Web Hosting,Domain Registration,Blogging

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

can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start?

You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home. I don’t say that because I’m the owner, but a free blog host is very rewarding for a new blog.  Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to build an audience and buzz for your blog.  It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service, is in the case your blog doesn’t become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”.  Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to…but only when you need to!

2) Niche

A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family, then you have a niche…you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.

3) Update Daily (nothing less)

This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. Though, I am seeing a growing trend of successful blogs that are not being updated daily, but they are successful and have a stable audience who continue to visit their blog daily.  Regardless, these blogs are still updated weekly with multiple entries.  Until you have a steady audience you should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don’t come to work for days or weeks…you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here…if you don’t update your blog for days or weeks you’ll lose visitors.

4) Traffic

It’s no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the “About the Author” passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the “About the Author” passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your blog in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Blog

How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what “you” have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to Your Audience

When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.

7) Multiple blogs

Use multiple blogging accounts (free) to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com and others. The more blog accounts the better (be sure to read and adhere to the Terms of Service for each site). You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.

Short & Concise

Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic.  Stay keyword-focused.

9) Digital Art

Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.

10) Keep it Personal

A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.

11) Interact With Your Visitors

You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: “Monday Money Tip” or “Picture of the Week” which entices your readers to look forward to each week.

Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you “will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated”.

Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about “Paris Hilton Getting Married” then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.

12) Make Money

Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You’re a Professional

You’re a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, TypePad, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a “move” announcement. The title should be “Moved” and the blog entry should state something like “I have a new home for my blog, please bookmark and follow the link: http://www.yournewblogdomainname.com/”. This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain.  Plus, search engines can easily index and crawl your new blog, since your old blog should already be popular with the search engines.

At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying “two heads is better than one”, more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.

To learn more about successful blogging subscribe to the Journal Home Newsletter

Blogging can be used a means of generating traffic to your website, Face book or My Space page or even another blog. However, to achieve that, you have to advertise your blog itself, and that should be taken into account when you create a blog. Use your blog to make money as well as to have fun and meet people.

Blogging is a great way to get traffic to your website, and if you create a blog for no other reason than that, you are practically certain to get positive results. Blogging and traffic are made for each other, and there are several ways of using blogs to promote products on your site.

The first question is what kind of blog? Although there are alternatives, the most popular blogging software packages are Google’s Blogger and Word press .For more details visit to www.rss-announcers.com. This offers you four blogging options, and three ways of creating a blog to get traffic to your website.

Why four from just two blogging packages? Here is the answer to that question, and how if you create a blog using each, you will maximize your earning potential from your products:

Blogger

Blogger is blogging software owned by Google. Most people run their blog from Blogspot, Bloggers blogging host. When you do that you have less control over your blog than if you operate it from your own IP address. Blogger is very easy to use, and very easy to get started with, and is popular with those who don’t want to worry about templates, plugging and designing their own blogs.

Word press

Word press can also be run from the Word press hosting site. However, where Word presses scores over Blogger is in the fact that the software can be uploaded to your website, and can be run from there. This enables you to use any of the thousands of Word press plugging and templates that provide an almost unlimited degree of functionality in your blogging that will help to drive traffic to your website.

When you create a blog with any of these two different packages, whether run from your own computer or from the blog host, you are able to provide fresh content daily to your virtual website. Because that is what a blog is: it is in effect a web page, in the same way that a Squidoo lens and a page on a website is a web page.

Bogging and Search Engines

Blogging allows you a presence on search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and allows those with little idea of SEO or even of web design, to sell products online. There was a time when blogs were a rarity and something new, but blogging is now a way for anybody that knows how to create a blog can drive traffic to their website or to their blog page and help they make money through free advertising.

However, even a blog has to be advertised. Blogging in itself is not an advertising technique, but one of displaying your thoughts, idea, products or advertising your products. Now, you might think I am being a bit duplicitous here, stating that blogging is not a means of advertising yet can be used to advertise! Yet both statements are true. Let me explain why.

Is Blogging an Advertising Technique?

Yes and no. You can create a blog in order to get traffic to your website, and in that respect you are using your blog for advertising. You can place a link to your website: your squeeze page, sales page or just a content page. The question is, how do you get people to read your blog, and then click on one of these links? The link could be placed at the bottom of every post, and on a permanent page on your blog, but how do yet get traffic to your blog: you have the same problem now as getting traffic to your website!

What you have here is that blogging can be use to promote another site, whether it be a website, another blog or a social networking site such as Face book, My Space or You Tube. You can use all of these to promote and sell products. However, how do you get people, to find your blog? Creating a blog is fine, but that is only the start.

Use Article Marketing in Blogging

There is one way, and that is article marketing. By writing articles about your niche or product, and then including a link to your blog in the article, you can use the article to advertise your blog .For more information logon to www.feed-reader-links.com. If you can persuade a reader to click on your link, they will reach your blog on which you provide them with links to your website, your other blogs and your Face book and My Space home pages.

Perhaps you can’t write, and maybe don’t know how to use articles properly, or even where to get them. Well don’t worry. If you want to make the best use of the internet than create a blog, get blogging and then use the help provide online to make best use of your blog make money.

Blogging and traffic go together, and it is easy to create a blog to drive traffic to your website or any other online web page (such as another blog). You only need to know how.

I can show you how: check out Article Czar for information on how articles can be used to make money from your blog, and also to receive a free gift for visiting. I also include a small file that shows you how to set up your Word press blog on your website. Also check out Create A Blog for more general advice on creating your own blog.