In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

http://www.blogmastermind.com/affiliates/index.php?af=832025

By: Wonderwoman07

About the Author:

Potty Training

Blogging advice tailored for newcomers can be hard to find. With new terms and tools appearing daily, it can be confusing for new bloggers to know where to start. To learn the basics of blogging such as how to set up a blog and make money from it, keep reading; it’s easier than you think.

First, pick which blog platform you would like to use. The top two contenders are blogger.com and wordpress.org. Here’s some simple blogging advice if you’re having trouble deciding. If you’re entirely new to blogging, blogger.com is the way to go. If you’re familiar with the basics of blogging or would just like to have more ”control” over your blog, wordpress might be a better choice. No matter which option you choose, the process is simple. All it takes is filling out your name, email address and naming your blog.

Although each platform comes with its own web hosting, here’s some blogging advice every blogger should take. Purchase your own domain name. Not only will having your own domain be easier for your visitors to remember, it will add another level of professionalism to your blog.

After you’ve picked out which blogger platform to use and have started to set up your blog, the next step is choosing your template. Templates are pre-made designs for your blog. The best blogging advice when it comes to templates is to make sure that your template reflects the topic of your blog. It’s more sensible to use a car template if your blog is about exotic cars, than it is to use a template about food.

You may not realize it, but you’re halfway done. You’ve picked a blog platform, registered your blog name, and picked out your very own template. You may have also decided to register your own domain name. Now its time for some blogging advice that everyone wants to know – how to make money from your blog.

There are 3 main ways to monetize your blog – through traffic, content and ads.

Traffic for your blog can be obtained in many ways. While most people think you have to pay a huge amount of money to achieve traffic results, the following tips are not only free, but also simple.

The easiest way to earn money from your blog is by simply filling it with content. If you can remember this, it will become one of the best blogging advice you’ve ever received. The more relevant content that you add to your blog, the easier it will be for search engines to find it. This means more traffic, which equals more money. When you first begin to blog, try to post several times a week and eventually work up to blogging on a daily basis. Readers like to know that every time they visit your blog, they will read something new.

Don’t worry if you don’t like to write; content comes in different forms. No longer is writing the only way to fill up a blog. Videos, podcasts and even games are now considered content.

Once you’ve filled your blog with content, the next step is to add your blog to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites are websites that cater to sending readers to blogs based on their personal interests. The top social bookmarking sites include StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Propeller, Fark, and Del.icio.us. However, many bookmarking sites prohibit any marketing ploys; so to minimize risk, bookmark 4 to 5 non-self-serving links for every self-serving link you bookmark. Post comments on other people’s bookmarks and be an active participant in the discussions. Bookmark sites that other people have bookmarked so you’ll be seen as part of the community.

Another effective way to create income is by signing up for affiliate programs and promoting them on your blog. This is not only great blogging advice, but can be used for other ventures as well such as websites. Every time a visitor purchases an affiliate product from your blog, you get paid a commission for it. The commissions can range any where from a few bucks to hundreds of dollars. The tip to remember when it comes to affiliate marketing is to pick programs and products that are related to your blog. It’s much easier to get your visitors to sign up for a recipe subscription if your blog is about cooking, than it is to get them to sign up for a stock market subscription.

One last tip for creating money for your blog is to place ads. This can be done in various ways. One of the most popular ways is through Google adsense. Each time a visitor clicks on one of the adsense ads, you get paid. It’s also free to sign up for an account. As a bonus, if you signed up under the blogger.com platform, all it takes are a few clicks to get adsense onto your blog. If you chose wordpress, the setup is still easy. You just simply install a plug-in to add Google adsense to your blog.

A lot of people will tell you that this is the blogging advice they wished they would’ve received when they first started to blog. Not only do you now know how to setup a blog, you also learned how to profit from it. Now the only thing you have to do is go create your blog and start earning!

By: Jeremy Gislason

About the Author:

Mortgage Refinance

Advertising Your Blog In Your Email Signature:  If you have a blog that you are particularly proud of, and that you want to share with other people, there are a lot of free ways that you can get your blog noticed.  One of those ways is something that you do everyday, and that you may not even consider as a way to share

your blog. Put the link to your blog in your email signature.  Chances are that you send out emails more timese that you can count during the day, Each time you send out an email, you can advertise your blog by putting the address of your blog in your email’s signature. It’s always a good idea to write something catchy like, See what I am up to now, or Read my latest chapter of my fanfic here, depending on what type of blog you have.  The thing to remember about putting an adveritsement in your signature for your blog is to make it short,

but eyecatching.  You want people to be interested enough to want to click on it, but you also don’t want to scare them off.  Just like it is with any adveritsement, you want to give them just enough to be interested and take a closer look at what it is that you are advertising.  Think about what it is that your blog is about. What is really going to interest people abuot it and want to visit That is what you should include in your signature, and that is what is going to get people to go to your blog.

