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:
? 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;
? 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;
? Excellent advertising
platform. Blogging is a new way to advertise products, a
refreshing change from the traditional advertising outlets and
it is cost-effective.
? 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.
?
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.
? 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:
? create a style that meets the
needs of the audience;
? establish an open, credible tone;
? schedule weekly updating of blog - ideally, a few times
a week;
? include weblinks of other website and blogs;
? blog post should be in the “first person;”
? focus
on the business blog objective; and,
? 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.
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