Website Marketing Strategy Blog

by Kathleen Hobbins

Are you disappointed with the amount of money that you are making on your business weblog?  To make money, you need, first, to get traffic, and then to convert the traffic into sales.  If you are not making money on your business weblog, maybe you are making one of the following mistakes.

1. Maybe you aren’t blogging regularly.  You need to post to your blog regularly both to please your readers and to please the search engines.  Your readers will only keep coming back if there is new and noteworthy content on your blog.  Once the search engines have indexed your business weblog, they will only take note of it if something comes to their attention, either from regular new posts or from backlinks.  So keep posting regularly.
2. Maybe your content isn’t up to snuff.  Take a cold, hard look at the quality of the information on your blog.  See if you are posting interesting content.  Do you need images or videos?  Do your readers have a reason to email your posts to friends with the same interests?  Make sure your content is compelling.
3. Maybe you aren’t using your on-page SEO skills.  Make sure that you use your carefully-chosen keywords in your titles, categories and content.  That is how the search engines will find your posts and send new readers to them.  Do you know what you need to know about SEO?  If not, sign up for my free report, Website Marketing Strategy:  Search Engine Training.
4. Maybe your business weblog isn’t monetized.  To make money from your blog, you need to sell products or services on it.  You can do this in a number of ways.  Sell your own products or services; sell an affiliate product; or sell advertising.  But make sure you pick one of those methods and do it well.

To make money from your business weblog, you need to avoid making the mistakes outlined above.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

To be successful, your business weblog needs constant updating with fresh, well-written content.  It can be a challenge to keep up with it.  One tool that you can use to assist you is PLR, or private label rights material.  Used correctly, PLR can be a big help to you as you manage your business weblog.

PLR is easily available for download on the internet.  Although a large amount of PLR is on the broad topic of internet marketing, there is PLR available for many other niches as well.  It can be found in several formats, including ebooks, packs of articles and video series.

There are correct and incorrect ways to use it.  I don’t advise you ever to simply take it and post it unedited to your blog.  Duplicate content is discarded by the search engines, so posting an article that has been posted elsewhere on the internet, possibly dozens of times, will never be to your advantage.  Secondly, PLR material won’t be optimized for your keywords.  The best way to approach the use of PLR is to take an article, or a portion of an ebook, as a springboard to write your own article.  Your rewrite should be unique and optimized for your carefully chosen keywords.

But if you take that approach to PLR, you will find that it can be a very helpful tool.  Here are some of the things you can do with it:

• Take a pack of articles or an ebook and customize it into a series of blog posts. 
  
• Use it to create a short report on a specific subject that you give away for free on your site.  This is a common list-building technique.  The prospect of a free ebook is often enough to cause your readers to enter their email addresses.  It’s not that you couldn’t create the report yourself.  It’s just that using PLR material as a first draft helps you to get the report written faster and more easily.  And remember to link to your blog in the report to get your readers back there.
  
• In an expanded version of the suggestion just above, take a PLR book, enhance it with your own contributions, optimize it for your own keywords, update it if necessary and either give it away or sell it on your blog.
• If the PLR license permits it, you can leave the PLR ebook unchanged and give it, along with the PLR rights, to attract subscribers on your blog or through a JV giveaway event.  You can add it to another product as a bonus.  You can give it away or sell it to your list.  You can do anything you want to with it, as long as the license permits it.

PLR is easy to get and relatively inexpensive.  If you follow these tips and use PLR wisely, it can be a handy resource for you to produce fresh content quickly for your business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

Your website marketing strategy needs a business weblog.  But your blog needs its own strategy.  You need to devise a plan to bring traffic to your blog and make money from the traffic.  Here are five ways to maximize the benefits of having a business weblog.

1. Post to your blog regularly.  Bloggers who write about politics or the entertainment industry often blog several times a day.  From my perspective, few bloggers who manage their blogs as part of an overarching website marketing strategy need to post that often.  Posting three times a week is probably sufficient for most business bloggers.  But be sure that you do it faithfully.
2. Trade places with other bloggers.  By trading “guest post” positions with other bloggers, your readers will be introduced to your guests and your guests’ readers will be introduced to you.  That should expand the readership of all concerned.
3. Don’t forget to monetize your blog.  You can sell your own service or product on your blog.  Or you can sign up for an affiliate program.  Affiliate programs allow you to place a link on your site that will take your reader to the product owner’s site.  You don’t have to deal with a shopping cart, inventory, shipping or customer service.  Your only responsibility is to market the affiliate product and get a commission from a sale.
4. Don’t forget to optimize.  Do your keyword research to find appropriate keywords with a reasonable amount of traffic and a small amount of competition.  Then optimize your posts, including your post titles, for those keywords.
5. Ping your blog regularly to alert the search engines to your new content.  One way to automate that is by using http://pingomatic.com.

