So you’ve heard that having a blog is a good idea for your business, but are you sure WHY it’s important? Understanding how blogs operate and how to use them for your business will give you great payoffs for your investment of time and energy. Not using your blog effectively will simply waste this fantastic resource.
WHY SHOULD I ‘BLOG FOR BUSINESS’?
Blogs are a great method for giving your business credibility. Whether you post about industry news, recommend links to related topics or post valuable inside information or experiences, your audience will view you not only as a commercial venue but as a business interested in its community.
You can also use your blog to build traffic to your commercial site and to build a list of interested prospects. All of these issues are solid tools for marketing your product or service online.
WHY BLOGGING IS GREAT FOR CUSTOMERS
Blogs are not viewed the same as a typical website or sales page. The postings are often less formal or are presenting readers with interesting tidbits that entertain or inform about your topic or industry. Regular postings that draw the attention of your target market will build interest in your product and establish you as an ‘expert’ as well as create a good relationship with your prospects.
Your prospects can easily receive notice of your recent postings right in their email inbox. By regularly posting relevant information your prospects will look to you first when needing the service or product you provide.
Since many blogs offer readers the ability to post comments you immediately provide an opportunity for feedback or questions. This can clue you in to what your market needs or thinks, which can quickly be responded to in your next post.
BLOGGING FOR TRAFFIC
There are several methods of traffic buildings with blogs. One method is through the blog provider. Often the provider offers readers the option of searching for blogs with a word or phrase. Using that phrase in your blog or title will bring interested visitors.
The other method is through search engines. Search engines love fresh content and blogs make this easy. Simply ‘ping’ your blog to other media (this announces your update) and the search engines will pick it up. Using commonly searched words and phrases may give you the top ranking you were looking for. You can also link to your business website with the phrase and increase traffic directly to your sales page.
Finally, you can add an RSS feature to your blog. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows other websites to run the content from your blog. Every time you make a post the information will be automatically updated on sites featuring your RSS. This is attractive to sites with topics related to yours since they will benefit from the fresh content and you will benefit from the exposure.
If you haven’t jumped on the blogging bandwagon yet you’ve been missing out on one of the cheapest and smartest marketing tools available. Creating a blog is easy and profitable – so make yours today!
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With the increasing number of blogs on the Web, it is becoming very difficult to differentiate between blogging websites. So when you go about setting up successful blogging websites it is important to realize that you will need to have more than a unique theme. This is also true if you are trying to make existing blogging websites more successful. A unique theme is a good start, but you have to provide blog content that will deliver great content within a unique theme that appeals to a specific audience in order to achieve success. It is only after you have established yourself in this way that you can lay claim to owning a successful blogging website.
It is true that a unique theme is necessary for a successful blogging website. You have a lot of tools available to you for developing and hosting your blogs today. But everyone else has all of those same tools available for building their blogging websites as well. You need to have this truly unique theme in order to stand out from the rest, or at least to grab some of the audience from the rest.
Learning how to build blogging websites is not some abstract process that only the lucky can grasp. Instead, learning how to build blogging websites starts with understanding what is already working in blogging. As soon as you think up a unique theme, concentrate your efforts on doing all of those things in your themed blogging website that the successful blogging websites are doing. Give your unique theme a very personal feels to it. Don’t try to be anyone else, and at the same time, don’t hold back any of who you are from your blog readers. Make yourself relevant with every posting by sticking to your theme. Be consistent making your posts.
Of course, before your blogging website becomes the next great thing, somebody out there has to know it is a thing. In other words, if nobody knows you have a blog, it doesn’t matter how unique your blog theme is or what information you have to offer. You need to spread the word that your relevant blogging website is now available for the world to read. Take the time to make a marketing plan for your blogging website. You need to take this project seriously and always put your full effort into seeing it through according to plan. Decide how you will promote your blog. Then decide how you will hook your blog’s first-time readers to turn them into regular readers. Finally, be very consistent in your efforts, following the marketing plan from start to finish. Don’t neglects your blogging website or put it on the back-burner whenever life comes up with a lot of more urgent tasks.
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First of all, remember to stay on topic. Each person having a blog will have his own opinions regarding events and facts and they are generally accepted. But the other content on the blog should revolve around a general theme. Many of the visitors on your blog page will be more interested in the facts you present on your page and not to what you eat for breakfast. Try to define a certain style which can be associated with your blog and try stick to it. This way you will be sure that you create among your visitors a loyal group who reads what you say for the topic you write about.
Always keep in mind to be informative on your blog. If you write articles about a specific industry or any other specific thing, stay up to date with information about that sector. Because your reputation is at stake, remember to always check the facts before putting them out on the internet for people to see. Be as accurate on what you write as possible. Always be sure to distinguish clearly between facts and your personal opinions. When writing your personal opinions about a certain aspect, make it clear that the post is to be read as an editorial. Always be up to date with the information you write about. It is indeed very hard to write a page every day, but if you want to be keep your frequent readers close, write about current events. A story about an event which happened many months ago, no matter how big it was back then, is still old news and it will not interest anyone.
