Thursday, December 11, 2008

Blogging: Helpful Tips for Corporate Blogging

by Nicholas Tan

Blogs are massive resources of information from both inside and outside companies. Businessmen survive the world of blogging because they know how and where to dig information while protecting their own secrets. Although blogging can be risky world for businesses, there are several helpful tips that can help bring success to corporate blogging.
The Important of Training It is important to make sure the members of the communications team. In the past, this team was composed of a small group. However, with the advent of blogging, everyone who blogs at the company is spreading a specific message about the company. People who handle the blogging for the company must be trained to avoid any spill of unnecessary information.
If by accident, important information regarding the company has been disclosed, this can put the company under the watchful eyes of the regulators. More so, inappropriate leaks can provide competitors with leverage and may lead to embarrassing revelations about the inner workings of the company and its staff.
Although the usual action to be taken is to restrict employees from blogging, this can be a shortsighted decision. Bloggers from within the company can easily relate and make contact with potential clients and even enhance the brand of the company.
The Fake Blogs Several, if not all, companies are eager to establish one-on-one links with their consumers, though they are often hesitant to venture in the world of blogging. As a result, they set up fake blogs. Fake blogs are those that are created by marketing departments of the company in order to promote a product, brand or service using a fake name or character.
These kinds of blogs are risky since several bloggers who are passionate about what they do view them as an insult to the blogging community and no one can deny the fact that these blogs are very visible to the public.
Although there are no rules prohibiting a company from making pseudo-blogs, the subject of creating one is always welcome. Always keep in mind that you can choose to create fake blogs but remember all the risks involved.
Blog Tracking
Tracking blogs is one of the easiest and most important tips to remember. Firstly, the company can look around online and search for the most influential blogger who writes about their products or services. Remember to read the blogger's updates everyday and perform an automated tracking of discussions.
Tracking blogs is important because even those postings from small-time bloggers can be selected by search engines, strengthened by a well-known blogger and ultimately hit the mainstream.
The Public Relations
Blogs have the ability to break down barriers between the company and its customers. It is important for businesses to take that into consideration and adjust. There are several companies that start blog in order to attain customer loyalty and address the customers' concerns and comments. Relating to the customers is a vital factor in the survival of a business. Knowing what the customers think about the products or services can help enhance the company's services.
The Company's Secrets
Take into consideration one secret or secrets that you have kept at your company. Be it a list of projects for the following year or information about scandalous activities, there are several things that you must learn no to leak to your competitors.
In blogging, there is a certainty that you must rethink about something that you are trying to avoid, for that fact that other companies are increasingly sharing information to win new partners and generate new ideas. Although this does not mean that they are not keeping any secrets from you or that you must not keep any from them, it is important to reevaluate whether you can gain more out of sharing details than keep them to yourself.

Blogging: How to Plan Your Blog

by Nicholas Tan

The basics of blogging cover all the basic essentials, including your writing style, blog category and the content of your blog. Planning your blog can be difficult if you do not know what you want to talk about. It could be extra hard if you do not have the necessary background in blogging. However, knowing what you want to blog about can easily come to you once you start browsing and poking around other blogs. You can pick ideas from those blogs, expound and make them the basis of your blog.
The Blogging Categories
Generally, there are several types of blogs. Nevertheless, there are three popular categories of blogs, such as: the organizational, business and personal blogs.
The first category, the organization, uses the power of blogs to communicate either externally with the public or internally within their organizations. This kind of blog has the purpose of facilitation internal communications amongst employees, colleagues and other organizational personnel. In addition, organizational blogs normally publish information that is of interest by the public. In a certain instance, there are organizational blogs that publish seminar schedules, meetings, and announcements for their clients, customers or members.
The business blogs, on the other hand, are for promoting services or products offered by businesses in order to help increase profits, revenue and interest of potential consumers. These kinds of blogs can look for ways to increase their reputation and authority with vendors, customers and partners. They do this by publishing contents that express expertise and knowledge within a specific market portion, niche or industry.
The personal blogs are those that contain contents that are more of a reflection of bloggers' opinions and thoughts. Normally, they are used to publish articles that voice their points of view on several kinds and varieties of events and topics. Bloggers who publish personal contents usually find pleasure in documenting their everyday lives, stream of consciousness and even their hate to specific events through articles that reflects their moods.
The Target Audience
Your target audience and blogging style comes hand in hand. The moment you think of creating your own blog, you must first realize what your target audience is; you must know what they want, need and desire to read about. The blog you create and the contents you publish must provide quality and value to the readers in order to be effective in establishing communication and expanding readership.
More so, the kind of blog you want to create essentially creates its own target audience. For instance, an organizational blog is meant for those who are members or clients of a certain organization. Although the target audience may be limited, there is a good chance for consistency with regards to the dialogue you create with your readers and eventually more people would be interested in your blog.
The mentioned personal blogs are not normally designed for social dialogue with a certain target readership of any category and is rather meant to serve as a collection of your musings. These kinds of blogs are best reserved to your close friends and they are your target audience.
If you identify your target audience successfully, your messages that you want everyone to know about will be effectively targeted. Some of the greatest joys of blogging come from the use of your enthusiasm in publishing signification information for a community where there is a free exchange of opinions between the readers and you.

