Blogs.

As an Internet strategist – my life daily is consumed with social media feeds, blog alerts, feedburner stats, google alert updates, monitoring, strategizing, execution – all of these overused terms and time consuming tactics certainly take a toll on you.

But one thing I do often, as I do for all my clients, is research – taking notice of the growing digital space around me – thinking of ideas to implement innovative strategies among the community and with my clients.

One of those key strategies that are a must in today’s Internet spectrum is a blog.  A blog is key in driving not only traffic, but interest to your brand, product, or company.  Blogs help you appear authoritative in your industry – allowing you to give views on the latest events in your trade, offer reviews, insights, and so on.

This expands into relationship building tools, as you are able to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style, as compared to how you direct the voice on your main website.  Through the blog channel, they are more likely to trust you, and then all the more likely to visit your main website and then click your links and possibly purchase your product.

It also offers insight for your customers, and allows them to leave comments and ’speak’ to you on a key level. In addition, blogs are extremely search engine friendly – through thousands of possible keywords and fresh, updated content on a regular basis – blogs are simply great facets to have on your website today.  Your simply misguided if you think otherwise.

*Read More for a detailed blog breakdown of the popular clothing line Free People.

Now, another aspect of blogs I enjoy are creating them, not only content strategy, but programming and designing them on a unique level.  One aspect of ‘branding’ a blog is considering the number of possibilities you have when actually build the blog.

How do you want to approach a design?
Are you a creative or less scalable brand?
Do you have the ‘assets’ to build a ‘creative’ blog?
Do you have a content strategy built before you blog?
Do you know how to ‘market’ your blog on a daily basis?

These are all important questions you MUST think about before diving into the blog space – thinking you know what to do, when you might need a refresher.

And always remember that blogs vary, depending if you are in the business-to-consumer or business-to-business parallel – but your Plan of Action (POA) should always remain the same.

Case Study.

Free People. A blog that does it Right.

Free People is a ’boutique’ style of women’s and young girl’s clothing – offered both online and in brick and mortar stores around the world.  It is a sister-brand to another well-known bohemian-type clothing, accessories and furniture store – Anthropologie.

Now, the Free People store design is a very creative, bohemian look that stylizes the brand well, and does many good things as far as marketing the brand on the main website – but their blog page does an even better job in terms of look, strategy and content.

First, when you come upon the page – you have a nice flash banner on the top portion of the blog that draws instant attention.  It’s 3-D style and moving parts, keeps the user engaged enough to move the mouse over the falling curtain rod and press it – which then drags the screen over, as if you were in puppet show – making note of their blog’s name “Caravan of Curiosities” – to keep the user engaged enough to follow through the blog to discover its true meaning.

Another side point here – naming your blog something different and marketing that along side your main brand is a nice change of pace on occasion.  But it won’t work for everyone – so carefully think about that before you go off and name your blog something completely different.  The nice touch here is that ‘Caravan of Curiosities’ still has an engaging tone to it, and how they display it in the blog is effective as well.

Working your way down the page – you recognize the 3-D style curtain outline the navigation header, which is simple – and elegant. And then just three blog pages dress the navigation header:

 

Blog: links to the blog homepage
Videos: links to a custom video channel page in the blog
Shop FP: links back to the main website

 

And from a design aspect – you have to appreciate the look with drawn curtains going down the sides of the pages – very instinctual and effective.

Now, the opening page here is the blog homepage – which after the navigation has your standard blog format and layout with a search box, archives, categories, and a blog roll entitled ‘favorites’.  They also added a store locator and 6 products that are simple photos and text that link back to the main store. The column layout is a three-column layout morphed into two columns, and in that side right column they squeeze in the blog widgets.  All of this is complimented by a great ‘notebook’ style background.  As complex and rich as this design is overall – remember, it is their content that gets the job done…not the design.  Even though I truly applaud them on such a layout – very engaging for a user to traverse through.

Finally, at the bottom of the page — a nice connection with the footer, in relation to the header — similar to how you tie any story together — you must connect the beginning with the end of a story…as you do a website — design and content including.

Content of Free People.

Now, with any website, content is king, always will be king, and on the Free People blog – it is King.  Content on blogs are crucial for search engines because you can create thousands of keywords, all of it search engine friendly, and all the content you create is new and updated – so search engines will love you for it.

Free People does a fantastic job with approaching the all around marketing term – “On Target, Off Topic”. Free People have a target audience, girls, young women ages tween to 45; easily, and for the more trendy women who may breach beyond that age – even an older woman can wear their clothing.  With that target audience in thought – as a marketer – go ‘off topic’ for a bit, and consider talking about content that is not directly related to you, but still, in a way, is connected.

Free People’s breaks up its blog into 26 different categories; topics such as art, books, decor, crafts, food, home office, magazines, polls, music, and so on.  At the same time, they intermix direct categories related to some of their external social media tools, such as their flickr, myspace, facebook, and download pages.

The point is, their content is intellectually placed, and interesting…which is even more important!  They do occasionally drop in content that will push a new outfit, piece of clothing and so on…but not as often as you think.  And they are blogging everyday – with NEW content, and using this to their advantage.

