You have a profile page, you post bulletins, and even have one or two other sites for your business, organization, service or band…So why do you need to blog?
1)The file structure of the blog network is set up especially well for archiving. Other networks refer to this as a “permalink” which is the actual address of the actual file, not the database assignment for the blog and your personal ID.
2)The format is neater and faster to retrieve – therefore easier to be catalogued by search engines.
3) If you save a copy of the actual file address you can still retrieve the file even if the file is deleted by system administrators from the database, unless they really don’t like you and spend a 4 hours trying to get rid of the file.
4) If you put all your notices in bulletins you have to make special arrangements to get news releases out.
5) RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS Feeds can be collected by anyone who has a feed reader.
6) Almost every Internet Provider has home pages that allow you to add a feed to your normal home page with the rss address you get above the blog.
7) The RSS feed only shows up when there are posts. With a feed reade,r a person can get all the missed feeds from your page in a nice abridged list.
Believe it or not some people refuse to come to myspace, or your other private networks. But, they may love you enough to add a feed to their browser or reader just to keep up with your progress.
9) Every news headline that you read has been sent somewheres by rss. Your local newspapers have the ability to subscribe directly to your out going feeds and have your “Band” or “special interest” group show up as local news.
10) You have the ability to select whether your blog is Public, just for friends, a preferred list, or private diary
11) People on different blog networks usually have a “blog this” button which will copy a protected “quote” from your blog with a linkback or track back url link to your site. That way people would re-post and circulate your newsworthy topics for you.
12) If the only thing you ever change is new information in a bulletin, you have taken away many people’s reason to revisit your page that has those links to your commercial sites. Most people won’t subscribe to your page but, if they know you blog, they would visit your page more often.
13) There are many days that I and the rest of the people here will not want to go through 20 – 100 pages of bulletins to find out what you are doing. By being able to subscribe to your blog, a nice convenient dated list of all subscribed blogs shows up and a little red word “new” is next to any entries not yet read. Very easy.
14) The Blog Editor allows you to copy and paste either in code or WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). The bulletin only lets you enter in the format where you see the code.
15) A nice way to look at the code for something is to highlight and copy the whole item you need the code for, open the blog editor, paste it in the window, check the box to show the code and wahlah! you can then copy it to your notepad to save it for later use or copy the coded material into your actual profile page, —like video players and stuff. It is so much easier to deliver code to you that way.
16) Selfishly, I won’t have to write a new set of instructions to give you codes if you only try to use your blog editors. Thank you. The other option is to just send you to the same places I went for the instructions (It takes time, not always fun)
17) Instead of reposting everything you can put a list of links in your blog to the other blogs that have the info you want to share – That’s a link back. Just make a point to say more than “Check this out. (Frankly I don’t just follow links without having any idea what it’s for, give clues)
18) If you have more than one group with multiple moderators, all of your group leaders can subscribe to your post and deliver timely notices to their group members. That way your nice little helpers don’t have to run to each and every group to deliver the same messages over and over and over again.
19) If people only check in once or twice a month they have missed most of your bulletins since they only last 10 days. ( by the way sent mail messages are also deleted every two weeks…so unless you have saved a message or left it in the in box or received a reply, It’s gone.)
20) Because of the format and the ease of cataloging blogs the priority of where it shows up in the search list is much higher. By definition and rules for blog platforms, most of the necessary qualifications for a page to be searched have already been met.
21) Additional steps can be made to register your blogs. As this is a private network your tags are preset by my space. By individually registering your blogs you can appoint a new set of tags to your blogs. Each tag category you register will be catalogued as an entry into that category each time you blog regardless of the topic.
Example: I want to feature 36 bands/artist, I have 9 blog sites, If I dedicate 4 tags of my 20 to the name of an individual band or musician, than every time I send out a public blog about any topic, the band or artist name also gets catalogued. Every time I mention the name of the group in that blog that has a tag on that blog register it gets extra points for relevancy. These things push your name up higher on the list in search engines.
22) If the only thing that shows up when you run your name through the search engine is your page and the 20 pages you left comments on…You Should Be Blogging. (Unless you really don’t care if the world finds your commercial pages while casually using a search engines) Your goal should be that your profile pages and commercial pages show up side by side in a search list, and hopefully on the first page when you search. Sure you can spend lost of money to have your name stay on the list (and I do mean Lots of money)
This complete entry was written, formatted and posted by Debra Ford aka and will be posted simultaneously at 5 different blog sites on May 21, 2006. If you reuse this file information either use it in it’s entirety with the reference to the author or else use only a brief quote with a link back to the original source. Thank you,
Debra Ford -Writer – Content Publisher
Slight editing or updating may be done by the original author without notice.
