Blogs: Why, Where and How

Blogs: Why, Where and How

by: Amitabh Shukla

So you have heard about the blogs or you are sure you are now going through one of the blog. You might have seen blogs in the search results and would not have noticed it. Yes blogs are now making news but still a large number of people consider them as online diaries or a political mouthpiece. What about the business blogs that is lately surfacing on the web sphere? Top companies like GMกs Fastlane blog is there to prove the point that blog works. The problem is that regular media is not accepting it as one of the most promising medium, which could be as powerful as the newspapers, or tv channels in the future. Thanks to RSS, blog contents could be read via email as and when it is published.

Now the point is that why you should opt for a blog if you have a fullfledged website. How a blog will raise the profile of your business or could enhance brand of your organization. Lets look at the broader picture of the business blogs and why Internet marketers are so interested in this.

Search engine is still a mystery to most and blogs are ranking well in search engines without going into intricacies of the search engine optimization. You have a small business and no budget to make your companyกs online presence. No problem, signup for a free blog account at blogger.com without any prior knowledge and you are ready to go. This is the power of blog, inexpensive, fast and simple with minimum efforts on optimization.

You just created a blog and posted your first article. You want to optimize your blog. Just submit it to blog directories, which are very friendly and accept the submission within few days. Just remember to post 23 articles per week to get the search engine spiders to your blog regularly. If you write quality articles then you have to just wait for a month or so and free backlinks will start pouring in.

Major things you should remember for your blog success are:

23 articles per week

Write on only one specific Industry of your interest

Concentrate on one keyword per posting

Remember pinging your RSS feeds to major blog search engines and feed directories

Give quality to your visitors

Once your blog is famous, signup for adsense and earn for the time you spend on bloggging.

About The Author

Amitabh Shukla

Personal blog for the author is at http://seoexpertindia.tblog.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on March 25

by Amitabh Shukla

Top 10 Reasons to Use a Blog to Publish Your Ezine

Top 10 Reasons to Use a Blog to Publish Your Ezine

by: Denise Wakeman

Blogs are the hottest thing going these days when it comes to marketing on the Internet. A blog is a delivery medium. Here are 10 reasons why you should deliver your ezine articles via a blog.

1. A blog is web based so you can update and post new articles anywhere, anytime. Itกs a dynamic medium that can be updated on a momentกs notice.

2. Subscribers can subscribe to your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed and have your content delivered straight to their desktop. This delivery system bypasses spam filters and readers get exactly the content they want.

3. No web site to mess with. Itกs very inexpensive way to set up a web presence for your ezine. There are several sites where you can set up a free blog and others are very reasonably priced for the massive exposure you can get.

4. You can set up links for ads and your affiliate programs in side columns so you don’t have to include them in your ezine format.

5. You can set up a subscription form and send emails to your subscribers when new content is added.

6. Blogs link to other blogs which helps you create a viral marketing system and increases your exposure in search engines. Search engines LOVE text based, fresh content that is highly focused (key word rich).

7. You can use your ezine blog to become a trusted expert for your subscribers, by filtering content for them so they don’t have to visit hundreds of web sites.

8. You have an instant archive of all your articles. When you post an article, a new page and permalink is created. People can share that link with others and be sent directly to the article being referenced.

9. Readers can comment on your articles, which creates rapport and trust between you and your subscriber. Comments also add rich content to your site and again, helps your ranking in the search engines.

10. The bottom line is this: using a blog can help you attract more visitors who become subscribers and then eventually become clients.

For an ezine publisher, a blog compliments and can significantly ease the delivery of your ezine content. Essentially, like any web site, you have to promote it and encourage people to add your site to their RSS feed (thatกs another subject) or subscribe for updates through a subscription form. Thatกs why I put a subscribe form on my site – subscribers and get updates in anyway they want. You still need to submit to search engines and directories to drive traffic. If you already have an ezine subscriber database, my advice would be to post everything on the blog and then send a weekly email, or whatever your normal publishing schedule is, informing your subscribers when new content is posted.

Marketing is done in a conversational way and via the links on your blog. Announcements can be posted on the blog and to oneกs list. I see the blog and ezine database as complimentary…working together to increase your exposure and make it easier for people to get your information and build relationships.

