As providers of blogging services it goes without saying that we’re super-keen on the idea of every business including a blog as part of their online strategy. Even if you’re not going to ask Write My Site to write it for you, here are the top five reasons why a blog is a great idea for your business:

1)    You can establish yourself as an authority in your industry

Christophe Langlois is a good example of this. His blog, Visible-Banking.com, is the leading independent blog focused on social media in banking and financial services. As a result, Christophe is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and other high profile events. At Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing conference last week, Christophe said none of this would have happened without his blog.

2)    Business blogging is a great way to gain a following of customers (and future customers)

If your content is interesting, people will come back to read more of it. Simple.

3)    The search engines – especially Google – love sites with regularly updated content.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) basically boils down to three things: one is having your site built in an SEO friendly way (talk to your web developer); the second is getting other sites to link to your site; and the third is fresh, unique content. A blog is the perfect way to achieve two out of these three aims: a good blog will not only provide the search engines with the regular content they’re looking for, it will also generate inbound links when other websites refer to your articles.

4)    Business blogs provide regular opportunities to use your keywords

Look at how many times you can see the words “business blog” in this article. It’s one of our keywords and as soon as this business blog post (see?) goes live, the post and its keywords will be indexed by Google.

5)    Blogs give you a great excuse to direct people towards your website

Write an interesting article for your business blog and then link to it from Twitter, Ecademy and online forums. It’s the perfect way to bring your website to the attention of potential customers.

A blog that was set up to encourage young people to vote in the European parliamentary elections has been declared a huge success. The Think About It blogging competition, which targeted voters aged 18-25, received more than 2.7 million hits between its launch in February and the elections on June 4th.

The blog proved even more popular than EU Tube, the European Union’s online television channel which received 2.2 million hits in the same period. 81 bloggers from across the EU used the website to post 600 articles about European issues.

The European Journalism Centre (ECJ) and the European Commission, which funded the competition, expressed their delight at the outcome: “We never expected it to work so well,” said Wilfried Rütten, director of the ECJ. “The success can be seen in the site’s statistics: 2,000 comments, 5,000 trackbacks from external websites, 14,000 Google links and millions of visitors over a short time.”

Ruth Spencer, the associate editor of Think About It, said the blog had made European politics accessible to a younger audience. “This was a complete experiment because nothing like this has ever been attempted in Europe before. Our expectations were non-existent.”

Historically it has proved difficult to persuade young people to exercise their right to vote. In 2004, 67% of under-25s did not vote, compared with 54% of the electorate as a whole.

Statistics for voters aged under-25 in the 2009 election have yet to be revealed, but a YouGov poll published two days before the elections found that only 28% of 18-24 year-olds said they planned to vote. It remains to be seen whether the blogging project made a significant difference.

A website writer has claimed that the English language now has one million words. Paul Payack is the chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor, which accepts as a word any coinage that enjoys sufficiently wide usage.

According to website writer Mr. Paypack, the one millionth English word is – appropriately enough – “Web 2.0”. Its official definition is “the next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you”.

Other recent words to enter the lexicon of the Global Language Monitor include hybrid words in Chinglish (Chinese English), Hinglish (Hindi English), and Spanglish (Spanish English), as well as Hollywords (terms created by the film industry), computer jargon and words created by website writers.

Not all sources agree with the GLM’s definition of a word. The Oxford English Dictionary, as of 2005, contained only 301,100 main entries. Even when combination words, derivatives and phrases are included, the total is still just 616,500 word-forms.

This hasn’t put off website writer Paypack, however. “The Million Word milestone brings to notice the coming of age of English as the first truly global language,” he said.

Mr Payack estimates that new words are entering the language at the rate of 14.7 words every day. The explosion in website writing has revived the possibilities for independent word-coinage in a way last seen in Shakespeare’s time, when English was modernising and words were being invented at an unprecedented rate. Shakespeare himself used 24,000 words, of which approximately 1,700 were his own inventions.

Mr Payack and his team of website writers use what they call a Predictive Quantities Indicator to assess whether a usage qualifies as a word: each contender is analysed according to depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage). The formula also takes account of how many times a word has appeared in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, blogs, and social media such as Twitter and YouTube. Words must be cited at least 25,000 times to qualify.

Three other words almost beat “Web 2.0” to the one million mark: “slumdog” (made popular by the film Slumdog Millionaire), meaning a child slum dweller; “Jai Ho!” a Hinglish expression signifying a major accomplishment; and “n00b”, a mixture of letters and zeros which is a mocking term for an online gamer newbie.

New research published by Ofcom today predicts that 75% of UK households will be online by the end 2009.
Currently, 70% of UK adults have internet access at home: the remaining 30% fall into two main groups – the self-excluded and the financially-excluded.

Self-excluded people tend to be older, retired, adults – indeed, 61% of this group said they have never used a computer. Among the financially-excluded were a section of adults (30%) who said the internet was too expensive. 27% of respondents in the financially-excluded group said the cost of a computer was their main reason for not having internet at home. In addition, concern about not being able to afford monthly internet payments was cited as a factor that prevented some respondents from having internet access at home.

The 5% of UK adults who intend to get the internet in the next six months are more likely to be younger and working, use the internet already outside of the home and have children.

The main reasons cited for getting internet access were to source information (36%) followed by social networking (26%), keeping up with technology (25%) and because friends and family recommended it (25%).

Today’s findings will soon be followed up by the Government’s forthcoming Digital Britain report, which will explore the concept of universal broadband access. Ofcom’s Partner for Strategy and Market Development, Peter Phillips, said: “Broadband is becoming increasingly important to peoples’ ability to participate in the economy and society.

“The research shows some genuine opportunities for policy makers wishing to drive take up of internet services. But it also shows that some creativity will be required if we wish to capture the imaginations of those who have yet to engage with the benefits the internet may bring.”

PPC management agencies have gone back to the drawing board when it comes to keyword analysis. They are noticing a shift in the keywords that are driving consumer online spending habits.

Siddharth Shah of Efficient Frontier, for example, has noticed that loans and lending related keywords are not performing very well in the current economic climate, even though keywords such as “credit,” “lending” and “mortgage” have seen a huge jump in impression volume.

More searches and more traffic does not necessarily lead to more sales, of course – as we’re always telling our own clients! In fact, a large number of impressions and clicks without the subsequent conversions spell very bad news for organisations relying on PPC to drive enquiries and sales, because every ad that a user clicks on costs the organisation money. More consumers may be searching for financial information simply because the topic is high profile, rather than because they are interested – or qualified – to purchase a financial product.

So, which popular keywords are resulting in sales? According to Shah, the travel industry has seen a spike in search volumes for “cheap” and “discount” related keywords – these are increasing their impression volume and monetizing well. Keywords associated with more luxurious travel (e.g. “cruise” and “hotel”) are producing a lower conversion rate than they were last year. Furthermore, the “hotel” searches included several thousand combinations of hotel with location names and hotel brand names. Shah told Search Engine Land: “This indicates a shift in consumer thought patterns. People are less brand focused, and more value conscious. Clearly frugality is in.”