People often ask me 'What is a Blog'?

What are blogs? The term is short for web-log, and the original blogs were online journals and web reports such as live updates from journalists embedded with the military.

A blog is just a really simple website. The charm of a blog is that if you can send email you can blog. All you do is log-in, type a title and a short article (called a blog post) and push ‘Publish’ and your blog automatically adds the new blog post at the top of the page and pushes the older blog posts lower down the page.

Blogs have 3 main business benefits.
1. The search engines love blogs. Lots of words, frequently updates and bloggers often link to each other. Words+Links=Search Engine Success.

2. People subscribe to blogs to get an electronic notification every time you update the blog. The updates come to a cell phone or your computer through RSS feeds (a technical sounding term, but this is just a tool to facilitate blog subscriptions called Really Simple Syndication).
3. Blogs are more conversational than websites, you can allow a bit of personality to shine through a company blog or a CEO blog.

To see a few of my favorite marketing blogs, please have a look at our list of the Top 10 Internet Marketing Blogs on the TenGoldenRules.com website.


Flickr Photo Credit francescopozzi

Facebook RSS Feed

Here’s a cool way to add your Facebook News Feed to your iGoogle or Google Reader. The technique shown below will actually work with any device you use to read your RSS feeds.

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I live in my Google Reader so for me this was a great way to incorporate Facebook into my Google Reader World. I still have to log into Facebook if I want to comment on something but getting my social news fed to me through an RSS feed in the simplest terms, rocks!

Promote Your Blog with a Blidget

Got a blog? Why not promote it with a Blidget! A blidget is simply a widget which updates itself along with your blog's RSS feed.

Widgetbox allows you to create free blidgets to put on your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter or Myspace profile. You can customize the look and feel of your blidget by adding a title, subtitle, tags and by changing the color of your blidget.

Blidgets are useful in promoting your blog because it creates an eye-catching way to access your blog. You can reach out to related bloggers in the blogosphere and trade blidgets just like you would trade blogroll links. Other bloggers and their readers can stay up to date with your blog's content wherever the blidget is added and will visit your blog to read more if they are interested in what you have to say.

Blog Design and How It Is Important

Because I’m a blogger, and I also have an eye in web design, I find it important to have a clean looking blog design just as much as having interesting, unique content. There is also the argument that with many people reading blog posts through RSS feed readers, most of us don’t see what the blog looks like, so why would it be important?

First impressions are important, and a clean, easy to navigate blog design is a deciding factor on if they will subscribe to your blog or not.

Personally, I like blogs that have blog posts on the right side, with a side navigation or side bar on the left. This is because most people read from left to right, left being the important thing on your blog, which is content, followed by your sidebar. I think of the sidebar as the area where the reader goes next after they think the blog post is interesting, exploring the rest of your site.

If possible, you should always format your blog posts in a way that the reader will have to go to your actual blog if they are reading it in an RSS reader. That way they can see your design and possibly go to more posts, being that they are already on the website.

Remember, keeping it simple usually always works.

RSS Explained: Why You Should Use It

Those who are bloggers or familiar with blogging are most likely familiar with RSS feeds. But there are still many people who aren’t.

RSS is known as Really Simple Syndication and is a web feed format that is used to publish updated content, such as blog entries, podcasts or news articles. Basically explained, it is a way to read constantly changing content as it is made available.

RSS content is usually read using software called an RSS reader. The orange symbol on the left is used to identify an RSS feed, and when you see that, you know that you can subscribe to their content. You can save the RSS feed to your RSS reader, and every time a website is updated, you will see it in your RSS reader as soon as it is published. Web based RSS readers include Google Reader and Bloglines and they are useful because you can read your subscribed feeds in any browser, no matter what computer you are on.

If you’re a blogger, it is in your best interest to have an RSS feed placed a prominent area where users can easily find it. In most blog software such as Blogger and Wordpress, an RSS feed is already installed. If you want to measure how many readers subscribe to your feed, Feedburner is a recommended tool for traffic analysis, ways to promote your feed and a lot more features. It is free and easy to use.

So whenever you see that orange square, you know that you can subscribe to an RSS feed. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to Ten Golden Rules’ Blog RSS feed and be up to date on all our blog posts. :)