Traffic Generation Is the Key
Assuming you feels qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging, the most important things you need to monetize your blog is TRAFFIC Generation. It is also known as Blog marketing.
Why is Traffic so Important?
For most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.
You have heard before the rich always get richer. Same apply to blogging, when you get more traffic, you will be able to get more traffic. Some of the top blogger are generating from unexpected sources which we cannot teach you here. For example, while your blog is so popular, journalists will be finding you for interview by doing a Google search on topics you have written. Radio and TV station will invite you for live interview. This is when you get richer by getting more exposure and marketing. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.
If you’re intelligent and follow our strategies closely, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.
Beautiful & Attractive Blog Design, Does It Matters?
No matter how attractive and interesting your blog is, if you don’t market it and attract readers to it, you won’t make any money. Basically, blog marketing is any activity that publicizes or advertises products, services, a website or business through the use of blogs. However, before you can market on a blog, you have to successfully market the blog itself. If you can’t generate a healthy amount of traffic to your blog, you won’t be able to directly or indirectly market to them.
Consistency and Effectiveness
The key to marketing your blog successfully is consistency and effectiveness. This means that you have to consistently post new, interesting articles to your blog that are relevant to your targeted audience as well as consistently engaging in activities designed to drive traffic to your blog. However, there is a caveat on this last suggestion. Your traffic generation activities have to be effective. To ensure the effectiveness of your blog marketing strategies you need to become well informed about the types of strategies that typically get the best results, consistently apply them and consistently monitor them. You must be willing to drop strategies that do not work and replace them with hopefully more effective ones. It is important that you are not attached to your strategies but to your outcomes. If it doesn’t work, change it. Flexibility is an essential element to blogging success.
Once you have created your blog and have submitted some interesting and unique posts that are designed to pique interest and engage your reader in conversation through the comments facility, you need to get your blog pages indexed in the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This process is not automatic and if you don’t take the necessary steps you will have little chance of benefiting from search engine traffic. Generally speaking search engines require you to submit a sitemap, however if your blog is hosted by a service like Blogger you won’t be able to access the root directory to obtain the information. Instead you will need to submit code in a meta-tag. Your blog provider will direct you on how to do this.
Once you have submitted your blog for indexing with the search engines, the next most important step you can take to generate traffic to your blog is to submit it to as many relevant blog directories as possible. This can be a time consuming process so if you can afford it you may find it beneficial to pay a service to manually submit the blog for you. Automatic submission services should be avoided as they do not make allowances for the visual confirmation that is usually needed when submitting a blog to a directory. Blog directories can really pay of in terms of attracting visitors to your blog as long as you list your blog in the correct category and you take care to write a description that accurately describes your blog and appeals to your targeted niche.
These steps may generate one time visitors but it is up to you to keep them. If your blog is not updated regularly with new material it will stagnate. Regular posting is not only important in terms of attracting a loyal readership, it is essential if you want to improve your search engine page rank. The best search engine results tend to go to blogs that are tightly focused on a single niche and give their readers unique information and excellent value.
Building Relationship, Retaining Traffic Is More Important Than Generating
Once you have followed these basic steps to getting your blog up and running successfully, you can encourage readers and promote loyalty by subscribing to a feed
Money From Blog Coaching Club – MFB Blogging Phenomenon 2008
service such as Feedburner. Submitting individual posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us can also bring your blog a decent amount of additional traffic.
How to Build Traffic?
Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?
I’ve already written a lengthy section on this topic, so please refer to my Blog Marketing Guide. That article covers the general philosophy of traffic-building, which caters on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.
Below are some of the traffic generation strategies used by top blog earner.
• Social Bookmarking
• Forum Marketing
• Social Networking
• SEO and Blog Search Engine
• Youtube Marketing
• Classified Marketing
• Web 2.0 Marketing
• Commenting Marketing
• Banner Traffic
• CraigsList Traffic
• eBay Traffic
• Facebook Traffic
• Facebook Traffic
• Join Venture Traffic
• Podcast Traffic
• Social Shopping Marketing
• Directory Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
All of the above strategies will be shared in our MFB Traffic Generation Guide and MFB Marketing Action Plans Worksheet. Some of it will only be shared in our Advance Marketing Guide.
Examples:
Article marketing is another very effective way to drive traffic to your blog. It is a free strategy and produces naturally increasing traffic to your blog over time. However, it is a time consuming strategy which requires regular submission to article directories of articles closely related to the theme of your site and designed to encourage readers to click on your link beneath the article. It is also important that you do not put the same articles on your blog as you do not want your blog to be penalized under Google’s duplicate content rules.
Finally, take a bit of time and post comments on other related blogs that already have solid monthly traffic figures. Make your comments relevant and interesting and include a link to one of your own posts. You can also interact with others on high traffic forums and use your blog address as your signature link. Over time, these links can generate a decent amount of traffic.
Pay per click programs can also be very effective ways to drive traffic to your blog. However, these programs can be costly so you will need to conduct a cost benefit analysis to determine whether the potential profits to be made from the goods or services you are marketing are worth this expense.
If you follow these steps you will be best placed to generate traffic to your blog from which you will gain a growing base of loyal readers. Effective blog marketing will result in visitors to your blog who are interested in what you have to say and therefore who will be more open to the related products and services you are offering. A loyal readership provides you with a source of potential customers for your products, services and affiliate offers. When it comes right down to it, if you have monetized your blog well and you market it effectively, it can make you a lot of money. Register Google Adwords PPC.
How to Monetize Your Blog Effectively?
In my coaching program, I will be sharing with you the top 10 ways used by most successful bloggers to earn an income from $500 to $8000/mth from blogging alone. Monetizing your blog is simple, you just need to sign up the right programs and integrate into your blog or website to start generating an attractive income from it. The difficult parts are actually generating targeted traffic and also how to integrate the available monetizing platform strategically. All these will be taught with hand-on video in my MFB Online Coaching Program.
Firstly, before I go deeper into how to monetize your blog. I felt that it is necceary to share with you shortly why most people failed to earn money from their blog or website. It is important to understand the common mistakes and error made by most blogging failure so that you will not repeat their mistake again.
Getting Your Mindset Right! Do You Really Want to Monetize Your Blog?
Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money using their innocent blogs. If you think that by commercializing your blog is unethical, uncool, lame or anything along those lines, then don’t do it, don’t commercialize it.
If you have the above mixed feelings, then you should first sort out those feelings first before thinking about monetizing your blog. It is seriously important to sort them out and tidy your mindset before starting implementing any steps to monetize your blog. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from blog is challenging enough, you don’t want to self sabotage yourself and only release it when you give up on this business again.
You need to have a mindset to feel genuinely good to earn an income from your blog. You should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed.
If your blog provides genuine value, you definitely deserve to earn income from it, and much more than your expectation. However if you find yourself full of doubts over
whether this is the right path for you, you might find this want to ask yourself this: How Selfish Are You. It is about balancing your needs with the needs of others.
Don’t ever be shy about you want to generate an income from your blog. If you are going to put up an ad, then really put up ads. Do not just sticks a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere in your blog.
If you are going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t place it in a place where no one will see it. Put the word DONATES and pray for the best. If you are going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, give your visitor compelling reasons to buy. Of course, it must come with good intention, create value must be your ultimate first mindset. Don’t destroy your credibility by selling for the seek of selling. If you are going to do this, then fully commit to it. Perseverance leads to success. Just like now I am typing this eguide, it is not easy but I preserved and write with the mindset to value add as much as possible. Do you know, you can get tons of thank you from buyer for selling them, for asking them to take out their credit card to pay you? Just does it with a mindset to value add as much as possible? Selling will make you rich.
Complain from readers? You need to expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will make noise, depending on how you do it, but it is really no big deal. As long as the ratio is reasonable, like out of 1000 comments, only 1 give negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most that complaints will leave your blog and never return after a few weeks. Adsense and Text Link is still my most profitable income generating tools, although they are not my only source. You will learn more lately in this section.
Can You Make a Decent Income Online?
Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for any individual working part-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from 5 blogs, and these sites are only a few months old. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate such an attractive income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. Keep in mind, I am still working as a financial consultant servicing my 100 clients and doing coaching part-time.
Can Most People Do It?
I am not going to share about mindset here, but if you really want to achieve a success in this blogging business, I like to request you to feel “equip” yourself with 2 things. Believe this system and preserve till you success. If you can hold yourself accountable and push through all mental obstacles, you will be able to do it. So if most people can do it, than this business is for everyone. But if you are not prepared, than even I give you the most successful business, you will also fail it, not to say a proven e-guide.
Thriving On Change
Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains.
It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst.
Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.
The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out.
Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.
I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself.
What is Your Overall Income Generation Strategy?
I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.
Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. Again in our coaching program, we have already build a customize monetization plan with checklist for you to follow, yes to follow and not for you to create one again.
Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.
Refer to our monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.
When devising your income strategy, feel free to copy. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize my site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.
Will Putting Ads on My Blog Site Hurts My Traffic?
Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:
“Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.”
Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.
I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.
Multiple Streams of Income
You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On my site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all?
Blogging Software and Hardware
I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — It is free!
I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger or Wordpress.com if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I highly recommend HostGator for a hosting account with domain registration. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and I myself transferred all my domain and hosting from Yahoo to HostGator a year ago.
