Last week, I wrote about using your website to establish yourself as an expert. Blogs are another tool to sharing information with your clients, prospects, and partners, supports that will differentiate you from the crowd.
What is Blogging?
Blog stands for WeB Log, a type of web content that is used for sharing informal updates. Generally, blogs have at least one poster who shares information about their prospective about anything in the world. Blog posts will generally have dates and be sorted chronologically. However, because there isn’t an Internet-wide guide for blogging, this can be implemented differently by different websites.
There are bloggers who blog about politics, bloggers who blog about what they ate, bloggers who blog about parenting, bloggers that blog about their business, and those that share about anything else you can imagine. Because there is often no cost to blog, many people star a blog for the fun of it and the quality can vary greatly.
The quality of your posts must be worth reading. I don’t always have my editor read my blog posts because they don’t need to be as formal as other items. However, this special edition is more formal and even though I am using my blog it has still been edited.
Blogs should be updated often to be effective. This can be very hard. We all have a hundred things that we should do and deciding to make posting on a blog a priority is not easy. However, if we want people to come back to our blog to see what we have to say, then we need to make the time. Popular blogs can have many people visiting them in addition to using RSS to send updates. For example you can use RSS for a feed of content updates about the DDM blog.
Other ways that people find your blogs are through links on your website, search engines like Google, and blog search engines like Technorati. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us help drive traffic to your blog.
You can build a blog on your own site with the help of a web developer or you can use a blog service like Blogger, Word Press, Thoughts.com and others. You should look for a service that is easy to use. I like Blogger because it is free, easy, and reliable. Ideally your Blog should look more like your website than mine does, but I am trying to demonstrate the use of a third party blogging site.
Blogging on these sites are focused on text and having a few ictures and video. Picture blogging, video blogging and podcasts are valid tools to use as well. If you want to make the assertion that you are an expert on a given talk, how better to do it than to make Podcast? That is, if you have the time.
Video blogging, or blogging by posting video s something that is becoming more and more popular. This is still primarily a social trend, but if you have things you want to show or topics that require more of a demonstration, then video blogging can be done.
Podcasting refers to audio recordings that are done regularly. Many news agencies and some companies are using Podcasting. You can use RSS tosubscribe to Podcasts so that they are automatically downloaded for you. iTunes may be the best tool for this job.
Overall, blogging gives you a less formal tool to help you establish yourself as an expert. Come back next week for part III using email newsletters.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment