latest events in your industry, offer reviews of related items and comparisons of several items. Do anything, within reason, that makes you look like an authority on your topic area.

7 - Brand Awareness

The more a customer hears the name of your company the more likely they will be to remember it. It takes, on average, around seven items of direct communication between you and your customers to make a sale. A blog with hundreds of posts gives you the opportunity to name drop your company occasionally and ensure that your readers think of you next time they are looking for a particular product or service.

8 - Relationship Building

Another difficult aspect of building a relationship with your customers online is building a rapport with them. Because a blog enables you to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style than your website does, your readers will soon feel like they know you. The more they know, like, and trust you the more likely they are to visit your main site, click your links, purchase your product, and line your pockets with virtual gold.

9 - Gain An Insight Into Your Customers

A business blog enables you to gain insight into your customers. It does this in several ways. Predominantly, by allowing your customers to leave comments on your posts, you get a good feel for how they take to everything you say. You can also track which posts are being read more often and which generate a greater number of clicks, emails, and much more. As far as market and customer research goes this is hugely beneficial information.

10 - Reduce Calls And Emails

OK, this isn’t one to tell your readers but you can use a blog to pre-empt questions that customers might have. By sending readers to your blog you can gain all of the above benefits and you may reduce the amount of niggling questions that you get asked by customers. Of course, you might also receive a lot more orders by email, but nobody wants to reduce those emails.

Maintaining A Successful Business Blog

While there are free blogging services available they generally offer ad-supported blogs with a restricted amount of templates and options. To truly take advantage with a business blog your best bet is to use a commercial application or pay for a commercial service. These enable you to integrate the blog into your own domain incorporating your own design. This ensures that you offer the full benefit to site visitors while making it easier to point blog visitors toward the appropriate pages of your site.

Regular content is imperative to the success of any blog. This content needs to be informative, accurate, and written in a way that will appeal to your visitors. Every blog demands different content and by producing the right content on a regular basis it will pay dividends.

In some posts you should try to find an opportunity to link to at least one page on your main website. Try not to get carried away by placing too many links or linking from all your posts but if you mention a particular product, link the name of that product to the corresponding page on your site. Alternatively include a paragraph at the bottom of the page that includes a link to a related resource (on your own page, or an affiliate link). If you are using a blog to make money through affiliate links then you should be careful to only use affiliate links in a relatively small proportion of your posts.

Matt Jackson is a blog writer, website content copywriter, and a big fan of alliteration in article titles. Through his website, WebWiseWords, he offers a full blog writing and posting service for businesses of any size and industry.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matt_Jackson

Bloggers - Will They be a Fixture in Corporate America?

2006-11-28T18:35:00.000-08:00

How did Blogging get so popular so fast?

It does seem that blogging caught on like wildfire. Why is it so popular? Because it's human nature to voice your 2 cents on a subject, whether good or bad. Not to mention, there are blogging sites popping up all over the place, the templates are nice looking and easy to use and best of all, they are FREE. What does this mean for domain companies? website provider and builders? Bloggers are pulling the rug out from underneath them.

How did Corporate America become involved with blogging?

The same way tv and radio became involved with them. Bloggers voice their opinions much like a stock analyst. When do you get this information from the analyst? When the television program airs or in a radio program. When does the public learn about bloggers' opinions? At any moment on the internet. The internet is surely becoming bigger, faster and foremost in our world of information.

Corporate America and the Blogger

It only makes sense that businesses want to attach themselves to the most vocal and prominent bloggers. It is just another way of making themselves attractive to the wordsmiths rather than focusing on stock analysts. Bloggers have a reputation of being the new kid on the block that happens to be the underdog. This makes a perfect spoil for conglomerates to embrace the bloggers so that they can voice their opinions.

Bloggers are the new look of "every man". Symbolically, the blogger has turned Wall Street on its' collective ear as the "new every man" is suddenly being given new clout via a computer. It's no wonder Corporate America has hired bloggers to blog on their behalf. This just isn't a payoff, they are being analyzed just as the stock analysts have done in prior years.

It's just that it's nice to know that the "every man" has a voice in Corporate America.

Taryn Simpson is a published author and freelance writer with over 15 years of HR experience. Ms. Simpson owns her own writing company, Simpson - E Publishing which offers clients ghostwriting of novels/articles, web content, brochures, newsletters, press releases and more. Be sure to visit my blog: http://www.Musings-From-A-Writer.blogspot.com,

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Taryn_Simpson

How To Write Blogs

2006-11-28T18:34:00.000-08:00

Introduction

A blog is a web document. When you write it you have to think about your audience and understand their needs. On the other hand you should think what you want to achieve with a certain blog and write accordingly. Here are a few guidelines that will help you improve your writing style.