Cheap Domain Registration at GoDaddy , Yahoo Small Business, 1&1 Netowrk
Conclusion
Marketing is the most important part in all internet business including blogging business. Therefore we have spent lots of effort in our MFB Traffic Generation Guide and MFB Marketing Action Plan Worksheet. These guides not only will give you details overview of each strategies but also the secret, untold actions and tactics used by successful internet marketers. Many of us know about all those strategies but why we are not successful in it. Simply because there are still something not told to you that you do not know. In our Action plan worksheet, we compress only details actions, NOT THEORY, into 1 page for each strategies, yes 1 page of FULL INSTRUCTION to follow and guaranteed results. I can boldly tell you each pages I can sell them for USD49 and total cost is USD 490 worth of direct hardcore instructions from 10 strategies. This is something you really won’t want to miss out again.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Chapter 6: Create an income generating blog as a profitable new business
Do you want to quit your job to follow your dream and earning a full time income from an online business?
Well, all this is definitely possible with a blog. Just like any business, it is a mater of finding a market and implementing the right strategies. Some people are already earning a six figure income from blogging.
The key is to monetize your blog effectively and there really is no better time to do this than now. With new options and opportunities arising all the time, so let jump right into the most effective techniques you can use to make real profits with your blog.
Attract Lucrative Online Advertising by Signing Up for Free Ad Program
Many companies have seen how blogs are targeted to specific markets can build up huge loyal readership and they had started trying to reach this audience through blog advertising
This had led to the creation of ads program designed specifically to put bloggers and advertisers together allowing advertisers to reach the blog audience while giving blogger a way to earn an income.
It is usually very quick and easy to sign up for these programs and once you do, you can effectively create a product blog without actually selling anything yourself.
It is the best to specialize in a certain product category, such as digital cameras, ballet shoes or office supplies but you can also target specific products on a monthly basis.
Google Adsense: The most well known advertising program is Google Adsense. Google program makes contextual text ads or image ads appear on your website next to relevant content. Every time someone clicks on of the ads on your page, you are paid a percentage of the advertiser fee to Google. So for example if the advertiser is paying 20 cent per click, you might receive 50% of that. It is not a huge amount but multiplied by hundreds or thousands of clicks, your Adsense revenues can really add up.
Try targeting popular keywords that cost advertisers more per click. These are commonly found in the most competitive industries such as electronic and travel.
It is certainly possible to create blog containing articles that target the keywords. But you will need to attract lots of traffic to make it pays and you will face a lot more competition for this traffic.
If you generate lots of traffic especially traffic targeted to a particular niche market then you are able to generate a very respectable income with Adsense. Some bloggers earn several thousands dollars a month from Adsense but you must need very high levels of traffic to get to that level. A handful of bloggers even earn as much as six figures annually through their various blogs monetized with Adsense and other ad program. Initially, you may at least be able to earn enough to cover any blogging expenses you had incurred and built from there as you add more content.
BlogAds: Another potential source of advertising dollars in BlogAds. BlogAds is an advertising network through which members earn anywhere from $10 to $5000 a month from individual ads. Many high traffic blogs such as the political blog are their members. Like all online advertising, the more traffic you pull in, the more advertisers are willing to pay to place their ads on your site.
Unlike Google Adsense, BlogAds does not use contextual advertising and it doesn’t pay by click. Instead a company pays to appear on your blog for a set period of time. Again, you need god traffic to be able to persuade advertisers to pay money to be featured on your site.
Chitika eminimalls: A relatively new option is chitika eminimalls. These service works on the same principle as Google Adsense, the ads that appear on your blog are related to the content of your blog. However, Chitika are all selling products unlike Adsense advertisers whose ads also promote services and information websites.
Yahoo and MSN advertising program: Another couple of services definitely worth looking at come from Google two big rival, yahoo and msn.
Get Paid To Sell Other People Products
Another way you can use your blog to make money from someone else products is by signing up for an affiliate program.
An affiliate program is an internet marketing strategy that you can use to expand your reach on the web and generate more sales.
When you become an affiliate, the affiliate program operator provides you with unique ID numbers that allow them to track the sales that come from your blog. They will often also provide you with all the advertising tools you need to promote their products on your blog.
By creating an affiliate program, internet businesses are effectively recruiting you as part of their online sales force, so it can be a very profitable strategy for them, even after the referral fees they have to pay to their affiliates. They don’t pay you a penny until a visitor you refer to them makes a purchase, so it is risk free and a win-win situation for both parties.
Most of these programs especially digital information products pay very well. To make the most out of these strategies, it is best to focus on one or two high paying affiliate programs that sell products that will appeal to your blog’s target audience.
Here are some types on how to profit from using affiliate programs on your blog
• Only sell products that will appeal to your target audience
• Only sell quality products
• Target high paying programs that convert well
• Make sure all of your sales are tracked
• Position your affiliate links carefully
There are a number of affiliate programs that have become very popular with bloggers. In my monetization guide I will share more about it. Example of places you can register to sell affiliate products is Dealdotcom, Clickbank and CJ.
Create your own information product and sell it through your blog.
A step above from promoting or selling other people products on your blog is to create and sell your own.
The good news is this is not as difficult as it might sound. That is because information products are hot items on the internet. By saying information products, we mean electronic books or eBook and other packaged information that can be downloaded from the internet
The great thing about product like eBook is that your customers receive their purchase almost immediately and you don’t have to worry about printing cost, production and mailing cost eating into your profits.
So if you are an expert in digital photography for example and are already blogging on this subject, you could put together a product like “beginner guide to taking great digitial photo”. The important thing is to provide credible, useful information that you know your target audience needs and wants.
Places you can sell your own product Clickbank and Paydotcom. Or register a Paypal account to manage your own sales
Charge People for your “Premium” Blog Content
An alternative or addition to writing an eBook is to sell your expertise in a particular area through a subscription only blog. Most blog providers like Wordpress allow you to password protect your blog so you can write about your subject area and invite your readers to subscribe to a members only area for the complete version for a Premium or for FREE!
Types of Monetization Methods
1. Contextual Advertising
2. Display Advertising
3. Targeted Advertising
4. Text Link Advertising
5. Affiliate Links
6. Selling Your Content (eBooks, Videos, DVDs)
7. Consulting
8. Donations
9. Selling Products
10. Selling Your Blog
Some of the above monetization platforms are Text Link Ads, Chitika, SponsoredReviews and Widgetbucks. Register them now for FREE now!
Conclusion
As you can see, it is certainly possible to earn an income from blogging, even if you don’t have an online or offline business to promote. The key is to combine a few programs and techniques, while at the same time keeping your site focused and relevant to your target audience. In our MFB Monetization Guide 2008 we will be sharing more ways that you can monetize your blog. Not only we will give you more tactics and strategies, we also selected the top 10-15 monetization platforms and reviewed all of them. Best of all, we have short listed the 5 most lucrative platforms and will coach you how to make full use of it to get maximum income from each of them. We have also design a MFB Monthly Income Monitor Chart so that you can set appropriate income goals and see how it process towards it.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
Well, all this is definitely possible with a blog. Just like any business, it is a mater of finding a market and implementing the right strategies. Some people are already earning a six figure income from blogging.
The key is to monetize your blog effectively and there really is no better time to do this than now. With new options and opportunities arising all the time, so let jump right into the most effective techniques you can use to make real profits with your blog.
Attract Lucrative Online Advertising by Signing Up for Free Ad Program
Many companies have seen how blogs are targeted to specific markets can build up huge loyal readership and they had started trying to reach this audience through blog advertising
This had led to the creation of ads program designed specifically to put bloggers and advertisers together allowing advertisers to reach the blog audience while giving blogger a way to earn an income.
It is usually very quick and easy to sign up for these programs and once you do, you can effectively create a product blog without actually selling anything yourself.
It is the best to specialize in a certain product category, such as digital cameras, ballet shoes or office supplies but you can also target specific products on a monthly basis.
Google Adsense: The most well known advertising program is Google Adsense. Google program makes contextual text ads or image ads appear on your website next to relevant content. Every time someone clicks on of the ads on your page, you are paid a percentage of the advertiser fee to Google. So for example if the advertiser is paying 20 cent per click, you might receive 50% of that. It is not a huge amount but multiplied by hundreds or thousands of clicks, your Adsense revenues can really add up.
Try targeting popular keywords that cost advertisers more per click. These are commonly found in the most competitive industries such as electronic and travel.
It is certainly possible to create blog containing articles that target the keywords. But you will need to attract lots of traffic to make it pays and you will face a lot more competition for this traffic.
If you generate lots of traffic especially traffic targeted to a particular niche market then you are able to generate a very respectable income with Adsense. Some bloggers earn several thousands dollars a month from Adsense but you must need very high levels of traffic to get to that level. A handful of bloggers even earn as much as six figures annually through their various blogs monetized with Adsense and other ad program. Initially, you may at least be able to earn enough to cover any blogging expenses you had incurred and built from there as you add more content.
BlogAds: Another potential source of advertising dollars in BlogAds. BlogAds is an advertising network through which members earn anywhere from $10 to $5000 a month from individual ads. Many high traffic blogs such as the political blog are their members. Like all online advertising, the more traffic you pull in, the more advertisers are willing to pay to place their ads on your site.
Unlike Google Adsense, BlogAds does not use contextual advertising and it doesn’t pay by click. Instead a company pays to appear on your blog for a set period of time. Again, you need god traffic to be able to persuade advertisers to pay money to be featured on your site.
