Creating A Blog To Promote An Existing Business

Creating A Blog To Promote An Existing Business
By: Mal Keenan
If you belong to any of the following groups, then this article is for you.

You already have a business and a website that serves as the official hub for your online sales. The website may be serving as an online store for your enterprise.
You need a venue wherein you can promote your affiliate links.
Your already have a website, which may not necessarily be a commercial one, and it is enrolled with a Pay Per Click (PPC) program, like Google AdSense.

Success in these fields depends on one essential principle which you might have already realized: traffic is the key to your online business thriving.

You may have in your digital inventory the best products in the world, but they won’t mean squat if no one would get to see them. This is why each and every online businessman will fight tooth and nail just to have a piece of the Internet traffic. After all, the more visitors who get to visit your site, the more potential clients you have.

And blogs can most definitely help you drive visitors to your pages. Here is how you could use them to achieve such a purpose:

1. Download the WordPress blogging software, which is available for free at http://www.wordpress.com . An alternative is to go with blogger.com. I have posted instructions for setting up a Blogger blog at your own server in this PDF file:www.pluginprofitstraining.com/blogsetup.pdf

2. Remember that good content is always at the heart of a progressive online traffic stream. People are always looking for information, and if you will give them that, they would read what you have to offer. Dedicate your blog to the subject of your main website. Publish informative entries that would hook your readers and make them come back for updates. In between purely educational entries, strategically include a link to your site by suggesting their importance to your readers.

3. Using the above mentioned strategy, you could also include your affiliate links to pre-sell your affiliate products. The more traffic you drive to your affiliate merchant’s site or sales page, the more chances you will have of effectuating a successful sale and bigger commissions.

4. Links from blogs are unilateral, meaning, they are one way links to your websites. The more traffic a unilateral link generates, the more it becomes prominent in online searches. Avoid reciprocal links at all costs! Do not include a link to your blog from your website. Search engines abhor reciprocal linking.

5. 80% of your traffic will come from the search engines. You have to tweak your blog to attract the attention of the search engine spiders. Now, blogs are already search engine friendly. However, there is a very big possibility that you would be competing with other blogs on the same subject. You have to make sure that once you upload your blog, it is able to outperform its competitors in the search engine rankings.

One way you can do this is by using the title of your post to match the keyword phrases you are targeting, plus put a sprinkling of your keyword phrase in the post itself. I am doing this with great results.

6. Check your blog offline. It should be as readable and as navigable as possible for your prospective readers. Make appropriate adjustments if necessary.

7. Upload your blog to a reliable server that has enough bandwidth to accommodate many viewers.

8. Constantly update your blog. Search engines love regularly updated content, so publishing new entries will greatly increase your blog’s page rank, and consequently, your main website’s traffic.

9. Accepting links from other related blogs will also bring to your site some traffic from sources other then search engines. The way that a blog is designed fosters the building of a community of blog sites, and this will provide for an added stream of visitors for you.

10. You could also decide to enroll your blog site in the Google AdSense advertising program. This will give you an additional income stream. We will discuss this in future articles.

Blogs are excellent promotional tools for your existing business. Use them well and you will harvest the rewards in a matter of weeks.

Author Bio
Get Your Hands on My FREE and Exclusive 7 Day Blogging Report by Sending a Blank Email to freeblogreport@getresponse.com In this Report I Reveal All The Secrets for Creating and Running A Successful Online Blog.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com – Free Website Content

New Google Blog Search is Great Marketing News for Business Podcasts, Blogs and RSS Feed Publishers

New Google Blog Search is Great Marketing News for Business Podcasts, Blogs and RSS Feed Publishers
By: Rodney Rumford

Google just introduced Blog Search in beta yesterday. This new search function allows for you to search the internet for Blogs, Podcasts and RSS feeds. You simply type in your keywords and it will show you results that have come from these sources.

The results they display are not showing any preferences to Blogs that are published on Blogger. We are seeing results for all Blogging platforms. Actually Google Blog Search is not just looking at Blogs. They are looking for any RSS feed, which might be from a Blog, Podcast, or any other XML feed. It appears that the search tool is pretty responsive and we are seeing results show up in a matter of hours after a new post is made to the RSS Blog and Podcast Feed. This is another way that you can create online visibility for your business.

The organic results are sorted by relevancy, but you have the option to sort them by date as well. This is especially nice if you want to locate the latest post for a fast breaking news topic and want to find it quickly in the blogosphere. The other thing that Google has done is to try to eliminate some of the “noise” and Spam of the blogosphere. They are looking at high quality Blogs and show them at the top of the page under what is called “Related Blogs”. This is prime real estate for your Blog to be listed in.

As an example: Go to the new Google Blog search ( http://blogsearch.google.com ) and type in podcasting tips. The results that are shown at the top 2 of the 3 Related Blogs happen to be authored by me. You will also see over 1600 results and we have several additional results on the front page. This is because we are writing 6 quality Blogs and publishing quality content frequently to these Blogs. http://blog.podblaze.com

Google currently does not support a manual submission for your Blog feed. I think this is smart, since it keeps the unethical people out of the picture. If you are Blogging or Podcasting properly and following best practices; your feed will be found by Google. Make sure that you are also following best practices for pinging after your feed is updated. This will ensure that your feed is updated by Google.

It looks like Google started to index Blogs, Podcasts and RSS feeds in June of 2005. They are currently not showing posts that were made previous to this. They may change this in the future. Google has found a way to somewhat keep the black hat SEO and unethical Bloggers out of the results. We can all celebrate this; because this means quality and relevant results for searchers.

Podcasters should also take note that individual podcast shows are also being listed in the results. This is a great way for users find your podcasts and individual podcast shows, based upon specific topics and content.

If you are serious about improving your marketing and the online visibility for your business website; then you need to be creating quality content with a quality Blog or Podcast. If your business wants to get maximum exposure in this important new area of Google you should work with professionals that truly understand this technology. You can look at http://www.leveragedpromotion.com as they have experience with many Blogging, RSS and Podcasting Solutions.

Author Bio
Rodney Rumford has over 18 years of experience in the technology field. He has held management positions in Marketing, Business Dev, Enterprise Consulting, Sales and Engineering. He does corporate consulting in the areas of RSS & Podcasting strategy, execution and marketing. He has developed software solutions in the areas of RSS Feeds, Podcasting and PPC Advertising. He is the CEO of The Info Guru LLC., which operates several web properties that include: http://www.podblaze.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com