Promoting your blog is one of the most important aspects of business blogging. You want people to be able to find your blog amidst the plethora of other blogs in existence. Different people would have different takes on how one should go about promoting any blog. I ran across some really sensible tips in Business Blog Templates that you may want to consider as you look for ways to promote your own blog.

Have a clear objective for each post.
You always must ask yourself, what the aim of your post is and how it is going to help your site be promoted in search engines. And of course, you should understand that SEO isn’t a one-time occupation. It requires time and permanent attention. Search engines use to change their algorithms, which means you’ll constantly have to think of new ways to satisfy these requirements.

Consider seeking professional help.
If you believe that your business blog can do well without professional help, you’ll have to be in the know of the latest SEO trends and become one of the regular visitors of SEO authority resources. Otherwise trust control over your business blog to your SEO specialist. Always try to consult people, familiar with SEO – professional advice will never be out of place.

Focus on originality.
Create original content, interesting to your readers. Never write for search engines. Always remember, that the content of your business blog must contain 95% of useful and interesting information and only 5% of SEO. All SEO specialists agree that content is the most powerful optimization tool. With it’s help you can attract not only new readers, but new external links, which is another important SEO criteria.

Of these three tips that I found most interesting, I think the last one bears a lot of weight. Let us look into this point sometime in the future.

Don’t expect momentum to last
I think what John Chow is talking about is personal momentum – the drive that keeps you going with regard to your blog. If I understood his message correctly, then I totally agree with him. In everything you do, you will most certainly be all excited and raring to go in the beginning – there is nothing to that. The challenge arises when you lose momentum somewhere down the road – this is inevitable too. However, it is up to you to keep going, to keep your productivity up and continue to achieve results. If you don’t expect momentum to last, you can anticipate loss of drive (albeit temporarily) and come up with a plan to deal with it.

Don’t overlook content in the quest for promotion
Promoting your blog is very important – we all know that. We want to be able to get the word out that a blog exists and then attract people from all over the world to take a look at it. However, promotion can only go so far. You may have the best promotion and marketing machine in the world but that will not do you much good if your content sucks. Promotion is the first step – getting people to visit your site. Yet if you have nothing to offer by way of content, these very same people will not go back to your blog nor will they tell others to do so.

And that, my friends, is what John Chow has to say about NOT making your blog a flop.

While we’re on the hot subject of John Chow (pretty soon this name just might be a buzzword), let’s take a look at his post on “10 Ways To Turn Your Website Into A Flop.” I assume that you would not want this to happen so I kind of put a positive spin into it. Please note, I am just taking some of points that I agree with. So here are the “mistakes” that you should avoid when it comes to your blog.

Don’t work on something that you are not passionate about.
Passion is everything – or is it, really? Maybe not everything, but it does play a major role in your writing success. You can always write about something that you do not really care about but in the long run, it is the passion that will keep you going. Indeed, as John Chow (or Alan Johnson, his guest blogger for this post) put it: “But do you actually think that you will be able to tap your true potential if you don’t even like what you’re doing?” I don’t think so.

Don’t expect results overnight.
I couldn’t agree more with this. I remember a project I was working on a couple of years ago. The concept was really good and unique. I won’t go into the details but it was something about travel warnings (not tips and sights to see and all that stuff). The project manager had something potentially successful in his hands. The problem was that he wanted to make it big as soon as the web site was launched. As a result, he suffered disappointment within several months. It takes work and patience, that much I know.

(to be continued)

Assumption is the mother of all mess ups, so they say. I’ll go out on a limb here and assume that you have an idea who John Chow is. After all, he has been making huge waves in the blogosphere in the past few months. Now, just to make sure I don’t make wrong assumptions here, let me tell you a little bit about John Chow. He established The Tech Zone, which provides information on hardware news and reviews. He also established TTZ Media Network, which offers shopping and price comparison services for web publishers focused on technology. His site, John Chow dot com, gets an astronomical number of views each day as he offers a myriad of advice on how to make money online. Get the picture?

Just the other day, he posted an entry on his blog business structure. Though it is specific to his case (he lives in Canada), it could very well be useful for other bloggers who need advise on the matter of income through blogs and taxes. His main point is this: if you earn money through your blog, then you have to pay taxes on it. There is no doubt about that. He goes on to point out that in the eyes of the law, the person behind the blog is separate from the blog as a corporation itself. This, according to him, is the key to making some savings on taxes.

His entry does make a lot of sense and bloggers all over the world are realizing this. Though not everyone is a John Chow fan, you might be able to make use of the points he is presenting.

Correct me if I am wrong but when you start a business blog, your objective is for the blog to make it. You want your business blog to add that plus factor to your business, right? If you think like many successful people do, you do not even consider failure. However, the truth is that business blogs can fail, in fact, many blogs of this nature fail.

I ran across a post on Blog Herald talking about the reasons behind a business blog’s failure. It outlined the top five reasons business blogs fail – straight from the horse’s mouth, business owners themselves.

1. Not enough comments were left by visitors
2. Not enough subscribers
3. No increase in traffic to their main website
4. Difficult to come up with fresh new content for the blog every week
5. Couldn’t work out how to promote products and services via the blog

Andy of The Blog Herald gives his opinion on this matter – he says that blogging is not for everyone. I totally agree with this. I mean, blogging can give your business that edge when it comes to web presence and all that. I have posted a lot of entries on how business blogging can help you with this. However, no matter how much you know about the benefits of business blogging, if you do not know much about the inner workings of blogging, then you might be setting yourself up for failure. You would probably end up seeing one or more of the items in the list above. The solution? Know what blogging is all about or just stick to the traditional way of doing things.

