Everybody is raving on about blogs, it seems everyone has one, and it seems that everyone is telling you that if you want to get on in Internet Marketing you need one too!!

But what exactly is this Blogging Thing?

OK well like everything else, theres the Long answer, the short answer, and Martins Answer(often quite similar to the long answer, only, well, better:-) )

Blogging, Like MOST of the other New Trends, isnt actually new at all. Blogging has actually been around for quite some years now, I would probably say its Infancy was pre-2000 if I really wanted to push it back.

A Blog, or Weblog, is qute simply an Online Journal or diary.

BUT, thats not what people nowadays mean, when people talk to you about blog and blogging, they are really talking about using this blogging software to run your sites.

The Simplicity and design of the software enables even the most technically challenged to add updated fresh content to their webpages, basically if you can type and use Word, you can run a Blog, this in turn is why it is becoming ever so popular, and also why most people do use it for, or at least most people *Were* using Blog and Blog software to run little Personal Diary Blogs.

However, what it really is, is a way to have a regularly updated website related to your business or theme at the push of a button.

Here are the three most popular "blogs" at the time of printing this, they probably will remain like this for a long time, but although these are "Blogs" they are more along the lines of an actual real content website, rather than a personal diary type blog.

# 1
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
67,001 links from 19,265 sites.

# 2
Engadget
65,581 links from 14,884 sites.

# 3
PostSecret
PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.
By frank warren
21,503 links from 12,892 sites.

The MAIN Difference between a blog and a standard website, is the fact that bloggers tend to be more personal, tend to leave more of a personal stamp on their work. Thats why those first two sites above are WAY more popular than if they had just been a standard impersonal website.

DON'T let this blogging craze confuse you, its really not that complex, or infact that different to things you may already be used to, dont worry about this whole "Blog Revolution" thing, it is more of an evolution than a revolution, and the evolution involves websites and online business in general, not blogging on its own, blogging has simply become a tool to enable the following things -

Through blogging software, it has become easier and easier to add fresh orginal content to your website on a regular basis,

Bloggers share information, ideas and thoughts with eachother through reading eachothers blogs and talking about them on their own blogs,

Those are the simple elements of what blogging is.

When you start looking at the software running the blogs, and the functions it has, you can see even more benefits, and why it is much much more than just "a Weblog" I am talking about, I want you to understand that blogging is an ESSENTIAL part of your entire marketing campaign, along with Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and all the other aspects I cover, blogging is essential.

BECAUSE, Not only does your average blogging software enable push button content updates, BUT it also has the ability to do a MULTITUDE of the mundane tasks we have to undertake to build our traffic up to our websites.

Your blogging software can pretty much take care of all your on page search engine optimization AUTOMATICALLY!! All you need to do is post new content!!

Blog softwares can automatically reformat your content into different code types readable by different types of technology, with a little help, your blog could kick out pages viewable in Web Browsers, Palm Pilots, Mobile Phones, and perhaps the best one at the moment is RSS!!

Yes, your blog will easily produce a reformatted version of your webpage that can be syndicated by other sites, read by people directly on their desktops, and much more!!

I do cover a wide range of advanced blogging tactics which I won't go into here as I would be here for TOO Long!!

Quite simply, a blog, is a software to Power your websites, how you decide to use it is up to you, but one thing I WILL STRESS here at the end is that the whole idea behind the fact that blogs are easy to use is to use them well, and update them regularly, to see the full benefit. Its because of this fact, that a good blog should be updated regularly to get the most benefits, that most blogs are really quite a personal type weblog but DON'T let that start to limit your thinking about what you can do with a blog, look again at the top 3 blogs, go to Technorati.com and look at the biggest blogs.

Don't you think, actually, that most of the big blogs look more like a magazine now, rather than a journal or diary?

Remember what I said about evolution and not revolution?

You can use a blog for whatever you want, all I stress, is MAKE SURE you use it, and use it every day(or as often as you possibly can regularly)

Thats it for that, more will come soon, thanks for reading!

Entrepreneurs who blog can reach a new audience by writing in a conversational way and showing the human and personal side of their business, according to William Beutler, senior online analyst for New Media Strategies, a Web 2.0 marketing firm in Arlington, Va.

“Make your industry interesting to people by writing in a conversational manner,” he says. “Give people a glimpse into a world they don’t know.”

Beutler believes new businesses can benefit greatly from blogging. “There’s still an untapped audience in a lot of industries that are just starting to grow,” he says. “You have the potential to establish yourself as an expert in the field just by being the first person to write something interesting about your field.”

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