The blog has become a way to market your online business, your personality and your life. You can use it for marketing, traffic revenue or just for fun.
If it seems like every person and every company now has a blog, you're not crazy. Everyone is getting in on the blog craze to promote their businesses and their reputations. While blogs were once considered a way for friends and far-flung family members to feel included in each other's lives, they are now a powerful internet marketing tool. Doctors, lawyers, beekeepers- they all keep blogs to keep their customers and clients interested in their businesses. Even blog network sites keep their own blogs.
Join Blog Directories
Some of the best places to get links to your blog are blog directories. These are directories that work kind of like search engines, but search only through the blogs in the directory. Some blog directories are smaller, with a few hundred blogs included and some contain tens of thousands of blogs. People search through these blogs to find topics they are interested in and topics that they can link to in their own blogs. Getting indexed by a few blog directories ensures that your content will be there for anyone interested in your topic.
Keep Blog Posts Fresh
Blogs thrive on constant updating. Some blogs are updated daily and some 3 or 4 times a week. Ambitious bloggers may wish to update several times a day to keep the blog flowing. Most people who become interested in a blog will lose that interest if their repeated visits aren't met with new posts. Keep an updating schedule that will ensure that you don't forget to update. If you are looking for heavier traffic, updating often also increases your search engine rankings.
Use Pictures and Blog Links
To break up the text areas, use pictures as often as possible. Web readers expect some type of photos or graphics along with any large space of text. You don't have to take the pictures yourself, however. There are numerous free photo directories that offer royalty-free pictures of all descriptions. Simply save one and upload it to your blog along with the appropriate entry. Many blogs feature reviews of other blogs, recommended blog links, and attributed information with a link to another blog. Blog links are bring you into the community of bloggers that write about your chosen topic.
Build a Community or Not
There are people who want their blogs seen by the widest possible audience and hope to sweep the net for traffic. Those people spend a lot of time networking and marketing their blogs to get the word out about their blogs. This often includes posting on multiple forums with a link in the signature and guest blogging on other blogs. Building a community also includes writing in a way that others will feel a need to comment on. Lots of comments and an interaction between the readers and the writer keeps people coming back to read the new comments and to leave more.
Of course, just as many people aren't interested in building a community. Writing a blog may be an outlet for them- a chance to vent or to muse into cyberspace. Having friends, family and a few other readers look at the blog may be enough to keep you writing. There are also many people who use their blog as a series of writing sample and aren't interested in anyone else reading it. That too is a recognized use for a blog. As long as there is plenty of content, pictures and error-free copy, the blog will likely be seen eventually and may develop a following without any effort on the part of the blogger.
There are plenty of books and websites that can tell you exactly what to do and exactly which sites to go to in order to leverage every single reader possible from every corner of the internet. But, bloggers don't have to listen. Write about whatever you like and attract readers with interesting posts. In the end, that's all a blog really is.
Related article: Keeping a Personal Online Journal
