Blogging: Not Just for Teenagers Anymore!
How Your Small Business Can Profit From the New Blogging Craze
For
quite a long time I discounted blogging as something that was either
for teenagers, journalists or people with just too much time on their
hands! And like any other technology, when blogging first became
popular, it was pretty much the domain of those groups I just mentioned.
But
like everything else in the technological world, blogging is coming of
age – and there are some tremendous benefits that small business owners
and managers should be taking advantage of!
How many times have
you heard the words blog or web log - or how about online diary? If you
have been active online for the past few years, you’ve probably heard
it thousands of times.
What you might not realize is that
blogging is not only one of the fastest and easiest ways to get indexed
in search engines but it is also a huge source of income that is just
waiting for you to grab your share.
Blogging has actually been
around for quite a while but only up until the past few years have
online as well as offline marketers, become aware of how powerful this
medium is.
You can find plenty of free to very inexpensive
places to start a blog. A few of the top rated blog hosting services
are Blogger, which is owned by Google, Wordpress and Moveable Type.
Now,
what kind of advocate would I be without my very own blog? I started my
blog using Blogger, which is a very easy tool to use. You can see what
I’m talking about by visiting my blog at:
http://smallbusinessmavericks.blogspot.com/.
The easiest to get
started and set up would have to be Blogger.com, since they are not
only free, but they have a very simple step by step process for
creating your blog. Blogger is somewhat more limited in features than
some of the other services available, but it is a wonderful way to get
started – and best of all, it’s free!
The most common ways that
most Internet marketers are making a profit from blogs is by
integrating Google Adsense into their blog. This is very simple to do
and Blogger makes it even easier for you. You can also insert many
other contextual advertisements into the blog such as Yahoo, Kanoodle,
Chitika and many others as well as any other affiliate links you may
have.
The other benefit to blogging is also the ability to add
back links to your blog that point to your other websites. This is very
important since the more back links that you have coming inbound to
your websites, the better you will rank for the keywords you are
promoting. You will also have to setup the proper keyword anchor links
in your blog and on the pages of your websites that the links are
pointing to.
Let's look at a summary of what needs to be done in order to take advantage of blogging:
First,
you need to setup a blog either at Blogger (easy to do) or one of the
other online services mentioned (a little harder) earlier or create a
blog on your own domain name & web hosting account (not for
blogging novices!).
Once you have your blog setup, it's time to
start monetizing it by adding in contextual advertising such as Google
Adsense and / or affiliate links. Now add in some targeted keyword
anchor links that point back to your small business website.
All
you have to do now is post to your blog a couple times per week and
make sure that you are pinging after you make your new post. Sending
out a ping is a way to let the search engines know that you have new
content on your blog. The search engines will come to crawl your blog
and start indexing your new content and follow all those targeted links
that point back to your other websites. Are you starting to see how
powerful this is?
A couple of services for Pinging are Pingomatic.com and Feedburner.com – both free and very easy to use.
Now
just keep posting to your blogs and if you keep up with it and continue
to add new content on a regular basis, you'll start reaping the rewards
of blogging in no time. I’ve already noticed that when I post to my
blog, the search engines pick it up within 30 minutes (I can tell
because I have set Google Alerts to notify me whenever they find new
content). Pretty good service, particularly since it’s all free!
Go visit my blog and let me know what you think of it! http://smallbusinessmavericks.blogspot.com/
Become a Maverick today!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Entrepreneur and outdoor photography adventurer Caroline Melberg is
President and CEO of Small Business Mavericks, a division of Melberg
Marketing. She has over 20 years of experience creating marketing
communications materials and writing copy for some of the largest and
most successful companies in the world. Her small business columns are
syndicated online, and she publishes the popular e-Zine “Maverick Internet Marketing Secrets.”
Learn insider Maverick Marketing secrets you can use immediately to
find new customers and increase your sales. Get your FREE subscription
at www.SmallBusinessMavericks.com today!
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