Starting up your own business blog is a powerful way to build your brand as the industry expert in your market. Adding a blog to your website can greatly improve your organic search rankings by adding fresh regular keyword rich content. Now you have choices to make. Which blogging platform should you choose? Should your blog be part of your website or a separate?

Our recommendation is to use Wordpress.org and to host it as part of your website. Let’s look at why.

Which blog to use? There seems like an infinite number of choices: Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and many more.

1. Blogger is owned by Google and it is free. It is an excellent tool for the beginner. Hosting is done on blogspot.com. Set-up is easy and quick. It has only limited ability for customization and it is hosted on a separate location from your website.
2. Wordpress.org is the free open source blogging platform that you download and run on your own hosting account. You can completely control and customize blog functionality. This is more difficult to set-up , but it offers the best SEO results for your website.

We recommend Wordpress.org because you host it as part of your website. Adding a blog to your website not only adds keyword rich content regularly to your website but attracts links from other bloggers.

Visitors will be attracted as they find your blog posts which are broadcast to the Internet via RSS. Search engines will list your blog postings within minutes of your writing a posting. Many visitors that come to your blog will explore your website to see who you are and what you do.

Adding a blog to your existing website is the easy and natural way to add keyword rich content to your website. This is a great strategy if your website is small (5-10 pages) or is more graphical and lacks very much text content. Blog marketing is a great visitor interaction strategy.

Blogs are a natural link magnet that attracts inbound links if you write interesting, original and engaging posts. Adding “linkable” content to your site is the natural link building method. Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) today. Experts have long said “content is king.” Blogs add content to your website on a regular basis and then they broadcast your message to the world via RSS.

Blogs attract new readers to your website and then allow them to comment, creating an online discussion. Bloggers will then carry these conversations back to their own blogs and of course they will reference your blog article with a backlink.

How blogs help your SEO results.

1. Attract Links: Adding engaging content to your blog helps attract inbound links regularly to your website.
2. Adds Content: Each posting adds a new page to your website. Larger websites with content filled pages tend to have much better search rankings than smaller websites.
3. Keyword Text: Create a keyword plan for your blogs. Use these phrases in your blog titles and especially in the first paragraph. Use your keywords in the link text and link back to relevant pages within your site.
4. New Visitors: Since blogs broadcast your message across the Internet, your website will attract more new visitors that will be interested in what you have to offer.

Blogs help your website SEO by having a large number of postings focused on a particular subject. The page code is often very clean, text rich HTML. They are usually written in a simple, easy to spider format making them an excellent completely natural SEO tool.

SEO copywriting is much more than just writing keyword rich text for the search engines. It also appeals to your human readers once they arrive. You need to make the most out of every visitor. Effective SEO copywriting attracts targeted visitors and begins the selling process by attracting attention and building interest in what you have to offer.

Gone are the days when writing for the search engines meant a carefully structured page with a high keyword density. Content must be focused on your human visitor and answering the burning question they had when they arrived. More on SEO copywriting.

Website copy: Website visitors come looking for answers to their questions or problems. Merely giving information or logically presenting your products is not enough. You need to engage your reader at an emotional level and encourage them to take action. Effective website copy grabs their attention, builds strong interest and then finishes with a compelling call to action. More on website copywriting.

Business blogs have become the new trade publications. Effective blog marketing is focused around a topic and have at its heart a keyword plan. This focus allows the blogger to build an audience that will keep coming back. This plan must be highly flexible using long tail phrases. But at its core, the plan has a highly focused keyword plan. This plan guides the writer in choosing interesting and original articles that appeal to their audience. More on business blogging.

Press releases are only effective when you have something interesting to say. Press releases should announce new products, company announcements or industry news. Use your keyword phrases particularly in the title and first paragraph and then link to more information within your website using the appropriate anchor text. Links within press releases should be kept to a minimum and never exceed one hyperlink per 100 words of content. More on writing a press release.

