Why should you blog?
Why not? If I haven’t explained enough above, blogging is fun. Since its invention, it has made an impact on the internet, and the crater will continue to grow for years on. It’s one of those beautiful balancing mediums between personal life and technology, a harmonious interaction between mind and machine. With regards to communicating information, blogging is a lot more interactive than a plain sheet of paper, and a lot more intuitive and intimate than a cold, static website. If you must compare blogs to something, then compare them to dairies, because in essence, that’s exactly what they are. Blogs allow you to update information about yourself conveniently and whenever you feel like it. And when it’s published out on the web, people will have greater enjoyment reading your rambling thoughts presented in an organized manner, perhaps even more so than the local newspaper or a badly-written book.

What’s Blogger?
Blogger is one of the first popular blogging software, a forefather that got blogging started in the first place. The Blogger software was purchased by Google in 2002, and right now it is one of the many free services offered by good ol’ Google. The history of Blogger is typical of the boom and busts of the Dot Com Period. Originally created by Pyras Studios as a medium for community forming, Blogger went on a terrific growth before busting out like so many other site-companies. That’s where Google came into the scene and seized the opportunity to purchase the then, community of over 100,000 and growing members.

Why use Blogger?
Blogger is one of the many blogging software available on the internet. Of course, there’s no good reason to choose it over the others without some good, sound reasons detailing its advantages. Let’s start:

1. Blogger is free. But then again, so are lots of other blogging softwares, but Blogger is one of the more convenient ones to set up. You do not have a website. You either sign up through your Gmail account or on the Blogger website. Once you do that, you will get your new blog instantly and can start making your beautiful voice heard over the net. Hosting with blogger does have a small drawback, which are the ads they put on your blog. But those ads are minimal and do not distract from the content at all. In addition, Blogger offers a neat toolbar that allows viewers to browse other blogs with themes related to your own.

2. Features- Blogger is one of the more feature-rich blogging software out there. The Blogger interface is simple, attractive, and offers a multitude of options and ready-to-go templates to choose from. You can write new content, insert scripts, images, and HTML through its fully-featured editor. Because it’s affiliated with Google, you can even insert Adsense ads to “monetize” your blog. This brings us to the next point:

3. Money! That’s right, because it’s owned by perhaps the biggest advertising company in the world, Google, Blogger makes it trivial for you to insert contextual ads as well as other types of advertisements into your website. The contextual ads blend right into the content, making them visually appealing to the viewers looking at your content. Of course, whether or not to insert ads to into your blog is completely up to you, but the financial gains sure are enticing. Depending on the content of your blog, ads can bring anywhere from $0.10 to $10.00 per click! Now that’s a lot of money to ponder about, especially if you’ve got a really popular blog, which shouldn’t be too hard as it brings us to the fourth reason:

4. Indexing- because Blogger is owned by Google, its blogs tend to enjoy a ranking advantage over blogs of other software. But what software you use is really trivial compared to the quality of your content. Because if your writing is interesting to the readers, they’ll come to you regardless. Don’t forget that Google is the most popular search engine out there, and accounts for more than half the searches made every day. In addition, the Blogger community helps to promote each other’s pages. So be sure to take the time to make some friends within the community, as linking with established bloggers will do wonders toward increasing the popularity of your own blog.

1. A real estate blog allows for effective communication between clients and the agent who owns it. Through that communication, new leads are born. And even if the client end up not interested in a particular estate, he can always email the blog URL to his friends and family members who might be. This free Wordpress plugin here allows visitors to email an entry to anyone. I’m sure there exist similar plugins for other blogging interfaces.

2. Just having a real estate blog alone provides a new venue of communication between one’s business and the outside world. Think of it this way, having a blog can’t hurt you in anyway, and maintaining it is trivial. You can spend simply 20 minutes per day on it and still provide loads of informative content to whoever is interested. Having a blog out there gives you an advantage over the other guys out there who are only handing out flyers and calling prospective leads. A blog is resourceful in many, many ways, and all the advertising it does for you is free, provided that you put some time into it. With respect to maintenance and updates, a blog is clearly more advantageous to a website. The URL of your blog is a nice thing to put on your business card.

