Blogging isn’t just an online journal or diary. Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool. In this article, I’ll explain how you can use a blog and blogging in general to give your company or website a boost.

What is blog marketing?

Blog marketing is marketing that utilizes the medium of blogs to gain exposure or advertise a business, a brand, a service, or a website. Basically, you use a blog, whether it be your own or someone else’s to market what you want to market.

Why should I make a blog?

I believe that blogs are a powerful tool. They allow people to connect to you. When a customer or client is able to follow you through your blog they feel as if they know you. It’s like they were invited to read your personal journal (or diary). If you run a business you will be able to share with your customers what’s going on in the company, you’ll be able to show that your company is human and that you care. This is inviting to customers and allows them to feel as if they buy your product you will offer them support in any way that you can.

Besides that, a blog is a way to sell your product. By blogging about your product you will be able to sell the reader on it much more than if you just made a small banner or a little video. In your blog you can write pages and pages of content to show what your product does, how they can use it, and why they should ultimately buy it. By gaining a good reader base you will also have an outlet to promote new products as well. This can cut costs in the advertising department and raise sales.

Using Other Blogs in my Marketing Strategy

Blog marketing isn’t limited to creating your own blog. You can utilize other blogs to promote and gain exposure for your company. This doesn’t mean just purchasing ad space on a blog, although this is another method that you can utilize a blog in your marketing strategy.

Here is a strategy that you can use to gain exposure from other blogs. Search for well known and influential blogs in your niche. Look for blogs that are regularly updated and have a good comment count. Be sure to look at the comments to see if they are of high quality and not spammy. By looking at comments you will also be able to see if this blog is influential in your niche. If it is you can post comments yourself. Don’t spam the comment box with your link, instead offer helpful and insightful comments to stimulate interaction with the blogger and his or her readers.

Another option you have is to write guest posts. This is a great way to gain exposure. By writing a guest post you will be able to gain exposure to all of that blog’s readers. If you did your research and chose the right blog this could mean a lot of potential clients or customers.

The keys to this strategy are simple.

• Write useful content, whether it be a comment or a guest post if the content you write isn’t useful this will give you and your company a bad name.
• Choose the right blog. A blog with no reader base will essentially be useless to you. Look for a blog that is popular and targeted to your niche. These will yield the best results.

Go get your blog started!

A blog is a powerful tool. The next time you re-think your marketing strategy, think about utilizing blogs, they are a free and easy way to promote anything that you wish.

In this quick tip I’m going to explain how to show you how to change your background color with CSS.

The background color property in CSS is background-color. You can use this property on any type of element. To change the background of your entire page you would apply it to the body tag.

body { background-color: blue; }

As you can see you can easily specify the color with the name of the color that you want. There are 147 predefined colors that you can choose from, to view a full list visit w3schools.com. However, to gain more control over the color of your background you would use either a hexadecimal color value or a RGB color value. Both work in similar fashion, they set values for reds, greens, and blues, in that order.

To render the same blue background using a hexadecimal color you would use the following.

body  { background-color: #ff0000;  }

Or the RGB color value.

body { background-color: rgb(255,0,0); }

Another way that you can specify the background color with CSS is to use the background shorthand property.

body { background: #ff0000; }

Like I said before, you can use this for any element on your site. Enjoy playing with CSS background colors!

This is the question that most people ask, can you really make money blogging? The simple answer is yes. In this article I’m going to show you some of the ways you can monetize you blog.

How much money can you make blogging?

This is a very difficult question to answer but let me try to give you a little insight. I know we’re all used to hearing, “it depends”, but it’s the honest truth. There are many factors that can contribute to the amount of money your blog can potentially make, but here are just a few that I think are where you should start.

• Blog Topic – Your blog topic is important when determining how much money your blog can make. Just like a “Louis Vuitton” product cost more than a “Walmart” product, if you sell more expensive products your potential is that much greater.

How do you make money blogging?

There’s many different ways to make money blogging. Here are just some ideas.

