Use Your Blog as a Business Website

Posted In: Blogging And Forums . By dens

By: Suneva Lightfoot

A weblog is an online journal or diary. Part of the attraction to blogs from the beginning was that they supported a sense of community on the Internet. Weblogs are focused on a particular interest such as photography or kite making. The difference between a blog and a regular website is the interaction between the reader and the author of the blog: on most of these websites when you read a blog you have the opportunity to post a comment about what the author has written.

But lately blogs have become a source of income for many through the use of advertising. Google introduced Ad Sense and it became extremely popular because it’s a text form of advertising instead of a graphic image. Now the focus is on how to “monetize” blogs even further making them a genuine vehicle for business profits instead of just personal opinions.

This shift has caused a great deal of controversy and the truth of the matter is the process of making money from your blog is not as simple as it appears. Although there are many people who will tell you differently, a truly successful blog doesn’t happen overnight. And it won’t happen at all if you are not involved in the process; you don’t have to be a techno-genius, you can hire someone to do the programming, but you must have an understanding of the purpose of it and how a blog function.

There are several key elements that must work together harmoniously in order for your blog to generate income:

• blog publishing software
• HTML/CSS
• social bookmarking
• blog comments
• RSS/syndication
• feed aggregators
• trackbacks
• search engines and optimization techniques
• page rank
• contextual advertising
• affiliate programs
• webserver statistics
• email
• tagging
• pings

If this is new information for you and you have just fallen off your chair, brace yourself because there is more. This is a partial list of the web technologies and techniques you need to become familiar with in order to truly monetize your blog. A "Truly Monetized" blog means a monthly check for $3,000.00 instead of $30.00. The items listed here also represent some of the basic factors in Web 2.0: an Internet environment that is highly interactive, community oriented and extremely user-friendly.

Internet technology is constantly moving forward: now that it has become an accepted vehicle for businesses the focus has shifted to developing communities and personal interactions between these communities. The days of the static website are numbered; search engines must navigate through over 100 million websites in their task of creating the index for their directories. Websites that do not refresh their content on a regular basis will find themselves sinking in the search engine results listings and will eventually be excluded. The format of a blog is built around adding content on a regular basis: this is what makes a blog as a business website so versatile and lucrative.

The prominence of weblogs is partially due to the daily addition of new content which causes the search engines to return to the site and index them again. You can make money using a blog and the techniques that link it to the network of individuals who are interested in what you have to say, your product offerings or the services you provide.

But this process will not be a walk in the park: it takes determination and a high level of effort to monetize your blog successfully. The good news is that it is already being done. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here; find a blog that is successful and study the methods that were used to achieve that success. Learn your business in detail and then research which of those methods will work best for you.