Because blogs originally started as online journals, many people still believe there is only one type of blog, the personal blog. That belief was overtaken by events long ago. Today, there are many types of blogs and bloggers in the blogging world (or blogosphere).
When you are starting your own blog, it's important to consider what type of blog you desire. This will affect your choice of a blogging service or program and even the content you create.
Personal Blog or Online Journal
This is a blog on which you post your thoughts and opinions for others -- perhaps for the entire world, or maybe just for your friends. You may desire a full-blown blog solution, such as WordPress or Typepad. However, many personal blogging solutions today are inexpensive and easy to start up. You can set up a simple blog on Tumblelog to see how you enjoy blogging. Or, you can add a blog to your individual page on MySpace or Facebook. With Facebook, for example, you can control who can view your blog, and trick it out with many free and fun widgets. Personal bloggers today are moving into blogging on the go from their cellphones using the Twitter "micro-blogging" service.
Blog to Enhance Your Professional Reputation or Business
Blogging is a great way to position yourself as an expert and enhance your professional reputation. If you are blogging for a business, you can raise your business's profile and use blogging as a simple way to communicate with your prospects. You even use a blog as a way to pass along simple customer support information.
For example, Google engineer Matt Cutts operates a well-known blog that gives public insights into Google's services and policies. Yahoo operates a blog (ymailupdates.com/blog/) that gives useful customer service updates.
Business bloggers will want a professional appearance. WordPress (.org) and Typepad are both popular solutions, with many templates available, and many designers who can adapt a template or craft a custom design to give highly customized look. Both of these solutions also include features to enable bloggers to syndicate (i.e., distribute) their content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) data feeds and to write postings to be published later at set time. For extra convenience and speed, both solutions permit blog posting just by sending an email. Typepad is an easy solution to set up, with a very professional look.
Blog for Traffic
Some bloggers desire the internet traffic that a blog can create. Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts believe that blogs are an excellent way to generate web traffic, because frequent blog postings will attract the attention of search engines such as Google and Yahoo, who will spider or crawl the blog often, and give favorable search results positioning to the blog content. One such blogger is Rosalind Gardner, an author and columnist on affiliate marketing, who blogs in order to bring web traffic to her web sites. WordPress.org and Typepad are popular solutions for them, but WordPress.org is the leader because it provides more search engine optimization capabilities.
Blog for Money
Blogging directly for money is the most difficult approach. It requires a large amount of traffic for success. Although smaller bloggers try to get by using Google AdSense alone, many of the most successful bloggers combine several methods of making money on one blog. Noted blogger John Chow uses at least eight methods. Likewise, Darren Rowse, who writes about how to make money by blogging on ProBlogger.net, uses a combination of income sources, including affiliate programs (such as Amazon Associates), private advertising sales, and several -- not just one -- ad networks (including Google AdSense, Chitika and Text-Link-Ads). Consultant and coach Yaro Starak supplements his blogging with traditional email list marketing.
Bloggers for money need robust blogging solutions that can be highly customized and search engine optimized. Many of them use WordPress.org due to its flexibility.
Blog as the Starting Point for an Emerging Media Company
Blogs with the highest levels of traffic are emerging as media companies in their own right. They may have more visitors and readers than traditional mainstream media. BoingBoing and TechCrunch are consistently leaders in Technorati's index of top blogs. Political blogs such as Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Instapundit have large exposure and influence. Nick Denton's Gawker Media has assembled a network of over 10 blogs, including Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker. The emerging media blogs generally rely on a team of bloggers to post several times a day on a single blog, or even several blogs. They also have more sophisticated advertising sales, and are run like true media businesses. It is not too late for new bloggers to start small and hope to grow to this ultra-elite level.
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