• Paid Reviews
• Affiliate Marketing
• PPC/CPM
• Selling Ad Space

Paid Reviews

When your blog becomes popular companies may approach you asking you to review their products. Why? Because you are an influence in the market. For example, if you blog about computer mice people read your blog to find the best computer mice. A company that makes computer mice wants people to read about their mice so that you readers buy their mice. You can charge a premium for these paid reviews as one source of revenue.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is simple. Basically, you get paid to sell a third party’s product. For every product that you sell you get a small commission, usually a percentage but sometimes can be a set fee. Affiliate Marketing is also very closely associated with CPA type marketing. CPA marketing is Cost Per Action, basically these will pay you when a user completes a certain action such as signing up for an email or downloading a product. This helps the advertiser to generate leads which they can advertise their products to at a later date. Here are just some of the networks that I utilize.

• Peerfly
• Clickbank
• Amazon Associates

If we go back to the computer mouse example, for every mouse that you write about, you can link to a site that sells computer mice such as Amazon. You will then get a commission for the sale if your reader ends up buying it.

PPC/CPM

The great thing about PPC and CPM is that you don’t need to make a sale. PPC is Pay Per Click which basically means you get paid each time a user clicks on an ad. PPC can payout nicely in some niches but in general it’s pretty low. CPM deals with impressions, you will usually get paid for every 1,000 impressions that you produce. CPM tends to have very low payouts but is a valid source if you have a high Page View count.

• Adsense
• Chitika

Selling Ad Space

If you want control on what you advertise to your readers you can sell ad space on your blog privately. I believe this is a great way to go if your blog is generating loads of traffic. You can then set a premium price for the ad space that you sell. I have stopped selling ad space recently due to the fact that I feel it limits your potential revenue.

Where do I start?

Start with building your blog! If you’re completely new to the blogging scene, don’t worry, we have some great resources to get you started right here on BFS. I highly suggest taking a look at joining Wealthy Affiliate, it will give you the opportunity to be mentored and guided from aspiring internet marketers such as yourself and many experts in the field. There is a premium but I think it is well worth it.

What is Gravity Forms?

Gravity Forms is a premium WordPress Plugin that allows you to easily add and manage forms on your WordPress installation.

What does Gravity Forms offer?

Gravity Forms offers a lot of functionality that other plugins just can’t compare to. Here are just some of the ones I want to highlight.

• Multi-Page Forms – This isn’t your ordinary contact form plugin, with Gravity Forms you can create not only single page forms but multi-page forms as well.
• Limit Entries – Are you planning on running a contest? Want to only accept a certain number of entries? You can easily tell Gravity Forms to accept a certain number of entries and then display a message once you have reached your limit.
• Advanced Fields – Advanced fields include addresses, email addresses, URL’s, names, phone numbers and even file uploads. These make it easy to handle all types of data types without a second thought.
• Schedule Forms – Tell a form when to appear and when to expire with a few clicks of the button.
• Pricing Fields – Generate order forms in a breeze with Gravity Forms, it even will add up your total for you.
• Post Fields – Get user generated content easily by utilizing post fields.

Gravity Forms Add-ons

In addition, there are many add-ons that increase the functionality of Gravity Forms. There are many add-ons for Gravity Forms but here are some of the fully supported add-ons that integrate seamlessly with many 3rd party tools.

• AWeber
• Campaign Monitor
• Mail Chimp
• Authorize.net
• Freshbooks
• Paypal Payments Standard
• Paypal Payments Pro
• Signature
• Twilio
• User Registration

* All add-ons are included with a Developer license, except Aweber, Campaign Monitor, and Mail Chimp which is included with both Developer and Business licenses.

So what’s it cost?

Gravity Forms has three license prices.

Personal ($39)

• Use on 1 Site
• Unlimited Forms
• Unlimited Entries
• Auto-responders
• Export Entries
• Spam Protection
• 1 Year of Updates and Support

Business ($99) – Get everything that the Personal License offers plus:

• Use on 3 Sites
• Basic Form Add-Ons

Developer ($199) – Get everything that the Business License offers plus:

• User on unlimited sites.
• WordPress Multi-Site Support
• Advanced Form Add-Ons

Convinced, yet?

Gravity Forms is one of my favorite plugins. It allows me to make robust forms that create interactivity between my site and my users. At $199 for the developer license, you can’t go wrong. But, if you’re skeptical, act now with the coupon code GFDEV50 and get $50 off of a Developer License. Don’t wait, go get Gravity Forms now!

