Ready Set Start Blogging - Final Section

Blog for Traffic and Income
This is Final part of the crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Missed a post or don't want a referernce you can take with you? Become a Small Business Insider! and you'll automatically receive a full copy.

You've Taken the Course, Now are You Ready to get started?

You’ve taken a great first step in learning about blogging and how it can add traffic to your website, and revenue to your pocket.

The best thing to do now is take a few of the things you’ve learned and get started.

Signup for a free blog account and see how it works.
Explore other blogs to see what others are doing with blogs.
Try a couple of the tips on keyword selection.

Of course, if you need help getting started with your business website you can contact Webs 4 Small Business. We can provide everything you need from getting you started with your first business website to growing your existing website. You can reach us on the interent at http://www.webs4smb.com/, by phone at 877-468-6402 or by email at contactus@Webs4SMB.com

To help you get started here is a listing of the different resources that we've referenced during the course and a few that you may find helpful. Many of these resources are free or at least offer a free trial to get you off the ground. (HINT: Webs4SMB favorites are marked with *)

Blogging Tools

Google's Blogger *
WordPress
Blogarama.com
Technorati *
Digg *
FreeSite.com
bBlog
Blogrankings.com

Hosting Services

1&1 Hosting *
GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans
iPowerWeb Hosting

Traffic Building

MerchantCircle Business Directory *
ArticleDashboard
EzineArticles *

Affiliate Marketing

Shareasale.com
LinkShare *
Commission Junction
Kolimbo

Private Label Rights

Instant Website Content *
PLR Wholesaler

eMail Marketing

Constant Contact *
Vertical Response
Benchmarkemail.com

We hope you've learned some value information from this course. We're working on the next course right now and would love you input. Let us know if there are topics you'd like to see us include in our blog. While you're giving us your feedback why not ask for a FREE SEO Analysis of your site.

Want the entire Blogging Crash Course? Become a Small Business Insider!

Blogging Resources - Part 10

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 10 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Can't wait to read the entire Blogging Crash Course? Become a Small Business Insider!

Blogging Resources

The amount of awesome blogging resources on the net today is outstanding, and can truly make any average blog a special one in no time. There are millions of resources for you to tap into when it comes to blogs, a few of the best ones are highlighted here for your consideration.

We’ve already mentioned some like Blogger and WordPress where you can start blogging for free. We also talked about PPC options, like Google AdSense and Microsoft AdCenter. These are just the start.

Want to find out what the ‘hot’ blogs are? Blogrankings.com is a great site that ranks all the latest and greatest blogs. The value of this site is to look at what other top bloggers are doing, and attempt to emulate it with your own blog. You can also see what keywords have the most and least competition. Understanding what makes a certain blog in your niche so popular can revolutionize the way you think about and post to your own blog, which could have long lasting positive effects.

Submit your business listing for free to the MerchantCircle.com business directory.

The FreeSite.com offers free blog resources that are as much fun, as they are useful. The site offers users free software, and plugins to enhance any blog, or even create one from scratch. This is a great way to find free downloads if you support your own website.

Blogarama.com offers users a virtual telephone book of blogs from all areas of subject matter. No matter what your interest, or niche, this website can bring out the best and most popular blogs. This site is full of directory style listings, and even user ratings to help you search the net.

Also checkout Technorati and Digg to find out what are the most popular topics right now. Gearing your blog posts to similar information may help increase your traffic. You can also submit your blog posts to these sites for additional exposure.

Ultimately the best blog resource is the one that caters to your needs, and thus must be sought out by you according to what you are trying to achieve. Seeking out your own best blog resources will certainly help you profit from blogs in the near future.

The majority of web traffic comes from search engine listings, and blogs help even the most novice marketer place high in the search engine rankings. By having a high place in the search engine rankings you can receive significant amounts of traffic to your site on a daily basis for free.

Final Part of this course soon: Ready to Get Started?

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visitWebs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/ orRiverbank Consulting at http://www.riverbankconsulting.com/

Want the entire Blogging Crash Course?
Become a Small Business Insider!

