The Power of Blog For Business

Nowadays the development of blog have increased rapidly, the role of blogs is not only as a vessel of ordinary journals private. For media information, the role of the blog and give meaning to the search information. Almost all fields of information have been there in a blog. Blog even used the media as effective in selling a product via the internet, or better known as online marketing.

How a blog can become a media business and future profit for a company we can know by reading the article THE POWER OF BLOG FOR BUSINESS by Dave Taylor. Here he explains how a blog can bring in customers and affect mindshare.

HOW BLOGS CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS

Let’s get back to business basics—not because I think you don’t know your own business, but because I honestly believe that blogging can help each core fragment of what makes up a successful and viable company. The core needs for any business are as follows:

• Decent ideas
• A great product
• Visibility
• A well-trained team of people who work hard to make the company succeed

You also need good marketing, great customer relations, an awesome sales force, decent customer support, and a host of other factors. But if you have ideas, a product worth selling, a solid team behind it, and potential customers, the rest will follow naturally.

CREATING GREAT IDEAS

Every company has a lot of great ideas waiting to come to the surface. The problem with bringing those ideas to the surface is threefold: giving ideas space to develop, helping ideas get improved, and implementing the best ideas.

Often it takes only one person to come up with a great idea, but it may take 100 or more people to support and implement that idea. If the idea loses support, the company will need another great idea to keep going.

Great ideas can increase a business’s costs and people power, but they can also increase a business’s revenue and marketing power. This is why large companies who live or die by their great ideas employ researchers who spend their time seeking epiphanies.

The challenge for companies who invest in ideas is often that the best ideas don’t get to the top, don’t get reviewed, or don’t even get considered. This idea barrier could be killing your company. A truly open and internally viewable idea blog, or even individual employee blogs that allow people to float new ideas for peer review, should allow the best ideas to rise to the surface for selection and review. We’ll look at the concept of idea blogs more in Chapter 6, as they are an exciting way to empower your employees and generate thought.

CREATING GREAT PRODUCTS

The next challenge is deciding which great ideas get turned into products. After all, what good is thinking up the greatest idea in the world if your business can’t actually sell it?

Smart companies hire people who are able to turn a great idea into a great product. These people, often called product specialists or product managers, know customers, know the market, and know how to deliver new products on time and on budget.

However, to do their jobs well, product specialists need to talk directly to customers. This is where focus groups, customer demo days, and other customer-listening techniques come into play. Some companies even employ staff evangelists to work one-on-one with individual customers to maintain a good relationship.

We all know cases in which even the most well-intentioned products underperformed. Relying on a small sample of customers to reflect what the entire world desires is risky at best, and foolhardy at worst. If you can’t ask everyone in the world what they want, you’re unlikely to be able to deliver what everyone truly desires. With blogging, you can ask—if not the entire world, then at least your entire blog readership, who are probably connected to and/or reading other blogs all over the Net. Once you have insight into what a large community of readers wants, you can begin delivering it.

INCREASING VISIBILITY

Marketing is all about visibility—making the right people aware of the right product at the right time. Allen Weiss, founder of MarketingProfs.com, says that marketing is about customers, and he’s right. The hard reality, though, is that often marketing isn’t about individual customers. Often, it’s about creating a global message to which individual customers will respond.

New methods of effective marketing include creating “viral” campaigns, customer-centric events, and otherwise helping customers spread the word through incentive programs and contests. Visibility is also sought through media reports, event sponsorship, and interactive Web sites.

However, these visibility campaigns lack effectiveness on the one-to-one level. Companies assume that millions of people will be contacted, but only a small percentage of these people will respond. This method of marketing has its upside, but it doesn’t do anything to create relationships with customers, create positive experiences, or create customer evangelists.

HAVING A GREAT TEAM

One of the best ways to build a great business is to create a great team. Great teams will think up great ideas, build visibility, and spot defects in products, which they will then correct. A great team can fix just about any problem, given the right resources, and is happy to take on just about any challenge.

Unfortunately, great teams can be difficult to create and keep motivated. Anyone who’s built successful teams knows that more often than not some particular “X Factor” will make or break the team: often the ability to find common ground and common interests can be a make-or-break issue.

A team comprising colleagues with common interests, backgrounds, or passions will be able to rely on those commonalities, even in the most adverse circumstances. The challenge is to find employees who fit together; few employee profiles include information that will help you find the common ground.

To solve this dilemma, many large corporations are turning to self-forming and self-sustaining teams. These people have found that they have things in common and they work well together. Companies post internal team opportunities that “ultra teams” can choose to tackle or ignore. Sometimes projects will be assigned based on need, but, generally, having a team own a topic is a more effective tactic.

The challenge for companies looking to enable these dynamic teams is in figuring out how to enable employees to connect based on passion. Passion is an important part of any successful team—without passion, a team will not only find itself quickly in a rut, but it will likely find its members unable to gel, have fun, or help the company in a meaningful way.

Blogging For Dollars

Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it's the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.

Whether a blogger's focus is to communicate with customers or just to have fun, they have begun looking at ways to earn revenue from their blogs. The most popular ways for bloggers to earn some added cash for their pet projects are:

1. ) Google Adsense in Blogs
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content-relevant advertisements in blogs. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the blog, the website owner is credited for the referral. Webmasters need only to insert a Google-generated java script into the blog or blog template. Google's spider parses the AdServing blog and serves ads that relate to the blog's content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served.

2. ) Affiliate Programs (Product Endorsements)
Affiliate Programs work when an affiliate web site receives income for generating sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website. Generally, bloggers will mention or endorse specific products and if site visitors purchase the product, bloggers will receive a portion of the sale.

3. ) Product Promotion
Businesses use blogs to detail how specific features or product add-ons can increase functionality and save time. Content-rich product promotion will help with search engine placement. Like sponsored reviews.

4.) Banner Ads
While less popular than in the past, websites with high traffic levels can still earn decent revenue by selling banner space.

As the Internet evolves bloggers will continue to seek out ways to monetize their opinions and thoughts. Daily journals and online blogs have become more than just a communication means to many.

by: Sharon Housley

Copyright 2004 Sharon Housley

About the author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for the NotePage http://www.notepage.net and FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com product lines. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net 

Why Blogs Are Better Than Websites

Blogs are now the most trusted media source for useful information according to a Blogads survey of over 35,000 readers. Value was compared against newspaper, radio, television, direct mail and magazines. It is estimated that in the US 27% of the people read blogs on a regular basis.

Blog marketing increases exposure, generates buzz, and creates a global message to which individual customers can respond. Blog marketing is also a powerful search engine optimization tool which can be used to dramatically improve website rankings.

Why Blogs Are Better Than Websites ?

1. Blogs are active and websites are passive. Blogs broadcast their content out to the web via RSS every time there is something new. Websites on the other hand wait to be discovered by search engine spiders. It’s like the difference between fishing and hunting. You can sit and wait for fish or you can actively hunt and pursue.

2. Blogs are faster. Posting and syndication is almost instantaneous. Technorati and other blog search engines index and list your postings within minutes after you publish.

3. Blogs build a readership. It is easy for visitors to subscribe to a blog so they can view new postings as soon as they happen. Blogs encourage repeat visits with content being delivered to your favorite reader or delivery by email. Compare this to bookmarking a website which depends on the visitor to come back.

