What is a blog and why do I need one?
A blog (short for web log) is simply a web site or part of a web site that lets people easily publish content. Blogs have evolved a lot in the last 5 or 6 years and there are now some blogs that are multi million dollar businesses and are have sophisticated capabilities. Blogger (now owned and operated by Google) is one of the most popular blogging platforms. Anyone can set-up a free blog on Blogger and easily create new blog posts (stories) with not much technical know how. For those who want a more customized experience, check out Wordress. Wordress software is open source meaning anyone can download and edit the source code. This offers far more flexibility but also requires some sophistication.
A blog is a great way to keep your target audience informed about your product or services and a great way to create traffic from search engines. Most blog software is well optimized for Google and other search engines so that your posts will get indexed and hopefully draw free search traffic to your site. A blog can be a powerful tool to build an audience and drive traffic to your site and as many have learned, a blog can be a large business on its own.
Some basic guidelines for blogging:
-Blog consistently. Most readers will not come back if your blog posts are sporadic. Pick a schedule and stick to it.
-Write your posts in a friendly tone and keep them relatively short. This is not a rule but I find most popular blogs are brief, easy to read and written in a friendly voice rather than an academic voice.
-When you link to a site or discuss a product or service, reach out to the site owner and get them to link to you. A great way to build search engine ranking and drive inbound traffic.
-Tag and categorize your posts using keywords that will drive search traffic
-Make sure your blog posts are automatically submitted to technorati and other blog searches. Most blogging software does this automatically but make sure its enabled for your blog.