It’s been years since blogging has been practiced. But it’s just recently that it has been considered as one of the addicting fads. A blog is a great way to express your thoughts, create a web presence for your company and provide content to Internet users. Many teenagers and top business gurus have resorted to blogging as an outlet for their emotions and their businesses, a little online nook where they can blurt out whatever just bugs them or whatever makes them feel elated. Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won’t cost you a cent.
Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:
1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website’s alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog.
2. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?
3. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.
4. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.
5. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.
6. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favorite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.
So, how do you set up a blog? Here are some of the options you can make use of to take advantage of this fun way to advertise your Internet business.
Either you load blogging software or let a blogging hosting service do it for you. Host services such as WordPress.com, Blog.com, Tumblr .com, Weebly.com, LiveJournal and Blogger.com are the most popular in this field. Those hosts will provide you with easy instructions on how to put up your blog.
Let’s look at their featuring of this blogging platforms:
· WordPress.com -is perhaps the most feature-rich blogging service out there. It uses the popular open source web software WordPress, and offers many features in its free version — traffic stats, anti-spam filters, SEO, gorgeous themes and more.
· Blog.com- is another popular WordPress-powered blogging platform.
Just like other services, it has its own share of pros and cons. For a start, it offers many beautiful premium themes in its free accounts, as well as advanced plugins that one can expect only on a self-hosted blog. However, on the downside, the free service displays more ads as compared to WordPress.com. (But you can opt for paid upgrades to remove the advertisements.)
The free storage space offered on Blog.com is 2GB in the basic plan, which is less compared to 3GB that WordPress.com gives its users
· Tumblr- is a popular and feature-packed microblogging platform. It comes with many outstanding and interesting features such as audio blogging (for sharing your music, for example), free custom domains, hundreds of amazing blogging themes and more.
· Weebly- offers more than just blogging — it’s a fully featured website builder! Weebly’s blog manager features a drag-and-drop interface, support for image galleries, slideshows, video/audio, maps, etc. Additionally, you can opt for their Designer Platform that lets you build websites for your client, thereby effectively using Weebly as a content management system.
· LiveJournal- (often abbreviated as LJ) offers blogging with a touch of social networking to it. You can participate in polls, create networks and interact with other LJ users alongside your blog. With that said, the features, compared to other similar blogging services, are nothing to brag about. Their collection of template is decent, and plugins/extensions are pretty basic in nature.
· Blogger- Google Blogger is a well-known blogging service that offers many features to its users. For example, Blogger comes with a Template Designer user interface that lets you tweak your blog’s appearance as much as you want. (However, the templates provided are, in my opinion, no match compared to WordPress themes.) When it comes to ease of use, most beginners prefer Blogger as it offers a no-nonsense interface for administering your blog and top-notch integration with their Google account. Another great thing about Blogger is that it offers certain great features for free that you normally need to pay for in other blog-publishing services, most noteworthy being the ability to set up custom domains without paying a cent.
There are numerous blogging services out there, and choosing a specific one for your online marketing is more of a matter of personal taste and needs.
For the security and successful Internet marketing of your blog, I recommend sticking to online blogging services that are well known and reputable.
Top 6 Free Tips For Internet Blogging And Marketing