Blogger Forums – A Great Place To Advertise Your Blog:  No matter what type of blog that you have, one of the best places that you can advertise your blog is to join a blogger forum. After all, everyone who posts there has a blog and thats the main subject.  It’s a great place to meet other bloggers and to advertise your blog.  There are quite a few blogger forums that you can sign up for on the Internet. One is known as Bloggeries, where you can show off your blog, get your blog reviewed or review other blogs, and find lots of tools that you can use for your own blog.  Another good place to go is to Blog Forum. Blog Forum, like Bloggeries, has spots for you to market and show off your blog, Blogger forums are a great place to advertise because everyone in them are of the same mind and want to make certain that their blogs get noticed and read.  If you use your blog to advertise something that you are selling, or you want to get a lot of traffic to your blog in order to make money, you want to go someplace where it can get exposure.  When you advertise on a blog forum, you know that you are placing your advertisement in a place where blogging is something that people enjoy.  Just remember when you are posting to a forum to read the rules and abide by them. That way you’ll get your blog noticed and you will know that you are doing the

Blogging Directories – Great Advertising Venues:  If you want to have more people visit your blog, there are plenty of blog directories on the Internet that you can submit your blog to so that people will come and visit it. Most blog directories are listed by the topics that the blogs that are submited cover. Blog Catalog is a free blog directory that offers categories such as career and jobs, writing, Iraq, and many others. It has features such as featured blogs and other things to offer those who submit their blogs there.  Another great place to add your blog is blog-drectory.org. Not only do they have an an extensive list of categories with sub categories, you can get your blog reviewed. For the most popular blogs, it shows the amount of hits that blogs have and if they have any reviews. As well as listing by category, the blogs are also listed by location.  There are other blog directories on the Internet – these are only a couple of them. But blog directories are a great place to advertise your blog and to make

new friends. You never know what you will find when you browsing through the directory, and you may just find out information that you never knew. Some of the blog directories offer chat features as well, so that you can meet other people easily.  As you can see, blog directories are a great place to get your blog noticed and bring people to read your blog and look at your pictures.

Blogging Traffic – Give And Take:  Blogging traffic is a give and take relationship. Sometimes one of the best ways to get traffic to your blog is by visiting someone else ’s blog.  Go to their blog and read one of their entries, or read a few of them. Chances are that you are going to find something that you have in common. When you find something that you find truly

interesting on a blog, leave a comment so that they know that you were there.  One of the best known blogs available is LiveJournal.  A great feature of LiveJournal is that you can search

for interests on their site and it will come up with results of those who have that interest.  Are you interested in horseback riding You can see what other bloggers are interested in horseback riding as well.  When you are commenting on someone’s post, you want to make sure that you don’t leave generic comment. If you like the post, say something about what you read in the post.  After you have commented on the person’s post, then you can say something like, ‘I really like horseback riding too. I had a similar experience to yours.’ and

then use it to link back to your journal.  But be sure that you sound sincere when you are

commenting, and don’t make them feel like you’re just fishing for traffic.  If someone thinks that you are using their blog to get more traffic to yours, they won’t visit your site and your efforts will be wasted.

Join A Community To Advertise Your Blog:  Something that you will find, especially if you join something like LiveJournal or GreatestJournal, is that users just like you have created communities for people with common interests.  There are communities for just about any subject, and if you find that there isn’t a community for the subject you can create one. This is a great place to advertise your blog.  The nice thing about communities is that there isn’t

any limit as to how many communities that you can join.  For example, say that you love blogging about books, horseback riding, and skiing in Tahoe. All you have to do is look through the communities for ones that have those interests and join them.  As long as you post something related to the topic to the chosen community, people will see you and perhaps

they will check out your personal blog.  Something to remember is that you don’t want to write

a post tht is one sentence long in order to get people to go to your blog. They will want to know that what you write is interesting and is something worth reading.  Joining communities can be a great way to advertise your blog and drive traffic to it. If you are referring to something that you posted about on your blog, you can use a link back to your entry in your post.  As with posting comments on someone else’s blog, you don’t want people to think that you joined a community simply to get traffic to your blog. Otherwise, people won’t visit your blog and you may get banned from the community as well.

