So you just started a business selling widgets, unfortunately your biggest competitor is considered the Nike of the industry. Wild imaginations of your fierce competition using their billion dollar budget to make sure you can't compete with them, begin to surface. In steps the Internet. The medium by which all companies are equal...well somewhat. What the Internet will do is give you an equal balance of power to reach a global audience. The same exact global audience as your competitor. So how do you reach a global audience on a limited budget? Very simple, become your own product critic and create a blog. Unless you have been hiding in a closet, you probably already know what a blog is. Blog, short for web log, is a means by which anyone can post information on the Internet, in real time. Visitors to your blog get to see what you have posted, starting with the most recent posts first. Without going into intricate detail about the history of blogging, I can tell you that it is a great way to build your business. The reason why blogging will be good for your business is because search engines love content. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! need to index web sites in order the create search results based on keywords. The more content you can offer them, the more often and higher your web site will appear on search results. What makes blogging add even more content is the ability to allow your blog visitors to add comments or ask questions related to the blog content that you wrote. Let me give you an example of how all of this works. You sell widgets, and are very knowledgable about what you sell You decide to start a blog rating differnet widgets, talking about the pros and cons of them, different styles they come in and so on. Now you allow your visitors to comment on your rating, and ask questions so you can answer, and guess what, that creates even more content. Now people on the internet search for widgets, specifically looking for what you have already talked about in your blog. The visitor to your blog reads what you wrote, and sees that you are very knowledgable about the subject. Therefore they decide to shop with your site as opposed to your competition. This is a common practice among a lot of companies that do business on the Internet. Obviously the first question that probably comes to mind is, whouldn't the big competition just do this as well? Not exactly. They have huge budgets, mostly geared toward running marketing and advertising campaigns. They might post reviews of products on their sites, but rarely write a blog on what they sell. It is easier for them to just advertise. Blogging is a great way to get the word out about your products and business. With the variety of blogging add-on tools for web sites and businesses, you do not even need a lot of web development experience to get started. Throw in some links from your blog posting to other websites such as Digg and Newsvine to name a couple, to allow your visitors to promote your blog posting for you, and you will be receiving customers in no time. By: Bruce A. Tucker
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