Making Use of Blogs

Blogs (short for web logs) are primarily an online conversation medium. Blogs can be anything — from people’s personal journals, in which they talk about their day, their trip to the hair salon, and the rude guy who cut them off on the way to the grocery store, to media and corporate blogs that describe new products and services. Blogs cover entertainment, politics, fashion, lifestyles, and technology. If you name it, you can probably find somebody out there blogging about it. Although the exact recommendations for a blog will vary by industry, blogs should be updated daily, or at least a few times per week.

One way to use blogs is to set up a blog on your own web site. A blog can increase the amount of content (the text and media offered) on your site that relates to your subject matter because an actively used blog site builds content rapidly. A blog also helps you by improving user engagement on your site and strengthening your customer service: Blogs provide a place for you to hear from your users and to interact with them. (For more information on setting up a blog, see Book X, Chapter 2.) In general, blogs take a lot of attention and time, and although they get links very quickly, they lose those links just as fast. Blogs, like all social media links, are high-maintenance and require consistent care.