Email Groups – Hidden Treasure Troves For Advertising:  Something that has become increasingly popular since the Internet has grown are the email groups that are available through Yahoo, MSN, and other venues.  They are a great way to meet other people who have a common interest, and are very similar to the communities that are available through blogging sites.  There is plenty of diverse subjects and there are communities for just about any subject.  These groups can be a great place for people who have a blog about the subject and want to share it with other people.  Most of the time when you join a group, you are

encouraged to take a moment and to introduce yourself.  This is a great opportunity to tell people about your blog, but make certain that you don’t overdo it.  Just like with any of the other places you will advertise your blog, you want to make people want to go to your blog. If you are too overbearing, you will turn people off.  If your blog covers different subjects, you can

advertise it on the other groups that cover those subjects as well. Make certain that your post to the groups is interesting and that you let people know what it is that your blog is about. There’s nothing worse than getting taken to a blog under false pretences.  When people visit your blog, make certain that you thank them for visiting and respond to comments that

they leave.  If they know that you appreciate the time that they

took, they are more likely to come back again.

The power of being seen is the up most importance and blogging is one the best ways you can make sure others know of you, don’t let it pass you by.www.theonlinenbiznetwork.com, www.marinisgifts.com, www.onlinenichenetwork.com

 

By: Douglas Smith

About the Author:

Straddles

Blogs are online journals where people express themselves through writing. Writing is the process by which one puts the words of a language on a format that others can read. Writing has only been a day in the year that humanity has existed. Talking and thinking are much easier than writing. These processes just out naturally like a river of consciousness, just sometimes, we have to do.

Bloggingnews.net is owned and operated by GPRICESHOP LLC., a US corporation, as a free informational site. They accept only articles which are blog oriented news, provided are reprinted with the permission of the original authors as a promotional tool for their own websites.

Blogging is the wave of the future. They Would Always Like You To Come Back For Up To Date News On Blogging As Well As Always Having The Most Up To Date Blogging News Available.

Anyone submitting an article (blogging oriented) to this site agrees to allow it to be published in electronic form on this website. Publishing of articles by bloggingnews.net is wholly at their discretion. You will be notified via email if your article is published on their site. This site will not publish any article they find to contain profanity, are abusive, rude, illegal, or is not relevant to the topics covered in the site. Some articles have been slightly altered from their original form. These alterations are in html formatting only and are applied to author’s code to make them compatible with W3C specifications.

For more details, please visit – http://www.bloggingnews.net

By: Blogging News

About the Author:

Tax Lawyers

Blogs and the activity of blogging went mainstream a long time ago so much so that these days every 1.5 seconds a new blog is created! Crazy huh? Put another way:

• 7.4 Million blogs were created in the last 120 days

• 1.5 Million blogs were created in the past 7 days

• 900,000 blogs created in the last 24 hours

• 37,500 blogs created every hour

Those are downright scary figures especially if you are just creating a blog today because it is a reflection of the extent of the competition facing you today! So what really made blogs and the activity of blogging so popular?

Why Blogs Became So Popular

Well before blogging became so mainstream and the internet became literally saturated with millions upon millions of blogs, the activity was pretty much restricted to only the truly savvy online marketers (who traditionally set the pace for the rest of the crowd) and the geeks. Once those marketers realized the significant advantages blogs held over normal websites they quickly, quietly and efficiently converted their traditional websites to the blog platform. Here’s why they did it:

1. Blogs are quickly indexed by search engines;

2. A blog is easy to update and add content to frequently;

3. Frequently updating content encourages visitors to return to your blog;

4. You don’t need to know HTML or any other web coding language to manage a blog;

5. Blogs embrace the 2-way conversation interactivity that is so important to today’s business environment;

6. Social Media Websites welcome and are the perfect fit for blogs;

7. Blogs rise up the search engines quickly;

8. It is dead easy to attract web traffic to a blog even if it is brand new;

9. New content added to your blog is instantly viewable and just as quickly picked up by the search engines; and

10. You don’t need to be a web designer or have web designing skills to create a cool and professional-looking blog that stimulates visitor confidence and enhances their interaction.

