Blogging For Business Owners

If you run a small company, you may find that the world
of blogging for business owners is a world that you
want to be a part of. Blogging is a great way to get the
word out to consumers about your product or service,
and it can even be useful for inspiring employee loyalty
and helping you keep your workers at peak morale. If
you are looking for a way to take your business to the
next level, consider what starting a blog might be able
to do for you.

Blogging for business owners has a lot in common with
all other types of blogging, but it has its own unique
pitfalls and strengths. The key to having a successful
blog as a business owner is keeping your goals clear
and concrete at every step of your blogging adventure. It
can be all to easy to get sidetracked, especially if you
are just learning about the exciting possibilities of
blogging technology, but if you want your blog to
succeed you need to stay focused. Write up a plan for
how often you will update, how you will promote your
blog and retain readers, whether you will feature
photographs or video, and other aspects of your blog,
and then stick to it with the same kind of determination
that you used when you built your company.

Photo Blogging May be the Pinnacle of Modern Technology

Many people feel that photo blogging is the most
exciting kind of blogging that exists. Building and
maintaining a photo blog is no more difficult than
creating and updating a text-based blog, and many
people feel that the internet's high speed, full-color
technology reaches the pinnacle of its appeal with the
transmission of images. Posting photographs in a blog
format on a daily, weekly, or occasional basis is a great
way to express yourself while reaching viewers in an
emotionally charged and aesthetically engaging way,
and surfing photo blogs can help you to get a whole
new perspective on the world in which we live.

Many people who run image blogs are photographers by
trade, but photo blogging is also very popular among
hobbyists and amateur shutterbugs. To be certain, a lot
of the most popular photo blogs have gained attention
because the pictures on them are of the highest artistic
caliber, and a lot of the people who run these striking
blogs are graduates of prestigious art schools and have
impressive professional portfolios. However, some of
the most well known and most often visited photo blogs
are as notable for their concepts as for the pictures
themselves. Certain photo blogs, like the popular "Cute
Overload" which features picture after picture of
adorable animals, are more about the thematic content
of the pictures than they are about the style in which the
snapshots are taken.

The fact that photo blogs range from forums to display
the work of highly skilled artisans to playful collections
of curiosities shows that photo blogging is a truly
diverse form. The fact that photo blogs are so easy to
build and to update makes this kind of visual
communication very democratic, and enables people at
all skill levels to become a part of the global
conversation about the nature and value of photography
today.

Whether you are an artist or hobbyist who wants to
create a photo blog, or whether you are just somebody
who enjoys learning about new places and things,
spending some time looking at the most popular
photography blogs on the internet can be a very
rewarding endeavor. You can travel to another place or
another time by seeing pictures of faraway locations and
long-gone eras. You can see your own neighborhood
with fresh eyes by discover how local artists have
photographed the town or city in which you live. Photo
blogging allows people to communicate all of these
things and more, which makes it a very exciting part of
the modern blogosphere. If the best thing about web
technology is that it allows people to reach each other in
a very personal way from across great distances, then in
many ways photo blogs are the most successful kind of
web sites.

The Right Blogging Platform For Your Needs

Choosing which blogging platform to use is one of the
most important decisions that you can make as a
blogger. The right platform can make blogging a
breeze, and the wrong platform can make blogging a
chore. Because the program that you use to blog with is
such a powerful part of your blogging experience, it is
well worth putting in the time to find a platform that
provides your ideal balance between a user-friendly
interface and a flexible framework that allows you to
make your blog look and feel unique. Finding the right
platform isn't always easy, but with a little bit of
contemplation and a little bit of research, you will be on
your way to finding the perfect blogging platform.

Deciding what your priorities are in terms of ease of use
versus customization. Most highly customizable
blogging platforms, like moveable type, are a bit more
difficult to use than very automated platforms like
wordpress. If you are new to blogs and to internet
technology, you might want to sacrifice the ability to
create a custom background design or to integrate a
unique font into your template in order to find a
program that will be easy for you to use. On the other
hand, if you are a veteran web designer with knowledge
of html or javascript, you will probably find the
limitations of a user-friendly platform to be frustrating.

There is no such thing as a blogging platform that is
objectively the best platform, because every blogger has
unique needs. The blogging movement is very much
about individuality, so it makes plenty of sense that
there would be many different platforms available that
are designed to meet the needs of different kinds of
individuals undertaking different kinds of projects. This
diversity is a good thing, because it means that you will
almost certainly be able to find a program that suits
your level of technical aptitude.

However, the fact that no two bloggers need the same
thing from a blogging platform can make your search
for the right platform a bit tricky. When you are reading
reviews of different platforms, try to keep your
priorities in mind and do your best to take into account
the position that the reviewer is coming from. For
example, a negative review written by an accomplished
software designer who complains that a popular
platform is too limited may tell you that the platform in
question is ideal for a beginning blogger. There is no
such thing as the perfect platform for everybody, so
instead of looking for the "best" platform, look for the
best platform for your specific criteria.

The Pros and Cons of Video Blogging

Video blogging has a lot of advantages over text-based
blogging, and it is little wonder that this new
technology is catching on all over the globe.
Video blogs very effectively grab the attention of web surfers, and people are much more likely to become excited about the dynamic content of a video blog than they are likely to find a written posting very thrilling. The more enthusiastic viewers are about a site, the quicker the word of mouth spreads, and the more traffic the site will get.