Video.

Another aspect of their content they included was a blog page devoted exclusively to video.  This custom designed video player they added features behind the scene videos of their monthly catalog shoots, as well as a video featuring their 2007 holiday party.  These simple videos are barely 1:30 minutes long, edited with appropriate music, mostly indie stuff, and cut to look a bit grainy and eclectic, as their brand appropriately exhibits now.

This simple idea of placing video on the blog is a great marketing tool.  First, the video takes an editor, all of about an hour to edit and post.  From there…he can take this video – submit it to any external video channels, i.e. YouTube, Viddler, and so on.  They can then upload them to their Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr pages – only enhancing their exposure – through something as simple as video.

For those who don’t know what this is or means; essentially this creates secondary brand exposure that allows you to initially reach out to possible consumers who might not have seen your brand before, allowing them to now find you.  It also allows you to create ‘backlinks’ to your website – this all counts in that SEO puzzle so many clients and people I speak to are always trying to solve.

Final.

Here is the point about all this – what this blog does right is pretty much EVERYTHING. What they do wrong, next to NOTHING, nearly.  And let’s be clear on this, they have people who are supposed to be blogging and acting as community managers to maintain this blog, and update their external social networking profiles, and so on.  This all takes time, and we all know what time ends up being — $$$.  But, the effect of what they have created has allowed them to ‘connect’ with their consumers, and harness new customers, and so on.  Their blog has been around since November 2006, and has amassed a huge amount of traffic daily to the blog.  Agreed – they are a major brand and can spark that type of traffic, but honestly, the simplicity behind their blog strategy only enhances those numbers.

Any company or brand that is thinking of starting a blog strategy need to follow a similar model in structuring their content and direction when beginning or ‘changing up’ a blog for your brand or product.

If you need help in developing a blog strategy for your business, feel free to contact me @ anytime. nicholas.cifuentes@gmail.com

This article is for those few brave souls, who have just initiated their journey into blogging, and need that amazing high one gets when your blog is finally getting read by a substantial number of readers.

Please track your blog readers using services like Google Analytics, it just takes 10 minutes, and it will provide you with a vault of valuable information on your reader’s preferences, where your readers come from, and how they interact with your blog.

For those of you thinking about right now “Hey, I like writing for the love of it, and I don’t need any readers for approval”, I would like to say kudos to you, and do continue the good work.

But if you are serious about sharing your hard work (its blood sweat and tears when you have to do it 5 times a week) with the millions of users searching blogs daily, then let’s continue our journey down the rabbit hole.

A quick look at the statistics on Blogging – comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
” Total internet audience 188.9 million
” Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US alone
” Facebook: 41.0 million
” MySpace 75.1 million

Well that the good news!

But the bad news is that with the thousands of new blogs churning out each day, what hope is there for a reader interested in your topic to reach you. You many have written brilliant masterpieces, but how do you let others know that (remember most poets and artists die poor and unrecognized because they don’t reach out to share themselves with others).

In this article, we will not get into details about the quality of your content, and its assumed you have written good clean copy. Good copy being informative, entertaining and engaging (Don’t forget to get your keywords in the body content as well the labels/tags).

There are various ways to promote your blog and reach out to the millions out there. The strategies below will not only assist you in getting more traffic to your blog, but also get you higher rankings for your blog, as well as corporate site (if you have one).

Deep-Linking

Start a corporate blog for your employees, customer, vendors, associates and investors. The benefits of doing so are many, as seen in the trend where many corporate blogs are doing very well in building brand loyalty, customer loyalty and driving business through existing customers.

Also start a topic specific blog of your expertise. To give you an example of this, a SEO Expert Services Company, can start a blog on SEO tips, advise and attract marketing professionals, seo students, Internet marketing professionals, readers and businessman.

Now comes the easy part; Create relevant deep links between your corporate website pages, corporate blog posts and topic blog posts. Your website, corporate blog and topic blog are treated as separate sites as far as search engines go, so don’t hesitate to use you’re your content for link building purposes.

Each blog post is a potential to build another link to your corporate website. But don’t overdo it. Search engines dont penalize a site for too many links (unless the site is just a whole bunch of links for the pure purposes of link farming, and trying to trick the search engines to give irrelevant results), but it could a big turn off for your readers who just want to enjoy the story and don’t care much about your hair brained strategies to dominate the internet.

Cross-Linking

It’s easy to create links when you are the master of your website and blogs, but how do we get other websites/ blogs to give the same quality links back to your blog.

As in the real world if you have to build a new contact, you would approach that person, introduce yourself, inform that person of the value you offer, and maintain a good relation with that person.
In the blog world building links is no different.

1. Approach websites that has content/target audience similar to your blogs and offer some additional value to their readers, or even better write a good intelligent review about some service/products that website is offering. Send a nice email highlighting the same with a link back to your blog post. Online marketers like collecting testimonials so there is great probability that they will link back to your blog.

2. Approach other bloggers who command high loyalty. Most of the time if you have a professional approach, a good pitch and a value proposition, most bloggers will not mind writing a small review and linking to your blog.

