Get Into the Blogging Game

A blog for your business can serve as a vital means to communicate with your customers and get your message out.

Once the domain of hobbyists and amateur publishers, today, weblogs, or blogs, have developed into exciting and valuable tools to help businesses raise their visibility, communicate their brand, and increase their market share. Although it’s true that blogging might be easier than you think, there are a few tips and tricks that can help increase the chances that a blog contributes to your bottom line.

Recognize the power of blogs. According to a July 2006 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 39 percent of all Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs. Given those numbers, it’s easy to see how tapping into that market can be helpful to your business. Once you’ve created a site that attracts traffic, markets your business’ products and services, and showcases your industry expertise, you may find that a successful blog can help create a direct conversation between you and your current or potential customers.

“It is no longer a question of if blogs are valuable to businesses or not,” says Matt Lohman, director of market research at research firm KnowledgeStorm Inc., in Alpharetta, Ga. “Every business needs to formulate a blog strategy. The strategy could be as simple as monitoring the blogosphere for industry, company, and customer insights or as complex as authoring or commenting on blogs. Regardless of the strategy, blogs are a legitimate information channel that should not be ignored.”

Choose your software. Blogs are self-contained publishing platforms, often driven by software available for free. Examples of free blog publishing software include WordPress, Blogger, and Movable Type. Each of these software packages (and others) represents varying degrees of flexibility, ease of use, and installation. Yahoo! makes it easy for you by providing web hosting and blogging packages for as little as $11.95 a month.

Get a host. One of the key questions you’ll have to answer when setting up your blog is where it will reside. Yahoo! Web Hosting hosts more than 30 million web sites and blogs. Our partnership with the Moveable Type publishing platform makes blogging easy, professional, and inexpensive.

Start publishing. Blogs are unique because they allow for publishing in ways different than more traditional marketing schemes. Blogs act more like ongoing because their posts can be short, conversational, and to the point. As a result, it’s important to decide what you want your blog to say and who will say it. Do you want to talk about new products? Describe a service you provide? Showcase the talents of your people? Despite the fact that most blogs are written by one person, you might want to consider including some or all of your staff into a kind of “group blog” that highlights a sense of community between your business and your readers.

Get involved and stay involved. In order to develop a successful blog, you have to be committed to its success. Even if they are easy to operate, you must incorporate your blog into your business completely, especially if you wish to create fresh, compelling content on a regular basis. Blogs that post new information on a daily basis, for example, generate a larger and more loyal audience than those that post only occasionally or erratically.

Measure your results. Yahoo! provides usage statistics that can tell you how many and what kind of people are coming to your blog, which can help you measure its effectiveness. As well, a number of blog software providers, like Movable Type, allow you to send email messages to readers who sign up for regular updates, which can also help you gauge the usefulness of your blogging efforts.

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