hanaka's Blog

If there is a downside to blogging, I have yet to find it. The more you learn about blogging, the more there is to like.

In fact, here are 6 mouth-watering reasons why every marketer should be blogging:

1- Fast Search Engine Spidering and Indexing of Your Site:

Did you know that Google owns the most popular blogging platform on the planet? Blogger at http://www.blogger.com is used to produce thousands of blogs. Even a complete internet newbie can set up a blog in about 5 minutes at Blogger. And guess who can be counted on to come by and quickly spider all those new blog posts as they are written?

Yahoo is also embracing blogs and feeds in a big way. Savvy marketers know that adding their blogs and feeds to their MyYahoo page can bring the Yahoo spider to their site almost immediately.

One of the reasons that blogs get spidered so quickly is that most of them produce a feed. Many blogs automatically "ping" (or notify) some of the large sites that carry these feeds and make them available for syndication. Search engines spider these sites many times a day. Blogger, for instance, pings Weblogs every time you make a post. You can also "ping" a free site called Pingomatic (http://www.pingomatic.com) every time you add a new blog post. Your ping will notify Yahoo and 11 other large feed sites that you've added a post. If it only were so easy to get Google to notice new pages on regular sites!

If you have a new site that you are having trouble getting indexed, adding a blog or RSS feed is one of the quickest ways to get the spiders to come calling.

2-Blogs can Build Your Backlinks Quickly:

If you've spent time trying to get reciprocal links to your site, you know how frustrating, boring, and time-consuming it can be. I've long considered reciprocal link building to be one of the worst ways to develop link popularity. Many SEO experts consider one-way links to be far more effective.

A blog can build one-way links to your site fast. If you've just started a blog, you should submit it to the large blog and feed directories. Here is a list of the Top 55:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Once you've submitted your blog to these directories, you'll find your backlinks growing quickly. This past year, more webmasters are using RSS feeds on their sites to keep their sites fresh and spidered frequently. Software applications such as RSS Equalizer, Express RSS, and CARP make this easy.

After starting my first blog, I was amazed at how many different sites carried my feed with a link back to my site! These links can multiply exponentially over time.

Now tell me something. Wouldn't you rather be spending your time adding content to your site than trying to get questionable reciprocal links? Especially when it doesn't take any extra time?

3-A Frequently Updated Blog will Keep the Spiders Visiting Your Site Often:

Most of us are aware that the search engines like sites that are updated frequently. If you have your blog set up correctly, every post will update several pages of your site. Then pinging Yahoo and the blog and feed directories at Pingomatic can bring out the spiders in just a few hours. This is a great way to get new pages of your site indexed quickly and frequently.

4-Your Site is Stickier and More Appealing to Visitors:

A blog on your site is an easy way to keep your site updated on a regular basis. The upside is that visitors will come by more often. If they find your blog interesting and informative, they may bookmark your site. That means you have a much greater chance of making sales. And you have a ready-made audience for any new products you launch.

A blog can also add a human face to your website that potential customers will trust and respond to. Most marketers know that people buy from people they like and respect. A well-written blog is a great way to build a relationship with your visitors.

5-A Blog Is The Fastest And Easiest Way To Build A Brand-New Website Without Training:

Even a 10 year old could set up a blog at Blogger.com and be blogging almost immediately. No HTML knowledge is necessary. You don't need to know how to FTP. You don't need to know how to link the pages in your site together. All you have to do is type in your post and click on the "publish" button. And yet you can still set up an attractive, spiderable site in record time.

Blogs can be used for any type of site, not just for online ezine delivery or a place to announce new products. Using a blog you could quickly build a niche site. Just research the best keywords for your niche. Then write articles around those keywords and post them to your blog. Include your keywords in your title. You now have an instant niche site that will be spidered quickly and be easy to maintain.

6-Keyword competition in RSS feed sites is much less than in the SE's:

Google, Yahoo, and MSN each have many millions of webpages in their indexes. It can be almost impossible to get top rankings for competitive keywords if you don't have a high PR site with lots of backlinks.

It's a completely different story at the RSS feed sites. The competition for many high-competition keywords is almost nonexistent. Setting up a blog in some of these high-competition niches is a good way to successfully compete.

Marketers spend a lot of time and money getting traffic to their sites, creating backlinks, getting good SE rankings, and building relationships with their customers. A blog can improve your results in all those areas. There aren't very many free marketing techniques that can make that claim!

For more tips and ideas on how to make money blogging, be sure to visit my "Why Marketers Should Blog" weblog at (what else) http://www.WhyMarketersShouldBlog.com

The use of Business Blogging by small businesses is a topic that has been covered by many but is certainly important enough to be revisited here. I am convinced, given the wide range of potential benefits and the different ways in which a small business can use a Business Blog, that the discussion should not be if a blog is worthwhile but rather where its focus should lie.