4. Blogs have newer fresher content. By their nature, blogs have regular fresh content and they are more up to date. Blogs tend to deal with breaking events and technology insights.

5. Blogs invite participation and interaction. Blog conversations are encouraged providing multiple viewpoints and discussions. Comments can be made easily from each page.

6. Blogs are powerful influencers. “More than half (52%) of Europeans polled said that they were more likely to purchase a product if they had read positive comments from private individuals on the internet.” This is according to a Hotwire Ipsos MORI survey.

Why Blog?

Combining business blog marketing and traditional website marketing is especially effective when you start up a new business. Blogging is one of the fastest ways of announcing your business and spreading the word quickly about what you do.

New companies should look at launching a blog and a website for maximum exposure. A combined approach using a website and a blog is usually the fastest approach. You will that you will gain a much broader reach by using both a website and blog. The website and blog will have different functions.

The website is the advertising and marketing piece. The new website should be the marketing focus that touts the advantages, benefits and conveniences of using your business. The new website should bring in traffic with both pay-per-click advertising and organic SEO.

The website and blog will reach different audiences, have different focuses, have different conversational tones, but still strive to reach the same targeted customer. The blog and website reinforce each other and magnify the results.

By. Doug Williams

About the author :

Doug Williams is the founder and president of Doug Williams and Associates, LLC. DWA is an Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm www.dougwilliams.com.

Source :
- http://www.dougwilliams.com/blog-marketing.php

9 Tips for SEO Friendly Web Design

SEO: time-intensive, ever changing, and highly misunderstood. Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design.

If you’re a designer, are your designs really search friendly?

A lot of misconceptions about SEO still exist in the web design community and many designers, who have at least some knowledge, are often acting with outdated information. Once a designer understands the value of SEO, there is still the concern of how to keep a design attractive, while also being search friendly.

Designers love beautiful websites and SEOs love optimized content and code, but neither should fool themselves, because these days, both matter. In that spirit, I’ve put together a list of 9 SEO tips that help keep your stunning website optimized for search engines. Instead of focusing on SEO design basics, I’ll be covering some design-focused SEO tips, to show how SEO and beautiful design elements can co-exist.

1. It’s not the same old SEO

SEO can be hard to keep up with, because it is always changing. Today, SEO doesn’t mean a site has to be ugly.

First, forget everything you’ve learned about keyword meta tags and keyword stuffing, because those days are over. This is a great thing for designers, because search engines are looking for great content, written in natural language. Metrics, like keyword density, which make sites look hideous, are a thing of the past.

If you’ve been a designer for several years, start fresh and learn search engine optimization from a source that keeps up with all things SEO. Don’t let out-of-date SEO practices make you think pages have to be riddled with repetitive keywords.

2. Links talk

Links tell search engines what pages are about. This holds true on-site as well as off-site. The words you use in your designs to link to other pages do matter. The web has matured and no longer needs to be told “click here”.

This is just another form of the dreaded “click here”. There is an opportunity wasted here, where the designer could link out with the keyword-rich headings like “HR solutions”. The “learn more” link is great for users, but leaves search bots blind to what is on the other end of that link. As a human, we make the connection, and know that this link is about “HR Solutions”, but you’re telling search engines it is about “learn more”.

CSS can be used to keep the style, but the site would benefit from either linking the major headings, or changing the link text to something like “Learn More about HR Solutions”. This would drastically improve the site’s internal linking, with minimal impact on design.

3. Design is linkbait

This is great news for designers. Much of the life of an SEO is focused around baiting links from the link-giving portion of the web. The amazing thing is that this portion of the web loves great looking websites. Great design improves credibility and the user experience.

If you design great sites, use services like The CSS Gallery List to get your site submitted to CSS showcases across the web, or at least do it by hand.

4. Look at search bots as browsers

Earlier I mentioned how using “learn more” leaves a search engine blind. Considering a search bot as a disabled user or another type of browser, is exactly the type of approach needed for search friendly web design.

Search bots are extremely disabled and unintelligent users who use a dreadfully outdated browser. This user’s ability to understand your site may mean the difference of thousands or millions of dollars for a business.

One of the best SEO tips I can give a designer is to test as if Lynx was one of the web’s major browsers. If you can properly navigate your site, and understand its content in a browser like Lynx, then you are on your way to being a great SEO web designer. Other tools, like the Web Developer toolbar, really help test a site without elements like CSS, images, and JavaScript.

Keep up on the Google webmaster guidelines, so you know the limitations of this highly impaired user of your site. Focus on creating beautiful designs that gracefully degrade for this limited web user, “the search bot.” Or, instead of designing the site and working backwards, start with the lowest common denominator (the search engine), and work up.

Let’s Get Tactical :

5. Smoke some hash

That little symbol, the hash mark or pound symbol, is an extremely powerful SEO tool in the hands of a developer who knows what to do with it. The hash mark creates an element in the URL that is not considered unique by the search engines, so it is dropped.

There are a lot of great ways to use this. I’ve seen it used well on sections where new pages hardly justify having a unique URL. One example I’ve seen recently is a “people” section where only minor content changes are seen on each page. The designer assigned each employee’s profile with “#name”. These multiple, near duplicate, pages are all seen as one page by the search engines. There are plenty of other great uses for the hash.

6. Use SEO friendly JavaScript

Any time you touch technologies like JavaScript, you need to tread carefully. I love Javascript technologies, and all the amazing things we can do with them, but they can create huge problems.

Traditionally, AJAX is not SEO friendly because calls are made through JavaScript, which cannot be executed well by search engines. The result is that the content is never rendered or indexed by search bots. I like what can be done with jQuery, since you can have html link navigation in place (for search engines), and still have jQuery effects.

7. Flash is OK, sometimes.

Ask your average SEO about flash and you’ll be told how horrible it is for SEO. Ask someone who casually follows SEO news, and they’ll tell you flash can now be crawled. So how should a designer approach flash?

While Google is improving, you should not depend on Google to figure it all out. Here are some basic Flash rules to keep in mind.

* Do not include an entire site on one page.
* Do not use flash as the navigation.
* Do not include important content in flash.

Search engines are nearly blind to flash, so do not use it for important page elements. Use of flash for design elements and non-important content is ok.

Flash can be used in a search engine friendly design. You can enhance web fonts by using slfr. Since the flash does not replace the HTML content, but styles it, search engines are still able to read the titles. It’s even Google approved.

8. CSS image replacement

CSS image replacement is one way to make a site look great, while also being search friendly. There are a couple different ways to do this, but the biggest concern boils down to intent.

Google says:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

The two words to focus in on here are “perceived” and “intent”. During a manual review Google will try to interpret your intent; a practice that has come under fire recently when Google profiled SEO.

I think CSS is a common tactic and a fine solution to SEO web design. If your intent is to improve the visual experience, and you make this intent clear, you should be fine. Do not use this method to stuff keywords or manipulate with hidden content.

9. Have great linking with footers

If you have a design that will be compromised by the inclusion of a robust navigation above the fold, a solid footer is a great solution.

Sometimes footers get the job done, like Yelp’s boring, but effect footer. And sometimes they highlight content you want to rank, like the footer over at We Build Pages. But, they can also look beautiful, impressive, and creative.

