Blog Your Way To The Top

Blog Your Way To The Top 

 

So you've heard that having a blog is a good idea for your business, but are you sure WHY it's important? Understanding how blogs operate and how to use them for your business will give you great payoffs for your investment of time and energy. Not using your blog effectively will simply waste this fantastic resource.

WHY SHOULD I 'BLOG FOR BUSINESS'?

Blogs are a great method for giving your business credibility. Whether you post about industry news, recommend links to related topics or post valuable inside information or experiences, your audience will view you not only as a commercial venue but as a business interested in its community.

You can also use your blog to build traffic to your commercial site and to build a list of interested prospects. All of these issues are solid tools for marketing your product or service online.

WHY BLOGGING IS GREAT FOR CUSTOMERS

Blogs are not viewed the same as a typical website or sales page. The postings are often less formal or are presenting readers with interesting tidbits that entertain or inform about your topic or industry. Regular postings that draw the attention of your target market will build interest in your product and establish you as an 'expert' as well as create a good relationship with your prospects.

Your prospects can easily receive notice of your recent postings right in their email inbox. By regularly posting relevant information your prospects will look to you first when needing the service or product you provide.

Since many blogs offer readers the ability to post comments you immediately provide an opportunity for feedback or questions. This can clue you in to what your market needs or thinks, which can quickly be responded to in your next post.

BLOGGING FOR TRAFFIC

There are several methods of traffic buildings with blogs. One method is through the blog provider. Often the provider offers readers the option of searching for blogs with a word or phrase. Using that phrase in your blog or title will bring interested visitors.

The other method is through search engines. Search engines love fresh content and blogs make this easy. Simply 'ping' your blog to other media (this announces your update) and the search engines will pick it up. Using commonly searched words and phrases may give you the top ranking you were looking for. You can also link to your business website with the phrase and increase traffic directly to your sales page.

Finally, you can add an RSS feature to your blog. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows other websites to run the content from your blog. Every time you make a post the information will be automatically updated on sites featuring your RSS. This is attractive to sites with topics related to yours since they will benefit from the fresh content and you will benefit from the exposure.

If you haven't jumped on the blogging bandwagon yet you've been missing out on one of the cheapest and smartest marketing tools available. Creating a blog is easy and profitable - so make yours today!

12 Tips For Better Blogging

12 Tips For Better Blogging

If you are blogging to attract new customers and prospects to your business, it is important that you have a successful blueprint to follow.

With that in mind I created my step by step Blogging Blueprint, which you can find below:

1 While writing a blog, think like a visitor, as this helps immensely. If a blogger dons the visitor's thinking cap, there is more likelihood the words a visitor will use to query search engines will be present in the blog.

2. Add a good layout and catchy adverts to a blog. This helps because the visitor might want to stay longer reading the blog, rather than scooting away to another site.

3. Once the blog is published, it is a good idea to 'visit' the blog assuming to be a visitor. Going over links and various pages can give a feeling of how a visitor will react to the blog.

4. Inspect the site regularly, as this can uncover any broken links. Likewise, it is also a good opportunity to do some site maintenance as well. Jotting down points like what can be added to augment site appeal and what else could be added to the FAQ page can be of immense advantage.

5. Use key words that are more likely to be used by visitors to search for your blogs. If there are individuals who want to read about, lets say, power gardening tools, then missing out key words like power or gardening can be a huge mistake. This is because search engines will give the blog a go-by and opt it out of the listings.

Further, the visitor may even chance upon the blog in the listings, but may choose to avoid the site, because the keywords were not highlighted in the large search engine listing.

6. Posting articles about 700 words in length is considered good if taking into account search engine indexing tactics. You can make the post search engine friendly by inserting relevant keywords and links at the right places.

7. You can incorporate specific key words, which are adored by search engines. Integrate keywords into title, meta and alt tags to entice the search engine spider to give the blog a higher page rank.

8. Listening to feed backs and visitor complaints can be a blessing for you. Despite a lot of effort, a blog might contain obvious technical glitches or perhaps the content might require further elaboration or alterations.

9. Spamming can sometimes be disguised as intelligent comments, which might include further links or invitations to a spammer's website. Niche blogs might wish to opt out of the custom of inviting comments.

10. If you are into business blogging, picking up good categories like skin care, dry skin care, skin care specials, exclusive skin care products, etc can be particularly rewarding. A good post on niche products can improve keyword density while providing wholesome reading material for visitors.

11. Many bloggers give up after publishing a few blogs. Although there is no right answer to how often you should blog, the secret of profitable blogging is to publish regularly and as frequently as necessary while avoiding both extremes.

12. Use permalinks (permanent links) where servers allow their use. Permalinks allow the use of words as path names, unlike regular links to articles that may contain percentage signs or shorter cryptic path names. The secret is to use key words as path names on servers where the use of permalinks is allowed. This makes the site more appealing to those search engines that also look at links for indexing.