Blogging: Not Just for Teenagers Anymore! How Your Small Business Can Profit From the New Blogging Craze

For quite a long time I discounted blogging as something that was either for teenagers, journalists or people with just too much time on their hands! And like any other technology, when blogging first became popular, it was pretty much the domain of those groups I just mentioned.

But like everything else in the technological world, blogging is coming of age – and there are some tremendous benefits that small business owners and managers should be taking advantage of!

How many times have you heard the words blog or web log - or how about online diary? If you have been active online for the past few years, you’ve probably heard it thousands of times.

What you might not realize is that blogging is not only one of the fastest and easiest ways to get indexed in search engines but it is also a huge source of income that is just waiting for you to grab your share.

Blogging has actually been around for quite a while but only up until the past few years have online as well as offline marketers, become aware of how powerful this medium is.

You can find plenty of free to very inexpensive places to start a blog. A few of the top rated blog hosting services are Blogger, which is owned by Google, Wordpress and Moveable Type.

Now, what kind of advocate would I be without my very own blog? I started my blog using Blogger, which is a very easy tool to use. You can see what I’m talking about by visiting my blog at: http://smallbusinessmavericks.blogspot.com/.

The easiest to get started and set up would have to be Blogger.com, since they are not only free, but they have a very simple step by step process for creating your blog. Blogger is somewhat more limited in features than some of the other services available, but it is a wonderful way to get started – and best of all, it’s free!

The most common ways that most Internet marketers are making a profit from blogs is by integrating Google Adsense into their blog. This is very simple to do and Blogger makes it even easier for you. You can also insert many other contextual advertisements into the blog such as Yahoo, Kanoodle, Chitika and many others as well as any other affiliate links you may have.

The other benefit to blogging is also the ability to add back links to your blog that point to your other websites. This is very important since the more back links that you have coming inbound to your websites, the better you will rank for the keywords you are promoting. You will also have to setup the proper keyword anchor links in your blog and on the pages of your websites that the links are pointing to.

Let's look at a summary of what needs to be done in order to take advantage of blogging:

First, you need to setup a blog either at Blogger (easy to do) or one of the other online services mentioned (a little harder) earlier or create a blog on your own domain name & web hosting account (not for blogging novices!).

Once you have your blog setup, it's time to start monetizing it by adding in contextual advertising such as Google Adsense and / or affiliate links. Now add in some targeted keyword anchor links that point back to your small business website.

All you have to do now is post to your blog a couple times per week and make sure that you are pinging after you make your new post. Sending out a ping is a way to let the search engines know that you have new content on your blog. The search engines will come to crawl your blog and start indexing your new content and follow all those targeted links that point back to your other websites. Are you starting to see how powerful this is?

A couple of services for Pinging are Pingomatic.com and Feedburner.com – both free and very easy to use.

Now just keep posting to your blogs and if you keep up with it and continue to add new content on a regular basis, you'll start reaping the rewards of blogging in no time. I’ve already noticed that when I post to my blog, the search engines pick it up within 30 minutes (I can tell because I have set Google Alerts to notify me whenever they find new content). Pretty good service, particularly since it’s all free!

Go visit my blog and let me know what you think of it! http://smallbusinessmavericks.blogspot.com/

Become a Maverick today!