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By Terri Seymour in Featured

The term blog is short for web log, which started out meaning a personal online journal. Back in the late 1990s when blogs first emerged, they were usually filled with personal posts about the owner’s daily life, thoughts, and problems. They have since
evolved into invaluable online marketing tools. Blogs are now a “must-have” resource for any online business.

So jump into the 21st century and read below to see why your business demands a blog!

1. Corporate Headquarters – Every company needs a home-base or corporate headquarters, so to speak. A blog would be the hub of your business and establish your online presence.

2. Easy to Manage – The choices available to you when creating your blog are limitless. With widgets, plug-ins, templates, etc. it is one of the easiest and quickest ways to build an effective, powerful website. You will be amazed at the things you can do with your blog, even if you are technically-challenged.

3. Customer Interaction – A blog encourages customer interaction by allowing people to post their comments, opinions, questions, etc. This will enable you to provide more effective customer service. It will also enable your customers and visitors to get to know you better which in turn will build trust and credibility. Your blog will become an active community attracting more and more subscribers, followers, etc. by building relationships.

4. Cost-Effective Marketing – Research has shown that businesses with a blog have reduced marketing costs. Not only are the costs lower with blogs, but the results are much more successful. Blogs do generate more customers at a lower cost!

5. Value and Education – Because of regular postings and fresh content, your blog will educate your visitors as well as add value to their visit. For example: if you own an online jewelry store, you can add posts educating your visitors on jewelry. How it’s made, the value of the different gems used, the quality of the workmanship, how to take care of your jewelry and much more helpful information can be given to your customers. This will also help establish you as an expert so people will continue to come to you for help and information as well as for the products and/or service they need.

6. Free! – One of the best things about an effective blog is you can get one for free. You do not have to pay a professional web designer hundreds or thousands of dollars to create your business headquarters. Blogger and WordPress are two of the top blog providers.

7. Social Connections – A blog allows you to stay connected with your social sites more effectively. You can also allow your visitors to share with their social pages as well. With social media plug-ins and widgets, your visitors can simply click a button to share your site with all their followers, fans and friends. All these social connections could spin a pretty big web of customers.

8. Business Connections – Through your blog, other online business owners can find you more easily, thus increasing your chances of forming business connections and alliances. Joint ventures with other business owners can help get both sides more exposures, leads and sales.

9. Higher Traffic and Sales – Higher traffic and sales is a goal sought after by every online business owner. Having a blog on your site can help you achieve this goal by the more effective marketing results it can create. Your marketing is more efficient, your site is more valuable and educational, your online presence is much more announced and your networking circle is always expanding. This should all lead to more traffic and increased sales.

10. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Good blogs consistently provide fresh and updated keyword-rich content. This is exactly what Google and the other engines look for in a site. Blogs also increase your chances of getting more quality inbound links. This is another thing the search engines like. As your blog grows and gets more visitors, the importance of it will also grow. This can help you in the search engines as well. Overall, a blog will more likely do better in the search engines than a standard website.

There are many more benefits to blogging than what I have mentioned in this article so if you are not already a blogger, you need to seriously consider becoming one. You will be pleasantly surprised at how much it can benefit your business.

Don’t be one of the 95% of people who fail at their online business. Terri Seymour can help you make money online. Find out how to increase your traffic and sales with her popular “How to Build Your Online Business” ebook for FREE at: ==> http://www.SeymourProducts.com

By Adam Bauthues in Featured

bloggingBlog marketing is a wonderful way to connect with your audience, to provide valuable and useful information to prospects and customers, to sell your products and services, and to drive traffic to your website. However, before you begin to blog or even start to set one up, you
have one very important decision to make. Which blogging platform will you use? Here are a few tips on how to use blog platforms successfully.

The Big Three and Beyond

A blog platform is essentially a product which a blog or website is based on. In many cases they’re the service you use to host and publish your blog. In the blogging world, there are three big players with a host of smaller platforms. The big three are:

* Blogger, now owned by Google
* Typepad
* WordPress

There is also MoveableType.org, which is an open source publishing platform. Another is Joomla, which offers blogging capabilities but is considered more of a website platform than a blogging platform. There are many other website hosts which offer blogging functions; however, they’re not traditional platforms.

When you choose a blogging platform, you’re looking for a few key ingredients. You’re looking for:

* Ease of use - If you have to jump through hoops and read a 1000 page manual to get a blog up and running, you’re not going to want to do it. Intuitive interfaces and easy to find information are essential.