3. Possessing a real estate blog adds reflections of professionalism onto your job. It shows others that you have a passion for the business and you care about your clients. A blog is a passive, but live means of communication without intruding on your client’s free time. If well-maintained, your clients will want to come visit your blog.

4. Blog equals free advertisement! This was mentioned above but deserves its own point. A blog is one of the easiest things to promote, free! Search engines tend to find active blogs really quickly, and index everything it links to, including your company’s homepage. Now that’s something nice to do for your firm. It also helps to be part of a network of real estate blogs with agents from other parts of the country for the purpose of inter-network promotion. And yes, you will also make lots of new friends and learn from other blogging agents whom you will most certainly associate with in the near future.

Real-estate is a never dying business, because by their nature, people are always moving in and out of houses. There are always new houses, apartments, and land to be bought for people seeking homes. It’s not only a logical, but also study-proven deduction that picture speaks more than words when it comes to the mind of the buyers. But conducting a live tour of the estate site is not always viable, especially if the site is a good distance away and the buyer is reluctant to travel. That’s where the web comes in, as it provides a medium where the agent can display enough colored pictures to cover the entire site, something that is prohibitively expensive on paper. And nowadays, whenever something new involving the web pops up, blogging is sure to follow. Mark the truth- real estate blogging has enormous potential in its bright future.

Real estate Blogging is considered a new and revolutionary concept. It really shouldn’t be, because blogs have existed for how long, more than half a decade by now? The reason why real estate agents didn’t give serious considerations into blogging is because the professionals did not want to downplay the personal interaction between agents and clients, as on par with the traditions of the business. But with the emergence of blogs as a personal place (it’s even compared to a diary), active agents can no longer overlook the potentials of the online medium. In brief, blogging allows real estate agents to preserve the intimacy between clients, while utilizing technology to its maximum limits.

A static, cold real estate website isn’t much fun to browse through, unless you’re desperate to find a shelter. In comparison, a lively agent can keep his clients updated by posting a new entry on a weekly basis in his blog, accompanying a detailed coverage of the particular site with a personal tone, complete with photos, comments, and feedback. Whenever I visit the site, the first thing I see would be a new entry on an estate in my local area. Now that’s a site I will bookmark and visit in my spare time if I’m at all interested in finding a new place to live. Clearly now, we can see some of the advantages of real estate blogging.

All is going fine and dandy utnil you showed up to work one day and found out that the URL to your precious darling blog has been blocked! It looks like the administration has finally had enough with you logging on to your blog site 10 times a day. ANd just by conincidence, a new set of "made just for you rules) prohibits emloyees from logging on to their blog sites while at work.

Oh no, so the end is here right? Your blog has been your safe haven where you can vent your daily frustrations at people who seem to care. It's where you can escape reality for a brief period and interact with people whom you've probably never met before. It seems so unfair, so injust. Since where else other than work is a better place to stimulate the ingenius creativity from within?

Thankfully, there is no need to worry, as the end is definitely not here. Wherever there is a problem there is a solution. This is where mobile blogging kicks in. Mobile blogging allows maximum flexibility for your blogging success. Thanks to mobile blogging, you can update your blogs through your email or even your cell phone! Anywhere you can get any form of internet access, mobile blogging ensures that your blog will never get stale. It's no wonder why more and more blog addicts are getting hooked on what has become known as "moblogging".

So how do you moblog? Well, the five tips below will get you started in the right direction. In fact, it is insanely easy. It just takes a bit of initial set up. After that, everything else works just as they do with regular blogs. In fact, you may find that even though you have the rights to access your blog via a web browser, it is more convenient to just update your blog through email. This way, you won't have to visit the actual blog, log in, and all that good stuff. Now, updating your blog is as easily as clicking the Send button of your favorite email client.

How to set up a mobile blog:
1. Most blogging services already have mobile blogging capabilities. If you already own a blog, chances are that your blogging platform supports that function, so you do not need to move your blog to a new service. If not, try Wordpress.
2. Get a email account if you don't have one already…
3. Go to Options/Settings of your blogging software and set it up so it updates via email. This is the essence of mobile blogging basics. Wordpress offers additional plugins that offers an interested assortment of options to enhance your mobile blogging experience. Once set up, you'll receive an email address that you can send message to for updating your blog.
4. Now, start moblogging! Use any means you want to write an email. This can be done through a cell phone, PDA, laptop, etc… Simply send the entry to your blog's email address and Voila, instant content update.

