Is there really a compelling reason to start a blog when you could be spending your time working on your website? Is a blog really as effective a marketing tool as a traditional website? It all depends.
Whether or not you should start your own blog depends largely on the use to which you blog will be put. Many bloggers are blogging for strictly social reasons; other use their blogs for productive purpose; and some bloggers manage to combine socializing and being productive in a single blog.
If your intention in starting a blog is to socialize, you will be most successful by creating your blog at one of the high-traffic social networking sites like MySpace and opening it up for comments so that you can begin a dialog with your readers.
If you want a productive blog, on the other hand, asking yourself why you should start your own blog takes on added importance, because anyone maintaining a productive blog will have to make a commitment of time if he or she expects the blog to succeed.
If you are considering a productive blog, you would do well to steer clear of the social networking arena and set yourself up on one of the blog hosting sites like WordPress or Blogger. When you have your blog up and running, you’ll no longer need to ask yourself “Why start your own blog when you have an existing website?”
One time consuming aspect of maintaining a blog is that of monitoring the comments posted by your blog’s readers. While those fresh contents can keep your blog in the of search engines’ radar, you could end up with some less than desirable blog posts and even get caught in the middle of battles between your viewers.
Blog comments are also often abused by spammers who simply want to plug their own websites, blogs, or pet causes. And if you have to spend a great amount of time refereeing warring readers, you’ll have that much less time to attend to the marketing aspects of your blog.
If you think you can manage it, create a blog which allows you to interact socially with your readers at the same time you are using it to increase your productivity. Why?
If you want to run with the big dogs in your industry, you will have to find some way of communicating to them that you are ready to do so. Being available to answer their questions on your blog is one way.
If you have a firmly held, defensible, but generally discounted belief regarding your products, leave a few challenging comments on related blogs, with links to you blog so that those who are interested can drop by to argue your point. When they arrive at your blog, lure them to your sales page.
Why start a blog when you already have a website? To socialize, to become more productive, or to become more productive by socializing. Blogs simply function in ways that websites were never meant to!
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John Hacking asked:
The rise and rise of blogging as part of the web 2.0 phenomenon has taken the Internet by storm. Savvy web marketers are now using blogs as an additional weapon to generate leads, add credibility and improve their search engine rankings. Here are six reasons why you should consider blogging.
Blogging is gret fun! Yes, blogging can be great fun. Just open you posting window and go for it without the restrictions of corporate style guides and other impediments to creativity. Got something to say? Just say it. The other fun aspect of blogging is that people can post comments about your blog posts. You posts plus reader comments all become valuable food for the search engines.
Blogging is dirt cheap. The most powerful blogging systems are free. WordPress seems to be the blogging standard and now comes standard with many cheap web hosting packages. For less than $100 per year anyone can get their own domain with blogging included.
I wouldn’t use one of the free blogging services unless you are really desperate. You can’t be sure if they will always remain free and your posts will be building up someone else’ asset rather than your own.
Blogging is fast and easy. If you can use notepad you can blog. The user interface is very intuitive and allows you to add and edit, text, pictures, videos, whatever you want. Want to change the look and layout of your blog? There’s literally hundreds of themes available that take less than a minute to upload and install.
It gives you products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By blogging you show your target market that there is a real person behind the company you represent. By reading you blog posts thet get an idea of what you’re all about – warts and all. The personal aspect of blogging is one of it’s most powerful characteristics.
Your blog becomes another Internet asset. Some blog sites get thousands and thousands of readers each day. This traffic can be converted to hard, cold cash through Google Adsense advertising, affiliate programs and straight advertising space sale. Once you blog increases it’s Google PageRank, you also get the benefit of linking out from your blog site to other web sites you want to promote.
Search engines just love blogs. It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but I have found it to be true in my case. If you blog every day there’s a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog every day looking for that new content.
Convinced? Give blogging a try. There’s stacks of free resources listed in article directories like this one that will help you get into blogging.
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Yean Shin Yong asked:
No matter how the search engine ranking algorithm evolved, there are certain elements that remain unchanged; one of them is incoming link. Incoming link is one of the most important off page factor that the search engine used to rank your website.
What is link building? Link Building is a technique that the search engine consultants use to generate incoming links to your website. There are white hat link building and black hat link building method. Black hat link building strategies are not our main topic today, and not recommended by us. What we are focusing is white hat link building approach.
Here are some white hat link building strategies that we highly recommend.
The first strategy that we recommend is article marketing. Submitting your articles to various article directories will generate a lot of back links to your website. Article directories are websites that collect a lot of articles. Webmaster, bloggers, magazine writers will visit these websites to grab fresh new contents to republish on their websites, blogs and magazine. When they republish your articles, they have to remain the articles content intact, and a backlink to your website. Imagine having 100s of websites republish your articles, instantly you are having 100s of links back to your website.
The second strategy that we recommend is creating pages on authority web 2.0 websites. Websites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogspots, WordPress are considered as authority web 2.0 websites. Google place a lot of attentions to these websites. All you need to do is just go to respective websites, register an account and start creating contents related to your. After that you just create a link back to your main website to increase your search engine ranking.
The last link building strategy that I am going to share with you is submitting your website into link directories. Link directories are websites that collect and organizes all the links. There are 100s and 1000s of such websites on the internet that will accept you submission. Listing your website in link directories with high page rank will give you a powerful boost in your search engine ranking
The final thing that I need you to take note about is the anchor text of your link. Anchor text is the hyperlinked words on a web page that you click on when you click a link. It usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. Anchor text is very important in search engine ranking because it tells Google what is your page about. If your webpage has a lot of incoming links, with the anchor text “dog training”, Google will think that your web page is very important in “dog training” and thus will rank you higher for the “dog training” keyword.
Now which of these methods work the best? That is still much a matter of public opinion. In my personal opinion, they all work if done properly and in combination with each other. It is like your hand. How can you say which one of your fingers works harder or better? The above methods work but work better when used together.
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