After all these bloggers need to create content daily, so offer them a helping hand. Many bloggers advocate semi-advertising in their posts, and bloggers define their tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes about brands all the time. So why not get onto the bandwagon.

Another way is to leave intelligent comment on the bloggers post with something nice to say about the blogger, and then give a small link to your blog to explain in detail. Most times the blogger will leave a good comment and not delete it. I don’t personally use this method, but as they say, in this matter, flattery may get you what you want.

3. Some SEO experts and bloggers have good relations with other fellow bloggers. A good seo expert should be able to get some of these bloggers to write a good review and link to your blog/ website. It will drive traffic to your website and add to your link building campaign.

Create a RSS Feed

Most blog software’s like Blogger allow users to create an automatic RSS feed. If you notice a RSS feed is a very simple page, no major formatting, no pictures and videos.

RSS also knows as “Real Simple Syndication” is a mechanism used to distribute content without depending on the browser or email client. Users subscribe to RSS feeds to get latest updates (headlines with a small brief) about their favorite websites/ blogs across the internet in one place.

In your case, your blog posts form part of content that can be syndicated across news/content feeds. Once your RSS feed is published, you can submit the feed to many of the feed aggregators and have your content/ blog post distributed across their network of users. You can start by using this link http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm to submit your blog to many feeds.

Submit to Article Sites

Article sites are a great way for distributing your content to many sites without the fear of landing into soup for duplicate content. In addition you are building credibility as an expert in your domain, quality links, and driving traffic to your blog.

By submitting your blog posts to article submission sites having high page rank, you are basically syndicating the same content across various channels, getting links, and traffic. Now that’s a good deal!

A note of warning, don’t just submit your article to 1000 sites, rather be wise and work with a few key article sites. In this way it’s easy to build a good relationship with those sites and their audiences, as they feel that you have not plastered your article across every living website in the world.

Also its easy to keep the momentum up, otherwise submitting each blog post to 1000 sites would be rather time consuming.

Go Social with your Blog

Social bookmarking is the next wave to hit the new media landscape. Millions of users surfing the internet now have a voice and can rate/bookmark and suggest websites, blogs and share their likes and dislikes with the billions of surfers.

Wikipedia describes social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Register your blog with services like digg, reddit, del.icio.us and stumbleupon. Give your readers an opportunity to suggest/ bookmark/tag your blog post across the social media landscape and watch the traffic come in.

Make a Noise

Hey you have worked hard to get your blog started. Now is the time to announce it to the world, atleast the online world. Submit your blog to blogger search engines like Technorati, and other blogging directories on the net. As you submit your blog to the various directories out there, your blog is reaching out to newer audiences.

You can also submit your blog to PR sites which allow companies to submit press releases and announcements. It may not do much for your rankings, but many journalists are known to scan press release sites for a good story. Could it be you?

You can also announce your blog by putting it on your visiting card, in your email footer, on your corporate website, Facebook (profile, posts on wall, comments etc), Youtube profile, Linkedin profile, and finally the good ol’ word of mouth.

These should keep you busy for the next few months, and by then you will be raring to get into more advanced techniques of marketing and promoting your Blog. But that my friend’s is another time, another story!

Zen of SEO Blog: http://www.seo-optimization-experts.com/seoblog.html

Blog SEO is one of the most effective way to build automated traffic to your blog. You might have learn some basic SEO strategy, but have you heard that blog has a very different way that allows you to get your blog on the first page very quick and easy.

Most blogger will rush to build backlinks, but they will discover ranking is hard and struggling because they have forgotten to do some “On-Blog Optimization” that would help them to get to the first page few times quicker. These On-Blog Optimization are:

1. Use Domain Name That Contain Keywords

Domain name gives you a huge advantage to get to the first page on the search engines. I’ve seen websites that have only few links that rank higher than sites which have hundreds of backlinks. The difference is just these sites domain name contain their keywords. This makes the search engine thinks that the domain name is dedicated to show only contents about the keyword.

2. Does Your Blog Title Contain Keywords?

Type keywords in your blog title. When the blog title is your keywords, the h1 tag and title tag on your blog will become your keywords. Each page of your blog will link back to the main page of your blog with the keywords too. All of these gives you extra SEO benefits to your blog.

3. Does Your Tagline Contain Keywords?

Every WordPress blog’s general setting, you’ll realize something below your blog title called ‘Tagline’ or description in other blog platform. Tagline is another important location to type your keywords. Make sure get it done.

4. Do You Miss Out Ping?

Ping is a important function of each wordpress blog will have. Everytime you publish a new article, your blog will ping itself to inform few websites you’ve created new information on your blog. Ping also helps to inform search engines you updated new information on your blog. Search engines like websites and blogs that update themselves frequently because they offer their users up-to-date and quality information. Search engine will usually rank your blog high if you ping often. Remember to import more ping services in your setting.

5. Are You Using Duplicated Contents?

Beware of duplicated content on your blog. Try not to reuse your own or others’ content on your blog. Reusing same content doesn’t help in ranking because search engines don’t index many pages that contain the same content because it might annoy their users and it might be a way to avoid spammers to increase their page by duplicating same contents.

