What is a Blog?
One of the easiest and most effective ways you can get your great ideas and wisdom out to the world is by using a blog. If you’re new to that term a blog is short for web log.
Blogger (a blogging service owned by Google) defines it this way:
“A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world. Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules. In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what’s new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.”
Simply, it’s a way for you to present yourself uniquely and attractively to the world letting them know what you have to offer.
Here are some things that most blogs have in common:
• A main posting area with posts, or articles, listed in date order, newest on top. These posts can be organized into categories, helping people to find topics that they’re specifically interested in and helping you to keep track of what you’ve writing about.
• An archive containing older posts or articles. New visitors will be able to go back and read what you’ve already written so you don’t have to continually keep explaining yourself.
• A method for people to leave comments about your blog posts. Your readers will log into your blog with a user name to leave remarks about your articles. The feedback you’ll receive will give you new ideas and inspiration as well as building trusting relationships within your specialized community.
• A number of links to other blogs or sites that you want to recommend, often known as a ‘blogroll’.
• A number of feeds including RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Atom or XML feeds. These allow your visitors to keep track of all your new content automatically and instantly through subscription. They won’t have to check your site manually and their email inbox won’t be cluttered. And advertising becomes simpler because it overcomes many problems that regular marketing channels would encounter, for example, spam filters and delayed distribution.
Blogging is a great way of building a strong community of loyal followers and customers. It helps you interact with them as well as share your expertise so that they learn to trust and love you. It also increases your search engine rankings—a marketing technique that has a very low cost per lead but has a high return on investment.
Whether you’re new to blogging or have been doing so for some time, and you’d like to learn how to use your blog more effectively check out my new product Blogging ABCs to help you get your blog out into the world and share your knowledge and connect with your target market.
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