All You Need To Know About Blog Hosts
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:
1.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; 2.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; 3.Excellent
advertising platform. Blogging is a new way to advertise
products, a refreshing change from the traditional advertising
outlets and it is cost-effective. 4.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. 5.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. 6.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, or 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
AND 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: 1.create
a style that meets the needs of the audience; 2.establish an
open, credible tone; 3.schedule weekly updating of blog -
ideally, a few times a week; 4.include weblinks of other website
and blogs; 5.blog post should be in the "first person;" 6.focus
on the business blog objective; and, 7.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.