Thursday, November 13, 2008

GET BLOGING GOALS FOR BLOG SUCCESS

In order to have a successful blog, it's important to have blogging goals.

What are your goals with blogging? If you don't have any goals, how can you know if you're succeeding, if your blog is working?

Ask yourself where do you want to end up with blogging? You are never going to get there if there isn't any "there." How do you know you've achieved your goals if you don't have them?

I suggest going beyond merely listing goals and choosing a primary goal. Your primary goal may certainly shift over time, as may all your goals.

Goals for a business blog might include establishing thought leadership, engaging customers in dialogue -- Microsoft has been extremely effective in that with their 4,000 plus bloggers, increasing awareness of your company and its offerings, or perhaps just becoming a better writer -- writing is a critical business skill.

For example, my primary goal with my first blog was simply to experiment and become familiar with blogs and blogging. Once that was accomplished, my primary goal became to reposition myself as a consultant. Traditionally, I was a technical guy and many of my older clients used me for my technical acumen only. However I'd been in business for myself for a good 15 years including a number of startups and a lot of consulting, and I learned quite a bit about business. Some of my newer clients used me for my business acumen. I used my blog to help position myself as a consultant with a lot of business experience and a strong technical background.

I strongly suggest you write down your blogging goals, preferably on paper! Schedule a review date on your calendar a few months out and revisit your blog goals then.

Have you made progress towards achieving them? Has your primary goal shifted?

Just the simple practice of documenting your blogging goals and periodically reviewing them can have an enormous impact on the success of your blog.

SMILE TO THE BANK BY WRITING REVIEWS

There are several ways to make money with your blog. You can integrate Google AdSense into your blog to get paid from Google, selling affiliate products to earn commission, selling private ad spots and writing reviews. I guess most of you have heard about making money with Google AdSense, affiliate marketing and private ad spots; in fact most of bloggers are using these methods to earn money with their blog. Whereas, writing review is an overlook area by most bloggers, many of them unaware that they can generate a decent stream of income by writing reviews at their blog.
How does writing reviews make you money?
If you have a blog and thinking of increasing your income stream by writing reviews, it's easier than you think. Like affiliate programs in affiliate marketing, there are programs called blog review networks where you can look for companies that required third parties review on their product, services or websites. If your blog is new, your application to the blog review network may get rejected because normally there are some terms and conditions that you need to meet for your account to be approved. The terms and conditions such as the age of your blog (normally your blog should be at least 6 months old), the page rank of your blog and/or where you blog is hosted are among the consideration factors.
Assuming your blog is approved. You are now a member of the blog review network where you have opportunities to browse through the review marketplace and search for reviews to write. If you blog have high traffic with good contents and high page rank, many companies will approach you to ask you to write review on their product or service and post at your blog. Once you find a review that you are interested to write on, just write it and post it on your blog, then submit the review's post for approval. You may need to follow the requirement formats or standard guidelines of the reviewer. Once the post is approved, you get paid.
How much money you could earn each review?
The prices for each review post vary from one blog review network to another. Some blog review networks allow you to search for advertisers directly in their network and bid for review job. During the bidding process, you could even negotiate with the advertisers for higher price by letting them know why their products or services are worth to be reviewed by your blog. If you blog has high traffic and really related to what the advertisers are looking for, they may willing to pay higher, this will increase your earning for each posted reviews on your blog.
You will not get 100% of the earning pay by the advertisers because the blog review network will charge a portion, normally in percentage such 35% or a fixed dollar on each approved review post in exchange of using their services and system.

BLOGGING FOR YOUR EXISTING BUSINESS

Blogging as a business model. How it can benefit your online business and drive tons of traffic to an already existing website. It really doesn't matter what kind of business model you have chosen, attaching a blog to it will in a very short period time increase your exposure, and help you climb that ladder of search results.
So what is blogging exactly? Well, in the beginning it was more of a personal online journal, where you jotted down your thoughts. But over the past couple of years the smart ones have applied this to business applications with tremendous results. I have to be honest, I was very slow on the uptake on this one.
However, since I have been blogging I have a found out a couple things. Firstly it is an addictive pursuit, The other thing that I find so attractive about blogs, is the search engines love affair with them, and when you post regularly, at least every couple days or so, the search engines spider you often.
What a pleasant surprise to check your stats and see that Google is coming to your blog not once, but 3 times a day. By linking that to your regular website it gives additional links and gives you a business format for writing about your business niche. It opens up doors that simply weren't there before, opening up a door to better connect with people in your niche. There is only benefit after benefit with blogging.
Web 2.0 and blogging is the best way to explain it. Everything about blogs are in fact web 2.0 and what that means is the interactivity blogs offer you via available plugins. There are more options available that make it Web 2.0 compliant. Web 2.0 is basically interactivity, its about social connection with people and social platform. It's like Article Marketing on steroids.
I knew nothing really about blogging and when I began to get more and more emails about blogging, it was high time I got the straight scoop on just how it could best benefit us in our day to day efforts for building a business.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