* Functionality - It needs to be user friendly for your customers and prospects, and that means easy to navigate and easy to use.

* Features - You want your blog to be able to do what you want and need it to do, including sell products and services, host contests, take feedback and so on.

* Price – Always a consideration.

* Customization - You want to be able to make your blog look and feel exactly like you want it to without a ton of work, time and money.

* Reputation - You want a platform that’s going to be around for years and years to come so you don’t have to switch your blog to a different platform.

Before you choose a blogging platform you’ll want to spend some time determining what you want your blog to accomplish. If for example you want to optimize your blog for the first page of the search engines, you’re going to want a blog that is easy to optimize and maybe has search engine optimization plug-ins. This means making a list of your requirements before you even begin comparing blogging platforms.

Another important thing to consider is where your blog is going to be hosted. TypePad and Blogger are both hosted blogs, meaning your URL will be http://www.yournamehere.typepad.com/.

The same is true for Blogger. WordPress gives you the option. You can host your blog on WordPress or redirect it to another host so your URL is whatever you want it to be.

Read everything about your blogging platform before you go through the work to customize it and set it up. Some hosted blogging platforms do not allow advertising, for example, and if that’s something you want to do, then you’ll need to consider those restrictions before you
sign on.

The good news is that blogging is free and unless you hire a professional designer to customize it then your start-up expenses are nominal. (There’s a $10 fee to redirect a WordPress blog to another host.) Choosing your blogging platform just takes a little time and research.

Happy blogging!

Article by Adam Bauthues. And now I would like to give you free instant access to a secret blogging video, that shows where I do all of my blogging and why. Visit: http://projectmarketer.com/empower.php today, or come by my Blog to see it in action at: http://www.EmpowerNetwork.com/kadmon.

By Anindya Chatterjee in Featured

spn_exclusiveOkay, if not WordPress, try Joomla. But, the key is to have access to your own Content Management System. But, I am getting ahead of myself.

You are a small business and need a web presence? You have little if no software skills? I guess that describes about 99% of us, except those whose business is software!

First, know why you are going on the web in the first place. To be found and to be talked about. Both of these are going to need content; lots of it. A website that does not publish content frequently is dead – search engines give up on it, your repeat visitors come back once and see the same old stuff they saw a week back and are gone; never to return.

So, the investment in website development for your company is more than just a one time investment; it is a continuous process. You need to keep changing the text and the pictures to keep the search engines and visitors interested.

Do get your website professionally done. In fact, even if you are a software company, consider this. Web-design may not be your core competence area. Give it to a professional to do. Drive the strategy and branding, by all means but leave the execution to the experts.

But, and this is important, choose the development platform yourself. Remember, the content has to be kept updated? If your vendor did the development using technology that you did not understand, then every time you change anything on any of the pages of the website, you will need to go back to the vendor to change it. And, that will mean a recurring cost.

When we re-did our website, we looked for a vendor with specific skills on building using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System).

What does that mean?

It basically means that I have a powerful editor, easy to use at my command which I can use anytime to nip, tuck and even chop and change my website- long after my vendor is gone.

Change the navigation of this link? Sure, 30 seconds. Re-write the copy of the home page? 30 minutes to write and 30 seconds to publish. Change the image on the homepage? 3 minutes. Create a new promotions page and add it to the site? 30 minutes.

Bonus: Have a SEO friendly site with a structured sitemap the search-engines love, thousands of plug-ins for adding functionalities like search, ecommerce, social sharing and so on.

How can you NOT be on WordPress?

Okay, you can be on Joomla or Drupal or other open source CMS platforms too. We used WordPress and we know it worked great for us.

But, isn’t WordPress a blogging platform? I don’t want my site to look like a blog.

All I can say is that it won’t. Ours does not! Ours is simple, but there are some really complex sites out there developed on WordPress or other such open source content management systems.

Go ahead, give it a shot!

One more thing, if you want to know how to play with the WordPress backend and you know nothing about software, fear not. Consider starting your blog first on wordpress dot com. Takes very little time to get the hang of it. Once you know it, be aware that your website’s CMS will work EXACTLY the same way.

Anindya Chatterjee is an international sales and marketing leader based out of New Delhi, India. He now runs Anwesha CRM, http://www.anwesha.in, a software products and solutions company that makes hosted software for sales, marketing, distribution and inventory management.

