I found an interesting video from Katie Dubois that talks about submitting articles to online article directories to get visitors to your blog site. If you can see past the inferior audio quality of this video, you will get great value from what is revealed here to submit an article. This procedure also applies to any website or online property that you want to attract traffic to. Enjoy.

If you want to make money from your blog, whether you are operating a brick and mortar business or online marketing, you need to build your list as an ongoing goal. Without your list, your blog becomes a free information source with no return of value to you, businesswise.

Granted, you are still having a “conversation” with your audience, and they enjoy reading your content. But, without guiding your visitors with a “call to action” of either purchasing a product or service from you, the only other direction you should take is to keep the “conversation” going with an email newsletter that you can start with your customer list by way of the “opt in” box that leads to your list building.

The beauty of having a list is that you continue the “relationship” with your audience. Autoresponders, which are a program that enables you to pre-write emails, can keep your subsribers interested in what you have to say about you or your product and service. Yes, we get much too much email, but believe it or not, email marketing is still an effective way to keep communicating with your visitors because it comes from someone they already know…..which is you.

I often am asked about what to write in these emails in advance because most of the time you have to plan very far ahead to keep subscribers interested and engaged in your future offers. This is when you have to make an outline and plan out months in advance, where you want to lead your subscribers.

For instance, say you started your email campaign exactly one month before Valentine’s Day. The first email, of course, should focus on thanking the new subsriber. The next batch of emails should focus on valuable information such as tips and tricks from your business that makes life easier or able to solve a problem that the customer has. Still yet, the next batch of emails should focus on selling of one or two items that are either from your business, or a product from an affiliate that you represent. Rule of thumb is to sprinkle giving valuable content, selling items, and informing them of promotions or other reasons to visit your brick and mortar business.

Your list should be treated as “gold!”

Video blogging has become one of the main ways to get the most traffic in the least amount of time. People online are very visual in nature. Video is the preferred way to get content now days. Video is cheap to make, easy to upload to a video site like YouTube, and is able to reach millions of people by way of people referring the link to others.

The key way to get your video the most views is to be “cute” or show dumb situations that humans often portray, animals, babies, music, and contraversial topics. Videos can get just about any subject matter “famous,” but it is the unique content that gets the most attention from the view public.

How often do you get an email from a friend or family that has a link to a funny video or a video that makes you cry? Would you believe that a video, that is being made by a teenage girl showing how to put on make up is getting millions of views per month? You would never thought that something like that gets viewed often! Better yet, there is a video of an Asian girl that runs for about 3 to 4 minutes that just shows her staring at the video camera doing absolutely nothing, getting hundreds of views per day! Crazy!

Video for business is very important. It can’t be “boring.” It has to grab the viewer and capture their interest of the product or service you are providing. Make sure you can find some entertainment value in your video without coming across silly.

Video will forever go “viral” on the internet and many people will be referring the link to see your video on that video host site or they will “embed” the video code on some other blog or website.

Video gives your business strong count for search engine page rank. So make sure video is a big part of your online marketing campaign.

Your blog should be a “conversation” with your audience. Keep it fairly short and valuable to the reader and convey a sincere “personality.” People want a real connection with the blogger. This is especially important with a business blog. If you truly connect with your audience, you develop new customers quickly. Check out the video below. Very interesting.

If you want to make money from your blog, whether you are operating a brick and mortar business or online marketing, you need to build your list as an ongoing goal. Without your list, your blog becomes a free information source with no return of value to you, businesswise.

Granted, you are still having a “conversation” with your audience, and they enjoy reading your content. But, without guiding your visitors with a “call to action” of either purchasing a product or service from you, the only other direction you should take is to keep the “conversation” going with an email newsletter that you can start with your customer list by way of the “opt in” box that leads to your list building.

The beauty of having a list is that you continue the “relationship” with your audience. Autoresponders, which are a program that enables you to pre-write emails, can keep your subsribers interested in what you have to say about you or your product and service. Yes, we get much too much email, but believe it or not, email marketing is still an effective way to keep communicating with your visitors because it comes from someone they already know…..which is you.

I often am asked about what to write in these emails in advance because most of the time you have to plan very far ahead to keep subscribers interested and engaged in your future offers. This is when you have to make an outline and plan out months in advance, where you want to lead your subscribers.

