Is there really a compelling reason to start a blog when you could be spending your time working on your website? Is a blog really as effective a marketing tool as a traditional website? It all depends.
Whether or not you should start your own blog depends largely on the use to which you blog will be put. Many bloggers are blogging for strictly social reasons; other use their blogs for productive purpose; and some bloggers manage to combine socializing and being productive in a single blog.
If your intention in starting a blog is to socialize, you will be most successful by creating your blog at one of the high-traffic social networking sites like MySpace and opening it up for comments so that you can begin a dialog with your readers.
If you want a productive blog, on the other hand, asking yourself why you should start your own blog takes on added importance, because anyone maintaining a productive blog will have to make a commitment of time if he or she expects the blog to succeed.
If you are considering a productive blog, you would do well to steer clear of the social networking arena and set yourself up on one of the blog hosting sites like WordPress or Blogger. When you have your blog up and running, you’ll no longer need to ask yourself “Why start your own blog when you have an existing website?”
One time consuming aspect of maintaining a blog is that of monitoring the comments posted by your blog’s readers. While those fresh contents can keep your blog in the of search engines’ radar, you could end up with some less than desirable blog posts and even get caught in the middle of battles between your viewers.
Blog comments are also often abused by spammers who simply want to plug their own websites, blogs, or pet causes. And if you have to spend a great amount of time refereeing warring readers, you’ll have that much less time to attend to the marketing aspects of your blog.
If you think you can manage it, create a blog which allows you to interact socially with your readers at the same time you are using it to increase your productivity. Why?
If you want to run with the big dogs in your industry, you will have to find some way of communicating to them that you are ready to do so. Being available to answer their questions on your blog is one way.
If you have a firmly held, defensible, but generally discounted belief regarding your products, leave a few challenging comments on related blogs, with links to you blog so that those who are interested can drop by to argue your point. When they arrive at your blog, lure them to your sales page.
Why start a blog when you already have a website? To socialize, to become more productive, or to become more productive by socializing. Blogs simply function in ways that websites were never meant to!
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If you are the one that maintains the company blog, you know that your comments get jammed with cheap spam. Which is not a big deal if you use Akismet. But still, it is a little irritating to see all the auto generated comments in your spam filters when you log in.
What’s worse is that I actually stop and check out a few of these links from time to time. Because they are not all porn and pharmacy sites. No sir, many of them are small businesses trying to promote their website. Mortgage companies, real estate agents, lawyers and retail companies. In other words, regular companies just like you and me.
Spamming a million blogs with cheap software every day in the hopes of getting a few backlinks. Probably based on a shallow promise from a really long and really convincing sales letter. Or even a recommendation from a colleague.
Sad.
Because what they don’t know is that it’s really more likely that using these software programs and automated SEO sites is hurting them more than it is helping them. Because it is blasting their links willy nilly all over the internet without any concern where they are going.
think about it for a minute. Do you want your law firm linked to adult blogs? Or Hate blogs? For that matter, do you want your site linked to other websites that are not even remotely related to you or your business?
I know, some of you are actually saying, “yes, I do want links. Thank you very much. We really, really need traffic and we don’t care where it comes from…”
But you should care. Because inappropriate backlinks do not help your site at all. They hurt you site. Guilt by association my friends. In this case, some of the content contained on the sites that link to you carry over to you. Your website is directly defined by the content of these sites. I won’t go into it today, but you can look up “Google Bowling” and see just what can happen by having bad sites link to yours.
As far as the traffic goes, why would you want traffic that is totally irrelevant? I’ll be honest with you, I’m a statistics nut. I love looking at my AWstats website statistics each and every day. I like seeing the increases and I like knowing when there is a decrease.
But I also look to see where these visitors are coming from. Because that’s important too.
I don’t want crap traffic. I don’t want traffic that has nothing to do with blogging or business. Because it doesn’t help us or our company. It’s wasted bandwidth and totally unproductive.
This is why when working on building your backlinks, you need to build them in places that will help your overall SEO. You need to build them in places where, if you do get some visitors, they will likely be visitors that are interested in your products or your services.
At the very least, you want those links to show the search engine spiders some relevancy. To build the authority of your website.
So here is my advice folks. Please don’t use automated software to blast a million blog comments. It’s not the correct way to build your backlinks and it is not the way to work on effective blog SEO.
All it really does is make more work for lots of blog owners. Making them spend more time cleaning up their comments and monitoring them. The links that you do get really aren’t that great.
In the end, all that happens is that you have dropped a few bucks on something worthless. Or even worse, something that you paid for that in the end is costing you more money than you ever imagined.
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Someone asked on LinkedIn: “If I wanted to have a successful blog that potentially made money, what would I do?”