6. Applying The Technique Of Keyword Density

Do you mention your keywords in your blog? Repeat your keywords often. Try to keep your density of keywords above 2% and below 7%. It means you got to have keyword you aim for 3 to 6 times in every 100 words you wrote. The more often you use the keywords in your post, the more the search engines thinking your blog is relevant to the keywords. Many people already aware of this method, this makes some internet marketer stuff keywords in their page. Google penalize page that overuse this method. Try to keep it below 7%.

7. Relevant Keywords

Since many people discover the keyword density method, Search engines have created a different algorithm that can judge websites’ content by the amount of relevant keywords. If you are using Wordtracker or Google Keyword Tool, these tool is able to give you many other keywords that are related to the keywords you aim for. Use some of them in your articles too. For example, you’ll see “pimple” and “blackhead” as related keywords when you search for acne.

8. Speed Blogging

If you post a new articleon your blog 3 times a day on your blog or more, Google think that your blog have the latest news about a topic and always provide fresh contents. As a result, you’ll rank easier. If you have a new blog, start posting once every 3 days and increase your post to once a day after 1 month. If your blog has been there for certain period, it’s up to you.

9. Page Volume

Another tip many Black Hat SEO trick users know is increasing the vloume of webpages. However, we try to do it in a white hat approach by posting more new articles. The more pages your blog has, the more content rich and informational the search engines think your blog is. As a result, your blog will be ranked higher.

10. Is Your Page Long Enough?

Publish posts have contain more than 250 words to get your page indexed quicker and stay in Google longer. As I mentioned, there’re many spammers who use the technique of increasing blog page quantity to manipulate search results. They might simply use a few words to publish a page. Search engines have ways to calculate the words to ensure it doesn’t happen.

11. What Sites Are You Linking To?

Do you know that your blog will get lower ranking if you link to a spam site or bad site? It is the same the other way round. If you link to a high authority site, your blog will have a higher ranking too. I haven’t did any experiment to prove it yet but I am a strong believer of this concept.

12. Interlinking

Is your blog posts linking to each other? Interlinking is a tip many internet marketers apply to increase Blog SEO traffic from keywords you don’t aim for. Although backlinks from the same site is not as good as backlinks from other websites, they are useful in ranking too especially you are able to have it done automatically with blogs. Use “Similar Post” plugin and create links to your popular posts at your sidebar.

13. Change Title Tags On Each Of Your Posts

Another tip to get more search engine traffic from untargeted keywords, it’s crucial to have the title tags of each of your blog post start with the post title first. You can use a free plugin called “All In One SEO Pack Plugin” that will do this automatically.

14. Create SEO Friendly URLs

The url of each of your blog post will not contain any keywords which people would search in the search engines in it by defaul. It might be something such as http://your-blog.com/?p=123. To make each of your blog posts more seo friendly, it is important to change your blog’s url to keywords. You can go to the blog’s settings and customize the permalink into “/%category%/%postname%”. This permalink structure will turn change the url of your post into urls that have the words in your post title.

15. Does Your Blog Has A Map?

Having a sitemap on your blog will definitely help you to rank faster because robot bots from Google could only crawl certain amounts of links. If your blog has a good sitemap that allows the bots to crawl your blog easily, more pages will get indexed and continue to get a lot of traffic from the search engine. But creating your own sitemap requires

Alex Liu is a full time blogger who specialize in Blog SEO to increase blog traffic. He shares tips and strategies to get traffic to blog at his blog-http://blogtrafficgeek.com

Now, I am going to give you 9 powerful tips you must take into your action seriously for your blog online marketing. With those tips, you can build highly successful and profitable blog online and earn money on the internet. All you have to do is to take those tips in your action and marketing plan seriously. 

My investigations show that blog is one of the most popular and effective ways to earn money on the internet. Now, most of people have their own blog online. Also, most internet entrepreneurs use blog as their internet marketing tools to advertise and sell their products or services. 

Actually, blog online marketing is not all that hard if you know what you are doing. However, if this is your very first blog and you are wondering how to get readers For more helps visit on go on www.blog-and-ping.com. First let me just say that marketing your blog is going to require patience, and being consistent. 

Here are some great tips to use when trying to get your blog out there and get new readers. You’ll discover workable tips and secrets of how to build successful blog and earn money with your blog. 

1) The first key for your successful in blog online marketing is to update your blog frequently. We can not put enough emphasis on this tip. If you tell your readers that you are going to update your blog daily, then do it. If you tell them that you will be writing in your blog weekly, don’t let them down. Your readers are what make your blog successful. You may not realize this in the beginning, and you will have few readers in the beginning as well, but you will eventually build a readership base and have people checking out your blog regularly. Maybe you do not plan on telling your readers how often you will update your blog. That is ok too. However, think about this, if you were reading a blog on a weekly basis, and you expected to see the blog that you like to read updated at least once a week, you would be very disappointed to find out that it was not. Sure, things happen that might prevent you from updating, and that is expected, and excused, but week after week can hurt you and cause you to lose readers. 