For instance, say you started your email campaign exactly one month before Valentine’s Day. The first email, of course, should focus on thanking the new subsriber. The next batch of emails should focus on valuable information such as tips and tricks from your business that makes life easier or able to solve a problem that the customer has. Still yet, the next batch of emails should focus on selling of one or two items that are either from your business, or a product from an affiliate that you represent. Rule of thumb is to sprinkle giving valuable content, selling items, and informing them of promotions or other reasons to visit your brick and mortar business.

Your list should be treated as “gold!”

When marketing your blog, you are marketing your business. You are also branding your business. Many things go into motion once you blog….all good things!

But in order to successfully market your blog, you must have a plan to implement. For example, start with the purpose of your blog. If your blog is about golf, then give the best golf tips in your blog posts. Promote your blog to golf forums, groups, country clubs, golf equipment stores, write golf articles and submit to article directories, get on sports related blogs, in other words, scour every known source for putting your blog out there. You will find that sooner than later, your visitor count will go through the roof.

And it does not stop there, you have to keep on promoting your blog for the meximum exposure. Once you have hundreds of blog posts up and several years of your blog domain online, you secure a long term high page rank with the search engines.

Blog marketing is a culmination of doing several things consistently and persistently. If you have a solid plan, you can’t help but be a success.

For those of you who reside in the Phoenix, Arizona area, we are continuing to hold our popular LIVE seminar series.

Our next very informative live seminar will be held on Saturday, August 28, 2010 in Scottsdale.

For Details CLICK HERE.

Before you even start your blog, remember that the domain name is very important. It must be “catchy” and at least one main keyword of your niche or what your business does should be in the domain name. This is for search engine optimization purposes.

In planning your blog layout, you should have a clean and easy to navigate design. It should not be “cluttered” because you could lose your visitor interest if there is too much going on. What would you do if came to a blog that had a “gazillion” buttons, lots of banner ads, too many pictures and videos? When faced with making too many decisions on any website, you leave.

A very effective blog layout that has proven to be the most successful is a two column format, one post area and one sidebar, with a simple but compelling header design. There should be, on the average, 6 navigation buttons below the header graphic and always think of inserting an “opt-in” box either on the upper right or upper left sidebar. The most effective column to have the posting area is on the left side.

Just up until a year and a half ago, the most popular layout was a three column design, but it was found that it became too “busy” and the blog owner lost visits because of it.

The blog should be a thing of beauty in simplicity. People who visit blogs know where they want to go within your blog. They check out your new content and then go over the familiar areas that you set up, such as your videos, your white paper reports and other content you have available for your visitors.

Believe it or not, someone may be blogging something good or something bad about your business. Before we go into detail of this recent trend, I have a video below taken from the Fox News Network to explain further, the possible situations that can occur from either very happy customers or disgruntled customers.

Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter seem to the be “triad” of communicating with the most people online. Remember that, with these three social media sources at your disposal, your business is in front of as many of your targeted audience as it can get. But it takes a lot of work.

Facebook currently has over 500 million users online around the world. There are approximately over 100 registered users of Twitter and there are over 126 million blogs in the world.

Just with the Facebook and Twitter use alone, you have many possibilities of getting people to come to your blog to visit and become your “followers.” Now it can be a challenge if you are attempting to attract a local following to your business physical location, but that doesn’t have to stop you there.

When I teach people how to blog for their business, I also tell them that once the blog goes online, it becomes “worldwide.” This is something that should get your creative juices flowing with making digital products in the form of info products to sell to your “following” outside your local area.

Just think, if you owned a golf equipment shop. You originally intended on putting up a blog to get an online presence and to drive people, through local search of your blog, to visit your physical location. Well now you can think of serving two types of customers, the local market and the rest of the world!

This marketing of both the local and worldwide audience presents an opportunity to get the attention of everyone who visits your blog from being referred from Facebook or Twitter. With the blog software out there now, you can enable your Facebook visitors to go to your blog, your blog visitors to go to Facebook, and Twitter to do the same. Now at first, people coming in from these social media sites would not be “targeted,” in other words, it will have no value to your business. But eventually, there will be the type of people that will be interested in your product or service. These people will become your recurring visitors and eventually become cash paying customers.

So, although social media is a valuable resource to get customers, remember that, since the internet is always changing, what could be popular today may not be as popular or effective a year from now. Be ready to change when the trends to market your business change.

One important thing to have on your blog is a “call to action.” How often to you go to a website or blog and see some information, some pictures, maybe even a video but nothing to “do?” What I mean by that is, “what buttons can I click?”