First thing’s first, after figuring out what it is you’re going to write about and designing the blog and hosting it somewhere (I would suggest purchasing a keyword-rich domain name rather than hosting it free on Blogger or some other blog site), the most valuable thing you can do is add buttons and links to your blog to allow users to subscribe to it in as many different ways as possible. Some people use services like Bloglines, some people use an RSS app, some people use Firefox live bookmarks, but not all of these people are savvy enough to know how to subscribe to a blog without a specific sub-to-this-blog link for their preferred RSS reader. A great resource to help you make these different links is Feedburner.com. Feedburner also allows you to design email signatures with animated headlines from your blog, and many other different ways to publicize and monetize your blog. Plus, it lets you watch the traffic and subscription trends for your blog’s feed.
Next, you want to research keywords to find a keyword that relates to your subject matter that people actually search for, so that if you find yourself in the top ten rankings on Google for said keyword, you will actually get traffic from it. An awesome tool to help you figure this out is Wordtracker GTrends which is here: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/
Once you find your keyword or key phrase, you want to make sure your blog’s code is search engine friendly. You want to make sure your meta tags are within search engine guidelines, that your keyword density is appropriate for your subject matter, and that all of your titles have your keyword or key phrase in it. A good way to get a head start on this is to have your blog’s backend hosted by Blogger, while the blog itself is published on your own domain. I say this because Google owns blogger and as such, the new version of blogger features extremely Google-friendly code.
After this, you need to get some links pointing to your site from good, Google recognized sites that relate to your subject matter. The best way to do this is to search on Google for your keywords or key phrase and ask the top ten ranking web sites to link to your blog. You may have to be creative about this, using what we like to call link bait. This can be anything that entices another web site owner to link to your site. Because your site will be new and most top ten ranking sites know a thing or two about search engine optimization, you probably won’t be able to just get a link exchange – no one wants to link to a brand new blog for two reasons, one is that new bloggers have a tendency to lose interest after a while and you find yourself linking to a blog that never gets updated, and two is because the site has no Google PageRank. If you offer your potential linkers something else, you may have more success. For example, I once ran a campaign for a client that swapped links for a discount on my client’s products. Whatever it is you swap for a link is up to you, be creative.
You want to add your web site to blog directories and blog resources such as Technorati. If you haven’t spent literally a week straight doing this, you haven’t found nearly all of them. There are so many! Your best bet is to search Google for a list of blog directories.
Ask your friends or colleagues to Digg each of your blog posts using digg.com
Add links to the bottom of every post that will allow readers to add to delicious, post to facebook, myspace, stumble upon, etc. Use as much 2.0 power as you possibly can. Get a Twitter account and tweet as much as you can, follow as many users as you can. Make sure every profile you’ve ever made for yourself or your business on any site, has a link to your blog. Make sure your blog address is everywhere, when you comment on others’ blogs, when you talk in forums, etc.
You want to make sure you have an advertising policy available on your web site for potential advertisers to read, and as many different ways for them to contact you.
When all of this is set up and ready, it’s time to send out a Press Release. Make sure it is enticing and boldly underlines how this blog is different and why people will want to read it. Submit your press release to as many press release distributors as possible. Again, just search on Google and you’ll find a ton. Some cost money, some are free.
Now it’s time to post. Make sure your posts have personality. No one wants to read a dry technical blog. You want to make sure your own personality comes out in each and every post. Also, the more controversy, the better. A controversial post will entice readers to send the link to their friends and family in either horror or pride – both are equally as good! It will also encourage comments and repeat visits when something heated has been posted to the comments and the poster wants to come back to check the responses. It will also encourage repeat commenters and some will be compelled to subscribe to your blog. Make it controversial enough and you may even hit the mainstream news, such as Michelle Malkin did recently when she objected to the scarf Rachael Ray was wearing in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad.
Submit all of your article length posts to article databases utilizing the author’s bio as a spot for a link back to your blog. Hopefully people will syndicate these on their own sites keeping the bio in tact and thus, creating more links to your blog.
Some people use traffic exchanges such as BlogExplosion or Blog Soldiers and while it does actually increase your traffic, most of that traffic is useless. The only one I have ever found that actually results in real readers, is BlogExplosion.com. These sites are not entirely useless, however, as they do have directories that your blog is submitted to when you join. And there are no obligations after joining, so I would suggest doing so just to get into the directories as they are even more links to your blog.
