|
|
| www.1001TopWords.com |
|
|
Why Blog?
It seems everyone these days is talking about blogging. Everywhere I go, I find articles and forums devoted to this craze. I also have heard from many home business owners who are trying to figure out what a blog is and how they can use one to their benefit. The term "blog" is short for "weblog", which just means an online journal or "log". You can jot down personal thoughts and notes, post articles you've written or keep track of interesting websites you find. The sky is the limit, it seems, when it comes to blogging. A blog is something entirely of your own creation and you can use it to share your thoughts with the world, well?.with anyone you can get to read it anyway. One of the main debates going on about blogs is whether blogging can be done to improve Search Engine rankings for businesses or to create a buzz about business websites. Both of these can be true if the blog is used correctly. Many resources show that once a blog is created, many times it is listed in Search Engines within 48 hours. This was true of the blog I created for Christian Work at Home Moms. These are many ways to create a blog. The easiest by far is to use one of the free tools available online, such as Google's Blogger. You can create your blog for free using their online tools and templates(nothing to download). After you have created the blog, you can then publish your blog through them and "Wa-La" ? your blog is posted online for the world to see. Once you've created your blog, you will need to decide how you will use it. Will it be a personal blog, full of thoughts and comments for yourself alone or maybe your family? Or will it be a business blog, with articles and tips for potential customers? If you want your blog to be found by others, blogging experts recommend that you begin by setting the title and descriptions for your blog. These are similar to the the title and descriptions you set for your website. Try to make them meaningful because they are what people will see when your blog is returned in a Search Engine. If your description is simply "my blog", you may not draw the attention you'd like. If you are blogging in the hopes of attracting customers, make sure to use wise use of words and links in your blogs. Try to avoid the "click here" link. Instead, opt for links within descriptive sentences. Add the HTML link within the sentence and attach it to the words that are closely related to the page or site you are linking to. For example, to link to my website I would not use "click here" as my link. I would say, "Please visit Christian Work at Home Moms for home-based work resources." There are many ways to get your blog noticed outside of optimizing them for Search Engines. For instance, there are entire websites devoted to listing blogs dedicated to any topic that you can think of. One of the best such websites devoted to women-created blogs, is BlogDaisy.com. You can also use free tools such a FeedBurner.com to track the traffic on your blog and to create a dynamic title box that can be used to display your blog headlines on your website or even in your email signature. Each time you update your blog, these headlines are instantly updated. There are many ways to use a blog for either personal or business use. If used correctly, a blog can be a terrific tool to inform potential customers of your business. Be sure to update your blog at least once a week so that the content remains fresh and you remain in the Search Engines. Jill Hart is the author of the e-book, 2 Weeks Devotional Journey for Christian Work at Home Moms, and the founder and editor of Christian Work at Home Moms CWAHM.com. This site is dedicated to providing work at home moms with opportunities to promote their businesses while at the same time providing them spiritual encouragement and articles. E-mail Jill at jill@cwahm.com for additional information or stop by her site at http://www.cwahm.com This article is free to reprint if the Author's Bio remains in tact. For additional articles, please contact Jill Hart.
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Blogs: A Fool Proof Way to Attract Visitors Blogs might seem like an old hat at this time as by now really everyone has one him- and herself. But exactly this fact is what makes them such a valuable promotion tool even for long existing websites (that are no blog and don't have one yet): The wide and large userbase. There are thousands of bloggers around in every kind of niche that will visit every new blog they can find with great interest and thus making great new customers for your existing website. And the best thing is it doesn't even take much work to add your own blog to your website and promote it. This article will take you through the only three steps that are needed. Make Money Blogging You have created a blog and your blog is dedicated to a niche industry. Have you ever thought that the blog could make money for you? We would look here in this article, ways and means, to make money blogging. Lets first have a look at what are the prerequisites for a blog needed to make money: Bloggin for a Reason For some it's just a fun thing to do, while some others feel they will soon be left out; they soon join the crowd. Everyone who uses the internet knows someone who has a blog. Now what do you find in a blog that you dont find anywhere else? Nothing? If you are a friend of the blogger you visit his blog probably because you want a sneak peek into whatz happenning in his life right? don't deny that? been there done that! oh, and if you are a blogger yourself you visit other blogs thinking that the other guy reciprocates. For Wordpress users version 1.5 new feature ?Pages? After many requests from wordpress users, the latest version of wordpress has a build in option to create static pages. You can use static pages for an about page, contact page, a links page, etc. This dreamhost review page is an example of a stand alone static page. The advantages are that you can add stand alone content to its own page, outside the normal weblog hierarchy. Pages have the same editing options, plug-in functionality and themes as posts. Or you can customize the stand alone page as much as you want. Static pages also help search engine indexing, as opposed to dynamic urls. 3 Tips to improve your RSS marketing 3 Tips to improve your RSS marketingYou have created an RSS feed, or maybe you have several feeds and you post at least once a week to keep your RSS subscribers interested. So now you can sit back and watch your hit counter tally up all those extra visitors. Well you may think you have finished but there are a few things you can do to improve things still further.1. Let browsers and search engines know you have an RSS available.To do this you need to add a line of HTML to every page that has a link to your RSS feed. The link will be:link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="title" href="http://www.site.com/rss.xml"This line will need to be enclosed by angled brackets and placed between your HEAD tags of your page. Once you have done this some search engine bots and web browsers such as Firefox will know you have an RSS feed available.2. Submit your RSS feed to the RSS and Blog directories.Like you would submit your site to search engines you can submit your site to RSS specific directories. This will give your RSS greater exposure to an audience that is already interested and educated about the benefits of RSS. This is a list of Alexa ranked RSS directories and another can be found here.3. Announce that your RSS feed has been updated.Every time you add a new item to your RSS feed you can announce it to the world, or at least many of the RSS directories. To do this you need to ping each service. If you are using Blogging software your software is probably already doing this for you , check your documentation.For those of you who do not have software set up to automatically ping for you there is no need to worry. There is a free service at Ping-o-matic that will do this for you. Gathered Statistical Data Announces that Blogs will Dominate the Internet in Less than a Few Years ... if not months to come. Start Blogging Now: 10 Reasons Why You Really Need a Blog for Your Business 1. It is perfect for creating a web presence for independent professionals who have something to say and who need people to get to know them and what they can do for them. Microsoft and Google Show Its Time for RSS Marketing Many internet marketers are still wondering whether to start marketing with RSS or not. It seems that not even all the case studies, hard metrics and benefits available can't convince them, or everyone would be jumping on the RSS wagon by now. 