1 Why Blog? 3 Basic Benefits of Business Blogging

Does your business website have to include a blog? No, it doesn't. In fact, if you've tried business blogging in the past and failed to keep it up, then you already know some of the drawbacks of blog maintenance.

The truth is, blogging takes time and effort that you may not have available, especially if you are a sole proprietor or home based business owner. Furthermore, there is no blogging field of dreams; just because you build it, doesn't mean anyone is going to come read it. So the logical question is, "why blog"?

I'll give you three reasons:

Attract social media attention

From sports fans to political junkies, more and more of your customers are using social media to keep up on the things they care about. These virtual community members routinely share information with each other - like blog posts. A single social media mention from an influential member of your niche can dramatically multiply your website traffic and generate sales.

Improve SEO

Organic search traffic (visitors directed to your website by search engines) is perhaps the most sought after prize in Internet marketing. However, optimizing your site for search can be a real challenge; especially if your website is fairly small. (Fewer webpages means less room for keywords.)

Maintaining a business blog exponentially expands your optimization possibilities. Each new post can target a different keyword or words. Over time you'll end up adding dozens, even hundreds of search engine optimized pages to your business website.

Build brand loyalty

Blogging allows you to develop rapport with the online community. In particular, the comments section of your blog can be used to hold extended conversations, gather feedback, and engage your customer base. Engaged customers are loyal customers, and loyal customers are profitable customers.

Furthermore, blogging provides a platform from which you can teach the public about your products and services. It's an opportunity to showcase your authority and expertise, which is reassuring to prospects and established customers alike.

As for those aforementioned drawbacks, if you understand the benefits of business blogging, but truly don't have the time to write, consider hiring a ghost blogger. By writing your blog posts for you a ghost blogger allows you to enjoy all the benefits of business blogging without any of the hassle.

1 The Best SEO Advice For Bloggers

Blogs are by nature very search engine friendly, but there are some things you can do to make sure you rank well in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Here's my best SEO advice for bloggers. Take some of these suggestions, implement them and see if you don't start noticing an increase in traffic and readers.

Do Your Keyword Research

Start by finding out exactly what your potential readers are searching for. You can use free keyword tools like the Google keyword one, or the free version of Wordtracker. Personally, I like using the paid Wordtracker, but either option will do.

Enter one of the main keywords around your blog into the search tool and start putting together a list of keywords you can then use in your main blog title, category names and of course the titles of individual blog posts.

Optimize Your Blog's Title

Take a look at your keyword list and find a general keyword that best describes what your blog is about. You want to find a keyword that gets quite a bit of traffic. For one of my sites for example, my main blog keyword is "affiliate marketing blog". Use the keyword as early as possible in your blog title.

Install Permalinks

Having your keywords in the URL also helps. An easy way to do this is to set your permalinks to be the name or title of the post. In WordPress you use the %postname% token to do this. You only need to set this up one time and from here on out each post URL will be the name of your post.

Use All-In-One SEO

Install and use the All-in-One SEO plugin (again if you are using WordPress to manage your blog). It allows you to include a title, description and keywords. Make sure you include your keyword for each post in this section.

Take Advantage Of Tags

Tags not only make it easy for readers to search your blog, they can help with search engine rankings as well. Use your keyword as a tag for each post. I also like to include additional tags with similar keywords as well as singular or plural versions (for example "affiliate blog" and "affiliate blogs").

Set Up A Ping List

Last but not least, make sure you set up a good ping list on your blog. This will allow search engine "spiders" to quickly find, index and rank your new content.

1 Why 99% of People Fail at Making Money With Blogging

There are hundreds (and maybe even thousands) of information products and books available online and offline trying to teach people how to make money with blogging. It is a very small percentage of people who make any money with blogging however, and in this article I am going to look at the three reasons why 99% of people fail to make any money with blogging. I am also going to look at the two simplest and most effective ways to make money with blogging.

Let take a look at the reasons why most people fail first:

Reason 1: No Technical Ability

A lot of blogging experts talk about "making money from multiple blogs". Managing one good blog at the best of time is very time-consuming and difficult to do, and as a result the best way to make money with lots of blogs (some times hundreds) to turn them into "auto-blogs". Auto-blogs are essentially little blogs that run on autopilot and post content from RSS feeds you plug into them.

Creating, managing and using auto-blogs can be fiddly, time-consuming and difficult for a beginner. On top of that, a lot of these kinds of blogs are not of great quality and Google other and other search engines are clamping down on people using these methods. In other words, it is very difficult to make money with this method, and I don't recommend it. You need to have a technical skill-set to do it, and even if you did, it is still not the best way to make money with your blog these days.

Reason 2: Lack of Proper Planning

A lot of people go into blogging without any kind of plan whatsoever. I have actually seen beginners to blogging go out and create three or four absolutely appalling blogs. They put no effort into them, only put in the bare minimum effort and then they make a few half-baked posts on their blogs. As a result, the blogs don't get any traffic, and when they do get some traffic, the visitor soon gets bored of the terrible design and content.

The beginner makes no money from their efforts and promptly gives up. You need a plan for this kind of business model and you have got to stick to it.

Reason 3: Giving Up Early

Because people don't see a good or quick return from their efforts, very often they give up very early in their blogging journey. Far too often, people will do less than the minimum, and get cross when they don't see any results. It's crazy! A lot of the time, if people had a plan and stuck to it with some consistency, they would see results!

We have taken a look at the three main reasons why people don't make money with blogging, so now lets take a look at the two ways you can make money with blogging.

Method 1

Focus on just one blog. Focus it around a topic (or just around yourself) and write good quality content that people will ENJOY reading. Look at other blogs in your niche that you enjoy reading and look at the quality and length of the posts. Make sure you match that quality and better it!

Stay consistent and focused. Do an hour to two hours work on the blog every day. You don't always have to be posting content. You could be spending the time promoting your blog. You can promote your blog very easily with blog commenting (communicating with other bloggers) guest blog posts and having a link to your blog in your signature file on a forum you contribute to regularly.

Once you have built up a stream of regular traffic to your blog (around 1000+ a month) you can then start to look at monetizing your blog with some adverts. You can sell advertising space directly to people, or use an online advertising network. You could also suggest relevant products to your readers in your post and use an affiliate link so you get a commission if they purchase the product on the strength of your recommendation.

Finally, make sure you build an email list on your blog so you can update people when you have made a new post. Once you have over 2000 subscribers on your email list, you might even be able to start sending out affiliate email promotions to make some more money. Never spam your list or your blog though. Ultimately this method is all about building a brand online, and you don't ever want to do anything to harm your brand or your readers.

Method 2

If you are able to build a blog, then you can use blog software like WordPress and blogger to build mini-sites very easily and quickly. You can set up multiple blogs and monetize them using affiliate links and content. In fact, it is very easy to get these small mini-sites ranked at the top of Google very quickly, bring you a flood of free traffic.

All you need to do is build a number of these sites, with a few pages of content on them, and then get a very small amount of back-links to them. Before you know it, they will be ranking in the search engines in no time and people will be clicking your affiliate links and making you money!