Launched a blog to help market your business? Here are some tips, tricks and online tools that can make the difference between blogging obscurity and online celebrity. Blogging has immense benefits for a whole range of online businesses, but with millions of blogs languishing forgotten after a few posts, having some inside knowledge can help immensely.
Feedburner
One of the key components of a blog is the RSS feed. RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) allows anyone to click on the orange RSS icon and subscribe – for free – to any updates to your blog. Wherever they are, they will be able to open your latest posts in an internet browser or RSS reader without having to repeatedly visit every day to see if there is a new post.
To get the most out of your RSS feed, you need Feedburner. Feedburner allows you to monitor your subscribers and provides additional features giving greater flexibility and compatibility.
One such feature is being able to allow email subscriptions. Not everyone online prefers to use RSS readers – some will prefer receiving an email of your latest blog post when it becomes available. Feedburner not only allows you to add that service, but you can customise it with additional features to suit. Email subscriptions are also effective in that many people may not read everything in their RSS reader, but may be more receptive to an email they specifically signed up for.
Your Feedburner account will also show you how many people have subscribed and what they’ve clicked on. Don’t panic if the number stays low for a while - getting subscribers takes time. Subscribers are great to have but they take encouragement to hit the button. They subscribe because they feel there is enough material of interest to keep coming back, so you have to make the blog enticing for them. A blog has to give them something for free to make them subscribe – free advice, free laughs, free offers or free entertainment of some kind.
MyBlogLog
Some of you may already be using Google Analytics to monitor your web traffic and analyse how visitors are moving through your pages. MyBlogLog is another free service that can provide a handy and simple daily report on the viditor activities on your blog. You can create an account with your existing Yahoo account, otherwise it only takes a couple of minutes to join.
Once done, you can add your blog details. When you are asked for your Primary Feed URL, you will be able to use the Feedburner feed created above, providing the best RSS source so MyBlogLog can shine. This feed will update MyBlogLog with every post as you publish it, showcasing it to all other MyBlogLog users who have chosen to follow your profile or your topic area.
But the best bit is in the statistics section. On your profile, there is a link beneath your blog for Statistics. If you click on this, you can see how many visitors your blog gets every day as well as the websites they came from to find you. For example, if they used a Google search and clicked on your blog, you’ll see the URL of the search they did. If they came to your blog from a link on another website, you’ll see which website that is. You’ll also see which of your posts they are reading and can decide what is popular and what isn’t and design future posts accordingly. Finally, the statistics page also tracks which links readers clicked on to leave the blog.
Sharing with Social Bookmarking
A lot of bloggers and websites receive a great deal of traffic by getting their content syndicated through social media websites. For example, if a page from your blog is submitted by a happy reader to StumbleUpon, it can offer up that page to hundreds of other StumbleUpon readers, who may also give it a 'thumb up', spreading it to more, and so on.
There are various services that offer ways of attaching social bookmarking buttons automatically to your posts. One of the most popular is Share This. The Share This widget can be configured to reflect the social bookmarking sites you believe are most appropriate to your audience and provides your readers with an easy way to share your content with friends.
For further information, visit the following helpful guides.
Links
The key is to attract links to your posts. That is why it is necessary to write content that either is informative (offering content, facts and ideas not repeated ad nauseum elsewhere) or entertaining. People will link to content they like – and the more links you get, the higher in Google you go and the more traffic you get etc, etc, etc. It snowballs.
Sadly, this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes patience and a regular posting habit. It also takes networking with other blogs – bloggers like to link back to people who respond well to them. So visit some good blogs, read, enjoy, comment on their posts, interact, swap ideas. Blogging is one of those communities where everyone learns from each other.
One way to track which other blogs are linking to you is by creating a free account with Technorati. Although by no means infallible, Technorati does track most links from other blogs to your content and allows you to see how others are reacting to your posts. Blogging relies on these networks of links back and forth as opinions are exchanged, ideas swapped and topics debated. The right post with the right topic can prompt hundreds of other bloggers to respond with their ideas boosting your blog and traffic overnight.
There are a number of blogs that should be on the essential reading list for anyone who writes a blog or regularly uses content to attract site visitors. Here is just a sampling. By visiting them regularly, adding to the comments and entering the conversations, you won’t only learn a great deal but you’ll also network with some fantastic online people that can help generate traffic.
Twitter
Twitter has become a huge phenomenon in a short time and businesses are rapidly learning how it can help communicate their brand. Twitter can also serve as a wonderful publicity tool for your blog.
By creating an account with Twitter and another with Twitterfeed, you can easily configure your RSS feed to post a message publicising your latest post to all your Twitter followers automatically after it is posted live. The more followers your Twitter account accumulates, the more people see and hopefully click through to your content.
Blog it and they will come
The secret to any blog is regular, interesting and original content. Everything else is about placing enough breadcrumbs towards that content throughout the internet to help people to find it.
This may all sound like a lot of work, but blogging is an immensely rewarding past-time that can benefit your online business with increased links, much greater exposure, loyal followers, a reputation as a thought leader in your chosen field and the power to network with other influencers within your target market.
Blogging isn’t a short term activity, but one that gradually grows over time until it hits critical mass, opening the floodgates.
About the Author
Jonathan Crossfield (Twitter) is the head writer and Marketing Manager for PlanetDomain. He is a regular contributor on internet business to Nett Magazine and also produces a successful blog on writing.
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