If you are seriously eyeing long-term possibilities for your business, you need to go with the dictates of competition which is to enter the consciousness of the target market.  Without consumer awareness, any product or service offered will die a natural death without being given the chance.  Promote your blog and see the difference.

One of the most effective ways of blog promotion is to have it reviewed and published on the reviewer’s site with a backlink to your blog.  Blogsearchengine does this and more for a minimum cost of $ 14.99.  More exposure and backlinks for reviewed blogs are made possible by availing of advanced membership packages that include the Silver, Gold, and Platinum Packages as detailed in http://www.blogsearchengine.com/submit-blog/.

Signing up for membership entails a very simple process of providing blog details and paying the fee via the paypal gateway.  Automatic redirection is done to the advanced packages page upon payment of the standard fee.  An email is sent to the new member with the chosen username and password.  Depending on the advanced package chosen, bloggers are given a more in depth blog review through the Bloggy Award, link on http://xfep.com/uber-blogs/ for 3 months, featured link on Eatonweb blog portal, and a “Featured Blog” display banner shown for 15 days.

How does a business benefit from having its blog reviewed?  For one, it generates direct traffic since any review puts the subject in the spotlight thus creating interest.  Reviews also tend to encourage other reviews and more talk is almost always a positive development.  Links from quality blogs tend to increase a blog’s popularity that translates into better ranking in the search engines.  Since reviews link back to the blog or site being reviewed, it therefore redounds to the benefit of the business itself.  Critical and valuable feedback is provided by reviews which can be used to come up with better blogs for a more successful business.

Success in the writing field used to be defined as a published book with millions of readers.  Before this can happen however, a writer has to convince a publisher of the financial worth of the story or idea being offered.  Without this factor, a writer is almost always doomed into oblivion together with his work/s.  The writing scenario has changed with the advent of self-publication and blogging.

Writers are now given the option to publish their works themselves in the online environment, getting the chance to prove their writing worth, if indeed there is.  Commercial success has been realized by many writers through blogging which is unlike a traditional book that would require some time to get updated.  Writers of blogs or bloggers get to put in their fresh ideas as they come, having the chance therefore to sustain the readers’ interest in the original story or idea.

Articles directly related to the topic can be written or writers can opt to widen the scope of their topic by writing articles that can be considered on the basis of association.  Widening the topic scope can easily translate to widened readership. This should be accomplished without losing perspective of the target market lest readership is lost all together.

When looked upon as a means to earn, a blog should rise from the rest.  It should be a blog that gets traffic and allows its owners to realize convincing sales that would result to profit.  Of course, no one is about to stop anyone from writing because of the pure joy of it.  An earning blog can make it possible for writers to indulge in some self-serving writing to enable them to fulfill a passion at the same time.

Yet there is a workaround to this problem. Why not create a team of bloggers which can handle the business blog? This can mean that you, the head of the company, can still be part of that team or it can be that you will totally leave the blog to your “team.” I prefer the former set up though.

I believe that if you really want your business blog to help your business, you, being the leader of the company, should be deeply involved in the activity as well. Having other people working with you on the blog means that you won’t have to spend as much time on it, though. It will be a good thing for everyone’s productivity because the work for the blog will be spread between 2 or 3 people. The number of people on your team depends on how often you want to post entries. If you want entries posted everyday, then you might want 2 or 3 people on the team. You might also want to assign a reviewer to ensure the quality and integrity of your posts.

Another benefit of having several people work on your blog is intellectual variety and stimulation. Having different points of view and ideas in the blog will certainly add more flavor to your blog.

Image source: http://thegoldguys.blogspot.com/

I came to this realization when I read Rachael Herrscher’s post on “Another Reason To Start Your Own Blog.” At the beginning, I was thinking – oh great, here is another post on why we all should blog. Do we really need another post like that?

I really appreciate how she put things in perspective, though:

But blogging for your business or blogging about your industry gives you opportunities and a level of credibility with others that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. It also gives you access to a whole new network of people whom you would have had no excuse to talk to before. And of course, for those of you searching for someone to talk about you and your business, blogs are a vast new outlet to receive online coverage of your business.

I’m a small fish in a big sea of bloggers, but my various blogs never cease to serve up great contacts for me. Even on a person-to-person level (the real-life stuff), I’m able to meet people because of my blog. We have blogger dinners in our community, local blog networks and, of course, the huge network of bloggers available on the World Wide Web.

So if you’ve been putting off starting your business blog or blogging about a niche in your industry you are passionate about–it’s time.

You hit the nail right on the head with that post, Rachael!

Update Frequency Isn’t That Important
The common train of social blogging thought is that you have to be constantly updating your content, usually on a daily or at least weekly frequency, or else you’ll lose traffic. With a niche blog, updating daily isn’t needed after the site has gained a degree of search engine traction. In fact, you may find that if you’ve done things right by accident or design that your traffic will actually increase over time rather than decline even though you’re no longer actively updating it.