Chitika eminimalls: A relatively new option is chitika eminimalls. These service works on the same principle as Google Adsense, the ads that appear on your blog are related to the content of your blog. However, Chitika are all selling products unlike Adsense advertisers whose ads also promote services and information websites.
Yahoo and MSN advertising program: Another couple of services definitely worth looking at come from Google two big rival, yahoo and msn.
Get Paid To Sell Other People Products
Another way you can use your blog to make money from someone else products is by signing up for an affiliate program.
An affiliate program is an internet marketing strategy that you can use to expand your reach on the web and generate more sales.
When you become an affiliate, the affiliate program operator provides you with unique ID numbers that allow them to track the sales that come from your blog. They will often also provide you with all the advertising tools you need to promote their products on your blog.
By creating an affiliate program, internet businesses are effectively recruiting you as part of their online sales force, so it can be a very profitable strategy for them, even after the referral fees they have to pay to their affiliates. They don’t pay you a penny until a visitor you refer to them makes a purchase, so it is risk free and a win-win situation for both parties.
Most of these programs especially digital information products pay very well. To make the most out of these strategies, it is best to focus on one or two high paying affiliate programs that sell products that will appeal to your blog’s target audience.
Here are some types on how to profit from using affiliate programs on your blog
• Only sell products that will appeal to your target audience
• Only sell quality products
• Target high paying programs that convert well
• Make sure all of your sales are tracked
• Position your affiliate links carefully
There are a number of affiliate programs that have become very popular with bloggers. In my monetization guide I will share more about it. Example of places you can register to sell affiliate products is Dealdotcom, Clickbank and CJ.
Create your own information product and sell it through your blog.
A step above from promoting or selling other people products on your blog is to create and sell your own.
The good news is this is not as difficult as it might sound. That is because information products are hot items on the internet. By saying information products, we mean electronic books or eBook and other packaged information that can be downloaded from the internet
The great thing about product like eBook is that your customers receive their purchase almost immediately and you don’t have to worry about printing cost, production and mailing cost eating into your profits.
So if you are an expert in digital photography for example and are already blogging on this subject, you could put together a product like “beginner guide to taking great digitial photo”. The important thing is to provide credible, useful information that you know your target audience needs and wants.
Places you can sell your own product Clickbank and Paydotcom. Or register a Paypal account to manage your own sales
Charge People for your “Premium” Blog Content
An alternative or addition to writing an eBook is to sell your expertise in a particular area through a subscription only blog. Most blog providers like Wordpress allow you to password protect your blog so you can write about your subject area and invite your readers to subscribe to a members only area for the complete version for a Premium or for FREE!
Types of Monetization Methods
1. Contextual Advertising
2. Display Advertising
3. Targeted Advertising
4. Text Link Advertising
5. Affiliate Links
6. Selling Your Content (eBooks, Videos, DVDs)
7. Consulting
8. Donations
9. Selling Products
10. Selling Your Blog
Some of the above monetization platforms are Text Link Ads, Chitika, SponsoredReviews and Widgetbucks. Register them now for FREE now!
Conclusion
As you can see, it is certainly possible to earn an income from blogging, even if you don’t have an online or offline business to promote. The key is to combine a few programs and techniques, while at the same time keeping your site focused and relevant to your target audience. In our MFB Monetization Guide 2008 we will be sharing more ways that you can monetize your blog. Not only we will give you more tactics and strategies, we also selected the top 10-15 monetization platforms and reviewed all of them. Best of all, we have short listed the 5 most lucrative platforms and will coach you how to make full use of it to get maximum income from each of them. We have also design a MFB Monthly Income Monitor Chart so that you can set appropriate income goals and see how it process towards it.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Chapter 5: 7 Key Strategies to Drive Every Successful Blogs
Post Often – Over an Extended Period of Time
No doubt, the most important element of every successful blog is the frequency of posting. Thus, it is recommended for you to have a daily posting if possible. With this habit over a long period of time, it will be the best way to build a large, loyal audience. This large readership provides the base for you to make good money from your blog. Thus, posting often is crucial to making your blog profitable.
Make Your Content Relevant to Your Target Audience
There is no point posting frequently if your contents is not relevant to your target audience. By providing valuable information and links to other websites and resources that they can explore for more information, you will keep your readers coming back for more.
To generate sustained level of good traffic, it is not good enough for your content to be just relevant to your audiences. It also needs to be insightful, informative and even controversial at times. You don’t have to be greatest writer, if your voice is your own, your tune is genuine and your content is worth reading then you will be able to attract audiences.
Encourage Dialogue and Debate through Your Blog
As we mentioned, the most controversial blogs often attract the most traffic. Political blogs are prime examples of this trend. Obviously, if you are running a business blog, you will need to be careful on what you are writing but there is no doubt that there is a great way to generate large spikes in traffic is to write something new, fresh and if not controversial then at least noteworthy.
Not only does this generate interest in the blogosphere, which results in other blogs linking to you. It also encourages debate. People will leave a comment and then invariably return to read the responses to it and maybe leave other contributions. However, blog comments can be managed and there is no doubt that this dialogue is one of the stands.
Promote Your Blog Everywhere, All the Time Both Online and Offline
In order to make your blog a great tool to generate traffic for your online business, you will need to start by driving lots of traffic into your blog. The most successful blog will
use every tool, directory and promotional technique they can lay their hands on. Blogs are so popular online now; there are a lot of these tools available for you to take advantage of.
We will go into detail about the best traffic generating tools later in MBF Traffic Generation Guide because they are such a vital part of creating a profitable blog.
Make Friends, Link and Connect
Blogging is not solitary activity community dialogue and linking are words you will hear constantly in blog related discussion. The best blogs will make full use of the linking features available to link to other relevant websites or blogs.
By marking friends and connecting with other blogs that your target audience may hang out on, you can get those blogs to link to your blog. Therefore, this provides a bridge from their blog to your blog. This will generate more traffic for you.
Every time you post a comment on a blog you like or drop the blog owner an email you are effectively give out your business card. Cimokete with an instant link to your blog. It is really no different from networking at a trade show, party and seminar to build mutually beneficial partnerships.
Be Active in the Blogosphere
Just as blogging is a social activity, it is also an active one. The blogger who really put themselves out there, who link with other blogs, who post comments on message boards, forum and blogs, who become recognized as an authority in a particular subject an the ones whose blogs pull in the really big traffic figures. Ultimately, they are the one who have the ability to make big money.
Like we mentioned, think of promoting your blog as working the room at your local chamber of commerce networking lunch. The internet is a large global room but if once you find out where your target audience is and the other businesses that cater to that audience spend their time, then that where you should spend your time networking and making sure they know who you are.
Make Your Blog a Great Place to Hang Out
Of course, attracting tons of traffic is pointless if you don’t ensure that your blog is a fulfilling and worthwhile experience for your visitors. We had already mentioned the importance of the content itself but your blog should also be well designed, easy to navigate and having home in order to feature the categorized archives and image folders we talked about earlier in this chapter.
The most successful method will be combining the best element of chat room, online forums and information and news websites. With all these held together by a template, it will be pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate.
Many blog readers treat their favourite blogs like their favourite coffee shops, comfortable places where they can hang out to read, chat and socialize.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
No doubt, the most important element of every successful blog is the frequency of posting. Thus, it is recommended for you to have a daily posting if possible. With this habit over a long period of time, it will be the best way to build a large, loyal audience. This large readership provides the base for you to make good money from your blog. Thus, posting often is crucial to making your blog profitable.
Make Your Content Relevant to Your Target Audience
There is no point posting frequently if your contents is not relevant to your target audience. By providing valuable information and links to other websites and resources that they can explore for more information, you will keep your readers coming back for more.
To generate sustained level of good traffic, it is not good enough for your content to be just relevant to your audiences. It also needs to be insightful, informative and even controversial at times. You don’t have to be greatest writer, if your voice is your own, your tune is genuine and your content is worth reading then you will be able to attract audiences.
Encourage Dialogue and Debate through Your Blog
As we mentioned, the most controversial blogs often attract the most traffic. Political blogs are prime examples of this trend. Obviously, if you are running a business blog, you will need to be careful on what you are writing but there is no doubt that there is a great way to generate large spikes in traffic is to write something new, fresh and if not controversial then at least noteworthy.
Not only does this generate interest in the blogosphere, which results in other blogs linking to you. It also encourages debate. People will leave a comment and then invariably return to read the responses to it and maybe leave other contributions. However, blog comments can be managed and there is no doubt that this dialogue is one of the stands.
Promote Your Blog Everywhere, All the Time Both Online and Offline
In order to make your blog a great tool to generate traffic for your online business, you will need to start by driving lots of traffic into your blog. The most successful blog will
use every tool, directory and promotional technique they can lay their hands on. Blogs are so popular online now; there are a lot of these tools available for you to take advantage of.
We will go into detail about the best traffic generating tools later in MBF Traffic Generation Guide because they are such a vital part of creating a profitable blog.
Make Friends, Link and Connect
Blogging is not solitary activity community dialogue and linking are words you will hear constantly in blog related discussion. The best blogs will make full use of the linking features available to link to other relevant websites or blogs.