About The Author

Denise Wakeman is Chief Implementor of Next Level Partnership, a company dedicated to partnering with you to take your business to the next level. Denise has nearly 20 years experience in small business administration and management. She has specific experience in leveraging Internet marketing systems to create awareness, build customer loyalty and increase the bottom line. Visit Deniseกs blog at http://www.biztipsblog.com to get tips and tactics for taking your business to the next level.

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 07, 2004

by Denise Wakeman

Nobody Reading Your Blog?

Nobody Reading Your Blog?

by: Bolger Redet

So you got a your own weblog. Everything looks great, you have nice layout, some nice pictures and last but not least excellent articles.

You also update your blog on a regular basis but nobody seems to read it ! You start to think where did I go wrong. Well if your blog is really good you just need to be patient. Also make sure you submit your blog to directories specialized in blogs and search engines.But even if you did all this you might get not the amount of readers you wished for.

Get unlimited readers for you blog !

Smart people started to notice blogs are very popular so they came up with a great ideas. Blogexplosion.com is such great idea. The concept is simple, if you read other blogs then other people read your blog. So the more blogs you read the more people will be reading yours. Sounds good you might think. Well it actually is a very good concept. Just register your blog for free and login, then pick a category blogs you would like to read and start reading. You must read each blog for at least half a minute, after that you can select another blog. For each blog you have red you recieve a credit. This credit means one other member is going to read your blog. Again great concept. But there is a downside, first you have to spend of lot of time reading blogs in order to get other people to read yours. You can choose to read only blogs in a specific category (of your interest) but it is still really time consuming. Other people who are reading your blog might do this because they only want other people to read their blog. You can imagine these are not the most interested readers you wish for. But blogexplosion.com also offers non members to search their directory for blogs. These visitors are potenial quality readers for your blog! Other downside is that you can not only earn credits by reading other blogs, you can also buy them ! If everybody is going to do this then this concept doesn’t do so well anymore.

About The Author

Bolger Redet is webmaster at http://www.bloxster.net a free quality weblog hosting service. Bolger is working on the bloxster.net website to provide their users tools to publish multimedia content

This article was posted on August 07

by Bolger Redet

กBloggingก For Fun & Profits

กBloggingก For Fun & Profits

by: Jim Edwards

Unless youกve been under a rock for the last year, youกve heard the term กblogก once or twice.

To most people, a กblogก simply represents a glorified online กdiaryก where geeks, computer nerds, and lonely teenagers record their thoughts in cyberspace.

However, many people don’t realize that กblogsก are quietly revolutionizing the way companies and customers interact about everything from existing products to new ideas and improvements in customer service.

In short, กblogก style communication has come of age and anyone with an online business better sit up and take notice fast!

In the beginning, กblogsก were basically an online diary to record your thoughts; but กblogsก have now evolved into dynamic websites that nontechnical people can update immediately without html editors or ftp programs.

Blogs allow their authors to make instant website updates through a computer anywhere in the world with a Web browser and Internet connection.

Blogs also allow readers to respond to the authorกs posts, provide additional information, links, expanded opinions, and more.

In short, an active กblogก creates an interactive community with the author as the hub and the readers as the spokes of the wheel that keep the whole cycle turning round.

Unlike traditional กstaticก web pages where content rarely (if ever) changes, an active blog evolves in a state of constant and neverending renewal.

With blogs, smart online businesses rediscovered a principal that small กmom and popก stores understood for years: know your customers and stay in close tune with their wants, needs, and desires.

Large companies throw billions of dollars down a black hole every year to literally กguessก what people want to buy. Most call it the กMarketing Department.ก

On the flipside, smart online businesses understand that blogs allow you to avoid guessing whatกs on your customersก minds and provide an active and uptotheminute means for them to tell you exactly what they do and don’t like about your services, products, and virtually any other aspect of the market.

This lightning fast communication makes it possible for small companies to literally snatch huge market share away from more traditional companies.

Blogging also has a distinct advantage over traditional email newsletters in that subscribers can get udpates without having to receive an email message. Through the power of RSS (real simple syndication), subscribers get notified of updated content though an rss news reader.

Bottom Line: publishing a blog with an RSS feed that your readers can subscribe to means your content NEVER gets blocked by a SPAM filter.

Blog software basically comes in 2 flavors: hosted and standalone. Hosted blogging solutions make it extremely easy to get set up with a blog, often in just a couple of minutes.

