When you research most of the options available for promoting your business, it’s clear that the world wide web offers many attractive benefits and possibilities for businesses to not only create greater exposure for their products and services, but also to leverage the business owner’s time and effort.

The problem is that many business owners just don’t know how to utilize this medium to its full advantage. Many settle for putting up a website that is often no more useful than a static online brochure and then just hoping that it will work for them.

There is a smarter, cheaper, better, easier and faster solution. It’s called a business blog.

Some of the immediate advantages a blog offers businesses over traditional, static web sites, are a smarter content publishing and management platform, more direct involvement with their customers, built-in capabilities like RSS feeds and search engine notification, and greater control and flexibility over the way content is managed.

Plus, it is much easier to promote and grow your business online using a blog, than it is using a website if you know how. Not to mention the fact that your promotional efforts can have a longer lifetime and give you greater exposure than traditional advertising media like newspaper or radio ads. (In fact, you can combine these, for example, making your current promotion be the home page of your blog, then sending radio or print ad visitors to your blog.)

What’s the difference between a business blog and a business website?

You can make a business blog look and feel exactly like a website – in fact, many of the sites you are visiting right now are probably powered by blogging platforms like WordPress, instead of popular web design HTML applications like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. A significant difference, is that you don’t need to know web site coding language like HTML to run a business blog, or add and modify content on your site. You simply add content and publish. This makes business blogs a perfect online marketing tool for business owners.

Another important difference is that blogs allow you to have “conversations” and build interactive relationships with other people, where regular web sites tend to be more of a “one-way” vehicle for presenting information to visitors.

What if you already have a web site?

If you currently have a website that requires you to contact your web developer, web designer, web master or an IT savvy friend, nephew, niece or neighbor every time you want to make a change to your site, then you definitely need to consider adding a blog to your site. Simply install the blog in a subdirectory of your domain (e.g. yourdomain.com/blog), then promote your business using the blog and link your posts back to your site for more information about your products or services, to purchase, etc …

If you don’t have a website yet, then save yourself money on costly web development and a lot of hassle and just use a blog. With a blog, you can easily promote your business by adding regular posts and articles about a variety of different topics.

Here are just some ideas for topics you can write about your business, then post on your business blog:

• Product recalls
• Customer service information (e.g. how to ship product back, refund policies, etc.)
• News about your own business
• Product training information
• News about your suppliers
• Product / Service tips (how to spot quality, how to avoid paying too much or being ripped off, etc ..)
• Links to useful resources and information
• New things coming soon to your business
• FAQs
• Profiling customers
• Product service reviews and comparisons
• Product / Service benefits

As you can see, there’s no shortage of information to write about when it comes to promoting your business.

Now … just getting a blog up and running is not really going to help you. You need to know how to configure it properly if you want to achieve the best results with the least effort.

Fortunately, there is a great resource I recommend you check out if you are interested in knowing more about the benefits and advantages of using a business blog to help you promote your business and sell your products and services smarter. A company called SelfPublishWeb.com offers two ways to help you set up a blog for your business that will not only get your site pages quickly indexed in Google and other major search engines (usually in as little as 2-3 days), but they show you how to fully configure it so that it becomes a powerful marketing tool for your business, with many automated built-in promotional features that you don’t even need to think about.

You simply write about your business and the automated system running silently in the background goes to work for you.

SelfPublishWeb.com offers two options: They can fully install, set up and configure your business site / business blog for you and you’re then ready to go in as little as 4-5 working days, or, if you want to save several hundred dollars, you can purchase their complete ’step-by-step’ DIY video training tutorials package, which is done in a completely non-technical way so that anyone with basic computer skills (like the ability to cut and paste) can just watch over their shoulder and follow along as they show you how to get your own business blog up and running in 2 days or less.

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Mobile blogging is an exciting phenomenon that is sweeping the blogosphere. One of the reasons why lots of bloggers are attracted to the medium of blogging in the first place is that they like being able to make regular updates and posts that keep all of their visitors up to speed with present situations. Mobile blogs, or “moblogs,” take this to the extreme by allowing users to post things literally as they happen. It will be useful for you to find out that this modern wave of moblogs and mobloggers keep web surfers up to date with good and bad events of significance as they occur all over the world, helping to make global communication faster and more accurate.

Lots of persons feel that the limitations of blogging have a lot to do with geography. After all, there is only so current that a blog can be when you need to run home and boot up in order to update it. But, mobile blogging marks the beginning of a thrilling original time when web-based communication can happen spontaneously from any place. The point is that moblogging devices mean that there is almost nowhere on the planet that remains off-limits for bloggers.

It goes without saying that mobile blogging is still in its infancy since the technology that makes it possible has only lately hit the universal market. The first moblog technology became accessible over a decade ago, but it is only the past two or three years that mobile web devices have become user-friendly sufficient to appeal to most consumers. As camera phones and other mobile technology become more trendy, more and more bloggers are getting away from their desks and are hitting the streets. Moblogging is becoming much more widespread that it was even a few months ago, and mobloggers are rapidly attracting a lot of attention with the blogging community. It is not yet obvious whether moblogs will become the dominant kinds of blogs in the years to come, but the current trend seems to imply that moblogs are here to stay.

It should be also pointed out that mobile devices make it possible to blog from the sites where present events are unfolding, which is one of the reasons why mobile blogging has so much exciting potential to revolutionize the blogosphere. A moblogger with a camera phone can post blog entries from, say, the foot of the podium at a presidential speech, or from the stands during the last moments of the world series. This enables bloggers to experience the same real time thrills that live TV coverage provides, but in a more democratic medium. The combination of mobility and individual control that moblogging provides certainly places mobloggers on the cutting edge of today’s communications technology, and it is hard to imagine that the number and prestige of moblogs will not continue to grow in the coming years.

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Active Rain is a great place to blog for free. It was created with the real estate agent in mind. Giving us a place to build an online community. I have learned a lot from talking to the agents on Active Rain, reading their blogs and trying their ideas.
Active Rain carries a lot of authority with Google and the search engines so when you post something on Active Rain it gets crawled very quickly. I have even seen my posts appear in the search engines in as little as 15 minutes. Google just loves Active Rain.
I would not make this my main blog however, I would have a separate blog that I have control over and leverage the power of Active Rain. If I want to talk about something that is specific to the industry of real estate that agents would be interested in but not buyers and sellers then I post on Active Rain. If I am blogging about something that buyers and sellers are going to be interested in then I write the main blog post on my own blog and then go over to Active Rain. I write a teaser post on the Active Rain blog and link back to my own blog.
This does a couple of things. First, since Google loves Active Rain it will get crawled almost immediately so your teaser post will show up in the search engines very fast. Second, it will give you a very good back link to your own blog.
The free services are great but always keep in the back of your mind they can change the rules whenever they want. Don’t spend months and years building up a blog somewhere that you do not have control over. If they decided to start charging all of a sudden and the price point was out of your budget or they sell the company and the service goes down the tubes your online business goes with it. You just can’t afford to take that chance. Your main blog should always be something you host on a hosting service you choose and have total control of. If you don’t do this you are risking your real estate business.
Here is the link:
http://realestateagentsurvivalkit.com/recommends/activerain.html

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