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Inexpensive and Effective Marketing for Bloggers

June 22, 2009

Unless you’re writing a blog as a personal journal, there is little point in laboring over your blog posts if you don’t have any readers. The most difficult aspect of blogging when you’re just starting out is learning how to attract readers – and then if you’re hoping to earn income from your efforts the challenges get even bigger!

Since many bloggers are using their blogs to attract internet traffic and hopefully send them on to their website (where products or services are actually sold), this article will give you ideas for leveraging the power of your blog as an inexpensive, but effective marketing medium.

Are You Unintentionally Anonymous?

I can’t even begin to tell you how many bloggers set up their blogs and forget to include a way for readers to contact them. I regularly want to contact blog owners who write great content with questions or comments – and can’t because they haven’t included any method for contacting them! My guess is the majority of the bloggers without contact information don’t even realize they’re inaccessible – so make sure you aren’t unintentionally anonymous!

This is especially important if you are looking to generate income from the blog at some point. Don’t hide behind your blog as some anonymous writer – the blog is meant to develop relationships and trust with your readers and you can’t do that if you don’t include an email address, ability to post comments, or other method of contacting you. You might get requests for joint ventures and invitations to online events that would help you get additional exposure and readers to your blog if people are able to contact you, too.

Make Use of Free Article Marketing Resources

As a blogger, you’re used to putting words to paper. Use that skill to bring new traffic to your blog. You can write additional articles on topics your blog already covers, and submit them to article directories like EzineArticles.com, iSnare.com, or GoArticles.com. These sites publish your articles with your author byline information, which should include a link back to your site.

Other website owners and newsletter publishers regularly visit article directories to pick up articles for their publications. They are allowed to re-print the content you submit to article directories on their own sites and in newsletters, as long as they include your author byline and link. Each time your articles are republished, you’ll have a new link pointing to your blog. You can gain new readers through people who click on your link to learn more; and also through the boost all of these incoming links give you in the search engine listings.

You’ll gain the best results with article marketing if you do it on a consistent basis. Try writing an article once a week and posting to several article directory sites, and monitoring your blog traffic for several months to see if it’s increasing.

Become a Carnival-Goer

There are “blog carnivals” on just about every topic imaginable. Blog carnivals give bloggers another method of receiving quality incoming links to their blog. You submit your own blog posts to the carnivals that are hosted by websites on related topics as your own site; and if they publish your link, you’ll receive readers and additional incoming links for SEO purposes.

If you blog about personal finance topics for example, you would submit a link to your recent article to the host of a personal finance “carnival”. If the host likes your article, he or she would include it in their carnival post, which is basically a compilation of links to many blog posts from several different blogs.

You won’t see big results overnight by participating in blog carnivals, but if done consistently, you’ll probably notice improved positioning in the search engines, and an increase in traffic from the readers of the carnivals. It costs nothing but your time to submit. For a directory of different carnivals, you can visit www.blogcarnival.com.

Write a Guest Post for Another Blog or Newsletter

Writing a guest post is the same as writing an article for your own blog, except that it will be published somewhere else. If there are other blogs that focus on similar topics as your own, consider contacting the blog owner to ask them if they’d publish an article you write for them, along with an author’s byline and a link back to your own blog.

As with the other methods discussed in this article, you’ll gain additional incoming links to your site, and the possibility of new readers who click the link to learn more about you after reading your post.

Marketing does not have to cost an arm and a leg in order to generate results. Most marketing methods will be effective if they are done consistently. Make sure you measure and monitor the results of any marketing methods you attempt, to know whether or not they are worth the time and effort.

Debbie Dragon, guesting for ClubBlogger, is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.

Use Nailed-On Effective Email Marketing; Never, Ever, Ever Spam!

February 17, 2009

Effective, legal, effective email marketing is always permission-based. If not, it is called spam.


If you didn’t sign up for it, you think of it as spam – we’ve all experienced this. So why would anyone feel differently about messages you send them if they didn’t sign up for them?

Communicating, and marketing, via email requires a positive relationship. All messages swapped are opportunities to either strengthen or weaken that relationship.  To enhance the relationship, always make sure the content is relevant, useful, and interesting to the readers. You can hardly achieve this if they didn’t want to receive the messages in the first place!

Having and growing a big list of people who don’t want or read your emails gives you no advantage and is a waste of your time. Even if email is ‘free’, your time is certainly not.

You should appreciate and expect that a proportion of manually added email addresses will subsequently unsubscribe. Interestingly, if they do not, expect few of them to ever open your messages!  Remember this: even when someone deletes a message without opening it, they still see who it’s “From”. They are still exposed to your brand. The only take-home message they get is that you keep emailing them even though they don’t want you to! This is 100% actively detrimental to the reputation you have and to the relationship you’re trying to build.

