The phenomena of Blogging has captured the attention of the masses far and wide. Blogs vary widely ranging from Journalistic to Literature, to the baser side of things where fart jokes pale in comparison to some heavier duty material and on beyond the trivial to academic and business pursuits. The blog means many things to many people. To you as a buisness person it means taking the offensive. Instead of hoping passively that your web site will attract customers, you are going out after them.
But first you need to get a feel for the beast and learn the basic lexicon.
Content Typically, a blog’s content depends on the topic it’s dealing with. If you’re advertising a product such as perfume, apparel, or a vintage automobile, you could feature catalogs of the products mentioned.
Your Business blog should also provide stories and updates on key happenings in your business, such as upcoming sales or special promotions. While most business blogs stay on the pretty straight and narrow, some business blogs adapt a more in your face or cheeky attitude. If this is right for your business, the added flair increases readers entertainment value and thus encourages readership and ultimately more sales.
A blog should be updated daily to give readers reasons to keep coming back for more. A human mind always seeks for something new. Therefore, update. If a daily routine is not in the cards for your blog, make sure it is at least regularly updated. Regularity is a good habit and critical to blogging bowels.
Feedback Comments are very much welcome. Come one, come all! It doesn’t matter who comments as long as somebody did. Bottom line: You want to meke sure what you’ve written has an effect on people’s minds and aroused some opinions to merit it. Be glad you have a comment. At least someone has read your posts. Here, interaction takes place.
Tools and Concepts Blogging can be a fuss if you don’t how the process works. What in the world does RRS, URL, blogroll, and all that jazz mean? How can I use it? While a blog is a simple concept, they do have a number of moving parts that might not be obvious to all at first.
For greater understanding, here are some terms and definitions of some of the tool usually used in blogging and the concepts that go with it.
Archives – Archives are records of important documents or files preserved. Archives can capture significant amounts of material over time. These can be reused and/or serve as documentation.
Blogrolls – Blogrolls are a categorized list of network links to web pages. This can be a dynamic tool for your business. Permitting cross promotion with your business allies and direct linking to your main web pages. These provide your blog readers with direct access to key pages on your web site and to those of your partners.
Comment Spam – Comment Spam is potentially even a greater problem in the Blog world than on your email server. You will inevitabley receive irrelevant comments posted on your pages with links to one or more domains of the Spam poster. Thankfully, a number of “Plug Ins” available to bloggers can help all but eliminate this problem.
Downloads – Downloads is a verb pertaining to the pictures, audios, or videos That have been or could be downloaded from your site or to your site. Your blog is just another part of your web page and can access or be accessed to process downloads. Thus a simple blog post may hold multiple documents, video etc that you can in turn make available to your reader in quick order.
Excerpt – An excerpt is a set of summarized ideas of the post usually having a part of the entire article condensed upfront. This provides a prospective reader with a heads up as to the overall content. This will allow them to read your blog or not depending upon their interest in the material. An excerpt saves prospective readers time, and they will appreciate not having to read posts that don’t offer them value. A good excerpt is good business.
Feeds – Feeds are a way of transferring relevant material from one site to another. This can Permit you to automatically transfer information for other web sites of your own or a third party and have it post automatically on your blog. Creative use of Feeds helps provide a constant flow of fresh material to your blog.
Guests – Guest are the readers, viewers, spammers, etc., who visits your site. While you may not welcome the spammers, your blog exists for your guests. You want to attempt to make it as guest friendly as possible. While your objective is to accomplish a business purpose with your blog, the best way to do so is to focus on the Guests needs, rather than your own. Think about how you can build a relationship with them.
Hosts – Hosts are web sites willing to accommodate your registration as a blogger. I personally recommend WordPress and as a result frequently recommend securing a webhost who offers the use of a cpanel as their primary customer interface. If you web host has CPanel, it is a simple thing to set up WordPress.
Introduction – Introduction probably doesn’t require an introduction. But its a good idea to provide a preliminary part of the blog page to show the personal profile of the author or a brief description of the subject.
Links – Links are those ubiquitous blue words that serve as a tie up with a series of sections in the web suitable for navigation from one site to another; also known as a “permalink” or “hyperlink.”
Plugins – Plug in’s come in a huge variety and consist of characters or scripts adding additional function to the site. For example the Askimet plug in does an excellent job of screening for Spam Comments and segregating them, so you don’t need to worry about hand deleting them.
And that’s it. All the primary words above embody key aspects of the blogging community. While their is easy access to the blog and blogging in todays world that doesn’t mean easy manipulation. You must have certain concepts and tools to make blogging possible. You absolutely must get a blog going in most businesses to effectively attract the customers you want, but the process will require a bit of work and education.