A blog is a type of a website that is regularly updated about topics, events or opinions. These online journals can be maintained by an individual or a business. These can be commentaries, how to tips, or any type of regular journal entries. They can include text, photos and or videos.

What does blog stand for?
Blog is a contraction of the term weblog. A blog is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Entries are displayed in reverse-chronological order. This means the most recent entry is posted first and the oldest is at the end. A blog is a special website that allows for easy web publishing from any computer that has an Internet connection.

Blogs notify the web each time a new article is posted via RSS. RSS is short for “Really Simple Syndication”. Every time a new blog is posted, RSS feeds send out a small text file to the search engines with the title of the blog posting, the first 25 words and where the blog can be found. This way blog postings can show up in search engine results in just minutes. This is the same way news articles quickly find themselves in the search engine results.

What is Business Blogging?
Blogging means writing a blog. Business blogs have become a way for businesses to reach their targeted customers. Blogs are influential and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology.

Blog marketing has also become one of the best ways to learn and transmit industry news. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others have a readership of national newspapers. On a blog, the content consists of articles — also sometimes called “posts” or “entries.

Blogs are typically written by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate about their subject. They are written in an everyday conversational voice. What is being said is not being filtered and re-written by the marketing, legal and PR departments. Business blogging gives an “honesty” that is missing in traditional business communications.

If you have a blog or an informational website, how can you turn your website traffic into a stream of income?  How can you work from home and earn an income from the Internet? The web today has many opportunities for the entrepreneur.

1. Google Adsense: Sign up for an Adsense account and place Google ads on your website. These are context relevant search engine ads where you are paid every time someone clicks on one of the ads.
2. Text Link Ads: This is a  controversial tactic, selling text links for link popularity, but perfectly acceptable if “no-follow” tags are added.  Once your blog has a decent PageRank, sell one-way text links to webmasters who have niche relevant websites.
3. Video: Thenewsroom.com 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).
4. Affiliate Programs: Be a middle man! Receive a commission every time one of your readers ends up buying. This includes companies like Amazon.
5. Blog Writing: Contract to write postings on your own blog. This can include product reviews and postings with links to sponsored websites. You can get writing assignments from services such as PayperPost, Review Me and LoudLaunch.
6. Ghost Writing: Take writing assignments for businesses that don’t have the time or skills to write their own basic blog content. Here you will write for their blog

A really effective business website design is one that gives your visitor exactly what they want. It is about both the look and the functionality. It answers your visitor’s question. It’s not complicated, your visitor came looking for something… so what was it?

1. Solutions: Help your visitor solve a problem and reach their goal. Address a problem that the reader is facing and then a solution to fix it. Spotlight the benefits of your product or service and how it can solve their problem.
2. Trust: Start with a clean design and useful information and make sure there are no misspellings or broken links. Clearly show your phone number and address. Include a guarantee, a privacy policy and a returns policy.
3. Simplicity: Avoid confusing your visitor. Keep the design, navigation and information clear and to the point. Understand what a visitor wants to accomplish and help them reach their goal.
4. Image: Make your business look professional by having an organized, well thought out website. You have 3-5 seconds to interest a visitor or lose them in a click.
5. Content: Original content is the most important trait of a great Web site. Every time you write new web content, there should be some call to action at the end of the topic. The idea is to involve the reader emotionally and to encourage action.
6. Interactive: Get your visitors to do something when they arrive. Provide free tools, sign-up for a newsletter or send them a free report or an ebook. Use a survey tool like surveymonkey.com to conduct weekly or monthly surveys.
7. Action: People need to be told what to do. Each page should be designed with a clear action designed in. Avoid leaving the next step up to the user’s imagination.
8. Traffic: Decide your traffic source such as organic search, pay-per-click or referral traffic before you start the design. Organic SEO is much more effective when designed into a site.

There are many creative ways to increase traffic to your website. Some will cost you money, and some won’t. You really have two choices. You can select paid advertising such as Google Adwords or you can optimize your website to be found in the “organic” search engine results. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Paid Advertising: Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) can supply almost instant traffic to your website. All three major search engines offer PPC Advertising. Google Adwords is by far the dominant choice because of they have a dominant share (by far) of the search market.

PPC advertising makes sense for websites that can’t be optimized. This includes all Flash websites, hosted templates such many ecommerce carts and industries that are highly regulated. Regulated industries are ones that sell securities and must follow SEC rules that control content.