If you’re not sure your approach is the right one, it’s probably not. Remember this, too!

Relationships built on trust will last, whereas those built on spam are bound to fail. If you think someone might like to be on your email list, always invite them to sign up and let them decide.

For a free CD about nailed-on effective marketing, click here.

Three Steps to Finding a Niche for Your Blog

December 13, 2008

Are you planning to start a new blog soon? If so, one of the most important things you need to determine is your niche. In other words, you have to decide what you will be writing about and who your target audience will be. By honing in on what you will write about and who you will writing it for, you can better determine your topics while also more effectively winning over and retaining readers.


Step #1: Examine Your Personal Interests


The first step you need to take in order to determine your niche is to examine your personal interests. After all, in order to create a successful blog, you will need to post to it on a regular basis. Ideally, you should post at least once per day while your blog is still in its early stages. Therefore, you certainly want to select a topic that will retain your interest and that you will enjoy writing about. So, sit down and create a list of all of the general topics you would be interested in writing about before you move on to the next step.


Step #2: Fine Tune Your Topics


Now that you have an idea of the topics you might be interested in writing about, it is time to start doing a bit of research. Obviously, you want to write about a topic that will be of interest to as many people as possible. That way, you can bring more traffic to your site and you will have a better chance of making money through your blog if that is your goal.


In order to get an idea of what topics are of interest to people searching the web, use a tool such as Google adwords. Here, you can get an idea of the phrases that people are researching on Google as well as the amount of competition there is for those particular words. While looking at Google adwords should not serve as your final determining factor, it can give you a better idea of how to fine tune your niche. For example, if you listed pets as one of your interests, you may find that there is a great deal of interest in organic pet food. In this case, you may want to focus your blog on eco-friendly pet products or on healthy eating options for pets.


By fine tuning your niche, you can really focus on the topic and delve deeply into it, which will help you establish yourself as an authority on the topic. Later, if you want to address more pet topics, you may add another specialized niche topic to your blog or you may create a sister blog to compliment the first one you developed.


Step #3: Do Your Research


Once you have determined some more specific potential niche areas to explore with your blog, you should do a bit of research regarding blogs that are addressing this topic. Do some searches with the major search engines to learn more about other blogs that fall within your niche. Ideally, you should choose the topic with the least number of blogs already in existence. That way, you can keep your competition down, which will increase your chances of enjoying a larger audience.


If there are already several blogs addressing the topic, see if there is a way you can offer a different angle. That way, you will still have a good chance of carving out your share of the market.

Commenting on Blogs the Easy Way

November 21, 2008
If you are a blog owner the one thing that you want to see is lots of comments on your blog. Comments let you know readers like what you have written and want to share their thoughts. It’s a way of showing how popular your blog is. Some will become subscribers and some wont, but a high subscriber number does not necessarily mean that you will get hundreds (or thousands in some of the most popular blogs) of comments every time you write a new post.

Most comments will come from readers who are not subscribed to your feed. They will most likely come from the blog owners who posts you commented on. I myself try and (99.9 percent of the time I do) if someone leave a comment on my blog, I visit them and return the favor. The only time I don’t leave a comment is if their blog is no way familiar to what I’m blogging about. For example If they left a comment and I go visit and find out their blog is about cars,video games etc, I wont leave one because that is not in my niche.

One of the easy methods I use to leave comments is this:

When I visit a blog to leave a comment, I look at all the other readers who was there before me and left a comment.
I then go down the line to check out their last post or click on their gravator to visit their site.



If it is a site that has updated posts and I like it, I leave a comment. I then repeat this process on other blogs.
Depending on the time I have and if my eyes don’t start hurting me too bad :) , I can do a lot of comments in a short period
of time.

The other method I use is I visit this link I bookmarked a while back.


I go down the line and visit and if they have been keeping up their blog and have content that I can relate to, I leave a comment.

If anyone has a list similar to this let me know so I can add it to my bookmarks.

The old saying works in this concept “You have to give to receive”
My post Successfully Marketing Your Blog: An Overview had some good comments on how you should comment on other blogs.
Try and leave useful meaning comments and try to avoid the one-liners.

Reasons to Use Polls and Surveys on Your Blog

November 18, 2008

Perhaps one of the most overlooked tools in the blogger’s arsenal is the ability to set up surveys and polls on the blog. Yet, these surveys and polls can serve a number of different purposes for the blogger and, in reality, should be used more often on many blogs. Here is a brief look at some of the benefits that polls and surveys provide.


Benefit #1: Performing Market Research


Simply put, surveys and polls help you get to know your audience better. Although you should have already conducted some market research in order to get to know your target audience better, surveys and polls will help you get to know the people who are actually reading your blog. Armed with this information, you can create posts that are more to their liking and you can add features to your blog that will help you keep your audience happy. If you are trying to make money with affiliate products, polls can also help you when it comes to selecting the products you will try to sell on your blog.