Blogging: How to Profit From a Blog

by Nicholas Tan

Blogs can be for profit or non-profit but most bloggers blog for the purpose of making money. There may be some contents published to simply provide an outlet for voicing out the bloggers' opinions and share their thoughts. However, the general population of bloggers has the intention of profiting financially. Fortunately, there are several methods of profiting from a blog and applying these methods can help you gain money.
The Advertisements
Selling space for advertisers is one of the most common ways to profit from a blog. Since blogs that have a considerable amount of traffic can make income with ad sales, make sure that you have a target audience. The reason why bloggers choose to sell advertising is that it is a passive form of income once the traffic has progressed. Although it takes work to look for advertisers and maintain the ads on the blog, those who can achieve it can gain reasonable amount of money with the ads.
Compared to other forms of profiting from a blog, selling advertisement space can be one of the most consistent revenue streams. If you are able to maintain your ad slots filled, you should have a very good idea of just how much you can make every month.
On the negative side, selling ads requires you to have some kind of established traffic. Traffic is important because it draws interest from potential advertisers. You might find it hard to sell an ad space without traffic and it will most likely not produce much revenue. Additionally, the blog must have a target audience in order to achieve the maximum amount of cash for advertisement space. Remember that advertisers are more likely to pay if your target audience is a match to theirs.
Affiliate programs are also a major resource of profits for several bloggers. Affiliate programs are excellent in a sense that they enable you to have the opportunity to make money even if your blog has a small audience. However, one bad side to affiliate programs is that there can be instances where you cannot make any money at all.
Newly created blogs feature affiliate ads most of the time compared to selling space directly to advertisers. Since selling ads is hard to do without much traffic, affiliate programs are perfect for new blogs. More so, they can be easily maintained and only take very little time.
Promoting and Premium Content
Bloggers who are service providers at the same time have an excellent opportunity to look for clients and increase their rates. Maintaining a blog that focuses on your area of expertise can help you easily become a recognized authority in your field. Additionally, it can aid potential clients to find you. You can also benefit from the increase in demand of your services and improved reputation that you build, which enable you to charge more for your services.
Aside from promoting your services, selling premium contents are also excellent ways to profit from a blog. Blogs are a massive source of information and remember that not everything has to be free. There are bloggers and business that attained success by selling some of their work. There are blogs that sell memberships on their Web sites. Although selling premium content is possible in any field, you must have the capability to give something to the reader that is worth paying for.

Blogging: Search Engine Marketing

by Nicholas Tan

All bloggers know that a well-written, entertaining and focused blog can generate huge volumes of traffic from visitors. This is one of the basic learnings in blogging: blogs should be focused and centered on a topic and other related issues.
Search engine marketing is simply the process of getting your blog and its content sufficiently highranking in several search engines for your keywords. This would enable your content to generate more visitors to your site from SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages. Attention-grabbing content titles and sites help users to feel compelled to click on your link in the search engine results pages and eventually visit you.
Additionally, search engine marketing needs a Web site that is optimized for search engines. Normally, this is a Web site that can display a configuration setting that makes it look interesting to search engine spiders. In turn, the spiders will visit the site and look at your content. After doing this, the spiders then pick up significant keywords, which determine the characteristic of your page. Lastly, the content returns to the search engines for the purpose of being indexed.
Enhancing Search Engine Marketing
Nowadays, blogs are making tons of small news Web sites or mini content centers that contain significant information and links. Compared in the past, search engines visit major news Web sites since they were the ones who were the ultimate sources for the newest content to be found online. Blogs have outpaced several media outlets online due to their capability to deliver and publish fresh information to the public faster.
The key in getting noticed more by the search engines is to publish faster. Since search engines looks for the freshest, high value and relevant information, it is important for you to publish frequently. This would get your blog more visits from major search engines and others.
Blogs have a natural relationship with search engines. Since blogs are natural search engine magnets, the search engine spiders will visit your blog often if they detect an update from it. In addition, the content of your blog does not have to wait for months before getting into search engine result pages but instead, your content will be displayed in a matter of hours or days.
It is important to know how much the search engine can do for your blog. Blogs should be frequently updated to allow the search engine spider to visit you often, since they are normally programmed to visit your blog as often as you publish fresh contents.
Reasons Why Blogs Rank Well in Search Results
Firsly, blogs are designed to meet the demands for search traffic and search engines. Blogs are also highy significant in their niches and are considered as the best sources of the most up-to-date information online. More so, blogs can be keyword optimized. Keyword optimization helps blogs achieve high rankings in search engine results. Additionally, wisely distributing the keywords evenly on the content can also help your blog rank easily on search engine results.
Compared to Web sites, blogs are also text-rich publishing tools. This only means that the code used by blogs is light weight. This makes your blog's content highly visible to search engines. Search engine spiders can visit your blog frequently and crawl over your content faster because of greater clarity. This clarity provides a vivid interpretation of what the content of your blog is all about.

