Personal Blog of Forest Marie

Blogging is not just your personal journal but can also be used as a business site. You can create pages for your products and attract visitors to browse them. Creating a blog using Google’s Blogger or any other platform is a simple task. However, getting traffic to your blog might require some time and a series of focused efforts. I will share with you 4 such methods to popularize your blogs.

1. SEO: Using search engine optimization, you can increase the number of hits on your blog at least 3 times. Your home page will obviously have more hits than inner pages, so you must focus on this page for optimization. How to go about it? That’s simple. Choose one or two keywords or key phrases that are relevant to your site. Use Google Keyword Tool or SEO Book Keyword Tool to find out the keywords. Select those keywords which have a few thousand searches every month but still are not highly competitive. If you use a tool like Micro Niche Finder, your job becomes extremely easy. Now for SEO, you need to include these exact key phrases in the Title, Meta and the Body of the Article. They should be used once in the Title and Meta tags but 2-4 times in the content.

2. XML sitemap: Build the XML sitemap for your blog using Google pluggin. This will not increase the page rank for your site but what it will do is that it will index each and every page of your blog with the search engine. So whenever you are updating your blog or adding a new post, the search engine will know through the XML sitemap.

3. Back links: Search engines work on the principle that if your blog is good then it will have a lot of sites linking to it. Conversely, if you get many sites to link to your blog, search engines will pick up your site in their search results. How to get many sites to link to your blog? Again, that’s very simple. Write relevant articles and post to article directories. Then use the resource text to create a url to your blog. Give out your url in relevant discussion forums. Ask your friends to promote your url on their webpage. If you offer to do the same for their site, they will be glad to return the favor. If you do more of this, very soon you will have a large number of sites connecting to your blog, making it easier for search engines to find you and give you more traffic.

4. Paid ads: You can spend some dollars and boost the traffic using pay per click ads or paid listings. The most popular PPC engine is the Google Adwords. You can create your account in just $5 and get started. You are free to decide whether you want to spend $10 per day or $100 per day. Even in PPC, you need to research the keywords that will be effective in getting your ads to the top position.

Follow these methods sincerely and see your blog receiving much more traffic than you thought was possible.

Business Blogging

WordPress is a popular blogging platform. Many online marketers are using these blogs to promote their business. However, I have seen many of the blogs are not optimized for search engines. Some of these marketers do not realize that having a blog is one thing and making it visible to search engines is another. I will give 5 ways of becoming friends with search engines.

1. Permalinks setting: Permalink is the permanent URL for each of your blog post. WordPress gives a default setting which is not optimal. You need to edit this for better search engine optimization. Click on the “settings > permalinks” menu from the WordPress dashboard. Use your custom link here like yourdomain.com/category/blogname. What this will do is that it will display the category and name of the blog post in the URL itself which it otherwise displays as a number. This will make it easy for the search engines to locate your blog.

2. Use SEO software: Go for a commercially available SEO pluggin like All in One SEO pack. This will allow you to create your own custom title and add in the Meta and keyword tags for the home page and each of the blog posts. Setting the right tags is one of the most popular ways to get noticed by search engines.

3. Optimize keywords: This is a standard technique. In fact, you must do some keyword research even before you start writing your blog. Keywords that are highly competitive are best avoided. Choose long tail keyword phrases which have relatively less competition and write your blog for this. Include the exact phrase in the title once and about 2-3 times in the body of the blog. Keyword research can be done with Google Adwords Keyword Tool or SEO Book Keyword Tool.

4. Bookmark your blog: Bookmarking is a great way to build traffic for your blog. Simply use sites like delicious.com or stumbleupon.com and post your blog url under your category. Even better, use onlywire.com or socialmarker.com to post your url to multiple social bookmarking sites at one go.

5. Update your community: If you have a presence of social networking sites like Twitter, you can send a small tweet to your community about your latest blog post. When you update your Facebook profile with this, it will automatically send a mini feed to your entire network about your blog post.

These are all great viral ways to promote your site and create backlinks. Moreover, all these go a long way in making your WordPress blog search engine friendly.

Blogging Blogging, wordpress

Blogging is an accepted way of earning money online. But most beginners are confused as to how they can earn money by writing an online journal. They are confident of writing a blog but are not aware of how to build traffic to their sites. This problem is not just with beginners. Even experienced bloggers are always concerned with increasing the traffic to their site. It is obvious that more the traffic, more the money you can make. I will share with you some points that will help to attract more visitors to your blog.

Become friendly with search engines: Search engines like every one who gives them unique content. Original content helps search engines satisfy the needs of their customers. Similarly, you need to let search engines know that you have the right content. Firstly, you need to write content keeping keywords in mind. Include the keywords in the Meta, title and sub-headings of the content. This will help in the search engine optimization process.

Another time you need to let the search engines know about you is when you write something new on your blog or update some content. For this, you may need to ping search engines. Simply enter some sentence from your content in the search engine so that it locates your page. Thereafter, it will become easier for it to show your content to interested users. If you are writing good content, eventually, the search engines will anyway find your blog.

Build lists: When your blog becomes popular with your audience, they might want to know every time you write something new or have an update. So you need to provide for capturing email ids and then sending informative newsletters to the list of people. Many people will also link to your blog from their sites or blogs thus getting you more and more visitors.