Make sure you blog regularly, but not too much. Many people subscribe to RSS feeds as a much faster way to get their daily reading in. Blogs with a lot of daily headlines, generally get skimmed and sometimes just deleted when there’s no time. But blogs that only have a post a week, can tend to be forgotten about. My suggestion is to keep it to once daily, and at the very least, 3 or 4 times per week. If you are going to be unable to post for a period of time, vacation or something, post and let your readers know so that they don’t think it’s just another blog gone stale.
In the meantime, add Google Adsense to your blog, perhaps Amazon a-store and any high-quality affiliate programs that can relate to your blog’s subject matter.
If you keep all of this up, you will have advertising revenue. The key though, is patience. Keep at it and don’t get discouraged. Publicizing any web site can take months upon months before you see results. But once you do, it’s highly worth it. You may even want to design and sell your own merchandise for further revenue.
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Dassana Jayalath asked:
So you have a blog and want to market it and make it a successful blog. How do you do this? How do you go about getting your blog out there to be seen and known by others? How do you draw readers and keep them coming back for more? There are many ways to get your blog out there and known by others. This can be known as challenging for some and just quite easy for others. If you have ever had a successful blog before then you know what it takes.
You are not going to get anywhere by just setting up a blog and hoping that people will find it and read it. You are not going to gain any links, nor a higher search engine ranking by just having a blog. This is all part of blog marketing. Anyone can do it, even you.
Successful blog marketing tip number one. When you first create a blog, of course it is unheard of. No one knows anything about the blog unless you give them the link and show it to them. However, for a new blog that has never been seen, there are many ways to get it out there and known. You just need to know how. The first thing that you can do is to allow RSS feeds be taken from your blog. Allow other websites and blogs to publish your same exact blog. When you do this, they are giving you a link back to your blog, and also telling their readers all about your blog. You will get more traffic than ever with this tool. RSS feeds are wonderful for promoting and getting your blog out there.
Blog marketing tip number two. 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 makes 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. If you don’t have enough content, we recommend you join a private label article club sub as Turbo Membership.
Tip number three. 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 close to it and leave comments. 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. Which will be good for it as well. Commenting on blogs that get many comments will make yours be seen by those interested in that market. You will gain traffic and readers that way, and it is easy as well as free.
The fourth blog marketing tip. 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.
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Davion W asked:
Whether to buy SEO Elite or not – everybody seems to wonder. We know that SEO Elite can get you more hits than you can get even if you fiddle with your website for days. Is it really a wise decision to buy SEO Elite? You can probably save all the time you would have to spend trying to manually optimize your site for search engines, and get better results, as well. There are many reasons why SEO Elite is a safe and convenient choice for many users. Read this full review of SEO Elite and judge for yourself if the reasons are compelling enough.
1. Backlinking is one of the most important ways of your website’s Search Engine Optimization. When search engines rank your site, they look at the Search Engine Optimization in terms of titles, keywords in the content, and backlinks, which are crucial. If you buy SEO Elite, it will take care of this in a few ways.
a. SEO Elite analyzes your competitors’ backlinks and gives you all the details you need about the pages linking to your competitor. You can even use this information to get links on the websites where your rival has links.
b. The next step is to get links to your site from other sites as well as link directories. You can use SEO Elite to get links exactly according to your specifications. After you buy SEO Elite, you can even mail as many sites as you want at once, after creating a mail template. You can also find ‘authority websites’, links to which can significantly boost your ranking.
c. You can check if your link partners are still linking back to you. When you buy SEO Elite, this process becomes a lot simpler.
d. You can submit articles to articles directories all over the Web using this application. Adding a link to your site at the end of these will increase your ranking, and therefore, traffic on your site.
2. You can then feed in your key words and SEO Elite will monitor where your site stands in different search engines, giving you graphs with different time frames.
3. After you buy SEO Elite, you can see exactly which of your pages are indexed by even less popular search engines. If your pages are not indexed, you will naturally not figure in searches.
If you are new on the Web, you can get good ranking much more quickly than you can otherwise, using this software. If you are an old hand, it will save you time and effort, while still giving you better results than you can get manually. Either way, if you buy SEO Elite, you will get good rankings a lot easier than without it.
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Li Ming Wong asked:
So you have a blog and want to market it and make it a successful blog. How do you do this? How do you go about getting your blog out there to be seen and known by others? How do you draw readers and keep them coming back for more? There are many ways to get your blog out there and known by others. This can be known as challenging for some and just quite easy for others. If you have ever had a successful blog before then you know what it takes. You are not going to get anywhere by just setting up a blog and hoping that people will find it and read it. You are not going to gain any links, nor a higher search engine ranking by just having a blog. This is all part of blog marketing. Anyone can do it, even you.
