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Are you thinking of starting a business blog? If you are, then one of the first and most important decisions you will have to make during the planning phase of your site, is the aspect of blog hosting.

Blog hosting generally refers to companies that provide a hosting service better suited to a blogger’s specific needs while also offering all the regular features you would normally find in a typical webhosting company. Some of these needs might include special requirements for adult blog hosting, audio blog hosting, video blog hosting and so on.

Other features of a blog hosting service allow you to install a blog software such as wordpress, typepad, b2evolution, nucleus, pmachine or lifetype directly from your hosting control panel.

Another benefit of using an exclusive blog hosting service, may be that popular blog hosting providers already rank highly in search engine results and can thus give your blog exposure to a greater and wider audience faster because of factors like their authority and the automatic encoding already included in their service.

When researching blog hosting services look for sites that offer blog hosting comparison charts, where the charts are divided into categories (e.g. starting with cheap blog hosting options and moving up towards full-featured hosting packages), as well as information on the main blog hosting platform differences you can expect.

Free Blog Hosting | Cheap Blog Hosting Solutions

You’ll find there are quite a large number of companies that offer extremely cheap or free blog hosting services, like Blogster. Probably the most popular free blog hosting service available is offered by Wordpress, which lets you to create a blog for free on their wordpress.com domain. This is where things can become a little confusing for some, since Wordpress also offers a downloadable set of files from their .org website, for people who wish to host their blogs in their own servers.

In fact, many people are also confused when it comes to deciding whether they should opt for hosting a blog on their own site or hosting it in one of the major blog hosting sites, like wordpress, movable type, blogger or livejournal, or even hosting a blog on regular web hosting services.

Although there is great appeal in using a free blog hosting service or cheap blog hosting solution to increase your profit margin if you’re just starting out and your budget is tight, you should be aware that free blog hosting services are popular, but they are more suited for individuals who simply want to start a personal blog – an online journal to share their own thoughts and what’s happening in their lives, or even start a simple blog to test ways of making some extra money (e.g. as an affiliate marketer creating product reviews).

Paid Blog Hosting

Despite the fact that there are several excellent services available that offer free blog hosting services, however, more and more bloggers are opting to use a paid blog hosting service. Generally for blog hosting, a good choice is to look for linux web hosting services.

Business Blogs vs Blogging As A Business

For many companies and businesses, starting a blog can be an extremely effective method of promoting their products and services, interacting more closely with prospects and customers, and growing their business online faster.

Blogging, however, has also become a business on its own. Not just for work-at-home individuals doing internet marketing or affiliate marketing, but also where companies hire bloggers and freelance writers to create articles, product reviews and comparisons, search engine optimized content, etc … on a wide range of subjects (everything from consumer electronics, and game and movie reviews, to personal growth, self-help and business coaching).

Choosing a reliable blog hosting provider, therefore, is a vital factor in planning a successful business blogging career. This should be one of the first decisions you make after determining what the specific or intended purpose of your blog will be.

Another factor to consider in choosing a blog hosting provider for your site, is how well you can create, manage and market your blog, not just in terms of things like having a basic knowledge of web languages like html, web terminologies and blog features (e.g. RSS, widgets, plugins, etc.), and a basic understanding of different encoding methods and internet marketing techniques to promote your blog, but also the amount of time and resources you can devote to growing your blog.

While surfing the net, I found a great article entitled “Blog Hosts – A Short Tutorial” by Art Luff that explains blogging and blog hosting in very simple terms. I have reproduced the article for you here below:

Blog Hosts – A Short Tutorial

Apart from the chat rooms, instant messengers and electronic mails created for communication and dialogue beyond turf are the emerging innovations that help man build opportunities for interaction. The need for a personalized and human face aspect of building online communities is slowly changing the technological landscape of the Internet.

Blogs / weblogs or blogging are the newest gift of Internet technology to people all over the world. These are updated posts, crop up entries or personalized life snippets, of mundane or bizarre in nature. For most, a blog is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal meant to be shared in an online community. Blog site is a place where bloggers can publish anything; his thoughts, feelings, photos, special events, experiences, comments on issues and so on. It is more of an online diary with videos, links, documents, newsletters and opinions on just about any topics you are interested.

