Why Should I Blog?
With the exception of terms like AIDS and SARS, it normally takes 20 years to get a new word into the dictionary. The word blog made it in just under five years. According to an article in BusinessWeek Online 11% of Internet users are avid readers of blogs. That’s more than one in ten internet surfers with a common interest.
So it’s no wonder that the day after Merriam Webber proclaimed Blog the word of the year, Microsoft announced that they were opening an advertising supported blog service for personal use, which, despite its lukewarm debut, could help push blogs further into the mainstream.
“That’s fine for Microsoft” you might be saying. “But why should I blog?”
Reason One: Search Engines love them.
Every search engine has its own way of ranking sites, yet you can help your search engine results position with any of them by having a fresh, frequently updated hub of content about a central theme. This is the essence of a blog, a web log of date-stamped entries revolving around a specific topic.
All three major search engines have blogs of their own, and now that Microsoft has entered the game, each search engine has a built-in entry point to the world of blogs. Google owns Blogger, Yahoo has made its My Yahoo page compaitble with the vehicle by which fans track their favorite blogs, RSS and Atom feeds, and MSN now has MSN Spaces, its own network suitable for personal blogs.
Reason Two: People love them.
More than one in ten internet users loving the blog format is nothing to sneeze at. Blogs can be used to develop closer relationships with your community, audience and prospective market. Since you can pretty much blog about anything within the theme you erect about your site, product mentions can often lead to sales.
However, it should be noted for clarification purposes that your blog can be used as a marketing tool – it’s not intended for use as a sales tool. Yet, they are great vehicles for exposure, marketing, and public relations.
Reason three: Money Loves them.
Okay, that’s not literally true, more figuratively so, and how much will depend on your own particular skillset.
But it sounded good, didn’t it?
Don’t go out and quit your day job, or sell your home business yet. But should you start to blog, you might want to look into blogging as its own source of revenue.
Some sites carry Google AdWords or BlogAds and may earn several hundred dollars a month from audiences who click on their ads. Other people are becoming blogmasters and earning an income based on their writing – a couple of blog networks have set up to pay bloggers to write and take care of the advertising for them.
Last week, one popular blogger, Jeremy Wright, sold his blogging services on ebay for upwards of $3350, and another blogger has followed suit – current bidding price is $685.
There are books about blogging and RSS, not to mention free courses and articles. There are so many people interested in blog-related consulting, that like many of my colleagues, I have a backlog of requests – my services are limited to installation, training and consulting until January, when I’ll begin to take on ghostwriting and ghostblogging again.
Still others blog about their industry as if the blog section of their site were a magazine, with their products or services taking on the role of the full-page ad, thus earning money from incidental sales. Then there are models that derive from other online mediums such as advertiser-supported ezines that are moved to blog format.
So there you have it. your blog can bring you more people (who have the potential to become clients, or to do repeat business with you if they are clients already), more search engine spider visits (and more indexing if you set up your blog to entice them, and get linked properly), as well as more money (from product or service sales, ad revenue or as a blogger if you’re experienced, and have a good track record.)
Why should you blog? Given those reasons, you might ask yourself, why wouldn’t you?
Which, incidentally, is our next topic – who shouldn’t blog….
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