by: Angela Booth
Does your business need a blog?
A blog is a Web log, an online journal. Blogs started out as online diaries, in which diarists shared their everyday lives with the world. From their beginnings as a weird Web fad in 1998, blogs have moved on, and are well on the way to becoming a standard business tool.
Why? Because in February 2003 Google.com bought Pyra Labs, the company which owns the Blogger weblogging tool. Blogger.com, one of the main sites providing blog software and hosting, boasted a
million hosted web logs in early 2003.
Google.com's interest in blogs indicates that blogs are mainstream. A blog help your business in many ways, depending on whether you create a private or a public blog. Blogs are so useful that you'll want to create both.
Your business's private, internal blog
These days, no one works alone. Even if you're a solo business operator, you have colleagues --- partners, contractors, and suppliers with whom you communicate daily. A private blog makes working with a group easier, because you can streamline your interactions, saving time and energy.
A private blog can contain notes to yourself, or to colleagues. It's a place to store information and tips that might not warrant a special email message. You can post information like meeting notes, project tasks and summaries, and updated price lists. You can also post links to large files --- no need to email, fax, or
mail them to and fro.
Your blog is more useful than email, because blog postings are dated, and easily searchable. You can post a message you want everyone to read, and the message stays on the blog. With email, you read and delete, or read and forget.
If you've worked on a project with someone in another state or on the other side of the world, you've blessed email, because it makes sharing information so easy. Using a blog to share information is even easier than using email.
Your business's public blog
A business blog is a marketing tool. A blog can add value to your Web site, or it can take the place of a Web site. Look on it as a combination "What's New" Web site page, and an online journal. Because of a blog's freewheeling nature, it's friendly and relaxed.
If you don't have a site, your blog's a place to put your online CV, portfolio and client list. You can, and should, use your blog to express your personality and expertise.
If you have a Web site, your blog page builds loyalty, because if you provide interesting content, your visitors will return to your site. And because it's a Web page, your blog will appear on search engines, attracting new clients.
Google has been treating blogs differently from other Web pages for a couple of years. Whereas it takes a standard Web page/ site a month to be indexed by Google, blogs are indexed daily. This means that your blog is mega-cheap advertising. You can post something on your blog and have it indexed by Google within a day.
Will creating a blog help your business? As I suggested in the article: "Get Googled And Build Credibility", because Google.com is so popular and indexes so comprehensively, if you focus some of your marketing and promotion time on getting your name out on the Web, you're building your credibility, both online and offline.
(You can read the complete article in the newsletter archives at: http://www.digital-e.biz/newsletter.html
So go ahead, blog your business!
Final Sense
Blog Your Business
Writing Good Blogs
There's a lot of blogs out there on the Web, most of which don't entice one to go back regularly to read updates. What is missing from these on-line journals that would essentially make them 'good' blogs? Well, the answers in life usually come down to simplicities.
So let's look at the problem like we were children. Children don't complicate life with miscellaneous information, and when they speak they tell you straight to the point exactly how they feel and think about a subject.
First of all, we should ask the questions," Why do blogs exist? And what are they here for?" Well, in an ideal world 'good' blogs would help people connect, sharing knowledge and feelings about issues in life. As they are journals written by individuals we would hope that they'd be readable and open to comment by all other people, not just a select group of friends.
The key is speaking in a way that is understandable by the masses, get rid of acronyms and local slang that only few will comprehend. Keep the sentences grammatically simple and generally short and concise.
Try to write in your blog as often as possible because if people enjoy reading your thoughts and ideas they'll want to communicate or at least be filled in regularly on 'your world'.
Ask questions, comment on other blogs of similar content, start communities with others you've never met, based on your interests. Keep focused; if your blog is about thoughts on war and peace, keep your thoughts on the latest movie and how hungry you are for somewhere else. The idea is to incite intelligent communication so that in time our collective stockpile of knowledge and wisdom will gradually grow like a tree in fertile soil.
I think of most importance is the fact that you want this journal to be 'good' reading. Of course we all have ideas about what genres and styles we like, but writing from your heart and soul is imperative for the connection with others that you're looking for. Share yourself; don't hide behind walls of fear of ridicule and judgment.
In real life relationships trust, respect, intimacy, and unity are all necessary for a bond to form. It's the same in the 'virtual' world; people want to hear from real people-not just one-sided, highly opinionated arguments from egos that don't want to hear the 'other side of the coin'.
Now, in my last article I really tore apart most writers out there, and here I'm giving some pretty complex ideas on how to fix the problem of 'bad' writing. In my next article I'll attempt to go back to the simple basics of how to write for beginners. I hope I haven't come across as too judgmental, I just truly believe the 'blog world' could become a real asset to humanity, and at the moment it's missing the mark.
Ideas about sentence structure, grammar, paragraphing, using a thesaurus (varying terms used so as not to sound repetitive), whether or not your blog is suitable for a personal or professional approach, are all important to creating a simple and enjoyable read for the blogging visitor. If you are a beginner, please check out my next article on the basics.
