Is Blogging Really Worth It ?

Is blogging really worth your time and effort ?

Well we say yes, absolutely.

You see the internet is an information goldmine. In the early days before ecommerce really took off people were searching for information. The questions people posed were to answer something that they had an issue about or a problem they needed solving. It was great.

Really the same holds true today but most sites don’t actually just provide free information about their subject because everyone is trying to monetarise what they are doing and turning their thoughts into profits - and this is no bad thing because after all, most of us are in this world to have a happy life and in order to do that you need income.

But how does blogging help your business ?

If you go back to the initial thoughts about people looking on the internet for information then a blog is the perfect way to get your ideas and experience onto the internet. If you add articles onto your blog every week you will start to get regular readers who come back time and again. A blog of course was an online diary but the blogging software that is around today are really simple to use content management systems (CMS) and we use Wordpress which is probably the easiest to use and easiest to change for what you want to see on your website.

Additionally many companies make it easy to get your site indexed in the search engines and for people to sign up and receive email updates. You don’t need to know much about anything to start.

Then back to the information. Most pages online are pretty short and don’t go into much depth about anything. Generally you’ll find something about the issue you are looking for but it doesn’t quite cover it all. Then you have to go back to the search engine results and find another site that covers the other 20% of what you need or even go to another 3 or 4 sites to find the answers.

So if you found a site that answered everything on one page wouldn’t that be the best ? And that’s where you come in. Everyone in the world is an expert in something. Whether that is home cooking, managing children, running a business, being an expert chess player or whatever, you have something to say that other people want to hear. Don’t think that you know nothing. Even if you are unemployed and heavily in debt you have a story to tell on how you are managing your life and how you are getting out of debt.

So that summarises what you can write about and that’s the easy part. When you write just write as you would discuss your topic with your friends or other people in the street — and don’t be too afraid just to write what you believe and how it affects you as these are the best articles.

To set up you need your own domain and some hosting. These are straight forward. Then once you have these just go to Wordpress and set up your blog. The basic template is , well, basis but there are loads of free templates you can download to make you blog a bit fancy.

Once you get going you need to tell people about your blog. Use the “blog and ping” strategy. Go to a website called pingoat - what this site does it effectively announce to loads of online resources that you have posted an article on your site. These get syndicated and you will eventually end up in the search engine results.

This strategy will not be an overnight success, but if you carry on writing you will soon see visitors come to your site from many places. And once you have some visitors you will get more as other sites and blogs will start to link to your site and the snowball begins.

As you write and become more successful it’s time to think about generating some income. But as we said above be patient. It’s best to get visitors coming to your site and then begin to generate income.

You can generate income from many sources including, but not limited to:

• google adsense
• selling text links
• banner ads

And you should experiment with all forms of advertising.

If you run a business and have 30 minutes spare a day (or someone in your organisation has) then start blogging today - because it really can be worth that short amount of time to get your story out in the internet world and earn some cash from it as well.