If you know how to type, you can create a blog. Log on to Blogger.com and you can set up a blog free of charge and start posting in just a few minutes.

Blogger.com (owned by search giant, Google) will even host your blog on their servers.

Typepad.com, which charges as little as $4.95 per month, is also an excellent hosted service offering additional features that enable you to quickly get your own blog up and running.

The alternative is standalone blogging software installed on your own website.

A very popular solution is Moveable Type, available from moveabletype.org, which provides a very versatile and powerful suite of tools for creating a fullfeatured blog to rival that of any size company in the world.

This is the solution Iกve chosen for my blog at http://www.IGottaTellYou.com/blog/

Whichever blogging solution you choose, if you plan to successfully conduct any form of business online, understand that a กblogก must form an integral part of your overall plan for customer communication and interaction.

© Jim Edwards All Rights reserved

http://www.thenetreporter.com

About The Author

Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the coauthor of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links…

Simple ‘traffic Machineก brings Thousands of NEW visitors to your website for weeks, even months… without spending a dime on advertising! ==> http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com

This article was posted on August 13

by Jim Edwards

10 Reasons To Have A Custom Blog

10 Reasons To Have A Custom Blog

by: กRagsก Kelly R. Ragland

Blogging is a growing trend on the Internet today with hundreds of users adding new blogs and fresh content daily. While many use their blogs for personal journals, ploitical opinions or other topics of discussion, one could also look at a blog from a marketing perspective and find benefits for their business. Here I suggest ten reasons to start a custom blog to enhance their online marketing efforts.

10 Blogs generate traffic

By posting blogs online you generate new keyword content that can be crawled by search engines. Unique searches by Internet users seeking products and services can lead them to your articles and topics for further review. If your blog answers their question, provides them information on what they are searching for or captures their interest you have a possible repeat visitor, lead or sale should they click through to browse your web site.

While many web sites use focussed articles, case studies and press releases in such a way, a blog gives you the advantage of covering several topics to capture a broad range of interests. A blog encourages repeat visits, remains open to interactivity when allowing users to comment or leave feedback and becomes a channel for you to network with the online public discussing your business, products and services.

9 You don’t have to be a professional writer

Writing effective material for web content that is keyword friendly and well presented for generating a sale is often left to professionals, and is very important to a web sites success. A blog however leaves the style and approach to the content completely up to you. As the owner of your business you are qualified as the expert in your field, which is enough to interest and educate your customers about what you do. You have the creative license to discuss subjects about your business with personality and even humor. You have a forum to converse with your readers about your business, yourself and what you do best.

8 Custom blogs can have special features

There are many features used on the Internet such as polls and surveys that again help you communicate with your customers and your web site visitors. A custom blog can be modified to do whatever you would like it to do just like a web site. Any additional features that would improve your blogs interest can be added at any time, while a free or programmed blog can leave you less options or no options at all.

7 Fresh web site content on your schedule

Fresh content and frequent updates are essential to a successful web presence. A blog allows you to add new content as your schedule allows be it the tip of the day or the product of the week. Blogging puts the task of keeping your site current right on your desktop.

6 Broadcast on demand

Announcing promotions, sales and special events is as easy as typing them into your blog. Make any notice public within minutes.

5 Today a blog, tomorrow an ezine

As time passes and your blog archives your posts, your blog becomes a virtual magazine of material with a range of topics. The more content you add related to your business, the more keywords are added and more material is available for interested Internet users.

4 Customer education

No matter what business yourกe in it is important to give your customers a clear message of what you offer. You can use your blog to help them better understand your methods, products, policies and more. Frequently asked questions can be addressed and explained easily, a benefit to you and your clients.

3 Customer service

Use your blog to support products and services by adding content that can again answer questions or explain procedures. The ability to attract attention to new products or inform customers about those products can give your customers a reference point and save them a call or possible confusion.

2 Customer satisfaction

One could use their blog to allow customers to leave feedback on their purchases, build a list of testimonials, offer ways for them to recommend, rate or request products and more. All adding more content to the blog to interest other readers and sales leads.

1 Your satisfaction

As this article suggests, with a custom blog you have a marketing tool and total control over what relationships can build from it. An affordable online web presence that requires little time, knowledge to operate and an open channel to the Internet at large.

