I was sitting last night with my newborn baby girl in one hand and tried to draft ideas for new blog posts with my other hand.

Typing one handed not being my forte, I decided just to let my mind drift... thinking about the Secure-eBook customers and other fellow Internet business operators I've chatted with over the last few months.

One topic that often comes up is "blogs". Blogs are still fashionable and a lot of people are looking into ways to make their blogs profitable.

What's a blog?

A blog is a simple Web site where the author posts short articles about a certain topic. Readers can usually leave comments on a blog and initiate dialog with the blog's author and other fellow readers.

Many of my friends run blogs - a few of them have even attained a good readership.

"Eric", one of my friends said, "I think I've got a good readership... I think I have a niche subject... do you think there's a way I can make a living out of this blogging thing?"

I'm having fun with my friend, coming up with ideas about eBooks and other products that might be of interest for his blog's readers... as well as trying to pull information from him about what actually makes a good blog.

"That's funny", I though. "He has a successful blog and is looking for a product to sell to his readers... this is the reverse of the situation I'm used to."

See, many of my customers have a product to sell... and are looking into creating a blog to market it.

I happen to think it's a splendid idea!

  • Blogs are tremendous tools to create simple, community-building Web sites easily. Well, to be fair, the "easy" part is setting up the Web site - you still have to work to make a community out of it!
  • Blogs are a good way to work towards establishing you as an expert in your field. Not by simply stating your expertise - anyone can brand themselves an expert - but by actually proving it by providing relevant content to your readers.
  • Blogs are excellent to stimulate comments from your readers. This helps you build a community around you and, provided your content is up to par, it attracts relevant links - a wonderful way to attract more readers and potential customers. Not to mention all the cool ideas for new books and products that your faithful readers can provide...
  • Search engines love blogs and renewable content - and that's exactly what blogs are: very dynamic in nature... provided you update regularly.

Bottom line: I firmly believe that a blog is an excellent tool to establish yourself as an expert and make yourself visible in the online community.

Its no far stretch of the imagination to see that established experts sell more books. If that's what you're all about, you might enjoy my next few posts :)

There are many "top 5 tips" and similar articles on the Internet to help blog owners.

Over the next few weeks, I'll look at these tips for you and will give you my take on them.

So be on the lookout for tips on writing for your readers, writing for the Internet, posting regularly and building readership on this blog.

If you want to make sure you won't miss them, register to receive them by eMail or subscribe to our RSS feed with the options provided on the right!

First post will be up on Friday and will be about Writing for your readers.

See you later!
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Eric