In fact eMarketer have released some stats which show exactly how much rubbish is floating around on Twitter. The stats (August 2009) show that 40.55% of Tweets were deemed “Pointless Babble”. That with an additional 3.75% of spam and you are starting to approach a value that would make Twitter perhaps only 50% useful.

Tweets Worldwide By Content Category, August 2009

There is an upside to all this useless chatter on Twitter (and Facebook). It used to be on blogs.

This means that blogging will gain a higher reputation now that Twitter has taken much of it’s useless blog posts away. This will mean that more of the information found on blogs will actually be meaningful and therefore gain a higher ranking / reputation from search engines.

Although he does not guide you through the exact steps on how to setup your own blog, he does tell you what they are all about, different platforms that you can use, the importance of blogging, what RSS is and a little about adding social media and links.

This article is great if you want to know that little bit extra about blogs and/or if you wonder whether it is a good idea for you to start up your own blog on your website.

1. What For?
   What do you plan to use your blog for? A blog is best used to add additional information to support the content that already exists on your website. This may consist of special offers, product reviews, special occasions, informational articles, news releases etc. Do not copy the exact content that exists on your website or you will trigger a duplicate content penalty in search engines and your website rankings will decrease rather than increase.
2. How Often?
   How often do you plan on updating your blog? How often will you add new posts? In order for your blog to be successful, and by successful I mean in order for people to come back and visit it often and more importantly for search engines to rank it highly, you need to add new posts a minimum of three times per week. Ideally you should post at least five times a week. If you cannot update your blog as often as this, then it may not be worth the effort to include a blog on your website.
3. Blog Location:
   Where you put your blog is very important. Many people will setup a new account with Blogger or the like and use their space. This results in a domain such as “yourblog.blogger.com” and they will usually like to their website and vice versa. Although this is a start, it is not the best start. Instead your new blog should be hosted on your own space and should be located as either a subdomain of your own website or as a subfolder. So ideally what you want is something like “www.your-web-address.com/blog/” or “blog.your-web-address.com”.
4. Blog Name:
   If your blog is hosted on your own space then “blog” is the most common term used for ease of use. If it is hosted on the blog systems URL, then it is best to use descriptive keywords seperated by hyphens and limit it to about three words maximum. So if you sell HP printers for example you could use the domain “hp-printers.blogger.com”, otherwise, your own URL should have your most important keywords in it and therefore “blog” should be sufficient.
5. Blog Plan:
   To keep your blog up to date it is best to have a plan in place of when you will update the blog as well as what topics you will update it with. Plan what topic you will post on each day of the week to ensure that you have enough content to write about. With a plan in place you can also schedule blog posts, writing them in advance.