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.

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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.
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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/

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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?
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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/

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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.

Blogging Can Help Your SEO Efforts - Part 5

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 5 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 SEO - How it Can Help You

Blogging can greatly enhance any websites natural search results through regular postings, and natural keyword placement. There in fact is no stronger way to market ones website for free than by blogging with natural keywords.

Similar to article marketing, posting daily blogs with the keywords of your business included can have remarkable effects on the ranking of your site in any given search engine, and thus net you more traffic. One key to gaining more traffic from keywords is to use ‘niche’ keywords. These are keywords or keyword phrases that may be searched for less often, but that have less competition. This means you may be able to rank much higher for these keyword. An example: The keyword term “baseball” is certainly searched for often, but there are millions of websites optimized around this keyword. However a keyword phrase like “Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz news” would have fewer competitors. The longer keyword also increases the likelihood that your blog contains exactly what the visitor is looking for.

Getting picked up in search engines can lead to huge masses of traffic heading to your site every day. There are top keyword placers that use blogs to retain huge amounts of daily traffic to their sites just by integrating a variety of niche keywords into their posts. The amazing thing about blogs is they are often picked up by the search engines almost as quickly as one posts to it, which makes it a wonderful tool for SEO purposes.

Another way blogging can help your site’s search engine ranking is by the quality score. Most search engines, including Google rank sites with a quality score, the more unique, user provided content, the higher it appears the quality score becomes. If a website is just a sales page, and a few pictures, the quality score will most likely be low. But if a site has a blog on it, with fresh, daily posts, the quality score becomes much better, and thus the site gets ranked much higher when people are searching for your niche, or keyword terms.

Part 6 of this course soon: Blogging and RSS

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.