Bonus Tips for Designers!

Three mini bonus tips that are exclusively for designers to use to promote their business.

Many designers drop an attribution link in the footer of their designs like so:

“Website Designed by Creative Company Name”

Here are 3 Mini SEO Tips

1. Include a keyword in that attribution link. Stop linking your company name only and at least include the “Website Designed” portion. Even better, use something like “Designed by: Company Name – A New York Web Design Company.”

2. Once you design a few sites with your keyword-rich attribution link, change the wording. It doesn’t need to be drastically different, but create some variation. Do this periodically.

3. Create a pre-sale page on their site that features a testimonial and links back to your site. Then, link to this pre-sale page site-wide from the footer of their design. This will help you avoid the negatives of the run of site links, while getting a link from a page with a lot of internal PageRank flowing to it.

If you’re a designer, I hope these tips help you find some elegant design solutions to common SEO design problems. If you’re an SEO, I hope these tips are something you can forward to your designer.

I’d love to hear any tips or techniques you use in your designs to handle complex design needs in a search engine friendly manner. If you have any great SEO tips, ideas, or questions please leave a comment.

By. Justin Briggs

Source :
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/9-seo-tips-for-attractive-search-engine-friendly-web-design.html

Secrets To Increasing Web Traffic

It is no accident that some web sites have thousand or even millions of hits every day while others seem to be camouflaged with no visitors clicking on their sites. In general, there are 3 major areas of Internet marketing strategies.

Have a product or service that is in demand. The more unique and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the profits.

1. Have a product or service that is in demand. The more unique and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the profits.

2. Create a site that sells. A website sells product by design. It presents the product / service, builds trust, and then closes the sale. If people don't trust you, they won't buy from you. It doesn't matter how many people you attract to your website if they get turned off by an unattractive presentation or a half-built website.

3. Draw a stream of potential buyers to your site. You can obtain first page rankings on search pages without using tricks. If you build highly optimized, search engine friendly web pages, you can score well on several different keywords or keyword phrases. This is called search engine optimization.

Let’s start by looking at what doesn’t work:

1. Banner Ads: Click thru rates have now dropped to just 0.3%. This is not a cost effective traffic builder for your site. Banner ads that are tied to keyword phrases are more effective.

2. Exchange Banner Ads or links. The downside is that you work hard to attract a targeted customer to your site and they end up leaving before you can close the sale. The upside is that links pointing back to your site improves your ranking with many search engines. My suggestion is that if you want to add links, do this on a separate links page.

3. E-mail marketing: This is one of the most disliked forms of internet advertising. It violates one of the basic rules of the Internet…NEVER SPAM. The bottom line is that email marketing doesn’t work.

4. Classified ad services:“Free for all” classified ad sites have popped up all over the web. This is how they work…first you sign up and receive your own classified ad site. Then you allow visitors to post their ads for free. In exchange, you get to send them your spam. The issue is that you are not dealing with targeted customers and you end up with zero results.

Search Engines

Search engines are a great source for new customers. Existing customers already know you and usually they usually don’t arrive thru searches. Since visitors find you by entering in search terms, they are new customers. These visitors are targeted…they create the search that finds your keywords. Since they found you, they are motivated and much more likely to buy. Properly targeted search engine traffic results in sales that could have gone to your competitors…and this goes to your bottom line.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

This is a very important part of web page optimization. You need to understand how your customer thinks. People who use a search engine are looking for the product and its features. Remember, 3-4 word keyword phrases attract buyers, 1-2 word keyword phrases attract browsers.

Create a list of keyword based on common names, combining words into compound words, common misspellings, looking at competitor key words. Stay away from company name and brand names as keywords. Select keywords based on recent actual search usages. This information is available from the Internet.

In picking the best traffic building keywords you will want to end-up with 80% specific keywords or keyword phrases and 20% general keywords / phrases. Eliminate words that are unlikely to be used. Choose approximately 16 specific keywords / phrases and 4 general ones. Make sure that the words cover your entire product line.

Spiders on the Web

Search engine spiders are programs that follow links on web sites, gathering data for search engine indexes. The spider, robot or crawler goes to a web site and follows hyper links throughout the site. The spider reads the meta tags on the web pages. Meta tags are tags that appear in HTML at the top of each web page; these tags tell the spiders what's on the page in a fashion that is easy for them to index. The robot reads these tags and compares them to the content on the page. The better the tags add up with the actual content of the page the higher the spider will rank the page's TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS. When the spider finds material in the tags that does not reflect the actual content of the page, it will give the page a low ranking or will not index the page at all.

Design your site to be spider friendly

The Meta Tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed.

1. Constructing your Meta TITLE tag. All your most important key phrases should be in the TITLE tag. Browsers only display the first few words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So while the first sentence of your title tag should be readable by people the rest can be just a list of key phrases.

2. The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web page. You've already written one for the TITLE tag! So just edit that to make it human readable (and perhaps a little shorter).

3. Meta Keywords tag. Enter your key phrases in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a key phrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times.

4. The first paragraph of your page should repeat and expand upon everything in your title and description meta tags. You need to have all those key phrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind.

Don’t put up spam pages

You clearly want to have your important key phrases on your page more than once, because this is what gives the search engines a clue as to what your page is really about. However, you don't want your key phrases to appear too many times. This might make the search engines think your page is a spam page trying to rank highly for a particular phrase and will not list them.

RSACI Rating

Say that someone visits your page... but they can't! Their browser blocks it, saying that it's "not appropriate". This is probably because you haven't installed rating tags on your site. It's pretty simple to do, and it means that a lot more people will be able to access your site. See The Internet Content Rating Association at http://www.icra.org/ for more information.

Paying for hits

Pay-per-click is another way to increase the traffic to your website. Pay-per-click providers are simply a search engine where you can bid for the top positions for various search keywords.

Even if you have done everything right and you have a perfectly optimized web site for search engines and you have traffic flowing to your site, you can quickly lose your potential customer with a poorly designed website.

10 ways to design an annoying site that drives traffic away.

1. Have useless or just plain bad content.
2. Make your pages over 50K so the pages load real slow.
3. Disable the back button so people can’t leave the site.
4. Place blinking text and moving or spinning graphics to distract the reader from the other really bad stuff on your site.
5. Don’t proof read what you do and have plenty of spelling and grammar “misteaks”
6. Put in music…and make it really loud.
7. Make your text unreadable by putting light blue printing over a medium blue 3D wallpaper or similar background.
8. Put your entire site on one…long…long…long page.
9. Clutter up your site and make it confusing so no one can figure out exactly what you are up to.
10. Have plenty of pointless graphics or clipart for no real reason.

By. Doug Williams - October 2005

About the author :

Doug Williams is the founder and president of Doug Williams and Associates, LLC. DWA is an Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm www.dougwilliams.com.

Source :
- http://www.dougwilliams.com/increase-web-traffic.php

15 Web Copywriting Tips

When a visitor arrives to your website, they scan your website quickly and if they don’t see what they are searching for, they are gone in a single click. Website copywriting is very different than writing for any other media. If you can capture their interest in those first few seconds, then they will stay and look around.