Benefit #2: Starting a Conversation


Polls and surveys are often great fodder for getting conversations going. One on hand, you can ask a question with your poll and then ask your community members to explain why they provided that answer. On the other hand, the results of the poll or survey can often stir up additional conversations – particularly if the topic is one that is controversial. In fact, using a poll or a survey is a good way to introduce a controversial subject for your readers to debate without you having to take a strong stance on either side.


Keep in mind that you will have the option to allow your readers to view the results or to keep the results closed as the survey is taking place. If you don’t want the responses to be skewed, you might want to keep this feature closed until after you have conducted the poll.


Benefit #3: Keeping it Simple


Polls and surveys are also beneficial to the blogger because they are pretty easy to set up. So, if you have a day when you really can’t think of anything to write about or you simply don’t have time for a post, putting up a survey or poll will still interest your readers without taking so much time to create.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although polls and surveys are relatively easy to create, this is not to say you shouldn’t put any thought into the one that you create. Rather, make certain you ask a question that involves a topic that is meaningful to your readers. Also, make certain your answer choices are clear and well-defined. That way, you will get an accurate response to your poll or survey and you may actually be able to use the information to further improve the content of your site.

 

SEO-What’s more important?

November 16, 2008

What’s more important? Creating sites for users or the engines? The answer is both.


Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this –
they naturally attract search engine traffic.
Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

Successfully Marketing Your Blog with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

November 10, 2008
This is part 4 of a 4 part series on Marketing your Blog.

The final method you can use for marketing your blog is through the use of search engine optimization, or SEO, techniques. Search engine optimization involves taking steps to make your blog more attractive to the search engines so the search engines will provide your blog with a higher ranking on the organic search engines results page. Obviously, the higher your blog is ranked on the results page, the more likely it is that people will visit your site. And, since these search engine results are completely free, you don’t have to worry about paying every time someone clicks on your link.


Getting your blog to rank naturally high on the search engine results is possibly the best way to market your blog. Not only does it cost nothing, but many people don’t bother to look at the sponsored links that are brought up from a PPC campaign. In addition, simply having your site ranked high on the list automatically makes your blog appear to be more relevant and reputable in the eyes of those who are searching for a particular keyword phrase.


There are numerous ways you can get your blog to rank higher in the search engine results pages. One method is to incorporate certain keyword phrases into your blog posts. In order to give yourself the best chance for success, visit a site such as Google Adwords and look at the popularity of various phrases that are related to your site. Ideally, you should target those phrases that are searched often but that do not yet have a great deal of competition on the Internet.


Creating links within your blog also helps increase your search engine standing. By linking various relevant posts to one another, the search engines are better able to crawl throughout your blog and analyze what it has to offer. It is also beneficial to build up your incoming links, which are links coming to your blog from other blogs and websites.


There are several methods you can use to increase your incoming links. If you engage in social networking, you can build your incoming links by leaving a link to your website at forums, blogs and other social networking websites. You can also increase your incoming links by guest blogging on other blogs and by submitting articles to article directories. If your article is good enough, it may go viral. This will help increase your incoming links while also improving your overall reputation within your target market.


The way your blog is set up can also have an impact on your search engine ranking. If your blog is full of broken links, for example, the search engine spiders will not be able to comb through your blog properly. As a result, the spiders may think your blog has less to offer than it really does. Therefore, if you are not comfortable with the technical aspect of maintaining a blog, it may be worthwhile for you to hire an expert to help you with the initial set-up. That way, your blog will be attractive and easy to navigate for search engines and for your readers.

Successfully Marketing Your Blog with Social Networking

November 7, 2008
This is part 3 of a 4 part series on Marketing your Blog.

If you don’t have a great deal of money to dedicate toward marketing your blog but you do have plenty of time, social networking is a great way to boost your traffic while also building a community with your blog. In fact, one of the great things about social networking is that it can really help you build a solid reputation within the community of your target audience while also helping you build-up the popularity of your website.


There are many ways you can go about conducting social networking, but the basic premise behind this marketing method is to get out there and interact with others so they will want to come check out your blog. One common method of social networking is visiting blogs that seem to be targeting the same audience as you. Take some time to get to know the blog and its community, then start making your own comments and participating in the discussions. Each time you leave a comment, you can also leave a link to your blog. If the members of that blog community like what you have to say, they will likely click on your name in order to learn more about you.


You can use the same type of technique with forums. With forums, you may be able to set up your account so your forum log-in name is linked to your blog. If not, you can include a link to your blog in your signature. That way, your link appears every time you leave a message on the forum and, once again, those whose interest you pique will click on the link and visit your blog.

