From Simple Communications to Blogging as a Business
The invention of the printing press didn’t start the advertising game. It just made it quicker and easier to find and inform business clients. And technology rolled on. Moving steadily from telegraph, telephone, fax machine, direct mail marketing, right up to today’s internet. And all along the way entrepreneurs’ took advantage of the changes to engage in their business endeavors. And nothing has changed. Take for instance, the ever popular blogging phenomenon and changing it from a home spun communications medium to a business promotion wonderland. Early on it was know as the poor man’s website.
Blogs started out being a place where the common person had somewhere to express themselves. A place to open up their diary’s and let the whole world know their hereto before private thoughts, their opinions, and even their political views. These online diaries were interesting to the reader, even thought it appeared to be a quagmire of unprofitable information.
While the blog wasn’t initially made popular for financial gain, they have achieved phenomenal growth. In fact, according to Worldometers (as of March 2015) there are approximately 1.13 million blog posts a day. It is no wonder the Blog was destined to become a retail marketing medium.
One of the advantages of blogs for business is that it’s easy to access and use, and in many cases cost-free if you use a blog platform like blogger and wordpress.com. Because blogs are user-friendly and easy to customize, it’s also a cost-effective tool for the internet marketer. Even if you choose to invest in creating a professional-looking blog and hosting it through a paid hosting service such as Bluehost, it still generally costs less than $10 a month.
Many companies use their blog to promote their retail website. For example, let’s say you have a website that sells sports tennis shoes. So now you create a blog called, ” Freddie the Sneaker Tweaker;” a site where people come to read Freddie’s latest critique or praise about different sneaker brands being sold on the internet. In the content of the article there just happens to be a URL for your sports tennis shoe website clearly visible on the blogs review page, directing readers (traffic) to the retail website selling the sneaker.
The best business blogs are still those operated by people who began them by sharing something they had passion for. That passion for the product or information continues to garner interest from people seeking meaningful information. Not to mention the search-engines love them (that’s a post for another time). These blogs have created sought-after industry experts, well-known authors and even online celebrities.
It looks like the blog is here to stay.