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. Is RSS Here to Stay or Gone Tomorrow? RSS is totally hot. We have seen it everywhere, from John-Doe blogsites to major news websites. If you haven't heard of RSS before, that's okay, because I hadn't either until a couple of months ago! What Is This RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom Business? It's been a long day at work and you're in no mood to cook dinner or go out. Time to count on the reliable pizza delivery guy. The order is called in and he promptly arrives with smokin' hot pizza within 30 minutes as promised. If it were only that easy with a picky family where no one can agree on the same restaurant for dinner. One wants Mexican, another wants Chinese, and another wants a burger and Mexican. Instead of running to three different places, you call a delivery service that goes to all of them and brings it to you. What could be easier in getting a meal without cooking it or fetching it? Blogs are an Art Form that Takes Practice to do Well Writing?Blogs?Blogs are on-line journals where people express themselves through writing. Writing?Writing is the process where one puts down words of a language on a format that others can read. This process has not been around very long, to use one of my writing teacher's favorite sayings, "Writing has only existed for one day in the one year that humanity has existed." Speaking and thinking come much easier than writing. These processes just flow out naturally like a river of consciousness; sometimes we hardly have to think about doing them. Anyone and everyone can write words down on paper but that doesn't mean it's 'good writing', myself included. Like most things in life, our society already takes writing for granted which is proving to expose more of our ignorance. Writing is a new form of expression, and if we want to do it in a way that the masses can connect with our ideas, we have to think much more simply and clearly about this art. Top 6 Reasons for Having a RSS Feed - Come and Explore the Possibilities! Getting traffic to your website can be hard. No one just randomly types in "makelotsofmoneyonlinequicklyandfromhome.com" and with this market slowly being filled in, it is hard to get a good rank on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and all the other major search engines. Although paying for advertising is effective and gets targeted results, RSS feeds are the way to go for free, cheap, and somewhat easy advertising. Blogging for Business Not long ago a blog was simply an online diary. Initially, people decided that blogging was describing, in excruciating detail, how their day went, what they had for dinner last night, and why they spent the whole weekend doing laundry. Build a Website Using Blog Software Have you thought about how easily you could build and maintain a website if you created the entire thing using blog software? Talk about an inexpensive and easy way to make your own website, this is it! How to Create an RSS Feed An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new content on your website without the need for them to keep on visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming. You will be comfortable in the knowledge that people who request your feed are actually interested in it because they have actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to create your own RSS news feed.There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an editor designed for the purpose or you can create a file using a simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some XML whilst the former will do the hard part for you. First off I will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will be showing you version 2.0, the latest RSS version.An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different tags and the files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The file is made up of header information and item information, the item information contains the actual news items.The first section of the file contains the header information. This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title, description and link which explain the what the feed is about and what website it is associated with. The final part of the header is the optional image information. If you use this the software that is used to parse or read your file can display a small picture such as a logo. Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.[?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?][rss version="2.0"][channel][title]The Widget news feed[/title][description]The latest news on widgets[/description][link]http://www.widget.com/[/link][image][title]Widget News[/title][url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url][link>http://www.widget.com/[/link][/image]The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in the format shown in the example below. [title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title][description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description] [pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate][link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link][/item]You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user with too many items.Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag.[/channel][/rss]I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.0) specification.Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file. That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article. What the BLOG? Blogs Are the NEW Secret Weapon for Reaching Your Tarket. Just like you, I hate being marketed to. Every day we're bombarded with over 3,500 marketing messages. And frankly I'm sick of it! But blogs are different. Blogs are a two-way conversation between blogger and bloggee (plus all the readers in between). Through commenting and cross-linking, you can share feedback. You can build your network. You can become, dare I say it, an Internet celebrity! Make Money with Your Own Blog Well, basically, setting up a blog means that you are creating a little space of your own on the Internet where you can make posts about anything that interests you. Of course, if you are going to be blogging on a variety of topics, the best way to make money with it would be to have different blogs for different topics otherwise your blog will be just one big jumbled mess that nobody would want to read about. What is Blogging? Blogs have been around for many years but have recently become somewhat a new 'craze'. A Blog is short for Web Log is basically an online journal. They can be set up at little to no cost at all, and can be used for a wide variety of things. Some bloggers just blog for the fun of it, while others tend to use their blogs for business reasons. RSS Meets the Needs of Direct Marketers Contrary to general opinion, RSS meets the needs of even the most demanding direct marketer, actually providing most of what e-mail marketing does, except for the strong push factor.
|
| © Athifea Distribution LLC - 2015 |