As we have discussed on previous articles, Internet blogging has exploded onto the scene. As a “tree” it has become a firmly planted means of fascination, expression, as well as a useful tool. We are going to examine one of the branches of blogging that has become a mainstay in the business world. It is what has been dubbed the corporate blog.

Typically speaking a blog is a web page of content made of text, images, video, or an audio stream. Practically speaking when we think of a blog we assume it is a feature presented to the public over the web. In the corporate world there is often an internal network that can benefit from corporate blogs. This is still an Internet application but like we said it is on an internal network. This is commonly called an Intranet.

And it is quite useful. For one it is an enhancement or an improvement of the old standby in house network, for example, the office memo.

Yes we all have heard of the expression “didn’t you get the memo?” whether we have worked in an office or not. The basic concept of the memo is to send information via a printed page and deliver to all who will need this information. A memo is an effective tool but using your Intranet is even better. How is that?

With a memo it takes time to get the memo out to all people that are intended to get it. Often if there were any questions or suggestions they would have to be delivered back by a one on conversation, e-mail, phone, return memo, or an arranged meeting to discuss the memo.

With an Intranet you can get an internal blog out and as the blog is being circulated instantaneously and read in a reasonable amount of time by all it concerns, the readers can instantly respond. Yes instead of getting back to the originator or others individually, you are responding right at your station and all can see and also reply or add to the blog. This can eliminate the annoying meetings.

Using an in house internal blog is more effective than sending out e-mails. You only need to post in the blog and you know all will be able to read it. You will not forget to email it to someone. Plus everyone can see the blog in its entirety and can see the contributions added to it without a slew of e-mails going back and forth and hither and thither. The internal blog involves far less effort and it usually gets faster results.

In essence it becomes a “community” forum. This can make room for things to be considered faster and yet allow for conflicting schedules or people being in different locations. Let’s face it many businesses have multiple offices/workplaces spread across a geographical landscape. Getting together can be problematic. Yeah you still have the conference call or email options but really as we have considered the internal blog is the best choice. And the bigger and the more spread out the more helpful the blog method is.

Now in the corporate world also makes use of the external network via the Internet. From a company standpoint the corporate blog can be used to help internal matters. It can be accessed by the employees, marketing teams, and companies you do business with. You can announce new products or explain why you are discontinuing products. You can release news and policy. But again the blog allows for immediate response from any or all of these people. Think about how useful this is.

Again this is more of a communal approach. It accomplishes more in a shorter time period than reaching out by way of e-mails, operators on phone, and mailings. What about the customers?

Most definitely the corporate blog can be helpful to the customer. Some of the news and announcements you share will be relevant to them also. Fielding customer response is also easier by using a corporate blog. Instead of responding to a number of people individually you can direct people to your blog that covers pretty much all of the concerns that the majority of people may have. This also allows customers to participate on your blog.
Corporate blogs may include offering virtual assistance through a chat line provided on the corporate blog.

Overall a corporate blog is very professional and yet a little less informal and therefore is more customer friendly and appealing. This can have a very positive impact on your employees and your customer base. It can be designed to target a market and come across more personal able than a standard business web site.

The best part of all of this is that it has an impact on the job and/or contractor market. Designing, developing, posting, managing, tracking, etc are all tasks that need to be performed by either employees or an independent contractor for the corporate blog to be successful. And as we discussed earlier there will be positions or needed contractors for virtual assistance for on line chat support.

Keep in mind the more elaborate the blog the more applications that will need to be done. Meaning that video, audio, or images likely will be included. Now while web design covers some of those items, the making of the video, audio or providing images opens up more income for someone.

This could be your opportunity to earn an income or to get a job in these difficult times. It may also be a chance for self employed contractors to line up some clients. Keep in mind that the use of corporate blogs will continue to grow and their needs will increase in demand. Where do you fit in?