Scientific sounding terms make products sound safer and more trustworthy. But is this advertising double talk or is there real meaning you can count on with these terms?

Have you read through the website content on food products,  women’s cosmetics,  dietary supplements or a weight loss website? Many times the advertising is filled with scientific language designed to make you trust what they are saying. But what is “clinically proven” or “all natural”?

1. All natural: can include animal products raised with the use of artificial hormones can include genetically modified plants or animals. Natural does not mean organic. “Natural” has no meaning in law or regulation although it is taken to mean no man made chemicals have been added.
2. Organic: This term has precise definitions that items are produced and certified to meet defined standards. If the label just says “organic,” a processed food product can have up to 5 percent non-organic ingredients by weight. A product called “100 percent organic” must contain all organic ingredients. Wild or farmed fish though can be labeled organic even though there is no guarantee that it is free from mercury or other industrial chemicals like PCB’s.
3. Clinically proven: This usually means that there was more than one controlled study performed. To be sure of the significance, you need to look at the details of the controlled test that was done. Examine if this was run in a university hospital with thousands of subjects over multiple years or was it a 2 week trial run with a half dozen subjects. A single trial is supposed to use the term “clinically shown.”
4. Dermo clinical trials: This term seems to be an invention of the advertising industry. Dermo would apply to skin care products. Clinical trials are controlled tests on human subjects.
5. Free Range: Used in describing eggs from free roaming chickens. Actually this only means the chickens were given access to the outside for as little as five minutes each day (not that they even went outside).
6. In vitro testing: This means testing that was done in “glass” such as in a test tube or a Petri dish. This means testing was performed on cells or tissues outside the body and in the lab. It does not mean it was proven to work in actual use.

The best way is to carefully question advertising language to truly understand what is being said. Often you can’t accept things at face value without understanding the true meaning of the terms being used.

Investors and businesses have discovered a new type of property to invest in. Much like someone would buy a home, fix it up and then sell it for a profit. You can do the same with websites. People will buy an established website with good visitor traffic, tune it up, add revenue streams and then sell it at a profit. Flipping websites is another way to earn a living in today’s online economy.

There are three major reasons to buy an established website.

1. Resell: Buy a website in need of work at a bargain price and then fix it up for resell. Many businesses are looking to purchase websites that come with an instant online presence.
2. Traffic: Buy up highly relevant websites to an existing or new business venture. Traffic can then be referred to a new website or lead capture forms can be added to capture new business opportunities.
3. Links: Buy up relevant websites with a high number of backlinks. Use these as a linking strategy to deliver links to your primary business website.

What factors affect a website’s value? You should look at your own requirements and select what fits your business strategy. Remember that when you buy a website, you are really buying a business with real income potential. Generally the most important factors are:

1. Domain: Older keyword rich domain names that are .COMs are the most sought after.
2. Revenue: Just like any business an existing revenue stream increases a website’s value. This could be from product sales or AdSense revenue.
3. Traffic: Review the website statistics for visitors and traffic sources. Ideally you are looking for most of the traffic to come from organic searches for keywords relevant to your market niche. Look at Alexa rankings.
4. Backlinks: Links are an important measure of a website’s importance and its relationship to other websites on the web. Look at the number and quality of links, and the PageRank of the website. Look at the anchor text being used on the backlinks.
5. Pages: Larger sites with original content are more valuable than smaller websites. Check how many pages are indexed by Google. Do you have exclusive ownership to the content?

Investing in virtual properties is becoming big business and is a fast developing frontier.

You can have a very popular website that doesn’t sell anything and still generate a nice revenue because of your visitor traffic. You earn money by displaying various forms of advertising on your web pages. These can take many forms.

