Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The Philosophy Of Why Blogging And Publishing Content Online Is So Important And Profitable

The blogging experience is about not only putting your thoughts on the web, but hearing back from and connecting with other like-minded folks.

Most people surfing the Internet are looking for information. In other words, most people are not actively seeking to buy a product and nearly everyone expects to get the information for free.

Speaking specifically about the market place of people who are "interested" in having an online home business and/or generating income from the web, most of these people want to find good information about the subject first.

Therefore, by becoming a provider of trustworthy information about online home businesses, legitimate work at home opportunities and ways to generate income online, positions you as the source for what people are actually looking for in the first place.

Then, when people find your information and get engaged in the articles, they will naturally find the links that point to your sales page and visit them. Now, they have already been pre-sold and have more trust in the link to your sales page because they have already benefited by reading the free information provided in the article on your blog!

Also, blogs are the most search engine friendly Internet publishing tool in existence. This means that the pages of your blog can start being indexed by the search engines almost immediately and some of your blog content pages will start showing up in the free listings of the search engines when people search for various keywords. Therefore, adding quality content to your blog on a regular basis can generate free targeted traffic to your website potentially forever.

Publishing a blog allows you to instantly create new content-rich web pages. These new pages can be linked to from the home page of your current website and/or promoted separately. By creating additional content-rich website pages and promoting them from your home page or through other means, you will be accomplishing two important things:

1) You will provide more value for your website visitors. This increases the "stickiness" of your website making people stick around longer and ultimately trust you more. On the Internet, trust translates to profits!

2) Search engines love fresh content created through blogs. By publishing your own blog and adding fresh content to it on a regular basis, you will attract the attention of the major search engines who will list your website in their directories for free. As soon as you have pages of your blog in the search engines, you will start attracting free qualified traffic to your site without paying a dime for it. Imagine running a large and comprehensive Google Adwords campaign without paying anything for it. That is exactly what you can accomplish by publishing your own blog!

Anytime you have some news to share about your business, it is a great idea to use your autoresponder to let your subscribers know about it. You could even link your autoresponder to your blog, so that each time you post information on your blog your subscribers are notified by email. This type of active relationship building can make a huge impact on your business. The more you interact with your subscribers, the more they will trust you and want to do business with you!

With a blog, the publishing possibilities are only limited by your own imagination. The point to realize is that, as a blog publisher, you have just unlocked a huge window of opportunity for yourself!

About the Author:
Cynthia Minnaar works from home online and invites you to visit http://www.cyns-home-biz.com for ways to generate income online. Visit http://www.cyns-home-biz.com/pips.html to start your own web income generating website complete with 400 day pre-written email autoresponder campaign.
Added: 02 Nov 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/41258.html

Saturday, August 18, 2007

How to Find a Niche For Your Blog

It is important to realize that your choice of a niche can have a significant influence on the success or failure of your new blog.

Deciding on a theme can be a daunting task. What exactly are you going to write about? Your niche needs to be a popular topic that many people are interested in.

If you are going to blog about yourself, then you better have a very interesting life, or you will have difficulty keeping your readers coming back for more. You should choose a topic that will make it comparatively easy to grow your readership and build a strong following.

Since many bloggers write about their favorite subjects, it’s not a bad idea to start brainstorming by writing down a list of your hobbies, interests, and any areas of professional expertise. Now try to determine a niche you can target within one of those areas.

Should you blog about automobiles in general, or the latest sports cars? If you choose too narrow a theme then you may struggle to come up with regular, fresh content. And if you choose a topic that’s too general your readers may be confused by a jumble of seemingly unrelated posts.

You might consider niches within the following general topic areas which have proven to be popular for blogging:

• Automobiles

• Computers & Information Technology

• Digital Cameras

• Gadgets

• Music

• News

• Photography

• Politics

• Shopping

If you plan to use Pay-Per-Click advertising to get traffic to your blog, then remember also that the hottest topics might have the highest pay-per-click fees.

You can sometimes get great niche ideas by browsing at Blog directories and sites like Google Blog Search: http://blogsearch.google.com

Since it is so time-consuming trying to com up with the ‘perfect’ niche idea, many bloggers and webmasters have turned to specialized niche discovery tools. I particularly recommend Online Gold Finder and NicheTopics.

With Online Gold Finder you can uncover profitable, undiscovered online markets with just a couple of clicks. Read more about Online Gold Finder at: http://www.moneyforblogging.com/goldfinder.htm

NicheTopics is quite handy in a different way. You get to use some great research that’s already been completed by an expert. It is a ready-to-use report on 109 unique, untapped niches. Read more about NicheTopics: http://www.moneyforblogging.com/nichetopics.htm

The tools above are not free but consider for a moment. If you are planning – or would even like - to make some money from your blog, then it will be worthwhile to start off with a well-researched niche.

If a particular tool uncovers a good niche that pays an additional $5 a day, it will pay for itself inside the first month!

Don’t forget, it will be very difficult to change the theme and niche of your blog later. So invest some time wisely during your planning stage.

You will be off to a strong start in building a successful blog.

About the Author:
Mike Seddon is a writer, entrepreneur, and webmaster. He is the author of the popular e-book, ‘How to Build a Money Making Blog’, available from www.MoneyForBlogging.com
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

6 Things You Must Do If You Want To Have An Effectively Branded Blog

The term blogging has recently found its way into the standard Internet terminology. While most people don't have a blog, or don't even know the first thing about blogging, they have heard of the term and have at least a vague idea of what it means. If you decide to venture into the world of blogging, there are some things you must do to increase your chances of making your blog more successful. Most of these things are common sense, but some of them may be new to a first-time blogger.

1. Identify the Target Market for Your Blog You should focus on one topic area, or related topic areas for your blog. If your blog wanders too much in many different directions, it becomes a general discussion blog, and you risk losing the more motivated readers. For example, if your target market of interest is travel, then you would want to focus your blog on topics related to travel. You could broaden your topics to include adventure travel, cruises, all-inclusives, hotels, etc., however the more focused you are in your topics (if you just stick with cruises), the more effective your blog will be in terms of branding you as an expert about cruises, and the more responsive your readers will be to your cruise related posts.

2. Give the Readers to Your Blog What They Want Unless your blog is set up to just display your random streams of consciousness, the readers to your blog are going to want valuable and timely information that is accurate. If you are making statements about policies or current events, you should back them up with links to the sources you used to make those statements. It is also important to keep the reader interested by giving your own personal insights, or giving a new way to look at current events. Putting your own personality into your blog is essential and will keep your readers interested in what you have to say.

3. The More Creative Your Blog, The Better Be creative within reason of course. However with so many blogs out there today, it's now more difficult to have your blog stand out from the rest. Your blog must have personality and depth to keep people's interest. Also realize that your blog will not appeal to everyone, and that is OK. Your blog is not meant to appeal to everyone, that is why you first went through the step of determining your target market and targeting your blog to those readers.

Read full article at thewebmarketingblog.com

About the Author:
B Hopkins
For more information visit thewebmarketingblog.com
Added: 01 Nov 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/41163.html