A blog can play a central role in the marketing activity of a Small Business but, like all forms of marketing, it needs to be planned, targeted and measured. Consequently, a key phase in creating a successful Small Business blog happens ahead of its launch when you plan out how you want to use your Blog, who your target audience is and what you want to achieve with it. All three of these elements are key to its success.

If we now take a look at some of the potential types of focus that a small business Blog can take, then you will see what a powerful tool it can be.

Demonstrate and communicate your expertise
Most small businesses offer specialist knowledge and skills - it's what differentiates them - but what they often lack is a way to demonstrate them to potential customers. A Business Blog offers the ability to do this and much more beside. By what you write in your posts and also how you write them, you can show your expertise without overtly selling to your readers - this gives you the chance to build up a positive reputation and a degree of trust with potential clients and partners alike.

Build individual networks and foster collaboration
Small businesses may be specialists but they also need a strong support structure and partners around them. Business blogging is not only an ideal way to start to engage with customers, as we have seen, but also to foster partnerships, collaborations and joint ventures with others in your industry. As you attract other players in your marketplace to your blog, opportunities for collaboration and networking will develop naturally through the conversations taking place.

Communicate with a local, national or global audience
While Business Blogs are most often used to communicate with a targeted, but geographically widespread, audience, they can also allow you to focus in on a local customer base, primarily by changing the emphasis of the posts and the structure. This flexibility of approach means that small businesses of all types and with all types of customer base can use blogs to promote their business and develop relationships with their customers.

Developing reputation and trust
We all need to get closer to our customers and a Business Blog is an excellent way to achieve that. It allows us to engage customers and readers of our blog in a way that no other online method can achieve. This in turn gives us the time and the opportunity to develop our reputation in their eyes and foster a high level of trust between ourselves and our customers.

Great Search Engine rankings
With so many people using the internet to research products and services before they buy, small businesses need to achieve a prominent position and high ranking in Search Engine Results for their chosen key phrases. Business Blogs can help immeasurably in this. The structure of a blog combined with the focused nature of the posts, regular updates and the interlinking which is part and parcel of blogs, will all push you towards to the top of the rankings. This makes a Business Blog ideal for small businesses looking for greater visibility and enquiries.

Dominate a Niche Market
Small businesses usually have a set of services or products which are designed to answer the needs of a specific, and often, niche market. Getting exposure in that market is key to being able to dominate it and ensure that your business is the one that the market itself recommends. Using a Business Blog, you can raise your profile and lead the discussions on any aspect affecting that market. Talk about it and get talked about!

Project your personality
As a small business, you will tend to work very closely with your customers. Your expertise is highly important but so are you as a person and how you get on with your customer - a strong relationship will help to ensure that the project develops well. Blogs can let your personality shine through before you enter the relationship and may give you the edge in being selected.

Easy Web Publishing - no webmaster required!
While we rightly focus on external benefits, we should not forget that there are also solid internal reasons for using a blog in a small business and ease of use is right at the top of that list. Blogs can be used in addition to a business website or as part of it - they can also be used instead of a website. In all of these cases, once established, you can publish new content or change pages on your site without relying on a web designer or webmaster. Reader friendly, user friendly and cost effective.

Research your Market
Your Business Blog provides you with a two way communication tool, and the information that you can get from your readers may be highly important. By participating in the discussions that your posts will generate, you should be able to get a clearer idea of what the up to the minute interests of your clients are. Surveys and focus groups can achieve this to a certain level but open conversations on your Blog will achieve much more, both in terms of depth and breadth.

Finally a word of advice: don't get hung up about the word "blog" - a blog is a tool and it's what you do with it that counts. Many people use Microsoft Word but the documents that they produce are as varied as the author - the same is true with Blogs for small businesses. So, evaluate what you need as a business and then focus strongly on using the Blog for that purpose and it will be successful for you.

"Emarketing" Mark White is an emarketing consultant and business blogging specialist working primarily with companies in the UK and Europe. For blog set-up, advice, training and coaching or a free eCourse on Successful Business Blogging for marketing and business development, visit Better Business Blogging.

If you read my last article, you know about Chitika and the new eMiniMalls that are popping up everywhere on the web. You can serve up relevant product ads to your users, and let them search for other products without leaving the comfort and safety of your web page. I was asked recently about how to add Chitika ads to your Blogger blog, so I thought I'd take some time to write up exactly how this is done.

In case you haven't seen my previous article, I'll give a brief rundown on how to get set up. First, you'll need a Blogger blog if you don't have one already. This is quite easy to set up. Just go to Blogger.com and click the giant "Create your own blog now" button. You'll create a username and password, name your blog, and choose a template. This should take you all of about 5 minutes.