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The tomatoes are righteously sweet and delicious, and there you are staring at them on your BLT sandwich. As you take that first wonderfully anticipated bite you think to yourself “I should have planted some more tomatoes!”

And thus we have been drawing on the concept of growing a garden and correlating it to managing our very own Internet business. And how along the way you can be enjoying and reaping the rewards of your “gardening” just like you would from the hard work of your own back yard garden. So back we go to our Internet garden.

In previous articles we have discussed our Internet garden with the idea of a back yard garden concept of planting items in rows. With that mindset we have reviewed some of the tasks involved in having a e-commerce and/or an affiliate On-line business. We have our rows of e-commerce and a row of affiliates. In this article we are going to cultivate our blogging business. We are going to see what to do with the row of blogs we have planted.

Just like in the previous articles, you have already planted the blogging seeds and you are writing like you’re a novelist locked in a room cranking out masterpieces. Your web site is up and going, with the seed in the ground, now what?

Honestly one concept that you need to grasp is not taking anything for granted. One of your duties should include reviewing and analyzing what you got going. The look of your site is naturally one item that cannot be overlooked.

This is especially a factor with a blog page. Reading your posts needs to be an experience from the moment the visitor clicks on to your page. The reader may not know it but the visual will enhance or take away from your words of wisdom. Of course that does not mean that you need to have everything under the sun on your page. But you do need enough to keep your page eye pleasing. The word attractive is not just a clever ploy. It means exactly what it is saying. Something attractive attracts.

As always we also will put out the warning of being careful of not overloading your page with too much flash or modern web design technology. Why? Remember not everyone has the computer capabilities you do. In fact most computer users are a couple operating systems behind the hardcore users.

Okay back to our blog. Since blogging is so diverse we are going to break it down into a few parts. Part 1 is going to delve into a fun or fan blog.

The most common examples of this type of blog are those devoted to your favorite band, team, celebrity, hero, author, artist and the like. For example let’s say your site is called www dot popbanb dot com. Yes your site is about your favorite musical artist.

Your page discusses the music and the people behind the music of your favorite band. You have some other options also that you need to consider if you have not already done so. Like what?

For one your hard work will be appreciated by the band and its management. Therefore you need to contact their people. I would say have your people get into touch with their people but chances are you don’t have people. Yeah me neither.

Anyhow most artists, if not all of them, are looking for people to promote them. They in fact create what is called “street teams” and enlist “fan clubs” to promote their merchandise, concerts and recordings. They are usually rewarded with something of value. While it may not be cash it will be some cool stuff you as a fan would love. Think about it, you’re going to do your blog anyway, why not get something for your passionate efforts. What fan would not enjoy some cool perks like tickets or special merchandise for promoting sales for their fave band?

Regardless of how professional or gossipy you make your site you want to attract people to check out your site. So you need to put some effort into your blog. Nobody, not even a bunch of 13 year old fans want to read “oh they’re so great”, or “oh their so cute” every other sentence or every other post. Sure you can be giddy and simple but you also need to give some fresh and substantive information and content. That is if you want to have a successful blog.

Just like your back yard garden, you can plant seeds and then forget about it, but you probably won’t get satisfactory results. If you want a productive garden, then there is work to do. And so it goes with your Internet garden and the success of your blog.

So whether it is an artist, celeb, or any of the other examples we mentioned you need to put some thought and effort into your content and lay out. You should be somewhat aggressive and passive.

What is the latest news surrounding the people your site is about? Are you up to date with their schedule or upcoming events?

Where are they from? What are their interests? How did they get into their field? Why are you such a big fan other than because they’re awesome and/or hot? Why should I, the reader, be interested in them or what might I find interesting about “them”?

Give us some history, some did you know, and some unique aspects. Write with passion and creativity. Write with your heart and your brain. Maybe you can get some thoughts, interviews and contributions from others who share your passion or have knowledge of them.