1. Five second rule: Internet users are active, not passive. If they don’t immediately see what they are looking for, they are gone. First impressions are critical. One click and they're gone in as little as 5 seconds after they arrive. Make sure they can see what your website is about without scrolling down.

2. Am I in the right place? Most web visitors arrive via Google or similar engine. They found you by searching for a particular phrase. As a result, the headline and bulleted text have to address those questions. You want your visitor to think “This is exactly what I have been looking for!”

3. Headline: The headline sets the tone. It grabs attention...or not. It reveals a promise. It raises hopes. It creates surprise. Your headline has to be the most powerful text on your page.

4. Open with a Benefit rich headline: Only one in five people read behind your headline. Use power words such as Announcing, New, Free, Sale, Breakthrough, Facts, Now and Discover. The idea is to grab the attention of you visitor and turn him into a prospect.

5. Keep it short: Use bullets, italics, or lists. The longer the text, the less likely they are to read it. Make your key points stand out.

6. The Five Great Motivators: Psychologists have identified five "Great" motivators, and virtually all good web copy creates sales by catering to one of these forces. These include fear, exclusivity, guilt, greed, and the need for approval. When our custom copywriters tap into these basic motivators, you will see your sales increase dramatically!

7. The Soft Motivators: In addition to these five great motivators, the consumer is also motivated by what is referred to as "soft" motivators. The soft motivators are convenience and pleasure. These are utilized best when combined with one or more of the five great motivators.

8. State the benefits: Benefits are what sell. This includes Features (what products do), Advantages (what features do), Motives (importance of features to buyer) and Benefits (what features mean).

9. Writing to be found: Most of your visitors should be finding you on the search engines, Include your keyword phrases in the headlines, bulleted text and in the top 25% of the text. Pages with about 600 words of text do better in the search engine rankings.

10. Make it personal: If you want to hold a reader’s attention, drill down for the details of your story. Get down to a personal level. If you’re selling a trip to Hawaii, don’t talk about Hawaii, talk about one person enjoying Hawaii.

11. Put a face on your website: The Internet is cold, faceless and impersonal. People want to do business with a person. Add a meet the staff page, include testimonials or highlight a spokes person. Add personality into your web copy.

12. Anticipate Questions: Focus on the benefits and answer your visitor’s question “So, what’s in it for me?” Other questions that need answering include: "What am I doing here," "How do I do it," and "Where can I go next?"

13. Call to action. End your page by asking for some sort of action. Have questions? If you need answers call, email, click on live chat or whatever action you want your visitor to do. Better yet: Buy now!

14. Back up what you say: Web visitors don't believe hype. If you want to be believable, you have to back it up.

15. Start strong and finish strong: Grab their attention when they arrive, and astound them with your finish. Put your best material at the beginning and the end.

Go through your website and test it against each of these writing tips. Remember that your home page is the most important page to do. You only have a few seconds to make that perfect first impression.

By. Doug Williams - April 2006

About the author :

Doug Williams is the founder and president of Doug Williams and Associates, LLC. DWA is an Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm www.dougwilliams.com.

Source :
- http://www.dougwilliams.com/web-copywriting.php

5 Easy Ways to Boost Traffic to your Blog

Blogging has become an extremely popular method of marketing a product or service. I mean, blogs are easy to install, administer, update and the search engines love them.

But what if your blog isn’t getting any traffic? Uh-huh. It does happen.

With that said, here’s a few ways to boost up your traffic flow:

Put together a list of blog services, like Technorati, for you to ping after each time you post. This is the way for you way to notify the search engines that your blog has been updated. Here are a few blog services you can use to ping your blog:

1. AutoPinger is a service you can use to ping 51 different services. Also, you can register your blog to be “auto pinged” each time you post for free.

2. Ping O Matic is another service you can use to ping 23 different services. Ping O Matic also gives you the option of pinging your RSS feed.

3. King Ping will ping your blog to 60 different services and, like Autopinger, can automate the process for you if you register.

Now, I do not suggest you use all 3 services. Many of the SERPs they submit to overlap. Over pinging your blog is considered spam and can get you into trouble. And we don’t want that. So, be sure to pick one if you’re going to use any of these services.

Another way to boost traffic to your blog is to add some popular news readers to your blog. Sites like Yahoo, Google and the like have pages that allow users to choose different sites with RSS feeds that will fetch updates from different blogs.

This enables them to have the latest updates from a number of different sources. Doing this gives these users a way to add your blogs content to their news readers, which results in exposure for you and your blog. Adding these button to your blog allows your readers to do the same as well.

The most important thing for you to do, in terms of boosting traffic, is to update your content on a regular basis. I know I’ve said this before, but its absolutely imperative for you to post new content at least once or twice a week, although I recommend 3 times a week.

Generally, I post every other day or so and I posted 20 times this last month. I intend to keep that average up due to the fact that my blog will stay on the first page of Google and Yahoo when I keep to this regimen. However, the best way is to post daily if you can. Be careful though, posting more than a few times each day can hurt you with the search engines.

Posting in forums is another good way to boost your traffic. Find some forums you have an interest in or that your blogs content relates to and make some forum posts. Make sure you read the rules of the forum you’re interested in because many have rules on what you can post. And most frown upon blatent advertising, so it’s best to just link to your blog in your signature, but again…read the rules!!

Some forums have strict rules on what you can and cannot do. But done right, you can build some nice one way links back to your blog which will boost your rank in the search engines which will most likely result in a boost in traffic. Which will…just kidding. :)

Finally, you want to submit your blog to search engines at least once a month, but no more than twice a month. Again, to submit more than that will result in you getting labeled a spam artist and you really don’t want that.

Google, in particular, will drop your blog like a hot potato if you do not heed my advice. And it could be months before Google will pick your blog back up again, so just don’t do it. These search engines will bring you targeted traffic (people who are searching for the kind of information that you provide).

These techniques are relatively simple ways you can use to boost the traffic your blog receives. For me, the most important rule to follow is to update your blog on a regular basis and ping the serps each time you post. There are a few other things you can do, but I will leave them for another post. Follow these and you’ll be well on your way to boosting your traffic.

That’s all for today and I hope this finds you well.

Source :
- http://mikesblogmarketingtips.michaeldroberson.com/434/5-easy-ways-boost-traffic-blog/

Writing Good Quality Blog Content

In order to build your blog as a successful seo marketing blog, it is highly recommended that you should write good quality content for your blog. As previously noted that this is one elements of blog SEO that taking a major role in your effort to optimization techniques for your blog.

Please bear in your mind, this is probably the single most important point you should remember when doing SEO, especially if you want your seo marketing blog to be found on the web.

Although your blog may be technically perfect so that the search engine robots find it, you will find that it will not help if the actual content of your blog is not good. For the content of your blog to be good, it should be factually, as well as grammatically correct. But this is not really necessary for every blog that is on the web today.

However, what is important is that whatever your blog is about, the content actually needs to be unique and specific so that it will appeal to people. Moreover, it in fact needs to be particularly appealing to those people looking for information or who want to find your blog. 

By having good content on your blog, visitors will return and eventually these visitors who return are more likely to link to your blog. Having lots of inbound links is not only great for your blog, but for search engine rankings also. It is even better if those links are from more highly ranked blogs than your own.

Also, not only do you need to have good content on your blog, you also need to have fresh content also. If you add new content to your blog on a regular basis, you are giving your visitors more reasons for returning to it. 

