Why does blogging work to reel in web site visitors? Read on…

1. Search engines LOVE blogs. Blogs are usually focused on a particular niche, so they have lots of subject-specific content that’s well-organized. This makes it easy for the spiders to read the content because there’s usually less graphics, scripts, flash, etc.

2. Content tends to be updated more frequently than web sites, which the search engines love. If content doesn’t change very often, they tend to visit less often. Search engines also like that there are lots of links because they index sites by following the links.

3. There’s no special programming or HTML skills needed so if you love to write and are an expert in your field, you can be up and running in no time. Before you know it, you’ll have lots of web site visitors reading your articles with anticipation.

4. Subject-specific articles generate tons of traffic! Let’s face it. Many of us publish Ezines in order to get people to visit our web sites, and if we publish the articles on our website, we gain an even better chance of people finding us.

5. Blogs accomplish the same thing, only it’s much easier to write your article and publish it immediately than it is to write content for an Ezine, format it, test it, and then publish it, only to find out that half of the emails were blocked by spam filters!

6. Increase your subscriber list. You can subscribe to blogs in the same way you subscribe to Ezines. Simply sign up and you’ll receive notices when the content has been updated. Plus, the notices don’t contain HTML, which means that the notification will be more likely to get past the spam filters.

7. It’s cheap! Many services like Blogger offer it for free. Why spend tons of money creating the perfect web site that needs lots of search engine optimization when you can be up and running with your own blog for free, or at a very small monthly charge? What an inexpensive way of generating traffic!

There you have it. Six good reasons to build your own blog. Now what are you waiting for?

Jean Hanson is a Certified Professional Virtual Assistant. Discover how partnering with a virtual assistant will give you more time to do the things you love to do! For more information about virtual assistance, visit Jean’s website at http://www.VaOfficeSolution.com

Jean is also the author of the eBook, Virtualize Your Business – Secrets to Simplifying, Automating, Organizing, and Virtualizing Your Business. http://www.VirtualizeYourBiz.com

I signed up with four blog exchanges and one traffic exchange. There are quite a few traffic exchanges out there but I found many of them to be, well to put it mildly a waste of time. These exchanges were mostly auto surf exchanges where amusingly enough the visitors were not encouraged to actually look at the sites they visited.

The idea behind the exchanges I chose to test where that you visited other sites and blogs in the network and in exchange the webmasters of other sites visited you. The idea is simple and should be an easy way to bring traffic in. The list of these sites can be found at http://www.blogtonomy.com/blog-and-traffic-exchanges.php

I have been using these sites for several weeks and I think I now have enough data to come to some reasonable conclusions about using exchanges in order to generate traffic to your site.

Does it generate traffic?

You can get traffic pretty much straight away as some of the sites give you some credits for joining, but most of the traffic needs to be generated by you visiting other sites in the network. How much traffic you get will depend on how long you spend visiting other sites, on average I found that you could get about 40 visits in return for about an hours surfing.

The catch

This is probably the easiest and quickest way to get traffic to your site or blog. After looking at the traffic being sent from these sites I noticed that not many of the visitors went beyond the first page. This is not really surprising as, like you, most of the visitors are webmasters trying to generate traffic to there own sites.

I would conclude that as a starting point for getting traffic and for testing new pages on your site then this can be a useful tool. The audience will be mostly untargeted and so probably not interested in what you have to offer and therefore probably the hardest type of visitor entice into making a longer visit or returning for a later visit.

If your site or blog is more targeted towards traffic generation and promotion then you may get a better response from the visitors. I would recommend setting up a landing page especially for the visitors from these sites so you can offer them something they are likely to be interested in. It would be worth investing some of your time in experimenting with this sort of traffic to see if it works for you. You can always dismiss it later if you find it is not working for you.

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.blogtonomy.com/ where I will show you how I am promoting my site.

So why do you blog? Ask yourself this question. If you can’t answer this I can tell you why you blog -

1. You wanted to be famous like the friend of yours getting all the attention? You want people to give you more attention and listen to you more.

2. You are socially disabled and the only contact you have is with the computer. You obviously have not taken a bath in a week or more. And you believe that the only people in existance on the planet are living on the internet.

3. You do not really care what people think about you. You want to drown others in your personal agony. You come up with some thoughtless contradictions that you think others will like to argue with you about.

4. You want to have a say in all things that is happenning around you. You want to talk about what you ate this morning, which side of the bed you got up etc. You have an agitated head that wants to express all the million bits of thoughts that is entering your head.

