Blogs and Business

Posted On: 2006-01-17Length: 60:00

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Hello! This is Anita Campbell your host of Small Business Trends radio. I'm so glad you could join us today. As usual, we have another fabulous guest today, and we'll be introducing her in just a few minutes. She happens to be a personal friend of mine, Barbara Payne, of reallygoodfreelancewriter.com, and she's going to be talking with us today about business blogging and specifically about business blogging for small businesses. So we'll be meeting Barbara very shortly.

But before we do, at this time in the show we always do a segment called Today's Trend. And so in honor of Barbara being with us today to talk about business blogging, today's trend is on "trends in business blogging for 2006." The number of blogs has grown exponentially. Technorotty.com, a tracking service, says that there over 25 million blogs today. And businesses of course have caught on to blogs, and as the blogosphere as it's called, has grown, so has our expectations about what we expect from small business blogs. And so our trends for 2006 really reflect a raising of the bar, if you will, a little on what we expect. So I've got ten top trends for you. I'm going to go through these trends very quickly. I will also have something up on the Small Business Trends website later that you can refer to, which will be in much more depth on these trends.

But the first trend is: design matters. Meaning that we're going to see more custom designs of small business blogs in 2006.

Second trend: blog sites abound. What that means is blogs and websites are now getting closer together and we're seeing sort of a hybrid, something that some people call a blogsite, which is the combination of a website and a blog all in one.

The third trend is navigation gets better. Let's face it. Your average blog has pretty primitive navigation when you compare it to other kinds of web sites. But that's changing. Blogs are just getting better navigation, better ability to move around within them and search.

Trend number four is easy administration...