By marking friends and connecting with other blogs that your target audience may hang out on, you can get those blogs to link to your blog. Therefore, this provides a bridge from their blog to your blog. This will generate more traffic for you.
Every time you post a comment on a blog you like or drop the blog owner an email you are effectively give out your business card. Cimokete with an instant link to your blog. It is really no different from networking at a trade show, party and seminar to build mutually beneficial partnerships.
Be Active in the Blogosphere
Just as blogging is a social activity, it is also an active one. The blogger who really put themselves out there, who link with other blogs, who post comments on message boards, forum and blogs, who become recognized as an authority in a particular subject an the ones whose blogs pull in the really big traffic figures. Ultimately, they are the one who have the ability to make big money.
Like we mentioned, think of promoting your blog as working the room at your local chamber of commerce networking lunch. The internet is a large global room but if once you find out where your target audience is and the other businesses that cater to that audience spend their time, then that where you should spend your time networking and making sure they know who you are.
Make Your Blog a Great Place to Hang Out
Of course, attracting tons of traffic is pointless if you don’t ensure that your blog is a fulfilling and worthwhile experience for your visitors. We had already mentioned the importance of the content itself but your blog should also be well designed, easy to navigate and having home in order to feature the categorized archives and image folders we talked about earlier in this chapter.
The most successful method will be combining the best element of chat room, online forums and information and news websites. With all these held together by a template, it will be pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate.
Many blog readers treat their favourite blogs like their favourite coffee shops, comfortable places where they can hang out to read, chat and socialize.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
Chapter 4: Blogging Advantage to Offline Business
You have seen how a blog can benefit your online business in many ways. But what if you run a business that hasn’t yet ventured onto the Internet? Maybe you own a small bookshop or maybe you are an insurance agent, a real estate agent, a writer or car dealer.
The fact is, if you ignore the Internet, you ignore the fact that:
10 Billion Adults are using Search Engines on a Typical Day
Chances are some of those 10 billion people are using the web to search for your products and services in your country or city. And because so many people now turn to the internet to research products and services before they make their purchase, almost any business can benefit from some sort of presence online, whether you actually sell online or not.
However, many offline business owners find creating a website for their business daunting. So they don’t do anything about it or they pay thousands of dollars to have someone else do it. We always recommend that you learn how to do it yourself- it is easier than you think.
A very cheap and very easy shortcut to creating an online presence for your offline business is to simply start a blog.
Starting your own blog is a great way to gain some experience on the Internet and get an idea of how an online presence can benefit your business. Specifically, a blog can
• Allow you to tap a whole new market for your products or services
• Help you communicate with your customers
• Drive buyers to your offline store
• Establish you as an expert in your industry
• Help you develop new products
Attract People Searching Online for Your Products or Services
A blog is a great tool for attracting online traffic and then converting it into foot traffic for your offline business. It doesn’t matter if you don’t sell anything on the internet, as most people are actually searching for information - very possibly information related to your subject area, products or services
Research shows that 80% of the internet users had researched a product or service online, only 67% actually made a purchase online. So, although spending is predicted to grow to a massive $329 billion by 2010, not everyone who searches on the net necessarily want to buy on the internet, which mean your offline business can definitely benefit from an online presence.
In addition, many people use search engines like Google instead of referencing an offline resource like the Yellow page or even a local directory. By creating a blog, you can pit your business in front of people looking for the kinds of products and services your business offers. And the beauty of a blog is that you can do this without spending a dime on advertising fees, website development.
Keep in Touch With Your Customers
If you regularly hold sales events and other promotions at your offline business, a blog is a great way to keep your customers up to date. You can also use it to tell your customers about any seminars you are giving or provide details of other speaking engagements your customers might be interested in. Many people who offer public relations consulting and other advice-base services make good use of blog for this.
And if you offer a service that involves travelling to different cities or countries, you can let your readers know when you are going to be in town. One of the most exciting benefits of having a blog is that you can keep in touch with your customers from just about anywhere, anytime even if you are not connected to the internet. You can blog by remote internet connection, by email or even by telephone.
This means that you can blog while you are on the road or even on vacation.
Position Yourself as an Expert
One of the best reasons to use a blog is to boost your credibility in the eyes of your current and potential customers. The blogging format is ideal for posting short, punchy items of interest to your target market, as well as longer, insightful articles and comments on your industry.
There really is no better way of showing your target market that you know your stuff and many people have used blogs to establish themselves as experts in their industry. If you have a slightly unusual, less well known business, a blog can be an excellent way to demystify it for your customer. By talking authoritatively about issues in your industry and providing valuable information ca help you built up an excellent reputation and a large readership.
Great Alternative Streams of Income
Not only is a blog an excellent way to promote your offline business to a new online audience, but many business owners who had not previously considered adding an online presence to their business have found that their blog opens up a whole new range of new and exciting possibilities.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
The fact is, if you ignore the Internet, you ignore the fact that:
10 Billion Adults are using Search Engines on a Typical Day
Chances are some of those 10 billion people are using the web to search for your products and services in your country or city. And because so many people now turn to the internet to research products and services before they make their purchase, almost any business can benefit from some sort of presence online, whether you actually sell online or not.
However, many offline business owners find creating a website for their business daunting. So they don’t do anything about it or they pay thousands of dollars to have someone else do it. We always recommend that you learn how to do it yourself- it is easier than you think.
A very cheap and very easy shortcut to creating an online presence for your offline business is to simply start a blog.
Starting your own blog is a great way to gain some experience on the Internet and get an idea of how an online presence can benefit your business. Specifically, a blog can
• Allow you to tap a whole new market for your products or services
• Help you communicate with your customers
• Drive buyers to your offline store
• Establish you as an expert in your industry
• Help you develop new products
Attract People Searching Online for Your Products or Services
A blog is a great tool for attracting online traffic and then converting it into foot traffic for your offline business. It doesn’t matter if you don’t sell anything on the internet, as most people are actually searching for information - very possibly information related to your subject area, products or services
Research shows that 80% of the internet users had researched a product or service online, only 67% actually made a purchase online. So, although spending is predicted to grow to a massive $329 billion by 2010, not everyone who searches on the net necessarily want to buy on the internet, which mean your offline business can definitely benefit from an online presence.
In addition, many people use search engines like Google instead of referencing an offline resource like the Yellow page or even a local directory. By creating a blog, you can pit your business in front of people looking for the kinds of products and services your business offers. And the beauty of a blog is that you can do this without spending a dime on advertising fees, website development.
Keep in Touch With Your Customers
If you regularly hold sales events and other promotions at your offline business, a blog is a great way to keep your customers up to date. You can also use it to tell your customers about any seminars you are giving or provide details of other speaking engagements your customers might be interested in. Many people who offer public relations consulting and other advice-base services make good use of blog for this.
And if you offer a service that involves travelling to different cities or countries, you can let your readers know when you are going to be in town. One of the most exciting benefits of having a blog is that you can keep in touch with your customers from just about anywhere, anytime even if you are not connected to the internet. You can blog by remote internet connection, by email or even by telephone.
This means that you can blog while you are on the road or even on vacation.
Position Yourself as an Expert
One of the best reasons to use a blog is to boost your credibility in the eyes of your current and potential customers. The blogging format is ideal for posting short, punchy items of interest to your target market, as well as longer, insightful articles and comments on your industry.
There really is no better way of showing your target market that you know your stuff and many people have used blogs to establish themselves as experts in their industry. If you have a slightly unusual, less well known business, a blog can be an excellent way to demystify it for your customer. By talking authoritatively about issues in your industry and providing valuable information ca help you built up an excellent reputation and a large readership.
Great Alternative Streams of Income
Not only is a blog an excellent way to promote your offline business to a new online audience, but many business owners who had not previously considered adding an online presence to their business have found that their blog opens up a whole new range of new and exciting possibilities.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
Chapter 3: Blogging Advantage to Online Business
Create a Blog to Generate Traffic and Sales for Your Online Business
Like any new technology, blogging took some time to become firmly established. However, now blogging has matured to the point where we can fully understand its marketing potential and develop proven system so you can use blog effectively to promote your business on the internet.
There are many blogging strategies techniques and tools that have now been tested and proven to work. These ranges from traffic strategies to writing techniques and from promotional tools to tips on how best to generate profit with your blog.
What this means to you is that you don’t have to waste time trying out lots of different tools and strategies to find the one that work. We have already analysed hundreds of successful blogs for you, tested our own ideas and discovered exactly what techniques and approaches generate the most interest traffic and sales for you business. All you have to do is simply follow these proven formulas for success.
Of course how you use these tools and strategies will depend very much on the blog model you choose to follow. There are 3 main business blog models:
• A blog that promotes your online business
• A blog that promotes your offline business
• A stand alone blog that generates its own revenue
The Benefits of a Blog
You can promote a blog through search engines and directories specifically designed for blogs, where there is less competition than in a regular search engine.
• A blog is more of a two way to discuss between you and your readers which gives your audience a voice and facilitates a community environment
• A blog is much more informal way that gives your business a friendly face that readers are more likely to trust and relate to
• Blog content is more frequently updated which prompts visitors to return frequently
• Create value added content to attract more visitor to you website
A blog contains so much contents, thus, it can be a great tool to use if you sell a product online. Through the posts on your blog, you can give your visitors useful information relevant to the needs of your target audience.
