Should Your Website Host A Weblog?

by: Fran Kramer

Blogging is hot right now, but is it right for your site? Six functional features of blogging software can tell you if a blog will be beneficial to your site.

During the recent Iraqi War weblogs (or blogs) heated up the Internet with real-time reports from the war zone, causing web developers to ask if this “hot” online reporting tool could jazz up their websites. Developments in software make installing and maintaining a weblog inexpensive or free and easy to implement, even for a beginner. But is a blog the right choice for your website?

A weblog is basically a web page that can be updated instantaneously. The weblog may be open to public postings or it may be designed with a filtering process that allows only the author or selected readers to update the page. The updates can be articles, comments, or graphics and may be hyperlinked to other resources on the Internet. Weblogs are usually built around a particular interest or topic. That being said, your website could benefit by a blog if you need to:

• Constantly update a web page. Web pages used to post jobs, announce events, record ballgame scores, solicit documents and keep a diary are all good candidates for being converted to weblog formatting. Frequent updates can be done online without the fuss of ftp, page redesign or reformatting.

• Record the time that each update was made. Blogging software can place a time stamp next to the blog entry, letting anyone know when the web page change took effect.

• Sequence entries in chronological order. Let’s say you need to document the development of a project or the progression of an online conversation. Keeping a chronological list of entries maintains the flow of ideas and illustrates the relationship to entries posted before and after it.

• Ensure that authors submitting material are credited with, or made accountable for their entries. Blogging software posts the username of each author along with the entry. Used internally within a company, an intranet blog can be an indicator of performance, quality control and deadline adherence.

• Search entries at a later date. Blogging software can archive entries according to date and attach a search function, permitting the viewer to peruse and retrieve earlier postings.

• Gather related material from a variety of sources. Your weblog can be the means to receive and store documents and chances are it will be a lot cheaper than most document management systems!

Even if you could benefit in some of these ways by the weblog’s powerful functionality, your blog could bog down your website if you don’t adhere to one important caveat: keeping the blog current. Weblogs are most viable when they are frequently updated, and like yesterday’s newspaper, quickly become stale overnight. If you or an appointed blog author might fail to keep the blog fresh, then you are best off sticking to the conventional web page.

About the Author

Fran Kramer is a senior web designer working for Apex Consulting Group, Inc.

Blogging Advice - Give Your Readers What They Want

by: chris hickman

Web gives a lot of exposure; weblog stabilizes the exposure with a profound purpose. The purpose of a Weblog is to complement e-newsletters, serving readers in a way that extends a blogger's expertise and leadership in the market.

So, what is it that is expected from a blog? A blog is considered to be a place to inform and to be informed. Straight talk is what readers consider to be an ideal blog message. Straight talk is a four or five sentence of direct, informative content about a specific issue or bit of news.

Blogs consists of human expressions and is expected to have a soulful purpose. Blog posts are expected to be a personal post, as it can convey blogger's emotions. So, these messages are mostly written in first person singular and are rich in emotions. Blogs are also expected to provide details from the writer's life: missed flights, break-ups, rodents under the stove, computer breakdowns, muggings, and tamale recipes and more.

A blogger should always remember that if there are doubts that readers will discount the article entirely based on its context; they shouldn't consider linking it at all.

Authentication of the message is one important aspect that a blog post is expected to adhere to. Blogs are expected to be clear about its source. This avoids chances where readers may cease to trust the bloggers. These chances may take shape if discovered that the information source has been disguised or the blogger didn't make the source of an article clear. The readers might have evaluated these sources differently had they been given all the facts. Into every aspect of the practice of weblogging, transparency is one of the weblog's distinguishing characteristics and greatest strengths.

A writer's goal and priority should always be clarity.

It is a bloggers responsibility to focus exclusively on producing content that attracts the reader. What determines the right kind of content? This can be determined by reading other blogs and hitting whatever is hot in discussion or high in trend.

