Blogging

Those of you who aren’t ready to wade into the Blog pool are taking your time for several reasons, according to my informal interviews with people before and after they blog. Others start blogging and then abandon their projects too soon, unaware of the benefits.

Whatever your reason, you should get started now – or get back to blogging as the case may be. Here’s some motivating enlightenment that you may find surprising.

Reason # 1 that you aren’t blogging – You don’t realize how huge the benefits are, and how much they may outweigh any monetary or time costs involved.

I think number one may partly the fault of people like me, who have a foot in the marketing arena, and don’t explain the idea in detail.

We tend to tell you how great blogging is, but we don’t tell you why, or better yet, show you. Or we tell you how to get the best results with your blog, but don’t tell you where to start. Let’s talk about some of the basic facts.

If you’ve ever dreamed of going from getting 10 hits a month to getting a few dozen visitors a day from search engines, blogging can make it possible, if you do it right. The structure of a blog, and the fact that most of them automatically generate content feeds, also make them the best food for your friendly neighborhood search engine spider.

If you would like to have visitors come back to your site over and over again, until they buy, you may want to be a blogger. An informative blog that engages your audience shortens the sales cycle. It also creates a courtship period. They can subscribe to your thoughts, see if they like you, even get to know you a little.

People buy from people they like. I don’t remember who said it first, but I’ve learned that it’s the truth.

If your visitors don’t feel like they are getting a personality vibe from you, they are often less likely to buy. Vibe = buy. Remember that, and that blogs make it easy for you to vibe.

If you’d like to create new targeted search engine pages for your site without needing to hand-code a new page, or fire up your HTML editor every time, you may enjoy blogging. You log in to your blog admin panel, type your thoughts, proofread, press publish.

Presto. You’re a blogger.

If you’d like free one-way links back to your site that contain your lucrative keywords, blogging helps with that too.

Even if you’ve made a mess of your SEO efforts, or been the unsuspecting victim of an algorithm change, as long as you aren’t banned by a search engine, blogging can help bring you back into top results. Because they have a search engine friendly architecture, and can make use of your keywords automatically, without being gratuitous, they are an easy way to get into a search engine and stay in.

Reason #2 That you aren’t blogging – You think it’s hard and expensive.

Granted, especially if you’re busy, or have a medium sized to large business, it may be in your best interest to hire one of the few consultants that works on these types of issues.

But if you’re a small business owner or home business owner with an online element, you can get away with firing up a free blog and paying for an inexpensive custom template if you can’t install one on your own. Most blog consultants will do all the keyword research, etc for you, so that all you’ll have to do is log in and blog.

Many of the most common blog software systems are free or inexpensive, especially when weighed against the cost of only using paid methods to attract visitors.

Reason #3 That you aren’t blogging – You don’t think of yourself as a writer.

Not only can you get away with a few paragraphs, you don’t have to write in professional-speak, or use industry jargon to blog. By nature, blogging is done in a casual, conversational tone.

And your blog posts don’t have to be long article-type entries like mine are. I’m used to writing articles, and I’m just naturally verbose. My audience is used to my mini-brain dumps, just as your blog readers will likely be happy with, or adapt to, whatever your style is. Your audience will be thrilled with a few paragraphs every day, as long as they’re informative and consistent.

So take the plunge. Start blogging today. If you’re already a blogger and didn’t see the benefits the first time around, try making it a part of your routine – and have a little fun. Give it time to work for you.

You’ll be glad you did.

Tinu is a web site promotion specialist who writes about many different ways to get more visitors to your web site. If you want better search engine results, more visitors and return traffic she invites you to take a free ecourse on blogging at http://RescueYourBlog.com .

Why would you use Blogs instead of a web site for your online business?

What’s wrong with using a web site for conducting your online business? How can Blogs help and why should I need one anyway?

Combining a website and a Blog however offer a number of superior advantages in terms of traffic generation, marketing and efficiency which a stand-alone website cannot do.

(a) Automatic push-button publishing.

Blogs are the easiest and cheapest way to have an online presence. For example, if you’re using Blogger, your Blog is hosted free by Blogger. Blogs allow you to publish your website without the need to know about any technical or programming issues such as HTML, FrontPage, FTP and so on.