For instance, if you are selling an eBook on motorcycle maintenance, you can post news items on motorbike related topics and tips on keeping your bike running smoothly. Remember, this type of relevant content fives you a leg up in the search engine rankings and attract more visitors to your blog and web site.
Alternatively, if you are running a website selling scuba gear, you can write a blog entry on tips for maintaining your equipment. You can also blog about diving news and destinations and create a way for your visitors to connect with other divers.
Build a Buzz around New Products
You can also use your blog to tell your potential customers about any new products or services you had offered. In fact, this strategy is now used by some authors and publishers of eBooks and other information products who release selected parts of their working in progress to build some buzz before they actually launch the product.
But this strategy isn’t just for information products. You can virtually take any new product and release snippets of information about some of its new features and benefits to build up a sense of anticipation within your market.
A blog which can easily be updated daily which is ideal for this process. By timing it well, you could create a virtual line up of people wanting to buy your product on the launch day!
You can even involve your readers and customers in the development of new products by asking for their comments and suggestions.
As long as you are not duplicating content, running a couple of blogs and linking between them, it can be an excellent traffic strategy.
There is a blog setup specially to sell one particular product by providing interesting and relevant content that will appeal to the eBook’s target audience. By involving the readers in the book development, the author is generating a ton of interest in his book before he releases it.
In fact, this request for help with designing the cover had generated nearly 150 responses, with many readers leaving long, detailed feedbacks.
Collect Your Blog Visitors’ Email Address and grow your opt-in Email List
One of the best ways to turn your blog visitors into potential customers is to collect their email address so that you can follow up with them and market to them by email.
If you already use an opt-in form on you main sale site to grow your opt-in email list, then it will be easy to simply add another opt-in form to your blog. In this way, your blog’s visitors can sign up to receive your newsletter report or whatever you are offering and you will have a way to keep in touch with them after they left your blog.
Most importantly, you will have a way to drive those subscribers to your sales website and ultimately convert your blog visitors into paying customers.
If you don’t have an opt-in form on your main sales website, now is the time to create one. By offering your website visitors something free of charge of value for free, you will be able to collect their names and email addresses. Once you have this crucial information, you can get in touch with them again and again to offer them free information, maintaining your relationship with them and promoting your products and services to them.
Then you can add a similar opt-in offer to your blog, and use it to add your blog visitors to the mailing list for your sales site.
You can use opt-in to:
• Let your subscribers know about your latest blog posts
• Create previews of up and coming hot topics in your blog
• Send a monthly free newsletter to your subscribers
• Announce new products and services you offering from your sales website
• Promote any special offers or discounts on your products
Additionally, you can drive both your website traffic and blog visitors to you sales site where you can convert them into paying customers.
The best part is that you can handle all your opt-in automatically using software like 1shoppingcart. With auto-responders, your email marketing campaign will be 90% hand free.
Of course, before you are able to email your visitors, you have to collect their email address first. In order to do this, you will need to place an opt-in box or subscription box prominently on your blog. To get this auto-responders program, we highly recommend you to use one shoppingcart; this is a very reliable web base auto-responder program which have every feature that you need.
Email marketing is one of the most successful online marketing strategies.
Offer Paid for Content
If you are selling information such as stock tips that you have to regularly email to your customers, you can use blogging software to create a password protected content hub and there is a chargeable fee for you to access to it as an alternative or addition to the email service.
If you are selling information product like an eBook, you can offer one year free access to a blog containing valuable extra information as a form of bonus when selling your product.
They key here is to offer some of your information for free as a taster that will invite readers to subscribe for the full text and access to the complete archives. Many online news organizations and research websites do this, as do online businesses that offer members only areas of their site.
Create a Community around Your Blog
If you sell products such as camera, a blog is great for posting content like product reviews, photography tips and news that is all aimed at a very specific target audience.
A community encourages people to return again and again and you can even use this community to help you to generate ideas for new products. For example, if you sell a software application that you had developed. You can invite readers of your blog to contribute suggestions as to show how the software can be improved for the next version.
If you sell a product that is updated regularly, a blog is perfect for generating invaluable customer feedback as to how you can improve your products.
Improve your Customer Service
You can use a blog to provide answers to the questions your customers have about your products, services and other aspects of your business. When you allow your customers to post questions making your blog a kind of interactive FAQs, or you can simply post answers to common questions that your receive through customer’s email.
When you are attentive to your customers’ needs and are willing to go that extra mile to provide them with excellent service. These will make existing customers more likely to buy from you again and will encourage potential new customers to do business with you. You don’t even have to call it a blog.
Humanize your Business
One of the challenges when you are running an online business is that you have very little face to face contact with your customers. Hence, it can be lacking of a human element. A blog with an informal style is a great way to humanize your business and inject some of your own personality into it. Ultimately, you are able to make potential customers feel more comfortable buying from you.
Of course you can do this with your regular website by adding a photograph of yourself and a personal message. However, that fixed message is very much a one-way communication from you to your customers.
A blog allows you to initiate and maintain a rapport building dialogue with your audiences. It allows you to stamp some of your own personality onto your business and talk about topics and issues that are relevant to you and your target market.
Boost Our Credibility and Establish your Expertise
By offering informative and relevant information to your target audience, you will boost your credibility in the eyes of your readers. This will allows them see that there is a real person behind the web site on their computer screen
By talking knowledgeably about your subject area, you will also be able to build your reputation as an expert in your field, something that you can only help you to attract more customers and generate more sales.
Once you gain your readership, you can even release an eBook made up entirely of a collection of your post and sell in on your blog for some cash.
There is even a service call Blogbinders that allow you to turn your blog into a printed book. Cafepress is another site that allows you to create and sell your own books.
The beauty of using blog is to promote your online business is when you add more and more posts; you are effectively creating a dynamic and constantly changing content section for your web site. Additionally, by including important keywords in the content, the ones used by your target audience to search for information on your subject area, your blog will continually act as a magnet to draw traffic into your site through the search engines.
The content of your blog is not just a useful information resource for your visitors; it can also boost your credibility by showing off your expertise in your industry. You can also incorporate subtle marketing strategies such as creating a buzz around for a new product by releasing information on your blog before it launches. You can also announce the release of new products or services with a link to your website of course.
The comments feature of blogs also enables you to create a community around your online business by hosting discussion revolving around the topics you write about. The informal and personal tone of a blog can humanize your business, reassuring your customers that they are dealing with a real person and not just a website or computer.
Most importantly, there are tons of new free resources with the all the features above, you will ultimately increase your traffic and sales.
There are many blogging strategies techniques and tools that have now been tested and proven to work. These ranges from traffic strategies to writing techniques and from promotional tools to tips on how best to generate profit with your blog.
What this means to you is that you don’t have to waste time trying out lots of different tools and strategies to find the one that work. We have already analysed hundreds of successful blogs for you, tested our own ideas and discovered exactly what techniques and approaches generate the most interest traffic and sales for you business. All you have to do is simply follow these proven formulas for success.
Of course how you use these tools and strategies will depend very much on the blog model you choose to follow. There are 3 main business blog models:
• A blog that promotes your online business
• A blog that promotes your offline business
• A stand alone blog that generates its own revenue
The Benefits of a Blog
You can promote a blog through search engines and directories specifically designed for blogs, where there is less competition than in a regular search engine.
• A blog is more of a two way to discuss between you and your readers which gives your audience a voice and facilitates a community environment
• A blog is much more informal way that gives your business a friendly face that readers are more likely to trust and relate to
• Blog content is more frequently updated which prompts visitors to return frequently
• Create value added content to attract more visitor to you website
A blog contains so much contents, thus, it can be a great tool to use if you sell a product online. Through the posts on your blog, you can give your visitors useful information relevant to the needs of your target audience.
For instance, if you are selling an eBook on motorcycle maintenance, you can post news items on motorbike related topics and tips on keeping your bike running smoothly. Remember, this type of relevant content fives you a leg up in the search engine rankings and attract more visitors to your blog and web site.
Alternatively, if you are running a website selling scuba gear, you can write a blog entry on tips for maintaining your equipment. You can also blog about diving news and destinations and create a way for your visitors to connect with other divers.
Build a Buzz around New Products
You can also use your blog to tell your potential customers about any new products or services you had offered. In fact, this strategy is now used by some authors and publishers of eBooks and other information products who release selected parts of their working in progress to build some buzz before they actually launch the product.
But this strategy isn’t just for information products. You can virtually take any new product and release snippets of information about some of its new features and benefits to build up a sense of anticipation within your market.
A blog which can easily be updated daily which is ideal for this process. By timing it well, you could create a virtual line up of people wanting to buy your product on the launch day!
You can even involve your readers and customers in the development of new products by asking for their comments and suggestions.
As long as you are not duplicating content, running a couple of blogs and linking between them, it can be an excellent traffic strategy.
There is a blog setup specially to sell one particular product by providing interesting and relevant content that will appeal to the eBook’s target audience. By involving the readers in the book development, the author is generating a ton of interest in his book before he releases it.
In fact, this request for help with designing the cover had generated nearly 150 responses, with many readers leaving long, detailed feedbacks.
Collect Your Blog Visitors’ Email Address and grow your opt-in Email List
One of the best ways to turn your blog visitors into potential customers is to collect their email address so that you can follow up with them and market to them by email.
If you already use an opt-in form on you main sale site to grow your opt-in email list, then it will be easy to simply add another opt-in form to your blog. In this way, your blog’s visitors can sign up to receive your newsletter report or whatever you are offering and you will have a way to keep in touch with them after they left your blog.
