Guide to Blogs and Blog Marketing   Personal Blogs | Management Issues | Forums   Introduction - a blog is the community journal part of a website.  It is an area where individuals can post comments and opinions 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 announcements 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 attention to customer enquiries a business displays through its blog, 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