Your blog gets noticed and gains popularity when people link to your blog quite often. It is a fact - links are stills the basic connectors, the basic relationship, on the web. Besides, links are going to be the easiest means for a search engine algorithm to evaluate the trustworthiness and significance of any web page. Why would people link to your blog if you haven’t got something worth linking for? People link to content that is valuable and this is why search engines like Google give more importance to websites and blogs that have external links, lots of external links on other websites and blogs.

Linking is both an active as well as a passive activity. Of course your content can encourage people to link to your blog but how do you make them aware of your content unless they are on their own finding your content through search engines? Unless people know that your blog exists they won’t be able to link to it even if they want to link to it. It becomes a vicious circle if you don’t proactively promote your blog and encourage people to link to it or to your individual posts. This is why you need a well laid out strategy to get external links:

• Build a content rich blog: This is a given but since it is so important we cannot avoid mentioning it. Continuously generate highly relevant and useful content for your blog to not only provide quality content to your visitors but also create sufficient reason for people to link to your blog. Optimize your blog content using relevant keywords so that people trying to find pages and blog posts to link to can easily find your content on the search engines. This makes it mandatory that you create highly focused content on individual blog posts so that they can cater to the appropriate tastes.

• Contact other similar sites: Link to other sites that have the same scope as your blog. Once you link to them, you can ask for a reciprocal link. But you can save yourself of this trouble, if your build a blog that is rich in content, informative, and most importantly unique and original; people will automatically approach you for a link in their site.

• Have your blog listed at Yahoo and other directories: Though this would mean that you yank out your wallet, it still is worth the price as it is definitely one of the best links that you can get. Directories are often highly trusted sources for quality links and many search engine algorithms attach higher weightage to links that have got a place in various directory listings. Perform the necessary research to identify the most appropriate category and get that title and description optimized. Interestingly this is the place where “Link relevancy” comes from.

• Submit to different specialty Search Engines and directories: Identify the best search engines and directories that are best fitted for your blog and submit your link to them.

• Cross link: If you have your own website and also run multiple blogs, then you can have your link appear on the website and other blogs.

As you advance in your blogsphere, you will learn more about better venues of link building like:

• High Trust Links – these come from very specific online places and respected editors.

• Topically Relevant Links – these are “Hub” sites within your niche that are run by real people, not by reciprocal link clubs.

• Quality Links – these are from subject specific search engines that are a fit just for your content and features.

Try these time-tested tips to encourage more people to link to your blog.

Few of the essential steps to successful blogging can help you achieve a greater success in blogging:

1. The starting place: Although many people refer to start their blog Using free blogging services like Journal Home or Blogger, This not recommended for publishing a successful blog because then neither the layout not the content is under you control. Besides, using a free service doesn’t do any credit to you as a professional blog publisher. Always publish a blog under your own domain. Registering a domain name and hosting it on a server is not very expensive these days and almost anybody can afford it.

2. Understanding the niche: Decide on something that interests you and you want to write at length about, quite enthusiastically on a daily basis. This could be a product, a service, or any topic. If your blog shows consistent content catering to a niche over a period of time, it will eventually become successful.

3. Regular updating: This is very crucial to the success of your blog because it serves a dual purpose – (i) it keeps your visitors interested and (ii) the fresh content posted on a daily basis helps the search engines to pick your blog in the search results.

4. Traffic: Once you start posting content regularly, building on traffic will become paramount to the success of your blog. You can achieve this through paid or free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds or word of mouth. You should also provide your URL address in the signature while using any of the digital communication tools. Another best way to create traffic is to write lengthy articles and submit them with your URL address to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. This then will be picked up and published by others with your URL retained in the “About the Aurthor” passage. This helps in creating popularity link and backlinks for your URL.

5. Analyzing traffic to your blog: You may not know if your blog is growing satisfactorily or not as many visitors who come your blog may not leave a comment or link back in anyway. Using a simple free page counter like StatCOunter.com or Active Metter will see the number of visitors checking on your blog. As you progress, you can use advanced services that give traffic analysis based on keywords, referrals, and search engine information.

6. Evaluate the response to your blog: Using the proper page counter, you should be able to analyze how other are finding your blog and it is through search engine, you should then look out for the keywords that are often used. Include such keywords in your content repeatedly (but intelligently!) will make your blog popular and interesting.

