Business Blogging

What Is Business Blogging?

First of all, a blog is nothing more than a website (stand-alone or attached to your main website) that allows you to write and share information called posts with your targeted audience, and gives you the authority to allow them to respond, thus creating interactive two-way communication.

The word blog was derived from the word web log, and was first used by techno-geeks who communicated back in the late 1990s.

It wasn’t until Google introduced Blogger back in 1999 that blogging became more mainstream, because of it’s ease of use, and your ability to start your own blog within a matter of minutes without having to know how to program like the earlier techo-geeks.

As blogging technology evolved, it didn’t take long for Internet marketers and other Online businesses to realize what a goldmine they had in front of them.

They saw the lucrative potential blogs had as a business tool.

How Can Business Blogging Help You Grow Your Home-Based Business?

Business blogging is beneficial to the growth of your business for the following reasons:

1. Allow you to build stronger relationships with your prospects and clients in a non-threatening way by two-way communication, thus establishing you as their most trusted expert, while simultaneously building a community.

This two-way communication allows you to have your own voice in cyber space and to add that human touch which is missing Online.

2. Generates more traffic to your website, because others will link to you if you provide great information, thus sending you their visitors.

This allows those other sites link to your blog to provide more value for their visitors because your great content.

3. Generate traffic to your website through the search engines, because once again, if you provide useful and relevant content based upon what the person is looking for, which is the keywords (hopefully your keywords), your site will show up high in the search results. This will provide you with the best kind of traffic, free and organic.

4. Allow you to take your products and/or services to a global audience.

All the above will eventually lead to an explosion of profits, loyalty, authority, and respect in your industry.

Those are only a handful of the benefits blogging can provide your Online business.

What Kind Of Content Can You Provide On Your Business Blog?

• Interviews of experts in your industry
• Reviews of products and/or services related to your market
• How-to articles that resolve a specific issue or achieve a certain outcome
• Tips and ideas
• Updates on your own products and services
• Post-sales support for your own products and services
• Industry news
• And so on...

Are There Any Dangers or Challenges Associated With The Use Business Blogging Marketing?

The downside of business blogging is the enormous amount of time it takes to maintain it in terms of keeping a constant flow of high-quality content and promotion.

The minute you stop providing useful high-quality content for your visitors, that will be the day you’ll start to lose them, and most likely they will never return.

Here are a few tips to help you manage your blog:

• Set aside a few hours per month to write several blog posts
• If you have a business partner, ask them to write post
• Invite industry experts to write blog post
• Subscribe to Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) free service to generate blog post ideas
• Download Google’s Toolbar (http://www.google.com/toolbar) so you can add the “Blog This” feature when you find information that maybe of interest to your target audience, such as, an article, website, and etc.
• Create a Blog posting schedule so you’ll know in advance what topics you want to write about.
• Post to your blog via cell phone using a free service created by Google at http://go.blogger.com. 

What Tools And Resources Must Be Used To Implement Business Blogging?

Blog Creation Tools:

Blogger (Created by Google) - www.blogger.com

Typepad - www.typepad.com

Movable Type - www.sixapart.com

Blog Search Engines: Google Blog Search – http://blogsearch.google.com

Blog Search Engines - www.blogsearchengine.com
Blogwise – www.blogwise.com

Feedster – www.feedster.com

Blog Traffic Tracking: www.google.com/analytics

Blog Directories:

Technorati – www.technorati.com

Blogwise – www.blogwise.com