About The Author

Kelly Ragland กRagsก is a published columnist, web designer, web site application developer, Internet marketing consultant and owner of Rags To Stitches Productions at http://www.astitch.com.

This article was posted on April 09

by กRagsก Kelly R. Ragland

A Basic Introduction to Blogging

A Basic Introduction to Blogging

by: Mal Keenan

Web logging first appeared on the net in the mid1990s. The term ขweb logข was initially coined refer to a server’s log file and then expanded to include the meaning of online personal journaling. Later on, to avoid confusion, the word ขblogข was adopted to refer to personal journaling. Today a blog is defined as an online publication where an author puts his or her personal thoughts and opinions from the most intimate to corporate ideas, concerns or events, in chronological order on the net.

Although, there are as many kinds of blogs on line as there are people, most of these will roughly fall into these kind of bloggers: Personal Bloggers (the original use of blogging), then there are the organizational and business Bloggers.

Organizational blogs are meant to facilitate communications between its internal and external audiences. It may also provide information for the external publics’ use.

Business blogs promote products or services for profit. They also increase awareness about the company, as well as establish itself as an authority with customers, vendors, through publications that demonstrate their expertise in the market.

What are the kinds of contents that readers can find in a blog that’s for distribution? The authors’ ideas, opinions, expertise in his/her field of work, resumes, and home recipes, pictures, streaming audio or video clips, ebooks, poetry, works, products, services and consultations.

Why have blogs become very popular compared to websites or email? Most websites are infrequently updated, while blogs have instant publishing tools which permit the author to regularly update & introduce new content. Although both have great content, websites are usually impersonal in informing their audience. While blogs allow the readers to leave their comments and feedback, to hold twoconversations with the author, who usually does the publishing and can immediately respond to his/her readers.

The blogs’ abilities to reach and immediately react to an expanding mass of audience have made businesses and marketers use these as a strategic marketing tool. Additionally blogs are very efficient, cheap to use and can quickly distribute information.

However, before you decide to jump on the blogging bandwagon, take time to find out what are your objectives for creating your own blog. Is it a personal, organizational or business blog? This will help you decide on what your blog will contain, where you’d place it and what publishing tools you’ll be using.

Copyright 2005 Mal Keenan

About The Author

For more information on blogging and other aspects of Internet Marketing and Home Business visit Mal Keenanกs personal blog: http://www.homebusinesstipsnewsletter.com/blog/

This article was posted on April 10

by Mal Keenan

Blogging Will Take Over The World

Blogging Will Take Over The World

by: Chris Everson

In recent years, itกs been pretty obvious that กbloggingก (Web + Log = Blog)has simply taken over the internet.

Early blogs were first used by creative (bored?) indivuals, and larger news companies. http://info.cern.ch/ was one of the earliest blogs, followed by NCSAกs กWhats Newก and also NetScapes กWhats Newก blog. After this point the blogging scene exploded.

What exactly is blogging? Many consider blogging in itกs truest form a type of internet diary. In itกs most pure and basic form its simply a single, scrolling webpages with a few links on the side, and an archive table, and larger, prominent updates in the center of the pages. Users usually post small excerpts about daily life, recent events, or news.

Creative writers often attract groups of people, who will pursue and follow that blog, often posting comments on updates. Some writers write outrageous, offensive things that also attract readers. Some people write about personal experiences, and some just flat out write whatever they want!

RSS, (really simple syndication) also started directly because of blogs. Rather than visit an indivual site over and over again to read the updates and posts, coders started using xml to enable these updates to be available anywhere in the world. In response, RSS has created a whole new chapter in the SEO world, all because of blogging.

Many people have begun to weave affiliate links and even sell there own products through their blogs, relying on their dedicated readerbase to generate huge conversion rates. Programs like WordPress can generate ENTIRE web sites simply by advanced forms of blogging. One of my own sites, www.emoneyreport.com utilizes this program. Instead of bloggin real life experiences, we blog our article updates and program reviews. Very nifty!

Even major search engines are taking part in the blog scene. Most noticably, Google, purchased the site www.blogger.com. Now google controls the largest, most successful blogging site to date! Google indexes and spiders every post created on this site, EVERY day. Itกs common practice to create a blog, write small posts and link to your own site through the blog, and doing this you can get spidered and indexed within a day!