The most compelling bloggers are necessarily the ones with the most insightful analyses and the best links; besides this the most successful are those who get the reader interested in their own ongoing story. Because bloggers on similar subjects link to each other, the reader finds it easier to understand opposing points of view. For bloggers, not linking to others is a death sentence for their ratings.

About The Author

Chris Hickman owns a full info site about Weblog blogging. Check Out his site at http://www.ez-weblog-blogging.com.

Nobody Reading Your Blog?

by: Bolger Redet

So you got a your own weblog. Everything looks great, you have nice layout, some nice pictures and last but not least excellent articles.

You also update your blog on a regular basis but nobody seems to read it ! You start to think where did I go wrong. Well if your blog is really good you just need to be patient. Also make sure you submit your blog to directories specialized in blogs and search engines.But even if you did all this you might get not the amount of readers you wished for.

Get unlimited readers for you blog !

Smart people started to notice blogs are very popular so they came up with a great ideas. Blogexplosion.com is such great idea. The concept is simple, if you read other blogs then other people read your blog. So the more blogs you read the more people will be reading yours. Sounds good you might think. Well it actually is a very good concept. Just register your blog for free and login, then pick a category blogs you would like to read and start reading. You must read each blog for at least half a minute, after that you can select another blog. For each blog you have red you recieve a credit. This credit means one other member is going to read your blog. Again great concept. But there is a downside, first you have to spend of lot of time reading blogs in order to get other people to read yours. You can choose to read only blogs in a specific category (of your interest) but it is still really time consuming. Other people who are reading your blog might do this because they only want other people to read their blog. You can imagine these are not the most interested readers you wish for. But blogexplosion.com also offers non members to search their directory for blogs. These visitors are potenial quality readers for your blog! Other downside is that you can not only earn credits by reading other blogs, you can also buy them ! If everybody is going to do this then this concept doesn't do so well anymore.

About The Author

Bolger Redet is webmaster at http://www.bloxster.net a free quality weblog hosting service. Bolger is working on the bloxster.net website to provide their users tools to publish multimedia content

Blood Test for Your Blog?

by: Nick Smith

Are you contributing to one of the estimated 36.1 million (and growing) blogs online? Or are you thinking of entering the fray and starting to publish a blog for your small or home business? Make sure you are publishing the right type of blog for your kind of business, or all that writing time will have been for naught.

The Blog Blood Test

Just as there are different types of blood, there are many different types of blogs, and each serves its own purpose. Giving your blog a blood test will help you determine which type of blog is best for your business and what may be wrong with the one you've got now.

Blog Blood Type 1: Customer Relations - Blogging is one of the best ways to put a face and personality on your business, especially if you operate entirely in cyberspace. Those that best employ their blog in strengthening relationships with their customers spend a lot of time interacting with customers, answering questions, providing useful tips, and keeping them informed of business happenings. These blogs focus less on the company's products and more on the company's culture and outlook. The goal of this type of blog is to engender customer loyalty and establish a consistent flow of interested website visitors.

Blog Blood Type 2: Sales - As you can imagine, most businesses that blog do so because of the perceived benefit to their bottom line. While very little quantitative research has been done with regards to the actual monetary impact of blogging on overall sales, the ubiquity of sales-oriented blogs indicates some kind of return-on-investment. Sales blogs focus on product developments and benefits to the customer. There is less online interaction with customers via the blog as the goal is to move readers off of the blog and onto the product pages. The goal of a sales blog is to encourage visitors to purchase a product, service, or information that the company is offering.

Blog Blood Type 3: Personal Web Journals - These blogs make up the bulk of the 36.1 million web logs online. The majority are personal accounts written without regard to size of readership or monetary value. Many have heralded free blogs as the Internet's greatest achievement, allowing virtually anyone with an internet connection to publish literally whatever they want, and all in a matter of a few minutes. There are as many purposes for personal blogs as there are bloggers. Perhaps the most common theme is the chance to be heard.