Blogs provide a simple editorial interface. All you need to do is write your content, and publish it just by clicking the ‘publish’ button in most cases, and you’re done.

(b) Fosters relationship building, trust and ’stickyness’

Unlike websites, which are static, Blogs allows interaction between you and your readers. Blogs have a commenting function, and if turned on, it allows readers and visitors to post their comments, thoughts or opinions to a particular article you have written.

Constant interaction with your readers builds a feeling of community and ’stickyness’ factor. You can then recommend products more easily to them, and they would be more ready and willing to accept your product or services.

(c) Increase search engine ranking

Almost every major search engine has a software program called a ‘bot’ that searches or ’spiders’ websites online to find new content which it can then bring back to update the search engine databases.

Basically what this means is the more frequently you update your site, the more frequently the search engine ‘bot’ will visit your site, and this helps to boost your search engine rankings.

If you make regular postings to your Blog, you can be sure that search engines will visit your Blog again and again.

You can then place links of your other websites in your Blog and these will get indexed quickly by the search engines.

Of course you could also update your existing web site with new content, but you would have to go through a more technical process, that of using an HTML editor or FrontPage and uploading through FTP and so on.

(d) Free listing in Google, Yahoo and MSN

The traditional way of getting your website listed in these three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN is slow and inefficient.

A listing in Yahoo directory alone would cost you $299.

However, with the inclusion of RSS feeds by these search engines, you can now gain a ‘backdoor’ listing which is legal and free. If you have an RSS feed, you can have it included in Yahoo and MSN and your website will be immediately listed in these major search engines within 24 hours!

My videos shows you the step-by-step process on how to do this.

e) Syndication Power

The most powerful feature of a Blog is its syndication function. Blogs can be turned into RSS feeds, and most Blogging service providers have this built-in function.

It is just a matter of turning it on from within your account.

Once it’s turned into an RSS feed, you can syndicate your Blog contents by:

? Submitting to the major RSS directories and search engines like Yahoo and MSN, gaining free exposure and free traffic

? Allow other website owners to publish your feed on their sites, again, getting free traffic you otherwise will not have

? Gain new readers, subscribers and potential clients by letting them subscribe to your RSS feed via a newsreader

http://www.marketing-rampage-with-blogs-and-rss.com

Brandon is the author of the “Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS” Videos. He’ll show you businesses strategies to getting more highly responsive visitors and more sales to your website without additional advertising costs, as well as increasing search engine rankings and obtaining quick listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN, by using Blogs and RSS.

There is lively debate about the republishing of RSS feeds on other sites. The argument surrounds the use of RSS feeds from the feed publisher being used in an unfair manner. This includes republishing the entire articles and not displaying sufficient credit to the original source.

Before we go into the details you may want to brush up on your understanding of RSS. This will help you fully appreciate and fully understand the issues involved.

I am glad this conversation is happening now as it needs to be made clear what fair use of RSS feeds actually means. There may be webmasters who are republishing RSS feeds in all innocence at the moment not realising the furore that is going on around them with regards to their republishing activities. I would like to help clear up any misunderstandings that surround RSS republishing.

Being an RSS publisher myself who is considering republishing other authors RSS feeds I would like to make sure I am not treading on any toes. I am basing the following RSS republishing etiquette on the good practice that Rok Hrastnik has enthused.

If you wish to republish an RSS feed then you should first consult the publisher with your intentions. This would be an email to the author stating how you wish to reuse their feed and the page or pages the feed will be republished on and the attributions you will make. You will need to clarify some points. If the authors feed contains ads then will they be republished? Will you be monetizing the authors work by placing ads on your republished page? To avoid conflict these issues need to be sorted out.

The general guidelines Rok Hrastrnik has provided state that the article title must link back to the original article. If the RSS feeds contains a complete article only an excerpt, Rok suggests 100 to 200 words, can be republished. A link should be provided to the article source, the website of the original publisher.

Further to this it is suggested that no archives are kept on the republished site and no full articles are used. I would suggest permission is sought from the original author if you wish to keep an archive on your site.

You can follow this discussion further at PR meets the WWW and Micro persuasion.

Allan is the webmaster at NewsNiche an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.