Successful blog marketing tip number one. When you first create a blog, of course it is unheard of. No one knows anything about the blog unless you give them the link and show it to them. However, for a new blog that has never been seen, there are many ways to get it out there and known. You just need to know how. The first thing that you can do is to allow RSS feeds be taken from your blog. Allow other websites and blogs to publish your same exact blog. When you do this, they are giving you a link back to your blog, and also telling their readers all about your blog. You will get more traffic than ever with this tool. RSS feeds are wonderful for promoting and getting your blog out there.
Blog marketing tip number two. 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 makes 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.
Tip number three. 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 close to it and leave comments. 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. Which will be good for it as well. Commenting on blogs that get many comments will make yours be seen by those interested in that market. You will gain traffic and readers that way, and it is easy as well as free.
The fourth blog marketing tip. 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.
If you want to start blogging for cash, check out Atomic Blogging.
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Jaturont Thanapura asked:
A website is a personnel treasured possession. A proprietor of whichever online trade is known for his site. The Webmaster feels comfortable and self satisfied if his site is well liked among the Internet buffs. If his website exists not in top 10 in search engines, all his pains to popularize the website ends in fire. In this packed world of Internet, all and sundry desires their site to become famous.
Link building service is capable of dragging numerous traffic to a particular site. It is a method concerning the website to whichever other popular site. Once this well-liked site is visited by its standard visitor, he would discover the link of your website. His curious nature will absolutely make him to click on that link and in this approach your page will get displayed ahead of him. And hence, your site gets a fresh visitor. To maintain whichever new visitor, it is extremely significant that your site looks good-looking in design and color
Don’t Do This….
It was extremely alluring to bond with one of the loads of dodgy ventures like a link swap program the sites at the peak can be wedged and over-taken but of course it will take time. The age of the region is also important, why for instance would a search engine like google provide a fresh site a superior serps location than a site, which has been around for three years. That fresh site may not even be around this time subsequent year, as many webmasters do not even restore their sites after one year. For this cause it is also a good idea to pay money for your domain for maybe five years as an alternative of just one as it shows that you have first-class intentions etc. It is also cheaper in the long run.
One-way link
This is another method that you can do in order to get a one-way link to your website and two others get a one-way link as well. To do this website A links to site B site B links to site C and site C links to site A. Sites A, B and C now have one way links.
Whichever way you decide to go, you will start on building priceless back links to your website and begin setting yourself apart from your opposition. Light the flames early and watch it grow into something that you would have on no account imagined. Work hard and you will see long-lasting results for years to come!
To learn more about Google ranking GET this FREE 5-day Google Ranking E-course!
If you use AdWords, then please check out this FREE AdWords E-course as well.
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Vikram Kumar asked:
Humans are social animals and have various things to share with each other. But due to deep involvement in work they do not get sufficient time for the same. This is the reason why since a long time people were looking for a kind of facility with the help of which they can interact with their beloved ones according to their own time and preferences.
With the advent of advanced technology it is not that much difficult now. Internet is an incorporated part of sophisticated technology. It offers the facility of online social networking with the help of which one can share his or her feeling with anyone, anytime, anywhere.
There are a large number of people who value their money much more then anything else. This is really a very good thing. Most of them wish they should get such kind of outstanding facility for free! For the first time it may look impossible but it is definitely not for the internet. There is availability of many sites on the internet which prefer to offer free online Social network to their users. This service also includes the facility of downloading, broadcasting and video sharing on mobile sharing on mobile phones.
Obviously, most of the users understand the real worth of services that are offered for free. None of the site will offered best possible services to their users. If you are among those users then you are right to some extent. Free online Social network may not offer you services which can highly match up with your anticipations. But it is not common with all the sites available on the internet.
There are few of the sites which have entered in the market with a user oriented objective. They believe in offering best possible services to their users regarding free online chatting and video sharing. Like all the other free online Social network sites their objective is also to avail good traffic and revenue but only after offering full service and satisfaction to their users. One such social networking site is Dimdix.
If you are becoming the member of this site then it is fully assured that you will avail a unique experience of online social networking. Most of the online users prefer this site for networking mainly because of the services and facilities offered by it.
Some of the unique services and features offered by this site include video sharing on mobile phones, online forums, live maps, etc.
When it is about free online Social network offered by Dimdix then video sharing has its own importance. With the help of this site you can broadcast videos of various memorable events from your mobile phones.
You can easily avail the services offered by this site through your computer and most of the mobile phones. The features offered by this site do not depend on any kind of GPS system to detect out ones current location.
Due to these outstanding features only this site does not require any kind of publicity to declare its presence in the market. Because of its strong support and dedication only it is presently maintaining a strong goodwill in the market.
Dimdix is a social networking site which you can really depend upon and stay ready to avail long lasting services and fruitful results.
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