When I saw my first blog, I wasn't impressed.The first blogs I ever read were embarrassing tales of teenage angst better left private, political diatribes from both
rabid right and
rabid left, and jargon-filled tech rags that made my eyes glaze over
And yet everyone was talking about blogs and that I would soon be left behind if I didn't have one. But they never gave me a simple explanation of how it would benefit me. They talked about RSS - you know,
obligatory "real simple syndication" - followed by a long, boring, techie article filled with jargon that wasn't simple at all. They talked about syndicating my site, but not how that would benefit my business.
No one ever told me, "Hey, fool, listen up! How would you like a 3 or 4 line text link to your site on thousands of other sites getting you tons of traffic and backlinks up
ying-yang on all
SE's?"
If they had, trust me. I'd have been blogging my heart out!
Eventually I did start a blog simply because it was getting harder and harder to get my ezine delivered. This particular ezine delivers tips to network marketers. Now if you've had any experience with spam filters, you know that any email with
"M" word (MLM) or
"N" word (network marketing) practically lights up
scoreboard! I even tried using "M*L*M" or "net*work mark@eting." But that got old real fast. Trying to sound like a halfway intelligent professional while writing like a first grader on their first day of school just didn't cut it. I was starting to confuse even myself!
So I decided to start a blog, and then just email my list with
link to
article every week. Not only has that greatly increased
day to day traffic to my site, but I discovered a couple of interesting benefits along
way.
One big bonus was how easy it was to publish to my site. Doing things
old way, I wrote and delivered my ezine. Then I converted
article to html and FTP'd it up to my site. Then I had to download and update my article archive page. Then I had to download and update my sitemap. Then I would download my index page and add a little blurb about
new article to get it indexed faster. All told, several hours of mind-numbingly boring work.