---

Put a blog to work
for your business

On the Internet, your content must do two things to be considered profitable: Your content must influence search engines and it must influence people.

Blogs excel at doing both. Since blogs have introduced the Internet to live content updates, you can use a blog to influence search engines and people much faster and more effectively than e-mail or instant messaging ever will.

E-mail is instant but closed. Your communications, while private, do not reach search engines and only influence the limited number of people to whom they are sent.

Blogs and Really Simple Syndication are a new way of publishing. Blogs alert others to new information, making your content more findable, searchable, and easier to reference and promote.

This new way of communicating can be characterized as conversational in nature and real-time in execution. Publishing content with a blog is more than just producing new Web content.

You are engaged in social marketing. Your content can be considered as digital conversations designed to reach a specific social market with the expectation of eventually building relationships with your audience.

You can still participate in the World Wide Web where information is static, stale and infrequently updated. It is your choice. But you should understand the price if you should go that route.

The "World Live Web" is a living mechanism. It never sleeps. Everything happens in the "now." Where it used to take Web site content weeks or months to get in the major search engines and spread, blog content takes seconds, minutes, or hours and it spreads exponentially.

A-list blogger Pakii Pierce of How to Blog for Fun and Profit says, "World Live Web content is viral and spreads easily and effectively with little effort on your part in comparison to the World Wide Web. Business content in the World Live Web outperforms the World Wide Web."

Pakii has been blogging and building his social network at How2Blog4FunAndProfit.com where he educates his readers all about blogs and RSS.

"Hands down it is the only way to publish." Pakii tells his network.

As a business owner or entrepreneur, you now have to become a market thinker instead of a product pusher. Pushing brochure-type content or direct-marketing messages will not only fall flat, but could mean a reversal of fortune if done obnoxiously enough.

In this new era of consumer-controlled consumption, consumers are using technologies like RSS to customize their content consumption and they are using blog-commenting systems to make their presence felt.