1. Display Advertising: You can sell your own advertising space on your website for a flat monthly fee. The more visitors your website receives, the easier it is to attract advertisers and the more you can charge.
2. Text Link ads: Sell text based ads that directly link to websites or a landing page. These used to be popular as a way to promote search rankings, but Google has campaigned hard to discourage this use. They are still effective for advertising with or without “No-Follow” tags. You can sell these ads directly or through sites like textlinkbrokers.com
3. PPC Ad Networks: With these are ads you are paid each time someone clicks on an ad and are taken off your site. These include ad networks like Google Adsense. Relevant ads in either text or graphical banners are served up on your site.
4. CPM Ad Networks: These are similar to PPC ads except you are paid based on the number of times and ad is displayed (impressions). CPM stands for Cost per Mille or cost per thousand impressions. Examples include Advertising.com and Tribal Fusion.
5. Affiliate Sales: You can get paid for connecting your visitors with other websites that sell products. You can keep a percentage of the sale for supplying the customer. Amazon.com is a popular affiliate where you can offer books and products that your readers would be interested in. You can also line up affiliates through services like Click Bank.
6. CPM Video: Voxant Newsroom allows you to find and embed videos on your website. When video news content with an advertisement is played by your viewers, you’ll earn a flat-rate CPM (cost per thousand plays).
7. Sell Products: If you have a good following you may want to sell products with your logo or slogan. Café Press offers an affiliate program where your visitors can order all sorts of products that they will apply your branding to. You will earn a commission on everything sold.

If you really want to make sure your website stays obscure and all but invisible on the Internet, than these are the website tips you have been searching for. It seems many people put up a website without any consideration toward attracting prospects from the search engines. If this is you, then you are probably following one or more of these “how not to” tips.

1. No focus: Start by covering as many different diverse topics as possible within your website. You might want to combine a travel website, a landscaping company and a computer repair business all in the same website. This will make insure the search engines are confused about your core topic.
2. Keywords: Create your own keyword phrases using internal “industry-speak” jargon instead of doing research on phrases consumers actually search for. Focus only on 1-2 word phrases which are the most highly competitive and also have the lowest rates of conversion.
3. Page naming: Name the pages in your website using numbers (instead of keywords) or use unfriendly characters such as underscores (instead of hyphens) between words.
4. Graphical home page: Since you home page is the most important page, put your content in images or substitute a welcome page that says enter here (splash page). Search engines may not read text images (pictures of text), but it will allow you to have full control of the fonts you would like to use.
5. Duplicate Content: Copy content from other websites in order to trigger duplicate content penalties. Copying other people’s content is a risky proposition because of copyright laws unless you follow fair use rules or reposting is specifically allowed as in the case of many articles.
6. META Tags: Use terms like “home” in the Title tag which is the most valuable of the META tags because it is considered visible text. Create duplicate META descriptions and META keywords tags so they are the same across all pages. Stuff dozens of keywords into your META keywords tags instead of only the few that apply to that page.
7. Analytics: Don’t apply any conversion tracking software or analytics that might allow you to understand how visitors find your website and through which keywords. Don’t make regular changes based on actual results

If you follow these simple tips, you will make life easier for the rest of us that really want to attract visitors and get business from the web.

You can search Google using SMS text messaging. Simply text message your search query to 466453 (”GOOGLE” on most devices) and Google will text message back your search results. Google SMS uses some standardized queries for getting your information.

SMS or Short Message Service is also caused texting. SMS search is an alternative to browser searches done on the web. You text questions to receive text answers.
Google SMS search shortcuts: For a full list of search shortcuts, go to Google SMS.