5. You want to be a self-proclaimed town crier. You think of those eyeballs of people who know you who are constantly looking for important updates about another person they know. You want to be the first to announce a friend’s wedding date that the others know about already. You want to keep the rumour mills turning.

6. You think you are very important in the society. They want your opinions to be read and heard. You want to give profound insights and meaningless thoughts that you feel will affect the society at large.

7. You want to be a writer and you are only practising your skills.

8. You have a lot of time and maybe you are even jobless at the moment.

If you said YES to any one of these and that is the only reason you blog, you probably need to rethink about what you want to do with your blog to put it to better use today.

Now I will tell you the reasons why I blog.

a. A blog is a very important source of information online. We know we are constantly on the lookout for more data to process and blog is an all important source. No denying that. I want to be a source of such useful information.

b. I have a business and I need to promote my business online. If I own my own blog? I can self promote my services to you and because you know me you are probably going to recommend me and refer your friends.

c. I know that Search Engines like contents. Blogs are a great way to get my site noticed by the search engines. Because a blog is fresher than static sites, search engines love to visit blogs to index them. If I talk about my business in my blog and put a lot of keywords related to my business, people are more likely to find me when they search for something in google and they find the link to my business site and visit it. Believe me internet works that way and this alone is a very good reason why you need to have a blog.

d. I want to establish myself as an expert in my field. The more people are going to hear about me and my business, the more likely they are to put their confidence in me.

e. Blogs are a great way to position my company in the eyes of my existing clients. In other words, giving it a more human face.

Here is what Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of server maker Sun Microsystems had to say about blogs after he started his blog himself and found that it was a gold mine. “It’ll be no more mandatory that they have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account,” Schwartz says. “If they don’t, they’re going to look foolish.”

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is considering starting a blog, says a company spokesperson. Filmmaker Michael Moore began a blog on July 4 to promote his controversial new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11.

I blog for a reason, do you???

Joji M John is the CEO of 2edge Solutions http://www.2edge.com, a webdevelopment firm specializing in ecommerce & CMS development. He also owns a number of successful websites.

For more information visit http://www.jojisayz.com

But to really see an impact, more is needed. First of all, be sure to set up your weblog with an XML site feed, allowing for the easy syndication of your blog’s content to third party websites – which in turn generates numerous inbound links to your website, all them relevant to your site’s content, which vastly improves your link popularity.

Then, if you want to make a real splash, submit your articles manually to article submission sites – respected ones – which are easy to find by doing a simple search on the net. Finally, be sure to use your keyphrases, as in this case, search engine optimization, in your article. Update as frequently as possible, and submit to the article submission sites, and don’t forget to ping the RSS feed directories.

A number of RSS feed directories are available – visit geckotribe for a start, and keep searching. You will find places (like this one, for example) which will post your article for free. People are starving for content. So feed them!

Matthew Foster is the President and CEO of ArteWorks Business Class – http://www.arteworks.biz – and has been active in the seo industry since 1995. Mr. Foster regularly optimizes websites for search engines, which appear in the top 10 results within 8-30 days. For more information, please visit ArteWorks.

Blogging allows bloggers to share their expertise and knowledge with a very large audience. Building a loyal audience is something that every small business owner would love to accomplish and bloggers are able to do this by simply sharing their thoughts using their business blogs. Building a community that trusts you and follows your blog updates on a daily basis is one of the key ingredients that hundreds of bloggers are using in their business.

2: Easy To Publish

Blog software is simple to use. With the push of a few buttons you can post your thoughts, link to resources and publish your blog. Blog software companies provide bloggers with all the tools necessary to get started. Bloggers can update their blogs much quicker than a website which usually requires contacting a web designer or uploading yourself.

3: Search Engine Traffic

One of the greatest benefits that bloggers receive is search engine traffic. Search engines love to spider pages that contain quality content and are updated with fresh content on a regular basis. Smart bloggers optimize their blogs by keeping their content focused on a specific niche.

4: Cost Effective

Blogging is a low cost alternative to having a web presence. Blogging has given small business owners the opportunity to create a web presence without the time to learn html or the income to hire a web designer. Blogging is quickly growing with popularity as an inexpensive method to get the name of your business out on the internet. Gone are the days of having to come up with a large investment to create a web presence.