As with any marketing website, you always should have a call to action, a way to guide the visitor to opt in to a newsletter, or sign up for a trial membership or click on an affiliate link to a product or service that your readers would be interested in.

The “call to action” is the oldest, but most effective way of marketing your business. Since you are online and have a blog to complement your marketing efforts, every effort should be made to tell the visitor what to do.

A simple thing like asking people to make a comment on your blog, will dramatically increase your blog comment count. If you position your newsletter opt in box to the upper right or upper left column will increase your opt in rate. Better yet, putting the opt in box all the way up in the header will make even more opt ins’ happen.

Blogging is more important than anything else you can do now. Whether you have a business, working for some large corporation, retired, even unemployed. If you don’t have a blog, you won’t have a way to attract attention in getting business, of getting a job if you are unemployed, or even having friends!

We are an online society, and it has taken on the world stage. I truly believe that in order to survive into the future, you need an online presence. Often, in my seminars, I even intruct my students to reserve their own name with a domain name company. You can always use it in the future.

Branding plays a key in the success of your business and personal success. If you brand your name, or your businesss, a blog can do that.

If you have not had any writing experience, I suggest you brush up on writing skills. When you start a blog, you become a publisher. When you become a publisher, you are responsible to write consistently.

I am often asked by bloggers, “what can I write about?” You should look everywhere around you. What is happening in your industry? What is happening on TV that pertains to your industry. What humorous things are happening in your industry. What kind of tips and tricks can you reveal to yuor audience. There is literally unlimited amount of things to write about in your blog.

Remember that your blog is an extension of you and your experiences and dreams and hopes. Share this with your audience and your will get a following and soon, paying customers.

I am a huge fan of professional blogger, John Chow. To date, he has made over a half million dollars from his blog. He is asked to speak at many seminars and workshops around the world and teaches people how to make money from their blog.

I found a great video here that shows what kind of equipment he takes with him when he travels the world and still manages to post regularly on his blog. Remember, just because you are away from home doesn’t mean you can’t keep up your blog! Enjoy.

When you blog, you are not only blogging for your business, you also have a greater purpose. It’s to develop a relationship with your customers and visitors. As mentioned before, a blog provides a “conversation” with your audience. When you “converse” with your audience, you develop that relationship.

What is a relationship? It is developing trust and gaining favorable reputation with your customers. This takes time. No one wants a “relationship” thrust upon them in a short time. Japanese businessmen have a ritual where they have to know you for quite a long time before they will do business with you. They have inner patience to “give and take” within this relationship and make it in their best interests to do business with you. It is not because they got “burned” from some unscrupulous business scammer, rather, it just makes sense that they feel comfortable doing business with you after judging from your actions that likely to prove you are worthy to do business with.

It makes good sense to keep your blog content consistent to “prove” to your visitors that you are real and have value to offer them. If you sell at all, it comes down to how people buy. They buy from people they “like, know & trust.” It has been written in many creditable sales books that the relationship is the key to successful selling.

So, when blogging, keep this principle in mind. You should take the time to lay out consistent and relevent content that you know your visitors will appreciate and use. Don’t waste your time, and their time, in content that has no value. Also, keep asking your visitors and customers what they want to see in your blog. Let them have a “voice” in what they want to see from you. I guarantee that you cannot second guess your customers on what they want from you. Asking what they want in content, what kind of additional service or product your business can provide, will be very important to your business.

Your blog’s sole purpose is truly a collaboration between your business and your customer.

During my last seminar, I was asked, “what is the difference between blogs and regular websites.” Answer, blogs are interactive and easy to manage, and regular websites are “clunky” and are complicated to manage. I answer this from the standpoint of the website/blog owner. A website owner can hire a “webmaster” but it can cost a lot in the long run and there is no “control” directly from the website owner of the site. They are at a disadvantage because they know nothing of HTML code to control content on their sites.

On the other hand, a blog has a very user friendly administration area where they can add their own content. Yes, the learning curve is still there to add content, but it only takes maybe days, at most to learn.

You can find so many resources on the internet, whether through video or articles that you can find out for yourself that can teach you how to manage a blog.

For the long run, blogs are your best bet because, not only can the owner of the site manage it, but they can also grow the blog, with gaining more knowledge of how to creatively add features to it. Some of my clients who knew nothing of how to manage a blog, learned how to insert a post, moderate a comment, and add a picture in less than a week. From there, they will learn how to insert videos, add their own widgets and change the layout of the blog.