1. Definitions: To find definitions on the Web, enter ‘define’ (or ‘d’) followed by the word or phrase (ex: define ubiquitous, d network)
2. Driving Directions: To get driving directions, enter your start address then ‘to’ followed by your destination address (ex: 94040 to 94043, pasadena ca to los angeles).
3. Local business listings: type in what you want to find followed by the city and state or zip code. Example: pizza 98665 or sushi salt lake city.
4. Movies: To get movie show times, enter the name of a CURRENT movie and include a city and state, or zip code. Example: movies phoenix or movies 94110.
5. Product Prices: To get product prices, enter ‘price’ followed by the product name (ex: price dvd player, price camera), or enter ‘upc’ followed by the UPC code or ‘isbn’ followed by the ISBN code.
6. Stocks: To get stock quotes, enter a SINGLE stock ticker symbol or the word ’stock’ followed by a less obvious ticker name (ex: GOOG, stock DUCK).
7. Time: To get local time in a city, enter ‘time’ followed by the city name (ex: time London, time Boston).
8. Translation: To get translations, enter ‘translate’ (or ‘t’) followed by the expression, ‘to’ and a destination language (ex: translate dog to french, t new to german).
9. Weather: Look up the weather anywhere by entering weather followed by city and state or zip code. Examples: weather portland or; weather 10024.
10. Web Search: Do a web search using SMS by entering the word web followed by your search phrase. The top 3 results are returned. Example: web small business consulting.

What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process of preparing a website to rank highly in the organic results on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. You can get hung up on the technical details, but it really comes down to doing two things. Having lots of keyword rich content and getting other websites to link to your content.

1. Create a Plan: Create a master topic plan for your website that is narrowly focused on offering solutions to your market that matched the products or services you offer. Highly focused websites will be easier to optimize than one that covers a range of topics. Use this plan in laying out your website site map.
2. Choose Keywords using a keyword research tool such as Google’s keyword tool which is a free tool. Follow your master topic plan in selecting your keyword phrases and choose phrases that have a good traffic volume. Choose only 1-2 words for each page. Use phrases 3-5 words in length because people today use specific phrases when they are ready to buy. People use 1-2 word phrases when they are beginning their research.
3. Write pages: Write your pages using your keywords you selected. Each optimized page should have 400-600 words of test and use each keyword phrase 1-2 times in the body text. These should be used as close to the top of your text as possible. In addition, use the keywords once in the page headlines and once in link text. This should link to another relevant page.
4. Emphasize keywords: Use the keywords phrase(s) in the Title Tag and where possible, use them in other emphasized text such as bold, italics, ordered lists and numbered lists. This signals the search engines that these phrases are important.
5. Add a Blog to your website such as worpress.org. Adding a blog and writing original keyword rich content is one of the best ways to increase the size of your website and to attract links from other bloggers. Look here to read more tips about blog marketing.

Publishing your own online magazine is a powerful way to build your brand as the industry expert in your market. It takes work and planning to do it right. It is best to publish around a topic that you have a passion for whether it be a hobby, interest or business topic. Best of all, combine these so your work will seem like play.

1. Market Niche: Find a specific topic or market where the competition for a new magazine is low. Select a catchy and memorable name that readers will identify with.
2. Competition: Research your competition by doing a Google search for similar online magazines. Look at how they are organized, their articles, their writing style and who they use for writers. Plan how you can create an even better publication.
3. Online Plan: How will your magazine generate revenue? Will it be a membership subscription site generating monthly revenue because of great content? Perhaps the content will be free, but ads will generate money.
4. Content Plan: Develop an editorial calendar for the year with a plan for specific topics for certain months. Plan themes for certain issues, bring in interviews from recognized authorities and get industry experts to write for you.
5. Graphical: Create a graphic look and feel that will appeal to your readers. Develop designs for your masthead and magazine layout. Create a cover that translates into a great reader experience.
6. Writers: You will not want to write more than one article per issue yourself. You can hire freelance writers and ask industry experts to write your content. It is important to create a truly interesting piece that readers will look forward to receiving.
7. Solicit advertisers. Find advertisers to offset the cost of production. The more of a readership you can create, the more you can make from advertising. Create a media kit and send this out to potential advertisers. Until you develop sufficient advertising revenue, you can use Google Adsense to develop revenue.
8. Promotion: Start promoting early with blogging, contests and giveaways. Create anticipation and excitement so your publication can start with a bang. This is not unlike a grand opening for a major department store. Develop an email list in advance and use this to announce the launch of your magazine.