Anyone who can type can become a blogger. There are free sites (like Blogger.com) which make it possible to set up your own blog, and host it without having to buy a domain name or pay for a hosting account. In fact, homeless people even use blogs to improve their situations and communicate with the outside world. If you do have a website of your own, adding a blog has definite advantages in the eyes of the search engines, and you can leverage your blog into a traffic generator, customer service portal, and claim to fame, all at the same time.
For example, the aforementioned Blogger.com is owned by Google, and allows people to post updates onto a Blogger profile or directly onto their own sites. Every time a new post is published, Blogger will FTP (file transfer) the new posting onto your own hosting account, in a folder that is separate from the nuts and bolts of your website. You can alter the template of you blog so it has the same look and feel as the rest of your site, and only a savvy reader will know that you’re using Blogger. We use it for our own blog, it’s free, and we have seen our blog entries end up in Google within a few minutes of publication. Wordpress is also a very popular blog application, and has quite a few bells and whistles of its own.
What are the advantages to having a blog? From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standpoint, blogs are a fast way to add fresh content to your site. Each blog entry ends up on its own page, and you don’t have to pay a webmaster (or rewrite your site code) every time you make a new post. If you have new information that may be of interest to the general public, you can post a blog entry with text and/or pictures and then send the blog link to people in your network. You can even serve up contextual ads on your blog (through channels like Google Adsense) so you have the potential to make money through blogging. As a disclaimer, blogging for money should not be considered a money making career path, but there are quite a few people who do sponsored reviews for a few dollars per post.
There are plenty of business and personal advantages to blogging, but it does take a bit of time and effort. If you’re considering the blogging route, you should be aware that there are quite a few bloggers out there, given that the only barriers to entry in the blogging world might be a library card or the ability to borrow some time on a computer. Blogs become more popular when they are updated frequently with interesting topics. A little promotional work is also in order, so you will want to start by drawing attention to your blog, either by sending a link to friends and family, or to other sources if you don’t want your friends and family to know what you’re up to. If you’re a business, you can send blog links to your vendors, add blog links to your Twitter Posts and Facebook updates, or send out emails to customers. Once you get the ball rolling, you can even ask your readers to suggest topics, or go into depth on certain issues. Blogs are definitely a great channel for people who want to bring attention to themselves and their websites, and worth the small amount of time it takes to set one up.
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