By Timothy Arends

You have probably already realized that if blogging for business were not effective, then so many business owners and managers would not already be using it. Not only this, but more and more business owners move to the world of blogging every day.

Obviously, blogging has proven its value for almost every type of business, and it is picking up speed as more business owners recognize its benefits. It helps, however, if blogging is defined so as to understand why so many business owners have found value in it.

Defining the “Blog”

A blog is actually a special type of webpage in which posts are regularly updated and are arranged in the order of date posted. The term “blog,” a blend of the words “web” and “log” did not spring up spontaneously. In fact, the term was coined by Pyra Labs, the company that created the service Blogger, now owned by Google.

Such pages were originally called weblogs in 1997 by Jorn Barger. They started gaining popularity in 1999 when third-party companies began developing specialized blogging software and tools to make the procedure easier. Since then, the number of people involved in blogging has grown from just a thousand to over a hundred million bloggers.

Business Blogs

There are two kinds of blogs: personal and business. Personal blogs are like a combination of personal diary and journal and consist largely of opinions, while research links may be present on a more scholarly blogs. Business blogs are used as a communications tool for promoting a business to potential customers as well as to existing clients.

Blogging For Business Promotion

While good for marketing products and services, blogging for business is also a venue for communicating the special features of one’s product, for sharing one’s expertise as well as one’s business portfolio, and for boosting site traffic and connecting with potential customers.

Blogging Can Help Smaller Businesses

Smaller enterprises which may have just recently started seeing the benefits of blogging can expect the following:

• Easy to Use The process of blogging is simply a jotting down of your thoughts and a linking to various online resources and publishing these to your blog. Blogging software comes on every Mac in the form of iWeb, which is part of the Apple’s iLife software suite. This is a very capable, although basic, blogging tool. The trend more recently has been to use one of the online end-user-friendly blogging tools for Mac or PC such as Movable Type, Blogger.com and Typepad.
• Low-Cost Blogging for business is easy on the wallet, a cost effective alternative to expensive advertising and marketing campaigns. Such campaigns can eat so deeply into your marketing budget that little is left over for profit.

Not only is blogging inexpensive, but it is easy to set up even for business owners who feel they do not have the time or resources to learn how to do it. No knowledge of HTML is required and a web developer is hardly necessary. Just share your thoughts with your customers and potential customers and you will have a cheap and effective means of getting your business visible online.

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Tags: blog, Business

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 at 12:21 pm and is filed under PMI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.