Discover The Power Of Blogging

The dark circles under his eyes are evidence that he has been pecking away at the keyboard again. Night after night he sits, mesmerized by the computer screen surfing forum after forum filling the blank spaces with his comments and opinions about senseless issues, political debates, religious matters, business strategies and shopping options. All the while his marriage is deteriorating, his children are growing up and away, his business is wavering on the brink of bankruptcy, spiritual matters are being neglected, all to which he is oblivious.

One day he happens upon an internet forum about blogging. "What in the world is blogging?" he wonders.

Suddenly he becomes enthralled with a new mission. He has to get to the bottom of this. With all the time he has spent on the internet communicating with people throughout the world, he has never heard of blogging. He wants to learn everything there is to know about it...

Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon that is truly undefined due to the fact that it is not yet what it will become. Currently weblogs teeter on the edges of interactive journalism vs. personal archiving and information sharing. Different bloggers have varying purposes and goals. Some aim to record their thoughts, some to share resources and information and some to tell stories. Blogging has also been used as a tool for educating readers and for providing customer service and communications as well as serving as a tool for self-expression.

With Google's introduction of the AdSense content-targeted advertising program, you can even generate some revenue from your blog as you get paid per click for Google Ads accessed from your blog. Don't create a blog on the premise that you're going to get rich from advertising payments or you may be sorely disappointed. Rather, view the ad program as an added bonus for the time spent filling your blog with useful content, or as getting paid a little for doing something you enjoy.

The best way to get started blogging is just to jump in and get your feet wet. Decide what you want to accomplish through your blog. Is it a tool for getting things off your chest? Sharing your thoughts and feelings? Providing information? Tracking events?

Reading through various blogs will provide you with some ideas for your blogs purpose and for developing your writing style.

Find a blogging medium that you are comfortable with. There are some options out there for free blogs and there are some paid services that are very reasonable, some for commercial and some for non-commercial use.

Probably the quickest and easiest way to start your own blog is to use a hosted service like Blogger - http://www.blogger.com. Getting started with Blogger is a three step process that you can take care of right now. You simply create an account, name your blog and choose a template and you'll be ready to get started making blog entries. Once you get comfortable with the basic process of blogging, be sure to visit the "Help" section of the Blogger website to learn more about advanced uses and blogging options.

Blog And Ping Does It Work?

I have been doing an experiment with blogging and pinging, one of the ways which supposedly gets your site listed and ranked higher quicker.

Firstly I'll explain what blogging and pinging is. Blog and ping is a technique you can use to get your site listed in search engines. The idea is that search engines like blogs because of the ever updating content, so they keep going back. By writing a blog and placing some site links in the posts, the search engines will spider the links, and pages shortly after you blog.

Pinging is when you send a "ping" to let the directories, which keep lists of blogs, and when those blogs are updated, know that you have added content to your blog. These are allegedly closely watched by the search engine spiders, so they can spider any new content and add it to the search engine which controls them.

Anyway, back to my experiment, does blogging and pinging really get your site noticed?

Well my results have been encouraging. I have tested by only using a blog as the front page of a new information site I started. http://www.informationpagesonline.com has only been advertised by way of the blog to announce new content, and then pinged through http://www.pingoat.com which distributes the blog entries to several large ping sites.

Following a week of adding content, and then posting an announcement of the new content to the blog on the front page and pinging with pingoat, the site seems to be getting visitors to most of the sections, which I can see from the log files. I can also see some of the traffic is coming from search engines, and also a lot of spider activity can be seen on the site, where the search engines are crawling the content.

So I have to conclude that blogging and pinging is a way of getting listed on search engines, or at least of getting noticed by them quickly.

Should you be blogging and pinging?

Of course that's up to you, but for the time it takes, it maybe worth trying blog and ping for yourself and tracking the results. A quick blog post (use http://www.blogger.com if you don't already have a blog) and then ping with pingoat takes only a few minutes, and may help a site into all the search engines quickly.

Blogs Are A Great Tool For Influencing The Search Engines

Blogs are becoming a widely used devices for publishing information on the web. They can be used either to communicate general information, or as a marketing tool to promote products and services. Although the blog format has been around for a number of years, the way it is being used is still evolving.

The most distinctive thing about a blog is that it is "content-rich". Most blogs consist of a number of posts entered on a regular basis. These posts can be short references to some other resource on the net (connected by a link), or long posts which are essentially articles or essays on a specific topic with embedded references to other related sources on the web. This makes them ideal for writers, reporters, journalists, as well as marketers wanting to systematically report on current activities, news of the day, or the features of products.

For instance, blogs are used extensively by bloggers in China to comment on the political and economic scene there. They are used by political advocates in most parts of the world who want to push a certain point of view. They are used by journalists as an alternative medium to communicate their experiences and ideas without them being filtered by large publishers. And blogs are used by corporate communication people to keep in touch with employees and customers by carrying corporate news and comments on the developments within a company or industry.

They are also increasingly used by marketers who want to promote certain products and enhance the search engine exposure of specific websites. If you have a website, or are promoting a website on behalf of a client, then planting references to it in blog posts is a very good way of bringing it to the attention of the search engines.

**Blogs and Search Engines**

Blogs are useful marketing tools because the major search engines pay close attention to them. The structure of blogs makes them easily spiderable, so the major search engines -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. -- tend to view them as sources of "news." The more active a blog is, the more frequently it will be spidered. If a blog contains new posts every day, it will get spidered every day -- and sometimes more than once a day.

That means that the information in an active blog will show up in search engine indexes much more quickly than changes made to ordinary static websites. Many people think that simply making a change to their website -- for instance, posting a news item on their home page -- will result in that chance of being picked up by the search engines. But this is not the case. The search engines can only reflect that change after the site is spidered. And unless a site has a history of being constantly updated, the search engines will only spider it occasionally.

Therefore when it comes to influencing the search engines, blogs can serve two useful functions. First, as we have seen, an active blog gets spidered regularly. So as long as it remains active a blogger can expect a regular visit to his blog from the search engines to see what is being reported. New posts will get indexed almost immediately, and will start to show up in search engine results.

**Two Important Conclusions about Blogs**

First, if you want to have something reflected quickly in search engine searches, writing about it in a blog is the best way to accomplish this objective.

Second, since the search engines follow links, placing links in your blog posts to other sites to which you want to draw attention to is a good way to get them spidered as well. For instance, say you introduce a new product on your website. The best way to have the search engines visit your site quickly and reindex the changed pages is to make an announcement in an active blog. The spiders will visit the blog, follow the links pointing to your website, and index the changes to the website.

This is why links placed in blog posts are generally the most effective way of drawing attention to other targeted websites.

**Taking Advantage of Blogs**

There are two fairly straightforward ways to take advantage of these important features of blogs.

The first way is to start your own blog. It is surprisingly easy to become a blogger. Many sites offer free blogs that are part of a larger "community" of blogs. For instance, go to blogger.com (owned by Google), sign up (for free), and you can have you blog up and running in a matter of minutes.

The problem with this approach is that you may not be a writer, you may not be interested in making regular posts, or you may simply not have anything to say on a regular basis. In that case you might try to find someone who will let you make posts every now and then in their blog -- or at least create links pointing at your website.

Another interesting alternative is to pay someone to review your site, or feature your products every couple of weeks in their blog. That way you get all the marketing and search engine advantages of blogging without actually having to do any of the work.