For a blog to be most effective, make sure you put yourself on a strict blog posting schedule. Quite often there are too many excuses to not post on one day and then it leads to the next day and so on. Before you know it, you have a full week gone by and nothing new has been posted on your blog. When there is no activity on your blog, it becomes “static” and does not let the search engines that your site is active. In other words, think of it as “no one home,” so no one visits.

Entering a blog post is as simple as writing three or four short paragraphs. It does not have to be long. But it must be relevant content to the topic of your site. Especially when you have a business, it is always wise to write about anything that your business does or products it carries.

A good way to keep good content flowing into your blog is to plan it out in advance. What are you going to tell your audience about your product? How is this product going to benefit your customers? What kind of sales are coming up? Make it “exclusive” to your customers that if they act on buying a particular product with a “code” that you put on your blog, it will drive visitor traffic to your store.

All in all just be creative. There is no set rules on how often to make a blog post, but always remember that be consistent and keep your quality up. This is what sets you apart from other bloggers.

With the current blog technology at your finger tips, you can now use a blog as your main website. This blog site, is my main website that I use to attract my followers and customer base. It serves as my “home base” of online operations for me.

Blogs have added the capability to be a full fledged CMS or content management system. By CMS we mean that we can manage our content, whether it be a posting system or a static main website look. “Managing” content is the process of making changes to your site in the form of adding or subtracting text articles, pictures, videos, audio, and any other media that you may want to insert in your site. The coolest thing about a CMS system is that it is truly a user friendly interface for beginners and advanced users alike.

What all normal static websites have in common is a header, a sidebar, a main content area and navigation buttons. A blog has all that and much more. Blogging has come a long way and eventually I imagine we will see a full fledged “plug and play” or “drag and drop” interface that will make starting blogs in easy reach for everyone.

Now if you intend on starting a blog as your main website, you should plan out, just like a conventional website, what you would like to have featured on your site.

Contact information is a must. It should have a pleasant header design that is eye catching and easy to read is most effective. An opt in box, preferably in the upper right corner is mandatory to capture a visitors information and grow your list. An “about” page that describes the purpose of the site or tell something worthwhile about the blog owner. And lastly, a contact us page. People want to know how they can get in touch with you if they like your blog.

Of course the last and most important part of your blog is the posting area. This area contains all your blog posts or articles that positions you as the “expert” in your field or business. Blog posts are the best ways of getting the attention of the search engines.

If you are thinking of starting up another website or a business who already has a main website, you should still plan on putting up a blog that can eventually become your main website.

There are many different ways to write blog posts but no one ever gets how to pre-plan how to do it! It takes a little creativity and discipline to write blog posts on a consistent basis. In the video below, pro blogger, Darren Rowes shows how he “organizes” his desktop computer when writing for his two main blogs. Enjoy.

I find that many people who own a business, especially a “one man” operation doesn’t really know if they are up to the task of starting a business blog for their business. Let’s examine the pros and cons.

PROS: First off, blogs are the perfect online vehicle to get noticed by people who are interested in buying your product or service. They are easy to set up and maintain. Blogs have the capability to be totally interactive with your audience. Anyone online that sees your blog has the option of making comments on it to give you valuable feedback. Blogs allow you to expand what you sell at your “brick and mortar” business location. Let’s say you sell golf clubs at your physical location. You now have the capability to sell your golf clubs to around the world! If your blog site gets very popular, you also have an opportunity to sell other peoples services and products through affiliates or selling banner advertising to large corporations.

CONS: There is a learning curve to making a successful business blog happen. I would say, on the average, it takes about 4 months to get totally comfortable with the routine things you have to do with a blog. There is the responsibility of posting on a regular to semi regular basis. If you never wrote anything in your life, you better learn quick how to! You have to learn how to navigate around the administration panel to know where you can upload pictures or videos. You have to plan out in advance how to grow your business blog. You have to learn how to connect an autoresponder system to your blog to capture your valued visitors so you can sell them at a later time. Lastly, there is the motivation factor. Do you really know yourself to be able to follow through on blogging in the first place? After the “newness” wears off and you are now making business blogging part of the routine of operating a business, can you see this through? It is an extension of your marketing department. You must continually market your business in order to stay alive financially.

Blogging is fun, but is also serious business. Make sure you are prepared for the “long haul” first. Blogging can be fun through the long term if you let it.

I’ve been asked from blog owners how to keep their blog interesting. Well, we bloggers share the same dilemna that editors for newspapers have, “how to fill space” in their newspaper.

In conventional newspapers, you will find ads, columns about politics, health, local news, editorials, special feature articles, and then the offbeat things like, crossword puzzles, comics, advice columns, Scrabble, play bridge, even soduku.

You get the point here. There are ways and means of getting the interest of the reader. Apply these same things to your blog. Put a poll on your blog and get your visitors engaged in voting for something they have a passion for. You can post about trivia on a niche topic. You can have contests where you exchange “comments” on your blog for a chance to win a gift certificate to their favorite store. There are many ways to keep interest in your blog besides quality content. It serves you in more ways than one.

