Introduction to Blogging

A blog is basically a journal that published for personal or business use and is made available on the web. Blogs contain dated entries in reverse chronological order with the most recent first, about a particular topic. Functioning as an online journal, blogs can be written by one person or a group of contributors.

The activity of updating a blog is known as “blogging” and someone who keeps or maintains a blog is a “blogger”.

Blogs are typically updated frequently using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Blogs have become an increasingly popular method of communicating with small and large groups of people, such as company employees and millions of people surfing the Internet for specific information on a wide range of topics.

Most blogs allow comments to be posted after each entry by other registered users of that blog. By including a link to your site when posting comments, you can increase the number of links and visitors to your website.

Search engines love blogs because of their very nature of being updated frequently with fresh information. The frequency of which you post entries to your blog will be determined by the amount of time you have dedicated to that activity, along with the amount of new information available for your particular topic.

Make the link to your blog easy to remember. The word “blog” is a popular choice when setting up a blog. How you add it to your website is a matter of choice. You could tack it onto the end of your link, such as yoursite.com/blog, while some like to rename the blog folder to “articles” and link to it with yoursite.com/articles. Another choice is to put the blog in its own web space as a sub-domain.

The sub-domain technique does not use “www” in the URL. Instead, it is linked to as blog.yoursite.com. Keep in mind though, that search engines prefer the folder style of linking yoursite.com/blog over the sub-domain.

There are an increasing number of free blog Hosting services, such as blogger.com which is owned and operated by Google. Creating a blog there will give you an address such as yourname.blogger.com. The service pays for itself by advertising the main site from your website address (URL) and at the top of many blogs in the form of a search bar.

Since there are free blog Hosting services, why would you pay for one? I can think of several reasons. The first is having the blog on your own website. You would advertise your site, not a link that another company gives you. Along with that would be branding. The other large blog Hosting companies have already built their branding by having thousands of blogs on their site and people linking to them. Why would you add to the branding of another site when you could be building it up for your own?

Think about the pros and cons of using free blogging services and decide how you want your blog to be remembered. Do you want others to think that you are too cheap to get a blog on your own site? Or do you prefer to appear more successful by having a blog of your own?

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Jim Hutchinson manages Website Managers and helps small businesses build their Internet presence by designing and Hosting websites at rates that most home-based business owners can afford. Visit www.WebsiteManagers.net to learn how to get your blog, membership site or affiliate program online.

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