Building and using business blogs has become a standard for many online marketers in terms of marketing on the internet. However with the growth in popularity of online social sites many have begun using these communities as their primary marketing platforms.

In particular Twitter is being touted as a site that can supply all your business needs concerning marketing and traffic generation.

Does this mean blogging sites are now endangered in terms of their ‘leading’ role in web 2.0 online marketing? Actually this would hardly seem the case and here are 5 very strong reasons why.

Self-Hosted Blogs

Most blogs are self hosted meaning you own the site and the content and are therefore in total control. Online social sites have rule and regulations set forth by the site administrator governing behavior.

The ability to ‘personalize’ your space on a social network site is non-existent therefore ‘branding’ yourself is very difficult. You can not build a solid foundation to an online business on a site where you have no control.

Blogs Gain Authority

Comments or content you share at a social site are not displayed for very long thereby they will have no long lasting affect. On a blogging site every post, comment or useful information is always available for viewing and tends to build up the authority of the site itself.

The more content posted the more authority the blog will gain. This is a great foundation for building credibility and a business.

Symbol of Commitment

A blog is a symbol of commitment since it takes effort to maintain the site. Commitment is exactly what people look for in businesses since it is a sign of reliability. This leads to an increase in trust which is a vital asset to have when marketing on the internet. Online social sites require only that you ‘show up’ and chat a little thereby demonstrating very little effort or commitment.

The Strength is in the Link

Socialization communities normally link to blogs as opposed to the other way around. That kind of says it all right there since it seems these communities need to ‘defer’ to blogs as a source of reliable and useful content. This does not bode well however for the credibility of social network sites!

Analytics

Blogging sites have analytic capabilities allowing then to function more fully as a business platforms. These capabilities allow the site to improve and grow and are a necessary tool for anyone serious about building a lasting business.

Business blogs have become the adopted standard for online marketers due to their flexibility, ease of use and ability to interact with customers. Recent trends however indicate an increasing acceptance/reliance upon using certain online social sites such as Twitter as free standing marketing platforms.

These social communities offer the same attraction that blogging sites do in terms of interaction and ease of use but comparisons stop there. The ability of social sites to help people ‘build’ a business when marketing on the internet is in question.

The 5 reasons mentioned above as to why blogging sites are not likely to fall from favor as online marketing platforms merely fortifies their dominance. While many social network platforms such as Twitter are great traffic sources they do not offer a solid platform upon which to build a long lasting business.

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About the Author:
TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina. To learn more about the effectiveness of business blogs as marketing platforms and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques simply visit:http://blogbrawn.com/
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So you have set up your micro niche blog with an exact match domain for maximum Google love and have been lucky enough to get onto the first page of Google..or have worked really hard to get it onto the first two pages.

But there is a problem.

That keyword that you targetted is simply not delivering the traffic you expected and your site is not generating the visitors or income you expected.This happens a lot and is one of the drawbacks of micro niche blogs..sometimes the keyword numbers that you have based your site around simply don’t deliver the traffic that you expected from the numbers in the Google keyword tool.

This is why putting all your eggs in one basket is a problematic strategy and why you will want to transition this site to an authority site with lots of content.This type of site is not dependent on one keyword;rather it is capable of ranking for many different keywords and consequently will provide better returns in the long run.

The key to success with blogs or websites is keyword research and it is easier to rank,initially anyway,for a whole range of less competitive keywords than one hotly targetted phrase or word.

Your keyword research should target long tail keywords initially because you will gain momentum almost immediately and the way to do this is through proper keyword research. To do this you need to generate a large list of keywords and for each and every post on your site you should be targetting at least three keywords, not one.If you repeat this process stringently for every piece of content you have tripled the chances of ranking and winning traffic for each piece of content on your site.

And you will exponentially increase the potential traffic numbers rather than the disappointing situation of ranking really well for one keyword and then discovering that it really was not worth it.

Your keyword research needs to involve more than a cursory glance at the Google keyword tool and a check that the exact match domain is available. A product like Wordtracker will do the trick because it will generate huge lists of keywords and not just exact keywords but related keywords too.

This is vital to the proper setting up of your site with a widely spread range of long tailed keywords which will see you increasing your traffic exponentially.Related keywords are critical to your keyword research and any piece of content about, for example, education should also include keywords like “schooling”, “college”,”education grants” etc.

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About the Author:
Check out the EZGO golf cart and ezgo golf cart accessories at http://ezgogolfcartaccessories.com
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A blog, believe it or not, when properly prepared creates content, and quite often is put very fast in the top ten of Google. Why it is so, try reading the following contribution to enlighten yourself:

A blog of domestic implements from a few features, allow search engines to crawl the content very quickly. The result was the fastest I have ever witnessed, added a new post within 20 seconds (including the top 10 ranking) for relevant phrases. How can this come about?

BlogPing

BlogPing is a protocol that implements any popular blog system. It serves primarily two things:

1. Blogs to notify each other (They were linked)

2. Notify search engines (Google Hello, I have published a new page)

Especially with the integration of Google Sitemaps that go on WordPress with a click of the hand, you need a search engine’s new content page to look once more. Sitemap opens directly to crawl a new page.

High degree of optimization of the source code

In WordPress usually retains very accurate web standards. A title is reported only as such. The same is true with other HTML tags. The quality of the templates is such, that the code can almost always run easily to W3 validation process. This also simplifies the search engines crawling a site.

A clean URL structure

WordPress provides the possibility of a rational use of URL structure. This is also helpful.

Performance

In conclusion, you don’t have to worry about the performance website. Because WordPress is indeed far from being resource-saving, it also provides a plugin called wp-super-cache.