First, it shows that you offer variety in your blog to keep them interested. Second, it keeps your visitor statistics alive and in turn, you rise even higher in the search engine rankings. Third, it makes the blog experience fun for both you and the reader.

You need to plan out how you attract traffic to your blog. By this, I mean attracting online visitors that turn into real visitors that walk into your place of business. In order for you to do this, you should think logicially how this happens. I will be putting out a report next week that shows the way to plan this out.

For many people and businesses who has never “blogged” before or even used the internet to market their physical place of business, this can prove undaunting to say the least. You have to go in having a plan and working it or else nothing gets done and you are frustrated to no end!

Where do you start? You start by making an outline of your goals. What do you want from the internet? The most common place to start is “more customers and more sales.”

To get that, you have to know the various ways to attract traffic once your blog is up and running. Better yet, you need to plan what you want to have on your blog to make the “trip” worthwhile to your visitors.

Here is a quick run down of what works for me:

1. Research target audience for what they want
2. Research this audience for what they actually buy
3. Plan out products to sell this audience
4. Figure out ways to put these products on your blog
5. Make an outline of your content topics to serve your audience
6. Plan a way to get your online visitors on your “list” (aka opt in box)
7. Plan ongoing promotions exclusive to your blog that brings in customers
8. Make a list of at least 5 different ways to attract traffic to your blog

In the next couple of blog posts, we will go over a list of 5 ways to attract traffic to your blog.

One of the best ways to get your blog a ton of visitors is through videos. You simply make a video, upload it to a high traffic video site and have a “water marked” link back to your blog. This is a most efficient way to drive traffic.

Another great way to generate traffic to your blog or website is by submitting articles to article directories and have them linkback to your blog.

Yes, I said it. Another way to promote your blog is offline! Here, I am touting using an online presence to promote your offline business but nowadays, the best marketing “weapon” is with multi-channels of getting the word out about your business.

Take a look at this moment what you are using for your marketing and advertising in your business. It could be Yellow Pages, print advertising, flyers, business cards, radio commercials, TV commercials, magazines, classifieds, memberships, direct mail, co-op advertising, word of mouth, and so on. Well, you should complement your online presence (website or blog) with promoting your site’s URL. You have a “www. yourbusiness . com” that could be your blog site or main website. You should make every effort to make your blog URL as much your marketing message as the address of your business location. Consider it synonymous with your business location. This way, your customers or prospects gets to visit your site at a later time for more information. The beauty of a business blog is that it keeps customers in the know about ongoing promotions, what kind of products are provided by your business and also a little about the history about the business and its owners.

This is a great publicity component of your business and it will become more important in the years to come.

Another great way to direct traffic to your blog site is with commenting on other blogs. Simply put, when you comment on another blog, you attach your URL as a backlink to your “profile” when you register as a commenter and when someone views your comment on that blog, they have the means to “click” on your name and they are redirected to your blog site based on the URL you chose when you registered.

The moment you start up your business blog is when you should be making a list of other blogs that are complementary to your blog. For example, if your business sells golf clubs, you can make comments on sports related blogs. When you search out these other blogs, make sure you feel comfortable with the topics talked about and also make sure it is “active,” in that people are regularly posting comments.

Another important part of your research when looking for another blog to make comments on is the page rank. At the least, you need to find a blog with a page rank of 2 or more. The reason is you need to “tap” another blog’s traffic volume. It goes without saying that commenting on a higher traffic blog site is going help get traffic to your site.

Also, make a meaningful comment, it has to make sense and be relative to the topic that is being talked about. Too many bloggers get lazy and make a very short comment that is general in nature and obviously is not a “quality” comment. A lot of blog owners will delete these types of comments. They are almost like “spam” if they don’t make sense or are so short just for the sake of getting a backlink “credit.”

For blog commenting to be valuable to drive a sizeable amount of traffic to your blog, you need to dedicate many blog comments per month and eventually develop a large amount of comments on other blogs. I usually post on the average one a day, so roughly 30 blog comments per month. You will be surprised after a couple of months at the amount of traffic that will come back to you from other blogs in time!

A very good way to make a splash with your blog is with a well written press release. Now as metioned before, when you start blogging, you become a publisher and with that comes the responsibility as if you are a newspaper editor. An editor is responsible to “get the word out” about a news worthy story.

In our case, something that you talk about in your business blog becomes news worthy…..news worthy enough to be splashed in internet news sites. Some of these sites are, Yahoo News, Google News, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, etc. These online newspaper sites currently gets hundreds of thousands of views per day. Think of getting your news story in any of those high traffic sites just for one week! You would get a ton of people clicking to your blog site and, if you have great content on your site, will get noticed and eventually return to be a regular visitor to your site.

This is not hard to do. First, you must develop a topic of mass interest to your audience. A good example would be, if you owned a blog site dedicated to golfers, you could write a press release about the best way to get a cheap green fee at any golf course in the USA. You could dig this news item by contacting several golf courses around the USA and ask them what time of the year, the time of day that they have the most inexpensive rates. You could then craft a great news story on this and you get credit for writing this story with a backlink box at the bottom that sends people to your blog or any other website you choose.

