Besides instant messengers, chat rooms and emails that are used for communication and dialogue a new trend is fast making its presence felt with a whole lot of online communities gradually contributing to its growth.
Blogs also known as weblogs or blogging are the newest gift of Internet technology to people all over the world. They vary from crop up entries to personalized life snippets some simple while the others bizarre in nature.
For most, a “blog” is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal meant to be shared in an online community. A blog site is a place where bloggers can publish anything such as their thoughts, photos, special events, feelings, experiences, etc. It is more of an online diary with documents, newsletters, videos, links, and opinions on just about any topics may interest the author.
In general blogs should not be made too formal or seem intimidating as they are made to welcome the insights and opinions of all. Blogs written too formally may risk putting the reader off and as such reduce its popularity.
Blogging is all about individuals reaching out to other individuals. Having a blog has its own set of advantages for example:
- It could be an excellent Marketing platform. Having a blog is a good platform for exchanging genuine ideas from consumers to you as marketer of a certain product. Other’s opinion and getting their point of view is better than just showing the price quote.
- Excellent advertising platform. Blogging is a new way to advertise products, a refreshing change from the traditional advertising methods.
- Freedom of Expression. If you want people to hear you out and give their own opinion, this is the best way to create a dialogue.
- A useful tool for internal communication. Blogs can help a company to build a wide knowledge – based community of employees that is also good for harnessing employee relations identifying human resource issues in advance and increasing employee interaction.
- Other benefits like search engine optimization (SEO) could help your blogs to be seen more often by as many people as you wish. This could be good exposure for your products and services and your blog in general.
Many blog hosting services are available on the Internet. But the basic question is which one of the services will be the best to start off your business blog program? Most people are usually clueless to recent technological innovations that would help them maximize their marketing potentials. For these beginners, it is best to first study the services offered by blog hosts. An ineffective business blogging program may damage marketing opportunities instead of enriching them.
An individual or company may decide to do the following depending on their capacity and needs:
1) Host their own blog service
2) Pay someone else to host the service or
3) Setup a “blog aggregator page” and ask the employees to select their blog hosting services individually. There are paid and free services available for individuals.
For business blogs, they are required to have the latest blogging features; if not, this will prevent them from maximizing their marketing, public relations and SEO potentials.
While creating a blog it is essential to keep in mind that blogs should have the following basic essentials:
Comments : Welcoming comments provide opportunity for dialogue. In business blogs, they are a good customer feedback mechanism. This helps develop better customer relations based from loyalty and trust. Blogging is an innovative way to converse with your visitors or customers.
Trackback : This helps in maximizing company and product exposure. Through this service, visitors or consumers can get back to you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of locating you. If your blog is popular in a specific online community chances are links going back to your blog site are everywhere online, other blog sites or even websites.
Categories and Tags : These both help in classifying blog searches for ease of navigation and on site search. Categories act as libraries because it classifies posts by subject matter such as business, distance learning, e-commerce, online auctions, etc. Tags, help in the classification, especially in the blog search engine Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs about certain topics of interest by just clicking the tags.
RSS Feed : Really Simple Syndication is the feed from your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected through the various newsreaders and aggregators.
If you are intend to establish a blog, considerable options should be made available by the hosting companies short listed for the services. Free blog hosting services are popular but they are much appropriate only for individual online journals. Paid blog hosting services offer unlimited packages best for business blogging needs. You may want to suggest checking out some blogs that use the host first, read and examine their layout and design. Another important thing to consider is a reliable technical support the host has.
After, choosing the blog host, a team should be ready to plan the design and structure of the blog: The team should:
1. Create a style that meets the needs of your intended audience;
2. Establish an open, credible tone;
3. Schedule a weekly update of the blog – ideally, a few times a week;
4. Include weblinks of other website and blogs;
5. Blog post should be in the “first person;”
6. Focus on the business blog objective; and lastly,
7. Maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.
Remember, whatever the look, style and content found on your blog is a reflection of you and your company.
