What is blogging?

A blog is a self-published web journal that is updated frequently—usually daily or weekly.  Blogs started popping up in the late 1990’s when it became easier for people to create and maintain web sites on their own, without for specialized technical help. These early adopters started publishing these personal “web logs” as a way to share news and information with their friends, and blogging took off.

It wasn’t until the 2004 elections that blogs gained credibility and became recognized as an influential media outlet. Ever since businesses and other organizations have made blogging a key part of their overall marketing and business strategy. Blogs are a great way to extend brand awareness and influence, and they also make it easy to interact with customers and prospects. Blogs also help improve organic search results, which is a key part of an integrated marketing campaign.

Create a plan—and stick to it

These days, blogs are ridiculously easy to update, maintain, and syndicate. This is also the problem – although they are easy to start, maintaining them so they stay current takes work. To keep your blog relevant, you need to make blogging a priority in your organization. Create a content team, develop an editorial calendar, determine how frequently you can publish your content, and stick to it.

Make your blog the center of your social media and promotional strategies

Once you’ve established a rhythm and your blog is up and running, it’s time to really promote your blog’s content using social media. To be successful, your blog and social media sites should work together in a “hub and spoke” model. Your blog is the “hub:” the place where you’ll publish a wide variety of content on a regular basis. You’ll link your blog to social media sites that will serve as the “spokes” that will push out your content to specific audiences. And because these applications send out your content in a search engine-friendly manner, your content won’t be seen as spam, and you’ll boost your search engine optimization efforts.

There are other ways to promote your content. One of the simplest ways to get your content to your audience is to create a listserve, a program that automatically emails new posts to your blog’s subscriber base. Another great way to promote content is via RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication), which is a family of web feed formats that distribute frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news, podcasts, and videos, to a wider subscriber base. And getting your customers to write their own posts about your products –hopefully in a positive light—can be very powerful. That kind of exposure can help you reach new audiences and change your business overnight.