We have to ask ourselves, whats next for blogging? Will blogging become the next form of linking? Who knows? All I know for sure is that I like what blogging has become, and that it allows my site to generate income for hundreds of people all over the internet.

http://www.emoneyreport.com NO BS reviews of programs that we have used to make money.

About The Author

Chris Everson

http://www.emoneyreport.com NO BS reviews of programs that we have used to make money.

http://www.therealincome.com We have partnered with several internet gurus to release this book, containing the secrets that most internet gurus DON’t want you to know.

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 08

by Chris Everson

7 Tips for Choosing the Right Blog Software for Yo

7 Tips for Choosing the Right Blog Software for Your New Blog

by: Michael Turner

Choosing the right blog software for your new blog requires that you ask yourself some questions and make a list of all of the features and tools you need as well as your budget. Once you have this information written down you will be prepared to start shopping for blog software. However, keep in mind the following seven tips for choosing the best software for you.

Tip #1 Ping Updates

These allow you to update your blog and are very important in blog software. Make sure the blog software you are interested in provides automatic ping updates.

Tip #2 Comments

Whatever blog software you choose, youกll want to make sure that it has an area for comments from visitors. This will help you understand what is successful in your blog and what is not, as well as guide you in future blogs. This is a really great tool and should be part of your blog software.

Tip #3 Trackback

If you are discussing your blog on another blog, or simply adding information to another blog, trackback will allow you to update this information. This is a little confusing, but trackback allows you to talk on your blog about information on another blog and ping the writer of the other blog to let them know what is going on. Trackback is certainly a feature you want in your blog software.

Tip #4 Pingback

Pingback is similar to trackback, but it just sends a URL to the other blog to let them know you are talking about their blog on your blog. This is not used as much as trackback, but you will want a blog software that has at least one of these two functions.

Tip #5 Webbased

The point of a blog is you can post information instantly online, so you want your blog software to be similar to a word processor and web based without a shadow of a doubt.

Tip #6 Archiving

You want a blog software that supports archiving, and most of them do. The reason for this is you will want to save all of your past blogs by the date they were published and archiving allows you to do that.

Tip #7 Categorize

Another great tool you will want in your blog software is the ability to categorize. You want to keep your blogs organized and in categories, if you have them, so this option is really a great one for most bloggers.

There are lots of types of blog software available. You just need to do the research and compare what you find with what you need and then… start blogging!

About The Author

Michael Turner reveals stepbystep how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part miniseries. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/.

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 06

by Michael Turner

Top 10 Blog Writing Tips

Top 10 Blog Writing Tips

by: Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff

Most of the กrulesก about writing for ezines and newsletters apply to writing posts for your blog, but there are some important differences. Keep these 10 tips in mind and youกll be publishing great blog content that attracts prospects and clients in your niche market.

1. Write with the reader in mind. Remember WIIFM? It’s marketing jargon for What’s In It For Me? That’s what you should be keeping in mind. Your reader will read your post looking for what’s in it for them.

2. Make it valuable and worthwhile. Don’t waste people’s time. If you don’t have anything to say, no problem, plenty other people do. So share their articles, do an interview, review a book.

3. Proofread for typos and glaring grammatical errors. You wouldn’t go out of the house with dirty hair or missing a sock, so why would you publish spelling mistakes? Respect your readers by polishing up your stuff.

4. Keep it short and simple, sweetie. (KISS). Most people are scanners. You may have a lot to say and think it interesting, and it may be. But people are reading online and out of time. Get to the point quickly. Publishing short posts more frequently is a better format than publishing lengthy articles every few weeks.

5. Keep it lively, make it snappy and snazzy. Even if you aren’t a natural born writer, you can write for your blog. Just write like you’re speaking to your friend…or to yourself! Remember though, get to the point quickly. Keep in mind the journalist’s rule of 5 W’s in the first paragraph: who, what, why, when and where.

6. Link often. This builds credibility and positions you as an expert in your field. People don’t have time to know what others are doing, you should tell them. Linking to other blogs and websites also helps you build a network of associates who will in turn link to your blog.

7. Use keywords often. This will help you stay on purpose, and the search engines will love your blog. Your rankings will go up. This is one of the reasons we have you write out your purpose statements before beginning your blog. The clearer you are about your purpose, the more consistently you will deliver messages that are on target. And the more often your keywords show up, the better your search engine results.