When setting up PPC advertising, always direct visitors to a landing page that is carefully designed to maximize conversions, never to a website home page.  Why? Because you can quickly waste a lot of money sending traffic to a general purpose home page. Conversions and therefore sales are much higher when directed to a well designed landing page.

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO): 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. How do you do this?

Write informative and original blogs or articles and post them regularly on your website. If you are a good writer and the ideas that you present are original and insightful, then these much sought after links will come almost automatically.

Others will read what you wrote and then continue on the conversation by writing their own blogs or articles, many times with links to what you wrote. This turns into a very natural link building method and your website will move to the top of the search results for many different phrases. Organic SEO is best done during the business website design process.

Organic SEO methods take much more time to develop any substantial traffic, but they are far less expensive than PPC advertising. Many companies will use both and focus on PPC advertising while they wait for organic SEO results to “kick in.”

I am in the middle of renewing a modest ad in the Yellow Book and I have to ask myself, should I spend the money? We advertise in two of the three local yellow page directories. Each year the books keep getting thinner with fewer people advertising in them.

Each year at the office whenever the directories get dropped off and they go straight to recycling. The same happens at home. I ask myself, why would anyone use the yellow pages when they have the Internet? Now online yellow pages have some value, but the printed books?  It seems like such a waste of resources.

In this age of Internet, websites, online advertising and social review websites, printed yellow page directories are a dying resource. A business gets a much better return from a great business website design or from business blog marketing.

You may ask why we keep renewing our yellow page ads. It is because we still get  a few new customers from the yellow pages. We ask every new client how they found us and we still get a few who tell us they found us in the Yellow Pages. We get barely enough customers to make advertising in the yellow pages worth while.

Will I renew again next year?  I am not sure. The choice would be a lot easier if there was only a single directory like when I grew up. Having three directories in our local area splits the number of readers making it hardly worth the expense.

What do I recommend to other business owners? Track your advertising dollars carefully. If it makes money for your company, keep doing it. If it doesn’t make you money, quickly eliminate it. Replace it with something that works for your business.

You have seen lots of articles in the press lately about using blogs and social media to build up your business. Social media includes blogs, social networks like Facebook, Wikis like Wikipedia and other social websites. All of these can be used for business marketing, but none are more effective than business blog marketing.

How does business blogging work?

Blog marketing attracts readers. You would write regularly about related topics that your targeted customer is interested in. Including links back to your website will promote your website with the search engines. Unlike a typical website, blogs broadcast your message using RSS. Search engines will carry your blog message in minutes after you publish.

Business blogging gets results and gets results faster than traditional Internet marketing. This is a great way to boost your online brand, to increase your website’s rankings on the search engines, to reach new potential clients, to communicate with current customers and to publicize information about their company.

Blogs are the new marketing tool that you should add to your bag of traditional marketing strategies. Blogs allow you to reach your targeted marketing niche. In the past few years, blogging has moved from the early adopters to the mainstream in business.

What to write about?

Every blog should have a central topic that it addresses. What does your reader want to know?” Choose a topic that your ideal prospect wants to read about. The focus of the blog should be on presenting information, advice, tips, commentaries and opinions. Avoid direct selling and self promotion. More about how to blog.

Blogging will get your business noticed online. Blogging opens a whole new realm than you would find with just a website. More about results you should expect from business blogging .

A sticky website is one that draws in first time visitors and encourages repeat visitors to come back again and again. Something about the site motivates them to explore it further. What are some things that help create a sticky website?

1. Be conventional: Follow the online standards that make your website truly usable. Use standard terms in your navigation.  Keep consistent navigation throughout the site. Clicking on the logo should always take you to the home page.
2. Blog: By their nature blogs publish new content that allow you to build up an audience of interested followers. Blogs encourage involvement by allowing comments. Your writing style should encourage comments and interaction.
3. Interactive: Get your visitors to do something when they arrive. Provide free tools, sign-up for a newsletter or send them a free report or an ebook. Use a survey tool like surveymonkey.com to conduct weekly or monthly surveys.
4. Guided tour: If your website or service is complicated, offer a guided tour to quickly train a website visitor on how to maximize your website. Suggest places to visit or offer tips on using your website.
5. Tell your story: Present the human side of your business. Start on your home page by describing the advantages your product or business offers. Continue your story on the About Us page. The About Us page is the second most visited page.
6. Fast Loading: Even with the high speed Internet available today, some sites are still very slow to load. A slow loading website will quickly lose visitors. Optimize pictures and images to load quickly. Keep Flash files small and look at streaming video to shorten the wait time to watch videos.
7. Easy Shopping: For repeat buyers, store contact information and purchase history online to make it easy for repeat purchases. Keep your checkout process simple. Always allow buyers to calculate delivery charges by entering a zip code before they enter checkout.

