Even people who don't own a computer know what blogging is. 
Everyone is talking about it. Heck, even the Doonesbury comic 
strip ran a few panels on the subject. Anna Kournikova even has 
a blog for crying out loud!

But did you know that there is a secret benefit to blogging 
that has NOTHING to do with the subject matter? In fact, you 
could blog on about the sex life of the Tasmanian fruit fly and 
still reap big rewards.

Yep, just like nearly everything else on the Internet, there's 
money to be made with blogging IF you know the secret...

OK, OK. I'll tell you, but first let's take a quick ride in the 
wayback machine and see how blogging came to be as popular as 
it is today.

Back at the dawn of the World Wide Web, new web sites were a 
rarity. Geekie guys and girls struggled with the new technology 
and the launch of a new page, A new web site was practically a 
media event. In the early days of the Internet, each new page 
was a cause for celebration.

In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee, the scientist generally credit with 
inventing the World Wide Web (and you thought it was Al Gore, 
I'll bet), created the first What's New page. Later, another 
Internet legend, Marc Andreesen, put up his own page. Both of 
these men created hot links to all of the new pages springing 
up on the net.

As the World Wide Web came into its own, a new breed of 
programmer, called a Web Master (because they had mastered the 
World Wide Web) created their own pages that contained 
suggestions on cool web sites to visit. Because they didn't 
list every single new web site, just the ones that they thought 
were interesting, they were said to have filtered the net. In 
1998, Jorn Barger, a bit of an odd duck, even by Internet 
pioneer standards, first used the term 'weblog' to describe his 
blog called 'Robot Wisdom'.

As bloggers banded together to form communities, people sought 
easier and faster ways to create blogs. As a result, automated 
and easy to use blogging programs such as Blog-In-A-Box were 
developed so that even a half-dazed wallabie can put up a blog 
in between munching on stalks of grass.

But why in the world would you WANT to run a blog if you have 
an income-generating site?

Surely your customer isn't interested in reading about your 
trials and tribulations of the daily business grind, right? 
Probably not. However, if you can build a blog that catches 
their attention, such as where the fish are biting if you sell 
fishing supplies, they WILL come. And so will the surprise that 
I mentioned earlier.

You see, among your visitors to your blog will be a software 
program known as a spider. Not just any spider, mind you, but 
the granddaddy of all search engine spiders -- the Google 
spider. You see, Google LOVES to index blogs. Yep, it's true. 
And that, as soon-to-be inmate Martha would say, is a good 
thing.

In a nutshell, Google loves pages that have links to other 
pages. Blogs link to all kinds of stuff. Google loves pages 
that are linked FROM other pages. A good blog gets lots of 
links to it as loyal readers tell everyone they know to put 
links to their favorite blog on their web site.

Finally, Google loves fresh content. An active blog's content 
can change minute by minute, but at least it's almost guaranteed 
to change daily.

So, if you can find a decent subject to blog about, and you can 
get a blog up and running quickly and easily, you just might be 
amazed at what happens to your site's page rank in a few weeks 
or more.

Listen, with tools like Blog-In-A-Box available to get you 
going, there really is no reason NOT to get blogging!

Good luck from a couple of fellow bloggers.