Blogging: The Basics of Blogging

by Nicholas Tan

With the advent of internet marketing, Web publishing is continually gaining ground and popularity. Nowadays, technologically savvy corporate businessmen, or even business employees, use blogs to build and manage relationships with their consumers. They share their company's expertise, culture and other information, which can help develop the customer's interest in their products and services.
On the other hand, not only do businessmen venture in the world of blogging but regular computer users too. Not only can they voice out their opinions and thoughts to others but also earn money in more ways than one; from selling ad space to offering expert services, which in turn builds their reputation as a professional.
If you are thinking of entering the blogsphere, you must be ready of the problems you might encounter in several areas of blogging, such as: choosing, installing and configuring your blog software tools. Although the collection and assortment of configurations vary widely, a neophyte blogger can still get confused. The tools are not the only obstacles you must overcome but also the terminologies used for blogging.
Tools for Blogging
Basically, the software tools for your blog greatly depend on your provider. For instance, the RSS functionality can be absent from one provider but present in another. Additionally, some blog software tool providers can cost as low as $4 each month depending on the extent of service you choose, while others can be used for free but with limited services.
Choosing the right software tool depends on you. If you have enough cash to spare for a blog or if you want to really get serious with a blog and hope to earn cash in the future, which is always a possibility, you have the option of choosing priced blog software tools. However, if you are a newbie blogger, it might be advisable to start with free blog software tool providers.
Fortunately, some providers that charge for their services also offer free trial periods, which range from 10 to 30 days. This is an excellent opportunity to try and test out the services they offer without paying any fee. Luckily, if you find a provider that you are comfortable with and offer the services you need, you can always use their free trial periods to the full extent before subscribing.
Blogging Terminologies
Blogging is like a secret society and like most secret societies; it has its own language that you must learn. Although, technologically savvy individuals an easily familiarize themselves with these terms, it might be hard for those who have limited or no background with Web publishing whatsoever.
Firstly, the most important term in blogging is Post. A post happens every time you place or publish an update to your blog; you also create a post this way. Secondly, since blogs are a means of communication, comments are also possible. If your audience leaves a message regarding your published content, this message is referred to as a comment. Normally, the comments are labeled and time-stamped to allow you and other readers to see who posted the comment and when it was posted.
Comment spams, is also a term that happen when a single reader continuously repeats the same comment over and over again. This can be a headache for the blogger as the blog can be used by the reader to promote other blogs or Web site.
These are just some of the few terms that you can encounter in blogging. Only exploration and experience can help you understand the other terminologies involved in blogging.

