The Importance of Blogging/RSS to Your Home Business

by: Stephen Wright
Copyright 2005 Stephen WrightIn the 'good old days' (which now was only about three years ago!!) you used to keep in-touch with your customers using phone calls, email messages and face to face meetings. Nowadays the world has changed. People expect even more frequent updates, yet it's nearly impossible to meet with every business contact on a regular basis.Thankfully, blogging has come to the rescue. Setting up a blog on your web site - and having an associated RSS feed - means you can keep in constant touch with your clients and potential customers.Plus you don't have to email them and they can get your latest news without having to visit your web site. All this without the normal or typical cost of autoresponders and expensive email programs. So how does this all work?A blog is really a fancy name for a web page that gets updated regularly. It's nothing special. There are several methods of writing 'blogs', but they are nothing more than computer programs which allow you to easily update a web page. Far and away the easiest way to start a blog is with a website called blogger.com.However, for keeping in touch with your customers, RSS is the key. RSS stands for Really Simple. Syndication. What this means is that your blog can be automatically delivered to people who want to read it - you don't have to send it to them and neither do they have to come and collect it. All they need is the address of your RSS Feed and their RSS Newsreader can do the job for them. There are several RSS readers available and new web browsers incorporate the ability to read RSS feeds and keep them updated.Whenever you add new content to your blog, the RSS Feed automatically gets updated in everyone's Reader program or web browser. That means you are guaranteed to be able to keep in touch with clients and prospects. You don't have to do anything other than produce the content. Equally, you don't face the problems of email filters and anti-spam programs blocking your email. Furthermore, people tend to read RSS Feeds because they have subscribed to them whereas they tend to ignore non urgent emails.As you can see, there are several advantages to Blogs and RSS Feeds. But it doesn't stop there. Search engines love them. All the big search engines (such as Google) are including RSS/Blog content as bonus items in their scoring formulas these days. That's because blogs provide fresh and new content - precisely what searchers are looking for. Hence the search engines are actively pushing blogs higher up the search engine ranking. This means if you don't have a blog for your business, you are seriously reducing your chances of a high search engine ranking. You need a blog nowadays to get noticed by the search engines.So, blogging (and RSS feed) is essential. Not only does it improve your web presence, it also means you can keep in touch with clients and prospects more easily. And all the marketing research you can find will tell you that keeping in regular touch with your customers is an important component in gaining new business. So get blogging I say!