Of course, there are plenty of disadvantages to video
blogging as well. Hosting a v-blog requires quite a bit
of server space, which can make it difficult to get
started. It takes more time to process and upload a video
file than it does to dash off a quick bit of text, which
means that running and updating a video blog can be
quite a bit of work. In addition, web surfers sometimes
grow frustrated with the slow loading times of the files
on many video blogs. Whether you opt for a video blog
or not depends on what kind of subject matter you want
to cover, and how much time you can devote to video
blogging. Before you decide to pursue a video blog,
consider if there is an easier way for you to get your
message across.

Learning How to Make Money Blogging

There are two major types of business models that
entrepreneurs use to make money blogging:
- The first and most common way to turn a blog into a profit making machine is to sell advertising to different companies and brands who want to reach that blog's
readers.
- The second kind of money making blog is one
that helps a single brand improve its image by creating
positive associations between the blog and the product
in the mind of consumers. Both kinds of blogs can
make a lot of money, especially if the creator has a keen
mind for marketing.

If you are blogging with the goal of selling advertising,
there are two basic ways that you can go about
recruiting sponsors who want to put ads on your site;
you can let someone else do all of the legwork, or you
can do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue.
Within the first group, many people make money
blogging by selling space through Google's AdSense
program. The advantages of this program are numerous,
as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger
or webmaster to begin raking in profits. However, most
people discover that they make less money through this
method than they had hoped that their blog would earn.

Selling advertising directly to companies who want to
put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take
quite a bit of time, but it is often fairly lucrative. If you
have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the
topic of your blog, you may want to try to go this route.
People who have a strong background in sales and are
experienced at pitching proposals can make quite a bit
of money by renting blog space to interested companies.
The most serious problem with this model is that you
often have to build quite a sizable readership before you
can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to
do several months of work before you start to make
money blogging.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative
business, a lot of established companies are considering
how they can get into the action. One way that
companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by
having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for
their corporation. Often, a company will employ an
established blogger to create a weblog designed
specifically to appeal to that company's customers and
to create positive associations with the brand in
consumers' minds. More than one writer who never
even dreamed that he or she could make money
blogging has been approached by a company and
offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

Mobile Blogging is on the Cutting Edge

Mobile blogging is an exciting phenomenon that is
sweeping the blogosphere. One of the reasons why a lot
of bloggers are attracted to the medium of blogging in
the first place is that they enjoy being able to make
frequent updates and posts that keep all of their visitors
up to speed with current situations. Mobile blogs, or
"moblogs," take this to the extreme by allowing users to
post things literally as they happen. This new wave of
moblogs and mobloggers keep web surfers up to date
with good and bad events of importance as they occur
all over the world, helping to make international
communication faster and more accurate.

Many people feel that the limitations of blogging have a
lot to do with geography. After all, there is only so
current that a blog can be when you need to run home
and boot up in order to update it. However, mobile
blogging marks the beginning of an thrilling new era
when web-based communication can happen
spontaneously from any location. Moblogging devices
mean that there is almost nowhere on the planet that
remains off-limits for bloggers.

Mobile blogging is still in its infancy because the
technology that makes it possible has only recently hit
the global market. The first moblog technology became
available over a decade ago, but it is only the past two
or three years that mobile web devices have become
user-friendly enough to appeal to most consumers. As
camera phones and other mobile technology become
more popular, more and more bloggers are getting away
from their desks and are hitting the streets. Moblogging
is becoming much more widespread that it was even a
few months ago, and mobloggers are quickly attracting
a lot of attention with the blogging community. It is not
yet clear whether moblogs will become the dominant
kinds of blogs in the years to come, but the current
trend seems to imply that moblogs are here to stay.

Mobile devices make it possible to blog from the sites
where current events are unfolding, which is one of the
reasons why mobile blogging has so much thrilling
potential to revolutionize the blogosphere. A moblogger
with a camera phone can post blog entries from, say, the
foot of the podium at a presidential speech, or from the
stands during the final moments of the world series.
This enables bloggers to experience the same real time
thrills that live television coverage provides, but in a
more democratic medium. The combination of mobility
and individual control that moblogging provides
certainly places mobloggers on the cutting edge of
today's communications technology, and it is hard to
imagine that the number and prestige of moblogs will
not continue to grow in the coming years.

13 Steps to Successful Blogging

by: Ant Onaf
Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start?

You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn't become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your "move". Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has "moved" and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to...but only when you need to!

2) Niche

A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family...you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.

3) Update Daily (nothing less)

This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don't come to work for days or weeks...you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here...if you don't update your blog for days or weeks you'll lose visitors.

4) Traffic

It's no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the "About the Author" passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the "About the Author" passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your site in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Blog

How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn't mean your blog isn't growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what "you" have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to Your Audience

When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.

7) Multiple blogs

Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, tBlogs.com, etc. The more blog accounts the better. You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.

8) Short & Concise

Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic.

9) Digital Art

Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.

10) Keep it Personal

A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.

11) Interact With Your Visitors

You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: "Monday Money Tip" or "Picture of the Week" which entices your readers to look forward to each week.

Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you "will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated".

Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about "Paris Hilton Getting Married" then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.

12) Make Money

Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You're a Professional

You're a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a "move" announcement. The title should be "Moved" and the blog entry should state something like "Old Blog has been moved to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com". This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain.

At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying "two heads is better than one", more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.
About the Author
Ant Onaf is the owner and founder of www.JournalHome.com He is an online internet marketer, content writer, and IT consultant. Ant Onaf has years of IT-related experience and Internet-related experience. His ingenuity, dedication, and passion for technology, internet marketing, & writing have made him a monumental icon in the World Wide Web. His blog can be visited at http://www.journalhome.com/AntOnaf