Blogging: The Benefits of the Blog Types

by Nicholas Tan

In blogging, you are not limited into one type of blogging type. In fact, there are several types of blogs. No matter what type bloggers use, they publish content around topics and issues that they feel passionate about. For instance, several bloggers write about politics, others for pet care and some for personal computers. However, blogs that are business oriented are often focused into a single topic for the fact that they need to emphasize their services or products.
Blogs can cover a wide range of topics. Because of this versatility, several people are starting to blog. Not only can they express what they feel or advertise their products or services, they can also earn cash. Blogs are new methods of earning income at the comfort of your own home. However, that is just the icing on the cake since blogging can bring lots of joy to several bloggers for that fact that they can share their opinions and thoughts to others and receive advise from them or vice versa.
Blogging for Business
Several businesses are exploring the world of blogging. This is an excellent opportunity for them since blogging is a great medium of communication. Additionally, business oriented blogs can benefit from the search engine optimization advantage, which is the biggest leverage of blogging.
If the business has a Web site that promotes a product or service, any type of content that the business use as the vehicle to drive the business or commerce to another level require a blog. Blogs are very useful because they are text-based and light weight, with regards to the code used, compared to traditional Web site content. This only means that blogs minimize the crawl time of search engine spiders and allow them to retrieve more information about the page to the search directories a lot faster.
More so, blogs are dynamic because they can be updated frequently. By frequently publishing contents for the blog, the search engine spiders visit more often. The result is that the blog can have more pages being sent over the search engines compared to the business's opponents. This is very good indeed if the competitor is the one who has a static Web site. This also provides the blogging business an opportunity to reach out to more potential customers, thus possibly increasing their revenue.
Blogging for Personal Use
Normally, personal blogs have the characteristics of being exciting, interesting and enjoyable. Bloggers blogging for personal reasons have the purpose of keeping their friends and family updated about their lives and activities. Many bloggers find comfort in blogging personal contents. Additionally, if you create a personal blog, you are open to the idea of sharing your interest with other people who might visit your blog.
Like any other blogs, personal blogs can be incorporated with photos, videos and other multimedia elements. You can create a personal blog about anything that you feel passionate about. There are even personal blogs with contents regarding products that the blogger is really interested in. This provides the businesses ideas about the preferences of their customers. This only proves that blogs also work in synergy.
Blogs are very easy to use content management systems, which allow you to publish articles right away and in real-time. These platforms for communication unravel new opportunities to connect with others both in a personal or professional manner.

Blogging: Why You Should Blog

by Nicholas Tan

Many people are getting into blogging for several reasons. You might have heard it somewhere recently but it actually started more than a decade ago from its mother, the online diary. Back then, these kinds of diaries are used by people to record and share accounts of their personal lives. Although blogging still uses that same concept, it has now evolved into several categories and usage.
Nowadays, blogging is synonymous to online marketing. Bloggers not only publish contents reflecting their moods for the day or sharing what they have done for the past few weeks but also advertise and create a sturdy communication with their audience. More so, through the use of blogging, people are now able to find an alternative in making money. Blogging is an excellent opportunity for generating income.
The Blog
Before you even start to create you own blog. It is necessary to know what blog really is. The term blog is actually derived from the word Weblog or Web log. Back in the days, around the late 1990's, these Web logs are utilized by users to track updates and references to other resources online. They served as journals, which made them useful as a publishing tool for the user's stream of consciousness. Of course, the readers can still comment and share their thoughts on just abut anything under the sun.
Technically, blogs are also known as CMS or Content Management Systems. Being a CMS, blogs allow the writers to easily publish to a specific Web site and manage the content without the need of having to deal with the program code. Publishing software also provides users with a GUI or Graphical User Interface for easy pointing and clicking of their articles. Through the use of easy-to-do procedures, you can perform configuration and set up, which can ease your job as a blogger since the tool can automatically organize your published articles the next time you publish.
The Advantage of Blogging
The main question is; why should you start blogging? The first thing you need to know is that blogging can enhance and support your online communications. However, you must first understand the outcome of your blog that you desire in order to attain success. The main reason why you should start blogging, is that it can be both an excellent outlet for your frustrations or excitement and profitable at the same time.
It does not mean that if you are not into blogging, you should not blog. Being in a business, especially those with dealings on the Internet, requires you to establish a clientele that are actually interested with your services. Blogs can do this easily due to its accessibility and being an excellent medium for marketing that it is, blogs are essential for businesses.
More so, if you are handling a business, there is good chance that your competition is blogging about their products and services. This is an easy method for you to examine the competition and what their clients' preferences are. Additionally, blogs can create strong customer relationships since your target market can easily and directly communicate with the authority within your business.
This kind of opportunity is hard to resist since a strong customer relationship can eventually lead to lasting trust to your product and services; hence, eventual increase in your revenue.