2) You are going to want to be sure that all of your posts are formatted. Doing so will leave out any confusion for the search engines and you will have everything nice and neat and all organized. The label tags are there for a reason when you are dealing with blogs. So using them and not leaving them out is a great idea. 

3) I would recommend you to ensure that your blog has the track back feature. Let me tell you why. When you have the track back feature on your blog, you are allowing other people to link back to your blog. Maybe someone has a post to post on their blog that is relevant to one of yours. They can use the talkback to your post, and send their readers to your blog so that they know what they are referring to. Another good thing to remember is that if someone gives you a track back, it is a courtesy to return that to their blog if at all possible. 

4) Having a Google account and submitting a sitemap is almost a must when you are blog online marketing. Doing so will allow Google to know how often you are updating your blog and they will automatically know of any changes that you have made to it as well. This will let Google get those new pages indexed faster and get them into search results much quicker than if you did not have the sitemap. There is a certain way you have to do the sitemap for Google, and they can explain that to you. Just know this is an important step to blog online marketing. 

5) Exchanging links with authority blogs and websites that are in your same market is another great way to get the word out about your blog. The authority sites are going to have a higher page rank, and will also be listed high in Google’s search results. So do some searches and check those out and see if they are up to exchanging links. If they are not, you could always just add those into your blogrolls. You do not need permission to do that if they are not into linking. However, in the world of blogs, most blog owners are thankful for all links, and are willing to return the favour. 

6) Tracking is another part of blog marketing that is so very important. You want to be able to track your visitors and clickers to know where they are coming from. You want to be able to tell what keywords they searched on to find your blog and where they did their searching. Doing so will help take out all of the guess work when it comes to blog marketing. You will know what keywords are working, and which are not. 

7) Allowing RSS feeds from your blog is also another great blog online marketing tool. You are going to find that when you allow RSS feeds, your blog is going to end up all over the internet with a link back to it and that is a good thing. This is a wonderful way to get links to your blog with little or no effort. People that subscribe to your blog’s RSS feeds are able to then post your blog posts on their sites or blogs. This in return gives you a link on their site or page that they have you on. 

While you are working on your readership base, and trying to gain readers, you are going to find that commenting on blogs that are relevant to yours will surely help. Find a blog that is on the same topic to yours, or go on www.profit-pulling-toolbars.com. You can also make a track back with your blog postings to comment on your own blog. Doing so will probably more than likely give someone else the urge to track back to your blog? This will be good for it as well. Commenting on blogs that get many comments will make your blog seen by those interested in that market. You will gain traffic and readers that way, and it is easy as well as free. 

9) Learn and apply SEO to your blogs. SEO is search engine optimization. You are going to find that if you want your blog to go anywhere, you need SEO, and you need to know how to use it to the advantage of your blog. Just like a website, a blog will be better off optimized. 

Final thoughts, blog online marketing is only as hard as you make it. Use these powerful tips and get your blog out there and seen today! about blog online marketing to start & grow your highly profitable and successful home based internet marketing business with your blog today! You’ll discover great tips, workable & proven techniques, top secrets and steps-by-steps of how to get your blog been #1 ranking in major search engines, drive a ton of relevancy traffic and earn money on the internet with your blogs. Also, you will save a lot of your time & money to learn by yourself. 

Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and
best friend about your new blog but that”s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers.

These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the
moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to
help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is
called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you
no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers.

Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to
teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very
practical tips or advice.

This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical
and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current
(it isn”t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight.

The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum.

Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same
time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing
here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if
they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new.

This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed. You don”t have to produce
one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new.

Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will
be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so
the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call
your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily
rememberable domain name.

People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world
(that”s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them
to spread the word and pass on your URL.

Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry
about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember
then you”ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller
articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of
reader for your blog is to comment on other people”s blogs.

You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers
there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you
leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always
have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and
hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog
conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another
blogger”s article you can do a trackback to their entry.

What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it”s sort of like
your blog telling someone else”s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks
often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another
blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the
attention of another blogger.

The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They
may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time
down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone
to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If
they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since
you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about.

To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always
respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that
summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to
collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to
a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike
in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of
new readers but it”s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it”s worth the effort. Go to Blog
Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it.

You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit
back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with
this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to ArticleBase.com. This is another tip that doesn”t bring in hundreds of
new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it”s worthwhile because you
simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your
pillar articles and submit it to ArticleBase.com.

Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their
website or in their newsletter. How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource
Box”.

You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two
sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your
article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large
newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all
of the techniques I”ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you
do everything above you may bring in readers but they won”t stay or bother to come back.

Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of
over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

Warmly,
Gary Neame

If you want to Position yourself to be successful in blogging, The first thing you must have is a successful blog and here is 7 top tips that enable you to moving forward.

From my past blog teaching experienced, Not many people have the right concept of blogging with blog, they started blogging and thinking that with an hour or two a day they can become famous and earn several thousand dollars a month or more. I advocate part-time blogging with a successful blog for a full-time income, but that is not an overnight outcome. If you think it will happen to you within a week, a month, you are going to be disappointed.