Join the Webs 4 Small Business Insider Mailing List and get the full course and a valuable coupon.

Getting Traffic to Your Blog - Part 9

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 9 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Can't wait to read the entire Blogging Crash Course? Become a Small Business Insider!

Getting Traffic to Your Blog

As mentioned earlier, your blog posts will likely get included in the major search engines. Unfortunately, the valuable secret of blogging is out. That means along with your blog posts there are millions of other posts being added to search engines every day. It is not enough to rely just on search engines to drive traffic.

So after you hit up your family and friends, who else is going to find and read your blog? The answer is likely nobody unless you give them a reason to read it. This is where the traffic driving secrets come into play when dealing with a blog. The best way to get traffic to your blog is by using free promotional methods. The key is to have something on your blog worth checking out once they get there, but for this part we’ll simply focus on getting traffic.

Start out by joining all the forums, and social networks in your niche. If you have a blog that is aimed at baseball fans, make sure to join all the fan forums you can, and any find other free sports fan related sites and blogs. Post messages on relevant topics, making sure to include a link back to your blog. This way every forum you post to becomes a reference back to your blog. This also helps create the impression that you are an expert in your niche and more likely to check out your site. Remember to add value to the forums when you post. Posting ‘spam’ and other junk messages can not only get you banned from some forums but also damage your credibility.

Next it is important to start submitting your blog posts as articles to free article directories such as ArticleDashboard or EzineArticles. These free article directories will help promote your blog by distributing the articles to thousands of resources, which will also get your blog, and your article higher search engine ranking at the same time. Remember to include a link back to your blog.

Finally start to collect email addresses and setup your blog for RSS feeds. Allow the membership to enjoy your blog in the comfort of their inbox by choosing the option on your blog software to email the blog post every time a new one goes up. This will be a way to attract daily traffic to your blog for free, and keep the traffic you receive from your expert forum posting coming back.
Email Newsletters - 60 Day Free Trial

Part 10 of this course soon: Blogging Resources

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visitWebs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/ orRiverbank Consulting at http://www.riverbankconsulting.com/

Can't wait to read the entire Blogging Crash Course? Become a Small Business Insider!

Join the Webs 4 Small Business Insider Mailing List and get the full course and a valuable coupon.

Blog Ad Placement – Part 8

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 8 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Ad Placement - How and Where to Place Your Ads on Your Blog

In generating extra income with blogs there is one element that trumps all the rest in importance: advertisement placement. The actual spot where you put your ad is as important to your profits as any other thing you do with your blog, ever. The most successful people that blog for profit utilize special placement for their advertisements so to best get results from the site visitor.

Putting your advertisements at the top of the blog isn't good enough anymore. Many people have been using computers long enough that they have become accustomed to ignoring the advertisement banners at the top of a website, or blog. Thus website and blog publishers must find new and unique ways to get the advertisements read, and clicked by your visitors.

One place to put the advertisements for your blog is directly to the right hand side of the daily blog post. Research shows that the human eyes tend to gravitate to the upper right hand side of any page, which is where your advertisement should be in order to obtain maximum exposure. The more the ad is put in this spot, the better rate of clicks that you will get on the ad.

Another great place to put the advertisement is in the body of the text. This is commonly done by highlighting, and adding hyperlinks to some of the more popular keywords. By adding such keywords you can simply click on the highlighted word to learn more about a product, or service you might be promoting. Text ads placed within the text of your content aren't ever very big as not to disrupt the text, but they can pack a serious punch in terms of sales because of the natural curiosity of the reader to check out whatever it is you are promoting.

Finally you can place advertisements at the bottom of the blog, with more information about you, the author of the blog. Since blogs are typically personal, people enjoy reading about the author, and thus it makes sense to include a few ads near your profile, to capitalize on the profile checking nature of your visitors.

Part 9 of this course soon: Getting Traffic to Your Blog

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit
Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.webs4smb.com/ or
Riverbank Consulting at http://www.RiverbankConsulting.com

Can't wait to read the entire Blogging Crash Course?
Become a Small Business Insider!

Join the Webs 4 Small Business Insider Mailing List and get the full course and a valuable coupon.