If you are going to have a business weblog, you owe it to yourself and your business to make it the most successful blog that you can manage.  Follow these five steps to bring traffic to your blog and money to your pocket and to bring success to your business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

The search engines love a well-written business weblog.  They love the informative content, the comments from readers, and the frequent updates.  But if you really want to get traffic to your blog, you need to go out and get it.  Some of the basic strategies for driving traffic to a static website can be tailored to suit a blog.  Here are six easy tips to increase traffic to your business weblog.

1. Use your keywords.  Don’t forget to optimize your blog posts for your keyword phrases.  There are two reasons that this is beneficial to you.  First, your readers will keep coming back when they find that you are posting interesting, well-written content on a topic that they are doing searches on.  Secondly, your search engine results will soar when the search engines find regularly updated, keyword-optimized content.  To optimize your content for your keyword phrase, use it in the first and last sentences of the first paragraph of your post.  Use it in the last sentence of your post.  Then use the same keyword phrase throughout your post about once for every 100 words.
2. Optimize your titles.  Choose the keyword phrase that you will be optimizing for in your post.  Use the same keyword phrase in the title, at the beginning if possible.
   
3. Use your blog to build a list.  There are huge benefits to building a list.  You can use your list to bring traffic to your site by sending out emails that summarize your recent blog posts.  Finish each summary with a “read more” link back to your blog.
4. Submit your posts to social bookmarking sites.  Use the same keyword phrase that you optimized your post for as the tag on the social bookmarking site.  Write an enticing comment to generate interest in your post. 
   
5. Submit your RSS feed to RSS directories.  The process will build backlinks to your site, which in turn will cause the search engines to pull your site up higher in the search results.  It will also cause readers to find your business weblog straight from the directory.  Here is a list of RSS directories.
   
6. Convert your posts into articles and submit them to article directories.  Rewrite each post so that you aren’t publishing duplicate content.  Optimize each article for your keyword phrase.   You can find a list of article directories here.

Don’t pick one or two of these search engine optimization techniques.  Do them all.  If you do, your business weblog will flourish.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

Small business owners often get the advice that a business weblog is a great way to make money.  It is, but only if you take the appropriate steps to monetize it. There are five chief ways to monetize your business weblog.

1. Use your business weblog to sell your own products or services.  Showcase your products or services in a sidebar and use the accompanying post to highlight them.  You want to be careful with your tone.  Most people who keep coming back to a blog aren’t interested in a hard sell.  They would prefer candid and accurate information.  Use your blog to develop trust over time.  The sale may take a while.
2. Use your blog to promote affiliate products.  An affiliate product is one that is created by someone else who makes it available for sale through an affiliate network.  If someone buys the product from your site, you get a commission.  The products should be carefully chosen to reflect the subject matter of your blog.  You also need to be sure that you have a high opinion of the product you promote.  You don’t want to lose the credibility of your readers by promoting something that doesn’t meet your standards.
3. Sell space on your blog for advertising.  The easiest and best known way to do that is to set up a free Google Adsense account.  Once your account is set up, you can place code on your site to display the ads of other internet marketers.  When your reader clicks on an Adsense ad, you get paid.  There are two disadvantages with the program, however.  First of all, the amount that you get paid is typically very small, so you need a large amount of traffic coming to your site and clicking through on the ads before you make any money.  Secondly, the nature of the ad takes the reader away from your site, when your general aim is to keep your readers on your site.  Some internet marketers have made good money with Google Adsense, however, so you may want to test your results to see if it is profitable for you.
4. Drive readers from your blog to your money site.  This is an indirect way of making sales.  But if your business weblog is not your chief website and you have, in fact another site as a money site, you may find that a profitable business model is to attract readers with good content to your blog and then entice them to click through to your money site by describing your great offers.
5. Use your blog to generate a list, then market to the list.  Again, this is an indirect way of monetizing your blog.  The common advice about list-building from your blog is to offer a free report on a pertinent subject in exchange for your reader’s email address.  Once you have the email address, you can develop a relationship with the reader through your email campaign and use the relationship to market related products to your list.  The products can be affiliate products, your own, or a mixture of the two.  For an example of that model, have a look at the blog that you’re reading!
   

I knew once of a new internet marketer who wrote an interesting blog but, amazingly, failed to offer any money-making options.  It was largely because he was uninformed about how to go about it.  You have now been informed.  So take action and make some money with your business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

Putting up a blog is easy and lots of people do it.  But succeeding with a business weblog, and earning money from it, are far more difficult.  Here is a list of six habits to cultivate in order to succeed with your business weblog.