Jesse S. Somer
M6.Net: http://www.m6.net/ Jesse S. Somer is a writer hoping to help potential bloggers to write interesting and informative on-line journals.Final Sense
How to Build a Niche Site With a Blog
Building niche sites is all the rage these days.
The basic strategy is very simple. Find a niche market that isn't oversaturated. Develop a list of related keywords people are searching on. Then write an article optimized for each one of your keywords. Once you have your articles, upload them to your site. Monitize your site with affiliate links and Adsense.
For this kind of niche site to be effective and make money, it is imperative that you get free traffic, and a lot of it. And that's exactly where a blog can be your best friend.
At its very simplest, a blog is just a structure. It's the bones of a web site. A blog is a simple way to publish and display your content online. Most of us think of blogs as a chronicle of news events, or commentary on news and items of interest. Or personal diaries.
Few people stop to think that you can build any kind of website with a blog. In reality, a blog can be used very effectively to build a niche site. The fact of the matter is, a blog is the easiest way to publish your niche site content. But the biggest reason to use a blog is that it can drive traffic to your site a lot faster than a statically-built site. A niche site built with a blog is a very powerful strategy.
First, choose your niche and research your keywords. Write your first article based on one of those keywords, just as you would when building a regular site. Then set up your blog and publish that article. Your niche site is now live.
To make your site structure the most effective, be sure to choose a blog that allows the use of Categories, such as Word Press or Moveable Type. Use your 10 most important keywords as the name of your Categories. Then file all your secondary keyword articles under those Categories.
Why is this so important? If you keep building your site with keyword-rich articles, eventually you could have hundreds of pages. Each of those pages will have a link to your 10 Categories. And each of those links will use the anchor text of your most important keywords. As a result of all those internal keyword-rich links, your site will end up ranking very well in the search engines for your Category names.
Now it's time to set up your traffic strategy. This is where a blog can really shine. There are many special RSS/blog directories that are hungry for feeds. By submitting your new blog to these directories, you can start getting traffic almost immediately. Quite often these feeds will result in a lot more traffic than all the major search engines combined. This is why it makes so much sense to build your niche site as a blog. You can have twice the traffic, and get it much faster than with a static site.
Here is a list of some of the top RSS/blog directories you should submit your site to:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Once you've submitted your site to the directories, you can get it indexed by Yahoo almost immediately by adding your RSS feed to your MyYahoo page. If you don't have a MyYahoo page, just go to http://www.yahoo.com. Now click on the MyYahoo link at the top and set up your free account. Once you have your account set up, click on Add Content, then add the URL of your blog RSS feed into the Find Content box.
When you go back to your MyYahoo page, your blog plus your first post should be shown. If you go look at your web stats for your site, you'll find that the Yahoo spider has already made a visit! Your new site should be indexed in Yahoo in just a couple of days. This is a strategy that some marketers were selling for $50 just a few months ago. And it works like a charm.
Every time you add a post, you can alert the RSS/blog directories by "pinging" them. There is a wonderful site at http://www.pingomatic.com that makes this very easy. You just have to type in your blog URL and Pingomatic will send your ping to Yahoo and about 15 other large directories. That will bring the spiders back to your site almost immediately!
During the first month, I would suggest that you write and add a new article every day. Blogs that are frequently updated get the most traffic. And you'll find that the major search engines will spider your site every day. At the end of a month, you'll have a 30-article niche site that is already getting a lot of traffic. If you've monetized your site with Adsense and related affiliate programs, you should also be making money already.
Once you've started building your niche sites with a blog, you'll never go back to doing it the old way again!
How To Make Money From The Internet
A guide to the easiest ways of how to make money from the internet armed with a computer and a bank account.
Ways to Get Money from the Internet
The basic way to get money from the Internet is to promote products via ads. These ads are placed on your own website or on someone elses such as a search engine in the form of sponsored ads.
The product might be your own product or someone elses where you participate as an affiliate and receive commissions on sales.
How Much Money Could You Make from the Internet ?
With your own product you would make a profit on each sale based on your sale price minus the cost of materials, shipping and other expenses.
Own Product Example
You market an eBook priced at $49 for download from your website and use a 3rd party payment provider such as ClickBank.
Each month you have 1,000 visitors to your website and a sales conversion rate of 5% so your revenue is $2,450 per month.
Now consider expenses like web hosting at $10 per month and credit-card processing fees of 8% giving costs of $206 per month.
So, in this example your profits are $2,234 monthly.
Affiliate Marketing Example
You have a website about fishing where you review equipment and have product links carrying your affiliate tracking code.
Your website gets 10,000 visitors a month and 10% click on a product link. 10% of these people purchase an average of $100 of merchandise. You get paid 5% commission.
So 1000 people click and 100 buy a product and you are paid 5% of $10,000 in commission.