Disclaimer: I use Gravity Forms including on this site. If you purchase Gravity Forms with my affiliate link I will received a small commission. Feel free to purchase without my link.

Download this e-book for an introduction on how great blog contests are. Use blog contests to increase the popularity of your blog including traffic, subscribers, and interactivity. This guide will show you how to find contest sponsors, the mechanics of running a blog content and even goes through a few scenarios.

Download the Blog to Success through Blog Contests e-book now.

Choosing a domain name for your blog is one of the most important things you will do for your blog. It is your blog’s identity. Unfortunately, many bloggers fall into the trap of choosing a domain based off of keywords to get higher rankings. This technique does work, don’t get me wrong, but there is a point where you have to stop and ask yourself, is this really the right way to choose a domain name?

You have to realize a few things to understand the importance of a domain name.

• First and foremost, it’s not free. It will cost you roughly $10 a year.
• Not all domains are available. In fact there are many who make a living off registering the domain you want and then selling it back to you for ridiculous profits.
• The domain is your blog’s identity. Yes, you can name your blog whatever you want when its all said and done or design a brilliant logo, but the real identity is your domain name.
• You can’t just change it whenever you want. If you decide to change your domain you better be sure of what you’re doing and have a plan to retain your readers. I guarantee that changing your domain name will lose you at least a handful of readers if not much more.

So let’s break it down. For the purpose of this post, there are two paths to choosing the domain for your blog. One is to build a brand and another to get search engine rankings. There are other methods in which people decide to register a domain, such as thinking that another entity might want to buy it thus making a profit, but for this post we’ll stick to these two.

Choosing to build a brand is the way to go in my opinion. You’re choosing a domain that will be remembered and easy to type. When choosing your domain in this way you are thinking about long term readers. You want the reader to remember your site and come back.

A lot of internet marketers will tell you to choose a domain based off of a keyword (I recommend Jaaxy for this). This is a great method for affiliate marketing, it’s a lot easier to get good rankings if you have the domain for your keywords. This is great but if your domain is hard to remember, what is the likelihood that they will return?

Let’s go through a little example. Let’s say you are creating a blog about the solar power lighting. You won’t be able to get the domain solarpowerlighting.com (at the time of this writing, it’s being offered for $6,000), here are two alternatives available at the time of this writing, solar-power-light.com and lightfromsun.com. Although the former domain would be better in SE’s and has a better keyword term, lightfromsun.com is much easier to type (dashes are a pain) and can be very memorable. In this situation I might register both and use the better keyword to drive traffic to my memorable blog.

It’s really about your audience. Are you looking for one time sales or long term readers? More often than not, I would target long term readers. As you look for your domain, as with everything when blogging, think about your readers.

What is Themedy?

Themedy is a company that specializes in creating child themes for both Thesis and Genesis, the two most popular WordPress theme frameworks today. As great as these frameworks are, let’s be real, they lack a bit in the visual department. That’s where Themedy comes in, for just $80 a month or $130 a year, you can gain access to their entire library of themes.

What’s good about Themedy?

Themedy allows you take full advantage of the Thesis or Genesis WordPress themes yet giving you a visually pleasant design. Themedy allows you to purchase a single theme or avcess to their entire library of themes. With each theme they give you a fully layered PSD for easy customization of each theme. Themedy also has a support system that allows their employees and customers to help you out if you ever need some assistance.

Themedy Freebies

Themedy also provides some free resources that are well worth checking out. Here is a list of the free resources that Themedy offers right now.

• Fremedy Child Thesis/Genesis WordPress Theme
• Thesis/Genesis Author Box Addon
• Button Set PSD
• Stacked Notebook PSD
• Google+ Icons PSD
• Genesis Layout PSD
• Thesis Layout PSD

Themedy’s Current Themes

• Derby – The theme used in this site.
• Reactiv – Another of my recommended themes.
• Clip Cart
• Line It Up
• Foxy News
• Mock Five
• Clinch Press
• Feedpop
• Readyfolio
• Rough Print
• Smooth Post
• Stage
• Fremedy – A free theme and one of my favorites!

Conclusion

I’ve use Themedy themes to do a variety of jobs. If you’re not ready to buy Themedy, check out this site I did with the free theme called Fremedy, www.KAMPHawaii.org. I encourage you to create a great looking site with a Themedy theme, go check them out now!