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

blogging2One of the biggest advantages that the web offers is the relative ease of developing tools catering to the needs of a particular user set. For every ten people who want to perform a specific task, there will be ten ways for them to do it because each will have ten different needs to address. Blogging software is an excellent example of this phenomenon as there have been numerous blogging programs that have arisen since the advent of Livejournal in the late 1990s.

Understanding a few of the more common blog software programs can help any blogger make an informed choice about their particular needs and get their message out in the most efficient way.

Livejournal

Livejournal is the earliest, albeit not the simplest, of the blog creation programs introduced. It began as an early form of social media networking software; the emphasis was on friends sharing their journals online with one another. As such, it has a multitude of features aimed at creating a mutually-supporting network of watchers and friends.

There are groups that can be joined and monitored for content relating to the blog’s interest, which is a key tool in generating involved commentary. Similarly, it is easy to subscribe to specific blogs and monitor them on the “friends” list for the same kind of content. The Livejournal software also is used by a number of blogs, such as Deadjournal and Insanejournal, and was used by Greatestjournal before GJ went under. Thus, a great many people already are familiar with its functionality and there is a large user base to tap into.

On the other hand, it isn’t the simplest system to figure out, with some friends functionality buried under several layers of interface. Additionally, it suffers from a certain juvenile reputation, being firmly associated with high school students in many minds. The audience is still big, but it has its limits.

Blogger

Blogger is one of the most commonly used blogging programs out there. It has the advantage of being very simple and more or less omnipresent. It’s become so common to use that the .blogspot portion of a url has become inextricably associated with blogs of all types, be they serious or more casual in nature.

The simplicity of Blogger is its strongest advantage. It doesn’t bury the user in options, making the process of setting up and getting a blog moving very easy. Blogs can be tagged and disseminated on short notice, and there are a number of templates available to customize a blog’s appearance.

On the other hand, the simplicity of the interface is a slightly shallow concept. Blogs can be tagged, but they can’t be categorized within the blog itself. This makes organizing a Blogger blog a bit difficult. Going further, templates cannot be edited easily — doing so requires CSS and HTML knowledge. Any business hiring a blog writer to use the Blogger software will need to stipulate that CSS and HTML editing knowledge are a must as well.

WordPress

WordPress is growing in popularity as a blog platform because it offers a compromise between simple but limited options like Blogger and the more robust yet incredibly complicated options such as Movable Type. WordPress is essentially a word processor built into a publishing package.

A whole slate of editing options are available for writing the blog itself, such as font and formatting adjustments, and the option to edit in visual style or to go right to the HTML if the blog writer is comfortable with that. There are options to make a quick post with very little adjustment as well as options to make a more complex offering with jumpcuts, embedded video and elaborate pictures. Also, the templates can be adjusted without knowledge of HTML, allowing for much more customization.

Moveable Type

This is an unusual entry into the software. It is very well known and incredibly powerful for people who know what they’re doing. However, it is also notoriously difficult to install properly and even harder to use to its full effect. MT offers many options for customization, but then so does being able to program in computer languages such as HTML and C++. This is an option not for the beginner, but for someone already experienced with blogging and computer language in general who wants full control of every aspect of his or her blogging experience.

Self Made

This is a bit of a trick in that it isn’t explicitly a blogging software program. Instead, some users do elect to simply make posts directly onto their front page using the basic text software of their site. This has a certain simplicity to it, minimizing the need for complicated installs. However, it also has an unfinished look about it, and severely limits the options of what can be accomplished, and as such is an option more to be avoided than embraced.

As a final note, it is fairly easy to get a hold of these blogging programs. Before committing to any one of them, a user should create a “dummy” account for each and try a few sample posts to see how they like working with the software. This will make the entire process a bit more complicated up front, but will ensure that the company gets the tool it most needs.

Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/.

By Taylor Jordan in Featured

wp-bigWordPress is one of the most robust and extremely versatile content management systems available. It might be used to make a basic blog site, or it can be used as the robust support driving your ecommerce business. What is really special about WordPress is that you are able to effortlessly design both kinds of websites without any help; even if you do not know anything on the subject of creating a web site or Html code. Still the greatest thing about WordPress is that it is amazingly Search engine optimization friendly. Here are some reasons why WordPress is one of the best content management systems for SEO?