7. Keep it simple: Though lengthy articles are good for syndication and other publications, your blog should content information in a precise and concise manner. Include pictures, graphics, and photos occasionally to bring life to your blog in an interesting way. But do not compromise on the quality of content ever.

8. Be personal and interactive: Share your thoughts, ideas, and philosophy in a manner that is quite personal and use first-person narrative to establish a personal rapport with your readers. Make some interesting themes on a regular basis: “Thought for the day” or “Weekly does of enlightenment” which visitors look forward to.

9. Interact on other websites, blogs and forums: Blogging is a conversation medium; people are basically expressing their views and reacting on others’ views. Make sure to visit other blogs and online forums. This way you get to interact with different people on various topics. You not only get to leave your link their you also build your brand in front of a completely new audience. This also sends lots of targeted traffic to your blog.

The art of blogging basically involves lots of persistence, high-value, quality content and again, persistent promotion and marketing. There is nothing you can ignore and there is nothing you can put more effort on. There was a time when people used to think that if you have quality content on your blog traffic will be generated on its own. With hundreds of thousands of blogs being created every month this doesn’t remain so. This is a cutthroat competition and you have to market your blog along with generating quality content.

• Self-expression
• Earning advertising revenue
• PR building and business promotion

There is a fourth aspect of blogging that often remains unexplored: community service through blogging.  This was made evident during the recent spate of cyclones and tycoons in various cities including some cities in the USA, for instance Katrina.  Hundreds of blogs disseminated highly relevant and useful information regarding various rescue operations going on at various places.  Due to the nature of blogging – highly conversational and engaging – people can relate more to bloggers than anonymous officials or even newspaper websites (people don’t trust newspaper websites much anyway these days). A blog can be a great tool if you want to do community service.  In this blog post we are going to focus on the logical aspect of blogging vis-à-vis communities.

Communities are groups of people openly coming together for a common reason. They might gather because they share something in common: school, town, family, experiences, knowledge, interest etc. Communities are formed around this shared interest that gains recognition over a period of time as a specific community. Blogs, on the other hand, are individual efforts at least in the initial stage. Here the author’s specific interests ebb and flow in due course and begin to gain recognition.

It is interesting to see how communities that are purpose and group-driven can be supported by blogs, which are solo-driven.

To talk about communities first, any community requires the following elements for its proper functioning:

• Place: A common place where new and old members have the license to come together.
• Leader: A leader is required to keep the community going and maintain the interest level of all the members.
• Purpose: Communities that do not have leaders should have strong purpose to keep it flowing, because the belief in the community per se will keep it going even if a leader steps out for reasons whatsoever.
• Participation: This is a must for the community to survive. This is achieved through members actively participating; some showing up at special events; some being lurkers (non-active) and so on. Participation of these kinds help form a community.
• Networking: All of the above will become futile if there is no means to connect to one-another. Communities after all tend to achieve some sort of connection across a shared interest.

Now moving on to blogs, the underlying aspects of blogging do provide a tinge of community within blogging thus revealing how the idea of a community can be achieved through blogs.

• Readers’ community: Blogs are written with the purpose of attracting the attention of like-minded people and expecting them to react on the material provided in the blog. To begin with, it is centered around the author or the blog but a community shows up when the author needs some help or assistance in the matter.
• Comments: Often blogs allow leaving comments on the authors’ written stuff, giving readers an open chance to participate in the conversation. However, such comments do not allow readers to interact with one another beyond the confines of the blog. To have threaded discussions on the blog in the form of a series of conversations, there are blog platforms available that are geared for such threaded discussions like the typical community forums.
• Outbound links: Bloggers provide other sources for the readers to visit, concerning their interest area. This allows to reach out to a greater group of people out there on the Internet.
• Inbound links: When bloggers send links from his/her blogs, many bloggers link back via trackback.

To summarize, communities are about shared interest and blogs are about individual interest. When different individual bloggers and different groups of like-minded people come together, communities are formed thus integrating blogging with communities in a seamless way!

Foster Reliance: Nowadays professionals are increasingly looking to establish a trusting relation with people from whom they purchase products and services. This is especially the case in the service industry. Thus it is better to be clear and up front about your dos and don’ts with your clients and customers. Be open about your successes and failures in equal terms. If you present a picture that is too good to be true, you can be rest assured that people will not see you as a realistic person.