Promote your blog: You can use one or many ways to promote your blog. Write articles and press releases. Do podcasts and teleseminars. If you have the money, advertise using google adwords. And finally, make your presence felt in social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. The whole idea is to create more links to your site from all over the internet. Except for places where you advertise directly, whenever you interact with people, never promote your blog directly but only indirectly. You can say that the person can find some answers to his question by linking to an article you have already written on the subject.

In the final analysis, the more efforts you put in to promote your blog, the more visitors you will get which in turn means more money if you are running a money-making blog.

Business Blogging

Blogs are online journals to put it very simply. You might write a journal before going to bed but chances are that you would not want the world to see it. Yet, you might have thoughts that you want to share with the whole world. You can then write an online blog.

Setting up your blog on sites like blogger.com can take you less than a minute. There are pre-built templates which you can use to start writing right away. It is no big deal so far, but when you know how to earn money through blogging, then it becomes a totally different ball game. I will tell you 5 ways to earn money with your blogs.

1. Income from Advertising: Google’s Adsense program allows you to place Google’s sponsored ads on your blog. Whenever someone clicks on those ads, you get a small amount. This is the simplest means to earn money without doing anything except writing your own stories. However, the amount you make depends on how popular your blog is and how many visitors read your blog and what percentage of them might click on those ads. Initially, you will not earn much but if you are a serious blogger, then the amount can become substantial.

2. Income from Affiliate Companies: Some affiliate companies allow you to place a link on your blog. Again, you stand to earn only when someone clicks on those links and buys the product from which you will receive a commission. If you are into affiliate marketing, then you can check with the company if you can use their link on your blog.

3. Write Blogs for Others: There are many organizations who would like to outsource their blog writing to creative writers who are able to develop the company’s online image. If you have the writing talent, then you can earn a lot through this method.

4. Promote Your Blogs: Blogging only pays you when you have a large traffic on your blog. You can use several ways to promote your blog on the Internet including advertising on free classified ad sites, creating profiles on Facebook and MySpace and participating in online discussion forums.

5. Provide Informative Content: What you write must be meaningful to your readers. Then only you can get more traffic. So you must always ensure that your content is of the highest quality.

If one blog gets you X dollars, two blogs will get you 2X dollars. I hope you get the idea. You can create multiple blogs on different subjects of your interest provided you find the time to write so much.

Business Blogging

So you’ve launched your blog.

You know what to write about.

You’re applying 5 great tips that master bloggers apply.

You’re definitely on your way, so let’s go a little further and talk about newsletters and how they will enhance yourself and your blog.

So what the heck is a newsletter anyway?

A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication generally about one main topic that is of interest to its subscribers. In the context of this blog, I’ll be talking about E-Mail newsletters.

So you already know what you’re going to blog about. Creating an E-Mail newsletter that people sign up for on your blog will enhance your blog and your brand by keeping your readers up to date with information about your topic (and more importantly, the topic they are interested in learning about).

4 Key Advantages Of A Newsletter

1. They promote YOU and YOUR business.

E-Mail newsletters are product of your copywriting skills. When you deliver a newsletter to a reader via E-Mail, you need to always deliver value (I call it A.D.V.) on the topic you’re writing about.

When you always deliver value and build great relationships with your readers, your readers will trust you and be more responsive to partnering with, buying your product or service, and recommending other people to you.

2. They educate your business partners, prospects and customers

You already know that we like to be educated on particular topics. As a society, we are in a constant state of always wanting to improve (well, at least the people I surround myself with).

Your newsletter can constantly deliver valuable information to educate your business partners, prospects and customers, thus establishing yourself as an expert on a subject and building trust with them.

3. They allow you to reach many people at once

Your newsletter can reach many people at once. How many? Well, as many people that sign up to receive your newsletter. If you have 100k people on your newsletter (aka your “list”), then you are in a position to be delivering great value to 100k people.

4. They produce income for you 24/7

You can use your newsletter to advertise your products and services. Or a tool or resource you use that you highly recommend.

For example, tomorrow, I’m going to send out a mailing to my newsletter about Traffic Secrets 2.0 and why anyone who has ANY interest in learning how to market on the Internet NEEDS this product. Period.

So do you have anything of value you’d like to send out to thousands of people at once? If you do, it’s time to blog about and start an E-Mail newsletter.

So How Do You Create A Newsletter

It’s really not THAT difficult, so here goes a quick two step process.

1. Plan out what you want your newsletter to be about

This one is pretty obvious. You know what you’re going to write about, so just think of a newsletter that’s related to your topic. If your blogging about travel, for example, perhaps your may want your newsletter to be about destinations and deals.

2. Sign up for an autoresponder (I recommend Aweber and nothing else)

By the way, Aweber will give the code to put on your blog page. Call it a “mini-capture page”.

How’s that for rocket science?

In the next tip, you’ll learn more about autoresponders, their advantages, how to set them up on your blog, and why you NEED one if you want to dominate online.

But I’m a pretty nice guy, so I’ll quickly tell you what they are in case you don’t know…

An autoresponder is simply a mechanism to deliver your newsletter to thousands or even millions of people.

Do you see any potential with that?

Blogging, Internet Marketing Blogging, Internet Marketing