Why Blogs Are Becoming Increasingly Popular Among Small Business Owners

Why Blogs Are Becoming Increasingly Popular Among Small Business Owners

A blog is essentially a communication or informative site posted on the Internet consisting of informal, usually personal diary-style text posts. Posts are usually displayed in reverse chronological order, which means that the latest post appears at the top, followed by older posts. In blog parlance, a blog usually describes a specific event (such as a birthday or holiday) or refers to an interest (hobby).

Blogs have a distinct advantage over conventional websites, blogs can be updated more frequently and oftentimes more thoroughly than conventional websites because they allow their readership to “steal” information from one blog to another, building a network of related blogs. In fact, several of the biggest informational marketing programs of the past decade were started with a small community of bloggers with common interests and a shared goal to create a large, visible hub for Internet users. Blogs can generate alternate forms of revenue through advertising, sponsorships, and Google AdSense. However, the single most lucrative use of blogging is its ability to attract traffic from the search engines.

The most obvious advantage of blogs is that they offer a way for many people to get their thoughts out into the world at large and potentially communicate a message to a large number of people. Blogging is also an excellent tool for writers because it gives them a chance to express their opinion or draw attention to their work without needing to rely on the censorship laws of mainstream media. Websites like WordPress and Blogger enable even the least skilled of bloggers to create professional-looking blogs that are easy to update and maintain. While many people are comfortable using these popular platforms to publish personal blogs, there are other less-common uses of blogs that can be used to effectively boost a company’s presence on the Internet. Here are a few examples:

For companies looking to increase their visibility on the Internet, blogging offers an obvious way to accomplish this. With SEO (search engine optimization) specialists well in hand, a company can easily update and modify its website in accordance with the latest trends in search engine results. This makes updating a blog easy for anyone who is willing to do a little bit of research on a particular company’s past performance in order to make informed decisions about what to add or delete from a site. A company may also choose to add a blog to its website in order to attract visitors who are not interested in following a long-winded story, but rather want to read a short overview about recent events or current events in the business world. These visitors may then click on a link to learn more about the company in question from a reliable blog post styles article.

Unfortunately, many businesses have decided to ignore blogging altogether in favor of SEO methods, which can prove to be both time-consuming and expensive. Optimizing a website for the search engines can take months or years of work – something that many entrepreneurs and small businesses don’t have available. In addition, bloggers are not allowed to use copyrighted materials without permission, making some forms of blogging very time-consuming and prohibitively expensive for some business owners.

Luckily, a new wave of “blog-flavored” websites are popping up to catch-up with the times – allowing blog posts to resemble news articles or other informative content more closely, while still allowing blog authors to make frequent updates in a timely fashion. Many of these sites use RSS feeds, which allow blog posts to syndicate through the larger blogging community. In addition, blogs can be submitted to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious, increasing the chance that they will gain traction and become viral. Of course, with this increased distribution there is also an increased likelihood for blog entries to be picked up by larger news websites, giving them a wider reach than simply blogs themselves.