To blog or not to blog is no longer the question for entrepreneurs, small businesses and many individuals. It seems as if almost everyone is blogging, so the real questions are how to blog, where to blog, what to blog, and how to use the blog to drive qualified traffic to the website. Well executed and publicized blogs can be the path to entrepreneurship for bloggers who find the right audience.
Who Is Blogging
The blogosphere is exploding with over 181 million personal and business blogs tracked at the end of 2011 by NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/buzz-in-the-blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers/
Blogs encompassed almost every conceivable topic from AARP articles to zoology. To find out who is blogging, the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2011 survey collected data from 4,114 bloggers worldwide from September 13 to October 4, 2011 http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2011-introduction/
The survey found that 60% of the respondents were hobbyists blogging for fun, 18% blogged full- or part time for income, 8% are corporate bloggers who blog for the companies that they worked for as part of their jobs, and 13% of the respondents are entrepreneurs who blog for the companies that they own.
Blogging has spawned a whole group of entrepreneurs who blog for profit, such as the “Mommy Bloggers” who are paid to review products and affiliate program members who receive commissions for products that their readers buy after clicking on links.
Where They’re Blogging
There are three major free blog hosting services.
Blogger.com, which is now owned by Google, does not release statistics on the number of users. The State of the Blogsphere study 2010 http://technorati.com/social-media/article/how-technology-traffic-and-revenue-day/ found that Blogger and Blogspot were more popular with hobbyist bloggers.
According to the wordpress.com website on March 16, 2012, there were over 72 million Wordpress sites internationally, and Wordpress hosts about half of those blogs. Wordpress.com and wordpress.org are available through free downloads. There is user documentation on their websites and free tutorial videos are available on www.wordpress101.com which also has paid membership material.
Although it is the newest dedicated free webhost, Tumblr – www.tumblr.com - has shown explosive growth and now hosts nearly 44 million blogs. One interesting feature of Tumblr is that it allows a blogger to call in and create an audio blog entry.
According to NM Incite, during the third quarter of 2011, Blogger got 46.3 million unique visitors, Wordpress blogs had 20.4 million, and tumbler had 13.8 million.
Some businesses integrate blogs into their existing websites as a separate page or tab. Provided that new articles are uploaded on a regular basis, this is a good way of adding fresh content to the website and obtaining better search engine rankings.
Some bloggers use dedicated domains for their blogs with top-level domain names. Many affiliate marketers use this strategy for better search engine rankings for their keywords. Some companies use a separate domain to create backlinks to their main business sites. And some companies have both a page on their main websites and a separate domain for their blogs.
What They’re Blogging About
Some of the most popular blogs are used to disseminate information, express opinions, talk about hobbies and pets, review products, discuss politics, and provide updates on technologty.
Delivering the right material to the right audiences is very important to bloggers, and they closely follow their readership through web analytics. There are many free services that enable bloggers to determine who their visitors are, where they originate, how many are returning visitors and what keywords were used to find the blog. Among the most popular we analytic services are Google Analytics – the most widely used service, Feedburner, Yahoo! web analytics, Histats, and Clicky.
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Monday, June 4, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Web 2.0: You and Me and an International Village
Like many of you, I have evolved from a passive web user to an active participant in web communities. I network on linkedin, check products on ebay, comment on photos on Flickr, view videos on YouTube, search MySpace and Facebook, create tags for technorati, read the South Florida Public Relations Network message board, and encourage emailed comments on my blog.
With Web 2.0, the Internet has evolved from a static collection of websites that were basically a library-like repository of information and a showcase for public, private, and municipal organizations into a collection of communities where users are encouraged to participate and join. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which allows almost anyone to post or edit articles, defines Web 2.0 as follows:
“Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity…, collaboration, and sharing between users. The term gained currency following the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004… Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs.”
Folksonomies are tags or methods of organizing and bookmarking information into meaningful categories that add value and enable groups to easily find relevant documents, graphics, photos, products, or data. Because of the proliferation of information sharing on the web, folksonomies on sites such as technorati, delic.io.us, and flickr have become increasingly popular.
Web 2.0 websites share certain characteristics. They:
• Are interactive and dynamic with user-friendly interfaces
• Enable users to interact with each other as individuals, communities,
networks, or friends
• Allow users to access web-based applications through a variety of web
browsers
• Have long tails that enable narrow niches to reach out through the entire web
• Encourage user participation because users add value
• Facilitate cooperation rather than control
I recently attended a presentation sponsored by IBM that illustrated the use of social software in a corporate community. The employee directory features employee photographs, locations, contact information, job descriptions, interests, and pertinent information that the employee wishes to disclose. Employees in far-flung locations can work together in groups by uploading and sharing information or can join non work-related special interest online communities.
There is no doubt that Web 2.0 has changed the way that we live, work, shop, entertain ourselves, obtain information, and acquire new friends. And the power of Web 2.0 is that it enables all of us to leave our footprints on the Internet.
With Web 2.0, the Internet has evolved from a static collection of websites that were basically a library-like repository of information and a showcase for public, private, and municipal organizations into a collection of communities where users are encouraged to participate and join. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which allows almost anyone to post or edit articles, defines Web 2.0 as follows:
“Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity…, collaboration, and sharing between users. The term gained currency following the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004… Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs.”
Folksonomies are tags or methods of organizing and bookmarking information into meaningful categories that add value and enable groups to easily find relevant documents, graphics, photos, products, or data. Because of the proliferation of information sharing on the web, folksonomies on sites such as technorati, delic.io.us, and flickr have become increasingly popular.
Web 2.0 websites share certain characteristics. They:
• Are interactive and dynamic with user-friendly interfaces
• Enable users to interact with each other as individuals, communities,
networks, or friends
• Allow users to access web-based applications through a variety of web
browsers
• Have long tails that enable narrow niches to reach out through the entire web
• Encourage user participation because users add value
• Facilitate cooperation rather than control
I recently attended a presentation sponsored by IBM that illustrated the use of social software in a corporate community. The employee directory features employee photographs, locations, contact information, job descriptions, interests, and pertinent information that the employee wishes to disclose. Employees in far-flung locations can work together in groups by uploading and sharing information or can join non work-related special interest online communities.
There is no doubt that Web 2.0 has changed the way that we live, work, shop, entertain ourselves, obtain information, and acquire new friends. And the power of Web 2.0 is that it enables all of us to leave our footprints on the Internet.
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