I've Taken the Blog Blood Test…Now What?

Which category did your blog best fit in? Did you find that you're writing one type of blog but desiring the benefits of another? If you haven't already started your blog, which type do you believe would best match your writing abilities and desired outcome? Simply put, if you're not writing the best type of blog for the benefits you want, you'll never get them - and you'll waste a lot of time in the process.

If your current blog is doing exactly what you want it to, leave it alone. If you find that some changes are necessary, consider the following questions:

• Do I think I can drive actual sales from the blog?
• Would I rather spend my writing time interacting with customers (both positive and negative) or writing about my product? (Remember the blood test)
• Am I the best person to author my blog, or is there someone else who could do a better job?
• Do I want to stage the blog as a company-sponsored communication tool or would I rather it appear as a kind of third-party, objective review?
• How much time am I willing to spend writing?
• How free do I want to be with regards to frequency of posting and responding to customer comments?

Millions of others are already blogging, but don't let that stop you from starting. Give your business the blog blood test and see which type works best for you.

About the author:
Nick Smith is an internet marketer with an internet positioning strategy. For information about a DNA blood test and other DNA products, visit Genetree.com.

Blogging - what's it all about?

by: Inka-Maria Kunz

A blog usually is a web page that contains brief, discrete hunks of information called posts. These posts are arranged in reverse-chronological order (the most recent come first) and each is uniquely identified by an anchor tag which is marked with a permanent link that can be referred to by others who wish to link to it.

A blog is a means of communication and there are many different types of messages carried by blogs. Some are nothing but pointers to other web sites, while others run long essays, some are personal diaries, others feature technology, and some are edited by one person, others by teams.

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the Internet, and new blogs are created every day. Can anybody and more importantly can you blog? Yes, there are bloggers of all types, equipped with all levels of technical skills. Bloggers approach their sites with as much variety and passion as the general Net public approaches the Web itself.

The most commonly used blogging tool is Blogger. It requires the least amount of commitment in time or resources, allowing you to go from wanting a blog to having one in about five minutes and at no cost. The Blogger software is the property of Pyra Labs (www.pyra.com). Blogger is often credited as the reason for the explosion of blogging that’s occurred in the last couple of years. It is a web-based tool, requiring no installation of software on your personal computer or on your server if you happen to have a web site. You access the tool through the Blogger web site (http://blogger.com) and the blog pages are posted to your web site or to Pyra’s BlogSpot (http://blogspot.com) community blog server. For more detailed information on this see O’Reilly’s Essential Blogging.

Re-read anything before you publish. Electronic text can expose unintended meaning easily and it will also make what you say a lot more focused. If nothing else, it should help you catch spelling mistakes! Blogging is a way to share your opinions and thoughts to the rest of the world. If you post interesting things, share links with other bloggers and post comments on other blogs. Linking is the way of the Web that is the key of successful blogging.

In order to keep your blogs really fresh, invite a group of your friends / colleagues and give them blogging access. That way you will have several reporters blogging information and you won’t end up killing yourself, trying to keep your blog populated with good information. If you use Blogger, upgrade to Blogger Pro. You can have your team post to the blog from email, create and syndicate your blog as an RSS feed, and a whole lot more! Adding the ability to post comments on your blog extends interactivity and usefulness to the blog itself. Blogs are about community and information, and commenting is a real way to gauge your viewer’s blogging efforts. Blogging is one of the quickest ways to update your site. Syndicating others’ blogs into your own site is another. There is a wealth of information out there – just tap into it!

About The Author

This article was written by Inka-Maria Kunz, CEO of a flourishing multilingual translations agency with offices in Germany and New Zealand. This article may be printed or used in its entirety with full author contacts and details. For more information, translations or purchases of a new website/e-business, contact the author thru the official website www.linguatransl.co.nz or the blog www.linguatransl.blogspot.com.

