This blog is now on technorati…please bookmark it! Thank you!

If you’re are at next week’s NAIFA conference, come by booth #314 and say hello to Nick and Philip! They’re offering a special NAIFA promo for agents who sign up for our lead program at the conference. I hear they’re also giving away a pretty swanky looking digital picture frame to a lucky agent who comes by the booth.

Have a great weekend!

We just started a Babies at Work program. It’s a new company policy that allows parents to bring their infant to work until s/he is 8 months old or old enough to crawl - whichever comes first. Ambrosha, director of agent services, is our first parent to participate.

Read all about our program by clicking here…

To learn more about starting a Babies at Work program, click here.

No. We haven’t signed on to do a TV show about our new look. While I wish I could say Ty Pennington came out to visit us, this extreme makeover was web-based. Sorry Ty. Maybe next time.

You may have noticed we’ve changed our colors and updated our site with a fresh, new look, which should also make our site easier to navigate.

Needless to say, many exciting things have been happening at HometownQuotes.

Keep checking back for more news, tips and offers. We’ll be blogging on a more regular basis now that our new look has been unveiled. Let us know if you have any tips or suggestions for future blog posts.

Happy Wednesday!

Blogging?? Huh?

Are you new to blogging? The blogosphere? Not really sure what all the ruckus is about?

We’re going to take a few moments to brief you on the benefits of blogging…

Basically, a blog (short for web log) is a web site that is updated on a fairly regular basis by a blogger (author of the blog).

The phrase “fairly regular basis” is used loosely in this situation. Fairly regular to one blogger may mean once every few weeks, while others may update their blogs daily or the moment a news-breaking event occurs.

Some blogs are personal, resembling a journal. Other blogs have themes. Some companies maintain blogs.

What are the benefits of a blog?

George Siemens, in The Art of Blogging, offers the following uses/benefits of blogs…

Uses for blogging
As an emerging tool, blogging uses have still not been completely explored. Some current uses:

• Knowledge sharing and knowledge management
• Customer service
• Interactive journalism
• Communication
• Self-expression
• Learning
• Self-marketing
• Campaigning/social reform
• Community building
• Experience tracking
• Storytelling

Benefits
Benefits of blogging are numerous (which explains its rapid growth!). An overriding benefit is the democratization of information. In classic models, knowledge flow was “stopped” and administered by news sources (paper, magazines, TV). Many of the benefits of blogging are listed above in “Uses for Blogging”…other benefits include:

• Fostering the fringe - ideas are evaluated based on merit - not on source of origin.

• Filtering - ideas with merit are filtered through various blogs. Significant thoughts or posts receive multiple-links and spread viral-like across the blogosphere.

• Multiple perspectives - one-sided perspectives of newspapers are replaced by passionate debates exploring virtually every facet of an idea or concept.

• Barrier elimination - society is about barriers - actual or unspoken. For example, I don’t run in the same circle as Bill Gates - a socio-economic barrier (at the absolute minimum!). In society, this generally means that I do not have the benefit of Mr. Gates’ wisdom…blogging, however changes that.

• Free flow - any idea can be expressed…and accessed by any one. The process of blogging separates good ideas from poor ideas. The process itself has built in quality control - try that in traditional media!

• Real time - discussions and interactions happen right NOW. Waiting for tomorrow’s newspaper or radio program seems like an eternity compared to real time blogging.

• Links and connections - the complexity of an information heavy society requires specialization. Yet specialization is futile if a process is not created to link specialties. Blogging serves this purpose extremely well. Disparate fields of interest and thought are brought together (and dissected) in the machinations of bloggers.

We hope you will check the HometownQuotes blog frequently for sales tips and industry/company news. Our hope is to help you build your business and always provide a healthy dose of inspiration to close one more lead.

Happy blogging!