Blogging - Blood Test For Your Blog?

Blood Test For Your Blog?

Are you contributing to one of the estimated 36.1 million (and growing) blogs online? Or are you thinking of entering the fray and starting to publish a blog for your small or home business? Make sure you are publishing the right type of blog for your kind of business, or all that writing time will have been for naught.

The Blog Blood Test

Just as there are different types of blood, there are many different types of blogs, and each serves its own purpose. Giving your blog a blood test will help you determine which type of blog is best for your business and what may be wrong with the one you've got now.

Blog Blood Type 1: Customer Relations - Blogging is one of the best ways to put a face and personality on your business, especially if you operate entirely in cyberspace. Those that best employ their blog in strengthening relationships with their customers spend a lot of time interacting with customers, answering questions, providing useful tips, and keeping them informed of business happenings. These blogs focus less on the company's products and more on the company's culture and outlook. The goal of this type of blog is to engender customer loyalty and establish a consistent flow of interested website visitors.

Blog Blood Type 2: Sales - As you can imagine, most businesses that blog do so because of the perceived benefit to their bottom line. While very little quantitative research has been done with regards to the actual monetary impact of blogging on overall sales, the ubiquity of sales-oriented blogs indicates some kind of return-on-investment. Sales blogs focus on product developments and benefits to the customer. There is less online interaction with customers via the blog as the goal is to move readers off of the blog and onto the product pages. The goal of a sales blog is to encourage visitors to purchase a product, service, or information that the company is offering.

Blog Blood Type 3: Personal Web Journals - These blogs make up the bulk of the 36.1 million web logs online. The majority are personal accounts written without regard to size of readership or monetary value. Many have heralded free blogs as the Internet's greatest achievement, allowing virtually anyone with an internet connection to publish literally whatever they want, and all in a matter of a few minutes. There are as many purposes for personal blogs as there are bloggers. Perhaps the most common theme is the chance to be heard.

I've Taken the Blog Blood Test?Now What?

Which category did your blog best fit in? Did you find that you're writing one type of blog but desiring the benefits of another? If you haven't already started your blog, which type do you believe would best match your writing abilities and desired outcome? Simply put, if you're not writing the best type of blog for the benefits you want, you'll never get them - and you'll waste a lot of time in the process.

If your current blog is doing exactly what you want it to, leave it alone. If you find that some changes are necessary, consider the following questions:

Do I think I can drive actual sales from the blog?
Would I rather spend my writing time interacting with customers (both positive and negative) or writing about my product? (Remember the blood test)
Am I the best person to author my blog, or is there someone else who could do a better job?
Do I want to stage the blog as a company-sponsored communication tool or would I rather it appear as a kind of third-party, objective review?
How much time am I willing to spend writing?
How free do I want to be with regards to frequency of posting and responding to customer comments?

Millions of others are already blogging, but don't let that stop you from starting. Give your business the blog blood test and see which type works best for you.

Nick Smith is an internet marketer with an internet positioning strategy. For information about a DNA blood test and other DNA products, visit Genetree.com.

Car Insurance | Car Rentals | Health Insurance | Weight Loss | Life Insurance

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |

A Basic Introduction To Blogging
Web logging first appeared on the net in the mid-1990s. The term "web log" was initially coined refer to a server's log file and then expanded to include the meaning of online personal journaling. Later on, to avoid confusion, the word "blog" was adopted to refer to personal journaling. Today a blog is defined as an online publication where an author puts his or her personal thou...(related: Blogging)

Details Of Getting A Blog
Blogs, the abbreviation of Web Logs (online journals), are becoming more and more popular all the time. People are starting new blogs at an astounding rate so it's safe to assume that there are constantly people out there who want to know how to ...(related: Blogging)

Shorten Your Blogging-rss Learning And Submission Curve
A blog is a frequent, online publication of comments, web links, and news. It is an online Enzine of sorts. People maintained blogs long befo...(related: Blogging)

Rss Is Not Only For Blogs
Contrary to popular opinion, RSS is not only good for delivering content from your blog, although blogs are what made RSS so popular.In fact, RSS can be used to deliver a great variety of content and content types. If you can break down your content in to individual stories or individual pieces, you can deliver it via RSS.Just to give you an impression of the power of RSS, here are some examples of content you can publish using it ?--> MarketingVOX is using RSS to deliver internet marketing news to their readers as it...(related: Blogging)

Choosing Your Rss Reader
If you want to be able to read RSS feeds then you are going to need an RSS reader. The types of RSS reader that are available to you come in two flavours. There is the desktop RSS reader and there are the online or web RSS readers.Choosing your RSS readers need not be a difficult task, to be quite honest most RSS read...(related: Blogging)

Rss Publishing For Webmasters
Since the recent rise in interest in RSS there has been a slew of RSS sites and RSS software. RSS has been proclaimed as the next big thing. There has been many wild claims about the benefits of publishing an RSS feed such as it will generate floods of traffic to your website.If you have never heard of RSS publishing then you might want to take a look at this RSS Publishing FAQ to get yourself up to speed. More and more webmasters are starting to publish an RSS feed, those of...(related: Blogging)

Comparing Free Blogging Software
With the increased interest in Blogging (web Logging), many web hosting providers now provide an assortment of free usage, open source blogging software packages. Among the most popular of these blogging tools are B2evolution, WordPress and Nucleus. Each of these programs offer similar basic features, so the question arises as to which one is easiest to use and would be appropriate for the requirements of your particular website.The answer lies in the true purpose of your blog website. If your primary goal is to share your opinions and ideas with the general public, you would want to utilize a different blogging tool t...(related: Blogging)

The Language Of Blogs
I read over a lot of blogs each week, casually surfing one or two of the blog exchanges I belong.I realized yesterday that I seldom read the whole entry unless it's very short. Many are quite uncomfortable to read, some downright excruciating, in terms of their grammatical skills, spelling, and style. Because it is such an immediate and off-the-cuff personal expression, do the standard language rules apply?The conversational nature of a blog leads naturally to an informal, casual approach that can be ...(related: Blogging)

The Rss Promise For Internet Users
The RSS promise for end-users is simple:--> a unified one-stop-shop to consume online content, without having to visit dozens of sites every day to see what's new and without having their online subscriptions interfere with their personal and business e-mail communications;--> complete control over their content consumption, including a quick, easy and reliable mechanism to unsubscribe from content they do not wish to receive;--> the ability to receive breaking news as it becomes available, without having to wait for a monthly, weekly or daily recap sent to their e-mail addresses;--> the certainty of actually receiving the content they want, without the fear of it being stopped by spam filters on the way;--> the ability to receive ric...(related: Blogging)

10 Benefits Of Being A Blogger
I have been a blogger since September 2004 but only began to take it seriously this year. My blogging journey began when I stumbled upon a company owned by Google named Blogger.com that offered free tools to build a website.In fact Blogger provides you with free several templates which you can customize in addition to a domain name hosted on their ...(related: Blogging)

How And Why To Rss
RSS feeds and blogs (and blog and pinging) are part of the latest hyper-frenzy in internet marketing. Tools and services are mushrooming all over. But there seem to be some rather distorted ideas about all this.Unless you want to get into the technical stuff, exactly what an RSS feed is doesn't really matter. Now I care because I use them for a lot of things, work with code and do geeky tech stuff. But from a marketing perspective the underlying technical structure is only relevant because it clues us in on what to use an RSS feed for. And that's the thing you have to understand.An RSS marketing feed is not about ...(related: Blogging)