Blogging and Small Business Benefits
What is Blogging and what are its advantages to the small
business communities? The term Blog, on most resources,
refers to a website where entries and content are written
and posted in a chronological order and displayed in reverse
chronological order.
A Blog is a portmanteau – a fusion of two words – of the
words web and log. Jorn Barger, an American journalist, came
up with the term weblog on December 17, 1997, describing the
practice of logging the web while browsing through the
Internet. His concept in mind was to pick up interesting
facts or topics and writing stuff about it along the way.
The year after, Peter Merholz used the shorter term – blog,
by jokingly breaking the word weblog into the phrase we
blog, thus giving the term both a noun and a verb
definition; to blog – meaning, to create or edit one’s
weblog.
Blogging is a bit complex to define due to it being a fairly
new concept. Today, blogging is not only the act of
updating, editing, creating a blog post into personal
websites. Rather, it has become both an art and a continuous
ever-evolving set of process applications to the emergence
of new ideologies, technologies and media devices. Blogging
can be anywhere between just posting daily diary entries to
creating an intricate webpage where an individual or a group
of individuals can showcase talents, creativity and
innovation by use of new tools and software applications
based on the attributes of the Internet.
Blogging has been purposeful in a number of ways for several
industries. Blogging has been able to inspire improvements
in the concept of customer service, interactive journalism,
communications, self-expression and self-marketing,
learning, and community building. It has also been
instrumental in the realm of knowledge sharing and
management, campaigning, social reforms, storytelling, and
experience tracking among others.
For the small business communities, Blogging has also been
proven beneficial in a number of ways. Here are some of the
benefits that small businesses can gain from blogging:
1. Building a Community: Business blogs have provided
small businesses the opportunity to share their knowledge
and expertise in the form of products and services with a
bigger audience. The chance to connect with a community base
client is also beneficial to the development of consultants
and workers. Within these communities, small businesses can
use blogs to serve as channels for promoting their brands.
Blogs can also act as a place for their businesses founded
on a particular niche in the community and industry.
2. Easy Weblication: Weblication or Web Publication
is the combination of technologies and ideas used for
publishing web blogs. Easy to use blog software applications
are now easily available to service a wide range of users.
Creating a more personalized and custom-made blog entry for
the small business is much easier than hiring web designers.
With these custom-made blogs, the businesses can speak of
their brands and services in a more direct, open and honest
tone with the clients and customers.
3. Increase Popularity in Search Engine Rankings:
Search engine marketing is the newest trend in online
businesses recently. Internet users are using search engines
more often than the past few years. The optimization of
search engines has been proven successful to advertise
brands more effectively with directly proportional results
to profits. The cost of having your business brand posted on
a search engine marketing is much lower than the traditional
media.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization techniques can greatly
increase popularity in search engines. Blogging can greatly
help maximize these techniques based on the fact that search
engine rankings use link popularity and easy to index
regular content concepts. So if bloggers practice the basic
skills of search engine optimization and good content
management, they are surely off to better and higher search
engine rankings.
4. Decrease Costs: With blogging, small businesses
can maximize the low-cost alternative of having web
presence. Small businesses without the luxury of advertising
funds to create a web html or to pay for a web developer and
a web designer may now just use the principles and
advantages of blogging to get the business brand out on the
Internet. Blogs are a whole lot less inexpensive to setup,
operate, and maintain.
5. Better Benefits to Communications: With blogging,
businesses can offer up to date feedback to clients and
customers. It can serve as a time saver since businesses
don’t need to provide a lot of interviews but can send out
messages, notices or updates to many people at once by the
use of blogs. Because blogs give the opportunity to tell the
brand story over and over again, blogs helps set the brand
apart from competition. With blogs, communications between
business and customers can become personal, custom-made and
long-lasting. This can in turn encourage trust and loyalty.
Blogs can also enhance communications by enabling businesses
to articulate viewpoints, information, and expertise on
matters pertaining to the business. This allows the business
to position itself as an expert in the niche.
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