It takes work, especially at the start, to build a successful blog, but the rewards make it worthwhile. If your timetable is presently full and you are not prepared to make room for regular, and I mean regular work on your blog, you probably shouldn’t jump into the game just yet without building a successful blog. Here what you need to follow toward a successful blog in your blogging life.

Writing Good or Valua-able Blog Content Successful blogs all have one thing in common – they improve people’s lives. If your blog is to do the same, You have to determine what it is you can offer that can improve the lives of other people. Content is the value you offer to the public. Please remember each blog post does not have to be in lenghth. It can be as little as one to two paragraphs. Keep in mind that whatever you post should be valuable to the user and elicit a response.

Don’t Be Afraid To Write Blog Post Writing your own content is the best decision when blogging. Blog readers prefer conversational blog posts more than salesy or info posts where you can see most of the succesful blog have it. When you are merging content, don’t be afraid to re-write parts.

Be An Active Blogger For Your Blog Blog Frequently, at least a few times per week. The biggest mistake made by bloggers is to let weeks or even months go by without blogging. If your blog is not being updated it will no longer be considered “sweet” to the search engines, by that I mean it will be considered a “dead” blog and SEs won’t visit your blog as often.

Research Is Very Important (Stealing Idea) Research the most popular or successful blog within your topic or category, you can use google search engine or any others search engines or blog directories for your research. Look at what they are doing and try to model their sucess without copying exactly.

Become Apart of The Blogging Community Start leaving comments on other successful blog where they are relavent to your topics, and then eventually leave a link back to your site after creating a relationship.

Keep Getting Links To Your Blog You may aware that most successful blog has great ranking. You need to build more backlink to you blog, you may add your links to the internet directories to gain more backlines, or you may consider to add your blog in 3-ways link network as what I did to get automatically 250 quality and relavent backlink to each of your blog upto blogs, although it does require a small pay amount, but its worth and save your time from building link your own in effective way.

Always Know Your Traffic and Optimize Monitor your blog stats to see where your traffic is originating. It is important that you use a web stats program that can show you how many people are “bookmarking” your site. A good bookmark ratio is a good sign that people are interested in your blog and have plans on re-visiting it.

Being new to blogging, there are many fundamentals you need to pick up and further master it toward a successful blog, such as setting up a self host blog and so on. You may self learn on how to do it probably or you may consider join my 2 days Internet Blog Coaching program (with 6 more times after course review). If you are looking for Proper Guidance to master about blogging Basic, I am here to help you.

It’s critical that you actually willing to do what I tell you to do before you consider joining our blog coaching program, or you risk wasting your time and mine. I don’t want people in this program who don’t take action. You must have a desire to building successful blog and You must be prepared to invest time a few hours every weeks or every days if possible! I hope to see your in my March 2009 Coahing : )

Blogs have increased popularity over this past months. Many people have started to create their personal blogs to express their thoughts and feelings. Internet companies have also started their blogs to inform consumers on the latest product news and reviews.

Because of this, blogs are also being used as internet marketing media. Before, internet marketing is done by placing banners and links on popular websites, such as news and information sites. Links were also included on newsletters and marketing letters sent to the members of their mailing lists. Many people spend time reading blogs. People read their friend\’s blogs, their favorite author\’s blogs, blogs on topics that they are interested in, and blogs on product reviews. With the increasing popularity of blogging, it is even feared that people rely on blogs to get the latest news.

While getting news reports from blogs isn\’t reliable, some people look for product reviews through blogs. In some cases, this is more dependable. While it is true that some media persons are being paid to write good reviews about a certain product, blog writers write about their actual experiences on products and services from a company. Since there are many people who read and start their own blogs, blogs are a good medium to market a product. With the increasing blog traffic means increase in product sales.

Blog traffic can be increased by joining affiliate programs and sites, which will list your blog under a certain search category or name. You can also have your blog advertised in popular websites. This, however, will cost some money and is not advisable if you have just started blogging. A writer who has just launched his/her blog will want as much traffic as possible to increase advertisements on the site. Also, some advertisers pay every time their link is clicked or the page that has their link is viewed.

When you have increased traffic on your blog, you should try to keep you visitors coming back and recommending your blog to friends and colleagues. This can be done by having informative or amusing content and good blog layout and design. You may develop your blog\’s content or you can also acquire the services of a web content writer to provide you with the blog articles.

The blog\’s layout and design also plays a big role. While most of the companies offering free blog hosting offer pre-selected templates, there are also some that allows customization that if you utilize this feature correctly can increase your blog\’s traffic.

Here are a few tips to make your blog stand out from the millions of blogs out there that have standard designs.

* Customize the banner

The banner usually has the most generic designs that are common to the blogs from a blogging company or service. You can personalize this banner by having a graphic with the dimensions of the banner. You can also edit the graphic so that it will also include the title of your blog. In this case, you can create your own graphic or you can purchase professional looking graphics online for less than $10.

