Introduction to Blogs

Blogs, blogging, bloggers – what does it all mean? Well, blogging is simply the latest, greatest craze on the Internet. Here is an introduction to blogs for your edification.

Introduction to Blogs

What is a blog? For purposes of this introduction, it is simply a narrative written by people with opinions on something. The opinion can range from politics to ramblings on a recent trip to some location. If you consider traditional media, blogs are essentially letters to the editor in the newspaper. In this case, people using the web are the newspaper and there is no editor defining the content written.
Blogs are one of those things that are given far more credit than they really deserve. Yes, you have probably heard of famous blogs and bloggers. They are, however, a small minority of the total blog community. 99.9 percent of blogs are junk and never read by anyone other than the author. In fact, blogs are becoming harder to find than they used to be. The reason has to do with the realization that most of them will never be read so what is the point of spending time on them? From a marketing standpoint, this was not always the case.

When blogs first became popular, search engines treated them like regular sites. Since blogs were updated all the time, search engines actually liked them and ranked them high in the search result for whatever subject the blog was discussing. Once webmasters realized this, everyone and their brother started a blog. This results in a significant problem. The problem, of course, was people searching for a term were not really interested in blogs. If you were searching for widgets, you would often find the first 10 results on the search page were all blogs. It was practically impossible to find a widget! The search engines remedied this in late 2005, but downgrading blogs. In simple terms, they rarely are ranked high in search results.
So, should you blog? Of course! Why? There are two scenarios. The first is the simplest. If you just want to ramble on about something, knock yourself out. There is no harm in doing so since nobody will probably read it. The second reason is more salient. Blogs are an effective way to keep visitors to your site updated. If you have new products coming out, the blog on your site can serve to let people know. It is easier and simpler than building new pages every few days. You can just use your blog program to do it.

The tone of this introduction to blogs may lead you to believe they are worthless. They are not. You can use them on your site to communicate with and update your customers.