What those ten attributes listed above so characteristic of blogs essentially mean, is that a blog would invariably and inevitably beat a normal website when it comes to attracting web traffic and attaining exposure! What blogging had fundamentally done was to level the playing field so that even absolute beginners could take on well-established traditional websites that had had thousands of backlinks and been around for several years. What is more not only were blogs competing effectively with them but actually beating them at their own game!

Before long blogs were popping up as the number one listings throughout Google’s index for the most competitive keyword terms! Slowly and surely those traditional websites that had maintained a vice-like grip on the top-spot listings on Google for an eternity slowly lost their rankings to a large number of blogs.

Soon enough the secret was out that blogs wielded a considerable advantage over traditional websites and before long the activity itself had gone mainstream. Now let’s fast forward to the current situation today where the internet is super-saturated with blogs to the tune of a new blog being created every 1.5 seconds!

What 900,000 Blogs Created Everyday Means to You!

It used to be that anybody could virtually blog about anything and were almost guaranteed to attract enough traffic to make enough sales to actually justify it as being worth their while. In such a manner a lot of marketers who had embraced blogging early on were able to dominate a good number of niche markets quickly. But that was then and today, well, is today!

Long gone are the good ole days when you could target a small niche, slap together a few mediocre posts to your new blog and attract sufficient traffic to enable you to make money enough to quit your day job! These days most of those once little-saturated and highly-lucrative niche markets are overcrowded with more competitors than their daily web traffic allotment can possibly handle! What that boils down to is that only the very few, very best of blogs are actually able to make money online from their chosen niche markets.

That also means that if you are just creating a blog today, your blog will surely join the millions of mediocre blogs that never make any headway and are quickly abandoned by their owners unless you…

Make Your Blog Stand Out From The Rest Of The Crowd

To succeed as a blogger you have to make your blog stand out from the many other millions of blogs already proliferating all across the internet. This ironically is actually good news for you because most bloggers have absolutely no idea how to distinguish their blogs from the next guy’s. In fact these days there are two kinds of blogging style, the traditional type of blogging known as Old-School Blogging and the more recent style in tune with the current internet business environment known as New-School Blogging.

The big difference between Old-School Blogging and New-School Blogging is that unless your Old-School Blog is already ranking well on the Google Index, you are going to find it extremely difficult to draw enough attention to make your blog profitable. In other words if you start a blog today and adopt old-school blogging techniques then you are almost certainly guaranteed to fail. Why? Because old-school blogging techniques will not enable you to stand out from the crowd which also means that you cannot possible compete against blogs that have been around for a while and are already well-established.

The biggest flaw that old-school blogs suffered from was an inability to consistently draw significant amounts of web traffic!

However if you create a new blog and adopt new-school blogging techniques, within little time you will effortlessly attract lots of web traffic. Which method of blogging you choose will ultimately determine the level of internet success!

Click For More Tips On How To Make Money Blogging

By: Ba Kiwanuka

About the Author:

Find Your Niche

Do you blog? I hope you do, because blogging can do a lot for your freelance writing career. For a writer, blogs are not only an instant-publishing tool, they’re also an opportunity to find great writing jobs.

Blogs are a phenomenon. Although many “A-list” bloggers have been publishing for years and have built up strong audiences, it’s only in the past couple of years that blogs have become mainstream.

Let’s get definitions out of the way. What’s a blog? A blog is just a Web site in which the site’s pages are (usually) published in chronological order. Blogs are based on templates, and have a simple navigational structure, based on chronology, and on categories.

The major benefit of a blog is that it’s instant. If I want to post a message to a blog, I can do it in seconds. Contrast the “instant” nature of a blog with publishing in a newspaper or a magazine. The other major benefit of a blog is that it can be free.

How to Get a Blog Job

Top blogs are usually written by a group, rather than by a single individual, because high-traffic blogs are updated several times a day. This means that many, many blog jobs are available. All you have to do is look for them.

However, before you start looking, create your own small blog first. Anyone who hires you will want to know that you understand the nature of blogging.

Your blog should be in an area in which you want to be hired to blog. For example, if you have experience in health topics, then create a blog on a health topic. Or perhaps you enjoy celebrity gossip. This is a very popular topic in blogging, as it is in magazines, so create a celebrity gossip blog.

With your own small blog created, it’s time to find blog jobs. Yes, that’s plural. Most professional bloggers blog for a stable of blogs. Several colleagues blog for ten to 20 blogs. One friend blogs for many businesses. At last count, he was blogging for 30 blogs, and making an extraordinary income.