Most importantly, you will have a way to drive those subscribers to your sales website and ultimately convert your blog visitors into paying customers.
If you don’t have an opt-in form on your main sales website, now is the time to create one. By offering your website visitors something free of charge of value for free, you will be able to collect their names and email addresses. Once you have this crucial information, you can get in touch with them again and again to offer them free information, maintaining your relationship with them and promoting your products and services to them.
Then you can add a similar opt-in offer to your blog, and use it to add your blog visitors to the mailing list for your sales site.
You can use opt-in to:
• Let your subscribers know about your latest blog posts
• Create previews of up and coming hot topics in your blog
• Send a monthly free newsletter to your subscribers
• Announce new products and services you offering from your sales website
• Promote any special offers or discounts on your products
Additionally, you can drive both your website traffic and blog visitors to you sales site where you can convert them into paying customers.
The best part is that you can handle all your opt-in automatically using software like 1shoppingcart. With auto-responders, your email marketing campaign will be 90% hand free.
Of course, before you are able to email your visitors, you have to collect their email address first. In order to do this, you will need to place an opt-in box or subscription box prominently on your blog. To get this auto-responders program, we highly recommend you to use one shoppingcart; this is a very reliable web base auto-responder program which have every feature that you need.
Email marketing is one of the most successful online marketing strategies.
Offer Paid for Content
If you are selling information such as stock tips that you have to regularly email to your customers, you can use blogging software to create a password protected content hub and there is a chargeable fee for you to access to it as an alternative or addition to the email service.
If you are selling information product like an eBook, you can offer one year free access to a blog containing valuable extra information as a form of bonus when selling your product.
They key here is to offer some of your information for free as a taster that will invite readers to subscribe for the full text and access to the complete archives. Many online news organizations and research websites do this, as do online businesses that offer members only areas of their site.
Create a Community around Your Blog
If you sell products such as camera, a blog is great for posting content like product reviews, photography tips and news that is all aimed at a very specific target audience.
A community encourages people to return again and again and you can even use this community to help you to generate ideas for new products. For example, if you sell a software application that you had developed. You can invite readers of your blog to contribute suggestions as to show how the software can be improved for the next version.
If you sell a product that is updated regularly, a blog is perfect for generating invaluable customer feedback as to how you can improve your products.
Improve your Customer Service
You can use a blog to provide answers to the questions your customers have about your products, services and other aspects of your business. When you allow your customers to post questions making your blog a kind of interactive FAQs, or you can simply post answers to common questions that your receive through customer’s email.
When you are attentive to your customers’ needs and are willing to go that extra mile to provide them with excellent service. These will make existing customers more likely to buy from you again and will encourage potential new customers to do business with you. You don’t even have to call it a blog.
Humanize your Business
One of the challenges when you are running an online business is that you have very little face to face contact with your customers. Hence, it can be lacking of a human element. A blog with an informal style is a great way to humanize your business and inject some of your own personality into it. Ultimately, you are able to make potential customers feel more comfortable buying from you.
Of course you can do this with your regular website by adding a photograph of yourself and a personal message. However, that fixed message is very much a one-way communication from you to your customers.
A blog allows you to initiate and maintain a rapport building dialogue with your audiences. It allows you to stamp some of your own personality onto your business and talk about topics and issues that are relevant to you and your target market.
Boost Our Credibility and Establish your Expertise
By offering informative and relevant information to your target audience, you will boost your credibility in the eyes of your readers. This will allows them see that there is a real person behind the web site on their computer screen
By talking knowledgeably about your subject area, you will also be able to build your reputation as an expert in your field, something that you can only help you to attract more customers and generate more sales.
Once you gain your readership, you can even release an eBook made up entirely of a collection of your post and sell in on your blog for some cash.
There is even a service call Blogbinders that allow you to turn your blog into a printed book. Cafepress is another site that allows you to create and sell your own books.
The beauty of using blog is to promote your online business is when you add more and more posts; you are effectively creating a dynamic and constantly changing content section for your web site. Additionally, by including important keywords in the content, the ones used by your target audience to search for information on your subject area, your blog will continually act as a magnet to draw traffic into your site through the search engines.
The content of your blog is not just a useful information resource for your visitors; it can also boost your credibility by showing off your expertise in your industry. You can also incorporate subtle marketing strategies such as creating a buzz around for a new product by releasing information on your blog before it launches. You can also announce the release of new products or services with a link to your website of course.
The comments feature of blogs also enables you to create a community around your online business by hosting discussion revolving around the topics you write about. The informal and personal tone of a blog can humanize your business, reassuring your customers that they are dealing with a real person and not just a website or computer.
Most importantly, there are tons of new free resources with the all the features above, you will ultimately increase your traffic and sales.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Chapter 2: How a Business Blog Can explode Yours Sales & Profit
Benefits From Blog and Explode Your Sales and Profits
Benefit 1 - Reach a Wider Audience
If you make your blog interesting enough to your target audience, you can use it to reach far more people than a static sales web site ever could. A blog works so well because it takes advantage of the fact that most people are searching for information online. They are not necessarily looking to buy something right away.
However, by providing people with valuable information you increase your credibility in the eye of your target audience. That will put you in an excellent position to convert your readers into paying customers or the very least make them aware of your products or services.
Many regular websites provide their visitors with useful information by adding informative articles to their sites but because a blog is so easy to update, it is very efficient tool for creating and presenting fresh content that your target audience is interested in. These frequent updates also attract a lot more repeat traffic than a static web site could.
Even if you have an offline business that doesn’t directly sell anything online, like a coffee shop or a movie theatre, a well written blog can also help to spread the word about your business and bring more foot traffic to your place of business.
A static web site would have difficulty attracting such attention from people returning again and again to read the latest update but that is what blog are made for.
Benefit 2 - Generate Better Search Engine Rankings
If you do business in the internet, whether by selling products online or by using the web to promote your offline store or services, you will need to make sure that your target audience can find your web site among the millions of others. One of the best ways is to make sure you can be found by people for what you have to look for is to show up at the top of the search results in the free search engines like Google and yahoo.
That’s why search engine optimization has become such a key internet strategy. Everyone wants to become the top of the free search engine rankings. This is especially important when you consider the fact that there are more than 200 millions searches on Google everyday.
A blog is an extremely effective tool to help you rise up the search engine ranking with a very little cost.
There are 3 main reasons why blog are an excellent tool for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
Keywords: keywords are the words people use to search for information in the search engine. The more relevant keywords you have on your website or blog, the more chance you have to attract the people searching for those words.
Link: Short for hyperlinks, links are highlighted words or phrases that people can click to move from one blog to another or website to another. If popular blogs or websites link to your blog or website, the search engines will decide that your site is also popular and give you a boost up their rankings. f you have high traffic blog and you link your blog to your sales website, you can increase the search engine ranking of your website.
Fresh content: The third factor in how search engines rank your website is the freshness of your content. Google and other search engines want to provide web searchers with the most up-to-date and relevant content they can identify. That is why their technology is constantly gathering information about new web sites and updates to existing sites. The more frequently a site is update with fresh content, the more often the search engines will visit to index the pages and the better chance those pages will have of climbing higher in the rankings. Since a blog format allows you to add fresh content every day, a regular updated blog can give you yet another boost in the search engine rankings. Every blog post gets its own unique URL, therefore, the more you post the more you can increase your search engine ranking.
Benefit 3 - Boost Your Revenue
The ultimate goal of any business blog is to increase the profits of the business as a whole. A well managed blog can certainly provide a couple of additional revenue streams for your business. The most obvious being through the extra traffic a blog can drive to your online or offline store.
If your blog showcases new products and includes subtle marketing messages, you can drive people from your blog to the sales and product pages on your website with a little effort. As a result, you are able to close more sales. If you have an offline store, you can drive more traffic to it by showcasing your products and offers and generating interest and excitement on you blog.
The other potential revenue stream is third party advertising on your blog. As you now know, a good blog can attract significant volume of traffic. One benefit is that heavy traffic can make your blog attractive to advertisers. There are a couple of options available to you which we will cover later.
Benefit 4 - Develop Relationships with your Audience through Open Communication
Another great benefit of blog is that it allows you to develop a rapport with your visitors by posting advices, tips and updates on your products, services and industry as well as addressing any particular customer concerns or queries.
Benefit 5 - Build a Community of Interested Followers
Communicating with your customers through a blog can be completely one-way by you simply writing regular new updates or posting information of interest for your audiences to read. It can also be two-way, with you posting a topic and then allowing people to leave comments or ask questions.
The functions also provide another benefit with the ability to create a community of like minded people on a topic specific blog. By leaving comments, readers can interact with other people interested in the same things, as they would on an internet forum or message board.
Community building aspect of blog keeps people coming back to leave more comments or to view replies to their previous comments. The ease of open dialogue facilitated by blogging is a major factor in its huge rise in popularity as being able to discuss topics of interest with like minded people is very attractive to many internet users.
By allowing people to leave comments, you are encouraging discussions related to the topic of your website, which means that your blog site will be constantly updated with fresh new keywords related to your business, meaning better search engine ranking for you.