Subtly expose your personality: To be able to make a deeper connection with someone you do not know, it is worthwhile to give your visitors a peep into your human side of the personality. This doesn’t mean you load your blog with your personal bragging or struggles etc. Allowing others to know about you a little personally will help them connect with you better. Maybe occasionally sharing a photograph or penning down your experience on a trip can give both useful information and some insight on your personality.

Use case studies & stories: Though not many people will be particularly interested in your personal life per se, yet they love to know relevant information pertaining to their niche and look forward to gain further insight in the matter. You can achieve this in the form of stories, your experiences & others, case studies, instances etc. This way people relate to you and your thoughts and enhance their connection with you in a more meaningful way.

Be an authority: Expressing yourself with authority is something that cannot be achieved without labor. Flow in the knowledge of your niche and express yourself with conviction for people to look up to you. Strive to dwell on your individualistic thinking.

Share your knowledge openly: Often bloggers tend to give intangible information about their field of expertise, lest they loose out on trading dollars for their expertise. They feel their expertise should be revealed only when it is effectively compensated monetarily. But the fact of the matter is when you provide useful and valuable information at no cost in the beginning with a genuine interest of helping people to be successful, you gain better credibility and those people not only willingly pay you for your later services but also refer others to get in touch with you for their requirements.

If you really want to create a personal brand, give a serious thought to these recommended considerations and see how your ‘personal branding’ and business go a long way!

Technorati Tags: blogs and branding, blogs branding, branding with blogging

Once you start publishing your business blog on a regular basis it will become an integral part of your online marketing strategy.  This means that sooner or later it will have a deep impact on your business and this further means you need a business blog plan before starting to publish a blog.  Why do you need a plan? A plan helps you set directions and allocate resources for your blogging effort. Planning your business blog is crucial for its success whether you are a corporate organization, independent business owner/consultant, or a small startup company. Though the objectives and outcomes will be different for different requirements, you should aim to have answers to the following before you start your business blog:

What is the purpose of your business blog?

The purpose of your blog should be very clear in terms of what is it you want to achieve through the blog. The more focused and specific you are, the greater is the chance of success of your blog.

Knowing your target audience

This is another important aspect to consider. Do not make the mistake of addressing the masses all at one go – it simply is not possible. Choose your audience and provide them the information that they will warm up to. If you are keen on having a lot of things conveyed on different subjects, to lots of people, then create separate blogs specific to each subject. It is preferable that you stick to a highly targeted niche audience.

Measure your objective with the outcome

When you set out to create a blog, you would have certain objectives in mind. Evaluate if those will be adequately achieved and how should you measure your goals. You would need to put in effort, time, and investment, if any – thus you need to be doubly sure from the beginning how you will take the worth of all this from your business blog.

Blog integration with other marketing activities

Blogging is indeed a great way to market your business, besides being useful in lot many other ways. But using it intelligently with your other marketing activities, business development, and customer service activities will be the real challenge. your blog may turn out to be the greatest communication asset your business has.  Use it to its utmost capacity without unnecessarily bothering your visitors.  Communicate through your blog as much as possible.  Are you planning to launch a new campaign or a product and you need to disseminate this information as quickly as possible?  Your blog is the best mode of doing it.

Choosing the appropriate blogging software

There are various blogging software available offering different benefits for different requirements, for instance WordPress, MovableType and expression engine. WordPress is free source, that is you can use it and develop new content management applications using the source code.  MovableType too has turned free source to an extent but it is quite difficult to customize it.  Interestingly many business blogs use movable type rather than WordPress.  This is just because of a mental block against free software, otherwise, to be frank, WordPress is a lot better than MovableType. Acquiring knowledge on the kind of blogging software you require for your business will be paramount for its success. whatever software you use to publish your business blog just make sure you don’t use one of the free blog hosting services.

Naming your blog

Choose an appropriate name for your blog – either with keywords that immediately convey the purpose of your blog or the brand that you want it to reflect. The is very crucial because once your blog picks up the momentum it will be very difficult to change the name. The name becomes an inseparable part of its identity and whenever people mention your blog they will be using that name.  So if you change the name later on it will pose lots of difficulty for your blog.

Hosting considerations

As a rule of thumb, if your blog complements your website in terms of content, then it is good to integrate it with your website. in fact many businesses prefer to publish their blogs as a sub domain on an add-on domain. If your objectives are different, then choose different domain names to have your purpose served better.

Carefully choosing your domain name

Your domain name may affect your search engine rankings. Be descriptive in your domain name choice. even if you choose to host your business blog under the sub domain of your website name it in a manner that your keywords appear in it.

