Start your own blog! Start blogging! Get more traffic using Web 2.0! Use a blog for more traffic, interact, get moving!

What is a blog? A blog comes from web log - to maintain a log on the web. A blog (a contraction of the term "weblog") is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Why use a blog? A blog has more interaction with your visitors than a normal web site. One feature is the ability to leave a comment on a post. This allows visitors to take part in the blog.

Do businesses use a blog? Yes! Many businesses have realized the power of blog. It allows a business to interact more with current customers and be in touch with potential client.

What do people blog about? Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts: source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog.

What is needed for a blog? The most basic is a hosting account and blog software. The software is installed on the hosting with a database. The pages and content of a blog is not real pages but rather information added to a database. The most popular database to use is MYSQL. This is an open source database. It works well with PHP.

What is the best blog software? Wordpress was elected the best Open Source Software in 2009. For this reason and many others we make use of the wordpress package.

Some of the features include of a Wordpress Blog include:

• Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today's browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.

• No rebuilding — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.

• WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static "About" page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone. (We don't for technical mirroring reasons.)

• WordPress Links -- Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.

• WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.

• Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.

• Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.

• Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.

• Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.

• Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.

• Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.

• Typographical niceties — WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For information about the proper use of such entities see Peter Sheerin's article The Trouble With Em ’n En.

• Intelligent text formatting — If you've dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.

• Multiple authors — WordPress' highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.

• Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.

• Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

What do Social Media and Blogs have in common?

The increased interactivity with visitors and the ability to share content are the main associations between social media and blogs. It is the ability to share information that makes blogs an ideal marketing tool. This ability creates the potential to have a highly successful blog. Search engines are also favouring blogs and make them part of their rankings?

Are Blogs found on Search Engines

Blogs have the unique feature that they are found in normal web site searches, as well as specialized blog searches. This is almost a double the impact from one web site.

Is a Blog a Web Site?

Yes a blog is a web site. It is a type of web site that has been developed to act as an online diary - thus, the name of a blog is derived from web log - a log on the web.

When will I need my own blog?

A blog has work involved. Most of the time it is more fun than a web site. It could also be more serious. There are free blog options available. However, you have no control over if, or when the free blog will become obsolete or stopped. This has happened many times in the past. The impact is you lose all the work you did on the blog. - more specifically any page rank and traffic. Therefore it is a good idea to have your own blog, on your own domain. This ensures you are in control of the blog.

Get your own blog here right now! The offer includes:

• Wordpress installed and configured, ready to blog with all the features listed above.
• 10 Pages or posts of initial content
• Unique design according to your current brand colors. This will be inline with your current brand
• 1 Hour online training on using your blog effectively
• A complete blogging platform
• Social Media Ready
• Search Engine Friendly Links enabled
• Main Keywords for your blog