A blog is the best tool in your Internet marketing arsenal. Why? Search engines spider (check for updates) blogs more often than the average website. The reason for this is that blogs provide a continuous stream of new content from the author plus reader comments.

Three Big Reasons Why You Should Blog

Reason #1: A blog gives your book more exposure on the web, thanks to pinging services (pingomatic.com) that alert the search engine spiders and newsfeeds every time you post a new entry. You also have the option of submitting your site to the top blog and RSS feed directories for an even wider exposure for your book. Another resource is Blog Explosion, which is a traffic exchange service. For every blog you read, someone else will read yours.

With a website, you are limited to submitting your site yourself or paying submission service to do it for you. Then you can only submit once a month without any guarantee that your site will get listed. Submitting more than once will run you the risk of getting blacklisted as a spammer.

Reason #2: A blog not only establishes your expertise in your genre/topic, but allows you to build one-on-one relationships with your readers. Your blog is an excellent tool to build your fan base. Take the time to answer your reader’s comments. Once you develop a relationship with them, the more likely they will buy your book. If they like your book, well . . . need I say more? I was surprised to find that very few bloggers take the time to network with their readers.

Also, search the major blog directories for blogs that interest you and participate in their discussions. Enter the URL of your blog or website in your signature. Then offer intelligent feedback on the topic being discussed. Don’t pop in with a “hi, bye” comment. That’s considered comment spam, which is frowned upon in the blogging community.

You can also use your blog to build a subscriber base for your email (or snail mail) newsletter. Or, you your blog up to be an online newsletter, posting articles as well as blog entries. With email spam so rampant, this is the best way to go. The search engine spiders will love you. Your readers will love you. Everybody will be happy.

Reason #3: The more your blog grows in popularity, the more inbound links you’ll get from other bloggers/readers. If you link your website to your blog, this will help boost the search engine ranking for your website, which will give more readers to the opportunity to buy your book.

How long will it take to build your blog’s popularity? I’ve read that it takes about a year to build a solid readership. That’s the average. Your blog may take off . . . or fail altogether.

Don’t start a blog with the sole purpose of sell, sell, sell. That’s the guaranteed failure formula. Another guarantee for failure is spending too much time blogging and not enough time writing your book. I spend an average of five hours per week on my blogs, dividing my time between writing/posting content and promoting it.

The key to a blog’s success is content, useful and valuable content that your readers will benefit from. Allow them to get to know you, and take the time to get to know them. Find out what they want and give it to them. That’s the success formula.

About the Author

Deborah Woehr is the founder and editor of The Writers Buzz, a community blog with the sole aim of helping writers promote their books online and off. You can visit her website at http://thewritersbuzz.com

Q: I am an executive at a large company and in our industry we are seeing a trend wherein smaller companies are gaining market share at an alarming rate. Our CEO believes the reason for this is that smaller companies are more prone to innovation and more entrepreneurial than larger companies. He has instructed me to form a committee to study this trend and make recommendations on how we should deal with it. I m an executive, not an entrepreneur. Any advice would be very much appreciated.
– Name withheld by request

A: Your question reminds me of the time my teenage daughter tricked me into doing a chemistry project for her under the pretense of asking for my advice. But, daddy, you re just so smart The result was that her/my experiment got a C instead of an A and almost started a fire in the chemistry lab. Reckon daddy wasn t so smart after all: at least that was the opinion of the principal, her teacher, the fire marshal, and ultimately, my manipulative, yet adoring daughter.

However, you re in luck, Mr. X, because I know considerably more about innovation and entrepreneurship than mixing combustible chemicals.

Judging by your use of the buzzwords innovation and entrepreneurial I d bet your CEO s opinion (which I believe is dead-on, by the way) may have come from the Conference Board’s CEO Challenge 2004, which reported that 87 f the 540 global businesses surveyed cited innovation and enabling entrepreneur- ship as priorities for their companies. Furthermore, 31 f companies surveyed considered these issues to be of the “greatest concern.

FYI, the Conference Board is an 88 year-old, not-for-profit, global, independent membership organization that conducts research, convenes conferences, makes forecasts, assesses trends, publishes information and analysis, and brings executives together to learn from one another.

What many Conference Board members are learning is that they are getting their big corporate behinds kicked by smaller, more innovative, entrepreneurial companies that are not burdened by the need to have a meeting once an hour or to bury every great idea under a mound of red tape. You said it yourself: your CEO told you to set up a committee to study the trend. You might as well paint a big black hole on the wall and have everyone take turns trying to run through it. Committees and superfluous meetings are the biggest wasters of time and money in the corporate world and rarely produce anything even remotely resembling results and they are indicative of why smaller companies are gaining ground on their larger brethren.

The fact that innovation and entrepreneurship run rampant in smaller companies, but is often suppressed in larger companies is nothing new. Management guru Peter Drucker first addressed the issue in his 1985 book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Drucker wrote that one of the most often-asked questions in many a 1985 boardroom was, How can we overcome the resistance to innovation that plagues most organizations?

The question they should have been asking in 1985 and the question that you should be asking today is not only how can you overcome the resistance to innovation and entrepreneurship within your own organization, but how can you make your organization more receptive to innovation and more open to entrepreneurial practices?

Therein lies the key to your recommendation. To compete with the small boys, the big boys must create an environment in which innovation and entrepreneurship run rampant. Everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the executives to the managers to each and every employee must become innovation generators and entrepreneurial thinkers. You must create an environment where shooting for the stars is the norm instead of the shooting down of ideas.

To put it simply, you must turn your lumbering giant Goliath into a raging horde of Davids. Now I don t mean that you should arm your employees with slings and rocks and turn them loose on upper management, although that could be really fun to watch. What I m talking about is turning your organization into an innovative, entrepreneurial machine where everyone from the CEO to the janitor works to make the company more competitive and profitable.

One reason that large organizations are resistant to innovation is that everyone is so busy just keeping the wheels in motion and putting out fires and dealing with the day-to-day drama of big business that no one has the time to even think about innovation. And Heaven forbid they have to think like entrepreneurs. No one has time to even consider the opportunities that innovation and entrepreneurial thinking might bring. They are too busy to see that their product is becoming dated and their market share is becoming smaller. They are too busy to see the smaller, more innovative companies speeding up in their rear view mirrors. Competitors in your rearview mirror are larger than they appear

So, here s how you begin. First off, you should develop an innovation plan that outlines how the process of innovation will work within your entire organization. If someone has an idea for a new product, for example, the innovation plan would explain the process by which their idea should be brought to the attention of management and how it can be shared with others throughout the organization. The plan should also detail how entrepreneurial employees will be rewarded if their idea is accepted and further rewarded if their idea brings future profits to the company. Here is where most big companies drop the ball. They take a great idea, brush aside the person who thought of it, then hand the idea off to upper management so it can be buried under a mound of red tape, never to be heard from again.

This is a key point: to make innovation work you must reward the innovators monetarily or by letting them take a key role in bringing their idea to fruition. It s my opinion that you should do both: pay them and promote them.

Secondly, innovation and entrepreneurship must be promoted within your organization as the norm, not the exception. There must be a clear understanding that the best way to preserve and perpetuate the organization is through innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. If you can get everyone in the organization thinking like entrepreneurs, innovation will soon run rampant.

This is how you create the raging horde of Davids.

Next week we ll talk more about how large companies can become more innovative and entrepreneurial so they can compete with those pesky little guys.

Here s to your success!

About the author:
Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net, an online organization dedicated to the success of online and eBay entrepreneurs http://www.prosperityandprofits.comhttp://www.dropshipwholesale.nethttp://www.TimKnox.com