You can create a schedule. But if you do so, you must stick to it. People who currently read you will expect a new post from you on the date you specified and will not enjoy if you do not respect your word. Going on a holiday for some time is accepted and understood, but constantly missing your self-made appointments with your readers will only make you look unserious. You will not want to lose your audience after you have spent a lot of time and effort building your blog and gathering them around you. If you want the readers to easily understand and follow you, keep your writings clear and simple. Remember that not only people from your country may read your page and some phrases cannot be translated with accuracy.
If you want to increase your visibility by writing on your blog, remember to include key words in the blog’s title. Remember, titles attract attention and they should summarize what you have written about in the subsequent post.In order for both readers and search engines to be up to date and follow your blog frequently, archive your previous posts to build up somewhat of a portal around your blog’s theme.
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can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.
1) Where to start?
You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home. I don’t say that because I’m the owner, but a free blog host is very rewarding for a new blog. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to build an audience and buzz for your blog. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service, is in the case your blog doesn’t become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”. Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to…but only when you need to!
2) Niche
A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family, then you have a niche…you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.
3) Update Daily (nothing less)
This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. Though, I am seeing a growing trend of successful blogs that are not being updated daily, but they are successful and have a stable audience who continue to visit their blog daily. Regardless, these blogs are still updated weekly with multiple entries. Until you have a steady audience you should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don’t come to work for days or weeks…you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here…if you don’t update your blog for days or weeks you’ll lose visitors.
4) Traffic
It’s no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the “About the Author” passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the “About the Author” passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your blog in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.
5) Track Your Blog
How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what “you” have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.
Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.
6) Listen to Your Audience
When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.
7) Multiple blogs
Use multiple blogging accounts (free) to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com and others. The more blog accounts the better (be sure to read and adhere to the Terms of Service for each site). You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.
Short & Concise
Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic. Stay keyword-focused.
9) Digital Art
Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.
10) Keep it Personal
A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.
11) Interact With Your Visitors
You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: “Monday Money Tip” or “Picture of the Week” which entices your readers to look forward to each week.
Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you “will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated”.
Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about “Paris Hilton Getting Married” then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.
12) Make Money
Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.
13) You’re a Professional
You’re a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, TypePad, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a “move” announcement. The title should be “Moved” and the blog entry should state something like “I have a new home for my blog, please bookmark and follow the link: http://www.yournewblogdomainname.com/”. This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain. Plus, search engines can easily index and crawl your new blog, since your old blog should already be popular with the search engines.
At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying “two heads is better than one”, more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.
Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.
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Sometimes as bloggers, we overlook some of the most basic tools of the online community. Our commenting behavior can actually make a large impact on our reputation, our traffic, and our audience building.
Make the Most of the Comments You Make
One of the best ways to get others to find your blog is by visiting theirs and leaving comments about their posts and observations. Blogs, especially the popular ones, often form small online communities and fan bases and comments play a huge role in the communicative function of blogs. People will read a comment made by Bill on Bob’s blog, and in turn, start reading Bill’s blog as well. Bloggers tend to check the blogs of those who have visited their favorite blogs and you can develop some regular readers simply by making comments on other blogs.
In many cases, you can leave the URL of your blog in the comments, making it easy for all of that blog’s readers to find you, too. Be careful to remember how your blog comments may affect others, though – when you offer criticism to a blogger, think about how that comment will be received. Are you building a relationship or burning a bridge? Unless you are being anonymous (which is never really recommended), every time you comment, you associate your name and reputation with the comment. Are you willing to stand by that comment and have it represent you in the blogosphere for an indefinite amount of time? Even if you consider the blogger you’re commenting on to be a “competitor” – it’s best not to create controversy in such a way that you could tarnish your reputation. Remember that website content lasts a long, long time.
When leaving a comment on a blog, there are two things you should consider in terms of attracting traffic:
1. Length of the comment: Make sure your comment is at least two to three lines – up to a paragraph if your post is on a topic relevant to your area of expertise.
2. Quality: Make sure your comment is something like a mini-article – it must be informative, unique, and offer a perspective or insight into the topic that the blog post did not provide.
Making the Most of Comments on Your Own Blog
In most cases, as a blogger, it is important to allow comments from your readers, especially other bloggers. This inspires the sense of interactivity and community that makes blogging so attractive to the Web 2.0 world.
You may have to deal with blog comment spam as a result of your willingness to accept comments unless you configure your blog host to help you out – make sure you use the tools they offer to help you combat it. If you can do a word or code verification, it will filter out most. You can also choose to moderate your comments. This can become a time-consuming process down the line if your blog becomes super-popular down the line – it can also slow down the commenting conversation.
Try to allow as much interaction as possible on your blog – it keeps things interesting and interactive. As soon as you start getting comments, respond to them. Keep the dialog going.
Blogs are loved by many because of their interactive nature, so the more lively and interesting the comment section, the better the blog. This, of course, in turn, creates more traffic. If you don’t respond to comments, you cut the the debate short, signaling that it was never a very important feature of the blog anyway. That doesn’t mean that a blogger should necessarily respond to every single comment, but you should always be visible in your own blogging community.
When a person posts a comment on a blog for the first time, surprise them by acknowledging their presence with a simple “Hello”. (Or, if you own a larger blog, and have noticed an influx of new traffic, greet ALL the new readers.) Let them know that they’re welcome. Blog communities (and traffic) are built, after all, one person at a time. Never forget where that community was built from.
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