On an e-mail Google sent to users of its Video property, the search engine giant announced that they will be completing their video search engine and distribution product’s retirement by May 13. This comes as a surprise for most of us to find out that Google Video is still up, even after Google purchased YouTube back in 2006.
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A blog’s sidebar practically summarizes the content and all the features offered by the blog. In essence, it showcases what you have to offer in one or two neat, unobtrusive columns, depending on your chosen blog layout or template. It plays a large part in upping a blog’s usability, improving the user experience to give your visitors easy access to different sections within your blog without having to navigate their browsers away from your domain.
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Aside from organically spreading through social media sites and SEO-ing their links offsite, one of the best ways individual blog posts can get attention from the Internet is by optimizing your actual content. This involves creating original write ups intended for both human readers and search engines to go through and then polishing them with relevant images. Depending on their quality, context and relevance, images will definitely help magnetize both your existing audience and attract new, untapped markets to read your piece.
Unfortunately, not all bloggers are created equal and some may lack the creative skills and/or the proper equipment to craft illustrations, render animated elements or shoot photos of their own. Unsurprisingly, its vastness, the Internet, is just a browser click away to aid you.
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I once had a lengthy conversation with a mentor who was considering starting a blog for his financial services company. His concerns naturally revolved around whether blogging would pay off in sales and conversions for his firm. It’s always difficult to say what direct and indirect impact a blog may have on someone’s profession or on the amount of business a company gets, because the results of a blog are largely dependent on the amount of time and effort the writer is able to put into it. Additionally, some bloggers don’t do it for the money—sometimes writers just want to establish their personal brand online or promote their book, for example, and they may not have the ability to measure financial conversions directly.
Two things are certain: a blog definitely increases an organization or individual’s “findability” and, if used properly, can also establish the writer as an important authority in his or her field.
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Blogs are typically very inexpensive to set up, they are easy for beginners to maintain and update, incredibly powerful when it comes to amassing search engine traffic, and fun for the publishers and users alike.
The rise of blogging even prompted Problogger Darren Rowse to ask if the conventional business website is dead!
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