Usually this situation concerns itself with corporate sponsorship of you blog. A corporate entity will be attracted to your business message and want to partner with you by buying banner ad space or get in as a content contributor on your blog. This is a great partnership because it lends itself to leverage both of your audiences to be exposed to the other. This can generate a larger subscriber list or even cross selling of your products or services.

We found a video below that is in the fashion industry that proves out that a business blogger, such as yourself, can multiply your exposure with a corporate tie in with another complementary business.

A blog makes it possible to spread your information over multiple channels of media simultaneously and can be a very effective way of getting the word out in promoting your business. Enjoy the video below.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “think outside the box.” Well in this case, press releases are a great way to break through all the advertising “noise” out there. While the majority of small businesses are practicing advertising in the conventional way, you must start advertising in places where less of advertising is being made. The large corporations have a separate department strictly for the purpose of writing and submitting press releases.

Press releases can be regarded as another online way of promoting your business. Not long ago, it used to be that you would have to get various media outlets a phone call and bug them to receive your press release submission and then either fax that outlet or send them “snail mail” of the document. Now days, you can go online to a site like www.prweb.com and submit your press release directly. From there, these press release sites will submit via internet, to literally hundreds of national and worldwide news agencies. From that point, you will see your website or blog visitor count spike up dramatically for up to several weeks after the submission is made.

This is a great way to generate more popularity on the web for your business as well as opening up the door for more business opportunities that can come from anywhere in the world because the world has seen your news story.

Make press releases on a monthly basis and you will see your business grow!

Someday, if you are bold enough, you many want to contact the blog owner that you make comments on and send them a request to become a “guest” blogger on their blog. This is extremely valuable if you want a strong backlink from a high ranking blog site.

Rule number one in making comments on other blogs….make sure you check the page rank of the blog you are interested in making a comment on. It should be a blog with a page rank of at least 4 to 6. These blogs will get hundreds, if not thousands of views per month. You want to leverage the power of other blogs that get way more daily and monthly traffic than yours to it helps your ranking go higher as a result.

If you do this on a weekly basis, you will be assured of moving up in the search engine ranking system within weeks or several months at the latest. After all, this is the reason you want to market online in the first place!

I begin with asking them if they are interested in more ways to market online to draw more customers to their physical location. Of course, they will say yes and I simply give them my blog website address and tell them to contact me if they want more information on how to promote their business through the internet.

I also tell customers to share my blog site with others. I get more views this way than any other way. But in order to maximize your viewership is to add many other methods to drive visitors to your blog.

Blog marketing methods can also include print advertising with your blog site URL address on it. You can also make it part of your email signature whenever you send out new emails to friends, family and business associates.

Marketing your blog is only limited to your own imagination. Think of new and creative ways to get the word out on your blog. By getting the word out about your blog will also generate more sales of your products and services.

As mentioned in earlier posts, your blog is literally your online brochure that further describes the features and benefits of your products. You can also show pictures of your products and video of your products in actual use so that they can get and idea how your product performs.

Remember that the blog is only one part of your total marketing process. It is an ongoing task to help promote your business.

Whatever the case, your obligation is to be the “thought leader” in your industry. It should not be hard because, if you are in business for the long term, it goes without saying that you will be committed to making every effort to keep your customers interested so you can make more sales both now and into the future.

If you want to keep your customers coming back to buy your products and services, you give them a reason to come back and visit your store by changing the products you offer, continue educating your customers with what makes your products stand out over the competitors.

Building community means creating a relationship with your customers and making them feel comfortable with regular communication. It could be in the form of a blog, a forum, or an email subscriber list. In any case, with regular forms of communication, you can be assured of growing a solid fan base for your business.

It must be apparent by now, blogging, social media marketing, print advertising, radio spots, coop advertising all work together to get the word out on your business.

Many online sources are valuable to making sales for your business but keep in mind that the real key to marketing your business is using mulitple channels to bring in customers to your business.

Multiple channels of marketing your business should be carefully planned because you don’t want too many avenues that overlap and end up wasting your valuable time.

Let’s say you have a financial services company and you want to maximize your marketing efforts to bring in the most customers at the least amount of cost. Typically a business sets up a main HTML site, then you can “attach” a blog to it to feed traffic to the main site. You could print business cards with your website or blog address on it. You could generate a “signature” on all your emails so that it contains your website address on it. You could take out a small space ad in a magazine or local newspaper with your website address on it. You could list your website address with online directories.

One of the most effective marketing strategies is to start up a Facebook Fan page to link back to your main site and blog.

Just keep in mind that, if you plan multiple channels of marketing your business and blog, you will drive more customers in your front door and dramatically increase your sales. Know that you are marketing as you always did for your business, the only difference is you have more online channels to get the job done.

First of all, without fail, make sure you “ping” your blog posts. Pinging is a way of letting search engines know thaty ou made a change to your blog. Go to ping o matic and enter your blog URL and other information, and you will have made a ping.

Another way of promoting your blog posts is through your Facebook, and Twitter accounts. You can do this by taking the URL of your blog post and copying the link to your next Facebook post or Twitter post. This is the most popular way for promoting your blog posts currently. If you want a service that can do that automatically, you can use a site like socialoomph.  They have a free service and a paid version for a more complete coverage of submission to the social sites.

Another powerful blog post promotion device is IMAutomator.  If you are familiar with social bookmarking sites like digg, delicious, stumble upon, and technorati, these sites help you get found by a very large population online looking for new sites to read. With IM Automator, you can make submissions to theses sites automatic.

Lastly, making comments on other blogs either related or in the same industry as your business are excellent ways of promoting your blog. Make sure when making a comment to other blogs that there is a box that you can enter your URL. After all, you want to make sure if the reader of your comment is interested in what you have said on that blog, that they have a way to click to get to your website or blog.