Benefit 6 - Humanize your Business to Let Your Potential Customers feel Comfortable buying from you
One of the major benefits of a blog is that it allows you to give your business a personal voice. Blogs answer the public’s cry for a less sanitised style of business/consumer interactions and let people know that there is a living, breathing person behind that website.
This personal touch helps to create trust which in turn can help to build a loyal customer base. This encourages repeat customers, builds your reputation and ultimately increases your overall sales and profits.
For small businesses, it is fairly easy to write in a personal way, write as if you are speaking with your customers in person. This approach has worked very well for small business, however large businesses and corporation have seen blogs as a perfect way to get in touch with their customers and present a more human image.
Benefit 7 - Establish Yourself as a Leading Expert in Your Industry
Establishing your credibility in the eyes of your target audience is a very important part of any business but particularly an online business. After all, with an offline business, anyone can walk in off the street and ask questions to gauge your expertise.
However, web business owners have to work much harder to build their credibility because they cannot reply on this personal contact.
Here again, a blog can be invaluable. Not only can it humanize your online business by allowing you to write in an informal style, but it also gives you the opportunity to write posts that position you as an expert. This is a technique commonly used by people who offer their services online, like writers, business coaches and public relations professionals.
Benefit 8 - Blogs Offer Easy to use, Cost Effective Web publishing and Content Management Tools
Another reason for the stratospheric rise of blogs is that they are so easy to set up and manage. People who may have previously been put off from building their own web sites because of worries about their level of technical knowledge jumped on blog as a way to create their own presence online and this led to an explosion in diary style blogging.
In addition to that, a business blog is just as cheap and easy to create as a personal diary style one.
Any business owners can set up an effective blog for between zero to ten dollars a month depending on the provider you use and how advanced you want your blog to be. You don’t need any programming knowledge to start and to maintain your own blog, and you can be up and running in minutes.
You can post your blog instantly. This allows you to update your readers and customers with important information as soon as you get it. This is to show them that you ahead of the game.
Additionally, the archiving feature that is common to blog software will automatically store all the contents that you had created allowing you to keep a history and group posts into categories
These will make blog great information resources for visitors to your website. Many good blogs also have search functions allowing visitors to find the topics that interest them most.
Whether you are a small business owner or the CEO of a large corporation, a blog can help you to achieve key objectives such as communicating more personally with your customers, reaching a wider audience online, boosting the search engine ranking for your website and selling more of your products and services.
Benefit 1 - Reach a Wider Audience
If you make your blog interesting enough to your target audience, you can use it to reach far more people than a static sales web site ever could. A blog works so well because it takes advantage of the fact that most people are searching for information online. They are not necessarily looking to buy something right away.
However, by providing people with valuable information you increase your credibility in the eye of your target audience. That will put you in an excellent position to convert your readers into paying customers or the very least make them aware of your products or services.
Many regular websites provide their visitors with useful information by adding informative articles to their sites but because a blog is so easy to update, it is very efficient tool for creating and presenting fresh content that your target audience is interested in. These frequent updates also attract a lot more repeat traffic than a static web site could.
Even if you have an offline business that doesn’t directly sell anything online, like a coffee shop or a movie theatre, a well written blog can also help to spread the word about your business and bring more foot traffic to your place of business.
A static web site would have difficulty attracting such attention from people returning again and again to read the latest update but that is what blog are made for.
Benefit 2 - Generate Better Search Engine Rankings
If you do business in the internet, whether by selling products online or by using the web to promote your offline store or services, you will need to make sure that your target audience can find your web site among the millions of others. One of the best ways is to make sure you can be found by people for what you have to look for is to show up at the top of the search results in the free search engines like Google and yahoo.
That’s why search engine optimization has become such a key internet strategy. Everyone wants to become the top of the free search engine rankings. This is especially important when you consider the fact that there are more than 200 millions searches on Google everyday.
A blog is an extremely effective tool to help you rise up the search engine ranking with a very little cost.
There are 3 main reasons why blog are an excellent tool for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
Keywords: keywords are the words people use to search for information in the search engine. The more relevant keywords you have on your website or blog, the more chance you have to attract the people searching for those words.
Link: Short for hyperlinks, links are highlighted words or phrases that people can click to move from one blog to another or website to another. If popular blogs or websites link to your blog or website, the search engines will decide that your site is also popular and give you a boost up their rankings. f you have high traffic blog and you link your blog to your sales website, you can increase the search engine ranking of your website.
Fresh content: The third factor in how search engines rank your website is the freshness of your content. Google and other search engines want to provide web searchers with the most up-to-date and relevant content they can identify. That is why their technology is constantly gathering information about new web sites and updates to existing sites. The more frequently a site is update with fresh content, the more often the search engines will visit to index the pages and the better chance those pages will have of climbing higher in the rankings. Since a blog format allows you to add fresh content every day, a regular updated blog can give you yet another boost in the search engine rankings. Every blog post gets its own unique URL, therefore, the more you post the more you can increase your search engine ranking.
Benefit 3 - Boost Your Revenue
The ultimate goal of any business blog is to increase the profits of the business as a whole. A well managed blog can certainly provide a couple of additional revenue streams for your business. The most obvious being through the extra traffic a blog can drive to your online or offline store.
If your blog showcases new products and includes subtle marketing messages, you can drive people from your blog to the sales and product pages on your website with a little effort. As a result, you are able to close more sales. If you have an offline store, you can drive more traffic to it by showcasing your products and offers and generating interest and excitement on you blog.
The other potential revenue stream is third party advertising on your blog. As you now know, a good blog can attract significant volume of traffic. One benefit is that heavy traffic can make your blog attractive to advertisers. There are a couple of options available to you which we will cover later.
Benefit 4 - Develop Relationships with your Audience through Open Communication
Another great benefit of blog is that it allows you to develop a rapport with your visitors by posting advices, tips and updates on your products, services and industry as well as addressing any particular customer concerns or queries.
Benefit 5 - Build a Community of Interested Followers
Communicating with your customers through a blog can be completely one-way by you simply writing regular new updates or posting information of interest for your audiences to read. It can also be two-way, with you posting a topic and then allowing people to leave comments or ask questions.
The functions also provide another benefit with the ability to create a community of like minded people on a topic specific blog. By leaving comments, readers can interact with other people interested in the same things, as they would on an internet forum or message board.
Community building aspect of blog keeps people coming back to leave more comments or to view replies to their previous comments. The ease of open dialogue facilitated by blogging is a major factor in its huge rise in popularity as being able to discuss topics of interest with like minded people is very attractive to many internet users.
By allowing people to leave comments, you are encouraging discussions related to the topic of your website, which means that your blog site will be constantly updated with fresh new keywords related to your business, meaning better search engine ranking for you.
Benefit 6 - Humanize your Business to Let Your Potential Customers feel Comfortable buying from you
One of the major benefits of a blog is that it allows you to give your business a personal voice. Blogs answer the public’s cry for a less sanitised style of business/consumer interactions and let people know that there is a living, breathing person behind that website.
This personal touch helps to create trust which in turn can help to build a loyal customer base. This encourages repeat customers, builds your reputation and ultimately increases your overall sales and profits.
For small businesses, it is fairly easy to write in a personal way, write as if you are speaking with your customers in person. This approach has worked very well for small business, however large businesses and corporation have seen blogs as a perfect way to get in touch with their customers and present a more human image.
Benefit 7 - Establish Yourself as a Leading Expert in Your Industry
Establishing your credibility in the eyes of your target audience is a very important part of any business but particularly an online business. After all, with an offline business, anyone can walk in off the street and ask questions to gauge your expertise.
However, web business owners have to work much harder to build their credibility because they cannot reply on this personal contact.
Here again, a blog can be invaluable. Not only can it humanize your online business by allowing you to write in an informal style, but it also gives you the opportunity to write posts that position you as an expert. This is a technique commonly used by people who offer their services online, like writers, business coaches and public relations professionals.
Benefit 8 - Blogs Offer Easy to use, Cost Effective Web publishing and Content Management Tools
Another reason for the stratospheric rise of blogs is that they are so easy to set up and manage. People who may have previously been put off from building their own web sites because of worries about their level of technical knowledge jumped on blog as a way to create their own presence online and this led to an explosion in diary style blogging.
In addition to that, a business blog is just as cheap and easy to create as a personal diary style one.
Any business owners can set up an effective blog for between zero to ten dollars a month depending on the provider you use and how advanced you want your blog to be. You don’t need any programming knowledge to start and to maintain your own blog, and you can be up and running in minutes.
You can post your blog instantly. This allows you to update your readers and customers with important information as soon as you get it. This is to show them that you ahead of the game.
Additionally, the archiving feature that is common to blog software will automatically store all the contents that you had created allowing you to keep a history and group posts into categories
These will make blog great information resources for visitors to your website. Many good blogs also have search functions allowing visitors to find the topics that interest them most.
Whether you are a small business owner or the CEO of a large corporation, a blog can help you to achieve key objectives such as communicating more personally with your customers, reaching a wider audience online, boosting the search engine ranking for your website and selling more of your products and services.
Chapter 1: What are Blog and Blogging Phenomenon?
What is a Blog?
A blog is a website made up of short, frequently updated posts written by the website owner. The person is known as blogger.
“Blogging” is the act of writing and publishing blog posts. These actions had a huge impact on the way information is presented, published and consumed on the internet. Unlike many online developments that turn out to be just fads, blogs are most definitely here to stay.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
Smart Wealth Enterprise All Rights Reserved
History of Blogging
The first few blogs appeared on the web at the end of 1990s, no one could have predicated the amazing growth they would experience over the next few years.
