Networking Your Website with a Blog

By Rita Wilhelm, Contributing Writer     Rita's Bio        Email article to a friend

The internet is changing. People are communicating online as never before. One of the primary means of communication is through something called a blog.

According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs created every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second!

It’s not just businesses that are blogging. Did you know that 35% of moms maintain their own blog? Most people blog because it is a means of expression. Blogging gives each person a voice.

It’s very important as a marketer for your business that you are out there blogging, so that you can attract clients to your business.

So what is a blog?

A blog is short for ‘web log’. It’s basically like an online diary. You can talk about whatever you want to on a blog. You might have several blogs. Maybe one is for business, and one is for fun. Ideally, you would make a blog entry at least 2 times a month, to keep it updated and keep it attractive to search engines.

When you start a blog, you are officially called a ‘blogger’. And, your blog becomes part of the ‘blogosphere’, which basically means that your blog is one of the millions and millions of blogs on the internet.

When you create a blog entry, the most recent entry will show up on top of the page with the date, just like a diary.

Typically blog entries are:

• short, about 1-5 paragraphs in length
• written in a casual tone
• an expression of your personality/expertise

Most blogs are free. If you are part of a community that has a blogging feature, you can blog there. You can also start a blog by going to places like http://www.Blogger.com (which is owned by Google), or http://www.WordPress.com.

Because a blog is typically updated regularly, the search engines really like them. Google loves blogs not only because they are updated frequently, but because they are typically full of links (incoming and outgoing). That’s good search engine spider food, because the search engines spiders can crawl to visit other sites that your blog is linking too (such as your website).

When the search engines ‘spider your site’ it means they are indexing the content of your site. This is important, because Google and the other major search engines, will work to bring up a match for what a person is searching for. They will look through all their indexed sites to see what matches up.

As a business person, you can use a blog to write tidbits about your area of expertise. For instance, if you sell a specialty food mix, you can blog about recipe ideas using your products. If you are a realtor, you can talk about market conditions, or provide tips on increasing the value of your home. You can write about what is happening in your industry, book reviews, something interesting that happened in your shop today, a telephone call you just received from a happy customer, your thoughts on what customer service should be about, etc.

Write your entries as if you were writing a short email to a friend, which happens to be your target audience. You can use a casual voice. Try to stay away from the stiff ‘corporate speak’. Just be yourself.

Once you start your own blog, start actively participating in the blogosphere community. Find related blogs and start linking to them, or commenting on their blogs. You can find related blogs by doing a search at http://blogsearch.google.com.

Connecting your blog in the blogosphere immediately raises your blog’s credibility and credentials in the eyes of the search engines. And it is the search engines that bring more and more interested visitors (and customers) to your doorstep!

 

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Contact Rita Wilhelm at RitaW@TheNationalNetworker.com or Post a Comment on TNNW Blog.