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

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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/

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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/

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Software Options for Blogging - Part 4

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 4 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 Software Options

When you consider starting a blog there are many options. A great way to get started blogging quickly (and for free) is to use an online ‘standalone’ service like WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com/) or Google’s Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/). These are free, highly customizable tools that support both new and more advanced bloggers. The negative is that you can’t use your website’s domain name. For instance, if using Blogger, you blog address would be something like ‘yourblog.blogger.com.’ While you can link to this from your current website, search engines won’t know give you ‘credit’ for the extra content since it is a different domain. With creative cross linking however, you can still benefit from the increased exposure you can get from a blog.

These free services provide powerful software tool that balance value, quality, and ease of use. While some people prefer to use more basic blog services, they too can truly benefit from the ‘built-in’ benefits of WordPress or Blogger along with its existing large community of users.

One of the most notable benefits of these services is the ease of use, and advanced functionality of the service compared to some blog software applications. Neither Blogger nor WordPress require you to know any ‘coding’ and allow you to built and post to your blog with easy to use icons similar to what one would see in a word processing program. Having the ability to utilize a program like this allows people to create blogs that are as high tech, and complete as full blown websites.

If you are occasionally ‘offline’ you can benefit from WordPress’s ability to import posts. This means you can put your blog together while you are not connected to the internet and then import it later. Blogger allows you to make post via email, so you also have the ability to compose offline and then quickly email once you're connectd. If you already use another blogging service such you can also import your posts directly into Blogger or WordPress.

Another benefit of these services is their large widget or element and theme libraries that allow you to instantly add useful features, and professional looking styles to your blog. A very simple drag and drop interface allows you to add features such as an RSS feed with a few clicks.

Another option to consider would be blogging software that you can directly integrate into your website. Some hosting provides such as GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com/) allow you to use your existing domain name for you blog. The benefit is that the content of your blog becomes part of what search engines see for your domain. In these cases you are more likely to pay a monthly add-on fee to your hosting provider. As an alternative, Google’s Blogger allows you to publish to a FTP site, which means you can blog from your own domain. You lose some of the flexibility of the ‘out of the box’ service, but with a little effort you can have a customized template and pretty easy posting capability that resides within your domain.

As your needs become more advanced or if you are a more technical blogger you may also consider blogging software that can be directly integrated into your website. One to consider is bBlog (http://www.bblog.com/). bBlog is an open source, PHP/MySQL application. If you don’t know what the last sentence means, then this isn’t for you. If you do know, then you may benefit from the expanded flexibility an integrated application could provide.
In the end, you have a wide, wide range of very inexpensive (or free) options to get started.

Part 5 of this course soon: Blogging and SEO - How it Can Help You

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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Benefit from Niche Blogs - Part 3

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 3 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

How do you benefit from Niche Blogs?

Having a niche blog is something that can be profitable and easy, or challenging and difficult depending on how you handle the day to day posting. Niche blogs are typically blogs related to one or more specific industries or fields, including hobbies, illnesses, and sports. The more niche, or in-depth a blog is, the harder it might be for people not involved in that niche to get into it. However, people who are interested in the topic will become very loyal because they will find the connection very valuable. It is for this reason that one must think about the best way to make the most out of niche blogs, and finding the right niche is a good start.

When searching for the right niche for any blog, be sure to look at your business’s target market, topics that complement you business and your abilities to keep the blog up to date and relevant within that niche. Say you sell specialty items for baseball fans. You might consider a blog (or blogs) about your favorite baseball team(s). There is always something new to talk about in this field as long as keep up on current sports news. Sports fans that search for news on the team are already in the target market for the specialty items you sell. If you keep the information current and relevant you can become a trusted expert to those fans.

After you have selected your niche blog topic, it’s time to become an expert. No matter how much you think you know about your niche blog theme, chances are you could use some brushing up on the topic. One can brush up on a topic by simply doing research on the niche blog theme, and spending a few hours reading within the blog subject territory each day. Feel free to check out rival blogs, as they will give you an idea of what is popular in this niche, and what is not.

The most important part of getting the most out of a niche blog is becoming the go-to place for information in this niche. That means creating a blog that is constantly updated, and is accurate in the stories relating to the subject. If you do this with your niche blog, expect big time results.

Part 4 of this course soon: Blogging Software Options

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

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Why Blogging is so Popular - Part 2

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 2 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Why is Blogging so Popular?

Name one person, particularly an entrepreneur, that doesn’t like to share his or her point of view, and you will have just named nobody at all. The point is the simple fact that everyone likes to talk about themselves, and what they are up to, even if they say that they do not like doing so. There is something about being human that makes us self involved to the point where we truly feel as if others want, or need to know what is going on with us. Blogs offer a unique way to express one’s feeling or opinions on any number of issues, with the ease and exposure that only the internet can provide.

The benefit for the small business website owner is that not only do people feel connected by posting blogs, reading them has the same impact. A business owner who blogs about their experiences can create a connection with readers. That connection can easily be converted into a customer relationship.

The most common use of a blog is that of a journal, or an opinionated piece of writing involving some aspect of the author’s day to day life. While some blogs are totally commercially driven, they are often masked as personal musing in order to entice visitors. Each business owner can find the form of blog that best connects with their potential customers.

The internet can be a cold and bare place for people to be at times, and the blog helps create a sense of community with its powerful reach, and ease of use. Many people want to share, or keep up with others, but simply don’t have time. Email has gotten to the point that people are overwhelmed just to deal with their regular inbox each day, nonetheless an email from an old friend, and thus checking someone’s blog is commonplace nowadays. In fact, there are millions of blogs out there, and most of them are intended to be read by family and friends.

Blogging is popular because it relates to community, family, and friends, and therefore it is in direct relation with what matters most in life. Blogs can be a powerful tool to communicate to others, as well as to market with, as they are so friendly to search engines in terms of keywords, and ranking. Just making a few blog posts can literally get you noticed immediately, and is something that truly can help you become a big player in the internet business game. Look for

Part 3 of this course soon: How do you benefit from Niche Blog?

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

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Can Blogging Help Your Small Business - Part 1

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 1 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

What is a Blog and how can Blogging Help Your Small Business?

Even though blogs now seem to be everywhere, many business website owners don’t yet understand how blogs can benefit their business. This crash course will get acquaint you with the world or blogging and how you can use blogging to drive traffic to your website and ultimately drive revenue from your website.

While, the blog has been around for years, it has only come into major popularity in the last three years. The “blog” or “weblog” is simply an application that allows users to post written text that gets immediately posted to the web, like an online journal of sorts. The blog is something that is meant to be as easy to use as the word processor application on your computer. While most websites take hours to update, a blog can be updated in real time, as quick as one would save a file to a computer. This is partly what makes blogs so beneficial.

Blogging is a great way to get information on the internet inexpensively with great results, such as high search engine ranking, and free advertising. The blog, with its keyword heavy posts is a great way for a small business website owner to create traffic through search results of search engines like Google. What this means is that whether you are selling electronics, music, artwork, or wigs you can create a targeted blog and chances are that people looking for the products you are selling will come across your blog in the search engine. This added exposure will surely help more people notice your business, possibly increase your webpage rankings and most importantly drive potential customers to your website.

Blogs are most commonly found on the internet via the World Wide Web, and can be published for free by some of the biggest names on the internet. The fact that the blog is free is the main reason why people can so easily profit from using them. A blog can be started with no real upfront investment so the return on investment is almost automatic.

Look for Part 2 of this course soon: Why is Blogging so Popular?

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

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