There are many ways you can find blogs jobs. The most common way is to approach a business which as a Web site, but which doesn’t have a blog, and to propose a blog to them. If you’re new to blogging, you may find this approach a little intimidating, so let’s look at other ways suitable for new bloggers.

Here are three ways:

1. Use the out-sourcing sites

There are dozens of out-sourcing sites, and you’ll find blog jobs advertised there. Bid on projects, but don’t under-price your services. All writing takes time, and if you under-bid, you’ll be too busy blogging to look for better paying blog jobs. So bid a sensible amount. Genuine buyers will hire you.

2. Approach other bloggers

Another easy way to get blog jobs is to approach other bloggers. This is simple and it works, but although I’ve been blogging since 2001, I’m rarely approached. Maybe such a simple solution doesn’t occur to people.

Since businesses who want to hire bloggers do approach me, I’m happy to make introductions, as are all bloggers.

So politely approach bloggers, and ask that they keep you in mind to recommend for blog jobs.

3. Advertise your availability on your own site

Please remember to advertise your availability on your own site. Again, this method is so simple that it’s often overlooked. I’ve lost count of the numbers of blogs I’ve seen of people I know are looking for blog jobs – but there’s no mention of this on their own blogs.

So go and get some blog jobs – they’re widely available, they’re fun, and they’re profitable too.

By: Angela Booth

About the Author:

Forex Trading

Blogs.

As an Internet strategist – my life daily is consumed with social media feeds, blog alerts, feedburner stats, google alert updates, monitoring, strategizing, execution – all of these overused terms and time consuming tactics certainly take a toll on you.

But one thing I do often, as I do for all my clients, is research – taking notice of the growing digital space around me – thinking of ideas to implement innovative strategies among the community and with my clients.

One of those key strategies that are a must in today’s Internet spectrum is a blog.  A blog is key in driving not only traffic, but interest to your brand, product, or company.  Blogs help you appear authoritative in your industry – allowing you to give views on the latest events in your trade, offer reviews, insights, and so on.

This expands into relationship building tools, as you are able to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style, as compared to how you direct the voice on your main website.  Through the blog channel, they are more likely to trust you, and then all the more likely to visit your main website and then click your links and possibly purchase your product.

It also offers insight for your customers, and allows them to leave comments and ’speak’ to you on a key level. In addition, blogs are extremely search engine friendly – through thousands of possible keywords and fresh, updated content on a regular basis – blogs are simply great facets to have on your website today.  Your simply misguided if you think otherwise.

*Read More for a detailed blog breakdown of the popular clothing line Free People.

Now, another aspect of blogs I enjoy are creating them, not only content strategy, but programming and designing them on a unique level.  One aspect of ‘branding’ a blog is considering the number of possibilities you have when actually build the blog.

How do you want to approach a design? Are you a creative or less scalable brand? Do you have the ‘assets’ to build a ‘creative’ blog? Do you have a content strategy built before you blog? Do you know how to ‘market’ your blog on a daily basis?

These are all important questions you MUST think about before diving into the blog space – thinking you know what to do, when you might need a refresher.

And always remember that blogs vary, depending if you are in the business-to-consumer or business-to-business parallel – but your Plan of Action (POA) should always remain the same.

Case Study.

Free People. A blog that does it Right.

Free People is a ’boutique’ style of women’s and young girl’s clothing – offered both online and in brick and mortar stores around the world.  It is a sister-brand to another well-known bohemian-type clothing, accessories and furniture store – Anthropologie.

Now, the Free People store design is a very creative, bohemian look that stylizes the brand well, and does many good things as far as marketing the brand on the main website – but their blog page does an even better job in terms of look, strategy and content.

First, when you come upon the page – you have a nice flash banner on the top portion of the blog that draws instant attention.  It’s 3-D style and moving parts, keeps the user engaged enough to move the mouse over the falling curtain rod and press it – which then drags the screen over, as if you were in puppet show – making note of their blog’s name “Caravan of Curiosities” – to keep the user engaged enough to follow through the blog to discover its true meaning.

Another side point here – naming your blog something different and marketing that along side your main brand is a nice change of pace on occasion.  But it won’t work for everyone – so carefully think about that before you go off and name your blog something completely different.  The nice touch here is that ‘Caravan of Curiosities’ still has an engaging tone to it, and how they display it in the blog is effective as well.