* Personalizing photos

Of course, most of the photos that you will be posting will be your own. However, if you don\’t customize the photos before posting them, you may miss maximizing the enhancing benefits graphics can add to the page. Adding photo borders can help the photo stand out from the page. It can also add to the design of your blog. You can choose a standard border or you can also create your own border which can be associated with your blog\’s templates.

* Add a favicon

Don\’t you think sites with icons on the address bar before the website\’s URL are cool? Many people do. These favicons add a professional look to the URL. These easy to do using photo or graphic editing softwares.

* Check out blog templates, layouts, backgrounds, textures and skins from sites

There are sites that offer free blog templates, layouts, backgrounds, textures and skins. You can make use of these so your blog will not look generic like most of the blogs hosted by the service provider.

* Include RSS feeds

This is a cool way to inform people with newsreaders about your blog headlines. Tutorials on RSS feeds are available on the internet.

* Audio makes your blog more personal

Not only does audio personalizes the blog; it can also keep your visitors coming back. You can try having streaming radio stations, mp3 file or playlists loading with your blog.

* Advertisements

If you have signed-up with Google Ad-Sense, which I am sure you would like to do, make sure that the ads are conveniently placed that these will not hinder your readers\’ ease in accessing the information on your blog.

Try using these tips and you can definitely increase and retain traffic on your blog.

Before i start the basics about blogging are you aware that there’s a new way to keep your friends updated of the things happening in your life? blogging is one of the revolutionary way in the internet that can let you owned a personal diary that can be viewed by many people. This is called the weblog or more popularly known as the blog or blogging.

A blog is like a journal where you can write or post your daily activities on a regular basis. The term blog is the short term for web blog. Blogging is an act of adding, writing and maintaining a blog by yourself.

There are several types of blogs that in my opinion you should know. These type of blog is commonly use by a blogger in the web today.

• Personal blog – this is the most famous type of blog used in some of the friendly hub in the net such as blogspot,wordpress etc. This is defined as the online diary or journal that you owned, where you can post your poem and other literature piece or even what is happening around you.

Cultural blog – it discusses all about music, arts, theater and other popular culture.Usually,this is for educational purposes. Topic blog – it focuses on the function like some of the search engines present now. Some writers who want to write about something unknown can use it.This type of blog usually it focus on one niche topic. This type of blog is commonly use by internet marketer Business blog – this talk about the stock market and other business related topics. It is also use to promote businesses, to talk about economics in forum type and manage information.This type of blog is commonly use by buisnessman. Science blog – it is the mode used to disseminate information and data. However, scientists only use this mode for simple scientific data and information because they believe that it could damage the credibility of their science as many people can read it.This type of blog usually reveal a part of confidential information that only authorise people can view it. Moblog – it contains all the information from a mobile phone. This type of blog focus in one niche called handphones. Collaborative blog – this kind of blog is written by two or more writers. Particular site is open for all the writers to write together with others.This type of blog usually encourage people to share their thoughts and ideas. Eclectic blog – This type of blog it focuses on niches individually or collaboratively made. Educational blog – Similar to cultural blog but this is used by students to record the things they learned from their teacher including the activities done in a day. Directory blog – this blog gives a regular update of all the visited links.usually this kind of blog is contain a guide or information for its visitor. It focuses on particular news and happenings. Forum blog – it functions as an internet forum. It allows two or more bloggers to post discussion on the net. Spam blog – this is a form of persuasive advertising. Commonly known for the name splogs. It is characterized by the use of bold letters and self-claim advertisements.

There are many web-based blog journals available online. You can post your own blog, too. Anyone can start writing a blog. In many cases, it is free. How do you start making a blog?

Here is how, follow the following steps in writing a blog.

1. There are many blog sites available online that offers free blog posting. They also offer free accounts with many features.As i stated above, blogspot and wordpress provides free blog service.

2. You can choose your blog to be private view or public view. Many blog site offer a blog that contains a password, only a few can read your blog. You can also post a blog that can be read by anyone.

3. In Blogspot (a blog service that i personally use) You will be given an option to choose the scheme of your blog site. You can edit your own color, layouts and schemes according to your taste and personality.

4. You can write your own blog and post it after you choose the scheme of your blog site.

If you are keen to learn how to make a niche blog that will maximise your chances of getting blog traffic or If you want me to guide you step by step and give you tips and strategies in blog marketing for free please do not hesitate to visit my blog at http://increaseblogtrafficdirectory.blogspot.com.
I hope you find this article useful. Have a nice day!!!

Blogs and the activity of blogging went mainstream a long time ago so much so that these days every 1.5 seconds a new blog is created! Crazy huh? Put another way:

• 7.4 Million blogs were created in the last 120 days

• 1.5 Million blogs were created in the past 7 days

• 900,000 blogs created in the last 24 hours

• 37,500 blogs created every hour

Those are downright scary figures especially if you are just creating a blog today because it is a reflection of the extent of the competition facing you today! So what really made blogs and the activity of blogging so popular?