5 Spam Free

With Spam problems and email filters creating a huge challenge for email marketers to publish their newsletters, bloggers are now using blogs as an additional option to communicate with their subscribers. The advantage of using blogs is that you don’t have to worry about spam and email filters because your message will be delivered by using RSS (Really Simple Syndication). You can use these syndicated RSS “feeds” to display the latest news from major newspapers, for example, on your own web site or read them on other sites collecting these feeds. There are special programs and web-based services called “RSS feed readers” or “RSS aggregators” that, given the URL of an RSS feed will fetch the latest headlines periodically and let you read them comfortably and efficiently.

In Closing…

If you are looking for another source of traffic that is cost effective, spam free, search engine friendly, and perfect for building relationships, start publishing your own blog today. Once you get started, you too will experience the secret benefits that bloggers love and enjoy.

Copyright 2007 Benjamin Scott

Benjamin Scott operates a successful internet business working from his home personal computer. Grab a FREE copy of his 15 lesson e-marketing course at: http://www.eazyhomebusiness.com/

This awesome entrepreneurial spirit transmogrified Blogs into what they are today: very powerful marketing weapons that have almost made some other forms of advertising, redundant. It never ceases to surprise me how ingenious people are when it comes to finding new ways to generate cash flow, particularly in web marketing ? what a power-house!! It leaves real-world business for dead (in my opinion).

Traditional safelists are becoming somewhat threadbare. Isn’t it amazing how quickly business changes on the ‘Net, and isn’t it weird how safelist people ‘spin their wheels’ by posting, posting, posting, when most messages go to ‘junk’ in-boxes to be automatically deleted. You can send out a whole lot of messages with safelists, but only a tiny percentage are likely to be actually read by a real person. Maybe that’s why email traffic is threatening to choke the Internet. Because of this, many canny web business people have now shifted to Blogs as their main tool for promotion. Many others, like me – who continue to believe that safelists have a role (when properly used) -have made Blogs a valuable extra facility in their marketing toolboxl.

Blogs have become so popular because they are so very user-friendly for advertising. They are practical, easy to set up and very convenient to use. Keeping content up to date is very easy for webmasters who otherwise would have to spend hours uploading and downloading files. Be warned, however, that setting up a ‘Free’ Blog, will mean you will have a lot of other people’s ads on it (There’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’). It’s always worth paying because, yes, you get what you pay for.

Anyway, There are probably five key methods (and a whole lot more) you can use to ensure that Blogs pump up your web profits.

1. BLOGS ARE MAGNETS FOR SEARCH ENGINES: Go on, get on to Google and, whatever topic you search, you’ll inevitably see that the search engines have thrown up a number of Blogs in the top ten results. This is because Blogs are constantly showing fresh, new and key word friendly content just like your web pages should; that’s a Blog’s very reason for being. Imagine the value to you of having your own Blog pop in the top end of search results. The ubiquitous search engines clamor to highlight fresh, appropriate content ? they love it. Constantly re-newed and freshened Blogs leave stale, ageing (and rarely updated) web sites for dead.

Go on, get on to Google and, whatever topic you search, you’ll inevitably see that the search engines have thrown up a number of Blogs in the top ten results. This is because Blogs are constantly showing fresh, new and key word friendly content just like your web pages should; that’s a Blog’s very reason for being. Imagine the value to you of having your own Blog pop in the top end of search results. The ubiquitous search engines clamor to highlight fresh, appropriate content ? they love it. Constantly re-newed and freshened Blogs leave stale, ageing (and rarely updated) web sites for dead.2. BLOGS LOVE TO LINK TO EACH OTHER: Yes, Blogs love to stick together, creating networking ‘heaven’. Just one link on your Blog could see visitors drop in from all over the place. Wow ? visitors queueing to click your links; how powerful is that for an advertising and traffic generating system. Awesome.

Yes, Blogs love to stick together, creating networking ‘heaven’. Just one link on your Blog could see visitors drop in from all over the place. Wow ? visitors queueing to click your links; how powerful is that for an advertising and traffic generating system. Awesome.3.YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL APPRECIATE REGULARLY HEARING FROM YOU: You see, Blogs today have this great ‘comment’ facility which means your people ? your customers ? can ask you questions and give you valuable feedback almost immediately. This is almost like a ‘chat’ system, and is quicker than email. Forget about having to manipulate your source codes, Blogs make this unnecessary. Blogs have an amazing comment system that allows your customers to immediately post feedbacks and queries. And that’s what service on the net is all about today ? quick responses, dependable advice and getting what you want, when you want. Now. And Blogs can do it.

