It is easy to downplay the power and benefits of blogging. For us, blogging has been a great tool for sharing and it has also become our door to many opportunities. It allows us to express our opinions, meet people from around the world and to hopefully create new business leads out of it!
Here are 3 easy tips on how blogging can help your business.
1. A Strong Way To Show Off Your Capabilities
How will the world know what you’re capable of, if you don’t share it? Blogging is a great way to get your skills and knowledge across endless boundaries. Whether you have excellent photoshopping abilities or are a skilled photographer, you can display your work on a blog along with valuable photography tips. This goes for any skill, talent or knowledge. If your passion is finance, you can teach your readers how to buy, sell and trade stocks. A blog is like your resume, only non-static. It is dynamic and much more convincing than a piece of paper.
2. Daily Learning
Frequent bloggers understand the importance of catching up with advances, news and updates. Share what you’ve recently learned with the world and voice your take on it. The purpose is to gain knowledge and inspiration, help prepare for your next post and start up interesting conversations with others. The feedback/ comments you receive is a major part of your blogging. It generates more interest when other’s get involved and opens up new windows about your topic. It may generate ideas and give a glance into something that you may not thought of before. You never stop learning, so sharing what you know and receiving comments from the world is all part of it.
3. Business Opportunities
A blog places your ideas on the web and is open for anyone to visit. If you have great content on your blog, you have a high chance of attracting the right people to either advertise or collaborate with you. Like I mentioned in the “Daily Learning” section; the interaction set in place is great towards the growth of your skills and business alike. Take advantage of sharing this with others, so you learn and benefit from what the world offers as well.
Start Blogging!!
Whether you’re into marketing, dogs, cooking, engineering, SEO, design, music, writing, etc… a blog could be your perfect starting point to display your abilities. If you haven’t started already or have hesitated because you were never sure how to or what to say, simply go for it!. You never know what opportunities lie ahead until you take the first step. Just go for it and enjoy!
Web Analytics helps you track whats going on with your blog and helps you refine your sites goals and campaigns
Here are 7 excellent web analytics resources for your blog. I’ve specifically included several programs in here that have cool, useful resources like plugins and widgets for your blog.
Feedburner- Manages RSS Feeds and offers free blog analytics, tracks subscriptions, keywords and etc.
Mint - Excellent, self-hosted site analytics software. The fee is a one-time, $30 flat fee for a license, per site. Super cheap, and you get access to a ton of tools and plugins (called “Pepper”) that extend Mint’s basic feature set via their “Peppermill.”
Google Analytics – Ok so Google Analytics is still an ok free option, but keep in mind that it has some problems, namely underreporting. However, its still a good option for getting a general idea of what’s going on with your blog.
Feedjit - I had to include them in here, as they offer some excellent free widgets for your blog, all in real-time, including a live traffic feed, live traffic map, live recommended reading and live page popularity.
IndexTools – Recently acquired by Yahoo, and soon to be Yahoo Index Tools, they offer excellent options for web analytics, but the prices aren’t listed on the site, so you’ll have to do a little digging.
MyBlogLog – Great social networking site for those with blogs. It has the additional benefit of tracking your blog stats, cool widgets to show who’s visited your site and much, much more. Best of all, its free:)
HitTail.com: Excellent site analytics; their basic package offers man options and allows you to track up to 125 pages per month and up to 100k visitors. All for $9.95, which is a great deal.
