January 19, 2007 22:11
Category: Blogging
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With plenty of choice available on a platter, it is easy to start a blog. Seldom however is the question answered as to why we need a blog.
A blog is something to one person, quite different to another. For instance, my sister, who is an English teacher, takes her blog as literary expression of her mind. To her, blogging is just a pleasure, a pastime to be engaged in if time and mood permit. My blog - this one - is a pleasure and yes, my bread-earner too.
Concept of blogging therefore varies as much as chalk varies from cheese. There can be any number of reasons why you need a blog. Here is one among them.
Have you noticed links that say "..more", "for more information, click here", "click here to know more" and suchlike on homepage and other pages of a website?
Surely you've, and as you rightly know these are links that lead viewers to other pages of a website where the subject is dealt on in more detail. If the viewer finds interest in the brief description on say homepage, he/she is likely to click the "..more" link to proceed to the concerned page that has full description.
Suppose now you have changed the 'full-description' page because you've added more to your service or your product has a changed design. How will your earlier visitors who make a repeat trip to your site know about the changes?
For that matter, how about letting your visitors know about any change that you make to your website without the bother of coming to your site time and again?
We'll come to the answer, but are you saying there are proven ways to solve the problem? Perhaps you mean you always ask your viewers to bookmark your page, or that your weekly e-letter informs them of the changes made in your website.
In reality, none of them works. Bookmarking is an old concept that has lost its lure. After all, how many pages of how many sites will you bookmark? Even if you do (for example, taking help of social bookmarking sites), you'll soon face a jungle of bookmarked pages unless you're meticulous in arranging them.
About the e-letter, the less said the better it is. In these days of spam and motivated contents, email campaign has lost all its sheen. I know many small business owners who resort to hype in order to attract subscribers opting for emails, but rarely find any taker.
Clearly then, days of bookmarking and e-letters are behind us. Not that no e-letters succeed. I myself subscribe to about half-a-dozen, but they are in business for close to a decade and have proven reputation to speak about.
This means for most of us, the solution for communicating with our viewers needs to be something totally different. Yet it ought to be easy to implement and easier for viewers.
Let's remember if first-time viewers to our websites are honored guests, then repeat comers are like angels. Anyone who is in web-business for a while knows it is the repeat-visitors that provide sustained earnings.
It follows therefore that the best interest will be to keep repeat comers in good humor. If so, how? What is the magic solution to automatically let your viewers know what you're up to?
The short answer is starting a blog. And then syndicate the blog-content. But then what will a blog do for you?
For a start, why not record all site-related happenings in your blog? And in case you are a content writer like me, won't you like to add fresh contents - such as this article - to your blog?
If it seems a tall order, take solace in the fact that you need to know no extra html or other tech skill to add contents to your blog. It's that easy. Set up your blog and get going in just about an hour's time.
Google's Blogger (blogger.com) is a good help to start your blog. If you are game to downloading blog software, you can choose between WordPress (wordpress.org) and Nucleus CMS (nucleuscms.org).
If blog or blogging is one side of the coin, syndicating your blog content is the other. Without syndication, your blog will possibly remain unknown where it actually matters. Which means your viewers have to come again and again to view your site. When you syndicate your blog, you're sparing them from that trouble.
How do you syndicate? RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a tailor-made way for that. When your blog is up and running, it will have a RSS-feed (a feed-url), which you need to use with RSS aggregators like My Yahoo!, My MSN, Google and others.
You are almost ready to put your blog on fast track. RSS aggregators like My Yahoo! will automatically aggregate fresh contents of your site as you publish them. Just put a nice button (available from My Yahoo! site) on your blog-page to let viewers subscribe to your RSS feed.
That's all. You'll be surprised how easy the whole thing is. The real advantage is that subscribers are automatically fed with your site-news, which they are able to see in their RSS readers. If they find anything important, they'll simply click the link and come directly to your site.
RSS has virtually eliminated the need for yesteryear strategies like email marketing and bookmarking to keep viewers informed. It's more sophisticated in approach and easy to implement.
If you are still with me, why not learn a few tricks behind using RSS for distributing content? They have helped me a lot. Go the RSS way, who knows your online success hinges on it!
Even as RSS brings you results as you may expect, have a look at the following video, aptly titled, Turning Tennis Into Checks.
