A Brief Introduction to Blogging

Most of us are obliviously familiar with blog, podcasts vodcasts but still there are a lot of people who are not familiar with these terms. I would like to give a brief introduction about these terms to my readers before I get started with the ways of getting benifits out of it as a marketer or an entrepreneur.

According to Meeker, Pitz and Fitzgerald (2006), ‘the word “blog” is an abbreviation of “Web log.” A blog is a Web site where users can post their thoughts, typically about specific topics. New postings are at the top, while old postings appear below. Users can set up free blogs at sites like Blogger.com (owned by Google), MovableType.com, and TypePad.com’. Whereas Weber(2007), explains that blogs are online journals where people can post ideas, images, and links to other web pages or sites. It allows non-technical people to post information about their life, hobbies, politics, believes, business, interest etc. it is frequently updated and links to articles posted on other websites too. It is a place where visitors actually give comments on one’s blogs too.

Since 2003 the growth of blogs gets doubled every six months according to Technorati from March, 2003 till March, 2007 over 70 million weblogs were tracked and almost 120k blogs are being created everyday.

Now a days after understanding the power of blogs and blogging, even organizations started use of it in their businesses. As according to Sifry (2006), the number of personal and organizational blogs has increased dramatically in recent years, e.g. General Motor has a website for their corporate blogs. “Blogs allows people to have conversation and give rapid feedback not only on the same blog but also in other blogs. Newspaper and journals are not able to print the comments from the readers rapidly and reply instantaneously” (Mercado 2006). According to Leonsis (2007), “empowering a generation to believe that what they have to say, what they see with their own eyes, how they interpret that, is very, very important”. ‘“Information needs to be free” said by a distant education librarian named Meredith in her blog at Norwich University’ Katherine Holvoet (2006). Through blogs, bloggers got the ability to associate anywhere everywhere throughout the world. Blog combines the functions of an editor and author.

The new blogs mostly can be found through the links in comments, as well the benefit of commenting is to generate back links to your own blogs.

“Most blog platforms will propose an auto-ping option. Ping is when our blog sends a mail to feed providers to alert them about our new post. With this option enabled, our blog platform will alert blog services, like Technorati or Google blog search, to send a spider to our blog so they can update their content and link to us. A useful service for pinging is Ping-O-Matic (www.pingomatic.com), a service that pings freely to other blog services” (Gyger, 2007). Blogs are in text form, containing the company or product’s name and that makes search engines easy to index.

Blogs are updated frequently and search engines put those websites on top ranking, which are recently updated. This gives a chance to the company to bring their websites on top rankings so that their customers can easily find them. Blogs are cheap and even free to create it does not requires any installation of software for producing it. Producing a blog does not require to be specialist in computer skills as well the content can be disseminated as well as updated very easily and the readers will be sent an instantaneous alert of update through RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

From marketer’s point of view, blogs are one of the good ways of marketing. As always blogs are linked to some other blogs, (the more blogs are linked to a blog, the higher the page rank will be). The cream of the crop in blogosphere (Blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections), Wikipedia, when writes regarding the products or services, they produce large amount of visitors. It is good for marketers as the visitors read the blogs about the products and leaves their comments about it, which is marketing for them as well as sort of feedbacks. For the consumers it is good in the way that the other consumers share their experiences about the usage of the product.