Good internal linking

A blog encourages even the structural reasons to link an already written word. This is partially automatically handled by features such as tag clouds and the category classification of the contributions.

Latest content

Many blogs are designed to publish updated information. This is also one of the reasons for the short-term transport in the top ten. It is because blogs often contain the latest information about a topic. This also fits with the current real-time strategy Google uses. One carried a no-name content that is thought to be of high quality and watched the development of the link as the residence times, etc.

Another point concerning the timeliness is: A blog is posting updates itself. This is done firstly through features such as tag clouds or looking for constant movement on the sides. Another way is by comments that are received every now and then.

Blog instead of conventional web pages?

I am always wondering if it is best to ask a blog instead of a static Web site. The answer is clear: Why not? WordPress is ultimately nothing more than a content management system. Of course, it can create quite conventional looking pages. One thing is certain: Blog contents are not mainly preferred, because they are thought to be blog content. They are preferred because WordPress is so well optimized, and can be optimized by plug-ins.

Find the best premium WordPress themes for your WordPress powered blogs from the large collection of themes at ThemesAndMods.com

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/advantages-of-blogging-wordpress-blogging-1683945.html

Image via Wikipedia

by Kathleen Gresham

When you say WordPress, people automatically think of blogging. WordPress is the blog engine supreme. It is free, easy to install and easy to customize.

Thinking of WordPress as just a blog engine, though, seriously limits your options. That would be a shame, because WordPress offers so many options.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS). It can keep track of multiple authors and their privileges, provide a place to store documents and allow users to download them, keep track of document revisions and allow you to compare them and reinstate earlier versions—and so much more.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with WordPress. And most options are freely downloadable somewhere on line at no charge.

1. Web Sites

WordPress allows you to build a static web site much faster than any website builder software. Especially if you are not a wizard with that particular sitebuilder. That is, unless you are a super whiz with, say, DreamWeaver, you probably cannot match the speed—and certainly not the ease—with which you can set up a web site with WordPress.

Nowadays there are some great themes with dropdown menus that look like high-quality web site templates and can be easily customized.

Not only that, the search engine optimization benefits of a WordPress site versus a conventional HTML web site are tremendous. There are so many blog networks and SEO plugins and other tools that you can use to promote a WordPress site that are simply not available for HTML web sites.

2. Forums

There are several free plugins that allow you to easily set up a discussion forum, using WordPress. You can use that forum to make money from advertising, offer support for the products or services sold by your company (on line or off line), meet like-minded people, and so much more.

3. Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make residual income. You can charge a fee for joining, for example for a niche membership site, and/or charge a monthly membership fee. Internet marketers often use a membership site to post their products for purchasers to download, to offer affiliate marketing tools and status reports to their affiliates, and to offer support for their products.

Others simply charge a membership fee for members to get access to a host of free downloadable ebooks, software, or other original content in a particular niche.

4. Article Directories and Link Directories

Article marketing is a staple of online marketing, and articles sites have many purposes. If your article site becomes popular, you can make good advertising revenue. If not, you still have a good place to post original or PLR articles with links to your main blog or web site.

You can download free themes and plugins to build an article directory with WordPress. Or  you can build yourself a link directory with other free WordPress themes and/or plugins. You could, for example, add a links page from your main blog to all your other sites.

5. Blogs

Yes, of course, WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible blog engine for self-hosted blogs. The very popularity of WordPress means there are thousands of theme designers and plugin makers constantly providing excellent new free or paid products to add value to WordPress blogs.

6. Combination Sites

Lately I have been making combination website-blogs for offline and online businesses. That is easy to do with WordPress.

For example, see the site designed for Temples Gate, a charming metaphysical gift shop in Houston, Texas. The old site was unfindable on Google for any related keyword or phrase.

The new WordPress-based site rose to Google PR2 in just a few months. It gets traffic via Google searches from all over world.

The site continues to grow as we add more pages, posts, and photos. Google loves sites that steadily grow. And site visitors like to see new and different photos and text whenever they visit the site.

The embedded blog fits seamlessly into the web site, and the site is linked to a Google Calendar so that the store owner can easily add and update the classes, workshops, and other events held at the store.

We will soon add a shopping cart to encourage online purchases. WordPress makes it easy to do that, and several of shopping cart plugins are free. We are still comparing features and usability on a separate test site.

Flexibility and Free Tutorials

Some of the same features can be found on Joomla and Drupal, but nothing beats WordPress for design flexibility and the huge array of plugins, widgets and other accessories available to easily customize it. Also, there is so much free training available for WordPress. WordPress video courses abound, and many of them are free.

So think outside the box when deciding how to build your next site, whether for personal use, to enhance your offline business or for ecommerce. Consider using WordPress even if you are not building a blog. Your imagination is just about the only limit to what you can do with it.

Adding Extra Value to Your Blog

And consider all the options that the WordPress community offers for adding value to your blog. Even if a blog is your main goal, WordPress allows you to add a forum for your reader community or a paid membership area.

If you want to do business on line, WordPress is a great tool for that, too. The sky is just about the limit when it comes to WordPress.

Select Your Hosting Service Carefully

If you intend to build a business in online retail sales, however, make sure you have a good ecommerce web hosting service. Make sure  you use a service that fully supports whatever it is that you are trying to do.

My first hosting was horrible. We could not even get a simple WordPress blog to work properly on their service, and it was a nightmare. So look for quality, not just price, in selecting a hosting service, even if you are not currently planning to get into ecommerce.

What cool things do you do with WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Kathleen Gresham designs, writes, and promotes blogs and websites and consults on search engine optimization (SEO) and directory listings for online and off line businesses in Houston, TX. For more information, see Houston Blog Web and Web Fresh Leads.