A microsite is a highly focused 1-3 page website that targets a single event, promotion, product, or service and usually a single keyword phrase. They are set up on their own unique domain or perhaps a sub-domain.

Your business can use a single main website or you can use a series of smaller highly focused microsites in addition to the primary website. These microsites complement your main website.

Let’s say you have a website that sells greeting cards for all occasions. You could create microsites for the history of Mother’s Day, Birthdays or St. Patrick’s Day, etc. You would develop original content around topics that support your primary website. You would link these sites to the most relevant pages in the primary website.

Focus: Each microsite can focus on a single product or segment of your business. Visitors are not distracted with the wide range of information that your primary website contains. Your visitor’s attention is kept on the single reason they came to your website for.

Special Purpose: A microsite can be created to sell clearance or discounted products. They can be used to launch a new design or a new product and then be promoted with a print advertising or an email campaign. Microsites help when the message may be lost in the company’s main website.

Specific Customers: If your primary business sells directly to consumers, then you may set-up a microsite specifically for your distributors. If your company sponsors a non-profit organization, perhaps this would be best placed onto its own microsite. This is useful when your message is substantially different than the parent website.

Conversion: A microsite is highly targeted and will only focus on a single topic. By promoting only one product or service, a microsite presents just the information a visitor wants. They can act much like a landing page and can be used in PPC campaigns. The lead form or purchase link can be integrated into the primary business website.

Link Popularity: Creating a network of microsites for the sole purpose of creating one way links is a controversial technique. It is a powerful way of creating highly relevant inbound links if done correctly. If done incorrectly, they can result in sanctions from the search engines. The key is to have original content that supports the main website.

A landing page is the first page a visitor comes to from a PPC advertisement, a radio ad or a search engine result link. This is sometimes known as a lead capture page or a “sale closer” page. They are highly focused and specifically designed for maximum conversion.

Why should you use a landing page? By landing your visitor on the page that has exactly what they are looking for, you are encouraging them to purchase without thinking about it too much.

What makes for a good landing page?

Relevance:

1. The message must match your advertisement.
2. Keyword phrase must closely match your advertisement.
3. Use catchy headlines that closely match your advertisement

Design:

1. Conform to your site’s overall visual design, but simplify.
2. Keep headers and graphics minimal above the headline, they distract and push your message down on the page.
3. Make the call to action clear and above the fold.
4. Keep your message simple, clean and focused.
5. Remove all unneeded elements that could distract.
6. Reduce navigation that could encourage visitors to leave.

Content

1. Content should be simple, use bullet points and short sentences.
2. Keep your content interesting, you will lose visitors with dull copy.
3. Clearly show what benefits your prospect will realize.
4. Use action oriented words.

Conversion

1. Keep registration forms short and easy to complete.
2. Build trust by explaining your company’s value proposition.
3. Address concerns of credit card security, shipping costs, return policies, and email privacy.
4. Add reassurance with guarantees and post logos of organizations such as BBB Online, HackerSafe, Truste, etc.
5. Provide your contact details such as a phone number.
6. Create multiple landing pages, each tightly focused on a single topic.
7. Measure results and test, test, test.

I have to share a great Guerilla Marketing tip. We have been using this service for about three years. On hold marketing is low cost and markets to people while they wait to be helped on-hold. Now this is far better than the standard on-hold message or music on-hold businesses. This service produces highly entertaining mini-commercials separated by short bits of music.

Patrick from HoldTime Studios has this perfect “radio voice.” His recordings alternates short periods of music with stories about your business.  He is so good that I have actually had one person ask to be put back on hold to finish listening to a story.

I give out HoldTime Studios contact information at least once a week to people who call in and hear our on-hold marketing. As you can tell, I am ecstatic with the results we have seen. For a very reasonable price, this on hold marketing makes us stand out with people who call in.

We always looking for unique marketing ideas that work; Holdtime Studios is one of them. You can listen to samples of their work when you go to their Music On Hold website.

In the interest of being transparent, Patrick and HoldTime Studios are now a client, but we have been using his service for the two and a half years prior to doing work for him. Because I was sending so many referrals to HoldTime, we eventually ended up talking often and eventually producing a new website for them.

If you want to try something truly innovative, try HoldTime Studios.