Thanks to mobile blogging, you can now keep your blog fresh and delicious whenever. Don't you just love technology?

With blogs, the key to success is to diversify your money making sources. There are many sources to choose from. Here are some of the most popular ones:

1. Google Adsense- making money blogging with Google really is as easy as one, two, and three. Simply create the blog, customize the ads, and insert them into your blog. Getting into Adsense used to be somewhat of a big deal for beginning webmasters. Google tend to be a little picky with their application approvals. However, since its purchase of Blogger and to encourage its usage, you can get an Adsense account by simply signing up with Blogger, which is a lot easier to get in. You don’t even have to use your Blogger account, since your Adsense ID is good on any website you choose to use it on. Adsense does a really good job of blending the ads into surrounding content to make them more interesting to visitors. This helps you greatly, since you will be paid per click through. Each click can bring pennies or dollars into your account, depending on the competition between the advertisers on your niche. However, lower paying niches can be offset by getting more visitors (and clicks), which also happens to be easier than high-paying niches. 

2. Affiliate Programs- Here's how you make money blogging- for every visitor that goes to the sponsor’s site through your own website and purchases something, you receive a percentage of the total amount. This percentage depends on the products the sponsor sell. They usually range from 10-40% for hard goods, and up to 70% for digital goods (like E-books, softwares, etc…) Affiliate marketing has been in existence long before Adsense, and they will continue to do so as long as the earth is round. In comparison to Adsense, affiliate programs might be a little intimidating to use at first. But they can be powerful money makers. In fact, a guru once told me that no matter how much you make in Adsense, be it $100 or $1000 per day, you can always make more with affiliate programs. 

3. Rent out Ad Space- this is perhaps the easiest way to make money blogging, because once you get into the program, the money is essentially guaranteed. However, you must have really high-quality, high-traffic blogs to be eligible for this luxury route. When you rent out ad space, companies pay you a fixed amount before hand to post their ads on your blogs. This payment continues periodically in exchange for you keeping the ads on your blogs. A number of companies act as the middlemen in facilitating this type of service, like BlogAd and Adbrite.

4. Rent out links- this works similar to renting out ad spaces. Instead of displaying commercial ads, you add a link to the renter’s website on your blog to help his website gain popularity. The internet is basically a huge, finger-pointing medium. Whoever has the most fingers pointed to them gets the most attention. A smaller site just starting out is often willing to pay other sites to point to them. But to qualify, your site must have already been established for a long time. It’s much easier to find suitors to rent out links to than ad spaces. Again, there are companies that act as the middlemen here, but you also advertise your blog on E-bay yourself. 

A good strategy to make money blogging would be to join an assortment of programs, both contextual ads and affiliate programs. Just be sure that the affiliate programs you join have something to do with the topic of your blog, to ensure high conversion rates for your traffic. Also note that if you have Adsnese on a page, you can’t have any other types of ads. You can offset this by joining another contextual program like Adbrite, which is much more liberal with their regulations, and put them on the page in conjunction with your affiliate programs. Once your blog gets firmly established, you can then start renting out ad spaces and/or links, which is the easy to make money blogging.

Going about earning money with your blogs is not as straight-forward as it seems. Before we start, please determine the type of blog you have. Is it strictly a personal blog, a business blog, a niche blog, or does it fall in between categories? Don’t get me wrong here, because any blog can make money. It’s just that if you have like a personal blog that wasn’t originally suited toward making money, then it will take a little more effort. 

Monetizing niche blogs is the easiest, because your viewers already share the same interest in the same products as you. All you have to do is go out there, find those products, and promote them in some way on your blog. The easiest way to do that is to sign up with a contextual advertising company like Google, Yahoo Publishers (although they’re reluctant to accept new members at this stage), Adbrite, or Bidvertiser. Note that Google does not allow you to have ads or affiliate programs from other companies on the same page as Adsense ads. But that shouldn’t matter, because Google ads are plentiful and are enough to create big earnings all by themselves.

