A business blog is an incredible online marketing tool that saves you thousands of dollars but provides great business opportunities in just one click. Blogs are user-friendly, customized and flexible medium for disseminating useful information for effective positioning of your products in the market.

Companies engaging in business blogging have a definite edge over its competitors. Here are some advantages:

Word-of-Mouth. In a survey, there are currently 14 million blogs with 80,000 more being added each day and about 30 percent of the 50 million users are blog readers. Imagine how much gain your company will have, if your products are advertised through blogs. With Internet, information spreads so quickly especially if an impressive write-up goes with your product. Soon your blogs will be passed on to hundreds of possible customers.

Awareness and loyalty. Open communication with your customers creates trust and loyalty among them. Being there to respond to their questions and comments make them all the more willing to try your products and services.

Feedback. Blogs are good for product research and reviews. It would be easier to improve on your products if you observe your customers’ thinking and behavioral patterns. You can also take immediate action to your customers’ concerns.

Community halo-effect. Bloggers are reasonable, friendly and helpful. They are more than willing to create blogosphere of comments regarding your product. The only thing you have to do is embrace and take active part in the culture and your product will surely be considered in their next stop to the supermarket.

For better marketing results, actively promote your business blogs by submitting your blogs to blog search sites and directories. Do not forget to paste in with your blogs, your URL. Be sure that your blogs contain exclusive information with value and are always updated to keep readers popping in, read up your blog, move on to the next and click on again for updates.

Blog is like a setup booth in the biggest trade show on earth everyday. Marketing possibilities are just around the corner waiting to strike your sale scales up.

The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are important too in conjunction with your blogs to get the best benefits. Use effective keyword phrases to generate high ranking status in the search engine traffic. In this way you have better chances of people finding your website leading to your blogs. More traffic means more potential sales.

For this to be successful, you can use RSS for news update feeds which can be read through RSS reader application. This is a very useful tool for business and internet marketers as well.

If you are already convinced with the potentials of business blogs for marketing and targeting sales increase, your company is now ready to start blogging. But first, you have to be in tune with your company’s business objectives and determine if blogging will really help you achieve your goal.

1. Several blogs are dedicated to teaching people the do’s and don’ts of blogging, READ them! Include in your reading materials blogs that are consumer-based too to give you an idea.

2. Setup several test blogs right away.

If your initial try out with blogs worked well, you can now start setting up your blogs.

1. Study blog design. Blog hosting services provide pre-designed templates. But if you opt for paid blog service, you can ask your artist to design and layout your blog site to match the company’s identity and needs.

2. Choose a topic. Its good to have a line-up of topics you want for your blogs but be sure they are in consonance with your business objectives. This would be a test of your flexibility and open-mindedness since results may be going against the set objectives.

3. Remember the following safety measures in blogging: legal issues are sometimes involved in blogging. It is safer to include disclaimers and limitations of liabilities; corporate communication and legal department are responsible in educating the senior management on how blogs might affect business.

4. Create blogging policies; set limits on who gets to blog and what information are allowed to be made public. Avoid outright marketing blog or you will shy away your readers.

5. Make content updated, relevant and fresh. Reinforce the company’s core values. Encourage employees to use it.

6. Start blogging and complete 20 posts before going to marketing.

7. Begin marketing.

8. Regularly monitor the coming ins and outs of readers and get updates. Then, measure your results. Adjust if needed. You can always play with your designs in the blog site as long as it remains to match the company’s identity.

9. Strive to be consistent with your topic all the time. Try to have unrelated topics with general and broad appeal.

10. Schedule updates regularly. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday would be best to update blogs.

Once you have done all these things, you can now ultimately enjoy the benefits of business blogging. Happy blogging!

Don Alexander is owner of leading-online-business.com and writes on a variety of subjects. To learn more about this topic Don recommends you visit http://www.leading-online-business.com

Popularity: 24%

The first few blogs appeared on the web at the end of 1990s, no one could have predicated the amazing growth they would experience over the next few years.

Blogs started as a simple, user-friendly way for people to publish on the Net and regularly update their thoughts and views, information that are relevant to their readers and also links to other websites. However, these early blogs were mostly produced by people with a lot of Programming knowledge and they catered to a narrow audience of technically minded people.

Finally, in 1999 an easy to use online application called blogger made blogging accessible to anyone, and this new technology really started to take off. When mighty Google bought Blogger in 2003, the search engine secured the future popularity of blogging as an online activity for millions of people. The number of blogs on the internet soared and blogging officially become an online phenomenon.

Blogging had arrived and arrived with a bang!

Since then, blogging has continued to grow in leaps and bounds becoming more and more popular as time goes by. There are no signs of this incredible trend slowing down. Here are some of the blog-related statistics

· A search for “blog” on Google in November 2005 showed 475 million results

· Blog directory Technorati was tracking more than 21 million blogs by November 2005

· A new blog is created every second

· Bloggers add more than 33,000 new blog posts every hour

Plus the internet big boys have all joined in. Yahoo, MSN and AOL are all joining Google Blogger in taking blogging to the masses.

The result of this blog explosion is that everyone from millionaires to work-at-home mummy to carpenter to directors of fortune 500 companies can now have their own blog.

So what is the new age blog?

A blog can be a stand-alone website or part of a larger website which made up of short articles of pieces of information that usually contain links to other relevant articles or website.

These posts are written by the website owner or by an appointed person on a regular basis with the most recent post appearing at the top of the page. Blogging software automatically archives each post by date and often by category, so it is easy to find older posts. This reverse chronological content system and automatic archiving make blogs different from regular websites.

Another difference is that the comments system common to most blogs which allows bloggers to have conversations with their readers by letting visitors to post their own comments or views on the topics being discussed.

Blogging allows anyone and everyone to have a voice online, no matter what is their level of technical knowledge. This influx of fresh voice onto the internet combined with the open communication, blogging has thus helped to stop web from being dominated by large corporations.

Blogs have become flexible tools with many different uses. Most importantly, for our purposes - Blogs have become a highly effective business tool. Both online and offline businesses can use blogs to take their products and services to a wider audience, increasing their traffic, leads and sales. There are even bloggers today whose sole source of income comes from blogging.

However, before we start to explore on how blog can benefit your business, it is important that you understand the reason why blog have become so popular.

Learn more about blogging and blog business by reading about the it. You can download 2 FREE books sponsored by Money From Blog (MFB) coaching club to read and better understand the game. Download them at http://www.MoneyFromBlog.com/links.html or Visit the forum at http://www.MoneyFromBlog.com/blogforum/

Popularity: 31%