8. Write clearly (short sentences, only one concept per sentence). No double speak or jargon; no more than one idea in one sentence don’t make your readers have to think about your meaning. Spoon feed them. Use commas and dashes liberally.

9. Write like you talk. It’s okay to use common expressions from speech.

Examples:

Go figure.

Don’t even go there…

Now, I ask you…

Gotta love it…

(And, remember the age group of your readers…)

10. Use a clear headline, and don’t be afraid to make bold statements (but don’t mislead people either). Make it snazzy and use key words. Example: ExTechnoWeenie Masters HTML Code

BONUS: After you write a post and BEFORE you hit the save button

Use this checklist to ask yourself a few questions as you are reading through for typos and grammar:

__ Is the topic clear to someone who only reads the headline?

__ Does the lead paragraph tell who and what the story is about and why the reader should care about it?

__ Is the angle youกve used likely to seem newsworthy?

__ Would someone who knows absolutely nothing about this topic understand this post?

__ Is the post free of jargon?

__ Is it written in journalistic style and does it make an effort to be objective?

__ Have you peppered the headline and the post with keywords and phrases that will be attractive to search engines?

__ Did you remember to ask your readers a question at the end, or something to stimulate readers to comment?

__ Did you remember to write with the reader in mind, always keeping in mind WIIFT? (What’s in It for Them?)

About The Author

Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com.

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 19

by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff

Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines

Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines The Top 5 Tips

by: Tinu AbayomiPaul

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this they naturally attract search engine traffic.

Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages.

They also have the inherent potential to be welllinked.

If you haven’t already submitted to blog directories, you are missing out on some great oneway links. Many of the top directories can be found on Robin Good’s Top 55 list at MasterNewMedia.org.

But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then your new listings can help your site get the best keyword placement in the major search engines.

These are my top five tips for lucrative blog search engine optimization.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #1: Lucrative Keyword Choices

You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic.

Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a ขlucrative keywordข.

Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.

You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.

A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries.

The great thing about your blog is that it can get so wellindexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales.

Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004.

As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you’ll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #2: Keyword Placement

Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme.

You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the pages URL names, or even a combination of Technorati tags and the text of your permanent links that appear after each post.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #3: Timely Posting

Instead of pinging at 15 minute intervals when your site hasn’t been updated, or even pinging after every single post, you can actually get better results if you update or ping just once during one of three sweet spots in the day. Here’s one that you can use today.

Check your web site statistics. If you’re getting spidered every two weeks or even monthly, you can increase your number of spider visits by blogging on the anniversary of the period that the spider comes to your site. It takes a bit of monitoring, but you can often predict when the date of your last spider visit was.

An even faster way is to ping at a time when the spider is reading a page that carries your update. (This is a little harder to explain, as I’ve mentioned, but I have a resource that explains this process indepth at my site.)

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Get Linked

Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Robin Good’s guide can get you some great one way links.

If you sparingly include the lucrative keyword you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the spiders as they follow the link through to your site.

Once there, if you use these and other tips to skew your blog a little more to the searchenginefriendly side, the synergistic effect is better, more profitable traffic.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Frequent Updates

The more you post, the more food for the spider, which can cause the spider to react by splitting up its job into several visits, whereupon you have even more content, and so on, until the spider just adds you to a more frequent schedule of returns.

For example, my main site gets spidered several times daily by Google, and yet I can go a week without an update with no change in spider visits. This means my pages get indexed more often and my new pages show up faster.

Think of what that could do for the launch of your next product.

You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. In fact, some blog software will let you set up your posts in advance, so that you can have posts show up daily even though you technically only blog once a month.

Bottom line: A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.

Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

About The Author

Tinu is a web site promotion specialist and the author of several books on search engines, blogging, and RSS. You can read more tips in her blog at http://www.FreeTrafficTip.com.

This article was posted on March 04

by Tinu AbayomiPaul

Blog Revenue Ideas

Blog Revenue Ideas

by: Jonni Good

Are you lookin for ways to add revenue to your blog, instead of (or in addition to) AdSense ads from Google? Here are two suggestions.

The first service is called BlogAds ( http://www.blogads.com/publisher_html ) They offer 20% of the ad fee to the blogger. Even better, it looks like they love blogs, and are willing to help make their partners successful.

