Free blogs are used by many Internet marketing experts to promote their websites and products. Free blogs can not only be a means of advertising your brand name, but they can also be used to funnel traffic which converts and results in more sales. And then, you can always use pay per click ads or promote affiliate products on your blog or sell sponsored reviews and earn more. In this article we will briefly see what is a blog, why blogs are so popular and how to setup a free blog which can then be used to promote your website.
To start from the basics, a blog or weblog is a website where the owner (or the blogger) writes his/her ideas just like a diary or journal. Blogs are very popular because they have a personal touch. People are always interested in what other people think/do. This is basic human tendency and this is what makes blogs so popular. In the beginning of the blogging era, blogs used to be solely about personal things. However, now things have changed. More and more business establishments have blogs where they provide customers with information on new developments and products.
Blogs have many advantages over traditional HTML sites. Blogs are supposed to be updated every once in a few days. For this reason, search engines like Google love blogs. You might have come across blog posts in the top 10 search engine positions for many popular keywords clearly demonstrating that fact that search engines really love blogs. Blogs also have other advantages like built in RSS feeds. And then, creating / updating a blog is very easy provided you use the correct blogging platform like Blogger or Wordpress. In fact, it does even need any knowledge in HTML: if you can use MS Word, you can blog!
Creating a blog is not rocket science. There are many free blog hosting services like Blogger [www.blogger.com] and Wordpress [www.wordpress.com]. There may be others, but currently these are the best. Blogger is owned by Google while Wordpress is owned by a company called Automattic. If you were to ask me to choose one of them, I will go for Blogger as it is well integrated with Adsense. Well! Since Google owns Blogger, when it comes to search engine rankings it must be partial to blogs hosted there! You also have a choice to host a blog on your own domain. All you have to do is create a sub-domain like blog.yourdomain.com and install a blogware like Wordpress there and get blogging. However, I would prefer a blog hosted on a free blog hosting service. I will explain the reason later.
Once you create a blog, the first thing you should do is to do reciprocal linking between your site and blog. If your site has already been indexed, your blog will get indexed too in a short period of time. Usually it takes a few days for the search engines bots to arrive and index the contents of your blog. You can also do a little promotion to get your blog indexed faster. I will suggest two time tested methods: 1) Join an online forum and put a link to your blog in the signature and 2) Submit your blog to a few web directories. Forums get spidered daily and so your blog will get crawled and indexed in no time. Forums can also get you some traffic as other forum members may be interested in your blog. When it comes to directory submissions, an important note: Don't submit to too many directories in a short period of time. Search engines may equate this to link spamming and blacklist your blog or even ban it altogether.
Next, you should concentrate on creating quality content. You should always target keywords that are moderately popular. If you develop content without targeting specific keywords, you will not get enough traffic. This is why you should always keep keywords in mind while developing content for your blog. There are many free keyword research tools available. I use the free version of Wordtracker [http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com] to do my homework. There may be other tools available but I believe that the free version of Wordtracker is more than enough to get an idea about the keywords to be used.
Select key phrases that have three or more words i.e. long tail keywords as it is easier to optimize your blog for these keywords.While writing the content, ensure that the selected keywords get repeated evenly and the keyword density is just right. Also put the keywords in bold, italics, H1, H2 tags, etc. This helps in obtaining better search engine placements. Writing content is not difficult, but it does take sometime to write. If you do not have the time or patience to write, consider outsourcing it. You can easily hire a freelance writer for as low as $4/400 words. Give him/her the keywords and provide instructions as to what you need and you should have no problem in getting a good number of articles in a short span of time.
Update your blog often. Try to post at least 10 or more posts a month which makes one post for every three days. Also include images in your blog posts to get traffic from image search. Once you start getting traffic from search engines, try to funnel it to your main site. Apart from direct traffic, your blog will also act as a quality backlink to your site. As you may be aware, search engines rank sites on the basis of the number of relevant backlinks. If you use a free blog hosting service, the IP address of your blog will be different from that of your main site. Search engines give prominence to links from different IP addresses. This is why you would recommend using a free blog hosting service in place of hosting a blog on a sub-domain.
You can also monetize your blog traffic directly. You can add Adsense ads to your blog. If you use Blogger.com adding Adsense is much easier as it is integrated in your blog control panel. You can also write reviews/recommendations about affiliate products from Clickbank.com, etc. Whenever, someone buys those products from your links, you will get a commission ranging anywhere from 30% to 75%. And then you can always sell sponsored posts or paid reviews. There are endless ways to monetize a blog that gets good amounts of traffic!
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