Blogging for business is a hot topic right now and interest in using blogs for business and marketing continues to grow. I get frequently asked questons about how to create blog success for business and marketing. I wanted to publish a few here.

1.What are blogs and how are they different from web sites?

Blogs are identified with different names to signify their impact on media and marketing communications. Names such as social tools, citizen generated media, participatory journalism, word of mouth, online journals and more.

Blogs are dynamic web sites that publish content easily, instantly and frequently.

Web sites excel at publishing static content as web page for the purpose of getting your most wanted response whether that response is a direct sale, a sales lead or click to another site or page. Web sites are rather impersonal and update their content infrequently.

Blogs excel and publishing information as dynamic conversions for the purposes of building relationship, reputation and revenue. Blogs are personal, social and two-way communications tools that are updated frequently about a specific topic or theme of interest to a person or business.




2. Why is blogging so important now?

Blogging is significant because of it's power to communicate and socialize ideas quickly. Blogs are citizen media tools that represent your markets. These markets are forming communities of discourse around products, services and markets. Your markets content real-time conversations through active content, ideas and opinions and opinions are viral and consumers are exercising control through choice and voice.They are choosing what messages to receive and the voicing or evangelizing their ideas and opinions using blogs. Blogs accelerate the speed of communication, provide authoritative and quality content, and foundation for highly influential online social markets.

The blogging benefits for businesses is increase and accelerated exposure for your message, the opportunity to drive reputation and greater value into your niche markets much quicker and the ability to direct traffic and clicks to the messages that mean the most to your business.

3. What are the 3 biggest mistakes most people make when they get started with blogging?

There are initially 2 areas that immediately come to my mind. They are expectations and vocalization.

New businesses and marketers may expect too much too soon from their blogs. Blogs are not cash cows. Relationship and reputation will always precede revenue if you are using blogs for business.

New business and marketers may not vocalize their position clearly. Your blog must speak clearly and authoritatively to your markets with a high degree of relevancy in order to be effective.

4. How can I determine if a blog is right for me?

Ideally I would say that if you are engage in any level of online content publishing that is used to teach and reach and audience for prospecting and profit that a blog can be and ideal tool. Blogs are becoming and necessary tool because they allow you to reach your current markets and reach for new markets according to the change in how consumers choices are being made.

Right now there social markets maintain the highest levels of influence. You must tap into the social markets that are impacting your niche and establish voice and community for your business.

If you have something to say, something to sell or something to socialize then a blog may be for you. While this is a rather simplified reply you should understand the long term commitment required to develop content and relationships over time through your blog. You cannot throw up content and expect immediate success.

5. What are the 2 most overlooked opportunities with blogging?

I think one overlooked opportunity is the deployment of blogs for efficient internal communications. Rapid sharing of expertise and knowledge management in the enterprise is a place where blogs can really shine. If blogs allow your larger public markets to tap into your message and get access to your expertise how much more so in the enterprise? What thought leadership is locked up simply because there just isn't an efficient model for delivering knowledge and expertise rapidly to those areas of your business that need it most? Blogs can be used to aggregate knowledge and then stream it out using RSS to those within the organization that need it most. The skies the limits here.

I'm and IT professional by day and I lead a team of 5 engineers. We are virtual team that coordinates via e-mail, conference calls and some face time. But we're scatter across states. I check more blogs via RSS using my reader than I do my companies corporate intranet even those they force our browsers to default its homepage to the intranet home page. My consumption habits or different because of blogs and RSS. I RSS reader fires up and my notifications pop up and I'm off and running. I really have to force myself to check the intranet for news which I rarely do because I'm so busy. It doesn't work with how I work so it gets ignored. If there was and RSS feed I could place that information in my line of sight.

The opportunity here for internal communications is huge. I also believe there is a huge opportunity to not only rapidly share your own expertise but there is great opportunity to improve your expertise and business intelligence by monitoring other leading blogs through RSS.

Blog and RSS are just huge in my opinion. I continue to stay passionate about the prospects for blogs and RSS for online business communications as internal business communications tools.

6. How does blogging and RSS help bring traffic to a web site? Blogs naturally do well at ranking for keyword phrases. Google and other search directories see blogs as important and the structure of blogs make them very attractive to search engines that are looking for rich content.

For more detailed coverage of on how to create blog success with good search engine rankings you can read this article I published:

Create Blog Success with Improved Search Engine Rankings

7. What are the biggest factors for getting good traffic to my blog?

Well, aside from the more technical and organic aspects of blogging that I discuss in the article referenced in question 6 above, I would say that Passion, Relevancy, and Frequency are important factors.

If you are passionate about your topic your audience will be drawn in to your message personally. Your passion will fuel your focus and result in great value for your audience. You will be more authoritative and your content will be highly informative because you will know your subject matter pretty well. This is detectable by others and people like passion and passionate people. This is one key to having fun while blogging.

Relevancy is important because your audience has needs and interests. Relevancy keeps your audience satisfied and interested and encourages repeat visits to your blog.

Frequency is important because you need to provide fresh content regularly. Otherwise, why should anyone return to a blog that doesn't update?

All of these factors stem form social traffic which I tend to mention often. Search Traffic is important but social traffic is just as important. Your search traffic is your new and unique traffic from search engines. Your social traffic comprises blog new traffic and repeat traffic. You want people to come back again and again and have them evangelize your message with links and Trackbacks that send you more new traffic that will hopefully stick and return again and again.

8. What blog software do you recommend?

For do-it-yourself installs on your own servers I recommend WordPress.

For hosted blog software services I highly recommend BlogHarbor hands down!