Successful Business Blogging

Blogging is a popular way to market. It is easy, fun and done right can get you that much needed targeted traffic. It is used to link back to your site and encourage people to visit for more information. This is a fast way to get indexed by the search engines and is free.

There are several places to blog. Here are a few:

http://www.blogger.com this is the easiest way to build a blog and can be done without knowing any HTML It even has an option to customize if you need and provides templates to do this.

http://www.wordpress.org has more features and is one of the most used blogging sites. An especially useful feature is that you can put in plugins and create an MP3 player on your site, which you can use for Podcasting. It has many templates, tags, photos, and sitemaps. The code is search engine friendly and fast to do.

http://www.nucleuscms.org has additional features including making on ezine from your posts and sending it. This will help you build your subscriber base. There are fewer themes on this system.

http://www.drupal.org  this system is the most complex allowing you to create a whole community of blogs with a forum, group meetings and more.

Here are some ways blogging can help your business:

Branding your business. You can create your own brand by creating your own special market (niche) and writing about it. Your readers will associate you with a particular product or service.
Blogging is a great way to bring targeted traffic to your site and ultimately more sales.
You will become known as the expert in your field. This will cut marketing costs as people are coming to you instead of you trying to find them. They will be warm ready to buy visitors coming because they want more information about your products and services. They will be more inclined to buy.
Blogging helps you  build and establish credibility and trust in your potential customers. This will help you close more sales
RSS feeds and podcasting can be done from a blog. This allows you to open up different ways to market.
Readers can post replies to your blogs and questions allowing interaction and a way to build relationships with potential customers
All these systems are search engine friendly which helps you get even more free exposure. You can often get earlier inclusion into the search engines with blogs.

Here are some ways to drive traffic to your blogs:

Invite readers to subscribe to your blog with a bloglet subscription form http://www.bloglet.com
Set up a Yahoo feed to get your blog spidered regularly by http://www.my.yahoo.com for instructions how to do this http://www.biztipsblog.com
Comment on and read other blogs in your niche market
Ping blog directories with Ping-O-matic http://www.pingomatic.com every time you publish your blog.
Submit to search engines http://www.submitfire.com
Submit to blog directories http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55
Link to your blog with your email signature
Put your link to your blog in every one of your newsletter publications
In all your outgoing mail include a link to your blog
Print your blog URL on all offline promotional material, including business cards, brochures and flyers.
Start an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.                               http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm will give you information on how to do this.
Ideally you should post at least 3 times a week or even daily to keep readership of your blogs high and attract referrals. You can include links to articles, websites and other blogs in your blog post.
You can use Trackback links when you refer to other blogs. This sends a message to another server to alert it that you have posted a reference to another blog. Your link will also be seen on the other blog’s site.
Distribute articles with your blog link included in the bio box
Check your web stats for traffic stats on your visitors. You can also use Alexa Toolbar to check for traffic stats.

You can make money from your blog by putting Google Adsense on your blog page.

Blogging is a useful and free form of promotion, which is proving very effective. The trick to blogging is to make your blogs interesting and inspire curiosity in your readers. In this way they will want more information and visit your website. As you attract more visitors your sales will rise and you will grow your business.

April 18, 2006 – 5:22 pm by Constantin Chersin