Simple Internet Marketing Strategies for Promoting Your Blog

If you want to build a business on the internet, a blog is essential. It's one of the best public relations tools you can create because it allows you to connect with your audience. What I like the most about it is that you can automate much of the promotion, and so you can spend your time connecting with your audience, as well as writing great content. When you build your blog, follow these strategies to start getting traffic quickly. 1. Generate a sitemap and submit to the major search engines. There are only two search engines to concern yourself with: Google and Bing. Bing drives the results for Yahoo, so this will give you about 80 percent coverage in the search engines. If you use a plugin like SEO by Yoast (it's what I use), then you can automatically generate a sitemap and then submit it. This is a one time task. After that, monitor your sitemap looking for broken links, as well as to find out how much of your content has been indexed. 2. Submit to blog and RSS directories. Robin Good offers an excellent list that is constantly updated. Submit your blog to all the sites on the lists so that blog readers can find your content. When you post to your blog, it will automatically update these sites and can drive traffic for you. 3. Comment on other blogs in your topic. Although blog comments don't carry as much weight as a linking strategy, don't ignore this. Blog commenting, like other forms of marketing, is about connecting with your audience. People buy. Search engines and directories don't. Although they can help you with traffic and sales, they aren't your sales. When you start blog commenting, provide good content here too. Others will read your comments, and they may just visit your blog. 4. Write guest blog posts. Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to get the word out about your blog. You may consider doing a search in the search engines to find sites that accept blog posts. You'll want to search for guest blogging and your topic. Two sites that may also help you are My Blog Guest and Blog Synergy. Submit your unique content there and have it picked up by others blogs that want what you are writing about. 5. Use social bookmarking. This internet marketing technique will help you build high ranking backlinks, but it will also turn your content into mini news stories that are often read on these sites. It will help you get traffic and build your overall search engine marketing strategy too. Create a good description, title, and tags. Include your keywords in the title and tag so you get the best results. 6. Use a comprehensive ping list. A ping list is a list of sites that index blogs, and when you ping them, you are notifying them that your blog has been updated so that they update your content. They may be search engines or RSS directories. You want to get the most coverage possible, and pinging your blog will will do the job for you. There are free services available for you to do this, but if you set up the ping list within your blog, these sites will be pinged automatically and automate this process for you. 7. Write good search engine optimized content. Before you write your content, make sure you do good keyword research. Find the right keywords for your blog and write good content around it. Don't forget your readers though. They are the ones who will be reading your content. The search engines will only be indexing it. Give them good content too so that they read it. You'll build a better relationship with your readers by doing this. 8. Use Facebook plugins to promote. Facebook offers lots of tools to help you promote your blog content. Since it's the most popular social site, you have more opportunities to connect with your audience and these plugins will help you. You are more likely to get likes and comments by using these tools too. Once you install the plugin, you can automate the entire process. Just make sure you monitor the comments so you can connect with your readers. Whether you own a new blog or an old blog, these strategies will help you get more traffic and sales if you apply them. Use them as a checklist to get you started in marketing your blog. Then you'll connect with your audience and automate your marketing too. http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jinger_Jarrett