Because of this, search engine robots will also visit your blog more often as soon as they notice that you are updating it regularly. So what this means is that any new content you add to your SEO Marketing blog, will then be indexed much quicker in the future.

Source :
- http://tobablog.com/writing-blog-quality-content.html

Increasing Traffic with Killer Slugs

This is tip #2 in my series of “Blog Marketing Tips Even the ProBloggers Won’t Share” series. See tip #1: How to Optimize Blog Post Titles.

In tip #1 I warned that changing your blog post slugs–also known as permalinks or post URLs–is to be avoided, once you’ve published your blog post. While you can use 301 redirects if you do need to change your slug–more on that later–even that can have an unfortunate effect on your post’s ranking in Google.

In this tip, I want to share with you a practice that I often use here on Marketing Pilgrim–optimizing my slugs before I hit “publish.”

Tip 2: Optimize Your Blog Post’s Permalink (aka”Slugs”)

1. Change your default slug – while you often hear that most blog publishing platforms are “search engine friendly” out of the box, there’s one configuration that is important when setting up a new blog: change the default way post slugs are created.

If I had launched Marketing Pilgrim with the default slug structure my post URLs would have looked something like this:

Yuk! WordPress would have used a numeric value to represent each blog post. Instead of using rich keywords in my slug, traffic generating buzzwords such as “marketing,” “blogging,” and “tips” would have been reduced to “123″. Not very helpful–for my readers or Google.

Instead, it’s important to pick one of the more search engine friendly slug structures that instruct WordPress to pull the post title–which you worked hard on in tip #1–and use that as part of any blog post URL.

Here’s a screenshot of the WordPress option for Marketing Pilgrim:

Blog Post Permalinks

Notice how we used a “Custom Structure?’ OK, don’t necessarily follow that. While Google-friendly, we structured our slugs in a way that help with an old switch from Blogger to WordPress. Most of you will be just fine selecting “Date and name based” (or the equivalent for your blogging software).

Warning: While you might be tempted to use a slug default that shows only your post title you may want to think twice, if you have aspirations of seeing your blog syndicated in Google News. One of the requirements for entry is to have at least three numbers in your slugs, so that Google can identify your posts from your other blog content.

Using “myblog.com/my-post-title” would likely preclude you from Google News. At the very least, you should use “myblog.com/2008/my-post-title”.

2. Optimize individual posts – with the basic slug structure in place, your post slugs are going to be very Google friendly–they include the keywords you use in your optimized post titles! :-)

But, what if you find yourself publishing a post that is ten words long and most of those words are “fluffy”–meaning, they don’t help you much in Google? This is where the “post slug” box in WordPress is your friend. You’ll find the post slug box to the right of your blog post–when viewing your posts via WP Admin “Manage>Posts.”

Any string of words entered will be used as that posts URL/slug/permalink. The best format for entry is to use “keyword-keyword-keyword”–hyphenating each word. Why hyphens? It helps Google to separate and understand each of your keywords. Your goal is to enter keywords that are a) highly relevant to your blog post, and, b) likely to be searched for (a lot) on Google.
Here’s an example of before and after.

If I had let WordPress decide on the slug, I would have gotten this:

Before:marketingpilgrim.com/2007/08/youtube-rival-finally-named-hulucom-almost-in-beta.html

Far too long and far too many irrelevant words. Instead, I entered my own slug and used this:

After: marketingpilgrim.com/2007/08/hulu-beta-invite.html

The result? When Hulu launched the beta of its online video service, Marketing Pilgrim was #1 on Google for “hulu beta invite” and #2 for “hulu”–both brought considerable traffic to the site.

3. Don’t get trapped by lazy slugs – it’s one thing to optimize the slug for your new blog post, but you can still take it one step further. Whether you’re writing a blog post, or creating a new page for your blog, think about its future use.

What do I mean? Let me show you with a real example.

Remember tip #1 I wrote?

Here’s my original post title: “Blog Marketing Tips Even the ProBloggers Won’t Share: Tip #1″

Practicing what I preached, I’ve now changed that post title to be more “Google-friendly.”

It now reads: “Blog Marketing Tips: How to Optimize Blog Post Titles”

Now take a look at the post slug.

Optimized slug: marketingpilgrim.com/2008/03/optimize-blog-post-titles.html

Doesn’t match either the original post title or the optimized version, does it? Instead, when I first wrote the post, I knew that I wanted the post to rank for keywords related to “optimize blog post titles.” By thinking ahead, and optimizing the post slug, that page is currently #1 on Google for “optimize blog post titles.” Sounds genius, but as you can see, it was really quite simple.

4. Changing old slugs - whether you want to change a single post slug or all of them, don’t even attempt to do so without the help of a 301 redirect. While you might think that changing your slugs is a good idea–after all, let’s get some great keywords in there–you can damage your Google credibility (sacrificing any inbound links) by changing a post slug without telling Google.

How do you safely change your blog post slugs? You use a 301 redirect to instruct Google that you’ve changed the location of the post to a new URL. How do you do that easily? If you’re a WordPress user, you install the fabulous Urban Giraffe “Redirection” plugin and make sure you have the following box checked:

Now, you can change your slugs, safe in the knowledge that a 301 redirect will be automatically created. Be warned! Just because you tell the search engines where a new post lives, doesn’t mean they’ll always be smart enough to get there–so use 301 redirects with caution, not free abandon!

5. Repurpose your content - there’s another great reason for changing your post slugs. It’s a tactic that, once I share it with you, you’ll start seeing the crafty bloggers using. We use it here on Marketing Pilgrim. What’s the tactic? That’s the subject for tip #3, but I’ll only share tip #3 if enough people ask me to–these tips take a lot of work to compile you know. ;-)

Do you have any tips to share on blog post slug optimization? Do you want to see tip #3? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks!

Source :
- http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/04/optimize-blog-post-permalinks.html

How to Optimize Blog Post Titles

How many times have you visited one of the many “professional” blog advice sites, and left with little more advice than the ubiquitous (and unhelpful) “build great content?”

If building a great blog was as simple as writing quality posts, we’d all be tied for number one on the Technorati Top 100 blog list. I’m not about to start my own ProBloggingPilgrim.com web site, but I did want to start sharing tips that I’ve personally found valuable when building the traffic to Marketing Pilgrim.

It’s possible that these tips have been shared before–perhaps they were lost among all of the “great content” on the web–but I’m pretty sure these will be fresh ideas. I initially thought I could fit half a dozen tips in a single blog post, but as I started writing, I realized that each tip easily fills a single post. So instead, I’ll start with Tip #1 and see what you think. Leave a comment if you’d like to see more tips in the future.

Tip 1: Your Blog Post Titles Have Two Audiences - great article from Andy Beal, at marketingpilgrim.com

You’ve no doubt read that you need to make your blog post titles “search engine friendly,” but doing so often kills the creativity and initial appeal of your writing. Instead of trying to appeal to your loyal readers and Google at the outset, approach the two difference audiences in separate stages.

Stage One – Your initial blog readers

Your initial audience is likely going to be those that have already subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed–or happen to check your blog every day. They want to be thrilled, excited, and given a reason to not only read your post, but also share and link to it.