PPC and Blogging - Part 7

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 7 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Revenue and Blogging

Another benefit of blogging, beside more traffic, is the ability to make money from pay-per-click advertising. Whether you prefer Microsoft AdCenter, Google AdSense, Yahoo Ads, or one other the many other Pay-per-click (PPC) options, one of the easiest ways to generate income is by integrating ads into your blog. PPC and blogs go together peanut butter and jelly.

The key with any PPC optimized website is traffic, the more traffic that comes to the website, the more clicks the ads will get. While traffic is the key, there is one other important aspect of PPC money making schemes, and that is keyword placement. PPC advertisements are triggered by a keyword, or set of keywords. If your blog is rich in relevant keywords you should see PPC ads that your readers will click. Also, since inline ads are triggered by specific keywords you may need to ‘optimize’ your blog content to support relevant keywords. Don’t forget, though, that it is more important that readers find your blog content valuable so make sure your blog content keeps ‘human’ readability as its primary focus.

With blogs you can be assured that if you are making daily posts, most every PPC ad possible for your niche will run at some point during the blog’s life. This means that the variety of PPC ads on blogs is much higher than you’d experience on a more static ‘sales’ website.

PPC is a marketing business that needs to be tested constantly to ensure effectiveness. The sad fact is that many websites need to have certain keywords on them to attract big dollars, and the typical PPC client might not get the traffic to trigger those ads for years, if ever. With blogs you can constantly test new keywords to find the ones that best match your visitor’s and produce the most income for you.

Using PPC as a way to make extra income with blogs simply makes sense, a lot of sense, as it is the easiest, most effective way to make extra money on the internet without doing a single thing different with your blog besides placing the code in at the top to allow the ads to be shown.

Part 8 of this course soon: Ad Placement - How and Where to Place Your Ads

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit
Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/ or
Riverbank Consulting at http://www.riverbankconsulting.com/

Can't wait to read the entire Blogging Crash Course?
Become a Small Business Insider!

Join the Webs 4 Small Business Insider Mailing List and get the full course and a valuable coupon.

Blogs and RSS - Part 6

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 6 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Blogging and RSS

Many people don’t realize that blogs started out as a subscription style online journal for people to receive via email, otherwise known as a RSS feeds. Blogs are at their most fundamental state nothing more than a journal posting that can be delivered to subscribers via email. The RSS feed is an easy way to land your blog post in millions of people’s inboxes, and on the net under bookmarks as well.

With the advancement in technology the RSS feeds will now automatically update themselves to provide people with a wonderful array of blog posts daily without ever having to actually visit the blog itself. This means that you could grow a virtual subscriber base with one simple niche blog, and profit from the experience every time you make a post. Utilizing the power of blogging and RSS one can make some serious money by keeping people up to date with affiliate products, and services.

Since the RSS feed will deliver the blog to subscriber’s mailboxes, and let millions of people on the net know what your blog is about through a RSS feed description, it makes sense to attempt to profit from such an advantageous situation. By integrating affiliate products into your blog and website, one can provide their own affiliate link embedded into the blog for readers to click.

Get help starting your own Blog or Affiliate site from Webs 4 Small Business

One example of setting up a blog for maximum RSS exposure is to write a blog with hyperlinked keywords that are directly linked to your products. The more links the better, as the more chances you will have to sell the affiliate items to your subscriber base. Make sure that the links are either live, or given actual URL’s in the actual post so that the user can stay within their own e-mail application while reading, and visiting the recommend site that you provide them with.

RSS feeds are hugely popular today, and known to help search engine optimization as well, and thus are a must do for anyone serious about profiting off of blogs. Setting up the RSS feed is as easy as providing the address of the RSS feed in the blog application of your choice, which means it takes little time to do something that can help you drive new traffic to your website.

Part 7 of this course soon: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Revenue and Blogging

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit
Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/ or
Riverbank Consulting at http://www.riverbankconsulting.com/

Can't wait to read the entire Blogging Crash Course?
Become a Small Business Insider!

Join the Webs 4 Small Business Insider Mailing List and get the full course and a valuable coupon.