The second service is called rssads ( http://www.rssads.com/ ). This service isn’t up and running yet, but they have their sales site up. They will be selling ads that appear in the body of a partnerกs RSS feed (your blog posts). The entire post will appear in your subscriberกs news reader program, instead of a short paragraph. This would make sure that the ads get in front of your readers, but Iกm wondering if the reader will be as excited about it as they are. It will be interesting to see if this one flies.

Another option that website owners use (and it would work for bloggers as well), is selling text ads. In this system, you don’t have a script on your page that serves ads from Google or wherever. Instead, the ad buyer comes to you and offers to buy space for a text link. You can set this up yourself, with a subscription payment handled by PayPal.com.

About The Author

Easy blogging and RSS add these Search Engine magnets to your site in just a few minutes. Free tutorial shows you how. http://www.EZRSS.com.

This article was posted on January 29

by Jonni Good

Blogging For Business Great Reasons For Every Bu

Blogging For Business Great Reasons For Every Business To Start A Weblog

by: John Jantsch

If Howard Dean’s failed political campaign accomplished anything, I would say that it brought to the mainstream the use of something called a weblog or ขblogข as it known in cyberspace.

A blog is really nothing more than a diary uploaded to the Internet and until about the last 12 months was the realm of the individual who saw it as a way to publish there random (and sometimes disturbed) thoughts. The great thing about weblogs, and the growing set of software that is being created to publish them, is that they are a tremendous business tool.

Weblogs allow you to create content and contact…and that is what your clients crave more than anything.

I use a program (there is a free trial version) called PMachine to publish my weblog at DuctTapeMarketing.com/weblog.php. This program allows me to simply make many entries and updates and also allows readers to add comments. Better still, now seemingly random articles can be sorted and searched by content or subject. My weblog is more like a content management system and my readers seem to love it.

Another great reason to explore the use of weblogs is that search engines seem to love them. Within 30 days of launching my weblog it became the most visited page on my fairly high traffic website.

So what is it about blogs that those little spiders love so much?

Here’s a little secret, search engines crave content. Okay so maybe that’s not such a secret but to look at many websites you would think it so. The fact is that too many websites just sit there doing nothing that the search engines admire. Providing content, not to mention fresh content, is one of the toughest chores of anyone who maintains a website. But when it comes to generating traffic it is the most important job.

Blogs, by their very nature, are all about content. In a commercial environment every blog entry is fresh content. Get in the habit of making two, three, even four entries a week and you’ve got a content building bonanza on your hands. Everyone knows you need new content to give visitors a reason to come back; blogs just make the task so much easier.

Another advantage that blogs seem to currently possess over traditional web pages and sites is lack of competition. While the number of bloggers grows daily, there are still relatively few commercial blog sites. When I created my blog I found that it showed up in the number 3 spot in Google for the term ขMarketing Weblogข within about 3 weeks of launch. Not bad considering I did nothing to make it happen.

There are a couple of other things you should do to make your weblog a traffic magnet. They aren’t really that different than tradition SEO tactics but the names and faces are unique to the blogging world.

Use targeted keywords in your entry titles

No rocket science here but this tip can’t be stated enough. Forget cute…go for titles that fit your targeted keywords and phrases…even if they seem a bit awkward. (You do have targeted keywords and phrases don’t you?)

Register with Blog Search Engines – Search engines that specialize in blogs

http://www.daypop.com/

http://www.blogvision.com/

http://www.blogsearchengine.com/

Register with Tracking Services – These services note when a blog has been updated and publish an ongoing list. They even keep track of the most updated and most visited weblogs. Plus you get to learn what pinging is.

http://blo.gs/

http://www.weblogs.com/

Trade Some Links

You don’t need to get out of control on this one but a few ขrelevantข swapped links to related blogs can boost your traffic.

Syndicate your content

This one is way to technical to cover here but do some research on the term RSS and you may discover ways to have your content and entries fed to sites that are hungry for the type of stuff you write. Many of the popular weblog software packages have this capability built right in.

http://www.feedster.com/

Copyright 2004 John Jantsch

About The Author

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant based in Kansas City, Mo. He writes frequently on real world small business marketing tactics and is the creator of ขDuct Tape Marketingข a turnkey small business marketing system. Check out his blog at http://www.DuctTapeMarketing.com/weblog.php

This article was posted on March 23, 2004

by John Jantsch