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.

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.

Well the newspaper publisher certainly understands their responsibility. It is to work as a team to ensure the news is delivered on time and delivered accurately to their customers.

On the same hand, it is your responsibility as the publisher of your own blog to make sure you, as a team of “one” gets the blog content out in a timely and reliable manner. Now we all get “busy” every once and while and sometimes we cannot deliver the blog content on the schedule we originally promised the subscriber base. Every now and then your subscribers will forgive you and will still come and visit your site. But when it gets inconsistent and now your subscribers are not sure when you are going to add your next blog post, that is when you get in trouble. You see, your blog visitors are a fickle bunch. Once they get a feeling that your blog cannot be counted on regularly posted content, visitors will not come back. It is human nature. Also, you are not doing the search engines any favor! Search engines will not come back as often either and there goes your search engine ranking.

So, when you get to the point of not being able to reliably add content on your regular schedule, it is time to outsource content generation to someone else. You can go to many different sources to write your content for you, also having them insert the content to your blog. Whatever you can afford, make sure you add content at the least, twice a week. If you can post every other day better…..every day, is the best!

If you position your business in front of your target audience, you can’t help but be successful. But you must give real, valuable content. It must resonate with the audience you are serving. It sounds simple but so many businesses try to over analyze the “message.” To second guess your market is fatal. Try, instead to be real and develop your content that reflects your values, your personality and what you truly feel that your customers are going to consume and implement.

Once you have a fan club, you then get feedback from them on what they want. The old sales/marketing adage, find out what your “hungry market” wants and give it to them has never been truer.

Your blog should concentrate on reaching out and recruiting more people to your fan base. This is ongoing job. Keep this up and you will be more than profitable in the long run.

The secret here is not in the selling of your product or service, rather, it is stressing in developing a relationship with your visitor audience via having a conversation with them. Do you see the difference?

When you converse with your audience, you develop trust with them and in turn, they develop a like with you. Popular marketing guru, Seth Godin once said in his earlier books, “turn a stranger into a friend,” “then turn that friend into a customer.” Oh, so true. People want to deal with “real” people. When you are transparent in your intentions with your audience, your audience will respond with choosing to buy your product or service when the need arises.

Getting back to communication. We are a social being and therefore have a natural need to communicate with others. We need to belong to a community with like minded people. Blogs fulfill the vehicle in which we communicate online. It is a perfect “marriage” of a one to one relationship.

So, when you plan out your blog for your business, keep this in mind. If you approach using your blog as a tool to develop a solid communication with your audience, you will guarantee your business will generate a loyal following.

I don’t think any blog marketer will ever release true figures where their visitors are coming from because they are still working on their “secret sauce” of tweakng their blog site to maxmize their viewer traffic. They don’t want to “spill the beans” to anyone on where their traffic comes from because they think the competition will be mostly benefit from it and they will start to lose their effectiveness in getting traffic. To a certain point it is true, but I have to say, it is not “rocket science” to go to logical places to get traffic.

There are internet marketing products out there that sell from $7 all the way up to $1,997 that say mostly the same things. Here is the common denominator for all ways to get visitor traffic to your blog or website.

They consist of the follwing sources:

1. Content that is inserted in your blog
2. Backlinks to your blog from comments made on other blogs
3. Backlinks to your blog from other blogs and authority sites
4. Link exchanging with other complementary sites
5. Backlinks from other blog sites you make to link in
6. Telling friends and business associates about your blog and URL
7. Guest blogging on other blogs with backlinks
8. Visits from your past attendees when doing live seminars or workshops
9. Backlinks from your signature link when participating in forums or special interest groups

Do you see  pattern here? What I use most to get blog visitors is backlinks. This is an essential SEO technique that seems to work very well and consistently. The trick here is to work a little on it everyday. If you have to outsource a little or all of the tedious work, do so because it can get very boring!

The information I just listed above is what most “traffic secret programs” teach you in one fashion or another. Stop wasting your money and get with doing all or a combination of the above and you will see your visitor traffic dramatically increase within a matter of weeks. I won’t sugar coat it, you will get a slow trickle of traffic to start, but with time, and consistent posting of content along with all the above actions, within a matter of weeks, you will have a very large amount of daily traffic coming and the good thing you will have left to do is figure out what you want to sell on your blog or figure out what kind of promotions you want to display to intice your visitor to come to your place of business to buy what you are selling.

It is our basic human nature to be attracted to a good story. When you start a business blog, have a good story handy to help attract visitors to your site. It could be in the form of how the business started. It could be the unique twist your business has over the competition. It could be in the form of how the business is run.

Why do you think daytime talk shows (i.e. Oprah) or “soap operas” are so popular? They have stories to tell. Even reality TV shows use storylines as the attraction to get viewers. You’ll even see stories in commercials on TV. No matter how short the commercial, there  is a storyline with an interesting twist and a compelling visual to get people to buy the product.

If you tell your story in your blog posts, make sure you can interweave your story with all your other blog content. You should have a good mix of relevant content in your blog, well written stories, strategically placed advertisements, and a call to action for your visitors to come to your place of business.

Here is a great link to BlogOhBlog that will get your creative juices flowing for making your blog popular:

http://www.blogohblog.com/50-creative-ways-to-make-your-blog-popular/

Always be planning your next move on promoting your blog. It will pay dividends

It can be hard and easy at the same time. First, you need to know your customer completely. Where do they “hang out” on the internet. Get yourself in their “space” where they are and make your presence known.

An example, let’s say you are a home repair business. Go to other home product or service related websites. If you can make helpful comments, go there and make them. Make sure you leave your real name (of your person) and a backlink to your business blog. Now, there is an interesting strategy that goes along with this. You seek local customers who live in your physical area so they can go to your business to actually buy your product or service. First thing is to go to the local directories.

Here are a few local directory sites that you can list your blog for free.

www.usa-local-search.com
www.citysearch.com
http://www.areaconnect.com/
http://www.cityslick.net/
http://www.localpages.com/
http://www.thinklocal.com/

Also, give out a flyer or printed card with your blog URL and give them incentive to spread the word to their friends and associates in return for a discount or gift.

The object here is to promote consistently to every avenue possible and within reach that is cost effective. You will find that eventuall, your business blog will become popular.

It seems that the “amusement park” mentality of putting up so much “stuff” made it impossible to define the true purpose of the blog. Most of the “magazine” format blogs still do this but they have their own reasons. You can recognize a magazine blog by the large number of navigation buttons and tons of sub categories of excerpt articles at mid point and the bottom of the blogs. Their game is to drive as much online traffic to their sites as possible hoping that many of the visitors will click on the advertisements and generate either affiliate cash or “cost per action - (CPA), money from it.

With so much going on with those blogs, it only becomes a “money grab” for the blogging entity.

Now, small companies and also individuals play that game too by filling up their affiliate ad boxes with more than enough links to make their blog look like a shopping cart site. Now I am not condemning this pratice, only saying if you use affliate banners and links sparingly, then you are doing your blogg audience a favor.

The best of the best blogs have evolved to giving meaningful content on a daily basis. Google, the 900 pound gorilla, also wants relevant, high quality content on the blogs they are going to rate high for. There was a flood of blogs that used “article spinners” and other automated methods for generating tons of useless posts in order to “grab” the search engine attention only to be batted down because the quality of the posts were just garbage.

Thank goodness, I can say that I am seeing more meaningful blogs everyday I surf the internet. The quality of the writing just amazed me now. Sure, it takes way more work to produce good content, but in the end, if it stays online “forever” you stand to rank higher with the search engines for years to come and reap the rewards of being “found” more often than not.