Working your way down the page – you recognize the 3-D style curtain outline the navigation header, which is simple – and elegant. And then just three blog pages dress the navigation header:

 

Blog: links to the blog homepage Videos: links to a custom video channel page in the blog Shop FP: links back to the main website

 

And from a design aspect – you have to appreciate the look with drawn curtains going down the sides of the pages – very instinctual and effective.

Now, the opening page here is the blog homepage – which after the navigation has your standard blog format and layout with a search box, archives, categories, and a blog roll entitled ‘favorites’.  They also added a store locator and 6 products that are simple photos and text that link back to the main store. The column layout is a three-column layout morphed into two columns, and in that side right column they squeeze in the blog widgets.  All of this is complimented by a great ‘notebook’ style background.  As complex and rich as this design is overall – remember, it is their content that gets the job done…not the design.  Even though I truly applaud them on such a layout – very engaging for a user to traverse through.

Finally, at the bottom of the page — a nice connection with the footer, in relation to the header — similar to how you tie any story together — you must connect the beginning with the end of a story…as you do a website — design and content including.

Content of Free People.

Now, with any website, content is king, always will be king, and on the Free People blog – it is King.  Content on blogs are crucial for search engines because you can create thousands of keywords, all of it search engine friendly, and all the content you create is new and updated – so search engines will love you for it.

Free People does a fantastic job with approaching the all around marketing term – “On Target, Off Topic”. Free People have a target audience, girls, young women ages tween to 45; easily, and for the more trendy women who may breach beyond that age – even an older woman can wear their clothing.  With that target audience in thought – as a marketer – go ‘off topic’ for a bit, and consider talking about content that is not directly related to you, but still, in a way, is connected.

Free People’s breaks up its blog into 26 different categories; topics such as art, books, decor, crafts, food, home office, magazines, polls, music, and so on.  At the same time, they intermix direct categories related to some of their external social media tools, such as their flickr, myspace, facebook, and download pages.

The point is, their content is intellectually placed, and interesting…which is even more important!  They do occasionally drop in content that will push a new outfit, piece of clothing and so on…but not as often as you think.  And they are blogging everyday – with NEW content, and using this to their advantage.

Video.

Another aspect of their content they included was a blog page devoted exclusively to video.  This custom designed video player they added features behind the scene videos of their monthly catalog shoots, as well as a video featuring their 2007 holiday party.  These simple videos are barely 1:30 minutes long, edited with appropriate music, mostly indie stuff, and cut to look a bit grainy and eclectic, as their brand appropriately exhibits now.

This simple idea of placing video on the blog is a great marketing tool.  First, the video takes an editor, all of about an hour to edit and post.  From there…he can take this video – submit it to any external video channels, i.e. YouTube, Viddler, and so on.  They can then upload them to their Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr pages – only enhancing their exposure – through something as simple as video.

For those who don’t know what this is or means; essentially this creates secondary brand exposure that allows you to initially reach out to possible consumers who might not have seen your brand before, allowing them to now find you.  It also allows you to create ‘backlinks’ to your website – this all counts in that SEO puzzle so many clients and people I speak to are always trying to solve.

Final.

Here is the point about all this – what this blog does right is pretty much EVERYTHING. What they do wrong, next to NOTHING, nearly.  And let’s be clear on this, they have people who are supposed to be blogging and acting as community managers to maintain this blog, and update their external social networking profiles, and so on.  This all takes time, and we all know what time ends up being — $$$.  But, the effect of what they have created has allowed them to ‘connect’ with their consumers, and harness new customers, and so on.  Their blog has been around since November 2006, and has amassed a huge amount of traffic daily to the blog.  Agreed – they are a major brand and can spark that type of traffic, but honestly, the simplicity behind their blog strategy only enhances those numbers.

Any company or brand that is thinking of starting a blog strategy need to follow a similar model in structuring their content and direction when beginning or ‘changing up’ a blog for your brand or product.

If you need help in developing a blog strategy for your business, feel free to contact me @ anytime. nicholas.cifuentes@gmail.com

By: Nicholas Cifuentes

About the Author:

Foreign Exchange Trading

Now, I am going to give you 9 powerful tips you must take into your action seriously for your blog online marketing. With those tips, you can build highly successful and profitable blog online and earn money on the internet. All you have to do is to take those tips in your action and marketing plan seriously. 

