Why you should have a blog

[Kay]

If you ever doubted a blog should be part of your marketing strategy, look at Technorati's State of The Blogosphere annual report for 2008 and see if that doesn't change your mind. :)

Aside from the money you can make with it, I can tell you from personal experience it's a much faster way to get indexed by the search engines. The automated ping that tells the search engines to come and see your new post plays a big part in that.

I've made blog entries before on one of mine and watched for it coming up on my RSS feed on another site. Between publishing the blog entry and it showing up on the other site's feed, the fastest I saw was 17 minutes. If you set one up even just for that, it's worth it. Blogs are streets ahead of webpages in that respect.

A few snippets:




Blogs are Profitable

The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. Note: median investment and revenue (which is listed below) is significantly lower. They are also earning CPMs on par with large publishers.



Most Professional and Corporate Bloggers have benefited professionally

The majority of corporate and professional bloggers have seen a positive impact as a result of their blog. Half are better known in their industry, and one in four have used their blog as a resume enhancement. Fewer than one in ten have seen a negative impact from blogging and one in three have yet to see an impact.



Blogging has opened up unique opportunities

Blogging has brought many unique opportunities to these bloggers that otherwise would not have been available. One in four have been invited to participate in an event as a result of their blog, one in five have contributed to a print publication as a result of their blog, and almost as many have found themselves on TV and/or on the radio.


There's five days worth of information released, equivalent to five pages. How many more days there are to go I don't know, but it's a good read if you want to get a handle on the blogging world. :)

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

[Big_0n3]

Yes thnks for this good information. I am thinking to open a forum.

[Fergal]

Thanks for the link and for that excellent information Kay. It all certainly makes blogging appear to be very attractive.

Many people rush into blogging (I've done this myself in the past) and start their blog without a clear strategy or plan. I'd be very surprised if the successful ones didn't all complete clear and detailed planning before they published their first blog post. It's important to be clear on who your target market is and the type of content you are going to publish, before you start.

[Nazreen]

I've never tried blogging before and I just don't have time to spend writing blogs. I'm quite busy learning all I can about Forex in the hope that I can also be successful in this. When I have the time, I'll definitely give it a try and hopefully also earn some money out of it. :)

Thanks for sharing this very informative info on blogging Kay.

[scifi]

Yeah Kay! it's an interesting thing..well a new marketing strategy indeed..looks like soon we will have a course in MBA dedicated to this blogging as a marketing strategy:D...
Really a good thing on marketing ..but demands a lot of time....
But a good source to reach out to the world & convey u'r message or your thoughts you haven't till.

[Fergal]

...looks like soon we will have a course in MBA dedicated to this blogging as a marketing strategy:...

We certainly should have. Blogging is a very important part of marketing, used by major corporations.

[Kay]

Glad you all found it useful! :)

It's true, you really do need to be dedicated to working at it almost religiously if you expect to reach the dizzy heights of the professional bloggers out there and attain their kind of following.

That's the biggest hurdle for a lot of new bloggers. They see the likes of Problogger that makes it look easy and expect they'll get an immediate audience and people flocking to advertise on their blogs as well when they haven't actually invested much of anything content wise to deserve that. They soon lose interest and let it fizzle out.


Many people rush into blogging (I've done this myself in the past) and start their blog without a clear strategy or plan. I'd be very surprised if the successful ones didn't all complete clear and detailed planning before they published their first blog post. It's important to be clear on who your target market is and the type of content you are going to publish, before you start.

That's another reason I'm so interested in following Problogger's new blog about Twitter, Fergal. He's building it up from zero and showing how he does it as he goes along. Of course he has an edge with people already knowing him from Problogger, but it's good to see how a pro works.

[silent_thunder]

Nice thread!! kay!! Blogging can also be a social tool to get the message across. I blog about my country and people come to see it. I don't know of any other medium in which an ordinary man can reach such a wide audience

[Kay]

Nice thread!! kay!! Blogging can also be a social tool to get the message across. I blog about my country and people come to see it. I don't know of any other medium in which an ordinary man can reach such a wide audience


Thanks, silent! Sorry I overlooked this before. You're absolutely right there - I can't think of anything else that's so accessible to so many. We're lucky really to have such a huge database at our disposal, not only for work/research but to meet and connect with people we'd never in a million years have had the chance to. Have you given us a link to your blog before where you blog about your country? I don't recall seeing it.

[Nazreen]

As I'm new to the concept of blogging, on which domain or site shall it be good to start blogging? This is assuming of course that my main purpose for blogging is to create an extra source of income.

Shall I get my own domain or shall I get a subdomain under blogger/blogspot, multipy, etc? I have an acquaintance who blogs in multiply but it seems that he's not earning anything.

[Fergal]

Nazreen, personally I feel that your own domain is more professional and more brandable than using a blogging sub-domain. Having your own domain should help your blog become more popular. techcrunch.blogger.com just wouldn't have the same ring to it!

What topic will you blog on Nazreen?

[Nazreen]

What topic will you blog on Nazreen?

I've no definite plans yet Kay because I'm still focusing on learning as much as I can about Forex and trading in general. Anyway, if I were to start my own blog, it would probably be focused on things that I'm quite fond of like cooking/baking, business, forex or probably about badminton.

[Swastik]

I've no definite plans yet Kay because I'm still focusing on learning as much as I can about Forex and trading in general. Anyway, if I were to start my own blog, it would probably be focused on things that I'm quite fond of like cooking/baking, business, forex or probably about badminton.

:p

You should always do what you're interested in. That's the only way success will follow ya! :)

But yeah, the niches you mentioned are heavily varied. If you're going to start a serious blog, I'd advice to take a particular niche and stick to it. Of course, you may go off topic sometimes, but it helps in building a targeted following. People who subscribe will know what they can expect in their email box, not like today a blogging related post, tomorrow cricket related. :eek:

[Nazreen]

:p

You should always do what you're interested in. That's the only way success will follow ya! :)

But yeah, the niches you mentioned are heavily varied. If you're going to start a serious blog, I'd advice to take a particular niche and stick to it. Of course, you may go off topic sometimes, but it helps in building a targeted following. People who subscribe will know what they can expect in their email box, not like today a blogging related post, tomorrow cricket related. :eek:

I wasn't really planning of blogging about cooking/baking, business, forex and badminton, all in one blog because as you've mentioned, they're quite varied. Anyway, thanks for reminding me and the good advice. :)

Once I've set up in forex, I'm thinking that blogging might be another good source of extra income but as I've said before, there's no definite plans yet.

[flashgordonweb]

I love blogs, and have three of them. They all make money, and rank very well in the SEs after all of my SEO efforts. However, don't think of a blog as a personal web journal, as that is likely to get you no where. Rather, a blog is simply a content management system (CMS) for dummies. I run a site based on Joomla, which is more of a static website, but has all of the new Web 2.0 features that make blogs so popular and easy for SEO: pings, RSS, dynamic nature, tags, clouds, comments, etc. So, really, any website is a "blog" in that sense if you implement the right features.