1. Search Engine Optimization Friendly Permalinks: Permalinks are in essence links or URLs to your article. When you generate a post or article in WordPress, a URL is immediately created. WordPress lets you make URLs or permalinks that are made up of key words which search engines are attracted to. This allows for search engine crawlers to rank your site for the word of your choice.

2. SEO Compatible Article Titles: WordPress can be set up to automatically make the article titles a permalink. A keyword rich title utilized as a permalink to your internet site will make it simpler for you to achieve greater rankings in Google along with other search engines when people are searching for data or products that you are offering.

3. Allows You to Create Tags: Tags are similar to labels. Tags are found at the end of a article on any WordPress blog site and enable you to use keyword phrases to describe your post. At the end of this article you will likely see several words or tags at the bottom of the post such as “Word Press”, “WordPress for beginners”, or “WordPress for SEO”. These tags or key words will let the search engines web spiders better index your blog post which actually will assist surfers who are searching for information like “WordPress” or “WordPress for SEO” to find your website.

4. Lets You Cross Link Content: WordPress allows you to easily link associated content which helps with search engine optimization. Cross linking is where you create a link from one of your articles or blog posts to another relevant article on your website. Using this article as an illustration, I could create a link within this article that when clicked would bring you to a different WordPress
article which you might find insightful. The link would be a keyword, or keyword phrase such as “learn WordPress”. This is another WordPress tool to help with your search engine optimization.

5. You Can Ping New Articles or Posts: Each time you post or edit either a posting or a blog page your WordPress web site can alert a range of different web sites that you have updated your web site. This is known as pinging and it is another very valuable aid that you can use to help your web site with getting ranked in the search engines.

6. Effortless Install of Google Sitemaps: Google Sitemaps has two important advantages for site owners. Not only can it help site visitors see a outline of exactly what they can find on your web site, but it helps Google to further index and rank your website by letting Google know exactly which blog pages are the most important.

7. Ability to Create Categories: Categories enable you to automatically arrange your content on your website. Think of categories like folders or maybe, a directory. A visitor to your internet site can find any article that you have ever published on your website, or any product that you want to sell easily because WordPress lets you assign a category. If you have visited websites where you can easily choose a list of subjects or products based on type, that website has set up categories. As you’ve probably suspected, search engines like it when website information is well organized and this will also help with the indexing of your internet site on Google, or any of the search engines. Quick tip: Use keywords that your audience is searching for as categories to make it simpler for people to discover you. Building a website that is SEO friendly is a snap because of the tools built in to WordPress.

If you want to make it easier to be discovered for the net, WordPress is definitely a powerful search engine optimization tool that you can absolutely not do without.

Taylor Jordan writes for Tools For Social Media, http://www.ToolsForSocialMedia.com and Social Media For Business: http://socialmediaforbusiness.tumblr.com/ Check out more search engine marketing tips.

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

bloggingBlogging has this image of being something that’s quick, easy and casual. The savvy blogger is surfing the Internet, comes across the news story of the day, and dashes off an indignant commentary on the topic, his scathing wit flowing from dancing fingers into the ether of the web, going up within mere moments for all to see and appreciate.

So why is it that when I try to sit down and blog, it seems to take forever, or worse, never gets done as I continually push it aside? What the heck makes blogging take so long to get a handle on?

For an answer, I actually took a step away from the blogging world and looked at the way I handled another part of my life a few years ago – distance education.

There’s actually a lot of overlap between taking classes online or by correspondence and handling a career based entirely on your own creative input. In particular, the time management techniques that I used to handle my online classes applied just as strongly to the world of blogging as it did to the world of distance literature courses.

By Stefan Dyke in Featured

bloggingHaving a blog is one of the easiest ways to get started making money online and one of the best things about them is that they are extremely easy to setup and create. Not only can you maintain your blog at your own pace, modern technology means that you can even blog while you are on vacation or on the move – just imagine knowing that your blog is making you money while you enjoy a holiday somewhere nice!

Of course the first step to making any money with a blog is to get one set up. The good news is that it’s possible to do this completely free of charge and that’s what we are going to take a look at in this article.

First, you need to get yourself set up with a blog. There are a couple of options – host a blog using your own domain name or get a free one hosted elsewhere. Let’s concentrate on the free blog options initially and in this instance there are really only two decent options:

http://www.blogger.com or http://www.wordpress.com.