Deciding on the interface of your blog

If your blog is going to be a part of your website then integrate it with the website. If the blog is on a different domain, then design your business blog that will sufficiently depict the image you want to portray. Remember! Do not use the default template, hundreds of people already use it and it will make your blog look unprofessional and common.

With this groundwork done, you can start your business blog on the right track and achieve the desired result!

Technorati Tags: business blogging, professional blogging, blogging for business, corporate blogging, blogging for small businesses

Blogging is a powerful branding and promotion tool and this has been established beyond doubt. Many people often think, oh yeah, blogging can be good for XYZ business but what would my business achieve from a blog, and anyway most blogs seem so silly and useless. As it happens with every technology you can look at blogging from different angles. Take for instance the mobile phones; your mobile phone must be a great communication tool for you and you must be doing lots of business through your mobile phone. Hand over the same mobile phone to a teenager and its usage will be totally different and it may all of a sudden seem more like a toy and less like a powerful business tool. The same is the blogging; it is a great business tool but only for those who want to use it as a business tool.

Having said that, different businesses can use blogs in different manners but there is a fundamental similarity between all business blogs: your business blog helps you strengthen your brand and establish a direct connection between you and your customers and clients. If you have a real estate business you must understand the importance of credibility. People really need to trust you if they want to do business with you because they are spending so much money on what you are offering. How do you establish that trust? Your long presence counts of course, but you also need to communicate constantly to your clients. The more they are exposed to your ideas and opinions the more they trust you. You need to be familiar to them. You need to alley their doubts and fears constantly, on a regular basis. You need to show them that you are not always behind their money and you have got something extra to offer to them. Blogging helps you achieve that.

Blogging is a highly interactive medium. It encourages conversation and you can quickly disseminate your messages to a broad section of people. Lots of misunderstandings happen when you do business and suddenly you find that there is no easy way to deal with it. This scenario completely changes if you have a blog that people visit regularly. Mentioned below are a few things you can achieve for your real estate business through your blog:

Position yourself as a veteran

Imagine your real estate blog as if it were a regular column in the local newspaper and be in the news with regular posts and updates. A blog allows you sufficient exposure to the huge web audience while helping you with local information about building codes, restrictions, property sale statistics and so on. You see more knowledgeable when you regularly share your knowledge with your audience. People always prefer to deal with people who have knowledge and who share it.

Make your blog community-oriented

Loading your blog with just real estate information is not sufficient to grow your business. Build a network of local citizens and businesses to build a community around your blog. Request homeowner associates to join your community and share valuable and relevant information. Similarly seek businesses to post about their services, particularly those that pertain to real estate, something like mortgage companies, home inspections, landscape engineers, interior decorators etc.

Link your blog and website through email

Send your prospects an email giving information on the sold property and other updates, while leaving a link that leads the visitors to your blog for more information. This way, you will be able to create more traffic and make the search engine often choose your because of relevancy.

Use blogs to build friends, customers, and associates

Post comments on others’ blogs that are quite related to your business to increase traffic to your blog. This way, you will be able to promote your business better as visitors will trackback to your blog often with their counter comments, extra information, opinions, and criticisms.

Invite guest authors to post updates onto your blog

Provide guest authors with the login access of your blog and request them to post updates, such as a mortgage company regularly updating the interest rates; insurance companies warning homeowners against hazard policies; or interior decorators posting information on new themes and styles for homeowners’ interiors.

These are few tips and suggestions to be in the limelight and present yourself as a serious professional in your business!

Luckily there are these 10 proven ways to increase traffic and that too economically:

1. Sharpen your niche:  Provide specific information in your blog as opposed to giving generic information. When you move from specific to generic, your blog will win the attention of visitors seeking answers to their specific problems or queries.
2. Post reviews: Another workable way to attract more visitors to your blog is to post reviews. Voice your honest opinion about the products or services concerning your niche area. Since people seek to have the worth for their money, they would be interested in honest opinion and thus would visit your blog more often.
3. Incorporate a forum signature: Join some Internet forums of your niche area and leave your forum signature where you give visitors some useful information. For instance, your niche-quality signature can be something like “All the tips and secrets unleashed about online copywriting!
   http://mycopywritingsite.com”. This will act as a mini ad and people concerned might feel compelled to click your site for more information.
4. Incorporate an e-mail signature: Ensure you copy your signature on to your e-mail program. This way, you will allow yourself a chance to promote your blog with each of your e-mail.
5. Post comments: If you are visiting other blogs and find something useful to share with others, post your comments along with your name, email and website address or blog address. This will allow interested folks to click on your blog to know more about you.
6. Trade links with other sites: Though this technique has gained a bad reputation in recent years because of the ‘trade links with me” spam, it still is a workable technique when employed intelligently. If you are a part of respected site owners’ link partners group, then you gain the same reputation as the site owners and their visitors automatically become your blog visitors as well.
7. Provide freebies: Offer your visitors something extra at no cost and people would visit your blog more often.
8. Use Adwords ads to direct visitors to your free products or admired posts: Run your AdWords that link to your free products or popular post instead of having it linked to your site of blog. If the AdWords direct your visitors to free products or other popular posts, it allows them to have more information about you.
9. Use an easy and simple way for readers to share: Allow visitors to bookmark your blog in the simplest manner possible; this will allow them to come back to your blog later.
10. Send trackbacks: By sending trackbacks, you get highly germane links on other sites. This can result in hundreds of new visitors for your blog and also regular long-term readers.

Bob Lutz joined GM (General Motors) as Vice Chairman for Product Development in the year 2001 and after three years of his tenure in GM, he found things weren’t moving as desired. Customers were not showing interest in GM’s new product lines, nor were the critics interested in making pronouncements about what’s hot in the auto industries. Bob, being a dynamic and articulate communicator was finding it difficult to drive across his message to the masses. Bob was looking for a way to openly interact with the people who were still willing to listen to GM’s message.

His desperate thinking resulted in the launch of a blog by the name FastLane, where the initial entries were tout but the blog’s first post received 121 comments from the readers. The entries were a mix of criticism and positive feedback. Seeing the response, Bob continued penning posts with different titles on a regular basis. He was glad to find a technology that allowed his innate desire to communicate. After four months into blogging, Bob wrote:

“What began as an experiment has become an important means of communication for GM. It has given me, personally, an opportunity to get much closer with you, the public. Often, I find your comments insightful and compelling. At times your criticism is harsh. But the fact that you have remained interested and continue to have faith in our efforts to develop great products is a worthy motivator.”

Now GM does not depend on auto industry trade magazines or TV commercial ads alone to communicate with customers, dealers, or even their employees and investors. GM has a direct channel where he can react quickly to news items, criticisms and even float new ideas to have public reactions. What more – blogs offer a side benefit where every post gets about hundreds of comments, allowing new ideas to generate!

Updating about your new products and leaving links that lead to articles about it on related blogs is not considered being irritating or spammy. Talking about how good that new product of yours is in the comment itself is downright wrong.

Undecided customers will always like to check out the competition and a simple one line comment about how your company’s new product goes a long way in cementing the undecided customer’s attention.

Don’t shy away from defending yourself. If you feel that your product has been unfairly reviewed and a rather unflattering description has been assigned to it, make sure that you come out with all guns blazing to defend your product but make sure to stick within reason at all costs. You can’t be an irresponsible Rambo. You need to be a responsible Sheriff no matter how unfairly your product may have been reviewed. Remember that customers are quite smart and it will take a lot more than a bad review to make them shy away from you and it will take much more than a vehement rejection of that bad review, for them to come flocking to your product.

Be sure to enunciate the differences between similar products made by you and your rival. If there is a post comparing the two and you feel that a few important points have not been touched and a few parameters completely ignored do not hesitate to explain in brief about the missing points. This is not self promoting but actually a form of responsible commenting that will only do your image a world of good.

Congratulate your rival on a stupendous success. There are bound to be times when your rival will come up with a complete and thorough winner and your product can’t stand up to it. Start getting your act together behind the scenes but present the face of a dignified rival in front of the world. Some pointless or insignificant criticism will make you look like a child who can’t handle defeat. A simple congrats to the rival team on an excellent product goes a long way in assuring the consumer that you aren’t completely desperate or groping in the dark.

Nothing grabs attention more than humor and insider tidbits. Humorous comments will have people almost subconsciously clicking on your profile and will lead them to the profile of the company that you represent. Interesting comments with insider tidbits will have readers very much willingly checking out your profile and eventually your company.

So the moral of the story is that use common sense while commenting on articles about your products posted on other blogs and websites. Be dignified but don’t shy away from defending yourself when needed and you will gain respect and more importantly that PR-image takes a big boost as well.