I recently read a blog post about blogs and how they can increase search engine visibility. I have to admit that the content was something that I have encountered before but the way it was presented by Dan Patterson was very simple and easy to understand. Though the entry was posted last year, the content is still relevant and I thought I’d share it with you.

He focuses on two main points – changing content and link building. Let’s look at changing content. This is a very important aspect when it comes to search engines. Remember that they use spiders to crawl web pages and these spiders want fresh content. That is the main reason they will come back to a web page even if they have already visited it before. So if your page has fresh content all the time, that means that spiders will keep coming back. Now common sense will tell you that your blog would be more likely to have new content than a static web page. Posting on a regular basis is a simple thing to do, with lots of benefits in terms of search engine visibility.

Link building, on the other hand, is also a huge part of blogging. If you have been blogging for quite some time, you probably are into the habit of linking out to other blogs and relevant sites. Though your business blog may have one overall topic, you can still relate to other sub topics, giving you more links. Of course, by doing so, you also encourage other sites to link to your blog. This, once again, is a good thing for search engine visibility (as long as the links are real and relevant).

In the previous post, we took a look at blog directory submissions – what they are and how they work. In this post, let us focus on the advantages and benefits of using blog directory submissions. Are they really necessary to increase your online presence or are they merely one of the many stunts you find online? Read on to find the answer to this question.

One of the most important things about blog directory submissions is that there is a direct correlation to search engine rankings. This is because of the fact that the more (relevant and legitimate) links that you have, the better your search engine rankings will be. It is actually similar to the conventional referral system. The more referrals you have, the more popular you are. When it comes to your blog, the more links that you have, the higher the chances of people visiting your site. In the end, this is what you want, right? You want more people to know about you and your blog and for them to actually click on that link and visit your blog.

More so, when you submit your blog to a directory, it will be easier for search engine spiders to find you. They only need to crawl through the directory (or directories, for that matter) that you belong to and they will easily find you. That could also translate to higher search engine ranking.

Another benefit is that people actually manually browse through blog directories, looking for blogs that fit their needs and preferences. That is why the categories in blog directories are important. People know what they are looking for and look at the relevant category. This will increase your chances of getting click through traffic – again, increasing the visits to your blog and exposing potential customers to what you have to offer.

In the last post, I mentioned something about submitting articles to certain web sites in order to help you make your presence felt more on the Internet. In this post, I would like to focus on another type of submission – directory submissions.

What is this all about? As the name implies, you submit your blog to a web site that acts much like a telephone directory, except that the contents of the site are blogs and not
people and their phone numbers.

How do these directories work? It is actually quite simple. Blog directories would have various categories. For example, they have business blogs, personal blogs, fashion blogs, food blogs, and so on. What you need to do as a business blogger would be to look under the business blog category and see if they have subcategories that would suit the nature of your business the best. Once you’ve found this, you can send in a request for your blog to be featured.

Of course, blog directories have their own set of rules and regulations as to the submission process. You would want to check these first before submitting your blog. If you do not do this and you miss a specific requirement or step in the process, your blog might not be featured at all. Most blog directories would require you to include a short description of your blog so that this can be included in the feature.

In the next post, let’s look at the benefits of directory submission and what to look for in a directory submission site.

Make friends
You may not be an extrovert in real life but what is stopping you from being sociable online? After all, all you need to do is participate in forums and make comments in other blogs. Of course, make sure that what you post is sensible and reliable. This is particularly important when it comes to blogs that are related to your business. The people who maintain and read these blogs are the very same people that you want to get to look at your blog. As such, reading other blogs and making comments regularly will help you catch their attention and direct traffic to your site.

Link train posts
This used to be a popular way of increasing page rankings and thus increasing traffic to one’s blog. However, Google has taken some action in this regard so I am not quite optimistic about this point. If you are a firm believer in this idea, however, don’t let me stop. Just my two cents’ worth.

Submit articles
There are many article submission directories online. These web sites offer articles for free to the general public. The articles that you have to submit should be related to your business or your area of expertise. When people read these articles, they will see something about you (the author) and a link to your blog, thus increasing the chances of having new visitors.

These are only some of the ways by which you can increase the popularity of your blog. Do you have any other ways in mind? Why not let the rest of us in on your secret?

In the previous post, we focused on the physical looks and SEO in order to make your blog more popular. Here are more tips to help you get the audience that you want.

Feeds are your friends
I am not talking about the things that you give to livestock for nourishment. In the blogging world, feeds are a mechanism by which you can publish your blog entries automatically. If you use feeds, it will be easier for your readers to keep themselves updated on what’s new in your blog. They do not have to do things manually, thus saving them time and effort. If you keep readers happy that way, then you just might become more popular. Many blogging platforms support feeds already but you may want to make use of other sites, especially if you have your own domain.

Make the most out of social bookmarking
Bookmarks make it much easier for your readers to remember your blog. They eliminate the need for readers to memorize your URL. Social bookmarking takes things one step further by making your blog available to anyone part of that social bookmarking web site. Just be sure not to overwhelm your readers with too many social bookmarking sites as they will just clutter up your blog. Some really reliable sites that you may want to include are Technorati, Sociable, and addThis.

In the next post, let us look at some other ways that you can improve the popularity of your blog.