The Possibilities Of Starting Your Own Affiliate Program By Randall A Magwood Many online business owners can benefit from having more affiliates on their team. With a great large list of affiliates, you can have people making sales for you on autopilot. Sure you will have to share the sale with the affiliate, but you still earn a portion of the sale also, and more importantly... you get a brand new customer. There's no telling how much that 1 customer could be worth to you. They can either be worth 1 more backend sale to you, or be worth $5,000 or more for you. You could sign them up for your coaching and consulting services, host a yearly seminar for $1,000, or simply sell $300 and above products. Your backend customers are very important. This is why I started my affiliate program. I know the value and power that my customer mailing list has, and I wanted to tap into this lucrative profit source so that I could start earning more money online. Hopefully you have the right mindset as I do. Nothing is better than a constant stream of new customers coming in everyday. And this can be possible with your own affiliate program. Now it isn't all peaches and roses when it comes to getting more affiliates. You have to do a bit of promotion to get the word out about your affiliate program. There are many sites online that allow you to do so. Two of the most popular are Clickbank and Commission Junction. Everyday vendors are listing their product on these sites, and affiliates are promoting them right away. And when I say "right away", I mean RIGHT AWAY. So you can easily jumpstart your affiliate program by submitting to these sites - especially Clickbank. They have a whole slew of affiliates eager to promote something that pays good, and that has potential. Make sure you provide your affiliates with some marketing tools. I assure you that 95% of them won't create any marketing materials for your product - which is why they won't make any money at all. But if you want to maximize the chances of these affiliates having success - and you getting more sales... supply them with marketing tools. Create basic content. Create a 5 series email newsletter. Create 5 articles that they can use on their site for content. Create banner ads. Create forum signatures. Create product reviews. Give them proven pay per click ads and keywords. You want to supply them with as much content as you can so that they can go and take your material, and instantly "plug" it in to their system - and earn money. You have to do this initial work for your affiliate. This is the only way to maximize the possibility of them having success. And the more money they make, the more money you will make - it's as simple as that. Starting your affiliate program is something that you should definitely do, and definitely put it into action right away. This is something that you don't want to delay on. Good luck with having success with your affiliate program. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Randall_A_Magwood

Free Traffic

Starting Your Business A Step by Step Process - How to Start Your Own Business. Sage.co.uk/Start-Your-Own-Business Traffic generation is a subject that many people have no idea of how to tackle. Yeah they hear about all of the different traffic methods online, but nothing is clear with them. They still leave confused about what they need to do to get lots of traffic to their site. But one thing that they do pick up on is paid advertising. When beginners hear the term pay per click advertising (PPC), they go nuts. They start investing money into PPC to try and get sales, but sadly they don't become profitable. And aside from paid advertising, they have no idea of how to get traffic. They're lost and confused; they think PPC doesn't work; and then they just quit out of frustration. But paid advertising isn't the end of the story. There are other traffic methods online that people can use to drive traffic to their website. And the traffic methods that I'm talking about are free methods. I love free marketing for a lot of reasons, and you should get to know it also because it comes with a lot of benefits. You get to earn 100% profits on every sale. You don't have to spend money to make money. Sometimes you can see sales within days. You will get highly qualified leads to your site. And you will experience greater conversion rates from free marketing than you would with paid advertising. There are a few methods that I am familiar with really well, and I want to briefly go over those free methods here for you today. They're incredibly easy, they're easy to implement, and they can bring you a lot of traffic within the first couple of days of doing them. Here's free traffic method number 1 that I like to use: 1) YouTube This is one of the best form of free promotion that you will ever see on the internet. YouTube gets millions of visitors everyday to site. In fact, they are the number 3 ranked website on the internet in terms of website traffic. So you can benefit from this traffic right away. It's best to be behind the camera talking to your audience, but if you're camera shy, you can always opt for one of those "screen cast" software that records what you're doing on the computer screen. A lot of people are successful at doing this, and you can be successful at doing this also. Here's another good free traffic tip: 2) Podcasting Ever heard of a "podcast" before. I'm sure you have. Even the most successful people on television use podcasts as a part of their marketing strategy. For example, financial expert Suze Orman uses podcasts on iTunes to get more listeners and traffic back to her website. She does a great job at this. You can do the same too. Simply record a 30 minute podcast each week and submit it to iTunes. Let your email list know about it and put images up on your site letting your visitors know that you have content on iTunes. A portion of your visitors will prefer the podcast as opposed to reading, so you will be doing a big favor for them here. Be sure to check out these 2 free online marketing strategies and put them into use today. Good luck with promoting your site with free marketing. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Randall_A_Magwood