Just in case if you get lost out there, here are some blog monetization tips:
1. Your blog must have content first… Yes I know that to some of you, this statement is completely meaningless (after all, the point of blogs is to share your knowledge), and I apologize for that. But you won’t believe the number of “splogs”, or spam blogs, out there whose sole purpose is to display advertisements and nothing else, and get any passerby to click on them. That, by default, defeats the whole meaning of blogs in general. Anyhow, when first starting out, don’t think too much about monetizing your blog. Content is key. It’s always nicer to have good content, because without content you won’t get any visitors. Now here’s an ancient age trivia- if a blog has ads on it and no one comes to see them, does it make a cent? 

2. Once you have content, promote, promote, promote. Other than content, this is the most important blog monetization tip that will directly affect your earnings. Tell your friends and families about it. Post it on related community forums (make good use of signatures). Visit related blogs and start a chatter. Make your blog known on the guestbooks of related websites. Submit an article to an article directory. Knock your self out, but please do refrain from spamming, which relates to putting up unrelated and unnecessary comments on other people’s spaces. Experienced earners will tell you that for every minute you spent building your blog, you should spend two to promote it. The point of promotion is to draw a steady amount of interested traffic, from which your blog will monetize off of.

3. Promote the right programs. Depending on your niche, contextual ads like Adsense may not have enough high-paying advertisers to make your effort worthwhile. The other side of it is that your niche could bring you $1.00+ per click, although that will take a little luck. Anyhow, if Adsense alone isn’t for blog monetization, venture into affiliate programs, which can pay much more based on how much your viewers buy. Affiliate programs usually do better than contextual ads if your blog isn’t niche based. It is also the way to go if your traffic isn’t eligible for contextual ads, in that case affiliate programs are the only way to go. There are an infinite amount of affiliate programs out there. Of course, you want to be signing up with those related to your blog in some way. A good place to start is Commission Junction or Modern Click. Keep an eye out for programs that pay “per lead”. With these, your visitors don’t even have to buy anything, and you can get paid up to $16 per lead just for the sign up!

Business blogs also allows owners to form close some sort of a relationship with their customers over the cold, faceless medium of the internet. Almost all big businesses have maintain a blog because it is the best way to keep in touch with the customer pool and entice potential customers. Microsoft has one. Wordpress itself has one. Even Mark Cuban, the active owner of the overwhelmingly successful Dallas Mavericks franchise, maintain a regular updated blog.

More and more so, business blogs are becoming a norm for every aspiring online business mogul. So many businesses have them. So what separates a good blog and bad one? The standard of quality is the same for all websites- content.

Any search engine guru will tell you that content is king. To be attractive to potential viewers, your blog must have a continuous, regular inflow of high quality content. Of course if everyone has to shave their head just to come up with incredible, earth shattering news, there wouldn’t be too many blogs out there. You really do not have to pull your hair out just to make your blog stand out from the crowd. In fact, that’s not what blogs are for. No matter how prestigious, formal, and imposing a business or corporation is, their blogs are always regarded as less formal and more open. Blog designs are usually simplistic, because people didn’t come visit to admire the artistry. If you want to be the master of formality, stick to a static website. Blogs are a place to connect with your customers. The content you write should be natural, in your own words, in such a way as to maintain intimacy with whoever is reading your blog. You do not have to be a poet in everything you write, and you should not, as you will bore minds out of the most of your viewers. Just get the information you want to deliver out there in a manner you feel comfortable with.

Other than high quality content, it is very important to update your business blogs regularly. The purpose of a blog is so that you can add content easily. Take advantage of that! Blogs tend to get more traffic and more attention because of the new content added to it. If you add little new content erratically, the second or third time a visitor comes by for new information, they’ll think your company is stagnant. Do not give them the dreaded impressions associated with a dead blog. Maintain an active, open-minded approach to updating your business blog regularly. Customers will easily perceive this as a reflection of your business’s ethic and dedication. It only takes a few minutes a day, and it’s well worth the effort.

Because of the amount of traffic blogs receive, a business blog also a terrific vehicle of free advertising. If your writing is half way decent, any random visitor can be converted into potential loyal customers.

So now you’ve read it, take action! Get out there and show the other guys what you’ve got. Business blogs are tremendous resources to take advantage of.

There are really no particular software that is made exclusively for photoblogging. As stated above, a photoblog is simply a blog with lots of pictures on it. Anyone can put a lot of pictures on his blog, although that is a lot easier said than done. Uploading, organizing, and laying out the photos in a meaningful and creative matter does take considerable skill and time. That’s why there exists many plugins and add-ons to already popular blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger that facilitates these processes. Communities of photobloggers also exists online where developers can share technical and creative information and help each other out.