Disclaimer: I use Themedy child Thesis themes for wordress on many websites including this one. By purchasing Themedy theme or subscription through my affiliate link I will receive a small commission.

What is Thesis

Thesis is a WordPress theme framework. Thesis boasts airtight SEO, incredible design flexibility, and lightning-fast loading times.

Advantages of Thesis

Thesis is a great WordPress theme framework and is one of the most popular. Here’s a few reasons why.

• You don’t have to be a coder to use Thesis. Thesis comes with option panels that allows you to manipulate your website right through the WordPress control panel.
• Unparalleled SEO options. The main advantage that Thesis has is it’s SEO capabilities. Thesis allows you to control SEO aspects on every single page and post.
• Thesis offers an easy to use option panel to control the design of your website. Besides colors and fonts, you are also able to easily generate layouts of 1, 2, or 3 columns!
• Thesis offers great support not only through traditional means but an active support forum and a thorough documentation.
• In addition, the Thesis blog offers great tips from WordPress SEO to Email Marketing.

Who Uses Thesis?

I use Thesis but there are many others that use Thesis. Here are just some of the people leveraging Thesis to run their websites. If it’s good enough for these folks, you can be sure its good enough for you.

• Matt Cutts – Head of the Google Webspam Team
• Dave Navarro – Jane’s Addiction guitarist
• The Domino Project – Seth Godin & Amazon.com
• Krispy Kreme UK
• Toney Hsieh – Author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos
• Network Solutions

Get the Thesis Theme

Thesis will help you to get search engine optimized websites off the ground in no time. Get your copy of Thesis and get rid of your WordPress theme headaches.

Disclaimer: I use Thesis for almost all of my WordPress run websites including this one. By purchasing Thesis with my affiliate link I do gain a commission. Feel free to visit the Thesis website without clicking my link.

What is Jaaxy?

Jaaxy is a keyword tool from the creators of Wealthy Affiliate. Jaaxy is unique from other programs in it’s easy to use and more importantly easy to understand collection of tools.

Jaaxy Features

Jaaxy comes with a wealth of features. You’ll definitely have to try it out to see for yourself but here are a few of the features that you can look forward to having fun playing with if you decide to sign up for Jaaxy.

• To Do List – Easily add keywords to your To Do List when using the keyword search tool. This is a great tool that allows you to save keywords for working on later.
• Search History – Jaaxy saves your search history so you can easily go back and find the keyword you found last week.
• KQI – The Keyword Quality Indicator is a simple indicator allowing you to quickly browse through list of keywords. A green light means the keyword is worth looking into.
• Website SERPS – Get the scoops on your competition easily with this tool. You’ll be able to see the top 10 results for Google, Bing, and Yahoo along with data such as Alexa Rank, keyword density, and back links.
• Competition – Easily find articles, images or videos from top sites using the keyword that you are searching.
• Brainstorm – Find out whats trending on the web. Jaaxy searches Google Hot Trends, Yahoo! Buzz Index Movers, Alexa Hot Topics, Amazon.com Best Sellers, and Twitter Trends.

I want Jaaxy now!

Let me forewarn you, getting Jaaxy is a time consumer. You’ll have so much fun searching for keywords you’ll become addicted. Experience how fun searching for keywords can be, go get Jaaxy for yourself. You’ll even get 30 free searches to try before you buy!

Disclaimer: I am an active user of Jaaxy. By signing up for Jaaxy through my affiliate link I will receive a small commission. Feel free to sign up for Jaaxy without going through my link, it’s a tool that every internet marketer should have.

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is the creation of well known internet marketers Kyle and Carson. In the current version Wealthy Affiliate has become a community oriented environment called the Open Education Project or OEP. It’s a collection of tools and members who help each other to become successful internet marketers.

What do I get with my membership?

For $47 per month or $359 a year you’ll gain membership to what Kyle and Carson call the Open Education Project or OEP. The idea of the Open Education Project is that every member has the ability to share their knowledge and experience with every other member. Members have different strengths and weaknesses, by creating a web of knowledge the OEP allows a member to become a well rounded internet marketer.