Blogging: Writing and Publishing Your First Blog Entry

by Nicholas Tan

The content of your blog is an important factor in gaining traffic and acquiring a target audience. Publishing your first article or item is a great milestone in your blogging career. Fortunately, there are several basic guidelines, which can make your content more effective to your audience, adored by the search engines and respected by the world of blogging.
Publishing an Effective Content
Before you begin to write anything on your blog, you should know who your target audience is and what they want. If you see these factors as irrelevant for your blog because your blog is not business oriented in any way, you must remember that if you want readers then these factors are really relevant.
Always remember that where there are readers there is something interesting to read. The only reason why people read is because they want something. If you really want to achieve some kind of massive readership, you must strive to make your content interesting and actually what readers want.
First of all, keep in mind that communication is the key. More so, your communication must be authentic. The time when you publish your content is also the time when you let your true self surface. Blogs are personal in nature and communication is the key to being personal. The fact that each blog is unique because each writer is unique is enough for you to not to worry about future similarities with other blog entries. Keep in mind that whatever topic you are blogging about you must incorporate your personality with your writing.
In order to create a loyal target audience, it is important for the visitors to trust you and relate to you. It does not necessarily entail that they know about your personal details but you must connect with your audience in an authentic manner.
After establishing your communication with your audience, the content must also be credible. The blog must have authenticity even though credibility takes a lot of time to build.
The moment you begin publishing your content, which is of high value and useful to the readers, you also start establishing your authority. There will come a time when your readers ask you for advice or seek for your opinion; this is the time when you have achieved some kind of credibility and you must use this to build your reputation as a blogger.
The Blogger's Block
Blogging is writing but uses a different medium. There are several methods to fight blogger's block. Always remember that your blog software exists to serve you and not to frighten you. You do not have to try blogging carrying the idea that you have prolific writing skills, or a journalism degree. The fact is that you have something to say and you want others to hear it. However, if you are feeling stuck on an idea, there are several suggestions that you can apply when creating the content for your blog.
Firstly, you can try visiting other blogs. Visit those blogs that interest you and pick ideas and topics from those blogs that might be worth blogging about but keep in mind the relevance of the topic and your readership. You can also syndicate your news updates. You can do this by subscribing to news services online because they allow you to save time on searching using keywords. This is most useful for bloggers.

Top Reasons Why You Should Have Most Popular Posts Column

by Ramkarthik

If you are optimizing your blog, here are the top reasons why you should add most popular posts column to your blog.
1. Increases Page Views:
When a reader visits your blog, the chances are more for him/her to visit the most popular blog posts. Most popular posts will have a magnetic headline. These headline will attract the reader to click on the post and read it.
2. Increase In Subscribers:
When I visit a blog for the first time, I decide whether to subscribe or not by reading recent posts and few other posts. If you can capture the hearts of your visitors by the most popular articles, they are mostly to become your subscribers. For this you should know how to Convert One off Visitors to your Blog into Regular Readers.
3. Gain Back links:
When displaying most popular posts, few of the posts might be new. There are bloggers in the blogosphere who will link to great articles in the recent days. They might just give it a link or sometimes they will add their views on the post linking to your post. So there are more chances for a blogger to link to your famous posts.
4. Exposure To Your Old Articles:
By displaying most popular posts, your old articles actually get more exposure. You can sometimes handpick few old articles that you thought would have been a success. Those articles can be linked.
5. They Stand As A Trade Mark:
If you see the blogs I mentioned above, you could see that the top articles are very different and they are the blog's trade mark. Every blogger has/should have their own trade mark post or Flagship Content however you call it.
Instead of displaying those long blog rolls and big banners(other than your advertisers'), you can display your most popular posts so that you can enjoy the above 5 points.

Helping The New Blogger Earn Revenue From Their Blogs

by Peter Hamilton

For the past couple of years or so, more and more people have started blogging. More and more blogging platforms have cropped up on the internet, side by side of the social networking sites. It's becoming a worldwide craze.
More and more new users on the internet are quickly discovering the power of blogging and the fun to be had in writing your daily blog. Users of all ages are blogging and the creativity of their sites is inspirational to us all.
Who doesn't have a blog nowadays? We all do. Even the major corporations now have blogs which tens of thousands of internet users follow every day.
The sad thing is, not many people are realizing their full money earning potential with their blogs. There is money to be made and lots of it.
Monetizing your blog is fast becoming the norm, but still, there are millions of people out there not earning from their blogs. The majority are new users which this article is aimed at.
Many people are now making a living from blogging - can you believe that? I can. It's simple to implement and what could be better than to earn some much needed extra cash for blogging about your favourite subjects?
To fully maximize your income stream from blogging, you need to promote, promote and promote some more your blogs to gain as much traffic as you can. You also need to implement various proven techniques to see those pay checks roll in every month.
So, what are these techniques and how do you promote your blog?