MAKING MONEY FROM BLOGGING

TIPS TO MAKE MONEY FROM YOUR BLOG
To know how to make money from your blog, it is important to understand first, what is blogging? Blogging can be defined as a frequent, chronological publication of thoughts published in the form of articles. It can be used as a free marketing method of promotion by providing important information about your products and services to the people all over the world.
As the blog movement has increased in popularity, blogging has become one of the latest craze to hit the internet. The best way to grow your internet home based business without much of your investment is to learn how to make money from your blog and provide quality content on regular basis to the people searching for knowledge based information on the internet.
If you succeed in building high-traffic, you can influence thousands of people. So your main focus should be on mastering the blogging tactics that will help you to maintain constant flow of traffic to your website, as it is the primary necessity of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales and obviously more affiliate sales.
10 things that you should know to make money from your blog:
1. Give easily rememberable name to your blog to make it easy for the visitors to spread the word.
2. Create mind catching titles with fresh ideas presented in the content of your articles.
3. Update your blog by writing minimum two articles per week and insert a site link in the article resource box to give exposure to your products and services.
4. Make it a point to write the content that will give enjoyable experience to the readers.
5. The people are visiting the blogs with intention to find the information that they haven't seen before. So make it a point to write content that will meet the reader's expectation.
6. Do some research to find out the SEO friendly keywords that are being searched by people, so that your blog is seen by large number of people, while using those keyword phrases.
7. Communicate concepts and express ideas in a way people will find them more interesting.
8. Conduct a survey once a month for your readers that will help you to know their advertising preferences and convert them into buyers in the course of time.
9. Encourage people to comment on your blog posts and remember to respond to their comments. By this way, you can keep the conversation going by bringing the visitors back to your site and maintain the flow of traffic to your site.
10. Engage your readers by adding the content which will make them feel special, recognized and appreciated.
Blogging can be highly used as a marketing medium by being in touch with your visitors. But make it a point to retain only the required quality content on your website by eliminating the unnecessary words to cut the boring parts, as the readers are more likely to commit to something that they will like to read and finish.
After learning all the aspects of how to make money from your blog, if blogging is done properly by inserting the right keywords in your article content to get higher search engine rankings and continuous flow of traffic, it can turn out to be a great source of making money online by increasing your sales on daily basis.

ADVANTAGES OF USING FREE BLOG SITES

ADVANTAGES OF USING FREE BLOG SITES
Blogs are considered to be the latest trend in online communication; millions of online individuals make use of free blog sites to propagate their online presence -- either for personal use or for business functions. Using one for your online purpose offers advantages than having a professional make you one from scratch.
Cost-Effective Site Creation
You don't need to worry about site creation costs and maintenance fees when using free blog sites. This Internet service offers fully-functional site development tools to create professional-looking websites complete with features and applications. You don't have to hire a professional Web developer to do the job for you since free blog sites can help you make one up with just a few clicks of a mouse button.
No Need For HTML Programming
One problem faced by online individual in coming up with a site from scratch is HTML programming. HTML or Hypertext Markup Language is used by Web programmers to create websites complete with all the features and provisos that make it look professional and clean.
Free blog sites offer a user-friendly interface that will allow an individual to create their website just by toggling some of its features. You can easily make use of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text boxes to input your site content without needing to place in HTML formatting tags. You can evev insert pictures and links with just a click of a button.
Easy Update
Information is very important in putting up a website. To improve or maintain your online popularity, it is necessary to dose your page with updated information relevant to your topic that will attract the interest of your visitors. Free blog sites contains features where you can just type or paste the text you want post on your site and publish it quick and easy. You can also make use of third-party applications to submit your posts directly to your blog without opening a Web browser.
Build Up Your Online Network
Since most Web surfers today are busy checking out blogs instead of looking for information they need on different sites on the Internet, you can easily build-up your online network with every visitor that drops by your page.
Since each of your posts can be given a comment by anyone who views your blog, you can easily interact with them to increase your online popularity. You can also enable guestbook or chatroom functions of free blog sites to make your page as interactive as possible for better communication with your patrons.

ONLINE MARKETING AND BLOGGING

ONLINE MARKETING AND BLOGGING
There are a lot of users out there today that surf the internet to voice their opinion. This is called Blogging. The term BLOG came out of the original term weblog. It was later shortened in a play on words by Peter Melholz when he stated "We Blog" in a phrase. So what is blog and how do can you turn this to your creative and monetary advantage? A blog site is a forum where people go to voice their opinion, post photos and videos, and even let their creative juices flow.
There are over 61 million results when you type in the word Blog...What does that say to the new website business owner? The obvious thing it says is everyone has an opinion and they are more prone to share on the web then in person. A more important view to take is there are 61 million possible clients to purchase your product and share your website. Word of mouth is now and always has been a great way to advertise.
The bad part about blogging is the fact that it allows individual opinions to be posted live and in color for the entire internet community to view. So you want to try to follow the old adage about pleasing the world. Remember you can't please everyone so don't try. Try to view it as individual critiques. If most of the critiques are in favor of what you have to offer keep going in the direction your in. If the bloggs are critical about certain points, use this to tweak your website or product.
So how do you start a blog? There are a lot of sights out there dedicated to creating blogs. Google has a three step process to creating a blog. First you create an account then you name your blog and finally you choose a template. It is really as easy as one, two, three. If you are a program savvy individual you can also create your own templates. You can incorporate them into links and have various conversations occurring at the same time.. Think of this as an interactive guest book that will allow contacts to be made.
You can make blogging work for you by creating a forum people want to be a part of. Take a hobby and turn it into a forum for people to visit, for example scrap booking or writing. Both of these could be set up as a place to let the creative juices flow. Then you provide different services on the site and charge a fee. The fee should depend on the services. Marketing psychology tells you to make sure you do not make the number end in zero. For example if you think your service is worth $13.00 you should charge $12.95. The public subconsciously looks at this and thinks they are saving money.
Remember to plan the blog just like you would any other website. Make sure the KEYWORDS and TITLE work together with your search engine and that the site be fresh, creative and easy to maneuver. Blogging can be a fun and enterprising way to connect with the world.