What you Need to Know About Blogs and Internet Marketing

Feb. 21, 2008
Published by Ephran Price

A Sneek Preview Into The World Of Blogging

The key to making money through affiliate programs or other forms
of advertising is traffic, which is simply the sheer number of
visitors who arrive at your blog daily. In terms of affiliate
marketing and SEO, the more visitors your website has, better
are the chances or rather prospects of your products and services
to be recomended from your website.

Many first time bloggers automatically assume that once their
blog is setup and they put a few posts on it, they will get
some hits and regular readers. This is quite untrue. You won't
get any traffic if no one knows about your website. There are
many different ways to market your blog and gain more visitors
which will eventually allow you to make money through blog-based
affiliate marketing.

The use of blog traffic exchanges is one method you should consider.
In this particular article I intend to showcase methods for proper
blog usability which will automatically ensure sucess for the
reason of blogging.

BLOG USABILITY
The first priority your blog has to have is presentation.
Most web users are instantly turned off by poor presentation
or common designs that seems to be tacky at the best. It is
a known fact that, no person would prefer staying logged on
to a website if the navigation is annoying.

The aim is to have a unique blog, different than all the
other weblogs on the net.It shouldn't take a reader more than
a click, if any, to find your email address or a contact form.
This makes the reader feel like someone who actually runs and
cares about the website. An about page(regarding author details)
is also a great asset to have on a personal site or blog.
The more a reader knows about you, the more they trust your content.

CONTENT
Your blog's usability goes hand in hand with its content.
You can specialize in an unusual subject as long as you
have an idea of how many people might be interested in that subject.
If you do well with your niche subject matter, you could get some
crazy traffic for being the only decent blog online with that
type of content.

On the other hand you could have widely used content, such as some
aspect of technology, but add your own twist with your opinion or
comparing/contrasting from other tech analysts. People won't go to
your site to read other people's edition, rather they will be on
the lookout for new takes.

The one thing to kill your traffic is having identical content to
another several hundred blogs.Finding out what your content should
be is a key element of your blog's identity and the type of image
your blog will ultimately emit. More over blogging or using other
people's content will only allow google to announce your website
as a PLR (plagiarized) website.

Following are some questions along with the answers that are bound
to creep into the minds of many amateur bloggers:

1)How do Blog Traffic Exchanges Work? Blog Traffic Exchanges are
simply websites which operate on a reciprocal viewing ratio,
whereby you'll manually surf and visit various blogs in the network,
in return for other users to visit your blog. For example, by
logging into a blog traffic exchange and visiting one blog in
their network, I would earn one credit which means that I'll
get one visit in return from another blogger who is using the
same traffic network. This is the most basic principle of all
blog traffic exchanges, although some exchange networks will
allow you to buy credits which will translate to visitor
traffic from other users.

2)What are the requirements to use a Blog Traffic Exchange? )
The most basic prerequisite is that you will need to own a blog.
Registration for these blog traffic exchanges are usually free
and all you'll need to do is to submit your blog and start
surfing to accumulate traffic credits, which will ensure that
other users surf and visit your blog as well.

3)What are some types of Blog traffic exchanges?

Blog Explosion

BlogMad

Blog Soldiers

Blog Advance

Blog Catalouge

Blog Flux.
4)what are the advantages and disadvantages of blogging?
Advantages- Free exposure for new blogs. New blogs usually
have very little referral or search traffic and the focus
is on getting people to know your blog actually exists.
Blog Traffic exchanges can perform this function and may
even help to increase your initial reader base before
organic traffic from search engines starts to kick in.

Building long-term referral traffic. Traffic exchange
visitors are all bloggers and are the people you want
to attract when you are trying to build a much bigger
readership. The more bloggers you have reading your
blog, the more potential for incoming links and future
referral traffic.

Disadvantages-Some bloggers have suggested that
advertising networks like Adsense do not allow the
use of traffic exchanges, because they generate
artificial traffic and ad impressions.Blog traffic
exchanges are similar to StumbleUpon in that you'll
never really know what to expect.

For some exchanges like Blog Explosion, you can
choose to surf blogs only in a specific field
but I'm not sure how many users actually use
this function.The traffic that you are trying
to monetize is actually limited only to the
users of each Traffic Exchange. This means
that after consistently using each exchange
for a while, the quality of the traffic as
it relates to affiliate programs might decrease.

Now coming to the main point of blog success.
How does one do proper blog promotion? If your
blog is an acclaimed hit you don't have to look back.
Blogger itself has an array of settings, many of
which work to your advantage in this endeavor.
This first grouping is quite simple and just
requires that you sign in to your Blogger
account and flip a few switches.

Weblogs.com is a blog update notification
service that many individuals and services
use to track blog changes. When your setting
is activated, Blogger will notify weblogs.com
that you have updated your blog. That means
your blog will be included in various "recently updated"
lists on the web as well as other blog-related services.
Traffic-grabbing techniques is a little more persnickety
and not as readily activated.

The basic gist of this section of methods is
"If you build it well they will come."
You'll need to incorporate the other aspects
of self-promotion, but it's true that writing
a great blog goes a long way towards repeat visitors
and word of blog. Write quality content and do it well.
If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation,
and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd.
But the idea here is to get a big crowd so fix yourself
up a bit, pull it together man, have some respect for your
readers, and discover a style that shines brightly through
good blogging.

The other factors you need to keep in mind while blogging
on the net are: 1)Publish regular updates 2)Think of your
audience 3)Keep search engines in mind 4)Keep your posts
and paragraphs short.

Be unique and be sure that your data is content relative.
Another samll topic that creeps up in my mind now is
preference.Well just like other bloggers who blog through
common and basic accounts I to have a preffered account.

TECHNORATI
Technorati is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers.
It makes your blog much easier to find when people search by
technorati tags. Technorati is also a large blog ranking engine.
Based on the number of links to your blog from various websites,
your blog is given a rank. The higher your rank the easier your
blog is to find when people search for things. A higher rank
gives your blog greater credibility in technorati. If you don't
already have a technorati account get one fast.