Blogs started as a simple, user-friendly way for people to publish on the Net and regularly update their thoughts and views, information that are relevant to their readers and also links to other websites. However, these early blogs were mostly produced by people with a lot of Programming knowledge and they catered to a narrow audience of technically minded people.
Finally, in 1999 an easy to use online application called blogger made blogging accessible to anyone, and this new technology really started to take off. When mighty Google bought Blogger in 2003, the search engine secured the future popularity of blogging as an online activity for millions of people. The number of blogs on the internet soared and blogging officially become an online phenomenon.
Blogging had arrived and arrived with a bang!
Since then, blogging has continued to grow in leaps and bounds becoming more and more popular as time goes by. There are no signs of this incredible trend slowing down.
A new blog is created every second.
Bloggers add more than 33,000 new blog posts every hour.
Plus the internet big boys have all joined in. Yahoo, MSN and AOL are all joining Google Blogger in taking blogging to the masses.
The result of this blog explosion is that everyone from millionaires to work-at-home mummy to carpenter to directors of fortune 500 companies can now have their own blog.
What is the New Age Blog?
A blog can be a stand-alone website or part of a larger website which made up of short articles of pieces of information that usually contain links to other relevant articles or website.
These posts are written by the website owner or by an appointed person on a regular basis with the most recent post appearing at the top of the page. Blogging software automatically archives each post by date and often by category, so it is easy to find older posts. This reverse chronological content system and automatic archiving make blogs different from regular websites.
Another difference is that the comments system common to most blogs which allows bloggers to have conversations with their readers by letting visitors to post their own comments or views on the topics being discussed.
Blogging allows anyone and everyone to have a voice online, no matter what is their level of technical knowledge. This influx of fresh voice onto the internet combined with the open communication, blogging has thus helped to stop web from being dominated by large corporations.
Blogs have become flexible tools with many different uses. Most importantly, for our purposes - Blogs have become a highly effective business tool. Both online and offline businesses can use blogs to take their products and services to a wider audience, increasing their traffic, leads and sales. There are even bloggers today whose sole source of income comes from blogging.
However, before we start to explore on how blog can benefit your business, it is important that you understand the reason why blog have become so popular.
Why Blog & Blogging?
Bloggers and their readers love to read blogs, for a number of reasons.
One of the key reasons is that there are a lot of very good blog writers out there; all sharing their opinions, knowledge and advice on topics people are interested in reading about.
It is the human aspect of blogs that draws many people to them. Bloggers tend to write in a very personal and informal style, which is in contrast to the many more corporate and faceless websites out there.
Another very popular feature of blogging is its conversational aspect. Many blogs allow visitors to leave comments on what they had read and other readers can then reply to these comments and continue the discussion. Popular blogs often create a sense of community because the same people return again and again to post comments and connect with other people interested in the same topics.
Blogs also offer people with new fresh opinions, a change from the main stream media and online news websites. Since blog posts are usually brief, regularly updated and easy to read, many people now read their favourite blogs everyday as much as they could just like an online newspaper or magazine.
From the point of view of bloggers themselves, the incredibly user-friendly content management system offered by blogging is a major factor in blogging rapid ascent. People jumped at the chance to publish their thoughts and views on the internet without needing any special technical knowledge or even their own website.
The services or providers like blogger, typepad, wordpress and Yahoo 360 make blogging easy to use, quick and inexpensive or even free, which resulted in blogging now plays a major role in today’s online communication today.
That is why if you have an online or offline business or even no business at all. Blogs are one online development that you simply cannot ignore.
The Growth of Business Blogging
Everyone from the one-person business to the huge corporation has joined the “blogosphere”. What is particularly interesting to internet business owners and offline business owners large and small is the way blogs are fast developing into a very useful business tool.
A blog is a website made up of short, frequently updated posts written by the website owner. The person is known as blogger.
“Blogging” is the act of writing and publishing blog posts. These actions had a huge impact on the way information is presented, published and consumed on the internet. Unlike many online developments that turn out to be just fads, blogs are most definitely here to stay.
Visit Us: http://www.moneyfromblog.com/main-index.html
Smart Wealth Enterprise All Rights Reserved
History of Blogging
The first few blogs appeared on the web at the end of 1990s, no one could have predicated the amazing growth they would experience over the next few years.
Blogs started as a simple, user-friendly way for people to publish on the Net and regularly update their thoughts and views, information that are relevant to their readers and also links to other websites. However, these early blogs were mostly produced by people with a lot of Programming knowledge and they catered to a narrow audience of technically minded people.
Finally, in 1999 an easy to use online application called blogger made blogging accessible to anyone, and this new technology really started to take off. When mighty Google bought Blogger in 2003, the search engine secured the future popularity of blogging as an online activity for millions of people. The number of blogs on the internet soared and blogging officially become an online phenomenon.
Blogging had arrived and arrived with a bang!
Since then, blogging has continued to grow in leaps and bounds becoming more and more popular as time goes by. There are no signs of this incredible trend slowing down.
A new blog is created every second.
Bloggers add more than 33,000 new blog posts every hour.
Plus the internet big boys have all joined in. Yahoo, MSN and AOL are all joining Google Blogger in taking blogging to the masses.
The result of this blog explosion is that everyone from millionaires to work-at-home mummy to carpenter to directors of fortune 500 companies can now have their own blog.
What is the New Age Blog?
A blog can be a stand-alone website or part of a larger website which made up of short articles of pieces of information that usually contain links to other relevant articles or website.
These posts are written by the website owner or by an appointed person on a regular basis with the most recent post appearing at the top of the page. Blogging software automatically archives each post by date and often by category, so it is easy to find older posts. This reverse chronological content system and automatic archiving make blogs different from regular websites.
Another difference is that the comments system common to most blogs which allows bloggers to have conversations with their readers by letting visitors to post their own comments or views on the topics being discussed.
Blogging allows anyone and everyone to have a voice online, no matter what is their level of technical knowledge. This influx of fresh voice onto the internet combined with the open communication, blogging has thus helped to stop web from being dominated by large corporations.
Blogs have become flexible tools with many different uses. Most importantly, for our purposes - Blogs have become a highly effective business tool. Both online and offline businesses can use blogs to take their products and services to a wider audience, increasing their traffic, leads and sales. There are even bloggers today whose sole source of income comes from blogging.However, before we start to explore on how blog can benefit your business, it is important that you understand the reason why blog have become so popular.
Why Blog & Blogging?
Bloggers and their readers love to read blogs, for a number of reasons.
One of the key reasons is that there are a lot of very good blog writers out there; all sharing their opinions, knowledge and advice on topics people are interested in reading about.
It is the human aspect of blogs that draws many people to them. Bloggers tend to write in a very personal and informal style, which is in contrast to the many more corporate and faceless websites out there.
Another very popular feature of blogging is its conversational aspect. Many blogs allow visitors to leave comments on what they had read and other readers can then reply to these comments and continue the discussion. Popular blogs often create a sense of community because the same people return again and again to post comments and connect with other people interested in the same topics.
Blogs also offer people with new fresh opinions, a change from the main stream media and online news websites. Since blog posts are usually brief, regularly updated and easy to read, many people now read their favourite blogs everyday as much as they could just like an online newspaper or magazine.
From the point of view of bloggers themselves, the incredibly user-friendly content management system offered by blogging is a major factor in blogging rapid ascent. People jumped at the chance to publish their thoughts and views on the internet without needing any special technical knowledge or even their own website.
The services or providers like blogger, typepad, wordpress and Yahoo 360 make blogging easy to use, quick and inexpensive or even free, which resulted in blogging now plays a major role in today’s online communication today.
That is why if you have an online or offline business or even no business at all. Blogs are one online development that you simply cannot ignore.
The Growth of Business Blogging
Everyone from the one-person business to the huge corporation has joined the “blogosphere”. What is particularly interesting to internet business owners and offline business owners large and small is the way blogs are fast developing into a very useful business tool.
For example, if you are currently having an online business and you can add a blog to your website you can:
• Attract more traffic to your web site
• Encourage your customers to return to your site more often
• Build better customer relations
• Reach a wider audience
Ultimately, generate more sales and more profits on the internet!
Many other businesses have also started blogs and have been enjoying great success with them. Of course, this is very good news for you, because there are a lot of successful blog models out there to learn from. We now know what works and what doesn’t - so you don’t need to waste time on ineffective tools and strategies.
On top of the growing number of successful business blogs, more people than ever before are aware of blogs and what they are. In fact, there is probably no better time to start a business blog than right now because
Blogging is easier than ever with improved services from the likes blogger.com and wordpress.com
There are tons of great tools and blogging resources you can use, such as blog directories, RSS feeds and dedicated blog search engines
There are more way to make money with your blog than ever before, such as Adsense and Blog Ads
In this eBook, we will show you step by step on how you can create your own business blog and capitalize on this exciting phenomenon.
We will give you the best strategies and tools you can use to promote your blog and use it to meet your objective, whether that means increasing your sales, presenting a more human face to your online customers, reaching out to a wider audience or just generating some extra income.
And because the vast majority of bloggers don’t use these tools and strategies effectively, just reading this eBook will give you head start when it comes to launching your first blog
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