The Future Of Next Generation Weblogs

by: Bolger Redet

In the earlier days having a blog was an instant hit. People who embraced writing web logs from the beginning, did get a lot of extra exposure. Now the mass is jumping on a train which already left the station some time ago.

The success of the first blogs explained

The first blogs on the web were non commercial and that was the first ingredient for their success. Second, web logs are quality content and can be made really easy. As we all know search engines like Google really love good content. The first blogs could be on top of search results in mayor search engines like Google in a matter of days, where other (big) websites struggled to get the same result in years. This could happen because web logs contain loads of text which is related to quality content. Other traditional websites tweaked their sites with tricks that did not compete with the awesome power of blogs: honest quality content.

These days loads of people have their own blog and I must say 90% is not even worth reading. Because the amount of people having a blog is exploding, search engines which finally were able to find some good content related websites, now have to struggle with the millions of blogs with absolutely no good content at all. Many blogs are not updated on a regular basis, they are often made to sell products or used for marketing the thousands “get rich quick schemes” around on the internet. They really lack the power a good blog can have.

Next generation blogs

But there are really good blogs around and web logs will definitely stay around for a while. Beside that there is a new generation blogs on their way. Blog techniques are changing fast, many people start to put photos and pictures on their blogs. This caused a very interesting phenomenon. The first pictures of the London bombings where spread by blogs so fast, that they did beat the big television networks and news agencies. People actually submitted their pictures made from the scene with their mobile phones on their blogs. Other blogs picked up the news with the photo material in minutes and spread them around with lighting speed. I think this is the evidence that blog are really powerful things and earned their place on the internet. With the implementation of video on blogs their importance and popularity is even growing. This makes us consumers of news and multimedia much more independent from big commercial TV and news agencies. Those guys have other interests to consider then provide us with objective news, quality TV and radio programs.These advertisers and investors want everything to be a commercial success, rather then not so commercial quality content.

If you want to start your blog then here are some tips.

These days you can’t make any money from having a blog. You are way too late to do that at this stage. Use web logs for their own purpose e.g. provide quality content. This is the only way to attract people to you web log.

Pick a quality blog hosting provider on the internet where to host your blog. There are free providers like blogger.com and Bloxster.net, both of them are free and provide features for your blog you really need. There is no reason why you should go for a paid service. The bigger the blog community not always means this is the best choice, because the servers of these providers often can’t handle the hughe amount of traffic and need to be shut down for maintenance very often. So bloxster.net would be a good pick

Post pictures with your articles to enhance your blog. If you have a startup band or you want to be the new rising pop star on the block, place a link to your demo (make one in mp3 format), and place it on your blog. This is called pod casting. While traveling submit travel stories and photo’s to inform people at home or fellow travelers about your adventures. You can even stream video on you blog!

Most important write and provide quality content and update your weblog on a regular basis. Also take the time to promote your blog and rss feed to web blog directories because the competition of other blogs is fierce!

About The Author

Bolger Redet is webmaster at http://www.bloxster.net a free quality weblog hosting service. Bolger is working on the bloxster.net website to provide their users tools to publish multimedia content

12 Reasons Why You Need A Blog

by: Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian

"Why Should I Blog? I Simply Don't Get It"

This post on a popular discussion forum set me thinking - and I came up with 12 reasons you should blog.

Read them and get started on your blog. Or better still, go get your blog up and running and THEN come back and read this :)

#1 - You Do Not Need To Know HTML

One of the biggest hurdles many hopeful website creators face is they don't know to design a webpage. Blogs overcome this - all you do is type into a box, and the blog software automatically converts it into a webpage and publishes it on the World Wide Web for anyone to see.

#2 - You Are 'Forced' To Keep Your Content Fresh

Blogs are essentially online diaries. It doesn't make sense to write in your diary every month or two. Similarly, running a blog itself 'forces' you to update it often. And refreshing your blog often makes it more useful to readers and consumers - and by extension, to search engines who are in the business of presenting *their* clients with valuable resources.

