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I remember hitting my sister the first time she read my diary. Now reading diaries is big business on the Internet called "blogging".

"Blog", short for "web log", is an online journal. So how would a journal have any effect at all on e-commerce? The same way coupons in the Sunday newspaper stimulate sales.

Blogging sites send an RSS feed to the search engines so that people searching the web can find blogs that are relevant to what they are searching. Now the entry in the journal is a rest stop on the information highway.

When a blog contains information about a particular web site, an item or brick and mortar store, it pops up in searches. A reader clicks on the blog and is open to the opinion in the blog. This type of "word of mouth" leads companies to place ads on relevant blogs to stimulate sales. Here is an example.

John Bloggerhead blogs about how much he loves his new iPhone. AAA iPhones Online sells iPhones and purchases an ad on John's blog. Rita Blogreader searches for iPhones and sees John's blog. As she reads, she is convinced that she cannot live without this wonder product. Rita clicks on AAA's ad and buys an iPhone. She thinks that it is the best product she ever purchased. John and AAA are now cashing in on blogging.

Traffic makes money. The more hits a blog gets, the more advertisers are willing to have their ads placed on the blog. E-commerce has taken its first step. Internet ads are the key source of funding for most online ventures. Readers who click through the ad and begin spending money on the advertisers web site are the second step.

Some companies and bloggers trip on the third step. Remember John? John bought an iPhone to give to his girlfriend. Two weeks later, still no iPhone. John does all the complaining customer should to get his iPhone, but XXX imitationPhone is not standing by the sale. John gets busy blogging. He goes on and on about how wretched the customer service at XXX is. He calls them thieves and warns his readers to never buy anything from XXX.

Rita has subscribed to John's blog and reads this. Since John was right about the iPhone, and store with the ad on his blog was great to her, she trusts John's blog to be truthful. She smashes the "Email Blog to a Friend" button and begins an email that will be forwarded to 2,000 people in the next 24 hours.

XXX sees a massive soar in their site visits (hits) but sees no sales. These hits are the vultures circling, information highway rubberneckers. These on-lookers will now send a stern message to XXX by refusing to shop their brick and mortar store in favor of buying online with other retailers.

And now the blogging journey is complete. A huge business adage is proven false: There is such a thing as bad ink. E-commerce is affected by blogging everyday. How much more effective would blogging about your very own website be to your e-commerce business?

Learn more about this author, Ann Marie Dwyer.
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