Earn With Your Blog

Five Reasons You Should Be Blogging for Business Right Now

2006-05-27T11:54:00.000+01:00

Although web-logs (called blogs) started out as personal online diaries, today’s blogger can be anyone from a stay at-home-mom to a corporate mogul. And even the stay-at-home mom is likely to be blogging for business, not simply sharing her personal life with the online world.

If you're a small business owner, here are five reasons you should be blogging for business right now:

1. Creating an online presence is easy with a blog. Today, everyone expects anyone with a serious business to be visible online. But that doesn't mean a small business owner has to shell out big bucks on an expensive website right from the start. Instead, start with a blog. A blog can be set up easily and quickly at little or no cost - so no matter how small your company might be, you can be online blogging for business in (literally) a few minutes. You can also update your blog much easier and quicker than you can a regular website. You don’t have to wait for a webmaster to make changes for you.

2. A blog lets you develop relationships with your customers or clients. If you blog regularly, your readers get to know more about you and your services. They can also leave comments for you on the blog, so you can interact with them through this site. Research shows that people are more likely to do business with someone they know. Post to your blog daily (or at least several times a week) and readers will get to know you, trust you, and feel confident to buy your products and or services.

3. A blog gives you additional opportunities to network with other small businesses. You can provide reciprocal links at your blog. That just means you put a link to another company's website or blog on your blog and that company puts a link to your blog on theirs. You benefit from these links because your blog attracts additional readers from these other sites.

4. You can use your blog to help build your mailing list. A good way to do this is to offer something free in return for joining your mailing list. Free ebooks related to the products or services offered by your business are perfect "give aways" to use for this purpose. Put a sign-up box on your blog where readers can join your mailing list and automatically receive your free products via email.

5. By regularly posting to your blog, you become an "expert" in your line of work. People always turn to experts when they need help. Establish yourself as an expert in your field and people will turn to you when they need the particular type of products or services that you have to offer.

These are just five reasons you should be blogging for business right now. Once you start blogging yourself you'll notice additional benefits too, so don't wait. Start blogging!

Suzanne Lieurance is a freelance writer and the creator of the Lieurance Group, a co-op for freelance writers and graphics designers. If you just don't have time to create a business blog, visit the Lieurance Group's blog at http://www.lieurancegroup.blogspot.com or email them at lieurancegroup@hotmail.com and learn how they can start blogging for business for you.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Suzanne_Lieurance

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

2006-05-05T20:54:00.000+01:00

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

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

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman

Earn With Your Blog

2006-04-28T11:34:00.000+01:00

Ok so im going to give you a genreral idea for now as to how you can make money from your Blogs for free. I will go into further detail, as I progress.

To give you an overview, you must know by now what a Blog is and how they work, If not please read my previous post. Once you have got your blog all you need to do is add some Adsense code and your up and running to start earning. Of course it will not get you mega rich money just yet. I will explain further in upcoming articles.

Adsense is a Google company, it is a pay per click advertising strategy. Basically Google provide you with coding which places adverts on your site or blog, you then implement this code and ads will automatically be displayed. Don't be put off by the coding it is very simple, and I can help if you require it. So Everytime someone clicks on one of the adverts you will be paid a small amount, now imagine if you had a huge amount of people visiting your blog and clicking the Ads, you can make a nice little profit.

Now in order to register with Adsense, which is completley free, be sure you have an existing site or blog. In other words create a blog first with a good few posts and then register with Adsense. They take about 2 days to verify your account and then you can start making money instantly.

So why not go ahead and give it a go, you have nothing to lose and I will post more articles to help you along the way.

Coming Soon:
What to write?
Getting traffic to your blog
Adsense: What is it and How it works
And more...

Blogging: What is it?

2006-04-28T09:42:00.000+01:00

A writer who writes and maintains a blog is a blogger and the journal that he makes available on the web is a blog. Most blogs are like personal diaries with material appearing in a chronological order. The blog is also a forum for exchange of ideas and opinions as the reader can, in turn, if he wishes write his own comments to the blog. This innovation to personal expression has its own lexicon and is fast emerging as a new way of communication.

Since its inception in around 1994, blogging has evolved from being personal views and diaries to news and commentary blogs. The question is are blogs just random thoughts and personal expressions or are they similar to well sourced traditional journalism?

Blogs straddle two worlds that of talk shows be it radio or television and reporting. Just as SMS made clear inroads into evolution of language, blogging is set to revolutionize journalism. What blogging brings to the fore is unfettered freedom of expression. The writers give flight to their inner voice and just as medieval writers of the periods of revolution did, state in no uncertain terms what they perceive as facts. More often than not, the information is not contained by editors or political affiliations or the patronage of people in power.

Blogging has caught the imagination of the young and old and established writers, lawyers, techies, and other professionals are using the avenue to “spread their thoughts and words.” Blogging is on the fast track and has established a place in “opinion journalism.” It is seen by many to be a form of self declared independence.

With blogging all you need to do is convert your musings or fire and brimstone into a pdf file and upload it for all interested to view. Gone are the days when you had to knock on the doors of editors and publishers to get your work published. And, if your blog is popular you could attract millions of readers each day.

Concerns serious journalists have is that blogs can be biased opinions and contain inaccurate information. Yet blogs contain skeptical analysis, critical commentary, and alternative perspectives that are rarely exposed by mainstream journalism. Very often in situations of unrest and war it is blogs that bring to life personal, colorful, and first hand experiences. Not all blogs are random thought, and writers often provide sources and links so that readers can verify facts. Surprisingly today often breaking news can be found on blogs earlier than in traditional media. And many bloggers have established for themselves a great standing in their field.

Blogging according to lawmakers needs to address closely aspects of trust, credibility, integrity, transparency, and ethics. Many bloggers feel that the very basis is to: disclose all pertinent information and never to state as fact anything but the truth; provide links to facts that are present online; publicly correct misinformation; note questionable and biased sources and opinions. Freedom must be savored and not misused.

Web blogs according to experts are all set to outrank the New York Times web site by 2007. Blogging, the creation of pure love for writing and opinions, is all set to establish new trends in journalism. It gives wing to the freedom of thought and the written word.

Paul Wilson is a freelance writer for http://www.1866WebDirectory.com, the premier Website Directory provides human edited categorized website listings including business websites, news websites, gaming websites, shopping websites, travel websites and more. He also freelances for Jokes site http://www.1888Jokes.com

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