As previously mentioned, it all starts with great content. Writing about your business, your products, and your industry will greatly influence whether people are going to visit your site again and again. Once you get repeat visitors, then they may be inclined to opt in their name and email address into your email list. This is a very good thing because you then converted a “stranger” into a “friend.” When they start reading your email newsletter, then you have the advantage of “trusted advisor.”

Then, whenever you have a great product promotion in your business, you can let your subscriber list know first what products you have for sale that they can buy before anyone else knows about it.

Your subscribers then feel like they are “privilaged” to get into your VIP treatment. From there, your sales funnel can continue with more valuable content you give them and then upsell them with more expensive products that they may be interested in.

It is also important that you plan out the “sales funnel” process too. You want to be able to know what products and promotions you are going roll out way in advance so it looks to the subscriber that you are offering fresh and new offers in an ongoing basis. Little do they know you planned several promotions out months out in advance!

The sales funnel is practiced by the most experienced marketers out there. Plan and design your blog marketing efforts accordingly and you can’t help but make it a win-win situation for your customers and your businesses.

What you have to do is make a list of topics you plan on talking about in your blog and keep track of the number of times you write posts about each. I prefer to balance out the types of posts I make to appeal the widest readers of my blog.

Content can be in the form of blog posts, pictures and videos. If you consistently insert these items, you can’t go wrong in appealing to your audience.

Currently the best form of content (other than text posts) is in videos. Videos have proven to be very effective in generating a lot more views for your blog. Another popular way of getting your content useful is to comment on other people’s blogs. I personally found that, after commenting on one other blog, I received 20 backlink visits from that blog within one hour after posting. Very dramatic results.

What it comes down to is to generate content on a daily basis. I used to post once or twice a week but now, with more “blog” competition, I find that posting once a day keeps my stats very active. It doesn’t have to be a long drawn out post. A post of 150 words is all you need as a minimum. Just keep on writing!

Marketing your business to Twitter and Facebook is all the rage right now, but what most people will not tell you, is that you have to be very tactful when communicating with your following. Yes, you can “friend” as many people as you can, but on the downside, there are more people that are NOT your target market on these sites. With that said, it is not as important to get the quantity of a following as it is to get a quality following, which is probably going to to be a smaller number of people.

After sifting through the many people you “friend,” there is some time to relate to them and they to you. Share your business life with them. Tell them how much you helped your customers and most of all be “down home” with them when talking about your business. You aren’t selling them anything other than your trust.

Once you gain your trust and they make a lot of posts and communication with you, then is the time to present your offers to them.

In my next post, I will go over what you need to do to “ease” your followers into the sales funnel.

A great example is if you have a blog about golf clubs, you may want to put an affiliate ad for golf instructional videos. This is a perfect match since your market is not competing with theirs. When someone clicks on your affiliate link, they are sent to the product site for golf videos. Your visitor then has the chance to purchase something from that site. When they buy something, you get a commission immediately. The beauty of this system is that it is automatic. You don’t have to fill out any paperwork, you don’t fiddle around with a support desk, and you aren’t responsible to deliver the product.

A number of you may have heard of the Google advertising program called “Adsense.” This involves siging up with Google Adsense and then placing a code on your blog. When the code is inserted, a section of the blog will show up text ads that are related to the keywords and keyword phrases that best match what is on your blog.  Although, not an exact science, the flaw here is that more times than not, the text ads are not related to the product or services or content you write about. What’s worse, is that text ads that pop up may be products or services that are in direct competition with your own product or service. So currently, this is not my favorite way to monetize a blog, but many of my students wanted to hear my “take” on it.

Another great way to monetize your blog is through “CPA” or click per action. This is where you set yourself up as an advertiser with a CPA network that provides products for you to click on and insert into your CPA offers on your blog. When a visitor clicks on the hyperlink, you get paid from the click-through. The visitor does not have to purchase anything! You get paid from the lead you sent to the CPA network company! How cool is that?

That last and final way I see to effectively monetize your blog is through selling your own product. The most common way to do this is through ebooks or “how to” courses that cover your industry or market. People are constantly looking for solutions and will gladly pay for it through your own blog site because they already trust you and will be open to what you have to offer as original conteint.

You have more than enough information to keep on appealing to solving their problems. Blogging allows feedback from your customers as well. Remember in previous blog posts I stated that you need to carry on a “conversation” with your blog visitors. You make a blog post that is relevant to your visitors, and it sparks interest with them and they comment back to you. Now, just because you may not get many comments from your visitors, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading or paying attention to your blog. So many people are coming back to your blog and reading everything and not commenting.

You don’t realize it, but your visitors are paying attention to your blog. You will find out through checking your visitor stats. If you don’t know how to check your stats, ask your webmaster how to get into the hosting account to find these statistics. For those of you who have Google Analytics attached to your blog, you simply log in there and find out these stats.

What is important is you consistently post to your blog. In time, you will have hundreds, if not thousands of regular visitors to your blog and this is where you start monetizing your blog.

In my next blog post, we will cover techniques on how to monetize your blog.

When you make comments on other blogs, really get into the content you are talking about in the current discussion going on with those blogs. Darren says too many bloggers are lazy and simply “copy and paste” other blog content and never take the time to share quality feedback and contribution to other blogs.

Make a real effort to give back to the conversations and in turn you will get more people going to visit your site.

The first thing is to discover whether their site is indexed with the search engines, then take a look at the HTML source code underneath their site to make sure the headline tag, the description, the keyword and keyword phrases is fully included in the code. Next, I wanted to make sure they had a Google local business Places registration and if so, that it is fully filled out.

Of course I received many questions and was more than happy to answer them. One of the most pressing questions is what is the best way to get to the highest rank in the search engines. Answer: backlinks.

I will go over the techniques I use to get legitimate backlinks to my sites.

What I love about this event is you can meet so many other bloggers who have the same passion as you regarding blogging online. The trade show is a must see. There are several hundred booths that cover everything from podcasting, SEO, blog platforms, social media, website templates, article writing, and so on.

Check out this event this year if you can.

How do you get to know your audience? Simple, get yourself in front of you potential audience that you are catering to.  The most obvious and easiest way is to join online groups, forums and comment on other industry related blogs. This is how to engage immediately with your core audience. Remember that these people will gravitate towards you if you have something of value to offer.

When entering a forum or established group in your industry, kindly introduce yourself and start participating in meaningful “conversation.” There will be a lot of discussion threads so make sure you only pick the ones where you have some expertise or something meaningful to contribute to. You will gladly be accepted into the “group” if you prove yourself as helpful and friendly.

Forums and groups have a way when you registered as a user, to enter your URL back to your blog site or any site you want people to return to when click on your name to get further information on you. This is how the long term benefit comes back to you.

In the end, the object is for you to reach out online to your targeted audience in order to gain readership to your blog.