1. Work hard.  You will need to post to your business weblog regularly.  So you need to research and write regularly.  Make the content compelling to draw people back.  That takes work.
2. Be creative.  Think of new ideas to present and new issues to discuss.  Think of new ways to do it, using quizzes, lists, surveys, aggragations of comments and other techniques.  And look at the niche not from your point of view but from that of your readers.
3. Work at making money from your blog.  You can sell your services and products, affiliate services and products, and advertising space.  Test different products and different ways of selling them.
4. Always be looking for new ways to get traffic.  Use the tried and true SEO techniques of social bookmarking, article marketing and forum posting.  Use guest posting with other bloggers to expose each of you to the other’s readers.
5. Build a list.  Offer a free report on a subject of interest to your readers and give it away in exchange for an opt-in.  The list will give you a way to monetize your business and get readers to it. 
   
6. Persevere.  Don’t give up.  It will take time and effort, and possibly some trial and error, to get traffic and to make sales.  So you need to keep working at it.  Persevere.  Don’t give up.

Nurture these six habits and you will see that your traffic and sales increase.  And you will have succeeded at creating a terrific business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

Are you having trouble posting to your business weblog regularly?  Are you struggling to think of things to blog about?  Here are some tips to help you out if you are encountering obstacles trying to post regularly to your business weblog:

1. Many people agonize over a 400 word blog post.  Stop it.  Take advantage of the fact that blogging allows you to use a tone and style that is more casual than a lot of business writing.  So spend a moment to organize your thoughts and then just write your blog post conversationally, as though you were speaking to a friend or colleague.  It will reduce the time it takes for you to write each post and help you get over writer’s block.
   
2. Write your content in advance.  I often write a week’s worth of posts on a single day, then use my blogging software to schedule them to be published on separate days.  I find it easier to sit down and write several posts at once, than to sit down three times a week for a single post at a time. 
   
3. Engage your readers to comment and then glean ideas for future posts from the comments.  Pose a problem in your post and ask your readers for their solutions.  Then respond to the comments to generate more conversation.
4. Go outside your own business to identify issues in your niche at large.  Read other blogs and forums in your niche to see what is being discussed.  Then address it in your own business weblog.
5. Use PLR content prudently to generate ideas about what to blog about.  “PLR,” or private label rights content, is readily available for purchase on the internet in a large number of markets.  It comes in the form of ebooks, articles and videos.  Your purchase of it gives you the right to use the content as though it were yours.  But don’t ever use it without customizing it.  First of all, you want to be sure that all your content is optimized for your keywords, so you will need to rewrite it to use your keyword phrases.  Secondly, since the search engines don’t like duplicate content, you want to be sure that all of your content is unique to your blog.  So take a PLR article, digest it, and rewrite it to reflect your perspective.

I have found that blogging routinely makes it easier and faster.  And it’s necessary to post regularly to draw the attention of readers and the search engines.  Following these tips should help you with your job of posting regularly to your business weblog.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, search engine training, Website Marketing Strategy

by Kathleen Hobbins

The search engines love a business weblog.  But you still need to work hard if you want to rank high.  Here are eight tips that will help you increase your business weblog’s ranking in the search engines.

1. Choose your title and URL carefully.  You want to use a keyword in your URL, yet make it user friendly, while still finding a URL that is available.  That can be challenging.   Different bloggers approach the task differently.   This is what I did:  Since one of my keyword phrases is “website marketing strategy.”  The phrase itself was not available.  So I added the word “blog” to the end of my keyword phrase.  Another choice would be to add hyphens between words in your URL.  I used my URL as the title of my blog.  And that’s how you came to be reading the “Website Marketing Strategy Blog.” 
   
2. Post to your business weblog daily.  One of the advantages of using a blog is that they are so easy to use and update.  And the constantly updated material is one of the features that the search engines love the most.  So exploit those facts.  Blog daily — it’s easy and the search engines love it.
3. Use keyword phrases as your category titles.  The search engines will pick them up and raise your rankings for those keywords. 
   
4. Don’t forget to tag each post.  It’s easy to do on most blogging platforms.  Don’t overlook it.
5. Ping each new post to let the search engines know that there is something new that they need to check out.
6. Submit your business weblog to RSS directories.  You can find a list of those directories here.  It builds up your backlinks as well as bringing you traffic from the directories.
7. Social bookmark your substantive posts.  By the nature of blogging, some posts are light in content and value.  Those posts don’t have to be bookmarked.  But remember to bookmark your meaty content on at least four or five social bookmark sites.  There is a list of social bookmark sites here.
8. If you have a money site separate from your blog, link to your money site often.
   

Have you ever come across an abandoned blog?  I have.  Many people start blogging with good intentions but don’t keep it up.  I hope it goes without saying that a blog that doesn’t get treated well won’t serve you well in your marketing efforts.  Blogs are easy to create and maintain and very beneficial to you if you work them.  So make the most of your business weblog and it will be good to you, too.

Technorati Tags: business weblog, search engine training, Website Marketing Strategy