You see, Blogs today have this great ‘comment’ facility which means your people ? your customers ? can ask you questions and give you valuable feedback almost immediately. This is almost like a ‘chat’ system, and is quicker than email. Forget about having to manipulate your source codes, Blogs make this unnecessary. Blogs have an amazing comment system that allows your customers to immediately post feedbacks and queries. And that’s what service on the net is all about today ? quick responses, dependable advice and getting what you want, when you want. Now. And Blogs can do it.4. PUMP UP YOUR ADSENSE PROFITS: If you’re into Pay Per Click marketing, well Blogs are ideal for you. Then can stimulate even more regular traffic than your basic garden variety web site. Google AdSense, god bless ‘em, even lets Blog owners show as many as three appropriate ads, and these must relate to your theme and content, on their Blog pages. It’s Blogging marvelous!! Here’s the key reason why your Blog should have a ‘niche’, a specific theme, a targeted audience. Take time to give some thought to this when you set up a Blog. What about AdSense? The more visitors ? and they’re likely only dropping in because of what you specifically offer – who click on your Blog’s Adsense ads, the more income you can earn.

If you’re into Pay Per Click marketing, well Blogs are ideal for you. Then can stimulate even more regular traffic than your basic garden variety web site. Google AdSense, god bless ‘em, even lets Blog owners show as many as three appropriate ads, and these must relate to your theme and content, on their Blog pages. It’s Blogging marvelous!! Here’s the key reason why your Blog should have a ‘niche’, a specific theme, a targeted audience. Take time to give some thought to this when you set up a Blog. What about AdSense? The more visitors ? and they’re likely only dropping in because of what you specifically offer – who click on your Blog’s Adsense ads, the more income you can earn.5. BLOGS ARE A DREAM FOR AFFILIATE MARKETERS: Like me, I just bet you are enrolled in more affiliate programs than you can count. The problem is how to continue to promote all of them. ANSWER ? You can easily use Blog ‘reviews’. Simply design each Blog entry around the particular affiliate program you want to focus on that day. Extol the virtues of the program, product, service or what-ever, give good advice about the PROs and the CONs (this objectivity impresses the hell out of potential buyers who are usually pleased with honesty) and include your affiliate link, almost as an after-thought. This is not hard-sell territory. This is the ‘soft-sell’ Most 21st century people run a mile from ‘hard sellers’ but they will take time to listen if they believe you are giving good, solid, valuable advice. Providing such good, valuable info encourages your people to come back for more. Hey, you don’t even need to create an individual page for every affiliate program because Blogging makes this unnecessary. What a time saver!!

Like me, I just bet you are enrolled in more affiliate programs than you can count. The problem is how to continue to promote all of them. ANSWER ? You can easily use Blog ‘reviews’. Simply design each Blog entry around the particular affiliate program you want to focus on that day. Extol the virtues of the program, product, service or what-ever, give good advice about the PROs and the CONs (this objectivity impresses the hell out of potential buyers who are usually pleased with honesty) and include your affiliate link, almost as an after-thought. This is not hard-sell territory. This is the ‘soft-sell’ Most 21st century people run a mile from ‘hard sellers’ but they will take time to listen if they believe you are giving good, solid, valuable advice. Providing such good, valuable info encourages your people to come back for more. Hey, you don’t even need to create an individual page for every affiliate program because Blogging makes this unnecessary. What a time saver!!Whew. Blogs do get me a bit excited. And these tips are only the tip of the iceberg. I am sure you can be creative in the marketing use of your Blogs because they have enormous potential. Just check out the exponential growth of Blogs today and you’ll see what I mean. If you want fresh Blog ideas, all you have to do is cruise through a few of them. Check out what the pros are doing and, do the same. Remember, imitation is the ultimate form of flattery.

Don’t let anyone try to tell you that the bottom is falling out of web marketing. The awesome growth and popularity of Blogs shows that they could not be more wrong.

Happy Blogging!!

Contact Ross Storey with any feedback.
(Here’s Some More Great Blogging Resources)

Ross Storey is an experienced public relations and marketing consultant who has been obsessed with web marketing, web design and the internet for more than a decade.

Become a ‘Super Blogger’

Blog Biz for Beginners

(Copyright © 2007 Ross Storey Please feel free to use this article, so long as you keep this resource box intact)