I am very impressed from ”twenty something” online entrepreneur, Adam Horwitz from Calfornia, who is wiser beyond his years in marketing maturity, that came out with a video talking about how to handle attacks on you or your business online. As you are aware, there are many sites that criticize, slam and even slander other people and businesses.

Adam has a very sensible way of how to handle this. Check out the video below.

Lately, you’ve heard about the video of the homeless man, Ted Williams that went “viral” within a matter of hours and exceeded over a million views. Hypothetically, if your business could achieve that with a video, you would be practially rolling in the “dough!”

Of course that is an exeception to the rule. Ted Williams video was definitely a fluke. But the same idea remains…get your business video online so that people will discovered it and in turn, discover your business.

Blogs enable any business to gain customers through “showtime” methods. This involves presenting your business with some attention grabbing method while being so compelling that people “pass around” the video to others and they will pass it on to still others.

Yes, it’s the “showtime” theme now that makes a video go completely viral. With all the reality TV shows out there, everything is entertainment. You need to tap into this entertainment mentality in order to further promote your business online.

There are 4 common techniques on how to be on the first page of Google.

1. Create original content
2. Submit to blog directories
3. Submit blog to RSS feed
4. Get your blog URL out there

1. header
2. navigation buttons
3. about
4. sidebar
5. contact us
6. post area
7. opt in box
8. category listing
9. affiliate ads

These are necessary to make your blog effective in marketing your business.

Let’s start with the header. It must be readable and have a simple but classy design. It must not be cluttered looking. The header also is a “branding” tool. It gives your visitor a “flavor” of your business and what it represents.

Navigation buttons should be easy to read and also not “cluttered” looking. One way of detracting from your blog is to have too many navigation buttons. Most “magazine” style blogs have around 20 navigation buttons. This gives visitors too much to think about on your blog and they will go elsewhere. So be frugal with navigation buttons.

The about page/navigation button is leftover from when blogs were personal in nature. The about page is still important, especially for small to medium businesses because they give a “down home” description of the business and some background of how it started and the featured products.

The sidebar is very important because it breaks up a “boring” design and offers many different widgets for the blog visitors to view.

Contact us is obvious. There has to be an easy way for a blog visitor to get hold of the blog owner and what better way than a simple contact form to fill out. The blog owner usually receives this contact information to their email inbox.

Post area is the lifeblood of the blog. Here is where the valuable content that serves the blog visitor and the search engines at the same time.

Opt in box is just as important as the post area. It is usually located in the upper right corner of the blog and solicits the blog visitor to enter their name and email information so the blog owner can keep in touch with the visitor. In most cases, it is used to give valuable content to the subscriber and opportunities to sell the subscriber on products and services to them.

Category listing is important because it summarizes at a glance, the kind of content within the posting area. It saves the blog visitor time to immediately find what they are looking for in your blog.

If you are interested in monetizing your blog beyond what your business provides at your physical location, you can add affiliate ads on your blog that advertises products and services from other companies that complement what you have. When the visitor clicks on your affiliate link and buys something off of the affiliate site, you make instant commissions.

So, you can see that all the elements listed above are important when designing or laying out a blog. Adding all these elements will guarantee success of your blog!

Let’s say you have a business blog about cooking. You want to make sure you blog post is an actual keyword or keyword phrase that you want to rank for. The blog title is actually an important part of what search engines look at when serving your site to interested internet surfers looking for the keyword of your topic or niche. The second most important part of what search engines look for is what keywords or keyword phrases are contained within your blog post. So, for the example of cooking, you might want to add the words related to your cooking business so that people on the internet searching for your business can actually find it.

Other important things that help you get ranked higher for your keywords and keyword phrases is how you label your pictures. Let’s say you are a business that specializes in cookware. You write your blog post about cookware and add a picture of a frying pan. When you upload that picture, make sure you ad what’s called an “alt tag.” This is a short description of the picture in text form in the HTML part of the code. So, if your frying pan is a “Revere” brand model, S344, this is what you want to label your picture. When someone hovers over the picture of the frying pan, Revere model, S344 is what shows in a text bubble.

When the picture is also labeled, the search engines pick up on images of the cookware so that it also gets indexed in the images part of the search engine page.

Don’t take blog content lightly! It is important that you make it very easy for the search engines to find your labels and content and blog titles to help visitors get to your blog.

Many people get the wrong idea that if they put content for content’s sake, it will count towards search engine “love.” Google, the number one search engine in the world will differ on that opinion. What search engines are looking for is content that is relevant and valuable to the reader. If you try to “buy” content from someone else and use it as is, it won’t have the same quality rank as if you wrote it yourself or at least took the content you bought and “spun” it with your “voice” in it. In other words, it must be original in every way. You don’t want content you have on your site to be an exact duplicate of what is on someone else’s site.

Believe it or not, search engine giant Google really wants to become valuable to online visitors who are searching for anything on the internet. If they come up with junk results and the websites are spam or even worse, sites that are disguised as viruses, people will not use their search engine again. So it is in their best interests to serve up the best possible websites that are relevant so the searcher does not have to waste any more time to get the information they want.

So just what is valuable content? It is content that directly addresses the problem or information that the web surfer is looking for. If you are a provider of cell phones, your site better have valuable advice on how to pick the right cell phone, display all the options they have, pricing, and where you can buy one.

What seems to be working as valuable content these days is coming from authority sites. These are sites that have advice, industry news, forums, great discounted products, and a trust factor with the site owner. In other words, these sites answer every question that an internet surfer would have on that topic. It becomes bookmarked and this visitor is guaranteed to come back again and again and also tend to tell their friends and associates to visit the site also.

Video below describes this process.