OK, so you have splashed out on a professional looking website to promote your small business. This will enable people to read about your products and services, so far, so good. My next question is; have you also a blog which prospective clients can read? If you have answered no to this question then this is not so good. In fact you are missing out on a big opportunity and no doubt a number of sales. Your turnover would almost certainly increase if you also had a business blog and in this article I will explain the reasons for this.
Having a website is all well and good but it is basically a number of static pages. You may well be aware of the benefits of adding regular content to your business website however this still does not for go the need for a blog.
A blog is something which you can also have static pages on and should be used in alongside your website. Having just a website or just a blog just is not the same as having both working in conjunction with each other.
You can post content and information to your blog as often as you like, on a daily basis would be most preferential. The visitors to the blog are able to read your posts and can usually see the date that you published them. This will usually lead to visitors returning to the site, some on a daily basis.
All of this enables you to connect with your customer base or potential future clients. You can write about special offers that you currently have available and can delete these offers at any stage. This should, without doubt, lead to additional sales and is also a great way to cut the prices of your products, in an attempt to increase revenue, when sales become a bit slow.
You can also use the blog to link back to your website and as such direct traffic to your main sales pages. The blog should also increase the number of pages that you have within the major search engines and thus should enable more people to read about you small business.
Steve Hill is a webmaster from Birmingham, he has interests in a number of websites including:
stuttering treatment
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If you want to optimize your site, drive more traffic and improve your conversion rate, then the first thing you need to do is work on that Blog! Driving renewed traffic to your site can be very simple. The three things you need to know are be a blogger, tag each post, and optimize them for major search engines. Your blog can be the key to getting your business noticed and appreciated.
Write, Write, Right!
First every good blog has to actually be a blog. This means you need to keep it updated, writing a minimum of once a week. The more you write, the more people will read. Also you want to write interesting and noteworthy articles that will attract readers to your business homepage. Each blog article should have a title because search engines look for a site's information based on the title. Your titles should be clear, have appropriate keywords and engaging. Just like newspaper headlines or magazine covers, your titles must act as a hook for readers.
You should also join social networks like FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn to help promote your blog. Linking your blog to a FaceBook site exposes it to your friends, thereby promoting traffic to your blog and business homepage.
Trafficking in Blogs Is Effective and Legal!
Commenting on blogs you find interesting is also a good way to drive traffic. This gets you known through the blogging community and keeps you in contact with people who could link your blog to their site with widgets or other promotional tools. Some blogs link back to your blog each time you comment. You can do this for your comments boxes as an incentive for others to comment as well. And the more links you have on your site, the better your odds are of showing up on major search engines. Google, for example, gives priority to sites that have more links.
Socialize Your Blog!
Each time you update your blog you should ping it. Pinging a blog allows other bloggers to see that you have new information. You can use programs like WordPress that will automatically ping your article to the ping engine of your choice. Pingoat is a great one.
With every new article you put on your blog, you should tag it on sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati. To maximize your blogs potential with tagging, you should make your articles keyword friendly and ping them as well. Tagging your blog articles makes your blog, and essentially your business, more available to readers and potential clients. These tagging and pinging websites help promote your blog and drive traffic.
Multiply Your Effectiveness!
Another great way to promote your business through the web is to optimize your site for major search engines. Google gives priority to sites with more pages than fewer. By using programs like WordPress, you can expand the number of pages you have on your blog. What WordPress does is make each post viewed by Google as an individual page. Also some posts can appear multiple times for various searches, thereby making them seen as more than one page.
If you follow these tips, your blog will be on its way to working for you and your business. A key to site promotion lies within your blog. So keep your blog updated, fresh and interesting.
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increase trafficIn todays Internet Marketing environment having a Blog is not just a nice to have its becoming essential. More and more people are reading Blogs and they offer great opportunities to promote your products or services. In addition if your Blog becomes popular you can create a good passive income through the adverts that you carry.
As an Internet Marketer if you want to create a really successful blog, there are three main things that you need to concentrate on to get started. Many Internet Marketers make the mistake of thinking that building a successful blog is one of the easiest tasks out there and they couldnt be more wrong! A successful Internet Marketer needs to do more than just set up a blog page to chat about their products. You need to focus on three essential building blocks in order to have a successful Internet Marketing blog. These three building blocks are not enough of themselves to make your Internet Marketing blog successful however they will give you a great start.
Look
The first building block for a successful Internet Marketing blog is The Look. What this means is that your blog should start with an appropriate style. A style which reflects the rest of your online business or at the very least conveys your professionalism. You can begin when you first start your blog. Many blogging software programmes will help you out with the style of your blog. If you are using a blogging programme that is aimed mainly at beginners, you will find that it will offer different templates for you to choose. There will be something for everyone. You can go through the templates to choose which colours you like best for the layout. Experiment with the layouts to see which templates look best on the computer screen and which most readily match the rest of your Internet Marketing sites. You have the option to go back and change the template later if you want to change the look of your Internet Marketing blog. Make sure that if you are creating your own Internet Marketing blog, without using a pre-created template that you make it look as professional as possible. You can even hire a professional to do the job for you if you wish. The more professional your blog looks, the more seriously your readers and potential customers will take your posts.
Content
The content of your Internet Marketing blog is the second key building block you will need for a successful blog. While you can choose to create posts that have no direction or purpose, you will find that when you post interesting commentary or short information filled articles that your traffic will increase. Although you may think it is interesting, most readers will not enjoy reading about your day to day Internet Marketing activities, unless you make them into humorous stories.
It should also be noted that the more content you have on your site, the more successful your site will be. It is basically a numbers game at this point. The more you post, the more chances you will have that one of your posts will attract the eye of someone searching for a related topic.
Advertisements
The third building block is advertising. Internet Marketing Bloggers can make a steady passive income using advertising on their blogs. The trick is to have a good mixture of ads and content however. If you fill your blog with ads and have no content for readers, they will be distracted and not visit your site again. A good rule to remember is that you should never have more than two or three ads per blog page. This is an important rule to remember. You should not overwhelm you readers with ads. You should only present them so that the readers can further explore them if they wish. Dont use flashing ads or other bold ads that will annoy your readers. Choosing the right type of advertising program is part of it as well. In fact I would go as far as to say that the best way to advertise is by using Googles Adsense Programme which will place ads relevant to your Internet Marketing activities as long as you talk about them in your content! You have the option with Google Adsense to filter out your direct competitors which is an added bonus.
Dedication
The most important building block of a great Internet Marketing blog is dedication. You must be willing to be dedicated to your blog. You have to put in the time and energy to get positive results. Even with the other components in place, unless you take the time to update your posts on a regular basis, you will not be getting optimum results. Dedication can help a lot. It can mask the fact that you are a beginner and allow you to create a profit producing and functional Internet Marketing blog. No matter how little experience you have simple dedication can take you a long way and you are learning all the time whilst building up your Internet Marketing activity. You can have a great blog as long as you take the time to commit to your latest Internet Marketing project.
Paul Duxbury offers more advice on Blogging for Internet Marketers at http://blogging-for-internet-marketers.blogspot.com
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