You only have web hosting costs of $10 per month to deduct.
This nets you $490 per month profit.
Own Product or Affiliate Marketing ?
From the above examples it is clear which is the most profitable approach to take. However, you may struggle to develop your own product, yet you can immediately access 1000's of other people's products via the affiliate marketing route.
The affiliate commission on eBooks is generally far higher than physical goods so you can make good money marketing other people's eBook products rather than developing your own.
For physical products, successful affiliate marketers generally create sites that recommend the products such as sport's equipment. If the price of the products is high, you can make good money.
How to Make as Much Money as Possible
Which ever route is taken you need to balance the following factors for maximum profits:
Maximize Visitors
The more people that see your ads, the more will click and buy. Some ways to maximize visitors are:
Add more content and pages to your website
Optimize your website for search engines
Get more links to your website
Advertise your URL in Google adwords and pay per click search engines
Advertise your URL offline in classified ads
Maximize Click-throughs
Pre-sell products with reviews, articles and related information then provide links in easy to find places.
Maximize Profit
Adjust the selling price to balance sales volumes at the point where maximum profit is produced.
Minimize costs by reducing shipping costs and administration costs. One of the best ways to do this is to market digital products such as software and e-Books that don't require physical shipping.
Maximize commission. Look for large commission percentages and high conversion rates in affiliate partnerships.
Laptops – the Apple Macbook Air and the Dell Studio 17
Apple’s MacBook Air has been a very popular machine and there have been many people who have jumped at the chance to own one but is this because of the capabilities of the machine or simply the innovative look of this product? The Air has been marketed by Apple as the “world’s thinnest notebook”, however, have been a few claims that have said there was a Mitsubishi laptop from 1997 that was a fraction thinner but there are no other laptops around at the moment that come close to the size of the Air. The design and the engineering of this product is amazing and we would expect no less from Apple laptops, however, this device is very specialised and will no doubt not be as widely used as the standard 13-inch Macbook system. This could be because the MacBook Air has a few well-documented downfalls; it only has room for one USB port and no room for a built-in optical drive, mobile broadband, Ethernet or Firewire. On top of this, Apple still refuses to include a media card reader or an SD expansion slot in their laptops. However, there are of course some all-important plus-points; the ability to wirelessly connect to another system’s optical drive and new touchpad gesture controls. If you’re after an Apple Mac but aren’t sure whether the Air is for you then you will need to think of what you want from your laptop. For those who travel around a lot and who would benefit from a light-weight machine but with the extra screen space and who tend to hook up to the internet using Wi-Fi hot spots will probably be very impressed with the Air and its £1,199 price tag. If your needs are more complex and the high tech Apple MacBook Air doesn’t impress you too much in the looks department anyway then perhaps the new Dell Studio range laptops will suit you more. Dell laptops are made for a range of different prices but if you don’t want to be seen with the a cheaper Dell Inspiron laptop but the XPS range is well beyond your budget then the new Studio range could be just what you’ve been looking for. The Dell Studio 17 model can, like all Dell laptops, be customised to make it exactly what you’ve been looking for. The options start from the entry-level 1.73GHz Pentium Dual Core T2370 and work their way up to the 2.5GHz T9300 model. This means that there are choices of this laptop that will suit most budgets and performance needs. This model also has an HDMI output port and comes with a choice of three panels for its 17-inch screen; again, you can customise the screen in order to get the laptop of your dreams and with a price tag of £499, this sounds like a real bargain.
Read More..How to Write Your First Blog Post
Recently a friend asked me a question that any business that begins blogging will have to answer; What should your first post be about? That first post is terribly important, because it sets the tone for the blog, not just for the readers, but for the writers as well.
From the reader's point of view, I would want to see four areas covered in your first blog post:
1 - Who you are. Tell me about your business, but also introduce me to the blog's writers. Share pictures. The more information about yourself and your business that you are willing to share, the easier it will be for me as a reader to trust you.
2 - Why you are blogging. Possibly the most important question you can answer, because it will force you to spell out your intentions to your audience. And as always, consider your audience when answering this question, ask yourself, 'Why would someone come to this blog, what would they be looking for?' Hint: They won't be coming to your blog so that you can market to them.
3 - What will you be blogging about. Answering the above question makes this one much easier to answer. Will you be blogging about your business, or perhaps the lifestyles of your customers? Spell out the content on your blog so that I know what to expect when I arrive. And remember that this will also serve as a 'bookmark' for your writers to keep them focused on what the goal of your blog is.
4 - How I can leave feedback. Tell me how I can be involved. Can I leave comments? Do you encourage comments? What if I want to email you? Spell out exactly how I can contact you, and don't be afraid to encourage feedback, and even disagreement. In fact this would be a good place to formally spell-out your comment policy, which again can serve as a reference tool for your writers as well. But do everything you can to make sure that my feedback is appreciated, and encouraged.
