Marketing With Your Blog, Build Online Income

Blogging is a means of marketing online. Blogging has become popular for internet marketers and service providers. Blogs perform well in search engines, they’re easy to promote, and they can offer very sticky content. If you blog often, and you’re good at what you do, you will develop a following of readers who subscribe to your RSS feed and read your content on a regular basis.

Blogging offers multiple selling opportunities – from text links woven throughout the content to image ads like banners you strategically place in between blog posts. The sidebar can also be utilized as affiliate or direct sales revenue space.

If you decide to create a blog make sure that you have time to devote to your blog. Posting content in your blog regularly is essential for search engine spiders to index your pages and rank them as well as giving your readers fresh valuable information regarding your niche. Every time you make a keyword rich post you might want to ping your site to start acquiring traffic.

Write related material to your niche and remember to give your readers quality information with good value so that you will earn the respect of readers and they will regard you highly, return to your blog and recommend your blog, word of mouth is the best. Your readers want to read information related to your niche. If you’re running a blog about hiking the Appalachian Trail, at least 75% of your posts should be related to hiking the Appalachian Trail. Preferably 100%, most of your posts should be on target with your niche.

If you decide that a blog is right for your business make sure that you research your domain name and host your blog with a good hosting company that has an easy to understand interface. You will have to understand the basics of html.

There are other alternatives if you decide to outsource all of the technical aspects. Just keep in mind that when you outsource you leave someone else in complete control of your business.

Seth Godin and Tom Peters on Blogging

Why A Wordpress Blog Makes Cents For Small Businesses

A Wordpress blog is a strategic and cost effective approach for small business owners to obtain an online presence with little effort so that implementing marketing strategies becomes the main focal point.

Wordpress is free open source software that enables small business owners a professional online presence. Open source simply means that programmers worldwide are adding functionality and creative themes to enable you as a business owner to easily create a one of a kind look blog for free or a very small fee.

There are over 1000 themes to choose from at Wordpress with over 6000 plug-ins that enable functionality from search engine optimization, on-site analytics to instant payment processing. A great majority of the themes and plug-ins are free or of very little cost, most programmers ask for a donation and appropriately so.

Wordpress provides complete autonomy as well as having 100% power over content management with no html, css experience or having to hire a website manager and leaving them in control of your site.

As a blog owner you own a piece of virtual real estate that is easily monetized and may be sold once a reputation and profitable business is built. For example Zapatos started 10 years ago utilized a huge customer service campaign to build trust and was sold recently to Amazon for over 800 million dollars.

With the event of social networking as well as growing consumer confidence a rare and tremendous opportunity is available for a small business. This opportunity has never been available before and don’t think large companies aren’t taking advantage. For example it’s estimated that Dell made over 2 million dollars over its twitter stream alone.

Within the last few years marketing online has changed dramatically. This makes it a perfect time for savvy small business owners to take advantage of free advertising. When was the last time you saw an ad for a free billboard, TV commercial or radio spot?

A blog owner you are able to build brand awareness, process online transactions and inform your loyal customers of events and specials. A Wordpress blog can be set up to provide the customer a pleasant experience that is effortless to navigate allowing consumers the opportunity to make purchases as well as related up-sells.

Online consumers are redefining value through super highways of dialog. Small business owners can target this dialog through consumer keywords to strategically position their own business blog in front of consumers 7 days a week 24 hours a day without paying staff overtime!

With growing online consumer trust, free advertising, free blogging software it makes plenty of cents, (or will!) for small business to utilize and take advantage of a Wordpress blog.

Building My First Blog, A Trip Down Memory Nightmare Lane

When I decided I wanted to build a blog that I owned, I decided to go with what I felt is the leader which is wordpress. WordPress puts the power of content creation and content management in your hands with true autonomy and true control.

I will be brutally honest I did not really understand or know what a blog was about and had never heard of wordpress a few years ago when I started this journey. I am a baby boomer which means when I was going to college we went to the actual library to research and typed reports up on an electric typewritter if you were lucky.

I researched the internet, you tube, blogs, forums and how to journals to no end trying to figure this mystery out, how to, what order to, seo, keywords, etc to no end. The information was really overwhelming like trying to take a drink out of a fire hose and I couldn’t put all the pieces together, I was drowning in verbage that sounded like legal-ease to me and my frustration led to chocolate.

After months of miserable frustration I purchased a program that promised to answer all my blogging woes and turn me into a blogging guru. I happily sank into the information and just knew the moment of clarity was here. The program I bought was confusing, disorganized and the terminology was way over my head.

I started becoming bitter, or bitter sweet, more chocolate please. Even my playful dogs were avoiding me and my captain husband was gone fishing alot! I traded chocolate for wine.

This was not a healthy scenario, but being the tenacious hard nosed non quitter, stubborn scottish decent that I am I fought through my frustration and didn’t throw in the towel. I decided to give another on-line video course a shot and that was when the magic really started.

I don’t recall how I came across this video course created by Matt Wolfe but after viewing one of his free videos I bought the course. It wasn’t expensive but I was leary after wasting money on other courses. ” The Wordpress Classroom” course was so well presented and walked me through each step from beginning to end. The mental babble of understanding the FTP and loading what to what plug, upload widget, html, scurvy, blimey, blah, blah, blah, sql data, egg sandwhich, over my head rhetoric became clear to me and my mind happily hummed like a finely tuned race car. I was actually laughing as I watched each step unfold magically before my eyes. My dogs and I were doing happy dances all over the house again! My hubby came home from fishing and everyone in the village rejoiced!

Get started today build your own blog with Matts Tutorial. He gives away free videos so you will know if his teaching style is right for you. Another thing I would like to mention is that this is not a membership so you won’t be hit with monthly dues. The tutorials are yours to refer to at any time and you will since their is so much information in each video.

Visit Matt’s site replacing BLOGGING hassle with BLOGGING success