Return to the index of frequently asked questions about online marketing.
A blog (the term blog being derived from weblog) is a type of website featuring posts published on a regular basis by the website’s author, or blogger. Bloggers publish a wide variety of material online including: commentaries, news, opinion, descriptions of events, pictures, videos, forums and so on. Often blogs are set up in the form of a diary or online journal and keen bloggers often keep their blogs updated on a frequent (daily) basis.
Blogs are free to set up (e.g. Blogger) and are extremely popular. There are even search engines dedicated to mapping out the blogsphere (Amatomu, BlogScope, IceRocket, Sphere and the most popular, Technorati). By June 2008, Technorati had indexed over 112.8 million blogs. However, do not despair, it is never to late to jump on a band wagon and you may want to consider setting up a blog to attract more visitors to your website.
Before you set up a blog, you should consider whether blog marketing is the best medium for you to use for reaching your online target audience. If the vast majority of your market are still responding to mainly print advertising (yes, they will catch up one day), there is probably not much point spending a whole lot of time and money on a blog and blog marketing.
However, if you are keen to capture more of the search engine user market, then blogs can be a really effective way of increasing the number of visitors to your site. Why is this, I hear you cry? Well, blogs offer search engine spiders oodles of yummy, fresh food to crawl over and take back to their indexes.
From an optimisation point of view, blogging can really satisfy the appetite of a search engine optimiser craving new content. Blog posts mean text, frequent blog posts mean lots of text and if published the right way, (for example, with the right Meta data in place) it means lot of keyword-rich spider bait.
If blog marketing is the way you want to go, then here are my top tips:
If these terms sound like a foreign language to you, please don’t stew about it. You can refer to the (easy-to-understand) glossary of terms for more information.
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