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How Much Do You Know About Blog Hosting?
by Jo Han Mok
More Blogging Articles
Published on this site: October 19th, 2007 - See
more articles from this month
Apart from the chat rooms, instant messengers and
electronic mails created for communication and dialogue
beyond turf are the emerging innovations that help man
build opportunities for interaction. The need for a
personalized and human face aspect of building online
communities is slowly changing the technological landscape
of the Internet.
Blogs / "weblogs" or blogging are the newest gift of
Internet technology to people all over the world. These are
updated posts, crop up entries or personalized life
snippets, of mundane or bizarre in nature. For most, a "blog" is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal meant
to be shared in an online community. Blog site is a place
where bloggers can publish anything; his thoughts,
feelings, photos, special events, experiences, comments on
issues and so on. It is more of an online diary with
videos, links, documents, newsletters and opinions on just
about any topics you are interested.
Blogs are made to welcome the insights and opinions of all
and therefore, should not be written to sound intimidating
and too formal. This kind of blog is a sure way to put off
the readers. In the basics of blogging, conversational tone
would be more appropriate to reach the desired audience.
Blogging is all about individuals reaching out to other
individuals. Having a blog has its own set of advantages:
- Freedom of Expression: If you want people to hear you
out and give their own opinion, this is the best way to
create a line of communication;
- Networking is at its best: Having a blog is a good
platform for exchanging genuine ideas from consumers to you
as marketer of a certain product. Sound opinion and point
of view is better than just showing the price quote
- Excellent advertising platform: Blogging is a new way to
advertise products, a refreshing change from the
traditional advertising outlets and it is cost-effective.
- Gauging public opinion on products and services: The key
is nice and catchy titles with new ideas presented in your
content. This is an assurance of quick and repeated
responses from your readers.
Blogs is an excellent spot
for the exchange of ideas between the seller and the
consumer. Good for measuring public opinion regarding
services and products, even political and business matters
alike.
- Useful tool for internal communication: This will help
your company to build a knowledge-based community of
employees. Also good for harnessing employee relations and
identifying human resource issues in advance.
- Other benefits like search engine optimization (SEO): will help your blogs to be seen often by as many people as
you wish. This is very good exposure for your products and
services.
Many blog hosting services are available on the Internet.
But the basic question is which one of the services will be
the best to start off your business blog program? Business
people are usually clueless to recent technological
innovations which would help them maximize their marketing
potentials. For these beginners, it is best to study first
the services offered by blog hosts. An ineffective business
blogging program may damage marketing opportunities instead
of enriching them.
A company may decide to do the following depending on its
capacity and needs:
1) Host their own blog service
2) Pay
someone else to host the service
3) Setup a "blog
aggregator page" and ask the employees to select their blog
hosting services individually. There are paid and free
services available for individuals.
For business blogs, they are required to have the latest
blogging features; if not, this will prevent them from
maximizing their marketing, public relations and SEO
potentials.
Keep in mind that blogs should have the following basic
essentials:
- Comments: Welcoming comments provide opportunity for
dialogue. In business blogs, they are a good customer
feedback mechanism. This helps develop better customer
relations based from loyalty and trust. Blogging is an
innovative way to converse with your customers.
- Trackback: This helps in maximizing company and product
exposure. Through this service, consumers can get back to
you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of
locating you. If your blog is popular in a specific online
community chances are links going back to your blog site
are everywhere online, other blog sites or even websites.
- Categories & Tags: These both help in classifying blog
searches for ease of navigation and on site search.
Categories act as libraries because it classifies posts by
subject matter such as business, distance learning,
e-commerce, online auctions, etc. Tags, help in the
classification, especially in the blog search engine
Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs
about certain topics of interest by just clicking the
tags.
- RSS Feed: Really Simple Syndication is the feed from
your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected
through the various newsreaders and aggregators.
If your company is to establish a business blogging
program, considerable options should be made available by
the hosting companies shortlisted for the services. Free
blog hosting services are popular but they are much
appropriate for individual online journals. Paid blog
hosting services offer unlimited packages best for your
company's needs. You may want to suggest checking out some
blogs that use the host first, read and examine their
layout and design. Another important thing to consider is a
reliable technical support the host has.
After, choosing the blog host, a team should be ready to
plan the design and structure of the blog:
The team
should:
- create a style that meets the needs of the audience
- establish an open, credible tone;
- schedule weekly updating of blog - ideally, a few times a
week;
- include weblinks of other web "first person;"
- focus on the business blog objective; and,
- maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.
Remember, whatever the look, style and content found on
your blog is a reflection of you and your company.
Jo Han Mok: Is the author of the #1 international business
bestseller, The E-Code.
He shares his amazing blueprint for creating million dollar
internet businesses
at: http://www.InternetMillionaireBlueprints.com
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