Blogs are made to welcome the insights and opinions of all and therefore, should not be written to sound intimidating and too formal. This kind of blog is a sure way to put off the readers. In the basics of blogging, conversational tone would be more appropriate to reach the desired audience.

Blogging is all about individuals reaching out to other individuals. Having a blog has its own set of advantages:

* Freedom of Expression. If you want people to hear you out and give their own opinion, this is the best way to create a line of communication;

* Networking is at its best. Having a blog is a good platform for exchanging genuine ideas from consumers to you as marketer of a certain product. Sound opinion and point of view is better than just showing the price quote;

* Excellent advertising platform. Blogging is a new way to advertise products, a refreshing change from the traditional advertising outlets and it is cost-effective.

* Gauging public opinion on products and services. The key is nice and catchy titles with new ideas presented in your content. This is an assurance of quick and repeated responses from your readers. Blogs is an excellent spot for the exchange of ideas between the seller and the consumer. Good for measuring public opinion regarding services and products, even political and business matters alike.

* Useful tool for internal communication. This will help your company to build a knowledge-based community of employees. Also good for harnessing employee relations and identifying human resource issues in advance.

* Other benefits like search engine optimization (SEO) will help your blogs to be seen often by as many people as you wish. This is very good exposure for your products and services.

Many blog hosting services are available on the Internet. But the basic question is which one of the services will be the best to start off your business blog program? Business people are usually clueless to recent technological innovations which would help them maximize their marketing potentials. For these beginners, it is best to study first the services offered by blog hosts. An ineffective business blogging program may damage marketing opportunities instead of enriching them.

A company may decide to do the following depending on its capacity and needs:

1) Host their own blog service,

2) Pay someone else to host the service, or

3) Setup a blog aggregator page and ask the employees to select their blog hosting services individually. There are paid and free services available for individuals.

For business blogs, they are required to have the latest blogging features; if not, this will prevent them from maximizing their marketing, public relations and SEO potentials.

Keep in mind that blogs should have the following basic essentials:

COMMENTS. Welcoming comments provide opportunity for dialogue. In business blogs, they are a good customer feedback mechanism. This helps develop better customer relations based from loyalty and trust. Blogging is an innovative way to converse with your customers.

TRACKBACK. This helps in maximizing company and product exposure. Through this service, consumers can get back to you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of locating you. If your blog is popular in a specific online community chances are links going back to your blog site are everywhere online, other blog sites or even websites.

CATEGORIES AND TAGS. These both help in classifying blog searches for ease of navigation and on site search. Categories act as libraries because it classifies posts by subject matter such as business, distance learning, e-commerce, online auctions, etc. Tags, help in the classification, especially in the blog search engine Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs about certain topics of interest by just clicking the tags.

RSS FEED. Really Simple Syndication is the feed from your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected through the various newsreaders and aggregators.

If your company is to establish a business blogging program, considerable options should be made available by the hosting companies shortlisted for the services. Free blog hosting services are popular but they are much appropriate for individual online journals. Paid blog hosting services offer unlimited packages best for your company’s needs. You may want to suggest checking out some blogs that use the host first, read and examine their layout and design. Another important thing to consider is a reliable technical support the host has.

After, choosing the blog host, a team should be ready to plan the design and structure of the blog: The team should:

* create a style that meets the needs of the audience;

* establish an open, credible tone;

* schedule weekly updating of blog – ideally, a few times a week;

* include weblinks of other website and blogs;

* blog post should be in the first person;

* focus on the business blog objective; and, maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.

Remember, whatever the look, style and content found on your blog is a reflection of you and your company.

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If you are looking for affordable and reliable blog hosting, here’s the blog hosting service provider we use and recommend: Wordpress Blog Hosting.

Also, if you don’t know how to set up a blog, then check out our tutorials on how to install, set up and fully configure a blog that will help you grow your business online faster with videos and  ’step-by-step’ instructions: Start A Blog

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