Why Blogging?

Blog does mean Web log and many bloggers do use this online tool to create virtual diaries. While such bloggers blog for pleasure, other bloggers blog for business. There’s enough potential in a blog, as long as it has a professional style and valuable information. Here’s what writers might achieve with a good blog:

Public recognition: are you an expert in your field? Let people know it and provide unique, qualified information. Soon you will be listed on different sites as a “guru”.
Targeted traffic: no one just happens to “land” on a blog page. Web surfers search for information. The tags you used to describe your blogs are the baits that will determine a surfer to click on a certain link, visit your blog and (probably) read your content.
Earn extra income: through blog advertisements, AdSense and more.

Blog Writing Styles

I have seen many ways of writing and many styles. Obviously there are many ways to write blogs, but I’ll list here three:

Just write and don’t care about grammar or typing, after all it’s your blog and “if they don’t like it they shouldn’t be reading it”. (You’re right, I am being sarcastic!)
Just write but do pay attention at least at the spelling – no one will kill you if you have minor grammar errors when you are not a native speaker.
Write professionally… and that’s exactly what this article is all about!

Blog Writing Standards

Maybe I have a wrong tile: “How to Write Blogs”. Perhaps “How to Write Business Blogs” would be a better headline. But I don’t want to limit the topic. After all, although not all blogs are created equal, professional writing has some clear standards.

These standards start with a rule: plain English. Yes, you’ve got that right. Plain English is good English. It helps delivering your message clearly and concisely. And this is the writing style needed on the Web. Surfers want to get the information without too much effort. Reading essays online is problematical. Have you noticed how tired your eyes get after reading the long paragraphs of an article?

You need to write in a readable and clear writing style. Even the offline media journalists practise this style. Novelists argue sometimes that newspapers and magazines have a poor, simplistic style. Wrong! They have a plain style, to make it easier for the readers to understand and absorb the information.

It is important for a blog to be written in a clear, plain style, or the visitors will surf away.

Standards for Styles

If you want to start a polemic the best approach is a “teasing” approach. Do it carefully and try to avoid narrow sarcasm. Joke if you must, but never be offensive. After all, we owe respect to our readers. That’s if we want them to respect us.

If you plan to educate don’t tease. Don’t joke. Avoid narrow sarcasm. Be concise and direct, as your readers don’t have time for riddles and if you bore them too much with gibberish talk, they’ll surf away. This is the standard for business writing too.

Notice how I wrote this article: I used short phrases and one point per paragraph. This means writing concise and direct.

Writing Titles

Help your visitors “scan” your content (they’ll do it anyway), as you want them to. Take a look in your newspaper. What do you see? Titles, subtitles and summaries. Now all you need to do is mirror the style of your newspaper. Let’s start with the titles.

There are three styles of titles: informational (business style), teasing (polemic style) and cute (entertainment style).

Examples:

How to Write Blogs – Informational
To Blog or Not to Blog? – Teasing
Blog-a-boo! – Cute

Each style has another purpose. As this is an instructional article – more a tutorial – I chose the informational title. Short titles have a higher impact than long titles, especially when they summarize in a few words the entire content, providing a clue on the purpose of the article.

Writing Summaries

Newspapers use the inverted pyramid style to deliver the information. So should you. Why? The first paragraph of your article will convince the surfer to go on reading. So start with the conclusion and give details as your article goes on. My introduction explains clear my purpose. If you wouldn’t be interested in learning how to improve your writing skills, you’d be long surfing on other Web pages!

Additional Writing Tips

As you’ve probably noticed I used some lists in this article. This is a good technique: it helps readers remain focused. Usually you should keep each line of a list short, unless you need to provide a brief explanation on a certain topic.

Use bold words for emphasis, but don’t over-do-it! The same goes for italicizing or underlining words. Use easy to read fonts and legible colors. (No yellow or other light colors on white and avoid dark backgrounds in general!) Instead of Conclusion

This article was checked for accessibility and readability using StyleWriter and scored "excellent" for each of the following: style index, average sentence and passive index.

Mihaela Lica is a professional journalist, with more than 10 years experience in the field, four as TV journalist. Since 2002 she works as an online public relations and media consultant, making all possible efforts to promote quality web content. Read her SEO and web development blog if look for more interesting articles.

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