#3 - Your Blog Is AUTOMATICALLY Optimized For Search Engines

Search engines love fresh content. But that's not the only way blogs are powerful tools to rank high. Indeed, most blogs are structured to offer a high degree of search engine optimization.

All sections of your blog are linked together. The terms used as link 'anchors' are keyword-optimized. Categories can be created to host themed content. Navigating through your blog is intuitive. Archives can be customized, and generate hundreds of pages of content that act as 'search engine spider bait'.

#4 - You Get A Built-In Linking Structure

With very few exceptions, most blogs are structured to be a tightly integrated network of links - to other sections of your blog! It's quite easy for a visitor to get 'lost' within your blog... without ever leaving it.

Calendars link to posts on specific dates. 'Recent Post' listings point to your freshest content. Archives connect all your earlier posts. Search boxes let browsers look for certain kinds of content. And it all happens automatically, without you spending hours on creating a link structure or sitemap!

#5 - You Generate Multiple Content-Rich Pages

Every post you make on your blog is content. And by intelligently setting up your archiving preferences, you can turn each post into many different forms of content, each on a page of its own. Blog regularly for a few months, and you could end up having a 100+ page website - all filled with relevant, keyword-optimized, themed content!

#6 - You Can Keyword-Optimize Your Blog Extensively

All parts of your blog's template can be customized. And a very powerful way to do it is by inserting relevant keywords. It's a do-it-once job that will give you ongoing benefits for as the life of your blog. You can include keywords in your blog title, description, blog post headings, trackback links, comment invitations, archive titles, and category names.

#7 - You Create An Online Community

If your blog is on a specific theme, you can build a loyal readership and develop an online community. You can even take it a notch higher by tying it in with a forum or membership site. Ask for comments, suggestions, ideas and feedback, or invite reader participation. Pretty soon, your blog will be growing organically - even if you don't write a lot!

#8 - You Initiate Conversations With Readers

Of course, the first step is yours - to initiate a dialog with readers. You could do it with your blog post, asking a question or by inviting comments and interaction. Your blog will be read by an audience that's already interested in your subject or theme. This conversation will be priceless to you, the blog owner.

#9 - Your 'Inbound Link' Process - Trackbacks

Blogging is about distributed conversations online. Links are an integral part of such an informal network. Trackbacks are a kind of blog technology that make it possible - and simple! Your blog will benefit from the inbound links a trackback will bring, and you'll also get extra traffic from other sources.

#10 - You Can Syndicate Your Content Easily

Getting readers for your content is good. Getting your content out where many more readers can see it is GREAT! Syndication (via RSS feeds) is built in to most blogging platforms, giving you a quick and easy way to get a wide readership for your blog posts.

#11 - You're Creating Stuff Search Engines LOVE

Search engines exist to offer their audience a compilation of the best resources on a subject or keyword. Your blog is the answer to a search engine's prayers! By sticking to a theme and presenting the content in an organized, structured, intuitively connected pattern, your blog will be appealing to search engines in a way only a very professionally planned and designed website can ever hope to be.

#12 - You Get 'Alternate' Traffic Sources

Remember what we saw about blogs being linked and networked together? Bloggers like to share opinions with others. And when they 'talk' about you, they are going to point to your site, or a post on your blog, to show their readers what they mean. They become 'alternate' traffic sources - for YOU!

Other tools like blog rolls, furls, favorite bloggers and more can drive sporadic - but sometimes big floods - of traffic your way. And best of all, it's effortless and costs you nothing!

Not yet convinced? Well, then maybe blogging isn't quite your cup of tea. But if you trust me, try it - you just might be pleasantly surprised.

About the Author

Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian is author of 'Blog Profit Ideas Exposed - 33 Ways To Profit From Blogs" - http://www.BlogProfits.com - and 'How To Profit From RSS Feeds" - http://www.RSS-Marketing.com and publishes 8 different 'niche' blogs and has been reporting on marketing with blogs and RSS feeds since 2001.