Once you have your blog set up, you need to sign up with Chitika. You need a running web site to get approved, so post a couple of short items to your blog before applying. It will take you about 5 minutes to fill out their application, and you'll be approved in the next day or so. Note that you don't actually have to be approved to continue on to the next step. You can insert the eMiniMalls code onto your web site, you just won't make any money until you're approved.

See www.workfromhomespot.com (link below) for info on signing up with Chitika.

Now that you're all set up, you need to insert the Chitika code into your blog. Chitika will send you instructions on how to generate the HTML code to create eMiniMalls on your site.

The javascript code looks fairly scary, but you don't have to worry much about it. You can customize the size and colors on the Chitika web site, without needing to touch the code yourself.

Once you have the eMiniMall looking the way you want it, it's time to insert it into your Blogger template. Blogger, unfortunately, doesn't allow javascript inside individual posts, so you can't customize the products to each post. Actually there is a way to do it, but I'll write more about that a bit later. For now, we'll just insert the same eMiniMall code before each post. Note that this doesn't mean the same product will be shown over and over again. The code will pick a random product from the list for each eMiniMall.

Log in to your Blogger account, and select your blog from your "dashboard" screen. Click the "Template" tab at the top of the next page. Click "Edit Current" if it's not selected for you already. Scroll down, probably about two thirds of the way, until you find the Blogger tag. This is where the actual posts are in the template. Scroll down just a bit more, and you'll find a tag that looks like this: $BlogItemBody$. This is where the body of each post is inserted. Just put your eMiniMall code directly above (or below if you prefer) this tag. Click "Preview" to see what it will look like. You may find you need a couple of < br > tags before or after the eMiniMall code to separate it from the post body.

Once you have the preview looking roughly the way you want it, click "Save Template Changes". Click the little "Republish" button to republish your blog to the live site. That's it, you're now set to start making money from Chitika clicks on your site. You'll find that on average, Chitika pays more per click than Google does for AdSense. Using both is even better. Just remember that you need content in order to get people to come to your blog in the first place.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to try your hand at running a web site is to set up a blog. Once you're up and blogging, you can sign up with Google AdSense and start selling ad space. Bear in mind that starting a blog isn't going to bring you instant revenue. You'll have to put some energy into promoting the blog, getting it listed in the search engines, and of course writing quality content that people will actually want to read.

There are plenty of free blogging sites out there to get you started. My favorite is Blogger.com. Signup is extremely simple, and you can be blogging in a matter of minutes. See my blog here: http://workfromhomespot.blogspot.com. Blogger has plenty of nice templates for you to choose from, and they're all customizable should you wish to tweak them. Blogger also gives you a nice blogspot.com subdomain address for your blog, which looks better and may help search engines find you.

When setting up your blog, you want to pick a topic that you know something about. This will make it more interesting for you, and will make it easier to keep the content fresh. It's pretty much universally agreed that search engines prefer sites with lots of content. And if you want visitors to find your site, you have to get listed with the big search engines. You should also try to pick a topic that will generate some expensive advertising. Blogging about baby penguins is all well and good, but it's not a highly competitive market as far as advertising goes. Do some research on the Google AdWords site to find some hot topics. Tech topics are generally good sources of high paying ads, but there are others.

One thing to note about choosing a topic is that Google doesn't allow AdSense ads to be displayed on sites with content that they deem to be objectionable. Hate sites, sites with illegal content, and so forth will not be accepted, so just keep that in mind. Read the Terms of Service on the AdSense site if you have any doubt.

Once you have your topic, start writing like mad. Try to use lots of keywords relevant to your topic. This will help your ranking with the search engines, and will also make sure the right ads show up when you get to that stage. Don't take this to the extreme, however. You're writing for humans, not search spiders. Even if you have great keywords, if your content isn't vaguely interesting, you'll find no one spends any time at your site.

After you have several pages of content, you can sign up for a Google AdSense account. Just go to www.google.com/adsense, and click the button to sign up. You'll have to give them some information about yourself, and about your website. A human from Google will review your site within a day or two, and you'll get an e-mail telling you whether you've been accepted. If you're not accepted, they'll tell you why, and you can resubmit as soon as the problem is corrected.

When you're accepted, log in to your AdSense account and create some ads. They've got a very simple form to do this, and you just copy and past the javascript code they generate for you. At first you may see only public service or very generic ads on your site. After a day or two, if you have enough quality content on the page, you'll start seeing more relevant ads show up.

You're now a webmaster! You didn't have to buy a domain, pay for hosting, or even know much about web design. My next article will deal with how to promote your blog (or any web site), and build traffic to it. Check back soon!