By now you’ve probably heard that many people earn an income by blogging. As a business professional, that may not interest you or be worth your time. But before dismissing blogging altogether, consider these three reasons for professional blogging …3 Reasons for Professional Blogging
- Demonstrates industry expertise and participation – prospective clients visiting your site want to know what you can do for them and how good you do it. A professional blog allows the visitor to see, firsthand, your level of industry knowledge and activeness.
- Improves search engine performance – if you write blog posts on a certain topic, you increase your chance of being find through online search. In fact, some search engines (such as Technorati) search only blogs. If you’re not blogging, guess what? … you’ll never show up on the search engine results.
- Improve your practice by learning and exchanging ideas with your peers – you can learn from your peers by visiting and participating on their blogs, and vice versa, they visit and participate on your blog. Who knows … you just might learn something useful that you can apply and improve your practice.
Where do you host a professional blog? Is Blogger too “social” for a professional blog?
@CJ,
If all you need is a blog, Blogger works fine. It’s fast, easy, reliable, useful, and free to set up.
Two other popular (do-it-yourself) blog tools include WordPress (wordpress.com) and TypePad (typepad.com).
A lot of professionals want a blog and a website … the website part essentially serves as an online brochure of services and products while the blog serves as a professional journal. Therefore, a tool like WordPress (wordpress.org) offers more capability, is more customizable, and works well. However, it requires a little more web-know-how (but not a whole lot) to set up.
I may add … if it’s important to you, one of the downsides of DIY blog services (Blogger, TypePad, WordPress.com) is incoming links.
For example, if you set up a blog with Blogger, the URL for your posts will include “blogspot” … i.e., http://www.yourblog.blogspot.com.
So, any EXTERNAL site linking to your site is essentially owned by Blogger … incoming links are valuable in the world of search engine optimization.
If you’re going to keep your blog at Blogger forever, it’s not an issue. But if you ever wanted to move your blog away from Blogger to a different service, you won’t be able to take those incoming links with you.
Finally, you can setup and host a WordPress blog with just about any web hosting service. My favorite hosting company is ThinkHost (now owned by DreamHost).
You’ll need to choose Linux web hosting with MySQL and PHP support. Most hosting companies offer automated WordPress installation. Once installed, you can log in, choose/download a theme, configure some of the settings, add some plugins and widgets, maybe add a few images and a logo, and you’re off and blogging!