OEP also offers a bunch of tools that make your journey to becoming an internet marketer a lot easier.

• WordPress Express – This tool allows a user to easily create a WordPress site in just a few clicks. This is perfect for new internet marketers without a technical background. Using this tool allows you to create an unlimited amount of websites with free web hosting. This more than makes up for your membership cost by itself.
• Keyword Tools and Keyword Lists – Although, these tools are useful I do recommend also signing up for Jaaxy, another tool from the minds of Kyle and Carson. Jaaxy offers 30 free keyword searches. Read my Jaaxy review to learn more.
• Rapid Writer – Rapid Writer is a web based tool within the OEP that basically gives you a plain text box to write your articles or website content. There are two main advantages of using this, one it includes a keyword density analyzer so you can keep track of your keyword density, the other advantage is that the text you copy from Rapid Writer will not contain the markup that copying from Microsoft Word will.
• Link Tracker

The main benefit of your membership in my opinion is the networking opportunity that you have. Here are the ways OEP allows you to connect, interact and build a network with other Wealthy Affiliate members.

• Profile – The OEP has a social network type of feel. You’re able to let others know a little about you and choose to follow members that you wish to be in your network. By following members you’ll have quick access to everything that member does on OEP such as post on the forum, blog posts or when they publish a training.
• Blog – The OEP introduced the blog, use it as you wish. You can write your questions here, just journal your experience or just post a funny picture.
• Live Chat – Here you’ll find many helpful members. If you have a question along the way just pop in and you’ll usually get a bunch of members ready to help you. You can also find me here the majority of the time.
• Forums – The Wealthy Affiliate forums were the focus of Wealthy Affiliate awhile back. Now, the focus is on the OEP but the forum is still a great place to get answers to your questions and insight from other members.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam?

You’ll find many reviews about Wealthy Affiliate online, some good, some bad. Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam? No. Wealthy Affiliate does not promise you a get rich quick program or millions of dollars, Wealthy Affiliate promises to teach you what you need to know to become a successful internet marketer. In this, it fulfills on its promise and so much more.

One question you may be asking is, why the monthly or yearly subscription? Internet marketing is an ever changing and ever evolving business. The things you learn today may not be relevant next year or even next month. The beauty of Wealthy Affiliate is that it is always updated and there is always discussion on topics that affect our business.

How do I benefit from Wealthy Affiliate?

I have to admin, Wealthy Affiliate is information overload. It covers and gives you so much information it can be hard to focus. Follow these steps to really benefit from your membership.

• Complete: 30 Day Success Club – Getting Started Course, when logged in click on Getting Started in the left hand menu.
• When you come across a topic you can’t understand search for a training on that topic. Click on Training and enter a search in the search bar up top.
• If you can’t find anything or you still can’t understand hit up the Chat. Ask a question in the chat box to the right of your dashboard. You’ll find helpful members there, including myself and the owners Kyle and Carson. I don’t know many sites where you can interact with the owners like Wealthy Affiliate.
• If the Chat is empty or no one can answer your question post it in a blog or on the forum. Click My Blog or Forum to make the post. This way you’ll give a chance for the hundreds of thousands of members to view your question and see if they have an answer for you.
• Follow everyone that seems knowledgeable, working on niches similar to yours, and anyone that seems interesting. The biggest advantage of Wealthy Affiliate in my opinion is the networking opportunity.
• Once you gain some experience, help others. By helping others you will be able to grow your network. Do this by creating training modules, answer questions in the forum, blogs, and chat.
• Promote Wealthy Affiliate. Wealthy Affiliate offers a very generous commission. Refer a few friends and you will be getting your membership for free.

Go become a Wealthy Affiliate for free!

If you’re not convinced, that’s fine, go try Wealthy Affiliate for free. Right now, you can have a 10 day free trial no questions asked. I strongly suggest signing up for a few months to really get the feel of the website, 10 days is not enough time to get the full benefit of Wealthy Affiliate.

Disclaimer: I am a member of Wealthy Affiliate. I believe it is one of the better investments I have made and would like to invite you to join me. If you sign up through my affiliate link I will get a commission, however, feel free to go to visit their site without clicking on my link. Before you signup please read my review on Wealthy Affiliate before hand so that you know what you will be getting and how to take full advantage of your membership.