My investigations show that blog is one of the most popular and effective ways to earn money on the internet. Now, most of people have their own blog online. Also, most internet entrepreneurs use blog as their internet marketing tools to advertise and sell their products or services. 

Actually, blog online marketing is not all that hard if you know what you are doing. However, if this is your very first blog and you are wondering how to get readers For more helps visit on go on www.blog-and-ping.com. First let me just say that marketing your blog is going to require patience, and being consistent. 

Here are some great tips to use when trying to get your blog out there and get new readers. You’ll discover workable tips and secrets of how to build successful blog and earn money with your blog. 

1) The first key for your successful in blog online marketing is to update your blog frequently. We can not put enough emphasis on this tip. If you tell your readers that you are going to update your blog daily, then do it. If you tell them that you will be writing in your blog weekly, don’t let them down. Your readers are what make your blog successful. You may not realize this in the beginning, and you will have few readers in the beginning as well, but you will eventually build a readership base and have people checking out your blog regularly. Maybe you do not plan on telling your readers how often you will update your blog. That is ok too. However, think about this, if you were reading a blog on a weekly basis, and you expected to see the blog that you like to read updated at least once a week, you would be very disappointed to find out that it was not. Sure, things happen that might prevent you from updating, and that is expected, and excused, but week after week can hurt you and cause you to lose readers. 

2) You are going to want to be sure that all of your posts are formatted. Doing so will leave out any confusion for the search engines and you will have everything nice and neat and all organized. The label tags are there for a reason when you are dealing with blogs. So using them and not leaving them out is a great idea. 

3) I would recommend you to ensure that your blog has the track back feature. Let me tell you why. When you have the track back feature on your blog, you are allowing other people to link back to your blog. Maybe someone has a post to post on their blog that is relevant to one of yours. They can use the talkback to your post, and send their readers to your blog so that they know what they are referring to. Another good thing to remember is that if someone gives you a track back, it is a courtesy to return that to their blog if at all possible. 

4) Having a Google account and submitting a sitemap is almost a must when you are blog online marketing. Doing so will allow Google to know how often you are updating your blog and they will automatically know of any changes that you have made to it as well. This will let Google get those new pages indexed faster and get them into search results much quicker than if you did not have the sitemap. There is a certain way you have to do the sitemap for Google, and they can explain that to you. Just know this is an important step to blog online marketing. 

5) Exchanging links with authority blogs and websites that are in your same market is another great way to get the word out about your blog. The authority sites are going to have a higher page rank, and will also be listed high in Google’s search results. So do some searches and check those out and see if they are up to exchanging links. If they are not, you could always just add those into your blogrolls. You do not need permission to do that if they are not into linking. However, in the world of blogs, most blog owners are thankful for all links, and are willing to return the favour. 

6) Tracking is another part of blog marketing that is so very important. You want to be able to track your visitors and clickers to know where they are coming from. You want to be able to tell what keywords they searched on to find your blog and where they did their searching. Doing so will help take out all of the guess work when it comes to blog marketing. You will know what keywords are working, and which are not. 

7) Allowing RSS feeds from your blog is also another great blog online marketing tool. You are going to find that when you allow RSS feeds, your blog is going to end up all over the internet with a link back to it and that is a good thing. This is a wonderful way to get links to your blog with little or no effort. People that subscribe to your blog’s RSS feeds are able to then post your blog posts on their sites or blogs. This in return gives you a link on their site or page that they have you on. 

While you are working on your readership base, and trying to gain readers, you are going to find that commenting on blogs that are relevant to yours will surely help. Find a blog that is on the same topic to yours, or go on www.profit-pulling-toolbars.com. You can also make a track back with your blog postings to comment on your own blog. Doing so will probably more than likely give someone else the urge to track back to your blog? This will be good for it as well. Commenting on blogs that get many comments will make your blog seen by those interested in that market. You will gain traffic and readers that way, and it is easy as well as free. 

9) Learn and apply SEO to your blogs. SEO is search engine optimization. You are going to find that if you want your blog to go anywhere, you need SEO, and you need to know how to use it to the advantage of your blog. Just like a website, a blog will be better off optimized. 

Final thoughts, blog online marketing is only as hard as you make it. Use these powerful tips and get your blog out there and seen today! about blog online marketing to start & grow your highly profitable and successful home based internet marketing business with your blog today! You’ll discover great tips, workable & proven techniques, top secrets and steps-by-steps of how to get your blog been #1 ranking in major search engines, drive a ton of relevancy traffic and earn money on the internet with your blogs. Also, you will save a lot of your time & money to learn by yourself. 