Video websites such as YouTube also provide you with great opportunities for networking. If you create humorous videos, instructional videos or informational videos that become popular on the website, you can potentially bring a great deal of traffic to your blog. In fact, any time you create a video to post on your blog, you should also post it on sites such as YouTube in order to get even more use from your video and to increase your chances of reaching more readers.


Sites such as MySpace and Facebook also provide opportunities for social networking. By interacting with those communities on a regular basis, you can build relationships with other people that might be interested in reading your blog.


The key to successful social networking is to leave comments that are meaningful to the blog or forum you are visiting. Simply saying something such as “Great post!” is not going to be enough to draw in traffic. Rather, take the time to build relationships with the communities you find at these sites and you will soon find them coming to your blog to interact with you there as well.

Successfully Marketing Your Blog with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

November 5, 2008
This is part 2 of a 4 part series on marketing your Blog.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is one of the most effective methods for drawing traffic to a website or blog. At the same time, it is potentially one of the most costly methods for marketing. If done correctly, however, the return on investment (ROI) will pay off quite nicely.


A PPC advertising campaign is one that involves paying to have your blog appear among the “Sponsored Links” or the “Sponsor Results” you find on the right hand of the screen when you perform a search with a search engine such as Yahoo or Google. You accomplish this by placing a bid on certain keywords and keyword phrases. Then, every time someone enters those keywords into the search engine, your blog will be brought up in the sponsored results. Every time someone clicks on your link, you will have to pay the search engine a certain pre-determined amount.


As you can imagine, paying for a PPC campaign can be quite costly. After all, even if you are paying just five cents per click and you have 1000 clicks per day, that is $50 per day. That comes out to be $350 per week, which can eat away at your marketing budget rather quickly. Now, paying $350 per week may seem worthwhile if it is bringing you 7,000 new visitors. But, if only one or two of those people are people who are actually interested in your blog, the cost certainly isn’t worth it.


So, how exactly do you make your PPC campaign worthwhile? This is where your marketing research comes in handy. Since you now know the needs of your target audience, you can select keywords for your PPC campaign that will draw in visitors who are interested in what your blog has to offer.


Be certain to select keywords that are very specific in order to bring in the right type of traffic. For example, if you are maintaining a blog about dog training, you should not set up a PPC campaign based around the word “dog,” as this can bring in visitors who were looking for information about dog breeds, searching for dog food, trying to find instructions for building a dog house, or any other possible term associated with dogs. Rather, select keyword phrases that are more specific to dog training in order to bring in the right type of web traffic.


When searching through the various keywords you can select for your PPC campaign, you should look for phrases that are popular while still being within your budget. You should also place a bid on phrases that will allow you to be within the top 5 results. That way, they will be displayed on the first page of the search engine results and will be more likely to be seen by your target audience.


If you are looking for a quick way to boost traffic to your site and if there is room in your budget, PPC advertising is a good route to take. Otherwise, you may want to explore other methods of marketing that are not quite so costly.

For a free CD about nailed-on effective marketing, click here.

Successfully Marketing Your Blog: An Overview

November 2, 2008
This is part 1 of a 4 part series on marketing your Blog.

So, you have decided to get serious about drawing traffic to your blog and hopefully making some money in the process. If so, you probably already know that marketing is the first major step toward building a successful income with your blog. At the same time, understanding how to successfully market your blog is a completely different animal. In fact, it can be downright frightening and even costly if you don’t know how to go about it the right way.


There are three major ways you can go about marketing your blog. These include:


  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

  • Social Networking

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques


Within each of these categories, there are numerous techniques and methods you can use to successfully draw more traffic to your blog. At the same time, it is important for you to complete some market research before you begin using any of these methods. Otherwise, you can waste a great deal of your time and money on marketing techniques that do not yield any real results.



Conducting market research involves getting to know your target audience in order to provide your audience with what it needs. In other words, you need to “get inside the heads” of those people you are hoping to reach with your blog. You can accomplish this by conducting surveys and polls on your blog as well as by visiting other blogs and forums that are frequented by your target group.


During the market research stage of marketing, you should not focus on participating in blog and forum discussions. Rather, spend some time as a “lurker” who simply reads the posts of the community members. This way, you can get a better idea of the personalities of your target group as well as the problems they are facing.


Getting to understand the needs of your target audience is the key to building a successful marketing campaign. After all, if your blog will only be successful it is able to fulfill a need. This need may be social in nature or it may provide information to the reader that helps the reader in his or her relationships, career, hobbies or other area. For example, if you are writing a blog about being a single father, it is important for you to understand the concerns and problems that single fathers face. That way, you can gear your blog posts toward addressing those needs.


Once you have successfully created a profile of your target audience, you will be able to better determine how to market your blog in a way that will bring targeted traffic to your site. In that way, you will be better capable of monetizing your blog or simply creating a meaningful community for your target audience if that is your goal.