My Free Advertising Model - Blogging

Using Blogs to Generate Traffic

In my previous article, I discussed How to Optimize a Squidoo Lens. This time I am going to cover blogging.

Blogging is something that has really caught fire and any smart company has a blog on their site to attract extra visitors. People like to read blogs and blog posts often come up in Google search results. These two points suggest that blogging is definitely something that every advertiser should take advantage of. Some popular blog services are Blogger.com (which is hosting this very blog) and WordPress.

Blogs, like anything else, have to be content-optimized. When you pick a subject for your post, you want that post to be highly focused on the topic. This is how search engines pick up your post and tie it to a particular key phrase that a user may type in.

Aside from providing insightful articles, blogs are also a handy way to linking to other resources such as websites that you want to call attention to, or Squidoo lenses. Some people use blog posts as article teasers, introducing the nature of an article and then linking to the full thing. This is a good way to generate extra links to those articles.

Successful blogs are interesting. You have to provide content that people will want to read. Otherwise, why would they waste their time reading? Whether your blog has a personal or professional feel...it still needs to keep the reader entertained and not bore them. Make your content fresh and inviting. A successful blog also has new content added often. You should aim to make 1-5 new blog posts a day as a general rule. The more content you are generating, the more opportunities you give your blog to be caught by a search engine.

Once you have created your blog, you want to get it out there. Absolutely include the feed in your Squidoo lenses. Also bookmark it everywhere that you can. My Yahoo is an option, as are My AOL, My MSN, Google's Bookmark, etc. A couple of other good sites to submit and bookmark a blog are Technorati, Feedage and Feedest. It is also a good idea to have your blog pinged by as many different sites as you can. Ping-O-Matic and AutoPinger are a couple of good sites for submitting pings to multiple services at once for your blog.

It is important to get your blog as much attention as you can, as it can really draw in extra visitors, which will in-turn make your job easier. Also be sure to keep your blog as organized as you can with good tagging. People like to search and look for related posts.

That's about all that I can tell you about blogging. The basic concept is a fairly simple one and everyone probably already knows how to create one. Some people may not have known how to get one noticed, however. Hopefully reading this post has imparted some of that knowledge onto you. Be sure to read the next article which covers Article Writing for Ezine and other sites. It will provide some very useful information that can also be put to use when making content for blogs and Squidoo lenses, so you won't want to miss it.

Blogging - A Key Affiliate Marketing Strategy

For many people, the first step in the Affiliate Marketing world is a difficult one. You're lost and you don't know exactly what to do. Perhaps you've found a product to promote... one that you think will make you a good amount of money if only you get the sales. The problem is, you don't know how to go about promoting it.

A lot of people run to pay-per-click campaigns such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Big mistake. These are no places for novices to be. They will get expensive, wasting a lot of money for you without properly turning a product.

Before you ever venture into any type of paid advertising, you have to make sure that your clicks will convert into sales. This way, those clicks you pay for will actually be paying for themselves. How do you make sure your clicks convert? By first utilizing any free advertising technique you can. Not only will all sales be pure profit, but you get to test your site and various versions of ad copy to see which attracts sales the most.

Now I can go on for a long time about testing your site and all the various free advertising sources to gather your test subjects... but for the purpose of this post, I'm going to stick to discussing blogging.

Blogs, like the very one you are reading, can be a very effective way to get people to your website. No matter what type of product you are selling or what methods you are using to try to sell it, having a blog attached to your website is critical. Search engines love lots of fresh and relevant content, so if you keep a constantly updated blog with lots of nice articles, you'll easily boost your search engine rank.

Good blogs have lots of fresh, quality content. Google's bot is pretty smart, so you can't just throw any crap you copied from somewhere and expect it to work well. Original content works best. The more Google sees the same exact article, the less it ranks that article. Make your blog posts creative and informative.

If anything else, a good blog can at least get the word out about whatever you are trying to advertise. It's another source on the internet that someone might come across, and upon reading it, may discover what you wish to sell. Don't rule it out. However, to really make blogging work, you need to be serious and dedicated. Typically, the people who are most successful aim for 5 new posts a day. I know that can be a lot, but try the best you can. It might not be a bad idea to hire some blog writers for you if you can afford it.

Also, don't forget to check out my recently renovated website about making money online for more tips on how to get started with the affiliate marketing process.