Logically at this point you must continue to apply the marketing tools you have gained and learned. You need to learn about keywords for your blog for instance. You need to consider directories and other ways to promote your site. Use email, advertisement options, forums, social networks and do the web related work in addition to your blogging.

As you can see there is so much that can be done and needs to be done in regard to your fan blog. So make it happen and make your blog stand out from the other blogs about the same personalities. Remember you had the inspiration and desire to start the blog and you want your voice to be heard, so why not go the distance and get your site seen and enjoyed? Well, why not?

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As a continuation to our previous post “Creating your first online business” we are going to continue assuming that you already have your hosting account with Hostgator.

We are going to learn how to create our first blog. There are different blog platforms, some of them are free, and so we are going to go for one of these to build our blog.

Blogger.com and WordPress.com offer an online platform for you to have your blog hosted with them, but since we want full control of our blog, we are going to install our blog on our own hosting account which we created previously with Hostgator.

There are some other blog platforms like Typepad, or Squarespace, but we won’t cover them in this post.

When you login to your hosting control panel, you need to find the Fantastico Deluxe Script. This is a feature that many hosting providers offer, so you can easily install a blog, forum, guess-book and some other scripts in your website. Since we want to install a blog, we are going to use Fantastico for this matter.

When you click on the Fantastico Deluxe Script icon, you will be presented with the Fantastico menu window.

On the left hand side, you will see a sidebar with different options, in our case we are looking for the “WordPress” option. Click on WordPress and you will see some more information about WordPress. Here you will have the option of creating a new WordPress installation, which is what we are interested in at the moment.

Click on “New Installation” , you now are presented with a form to fill in about your blog. You can select the domain name where you want to install your blog and where within the domain you want to install it. This form is self-explanatory.

After you successfully finish the wordpress installation you are presented with the url to login to your blog control panel (Dashboard) and your login credentials (user name + password). Copy this information to a secure place and save it for later use.

When you login to your blog Dashboard you will probably have one post and a comment, those are a default post and comment that come with the wordpress installation. I usually delete them, since they have nothing to do with the content I plan to write about in my blogs.

On the top part of the dashboard, you will see a link “Visit site” to your blog home page. If you click on it while pressing the “Shift” key on your keyboard, it will open in a new window/tab. This way we can keep on working on our administration tasks from the dashboard window/tab and see how our blog looks on the other one.

Now you are at the homepage of your blog. That’s the default look of a wordpress blog. Although it looks very nice, this is the default look, so we can expect to find thousands of blogs with this same look.

Since we want our visitors to easily recognize our blog every time they visit it, we are going to change that look for a more unique one later on.

We are also going to install a few plugins to further enhance the functionality of our blog.

Stay tuned for the next steps to create your first online business and make money with it.

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Well, it is now a fact. The White House opened its official Blog, for our delightment.
Just a few minutes after Obama’s presidential oath, a team of specialists remodeled the White House’s website. The president’s collaborators already proved to have clear and avant-garde ideas over the vast internet possibilities and now they can make them a reality.

Macon Phillips, the White House’s media director is the promoter of the change. His revolution begins by maintaining through the internet, the connection of the American people that Obama requested since he was a candidate. For instance, from now on, any legislation that requires Government approval and it is not urgent will be exposed on the internet during five days to allow the American citizens its evaluation. It is definitely a good strategy and at the same time a doubled edge weapon. On one hand, the president may face some citizen opposition, and on the other hand, a massive popular support to any of the measures could help him get over any reluctance from any of the parliamentarians.

Another novelty on the White House’s web site (www. whitehouse.gov) is the creation of a blog in which you can follow day-to-day the president’s activities.
So, the signing of the first order Obama executed as president is already available to the world.

Besides the already applied measures, Obama’s administration has left a series of written statements that distinguishes it from Bush’s team.

The internet program promises to protect the net’s privacy, openness and neutrality. It will also make compatible the tools to help parents protect their children from the net with the first change to the American constitution, which protects religious freedom, expression freedom, and reunion and media freedom among others.

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