How can you tell when a blog is right for your business? Learn why people start blogging, how they find their niche and how blogging tools can be used for more than blogs.
Blog content is king
Some people like to read blogs, others like to read newsletters, still others want to rely on feeds and some read some or all of them. Whichever way the information is distributed, each medium has one thing in common: content. To have a blo
g connects your newsletter and your company with all these readers and delivers important content in a particular style.
A few bloggers tend to talk about their work, their products and their little world. Being able to work for celebrities where fans will know everything about them, but it does not work for the average businessman. Other items you want information on how to succeed and when a blog user time Hawking products offering information of no value, will get people back. The people whose products sell well are those that provide valuable information. Readers already know what kind of information they receive, so they have confidence that when they buy something, it will be the same or better quality. This value should be reflected in their blog. It is much as people who only subscribe to a newsletter after the first preview.
Who should venture where no one has blogged before?
Nobody wants to be a lemming. How do you decide whether or not to create a blog? The answer is not black or white (what did you expect?). Ask these questions:
Can you regularly update it - at least five times a week?
Got something to say other than just linking to others?
Do you read other blogs or feeds?
Can you provide information of value to others, not just for yourself?
How big is your newsletter subscriber list?
How many unique visitors you get on an average day, week or month?
The grand finale is whether you can write in the blog almost daily. The people behind the high traffic blogs post multiple times a day. Although resourceful, merely linking to other sites, do not give visitors much reason to make an effort to get to yours. Read other blogs or feeds are a great way to learn how to make a discussion. Find other blogs covering topics similar to yours and check them out. Disagree with their opinions? Write about it and explain your reasons. Cross-blog discussions are common, and there is trackback practicable.
Trackback is a blog feature. If you decide to comment on another blog posting in your blog instead of this blog's comments page, so you link to the conversation through the trackback link. Trackback resembles permalink, the permanent URL of this blog, but it has a different URL to copy and paste into your blog's trackback box.
Apart from the technical aspects of a blog on a daily basis, subscriber list size and Web site traffic are good indicators of what kind of reaction you get when you open a blog. Starting from scratch with little traffic means you have a long road ahead and lots of work to do. There is no magic formula that anyone can sell you for $ 97 to make your blog an overnight success. But with some perseverance and ingenuity, your blog can engage many prospects and customers.
Choose a niche
Given that there are many blogs out there, choosing a niche topic when starting a blog for a better shot at attracting and retaining an audience. Meryl notes focuses on three areas: Webby, geeky and wordy. In reality, it is too much. What we must do for our readers is create three separate blog entry points, so those interested in writing, newsletters and Internet marketing get nothing but the wordy entries. Interested in web design will Webby stuff and technophiles receive the geeky content.
The blogging tools for both our blogs come with syndication capabilities so those using feed readers or aggregators can read the content through the software. For an explanation of syndication and feed readers, see What Is This RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom Business? When you send a new issue of a newsletter, comment on it or link to it in the blog, the way the blog and feed readers will get the goods, so all three bases are covered.
Blogs in disguise using the same tools
Blogging tools are not just for, well, blogging. These tools are an excellent way to help you update your site more often than you would otherwise. We use it to manage the list of less-profitable Internet sites. Using blogging tools is much easier than the way we manage it before updating the HTML files by hand. Even using a blog tool, it is not a blog. In this case, the blog tool, become a content management system (CMS).
Owners of small businesses do not need the fancy and pricey CMSes out there. They find it easier to use blogging software to manage their Web sites or hire someone to customize the tool to their site. Women's Spirituality is one such site. Karen Casey can not use the blog, but she has discussions about the articles she writes.
Blogs have found a place in companies and people are finding creative ways to use them. Some companies have a blog on the intranet for communicating project status, jeopardies and measurements. They're used for knowledge management. With information pouring in, blog tools for a way to share, organize and process information.
Being a follower can be good or bad. Nobody wants to walk down a cliff with the lemmings, but everyone wants to succeed. Best practices will not help, since the decision to blog is based on the organization's mission, needs and objectives with its target market wants and needs. A blog about lemmings? There is one kind. Or maybe you'd like to start your own and talk about dumb business move.