When you first publish your blog post, follow this advice:

* Make your post title interesting – it could be that you ask a question, share a scoop, or offer a cryptic title that peeks your reader’s curiosity. I’ll often use a blog title that sounds like a scandal/scoop, but is really just a question. For example, “Microsoft Buying Yahoo?” I ran that headline last year–before Microsoft made its bid. It generated a lot of traffic then and even more so now.

* Keep it short and sweet – if you make your initial post title too long, you run the risk that you’ll either confuse a reader or give them so much information, tthere’s no need to read the post itself. Back to my example, “Microsoft Buying Yahoo?” leaves a lot of unanswered questions that just beg the reader to click through to view the entire post. If I had used “Rumors that Microsoft May Buy Yahoo, but No Confirmation Yet,” how many of you would have clicked through to read the entire post? Not many.

* Appeal to keyword scanners – When you read posts in your RSS reader, do you sometimes scan the titles looking for keywords that you know will interest you? Apple, Google, Wii, and Blue-Ray are all examples of keywords that might appeal to your specific audience. 

This is not the same as keywords for SEO–that comes later–at this stage, you’re simply looking to include words that will make your post stand out to your readers. Use popular keywords in your post titles and your post will have a greater chance of standing out among all of the other posts in your reader’s RSS aggregator.

In stage one, your goal is to appeal to the initial readers that will likely view the post on the day that you publish it. But what happens after your post is relegated to the archives? It’s unlikely someone will spend hours just wondering through your archived posts. Instead, they’ll likely discover your “great content” via one of the search engines. OK, only one search engine: Google.

With this in mind, you need to massage your post’s title so that it can go to work for you in Google’s search results.

Stage Two – Your Google readers

That cryptic, enticing post title you used to attract your initial readers isn’t going to cut-it when it comes to attracting Google search engine users. Sure, you want your post title to entice a click from the SERP (search engine results page) but if your post is sitting on page 10–and not page 1–it doesn’t matter how engaging your post title. In stage two, you need to give your post title the Google-juice it needs to make the first SERP.

* Add keywords to your title – you should have already included a relevant keyword that appeals to the human “keyword scanners.” Now that it’s Googleblot scanning your post title, it’s time to pump-up your keyword count. Now, don’t go overboard and add half a dozen keywords to your post titles–you want the title to remain targeted and enticing–but you should look for opportunities to include additional keywords. Compare this before, and after post title.

Before: “Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Management Nightmare.”
After: “Ten Ways to Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results.” Both are engaging, both convey the same meaning. Yet, the revised title removes keywords that are not likely to be Googled such as “avoid” and “nightmare,” while adding keywords that are searched often, such as “fix” and “remove negative results.”

* Change the word order – I always try to take into consideration my potential Google ranking, when writing my post titles. However, there are many times when I see my post sitting at #11 on Google, because the word order I used–while appealing to my initial audience–isn’t doing me any favors in the SERPs. 

So, like a good optimizer, I go back and change the word order so that the beneficial keywords are closer to the beginning of the title (which is where Google prefers to see them). Here’s a before: “26 Free Tools for Buzz Monitoring.” And after: “Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools.” (Notice I also added the keyword “buzz tracking” to the title).

* Optimize your TITLE – When you first publish your blog posts, you’ll likely want your TITLE (aka title tag) to match your actual post title. Once you start focusing on your Google audience, it might make sense to tweak your page TITLE so that it’s even more optimized than your post title (side note: most blog software will simply match your page TITLE to your post title). 

If you’re using WordPress, consider installing the SEO Title Tag plugin to do just that! I don’t use it on Marketing Pilgrim, but on other blogs, I’ve found it a great way to further optimize my TITLE–which is what is displayed in Google’s SERP.

* Don’t play with slugs – I’ll write more on the topic of page “slugs” (aka permalinks) but I’d be negligent if I didn’t warn here that, while you should change your post title, changing the actual page slug is to be avoided.

I hope you’ll find the above tactics to be fruitful in your quest to increase both initial, and Google-referred, visitors to your blog. I’ve got plenty more tips I can share, so let me know what you think and if you’d like to read more blog promotion tips.

Source :
- http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/03/optimize-blog-post-titles.html

Improve Your Blog Marketing Effectiveness

If you’re taking the time to create a business blog, you can improve your blog marketing effectiveness by considering three critical components: content, frequency and distribution.

Content - Your blog posts must be interesting and useful to your readers. Develop your unique voice and don’t be afraid to post things others will not agree to.

Frequency of posts are important as there is a direct correlation to blog popularity and the number of times it’s updated. Post 3-5 times per week at a minimum. Blogs that are updated many times a day can get included in the Google News index which is updated daily. That means getting your content into Google search results the same day its posted to your blog. This may not be as likely since the launch of Google Blog Search though.

Distribution of your blog is important. A common issue from people new to blogs and RSS feeds is where to find them. Marketing a blog brings additional advantages over a traditional web site. A blog and associated RSS/Atom feed can be promoted within the blogoshpere as well as through traditional directories, search engines and web site linking. The opportunity for blog exposure is much greater than a regular web site alone. Make it easy for news feed subscribers to find your blog through both web site search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and RSS search engines (Google Blog Search, Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati).

Here’s a list of search engines and directories lists and a list of Blog/RSS directories for submissions. Also, be sure to ping regularly with services like Pingomatic, Pings or Pingoat.

Additional blog optimization and marketing tips include:

* Blog with keywords in mind – Your blog post titles should use keywords that are relevant to the post. Also, update your blog software template so that keywords from the post titles are in text links to archive posts, in the title tag and meta description tag.

* Post on current news – Pay attention to your industry and keep up to date with trends and events so you can post about them and provide commentary.

* Post your own thoughts – Show your industry expertise by creating original content in the form of short articles. You can create a teaser article with a link to the full document on your web site.

* Link out – It’s important you link to thematically similar web sites/blogs. Other blogs that notice your link may often link back.

* Link in – Submit your blog to all the search engines and directories that you would submit a web site to. Also submit to blog/RSS specific directories and search engines.

* Trackbacks – Use a comment system that allows trackbacks to any news or blog sites you’re commenting on. This creates a link from other highly trafficked sites to your blog.

* Blog elsewhere – Find or ask to be a “guest blogger” on related blogs. You can also ask other bloggers in your industry to be a guest blogger on your site.

* Make comments – Monitor posts on thought leader blogs and other centers of influence and post relevant comments. You may get noticed and added to a blogroll or better, develop a dialogue with the blogger, whom you might not otherwise have communicated with.

Effective blog marketing requires a commitment in time, ideas and collaboration. Work smart and hard with your business blog and you’ll see benefits in the form of: improved customer relations, search engine visibility, increased sales and improved brand reputation on the web.

Source :
- http://www.toprankblog.com/2005/09/blog-marketing-tips/

Starting A Successful Blog Is Like Planning An Invasion

This post was written by Alan Skorkin. Alan shares his thoughts about software development, people and teamwork on his blog skorks.com.

Every blogger wants to be successful, it is only natural. We often start out blogging about something that is our passion and we want everyone else to be just as excited about our passion as we are. It is therefore surprising just how many people have no concrete plans regarding what they want to achieve with their blog (let alone how they are going to achieve it) beyond vague dreams of grandeur.

