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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For Details CLICK HERE.

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!”