I know it seems counterintuitive to those who’ve been doing social blogging. The thing is that over time Google begins to consider your site, due to the way your keywords are constructed and your link building exercises are done, an authority site on your topic. This, in turn, means you’ll get an increasing number of valuable search engine visitors even though your core articles haven’t been updated in a year and may be of limited utility.

I understand that your blog can gain search engine traction over time and that even if you do not regularly update your blog anymore, you will still get a lot of hits because you are already well established up in the SERPs. However, I think that this defeats the purpose of providing your readers with something new to read. In my mind, one creates a niche blog in order to address a need for information in that certain niche. If the most recent content was published a year ago, do you think that your old readers would keep coming back for more? I really don’t think so.

What is your take on this?

I would have to answer a resounding YES to that question. You see, niche blogs may be tightly focused on a specific subject but it does not mean that it is much different from other blogs. The idea behind blogs is to provide fresh content on a regular basis. It does not have to be daily, especially if you are maintaining several niche blogs. If you decide to post daily and you have several niche blogs, you might find yourself having a hard time juggling your posting schedule. In fact, I would say that posting every other day or even two or three times a week would be a good enough frequency for a niche blog.

Another consideration that you have to think about when it comes to content for your niche blog is the possibility of future posting. Basically, future posting is writing entries for your niche blog before you actually publish them. So for example, you can write the posts for the week on a weekend and then just pre-date them. With WordPress and Blogger, it is not a problem as they allow this. This idea is very important for those who have day jobs and other commitments. This means that they might not have the ability to set a regular schedule during the week.

The important thing is for you to lay down the guidelines for your posting schedule and stick to them.

The next question then is this: how do you determine which blogs are the most popular in your niche? Here are some tips to help you find those blogs. They are really easy and you may actually be doing some of them already.

Technorati
Everyone in the blogging business knows about Technorati. Even newbies are quite aware of what Technorati is and how important it is to building up one’s blog. One good thing that I like about Technorati is that you can download a file of the top 10 blogs in any of the existing category. That means almost no work for you!

Del.icio.us
Here is another simple way to find the top blogs. Just go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

StumbleUpon
I have been hearing about StumbleUpon for the longest time but to be honest, it was only recently that I joined the community. I wish I had done it earlier. There are tons of people using StumbleUpon and the classifications are quite specific. However, there is no single file that you can download like in Technorati. Still, StumbleUpon is a good way to find blogs in a particular niche.

Of course, these are only some of the tools that you can use. Do you have any suggestions as to how to easily find the top blogs in a niche?

I am assuming here that you already have chosen your niche – we have already talked about this in detail. Once you have that down pat, you have to generate some domain names that would fit with your overall niche blog strategy. One good thing to do is to choose a domain name that has keywords. This is especially important if you are aiming to get a lot of search engine hits.

So for example, if your niche blog is focused on the Wii, you should choose a domain name that has Wii in it. Of course, Wii.com is already taken so you have to add some other keywords in your domain name. You can try wiijunkie, wiienthusiast, everythingwii, and so on. You would have to check if your chosen domain name is available – that is why you need to come up with several in order to have other options.

There are many domain name checkers on the Internet but I personally prefer typing www.domainname.com (or whatever extension you want) on Google to see if it is parked, taken, or available. Once you have decided on an available domain name, do not waste time – register it at once!

There are many tools which you can use to determine this point. One kind of tool that you might want to use is a keyword tool – there are plenty in the market. Google has even come up with a new tool – Google Insights – which can help you determine search patterns.

Wordtracker is another useful tool. Ken McGaffin writes about it:

Wordtracker is a great tool for helping you identify and quantify niche markets. Keyword research tells you what people are looking for online and so helps you assess the size of the market for any particular product or service. To explore the size of any market, there are three stages involved:

1. Find the most popular keywords in your niche market.
2. For each popular keyword, see how it is used in longer search terms and use the total predicted volume of searches to estimate the number of people searching for that particular keyword.
3. Add up the total predicted volume of searches for each popular keyword within the niche to give an estimate of the size of the market.

Based on this and your narrowed down list of interests, you can already pick your niche. Do note, however, that the tools mentioned in these posts are only some of the many out there. Do not limit yourself to them.

So what is the first step? I suggest narrowing down your interests. I am sure that you have at least several interests that you would like to blog about. The thing is, when it comes to starting up a niche blog, you have to focus on one particular topic. So instead of trying to capture a wide range of interests, you should pick out one and focus on it.

How can you do this? This could provide to be a bit of a task especially if you have a lot of interests. How do you narrow them down and actually pick just ONE?

One way to do this would be to search online. Go to sites like Wikipedia and other informational sites. Do a search on several topics that are closest to your heart. Visit many other sites that can provide you with background information on your topics. Once you are done with this background work, take the time to make your decision. That is, pick a few topics that you feel you are most comfortable with. More so, pick a few topics that you think will be sustainable in the long run.