During the Online Advertising Series, we covered the topic of using blogging to increase your advertising spectrum. I’m here today to tell you the good news about blogging: Anyone can do it.

Blogging is rapidly becoming a necessary tool to successfully promote and market yourself or your business. Online social networks link together to share and spread the word of more than 115 million blogs across the web.

Here are some interesting pieces of blog data:

• 28% of all visits to blogs resulted in some kind of action (email signup, contact form, etc.)
• There are 120,000 new blogs being created every day
• Total blog posts created per day: 1.5 million
• 36% of those blog posts are written in English
• The Japanese language now boasts more blogs than any other language (37%)

Setting up and maintaining a blog is relatively simple, as now there are several publishers that walk you step by step through the process of posting your blog. Once you have your social media bookmarking set up to receive your blogs, the only part you have to concentrate on is the content. The rest is already in place to maximize your writings.

A great place to get all your social media bookmarking tended to is socialmarker.com. There you will find the majority of bookmarking sites to get you started with where your blogs will go. The more places your blogs go, the more people will see it, the more followers you can acquire. Getting followers of your blog is key to a successful blog writing campaign.

Once your route of delivery is in place, you need to get started with your writing. You don’t need to be an educated scholar in literature to be able to write compelling, informative blogs. Really, who better to talk about your business and services than you?

As you sit yourself down in front of the keyboard to begin, think of how you interact with potential clients face to face. Think of the tone and image you project to those potential clients. You want to maintain the same personality in your blogs. Remember, your blogging is another extension of who you are and what you offer.

You want your blogs to cover two audiences: Those that are potential clients and those that already know of you. Build your relationships, build your business.

Setting up a blog and not following through with regular entries and updated information is surely a suicidal move. With so many blogging options to choose from, readers will quickly move on to another blog to follow if your offerings are intermittent and unappealing.

Think of it this way, when marketing yourself in person, it may take a few approaches to land that new client. Approaching your blogging efforts with the same expectations will help you maintain the persistent schedule needed to get your blog established and noticed.

Now for the actual writing of the blog. When you are writing your blog, here are some important points to remember:

• Title must be relevant to material and your site or services.
• Keywords and keyword phrases should be used wisely throughout the blog post. Don’t overuse or randomly place your keywords and keyword phrases, the search engine will recognize your game and quickly shut you out of their results.
• Keep your paragraph short, just a few sentences per paragraph. Many blog readers will scan over the piece quickly and shorter paragraphs makes for an easier read.
• Use the bold feature on the important parts of your text that you feel best state your point. The bold will catch readers eye and register deeper within their memory.
• Forget about all the things you learned as a senior in high school. You want your writing to read at about an 8th grade level. Blogging is more of a casual, every-man type of medium to reach people.
• People are busy now a days, they want their information in easy to understand format that scans comfortably. The average blog browser will spend approximately 11 seconds scanning a post before deciding if they want to read it thoroughly. You need to make that 11 seconds count.
• Use your natural ‘voice’ in your writings. This will make it easier for you to develop the intimate relationship between you and your clients.
• Offer some sort of action for readers to take. It could be signing up to receive a newsletter, giving their feedback on your post or even something as simple as reading previous postings of your blog.
• Always include a link or two within your blog to pages of your website. This will familiarize your readers (potential clients) to the more detailed offerings you feature on your site. Bring the traffic to you.
• Finallly, write what you know. The words to interest readers come much easier when you stick to topics and voice that comes natural to you. Remember, the blog is your way of interacting in a face to face manner, just without the actual face to face.

photo credit: bensonkua