Many people thought that blogging was just a trend that wouldn't last, but it's clear now that blogging is here to stay as a powerful Web 2.0 marketing and traffic-generation tool, and marketers are definitely making money from their blogging efforts. Internet marketers are especially interested in blogs for a number of reasons. For more information, quivqo.com.
First of all, a blog is easy to set up and run. You don't have to learn HTML, and a blog can be set up and running in just a few minutes. There are many templates on the Internet that you can use with popular blog software like WordPress to make your blog look nice. And most professional hosting sites let you install WordPress almost instantly through the Fantastico options in your cPanel.
Even if you don't have your own website, you can still blog by using a hosted blog like the one at Blogger. But you should set up your blog on its own domain, with a professional domain name and webhosting.
Search engine optimization is a big reason why blogs are so important. When you add a blog post to your blog, just add a link or two to your main website that the blog is about. Over time, you should link to both the homepage and at least a few of the site's most important inner pages. This adds incoming links to your website, which may help your search engine rankings. Make sure that your blog template has the right robots meta-tag or that you use a "Do Follow" blog plug-in, or you may be wasting your time.
When you blog for marketing, it's important to write about things that are interesting to your niche, not just the industry that your niche is in. You must keep your attention on the problems, needs, and wants of your niches and ignore the rest of the market as a whole. You can't please everyone in the market, and that's not even what you're trying to do.
Set up a separate blog for each area or site you want to promote that isn't very tightly focused on the same niche. For example, an Internet marketer may have one blog for mainstream marketing, one for affiliate marketing, one for niche marketing, etc. Or, an Internet marketer who wants to target the golf niche might have one blog about golf swings and how to improve them, another about golfing equipment, and a third about golf courses around the world and how they compare.
Always remember that the more focused your blog is, the more targeted the traffic it brings in will be, and highly targeted traffic is the lifeblood of your online sales and list-building. In the previous example, all three blogs might lead to the same website, but one would lead to the page where you sell golf instruction videos and e-books, another to your section on golf equipment, and the third to a page where you sell golf vacations and packages.
The same example shows how easy it is for blogging to help affiliate marketers. Each of these three blogs could send traffic to two or three links that are closely related to the topic of that blog. Yes, all three have to do with golf, but if you do it right, you could target 6 or 9 different affiliate opportunities in the online golfing business.
It's also important to blog every day or at least a few times a week. Don't worry about how many people read your blog. The more you update it, the more popular it can become in blog directories and search engines. You should be able to build a good readership over time, and as time goes on, you will sell to those people. Add a sign-up form for your opt-in mailing list, and you'll have a very powerful marketing and profit centre that can bring new people into your sales funnel over and over again.
Use as many Web 2.0 services as you can to make sure your blogs get as much attention as possible. Use the "auto-pinging" feature of WordPress to its fullest, list your blogs with services like Technorati and MyBlogLog, and use online ping services like Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic to update even more directories every time you add a new article (post) to your blogs.
Blogging is a must-have tool for Internet marketing because it is easy to use, costs little or nothing, and has the potential to bring in money. It is especially good for people who are just starting out in the field. In fact, we're seeing more and more new Internet marketers start with blogging instead of traditional site building and sometimes stick with it. Get YOUR Internet marketing blogging going today!