Kick Start Your Internet Online Home Based Business With Blogging

Short description

Blogging has been used for some years as a platform for individuals to record chronological publication of comments and thoughts on the web. They usually include philosophical reflections, opinions on the Internet and social or political issues. This article explains how one could go beyond this to capitalise the strength of blogging to enhance one’s Internet business.

A weblog, or more popularly known as “blog”, is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.

The popularity of blog is gaining momentum globally with each passing month. A recent survey conducted by Comscore.com shows the following findings:

1) 50 million of the population in the USA visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005

2) This indicates an increase of about 45% compared to First Quarter of 2004.

3) An average blog visitor spends 23 hours per week online while an average Internet user spends only 13 hours online.

4) Blog visitors are 11% more likely than the average Internet users to have incomes of $75,000 or more.

5) Blog visitors are 30% more likely to buy products or services online.

Anybody thinking of starting an online venture, would be silly not to recognise the importance of blogging being one of the best tools of Internet marketing.

Blogging is a perfect way for the average person to make money online without going through all the troubles and frustration of learning how to set up a website and be an efficient internet marketer.

Let's now talk about nich products. Why do you need a nich product? And what has this to do with “blogging”? You may ask. It is because your online business has little hope of succeeding if you're going head to head with the big boys. As a small Internet entrepreneur, you can never hope to compete with the big boys in terms of the power of pricing strategy and advertising. But you can be successful by finding niche markets or niche products that you seldom find at your local mall in oder to stay away from the empowering presence of the big guys.

Niche market basically is a market with a significant amount of interest online that does not encounter the same competition as in other regular products. You can easily create a niche market based on any topics including even your own hobbies, e.g. gardening, guitar, tropical fish, D.I.Y etc. As long as the topic is being searched for online, you would have a great opportunity of making some profit through adding ads to your blog and making some effort in promoting your targeted affiliate programs and products.

Many internet marketing newbies opt for blogs to set up their niche markets because as beginners, they can very easily add pages, images, banners, downloads, ebooks etc to their blogs. Unlike the regular websites, they do not need to worry about having to understand HTML (the website design language)!

Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that is free because you could create your blog almost immediately at no cost compared to the setting up of a conventional website.

Putting information in your blog to help establishing your presence in the Web is now a growing phenomenon. Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to enhance the visibility of your products and services.

With the continuing improvement in software technology, publishing, introducing plug-ins, banners, pictures etc to create a fun and interesting “website” has become a breeze even to those retirees with old and rusty brains.

The more content you add to your blog, the more traffic you get. And you can add these materials almost on a daily basis.

You could get high ranking search engine placement for many internet marketing terms just by designing your posts around certain targeted keywords. This phenomenon is more prominent when handling niche markets due to the lack of competition. Free articles could be easily obtained from many article directories in the web and posted to your blogs for the benefits of your visitors.

There’s almost no limit to what you could and want to do with your blog. You can include your ideas, opinions, expertise in your field of work, resumes, home recipes, pictures, audio or video clips, e-books, poetry, products, services, consultations etc., etc.

What are the main differences between a blog and a website then? You may ask.

Most websites are relatively permanent with only occasional updating. With blogs, you could post any new content almost on daily basis. Also, websites are usually less personal as far as their relationship with the visitors is concerned.

How do you start your first step to set up a blog? There are many host services providers you could join. Among the most popular are Blogger.com and LiveJournal.com. You could start with Blogger.com which many newbies find serving their needs just perfectly.

With Blogger.com, posting your web content is like a breezy walk in the park. Photographs of your produces etc, along with any text, could be uploaded to your blog right away with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Another facility you could use is Audioblogger that enables audio posting to your current blog site with any phone at any time from any place. It is not only effective but also easy and fun. You call a given number, record a post, then your blog is updated with an audioblogger icon and a link to your recorded audio. Your message in your own voice is instantly posted! The beautiful part of it all is the fact that this is totally free of charge!

Blogging has been used for some years as a platform for individuals to record chronological publication of comments and thoughts on the web. Now we know how one could go beyond this to capitalise the strength of blogging to enhance one’s Internet business.

This article is permitted for reprinting on condition that the content of the resource box below “About The Author” is left intact.

About the Author:
Sung-Liang Woon (John Woon) is a Rubber and Latex Consultant with about 30 years of experience. He enjoys writing, lecturing, travelling, taichi, playing flamenco guitar and singing. Check this fantastic website to find out how he has ventured into Internet business: www.PlugInProfitSite.com/main-9747 Visit his website www.johnwoon.com and take a tour at his Blogs: www.blogwithjohnwoon.blogspot.com and lowpricepharmacy.blogspot.com
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 3

Optimizing your blog for fun and profit can be a daunting task. There are secret tricks of the trade that separate newbies from techies but that does not mean you cannot do some of it yourself. This article is one of a series that lifts the curtain on this shadowland of optimization.

In Part 2 of this series, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we're going to explore further into linking strategies and how to determine and obtain "high quality" links. We're also going to talk briefly about Google's PageRank system.