Why Blogs Became So Popular

Well before blogging became so mainstream and the internet became literally saturated with millions upon millions of blogs, the activity was pretty much restricted to only the truly savvy online marketers (who traditionally set the pace for the rest of the crowd) and the geeks. Once those marketers realized the significant advantages blogs held over normal websites they quickly, quietly and efficiently converted their traditional websites to the blog platform. Here’s why they did it:

1. Blogs are quickly indexed by search engines;

2. A blog is easy to update and add content to frequently;

3. Frequently updating content encourages visitors to return to your blog;

4. You don’t need to know HTML or any other web coding language to manage a blog;

5. Blogs embrace the 2-way conversation interactivity that is so important to today’s business environment;

6. Social Media Websites welcome and are the perfect fit for blogs;

7. Blogs rise up the search engines quickly;

8. It is dead easy to attract web traffic to a blog even if it is brand new;

9. New content added to your blog is instantly viewable and just as quickly picked up by the search engines; and

10. You don’t need to be a web designer or have web designing skills to create a cool and professional-looking blog that stimulates visitor confidence and enhances their interaction.

What those ten attributes listed above so characteristic of blogs essentially mean, is that a blog would invariably and inevitably beat a normal website when it comes to attracting web traffic and attaining exposure! What blogging had fundamentally done was to level the playing field so that even absolute beginners could take on well-established traditional websites that had had thousands of backlinks and been around for several years. What is more not only were blogs competing effectively with them but actually beating them at their own game!

Before long blogs were popping up as the number one listings throughout Google’s index for the most competitive keyword terms! Slowly and surely those traditional websites that had maintained a vice-like grip on the top-spot listings on Google for an eternity slowly lost their rankings to a large number of blogs.

Soon enough the secret was out that blogs wielded a considerable advantage over traditional websites and before long the activity itself had gone mainstream. Now let’s fast forward to the current situation today where the internet is super-saturated with blogs to the tune of a new blog being created every 1.5 seconds!

What 900,000 Blogs Created Everyday Means to You!

It used to be that anybody could virtually blog about anything and were almost guaranteed to attract enough traffic to make enough sales to actually justify it as being worth their while. In such a manner a lot of marketers who had embraced blogging early on were able to dominate a good number of niche markets quickly. But that was then and today, well, is today!

Long gone are the good ole days when you could target a small niche, slap together a few mediocre posts to your new blog and attract sufficient traffic to enable you to make money enough to quit your day job! These days most of those once little-saturated and highly-lucrative niche markets are overcrowded with more competitors than their daily web traffic allotment can possibly handle! What that boils down to is that only the very few, very best of blogs are actually able to make money online from their chosen niche markets.

That also means that if you are just creating a blog today, your blog will surely join the millions of mediocre blogs that never make any headway and are quickly abandoned by their owners unless you…

Make Your Blog Stand Out From The Rest Of The Crowd

To succeed as a blogger you have to make your blog stand out from the many other millions of blogs already proliferating all across the internet. This ironically is actually good news for you because most bloggers have absolutely no idea how to distinguish their blogs from the next guy’s. In fact these days there are two kinds of blogging style, the traditional type of blogging known as Old-School Blogging and the more recent style in tune with the current internet business environment known as New-School Blogging.

The big difference between Old-School Blogging and New-School Blogging is that unless your Old-School Blog is already ranking well on the Google Index, you are going to find it extremely difficult to draw enough attention to make your blog profitable. In other words if you start a blog today and adopt old-school blogging techniques then you are almost certainly guaranteed to fail. Why? Because old-school blogging techniques will not enable you to stand out from the crowd which also means that you cannot possible compete against blogs that have been around for a while and are already well-established.

The biggest flaw that old-school blogs suffered from was an inability to consistently draw significant amounts of web traffic!

However if you create a new blog and adopt new-school blogging techniques, within little time you will effortlessly attract lots of web traffic. Which method of blogging you choose will ultimately determine the level of internet success!

Click For More Tips On How To Make Money Blogging

Have you ever felt lost for words and pondered what topics to discuss on your blog site? Well, instead of feeling confused, your time could be spent on improving your writing skills. The best way to get rolling again is to focus on your blog headlines. Concentrate on creating a headline formula and do some research. Learn how to create headlines that make people want to click on your blog site.

Do this project on a weekly basis and before long, you will have created plenty of ideas for your headlines and therefore, articles to discuss on your blog. Surf the internet for information and read books on how to write great headlines.

Build a keyword file and list keywords that are related to your blog site. Write a headline and include a few of your keywords. Next, use your keywords throughout your article. For instance, the word “blog” is included in the headline of this article. The first paragraph shows the word “blog” three times, and the second paragraph shows the word “blog” once. Count how many times you see the word “blog” in the next paragraph. Okay, you’re starting to get the idea.

Now, before you get carried away including keywords throughout your articles, make sure you are showing top-ranking keywords. We used Wordtracker – a free keyword tool, to search for the word “blog” and their reports show an estimated total of 1,775 daily searches.

Don’t forget to include top-ranking keywords in your “tags” and “meta-tag” for each article that you write and submit your articles to search engines. This simple step will help boost the ranking and traffic to your blog site.

You can find more blogging tips at: http://justsayitblog.com

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