I understand that it can be difficult to set yourself concrete goals, you may not really know what you’re capable of and so much is simply beyond your control. But, I have a trick that you can use whenever you’re starting a new blog (or want to kick-start your existing blog) that will help you focus and put everything in perspective.

Think of your blog as a country that is planning an invasion. What does an invasion have to do with the internet, I hear you ask? Well, consider this. What you want to do with your blog is to take over the internet (i.e. be successful), but the internet is a big place and you probably won’t be able to hold the whole thing, so what you’re really trying to do is carve out a little piece of the internet for yourself (being the supreme ruler, god and emperor of it is strictly optional :)) and that is exactly what an invasion is all about - at least in the classical sense. Whenever you’re planning an invasion you don’t just send your troops out to ’see how they go’ and ‘play it by ear’ the first thing you need is…

A Strategy

Every grand strategy starts with a grand objective. Where do you want to end up and at what point will you pronounce yourself a success? You need to know what you’re working towards, it gives you your general direction. Once you have a direction, you need to map out - in broad strokes - how you will achieve your grand objective. What are the steps on the road to your goal - these are your milestones. Get 1000 subscribers, have at least 100 blog posts published, guest post on 10 of the top 100 blogs, get at least 300 visitors per day from Google, these are all great milestones and can form part of your strategy. And don’t forget to set yourself some deadlines, you’re invading, not going for a leisurely stroll, you don’t want to be at it forever. This is all well and good, I hear you say, but how do I reach each of those milestones? For this you need…

Superior Tactics

A grand strategy is necessary, but invasions are not won with grand plans, it is all about having superior tactics from battle to battle. In the blogging world it comes down to:

* how targeted your posts are - make sure your posts fit your niche, otherwise you dilute your message. It can make tactical sense to creatively jump out of your niche once in a while, but in general you want to play to your strengths (presumably you chose your niche based on your strengths). You will fight better and last longer (i.e. write better posts) and you will constantly reinforce your message.

* how timely your posts are - learn to know what’s happening in your niche, find out what’s important, what’s hot and what everyone is talking about. You need to know when and where to strike to achieve maximum impact. People don’t want stale content, that doesn’t mean you always have to break news, but a timely opinion piece on a hot topic can bring a tremendous amount of exposure.

* how your promote your posts to give them maximum exposure - you can’t just use brute force all the time, sometimes it helps to use terrain to your advantage. In blogging terms that means you need to promote your posts, use the social media terrain and let it do half your work for you.

Even with all these efforts it can still be tough, you’re targeted and you’re timely, but the terrain is vast and there is just so much ground to cover. Plus the more ground you cover, the more you leave your flanks exposed, not a good situation. You will need some help, you have to find yourself some…

Allies

Often you get stuck in a rut, you hit a stalemate, you and the internet are just equally matched. This is where having allies comes in really handy. It sometimes makes sense to band together with another invader, you’re both after the same goal and there is more than enough territory for everyone. You can help promote each others content or provide a fresh voice on each others blogs, and you don’t have to band together with just one, sometimes a coalition is a good idea - everyone benefits. You might even try to get the support of a major power (a top blogger), that can be a real bonus, all you have to do is be creative and persistent in your approach (a little luck doesn’t hurt either). And of course don’t forget the local powers (the social media power users), these can make the outcome of some of your battles a foregone conclusion. A successful invasion can be largely about relationships and the internet is no different. But of course, no amount of allies will help you win your battles if you don’t…

Win The Skirmishes

Skirmishes are the bread and butter of any invasion. They are not glamorous and there are lots of them, but together they combine to let you succeed when you fight your major battles. In blogging the skirmishes are your daily (or at least) regular periods when you produce your content. It is not a glamorous time and it is not very social, but it is the bread and butter of a successful blog. You need to make time to regularly produce content, it doesn’t have to be daily, but you do have to keep doing it. The more skirmishes you fight the more you wear down the enemy, or in the case of blogging the more content you get out there the more chances you have of being noticed. There is one thing though, that will always jeopardize your chances of winning your skirmishes (and battles)…

Getting Distracted By The Scenery

There is always more to learn in the blogging world. There is a lot of info, much of it free and you can keep reading and learning indefinitely. But while you might get knowledge or satisfaction from watching the scenery, it is also how you get ambushed. You look around at the beautiful trees (or helpful blogging info) and before you know it you’re ambushed and have lost the skirmish (not writing content) and ultimately the battle and the war. You have your strategy and you know what tactics to employ, these may or may not be the latest and greatest, but they’re tried and true and they do work - stick to them. And if you really want to give yourself some motivation and kick this invasion up a notch try…

A Blitzkrieg

In a blitzkrieg you hit the enemy fast and you hit them hard, and you keep moving before they get a chance to recover. This means you brainstorm an idea for several successful posts or a series of posts, then you write them all and then you release them in quick succession and go all out promoting each one. I don’t mean release them one minute after each other, but instead release them judiciously. Build some hype around the first one and before it starts dying down, you release the second and build hype and promote that one, and then do the same for the third. Don’t give them a chance to recover. A blitzkrieg series of posts can really allow you to move far in short period of time. The allies you built before will really come in handy here (to protect your flanks as you move forward). Sometimes though, all this is not enough, none of it seems to work because you have forgotten one of the most important things…

The Logistics

Your invasion will only continue to have momentum as long as it is well supplied, ratty equipment and threadbare clothing will come back to bite you eventually (invading Russia in the middle of winter has proven this time and time again :)). For you this means, looking at where your blog lives and maybe sprucing it up a little while you’re at it. Make sure your blog is hosted reliably, a poor host can really cost you. It doesn’t mean you need to pay an ëarm and a leg’, but it does mean you server should be able to handle traffic spikes that you will no doubt supply through your promotional efforts. At the very least you need to make sure you have a caching solution of some sort in place (e.g. WP-Cache plugin for Wordpress). It is really embarrassing when your blog falls over after a small traffic spike - almost as embarrassing, as realizing your tanks are not water proof when you need to cross a river. Oh and do invest a little bit into your blog design it will pay off handsomely in the long run. Everyone enjoys a unique and cool-looking design, it may not be the major selling point of your blog, but it does add that little bit extra. Finally, if you remember nothing else, always remember this old maxim…

No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy

What this means in terms of an invasion is that no matter how good your strategy and tactics are it can all go to hell in a second when you’re in the thick of things. The key is being flexible enough to adjust to these changing conditions, take advantage of the opportunities and minimize the losses you take from circumstances you couldn’t foresee. In blogging terms it means - well, exactly the same thing. You need to have a grand plan, you need to set milestones for yourself and work towards achieving them, you need to know how you will promote your content and your blog and you need to build relationships to help you do so. But above all you need to be flexible enough to adjust to anything. If something is not working for you, scrap it and try something else, figure out a different way to approach that A-List blogger instead of giving up. Find a way to advertise creatively rather than using Adwords like everyone else. Always remember this, you can become as successful as those who have come before you by emulating them, but to surpass them you will need to forge your own path. I wish you a successful invasion!

Source :
- http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/08/23/starting-a-successful-blog-is-like-planning-an-invasion/

Can You Really Make Money From Blogging

One of the questions I see frequently asked on online discussion forums is, "Can You Really Make Money From Blogging?" People want to know if there's some way to profit from the time they spend maintaining their weblogs or personal online journals.