Now this system does not guarantee that you will get and stay on page one of all search engine news sites, but you will be on their page one for at least several days until you get bumped by some other news worthy story.

If you think this right, you could be prepared for the heavy flow of new visitors with a compelling promotion you are having or some affiliate product you are selling. Don’t foget to have your opt in box ready to capture new subscribers so you get to “keep” some of your visitors information to sell them at a later date through your email message sequence.

Here is a video that talks about how a business blog improves customer relations by truly communicating with its audience in an informative way.

Did you know that many smart blog owners are making money just from the blog itself as opposed to what the blog is promoting? Yes! And how do they do that?

Well first of all, a smart blogger will make sure that they build up as much as a readership as possible. This is done simply to make regular posts of valuable content about your business or your industry or tips about your product. This process can take several months as you build up your number of posts. The more posts you have, the better you look with the search engines because of quality content and also the the volume of content.

Next, you have at least 5 great ways to monetize your blog:

1. Google Adsense
2. Kontera
3. Affiliate Ads
4. OIO Publisher
5. Banner Ads

Google Adsense is the most popular one mentioned, however, I have recently noticed more bloggers going on the items 2 thru 5 for better results. There is debate on whether Google Adsense is worth the time since it pays in such a smaller amount per click. In the next post we will go over the pros and cons of participating in the Google Adsense program. You can visit their site at www.google.com/adsense

Kontera is a great text link ad program that pays out more to the blogger than Google Adsense, in my opinion. If you go to www.kontera.com you will find an easy explanation of how it works and to sign up is free. After you sign up, it simply inserts a hyperlink out to an advertiser when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is clicked within the content of your post. Quite clever.

Affiliate Ads are another great way to advertise. You simply sign up (free) with an affiliate portion of a website that carrys a product or service that complements your business. As an affiliate, you receive an affiliate link that you insert into your blog, literally anywhere, and when someone clicks on that link they are taken to the site of that product. If they purchase something from the site referred to, you get an instant commission.

OIO Publisher is a very cool advertising platform that can manage and place banner ads anywhere in your blog automatically. The only downside is you have to pay a small fee to start this program. This program is very effective. You can reach their site at www.oiopublisher.com

Banner Ads are one of the oldest ways of advertising a product or service. This is usually in the form of a small square graphic or a long rectangle ad box at the upper right of the blog header. Banner ads can be quite expensive but effective if you place your banner ad on a very high traffic site.

What I did not have on the list is putting your own product or products for sale on your business blog. The best way to monetize your business blog with your product is to write a digital “book,” an ebook. It could be a book about how to do something or a summary or a valuable resource to your visitors. You simply upload your ebook on your webhost and connect a pay button to it that is attached to a graphic image on your blog. In future blog posts, I will go into detail on this.

The way a blog can be designed is endless. As a matter of fact, that is part of the problem with most blogging platforms. Since there is such a wide variety of blog styles, it sometimes can be a downside of making a blog. The reason is because you can easily get caught up in the “fancy schmancy” style and that can be a distraction to the message and conversation that you want to offer your visitors.

It used to be that the more number of columns your blog has, the better. But repeated testing and re-testing of blog readership has proven that the standard two column blog layout is the best. Since your eye is trained on reading left to right and up to down, the posting area to the left and sidebar to the right is the most effective design. Of course a header is on the top.

Now when it comes to themes, there are several things to consider. First, make sure your blog has a light or white background with black text on it. Early on in web design, all the rage was to design these blogs with a dark black background with white text letters. But people soon got tired of them because it was a strain on the eyes. Then came the fad of heavy graphics and loads of high resolution pictures. That really made it slow moving when loading on a typical browser, often 5 seconds or more to load! Lastly, bloggers were told they could get rich by inserting Google Adsense, tons of affiliate ads and sales messages. Well that could make a blog very “spammy” and repel visitors than gain them.

The current trend is to keep it simple and to the point. The typical layout is a simple and easy to read header, post column, sidebar column, a sprinkling of affiliate ads, an opt in box to capture names and email lists, and most importantly, high quality content for visitors to consume so they come back again and again.

In my next post I will go over what kinds of things to ad to a blog to make it even more appealing.

Every now and then I get calls from my students that tell me they don’t know where to go with their blogging. Is it “working?” “How come I don’t have thousands of comments on my blog?” “Why isn’t my affiliate links not being clicked?” These and many other questions are on the mind of bloggers.

I, for one, believe that blogging is helping you make your online “space” for the long term. If you didn’t blog today, what would you ask yourself a year from now when all the rage is to be branding yourself on the internet or else your competition will have you for “lunch?”

Blogging is definitely a long term committment. If anything, for the benefit of your business, you should blog on. The advantages are many, just that you have to look at the whole picture of your marketing efforts. If you stopped blogging for your business, it is like turning off space and print advertising. Blogging has to become part of your business operations just like anything else you do now for your business.

Here is a motivating video from a blogger/businessman from Spain. Take his message to heart!