Blogging 2010

Blogging

Blogging is sizzling hot right now. It’s so hot that it might even be called a bubble. As an some one intending to earn money online, you need a blog!

Check out this statistic:

At the beginning of 2009, it was estimated (based on Technoratiʼs index) that there were about 133 million blogs online. At the same time, it was estimated that there are around 900,000 blog posts posted PER DAY.

This is 2010, I’m scared to go and check out the current statistic.

Blogging is the wave of the future for Internet marketing. ‘Blog’ is a term that is actually a combination of two common words. Those two common words are ‘web’ and ‘log’. They have been combined into the term ‘blog’ which is short for web log. Everybody wants to be a blogger. People are jumping on this bandwagon all the time.

Blogging is the outcome of the use of the new technology that makes what is known today as Web 2.0. You will see the term “Web 2.0 websites” used frequently but what exactly does that term mean?

Way back in the dark ages of the Internet (less than a decade ago) in 2001, there was an occurrence that restructured the internet landscape referred to as the dot com bust. Experts built websites, promoted them and made millions on speculative ideas that were not founded in reality.

The internet was a one-way boulevard. Web design experts built websites and posted what they wanted their readers to know and nothing more. It was an autocratic setting in a way. Since the Internet was a relatively new thing, people bought into this radio-type communication but only for a short few years.

Billions were made and lost almost overnight. Some blame the dot com bust on nothing more than technological breakthrough. Maybe they are right.

Improvement in technology began to make it easier to build websites and more and more people built websites and hanged on to the Internet marketing bandwagon and they began sending out millions of uncalled-for marketing emails daily. These emails became known as SPAM.

SPAM became such a menace that the U.S. Congress the CAN SPAM act in late 2001 and it was passed into law in early 2002. This marked the final puncture to the already deflating Internet bubble.

Internet marketers became mandated by law to get permission from recipients before they could send out marketing emails and lots of companies couldn’t survive the blow. Those who did began building opt-in lists marking the beginning of single and later, double opt-in lists.

Today, opt-in lists are a big part (maybe the biggest part) of all successful Internet marketing operations that are alive and well today and that need for an opt-in list is not ever going to go away but it has been supplemented.

This tactic of using opt-in lists has been supplemented by blogs. Now bloggers and internet marketers who have blogs can give potential opt-in list members the one thing they all want…a voice of their own.

Blogs are now discussed in the same breath and given equal weight among successful Internet marketers as opt-in lists.

For blogs and opt-in lists, there are no hard and fast rules as you can have one without the other but it is of far greater advantage to have both and a blog is one of the best ways available to build a long and impressive opt-in list.

Over the course of centuries, people have been keeping journals but the Internet version of journal keeping called blogging is by far different. Rather than it being just the details of a personal life or the musings of a single person, blogging is more a source of shared information today – It lets you form your own community.

Successful blogs are dedicated to specific topics or niches. These niches vary as do the people who have blogs.

Let’s make up a fictional blog website and see how it works.

The owner of this travel blog might post the details of trips that they have taken, invite questions but those planning on making similar trips, and provide information about products and services for which they are affiliate marketers.

We all know that blog/website traffic is one of the keys to successful Internet marketing. A secret of creating an astounding amount of traffic to a blog website is social bookmarking and there are many social bookmarking sites to be used for traffic generation on the Internet. These sites allow users to upload their favourites to lists where others can click on the links. Thus, users are able to categorize their lists and create tags for each link within their lists.

Each time another user clicks on a link in a user’s list a back link is created. As the back links multiply, indexing on search engines accelerates.

Internet earners who have built very successful and profitable blogs make use of RSS feeds, podcasts and webcasts – Web 2.0 advancements to enhance and promote their blog websites.

Most blogging software is free but some can be purchased separately at give away rates. When a blog is created by a user there are many choices that must be made. The first and most obvious choice is the niche of the blog. For those who plan to monetize their blog, the choice of topic is very critical.

For those already actively making money on the Internet from a particular niche, the choice is easy but if a newbie is only just beginning to learn how to earn online, the choice of a niche topic can be a lot more difficult.

In depth research is necessary. It is important to choose a market that is viable. You simply will not make money from a topic like “Under-water Fashion Design.”

A good way to research for a viable topic is by visiting other blogs and forums on the Internet. Go to social bookmarking sites like Delicious to find out people are concerned about or topics for which they are seeking information.

Once a topic has been selected the next step is to actually build a blog. If you want to learn about blogging for a while you can build a free blog by signing up with Blogger.com or wordpress.com. There are many web hosting companies out there and many of them offer blogging capabilities. There are even web hosting companies who specialize in blogging websites. I recommend World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com if you are interested in buying a domain name and hosting. You can also use Hostgator.com. The reasons are simple. They are reliable and affordable and they have a reputation to protect.

Besides, I had issues, Hostgator.com’s customer service is exceptionally great too even better than Go Daddy’s

There was a time when only gurus could build websites. It was necessary to be proficient in the use of HTML among many other things but that is simply no longer the case.

Web 2.0 technologies now allow even novices who have never even thought of building their own website to do exactly that and to do it very quickly and very efficiently; in fact a webhost claims to do one-click installation of wordpress blogs.

Of course, there are some things that you need to know but these are things that are very easily learned.

Once a blog or website is up and running, it is important to get the search engine spiders to visit the site so that it can be indexed and appear in searches made on search engine sites. This is the place where social bookmarking comes into play.

There various software out there that make it quite easy to list your site with many social bookmarking sites all at the same time. It can be done quickly and easily.

Owners of blog sites have even learnt to help each other in a sense by pinging one another’s sites and create back links for both sites that are picked up by the search engine spiders.

Many bloggers use RSS feeds, podcasts and webcasts to enhance their blogs. Even though people still read they also like to get information via audio and video.

See my post on Free Internet marketing tool for 2010

The idea that a blog is simply a web log or a journal is a little behind the technology curve. It is so Methuselah. Blogs today are far more than that. Some like Techcrunch.com, Huffingtonpost.com and TMZ.com are even more powerful than a lot of physical media companies. Today’s blogs are rich with information that is constantly changing.

Very many active blogs discuss everything from the mundane to the controversial to the spiritual and everything else in between.  It would not be likely that you could think of a topic that holds any interest for human beings in general and not be able to find more than a few blogs that are currently discussing them.

My advice for any aspiring internet earner is to find a topic that you are interested in…even passionate about….and go out there and just do it.

Do you think blogging is necessary to online business success?

Cheers,

Billy