Because of their unique features, photoblogs usually draw a lot of traffic once they have been discovered. However, that traffic is mostly composed of recurring visitors who have bookmarked the site, and is periodically curious as to what the creators have in store for the next. Hey, some people simply love photos. Of course, traffic is not much of an issue once the blog is known, but getting the blog to be known does take some effort on behalf of the creator. Search engines index sites almost completely based on their written content. Through the keywords used in the text of a website, a search engine can categorize the site and rank it accordingly. Now the obvious problem with photoblogs emerges in that search engine spiders can’t interpret images. It would be insanely cool if they did, but they don’t. Thus, that’s why the written commentaries in a photoblog is vital to its success. It will take some cleverly crafted placement and word phrasing to make search engines act the way you want to. A good, some what techy way to help out the ranking of your photoblog is to use and abuse the images’ ALT tags to implant relevant keywords that will help a search engine classify your site.

A photoblog offers many rewards, not just money. Just having a photoblog is something to be proud of. It sets you apart from the millions of other bloggers, and gives you a new dimension to unleash your creative mind. Maintaining a photoblog is a terrific way for creative artists to maintain their profile and resume for potential employers to see. A highly successful and popular photoblog is just one way to get you hired for your next dream job.

Setting up a blog is the easy part. Wordpress prides itself in the 5-minute install of its blog. Customizing a blog is often as simple as pressing a button. What really matters is the content. After a blog has been set up, the rest is up to you to write words that transparently convey your intentions to the blog's viewers.

The 5 small business blog tips below will maximize the chance of success for your blog.

1. Write in a simple, easily comprehensible style
Small business blogs are not a place to show off your English skills. It's all about getting the right message across to potential customers. Do not use fancy constructs that could confuse the reader. Be as straight forward as possible. Also be terse. Web visitors tend be impatient and like their content fed directly into their brains.

2. Write Naturally
The best way to implace a sense of intimacy and candor in your writing is to write naturally. Write how you would speak in a conversational style. This will allow the reader to enjoy your content and easily understand what you're trying to say. This is one of the easiest, yet most important small business blog tips to implement.

3. Write Often and Respond to Comments
Regular blog posting on your small business blog is a reflection of your dedication. Update your blog frequently. Daily updates are best, but do update at least twice a week. Updating often has two major benefits. First, it provides your blog with a continuous inflow of fresh content that will entertain recurring visitors to your blog. Second, search engines like blogs what are updated regularly with unique content. They will give your blog a higher ranking as a result.

Mere writing is not enough. All blogs have the ability for the readers to post comments regarding your written content. Listen to them. This is a good chance to socialize with a potential client and listen to their comments and feedback. Show them you care. Lots of companies conduct expensive surveys just to get a feel of what their customers want. Your small business blogs allow you conduct surveys for free. It is up to you to phrase your content correctly that will result in the feedbacks you're looking for.

Now all this writing and responding daily make sound like a daunting task, but it really isn't. Remember that blogs are not the place to be formal. Just maintain reasonably good grammar and write in a simple, straight-forward style and you will be fine. It should take at most half an hour per day, and less as you get more experience writing. If it helps motivate you, assign a monetary value to your writing. Every 100 words is equivalent to say, $1 plus lots and lots of implied earnings for the future.

4. Promote your Blog
Just having a blog is good, but don't forget to promote your blog. A good way to do this is to read other people's blogs whose subject is related to the theme of your company. A lot of already established blogs get insanely amount of traffic daily. When you leave comments on other people's blogs, there will be an option to fill in the URL of your own blog for sharing. But please, don't abuse this feature. Leave only helpful remarks that are related to the author's writing.

5. Set up RSS feeds
Setting up RSS feeds for your small business blog allows other people to read your content without having to come visit the blog itself. They will still get all the useful content, but just in a more convenient manner. All blogging platforms have the functionality of setting up RSS feeds. Be sure to take advantage of this.

There you have it. 5 small business blog tips that could essentially revolutionize your business. Remember that content is key to any form of online success. The more you put into your blog, the more you'll get out of it.