Blogging for

Fun and Profit

Part II: Getting Serious About Your Business Blog

By Tom Ogg

Now that you have been having fun blogging with Blogger.com, it is time to consider increasing your level of expertise as a blogger and launch your first business blog. Here is the first thing you should do.
Buy a Domain Name. Find one or more domain names that are appropriate for your blog(s). This is a huge opportunity right now, as many of the descriptive category blog domain names are available for registration. Imagine what you would have to pay for the domain name CruiseNews.com? Yet, I was easily able to register CruiseNewsBlog.com and CruiseReviewsBlogger.com without any effort on my part. Descriptive category blog domain names are readily available for registration.
How do you register a domain name? Simple, while there are tons of domain name registrars, the consensus among most travel agents I talk with is www.GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy.com charges $8.95 per domain name, per year to register and maintain your domain name and features an easy-to-understand Web-based user interface. While Blogger.com assigns a unique address to your personal blog, you will want a memorable keyword domain name for your business blog. Think about how potential clients will search for the information that will be contained in your blog and then try to obtain that keyword domain name. Someone searching for Hawaii Wedding Specialists will probably Google that search term and if you have HawaiianWeddingSpecialistBlog.com as your blog’s domain name, they are quite likely to find you.
Once you have your domain name(s), it is time to build your first business blog. I would start small and use the blog for a specific purpose within your business. Perhaps you have a group movement coming up and want to enable the group members to communicate with one another while disseminating information to the group. Maybe you would like to post daily cruise specials as you receive them. I am sure that you can think of dozens of uses for your business blog.
There are a good number of blog hosting services and doing a keyword search in Google using “blog hosts” or “Web log hosts” will deliver many choices. However, I am going to focus on one of the major companies that hosts blogs. Visit www.Typepad.com. Note that Typepad.com is similar to Blogger.com, yet offers many more choice in terms of design and other features. Sign up for the “Free 30 Day Trial Offer” and start to establish your blog. Since you have already built a blog in Blogger.com, there is no need to go into detail how to do it again.
Typepad.com will allow you to name your blog so go ahead and name it [your domain name keywords] .typepad.com. As an example, if I wanted to use my CruiseReviewsBlogger.com I would name the blog CruiseReviewsBlogger.typepad.com. Typepad will allow you to point your domain name at the blog. Once you have done so, a visitor can find you by entering http://www.CruiseReviewsBlogger.com into their browser command bar. This is critical to your blog’s success. It is quite simple to do and takes only a minute for your domain name registrar to accomplish the necessary task. Typepad.com gives you complete instructions on exactly what to tell your registrar.
Once your blog is published and your domain name points to it, you are ready for your very first business blog post. Remember that your business blog now represents you and your business, so every care should be taken to present yourself in the most desirable way consistent with your business image. Always check your spelling and grammar before publishing your post and use the established netiquette of the online community. The result that you are seeking is an online presence that reflects your business’ professionalism and trusting client relationship. You want your blog visitors to leave with a feeling that they know and trust you. Blogs tend to be very personal in nature and represent a great opportunity for you to embrace your clients.
It is very important to use relevant keywords in your blog post title. Think about keywords that a potential client might use to find information that is contained in your post and use those keywords as the title. “Royal Caribbean Orders Huge New Cruise Ship” is a keyword-rich title that might rank highly in a search for information about Royal Caribbean’s order for their new huge ship.
While no one knows the real future of blogging, one thing has become quite apparent. It is becoming more difficult to unseat popular content-driven Web sites that may reside in the top search engine positions for a particular keyword search. One of the major benefits of blog postings is that they can gain high search engine rankings based on their keywords and timeliness. It is not unusual to find blog postings that are only hours old quite high in search engine results. If for no other reason, you should be building your business blog to take advantage of this fact. A well-structured blog post with an imbedded link to your Web site can build traffic from sources you may not be able to reach any other way.

Tom Ogg is editor and publisher of www.CruiseReviews.com and www.PortReviews.com