Saturday, May 12, 2007

The Allure of the Blog: Blogging as a Marketing Tool


Blogging is actually a quite easy to use marketing tool. Surely you’ve heard the term “blog” being kicked around lately. But what exactly is a blog, and why would anyone create one? Blogging allows you to create and maintain a brand, it will assist you in maintaining a high-search engine ranking, and they are easy to modify and add content to regularly, thus keeping things fresh.

A blog (which is short for Web log), can stand in place of a standard website in many cases, and the reasons for creating a blog instead of a website are many. First, creating a blog is comparatively easier than creating a website. Building a typical website involves a large amount of upfront effort and time to design the template, create compelling articles, designing a user-friendly, navigable site, ensuring search-engine optimization, etc.

A blog, on the other hand, requires a short set up of about thirty minutes for the average user. And adding information to it is just a matter of typing away – no links necessary. The content on a blog doesn’t have to consist of lengthy articles, either. In fact, a blog is designed to accommodate the kind of content that is off the cuff: short snippets of information, the kind that would have the subject line “Just FYI” if they were in the form of an email.