First, let's examine a regular link. It's a piece of text. It can also be an image that links to your blog but, for our example, we are using text.

Some of the factors that matter most are:

1) The address which it links to

2) The text of the link

3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let's analyze this information one by one.

You naturally want the link to link to your blog but to which page of your blog? Do you want to link to an individual post or to your blog home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to point to your main page instead of individual posts because individual posts tend to be very time-sensitive. One of my blogs, on News and Commentary, is a good example of this. Usually posts are outdated within hours or days of posting.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword.

Let's say your blog is about "technological gadgets" and another site has a link that says "Miss USA Pageant" and links to your blog. Doesn't make much sense, right? You want a lot of links to your site that contain the terms "technological" or "gadget" to greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. You see, the links from other similar sites with your keywords is what the search engines read. The more accurate the keywords of the sites linking to you, the better you will rank in the search engines. Hence, it is essential to put some thought to requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google's PageRank. It's basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on Google.com/technology/.

It is claimed that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google's robots will visit the website to index it. It is also claimed that the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google's search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank might bring you many benefits.

Now, there is much debate among webmasters about PageRank. Some webmasters say it really doesn't make that much difference. They are half right. Page Rank, in itself, is not the key to worry about. The actual power of search engines to affect your blog's visibility is in the keywords of your blog. When people do a search, using your keywords, you will automatically get a high PageRank if your keyword combination is unique and a low-competition keyword or phrase.

Remember this: Page Rank is only a side effect of our real goal which is to get people onto your blog. People do not search according to Page Rank they search with keywords they type into the search box. If your keywords are poorly thought out you will not rank at all.

Your blog will start with no PageRank at all if Google has not indexed your blog. Once Google's robots find your blog, through links on other sites, your blog will start with a PageRank of 0 (zero) then, depending on the PageRank (keywords) of the referring page, your blog PageRank will also rise. The referring page is the website/blog that is linking back to your blog. Google will find your link on their page and follow it back to your blog. Simple, eh?

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targeted visitors to your blog, who are interested in your niche, thus enabling search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank you higher in search engine results.

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.

About the Author:
Jim DeSantis is a 15 year broadcast News veteran. For all Parts of this 6 Part Series and lots of Free Resources go to Jim's blog at http://on-line-tribune-you-can-blog-too.blogspot.com
Added: 07 Jan 2007
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/47267.html

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 2

In Part 1 of this series we optimized your blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we inserted into your blog. This is called onpage optimization. Onpage optimization affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, don't skip it as every little bit helps when you're competing for search engine rankings!

Now, we are moving to offpage search engine optimization. These are factors that are not inserted into your blog but affect your search engine rankings greatly. There are many offpage factors. I will cover the major ones in this article.

The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog. These are links that point back to your blog from other locations/websites on the web.

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, keeping to our theme, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites, when you have a tech blog, would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like SWAT storming a meth lab.

Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for it. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information, chances are the webmaster of the site you want to get a backlink from will link to your blog to get the information you are providing.

Let's talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to link to your blog. We are discussing this based on the presumption that your blog is really content rich and offers high quality information. The most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster and request a link back. Here's how.

First, let's look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that your are targeting. In this case, let's search for "technological gadgets". The first few results will likely be commercial sites, so don't bother asking. We are looking for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Seems like www.gizmodo.com would be a good option!

A word of caution - stay away from Link Farms or Reciprocal Linking sites. You don't want hundreds of links overnight. This will be seen as spam and you know what happens, right? La-La Land for your blog!

So, compose an email to the webmaster of www.gizmodo.com (whose email address you can find on the site). Start by stating how you came across their site, i.e., "looking for gadget information, I came across your site". Do NOT say "looking for link partners."! Tell them how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really good about their site. Take some time and look over their site and maybe make a comment on a particular article or feature that you like and you think your readers might like it too.

Then, suggest that so-and-so content on your own blog will be a good fit to their site's content, as well. Ask that you be allowed to put a link on your blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to forge a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and your blog.

This is very important - all your emails, no matter to whom they are being sent, should have a link to your blog in the signature of the email! This means that everyone and anyone getting an email from you will see your blog address and this can mean even more traffic. This also gives webmasters an easy way to check out your blog to see if it's worth linking to. Make it easy for them!

In your email message you can even suggest what your link should say - "Your Source for TechnoGadgets"- as an example.

Along the way, you will find people who will not even respond to your email. Forget about them and move on. Remove their links from your blog to their site if they have not responded to your email within two weeks. You can set up a folder in your email program to store your link requests so you can go back and check in two weeks or so. But, really, if they do not contact you within two weeks, forget them. There are plenty of quality sites who will link to you.

Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up and, before long, you should have quite a few good sites linking to you. In the next article, we'll explore more advanced offpage factors and ways to improve upon them!

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.

About the Author:
Jim DeSantis is a 15 year broadcast News veteran. For all Parts of this 6 Part Series and lots of Free Resources go to Jim's blog at http://on-line-tribune-you-can-blog-too.blogspot.com
Added: 07 Jan 2007
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/47266.html