My answer is an emphatic "YES," because I do it... everyday!

Today I'll share with you how I do it.

Let me begin by saying that I don't make thousands per month from MOST of my blogs. However, I do have many making hundreds. Since I don't put in a lot of time maintaining them, and I enjoy blogging, I consider the money a bonus. I blog while sitting in my yard with my laptop (on a wireless connection)... watching the clouds roll by.

Another bonus I get from blogging is that it helps my regular websites that are set up as my "money machines."

The search engines visit my blogs more often than they visit my regular sites, and they follow the links from my blogs pointing to other sites. Some of these links point to my sites, and some point to sites of partners. This does help the search engine rankings of these sites MASSIVELY.

How Do I Monetize My Blogs?

I monetize my blogs by creating blogs on topics people are searching for... and that they are spending money on. I know which niches are hot to an extent based upon what my research proves pay-per-click advertisers are willing to spend their advertising dollars on.

I run Google AdSense ads on my blogs. I simply insert these ads in my menu bar and other strategic places on the webpage. I also experiment with other paid advertising on my blogs.

I sell affiliate products from my blogs. I simply find affiliate products at places like PayDotCom.com and Commission Junction. I incorporate these into my blogs. I do things like product reviews, how-to articles, etc. You can also locate suitable affiliate products by typing your target keywords + "affiliate program" at any major search engine. This should point out numerous websites with suitable affiliate programs to you.

How Do I Setup/Host My Blogs?

I have blog hosted on some of my own domains using Moveable Type. This is just one of many great pieces of blogging software. You have other choices... my programmer recommended this one to me.

I also have blogs hosted for free on Blogger.com. I have them on Blogger.com because they are incredibly easy to set up and maintain. A secondary reason I have them on Blogger.com is that Google OWNS Blogger.com and they index webpages hosted on their servers OFTEN and FAST!

The secret to getting Google and Yahoo! to visit your blogs often is a technique called "blogging and pinging." It's a method of notifying all of the major search engines, and blog directories, each time that you update your blog. The search engines come to take a look and they follow links from your blog to spider other blogs/sites. It's very powerful.

I won't go into too much details on blogging and pinging here. If you want more information on that topic I invite you to drop by my free, Internet marketing discussion board and ask any and all questions! It's at:
http://WillieCrawford.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

Examples Of Profitable Blogs?

I know, you want to see examples of profitable blogs :-)

To show you how simple it can be I'll show you just ONE. Its less than 2 months old :-)

The problem is that as soon as I show a site to anyone as an example, it's instantly ripped off. So, I'm going to "sacrifice" one making me about $60 per day from affiliate product sales and about $20 per day in AdSense revenue. That site is at:
http://cure-nail-fungus.blogspot.com

The above site currently ranks Number 6 on Yahoo for the term "cure nail fungus." It's a small niche but one that makes me $2400 per month... just from that one blog.

If you searched on the same term at Google, this site is not very highly ranked. However, THIS page is Num ber4:
http://www.chitterlings.com/no-more-nail-fungus.html

That happens to be one of my pages too :-) I won't tell you what ALL I'm up to on that page... that's another article. The technique involves using your own domains to promote affiliate products rather than advertising someone else's domain... so it improves your link popularity.

I'm not going to show more of my blogs because that just invites competition. Instead, I'm going to answer another question you have to be wondering...

"How do I find time to maintain all of these blogs, even if they are profitable?"

Well, first of all, I don't really need a lot like the "sacrificial lamb" that I showed you above to keep me satisfied.

I do have a number of secret weapons though. One is called AutoBlogger. You can check it out at:
http://WillieCrawford.com/auto-blogger.html

What AutoBlogger does is allow me to queue up a number of posts for my various blogs in advance. It lets you queue up "articles" which can really be anything you want. Then you tell the software at what frequency to make a post.

My AutoBlogger account allows me to automatically post to an UNLIMITED number of blogs.

WARNING: A program like AutoBlogger can get you in trouble if you misuse it! If you use it to spam or abuse the search engines, it's just going to get you banned. If you use it to abuse the blog hosts, they're just going to delete your blogs.

Here's how I use AutoBlogger:

I have sites where I discuss Internet marketing... as just one example. On these sites I share many of my articles and tidbits. I simply queue up these articles/tidbits to post at a given frequency. This frequency can be a set number of hours, days, weeks, or months. So theoretically, I can set up a blog, pre-schedule 50 posts, and not touch it in months, while it is automatically posted to for the next 50 intervals.

AutoBlogger even lets you set it to start rotating through the posts again when they run out, if you want to. I personally wouldn't do this since you'd just be posting duplicate content.

AutoBlogger allows you to insert RSS feeds right into your blog posts. So in addition to posting articles you can also auto-update by adding new RSS feeds at a set interval. Since I HATE sending my traffic to other sites (without reciprocation), these RSS feeds generally pull from MY sites. That way, my traffic is only sent to my other sites.

If you don't even feel like queuing up a lot of posts, you can go to a site like Elance.com and hire someone else to do it for you... or just hired your kids to do it for you. It can be as easy as you want to make it.

OK, I've just proven to you that you can make money off of blogs. In-fact, you can make more money than many people make off of their REGULAR websites. It just takes a little thinking outside the box!

It also takes not being too greedy. What I just showed you works for me because I'm not doing anything that's likely to get me banned from the search engines, Google AdSense, Blogger.com, or any affiliate program. It's only when you get carried away, and do things that harm the search engines that you "shoot yourself in the foot."

Set up blogs providing useful content. Make regular posts to these blogs but not in a manner that seems unnatural. By that, I mean don't auto-post twenty times in an hour, or post every hour for a month! No human can possible post to a blog at these rates for long, so the search engines detect something is "wrong." They don't generally prohibit you from using tools to make your job easier... just don't get carried away!

There are actually, thousands of people earning a living doing things similar to what I just shared... but with little twists. I'm meeting up with many of them in New Orleans in September. You're invited to join us. We'll basically be sharing how we make a fortune off of niche websites and programs such as Google AdSense. You can register today at: http://WillieCrawford.com/meet-in-new-orleans.html

Source :
- http://www.adsense.madeeasynet.com/can-you-really-make-money-from-blogging.html

About the author:

Willie Crawford has taught PROVEN Internet marketing techniques to thousands of successful Internet entrepreneurs since late-1996. Grab a free copy of his comprehensive, 20-Lesson Internet Marketing Success Course now at: http://WillieCrawford.com

How to Make Money Blogging

Create a blog for making money is to maximize function of blogs as a media campaign so that they can bring in income for us as the blog owner. In this case, the blog owner to be clever to manage information that is presented in order to bring a large profit.

In managing information, of course, a blog which can be a source of various information search on the internet will reach much visitor. This is what many companies use as the basis for major media campaigns.

Here are various ways you can do blog owners to generate revenue (a great article from problogger.net) :

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads and many more ad networking.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

If You looking for more information on how to make money blogging? Here’s a post thatb problogger.net wrote talking about his own experience - particularly looking at the top ways that he making money from blogs.

source :
- http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/06/how-bloggers-make-money-from-blogs/