Blogger is actually owned by Google, so it will generally be indexed by Google faster whereas WordPress is a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable. WordPress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories and you can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

A quick word of warning. If you are thinking of using a WordPress hosted blog, WordPress tends to frown upon blogs that are too commercial and hosted on their service platform. If you want to make money from your blog or make it commercial, you may want to use a self-hosted WordPress blog which you can get from WordPress.org or Blogger.

Once you’ve gotten yourself a free blog from either Blogger or WordPress you should post some test posts and get yourself familiar with the many options that are available to you (in particular with WordPress) so that you can be sure to understand how they work and what the benefits are.

Here are some key features that you should get to know in order to make the most of your blog:

Permalink - Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

Trackback - When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will automatically show up in their
“trackback” section. This feature is only available with WordPress, and not Blogger blogs.

Pinging – Pinging is the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gain traffic and get easy links to your blog, which can increase your search engine ranking.

Now that you know a little bit more about the language of blogging, let’s think about the type of content you should consider blogging about in order to maximize your chance of having a profitable blog.

One key thing to understand is that the nature of the internet and people in general means that there is no limit to the type of content that your blog could have. The main difference between a blog that does well and makes money for it’s creator and one that doesn’t is going to be down to the way that you write, not what you write about. Think about the type of articles you like to read. They are usually light weight and easy to skim in order to get the gist of the content, so you want to make sure that your blog contains quality content that is easy to absorb.

Adding a personal touch to your blog posts will attract more readers and have them coming back for more by making the site feel more friendly and engaging. Avoid writing like you are preaching to the masses. Instead, concentrate on writing as if you are simply talking with a close friend, someone that is eager to learn what you have to share, someone who you can relate to. And besides, it’s also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. We are all very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors will want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog will make a world of difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

One thing to remember – it can be hard to change from one blog platform to another without a large amount of work so if you are truly looking to make money with your blog, start with either a Blogger site or a WordPress blog installed on your own server (I’d personally suggest the latter).

Stefan is a UK based Internet Marketer who believes that blogging is a tool that should be in every internet marketers arsenal and as such has created an how-to guide designed to get anyone up and running a new blog as quickly as possible. Find out more about the guide at
http://cashbloggingtactics.com and more about Stefan at http://summit-marketing.com.

By Cathy Henry in Featured

wp-bigWordPress is one of the most powerful web design tools anyone can use when building their websites. No longer just a blogging platform, it has been developed into a fully functional CMS that is far more flexible, user-friendly than most other Content Management Systems.

The reason I love WordPress so much is because it is highly customizable. There are hundreds of thousands of plugins and themes available that allow me to create a website with any features I could ever want. Through the use of plugins and themes I cannot only build simple blogs, I can also develop fully functional websites with shopping carts to sell products and services or even create membership sites and community portals.

The biggest advantage to using WordPress is being able to automate almost all of the on-page SEO tasks and even some of the off-page tasks. Through the use of plugins, I am able to get my websites indexed in Google quickly, often within minutes.

Because most of the SEO process is set up to run automatically, every page of my websites are fully optimized to get the best possible placements in the search engines. No other CMS makes it this easy.

By Ray Carr in Featured

bloggingO.K. so you think you have an idea or even a product to sell through your brand new internet business.

Internet marketing is a brilliant business to be in. There are boundless opportunities to run online businesses which can make incredible amounts of money, if you have established that there is a market for your chosen niche or product, and have done the necessary research.

All set, ready to go?

Er, not quite.

You should establish a presence in your market before you unleash your product to the world.

If you are about to start an internet business, then you should be wondering about attracting traffic to your site. There are many advertising options available, but if money is tight, some of these options may not seem practical.

By Scott Jason in Featured

Blogs-&-PodcastsThere are three words not normally associated with SEO. They are quick, cheap, and easy. But there is one situation where I can honestly say these words really do describe the optimization process; the WordPress blog.

Google loves WordPress because it’s easy to spider and uses extremely clean code on the back end. But there’s more…

Google has a thing for dynamic content and lots of it. And it doesn’t get much better than WordPress when it comes to making Google happy. You don’t have to know a lot about SEO because WordPress sets you up to naturally take advantage of what Google likes. And if you invest a bit in a nice plugin, you can often see results you never even dreamed of.

There are just a few things to know about initial setup so I’ll cover them one by one.

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