By: ABHISHEK JAIN

About the Author:

Choosing a Forex Broker

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? Wordpress and Blogger (owned by Google)are the most popular blogging packkages on the planet. This offers you four blogging options, and three ways of creating a blog to get traffic to your website.

Why four from just the 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, plugins and designing their own blogs.

Wordpress

Wordpress can also be run from the Wordpress hosting site. However, where Wordpress 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 Wordpress plugins 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.

Blogging 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 them make money through free advertising.

Whatever you use it for, howver, a blog has to be advertised to get readers. No readers and there’s not much point in the blog. Blogging is not advertising: it is a means of expressing yoruself and your thoughts. However, you can aslo use it to advertise, not only your feelings, but also your products and your websites if you have any. 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 problem you have, and it is not a diffcult one, is how you are going to get people, not only to read your blog, but also to click on one of the 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 Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. 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. 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 Facebook and MySpace 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.

By: Peter Nisbet

About the Author:

Prenatal Vitamins

Blogs are hot in demand. Blogging is the current craze in communication over the internet. The web horizon is alive with active blogging activities, indulged in by people with different cultures from all over the world. The involvement with blogging is occupying much of the blogger’s time. Efforts spent on the blog reveal admirable results in terms of good content that is varied and of depth offering appeal and enjoyment to readers.

The popularity of blogs can be attributed to the following reasons:

(1) Blogs are easy to use

Blogs have the support from standardized technologies . Blogging can be done with real ease. Publishing content on the web can now be done with any hassle. Additionally, each blog can reference the information on other blogs. Blogs provide the bloggers with the opportunity to provide comments easily on other blog posts. This process opens up the opportunity to build good relationships. The relative ease in writing your thoughts and posting them for other bloggers to read certainly goes well with bloggers.

(2) Blogs are easily set up

There are numerous blogging software that will support the easy set up of any blog. Technological knowledge or expertise is not a prerequisite in setting up the blog. These blogging software additionally supports bloggers in many other areas such as keeping shared record of their work easily and convenient posting of comments.

(3) Blog owners are real humans

Behind every blog is a real human being. Each blog owner is different in many ways from the others. Blogging has brought people of different cultures together through communicating on their blogs. The reason is because the blog is basically approachable. Blogs encourage dialog which is so vital to the development of relationships amongst bloggers. The blog requires the human voice, and this makes blogging exceptionally special in terms of personalization through each blog. These factors actually increase the popularity of blogs today.

(4) Good networking communities are created by blogs

It is inherent in the culture of blogging that bloggers communicate with one another via link lists, their personal posts and through the posting of their comments on the blogs of others. This process supports the dissemination of information as well as making referencing of other bloggers’ information very much easy. The interchange of information and knowledge brings bloggers closer together. The opportunity to build mutual understanding, trust and cordial relationship increases as the networking mechanism develops.

(5) Conversational culture of blogs

Blogs allow bloggers to speak with personal voices. Conversations are easily created and distributed, giving rise to the much desired network that every blogger would love to start. The conversational culture of blogging brings out the true spirit of blogging. Bloggers speak with honesty and transparency. They want the conversations to be true and real in terms of sincerity and meaning. The conversations can be carried elsewhere beyond the blog itself. In effect, the blog will readily support the connection of bloggers with similar interests.

(6) Blogs are well-loved by search engines

Search engines love blogs intensely. The main reasons are that blogs usually contain many keyword-rich pages and constantly updated content. These content are often appropriately linked to other content, and this actually increases the popularity of blogs. Blogs that have a fair amount of incoming links certainly indicate that their content is well-written, relevant and well-received, and that their credibility will be positively assessed by search engines. Blogs that show good content indicates their authority on the subject.

(7) Blogs are versatile

Blogs make communication real and easy. They are versatile by nature. It is so convenient to make announcements, put up event calendars and to conduct exchange of information and knowledge. Technologies have benefited blogs immensely. Blogs provide good opportunities for better web visibility and syndication. Readers benefit from the easy access to other new information that they need from other blogs without having to disclose their email addresses.

Blogs are used for personal and corporate intentions. Many technologies in their synergy have made blogs where they are today. The communication scenario on the internet has improved dramatically, and this is attributed solely to the popularity of blogs.

By: Jeremy Long Chia Teik

About the Author:

Fine Wine