Blogging For Business

As of late 2003, there were 4 million blogs online. By the end of 2004, estimates call for over 10 million.

That's a lot of blogs!

But what on earth is a blog?

Blog software allows you to type something in your computer, press submit, and have it instantly posted online. Quick, easy, painless.

Blogs, therefore, are simply groups of posts created using blog software. Because blogs are so easy to use, thousands, correction, millions of people have found it a convenient way to post stuff online.

Most blogs are essentially online diaries, with no real value to anyone except the owner and his/her small group of friends.

But businesses have now discovered blogging and are more and more of them are beginning to use it to build their bottom line.

Here's a couple of examples:

At 101PublicRelations.com we use our blog primarily as an archive for this newsletter.

It's an extra step in the publishing process, but, since we began blogging on this site, we are receiving 35% more traffic than we received before and 39.5% of the people who come to our blog end up buying something from us.

Not bad!

Here's another one.

Yesterday, at 3:54 PM, Chris Pirillo, one of the more famous bloggers out there, posted a special coupon on his site. He had gone to the manufacturer of one of his favorite products and requested a special discount coupon code for his readers. They gave him a discount code, plus (more importantly) set up an arrangement with him so that every time someone uses that coupon, Chris gets an affiliate payment.

It's the ultimate win - his readers get a discount, Chris gets money in his pocket, and the software company gets more sales.

But here's where it gets really cool.

Here's Chris's original post:

Since then, in the last 16 hours, 4 other sites have picked up that content, and have linked back to Chris's site:

Airdispatcher

Mattberther.com

MoreStuff4Less.com

and now, me.

Isn't that cool! Chris actually has other people promoting his coupon that earns him money. Plus these other sites are sending people to his site and they are giving his site additional incoming links which helps his site get better rankings in the search engines.

Now that's cool!

This is one of the main reasons to have a blog - people who write blogs like to link to other people's blogs. So, if you write something worthy of mention, you can literally have your blog mentioned all over the web within hours.

One final example - blogs have taken such an important role that Bush, Kerry and even Nadar are running blogs on their sites:
George Bush
John Kerry
Ralph Nadar (Technically this isn't a blog, but he's trying to make it look like one)

And hundreds of other companies are building their bottom lines with blogs too.

Why aren't you?

Want to know 11 reasons why your business should have a blog?

We feel so strongly that almost every business should have a blog that we have created a Training Manual entitled Blogging For Business, How To Generate Traffic, Create Publicity, and Build Your Bottom Line Using Blogs. This info-packed manual tells you exactly what you need to get started in blogging, gives you examples of other business blogs, shows how to promote your blog, even exactly how to write and how often to write to your blog.

There's no better time to investigate how you can use a blog to build your business than right now!

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