November 23, 2006

What is a Blog ?

A blog gives you your own voice on the web.

It's a place to collect and share things that you find interesting— whether it's your political commentary, a personal diary, or links to web sites you want to remember. Many people use a blog just to organize their own thoughts, while others command influential, worldwide audiences of thousands. Professional and amateur journalists use blogs to publish breaking news, while personal journalers reveal inner thoughts.

The blogging experience is about not only putting your thoughts on the web, but hearing back from and connecting with other like-minded folks.

Publishing a blog allows you to instantly create new content-rich web pages. These new pages can be linked to from the home page of your current website and/or promoted separately.

By creating additional content-rich website pages and promoting them from your home page or through other means, you'll be accomplishing two important things:

1) You'll provide more value for your website visitors. This increases the "stickiness" of your website making people stick around longer and ultimately trust you more. On the Internet, trust translate to profits!

2) Search engines LOVE fresh content created through blogs. By publishing your own blog and adding fresh content to it on a regular basis, you'll attract the attention of the major search engines who will list your website in their directories for FREE. That's right!

As soon as you have pages of your blog in the search engines, you'll start attracting free qualified traffic to your site without paying a dime for it.

Imagine running a large and comprehensive Google Adwords campaign without paying anything for it... That's exactly what you can accomplish by publishing your own blog!

Blogging is a cross between a website and a discussion group/forum. It is more interactive than a website but not as interactive as a discussion group. What makes a blog stand out from a website or discussion group is that you plan what you want to say ( versus a discussion group where it's live). The best part is that you have full control over creating your blog - no web designer, no cost.

* Blogs are written in an informal style.
* Blogs are web pages that are date and time stamped.
* All messages and/or posts are saved and archived for instant access at a later time.
* Blogs are frequently updated with new information, which search engines like.
* Blogs differ from forums in that they link to other blogs and websites ( blogosphere)
* Blogs are interactive. Visitors can leave comments about your post.
* Blogs are published instantly. There is no need for a web designer.
* Blogs get around the email spam filters so your message will be seen.

By blogging you become a trusted expert in your field. When you write and publish, you are seen as an expert with credibility. People do business with people they trust. Even when you use other people's content you are seen as the "go-to" resource of information.

You can visit the Blogger website and have your blog setup in 3 easy steps.
http://www.blogger.com/start .

Once your first blog is published you then want to start by "pinging" your blog to get the automated traffic machine started. These sites are the ones I use to Ping my Blogs.

http://pingomatic.com/

http://pingoat.com/

http://www.technorati.com/ping/

You can add more articles to your blog anytime you want using the same simple steps applied above. It is recommended that you post 2 to 3 times per week. You might add your own articles or you could just add your own thoughts, ideas and experiences (like an online diary of your Internet marketing journey). With a blog, the publishing possibilities are only limited by your own imagination...

If you need help with your blog you can visit http://help.blogger.com/

To our Success!

Chantal Lennon
819-837-2761

http://clennon.payitforward4profits.com/

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