|
you are here:
Homepage
>
Online Marketing
>
Blog
Marketing
>
 
Overview of Blogs and Blog Marketing
Introduction
- a blog is the community journal part of a
website where individuals can post comments and their opinions on a regular
basis regarding shared interests. There are thousands of blogs covering a sort
of common interests and topics. Blogs tend to be organised according to
particular topics such as celebrities, fan clubs, artists, political
discussion and so on. Blogs are a great way to encourage user loyalty and
provide a sense of freshness and potentially controversy (which in turn
stimulates more postings by other users). Search engines love fresh content
and so the more relevant postings are in the blog (relative to the overall
website content) the greater the probability
a searchbot will return to re-cache that particular webpage. Blogs tend to be
highly unstructured and personal in nature. Blogs are mainly seen as personal
diaries rather than the traditional 'forum' structure which concentrates on
solutions to problems and answers to questions.
Personal Blogs - individual blogs are typically in a diary format and
are quite literally sharing someone's personal thoughts to the rest of the
world - giving them a chance to comment on it. By providing an outlet to
communicate, personal blogs have become a therapeutic means of communicating
for people (who want to communicate with other people anywhere on the
planet).
Business Blogs - there are a number of business benefits resulting from
the creation of a blog with owners of traditional businesses as well as
internet only businesses:-
- Raising Corporate Profile - blogs that have been produced by
owners of business websites tend to be more structured and reflect the
values of the company, its product announcements and announcement
regarding its business activities. Business blogs are a great way to speak
to shareholders, employees and customers, in a less traditional format.
They also provide the ability to post press releases, encourage
customer feedback on product launches, raise the brand awareness and
overall corporate profile.
- Low Cost Advertising - as blog software is easy to users non
technical users can maintain the blog themselves without the inevitable
delays and costs of contacting a 3rd party webmaster to upload a change in
web content. Any knowledge based business can also show off
its expertise and compete on a level playing field with larger rivals.
- Enhance Individual Credibility - the more of a personal service
and display of customer issues consultants and professionals can project
the more confidence prospects will have in the website overall.
Webmaster Management Issues - as posting a comment on the blog is
essentially anonymous activity, a blog is completely open to abuse from
comment spammers or unscrupulous webmasters seeking links back to the
website (to improve their own link popularity). Therefore, the larger and
more popular a blog becomes, the more likely these sorts of abuses are
likely to occur. It is good practice for webmasters to ensure that any URL
links posted by users are relevant to the topic under discussion and
automatically include a
rel=nofollow instruction to tell search
engines not to follow the link to its destination. Humans can still
click-through if they think the link is relevant to their interests. A
blog does not have to be just made up of text, it can include images, video,
data or music where like minded individuals can share content quickly and
for free. This naturally means that moderators of a blog must ensure that no
copyright or trademark breach occurs as a result of user posts.
Business blogs will typically have a webmaster moderator to ensure any
potentially malicious postings can be removed to a avoid any legal
repercussions. Owners of web sites and are acutely aware that some blog
postings may have potential liabilities such as defamation which may have
serious consequences for the business. Most blogging software allows
banned keywords to stop malicious posts as well as ban users and even IP
addresses. For small business owners blogging can be a
cheap way of posting content without having to outsource that activity to a
internet marketing company or writing everything yourself.
Forums - Blogging evolved from the implementation of forums. Personal
blogs are much more simple to implement for non technical users whereas
older forum software tended to be difficult to install, maintain and set up.
Today's blog software can be downloaded or subscribed to in minutes without
any technical expertise whatsoever. The content generated from the blog
software usually follows a traditional layout; each posting has a headline,
main body, date posted and is usually assigned an individual URL (even if
the posting is responding to a previous post and is part of a thread)
back
to top
Copyright
IntelligentMarketing.org.uk 2008
|
