we are heading towards the end of the Online Marketing Success Training Camp! It is not that you now are supposed to know all miracles of online marketing. What you should know though is what it is all about and have all basic elements available for kick starting your online experience. All the rest, perfection and in-depth knowledge will come along the way, the more you practice, the better the results will be, the more comfortable you will feel!

The most important thing though is to START. As I know from my personal experience and have heard the same story from many other online marketers away, I have decided to dedicate another session to BLOGGING and the power of it.

Blogging is straight forward, easy language and easy tools, therefore an activity anyone can start immediately. AN through blogging you will learn many new steps, all among those we have touched here in our Online Marketing Success Training Camp series. So, without any further delay, let us start!

What is a blog?

Blog is derived from the words “Web Log,” which has be shortened to just “Blog.”  Blogs can be used for a multitude of different reasons.  Here are some of the most common ways in which blogs are used.

• Personal & Diary Blogs (family updates, photos, info)
• News (News discussions, current events, etc.)
• Opinions (politics, gossip, etc.)
• Business (product reviews, FAQs, website promotion, etc)

RSS Feeds

Why Does Your Business Need a Blog?

Blogs can do a lot for your business.  Whether you’re selling skincare products, information products, or anything in between, your business SHOULD have a blog.  Ten years ago it used to be said that “if you didn’t have a website, you would get left in the dust.”  This proved to be true.  Likewise, it’s being said today that businesses without a blog will also be left in the dust. I believe that this will also be the case.  Blogs offer a lot of benefits for your business, and if your want to grow your business, you will definitely want to have a blog for your business.

Here are a few ways that Blogs Can Benefit Your Business:

1. For Your Customers – Blogs are a great way to provide fresh and relevant content to your customers. Providing fresh content will give them something to read, and keep them coming back to your site.
2. Search Engines – search engines LOVE blogs because by nature, blogs have fresh and new content.  Constantly changing content is something that search engines, especially Google, love.  By having a blog, you give the search engine spiders a reason to keep coming back and indexing your site.
3. Social Media – Taking part in, and building an online community is a great way to promote your business within the web 2.0 community.  For more on this, listen or research more on Social Media Optimization.
4. SEO (search engine optimization) – Blogging for SEO purposes is one of the biggest benefits of blogging because it provides you a great vehicle for building anchored text links on your keyword phrases.
   1. Write a post that is relevant to your products, niche, or industry.
   2. Insert between 2-3 keyword phrases in your posts, linking each keyword phrase to the page of your site that is most relevant for that keyword phrase (also known as deep linking).
   3. Insert an image into your post.  The image should be linked to the page of your site, most applicable to the main topic of your post.  Also, you can use the alt tag attributes of the image in insert one of your main keyword phrases.

How Often Should You Blog?

Well, there is no definitive answer to how often you should blog, the short answer is this:  as often as you can.  Blogging often builds your content faster, builds more keyword phrase links to your site (backlinks), which helps tremendously with SEO, and gives your customers and readers a reason to come back more often (this includes the search engines).  Here are some recommendations I make to my clients when instructing them on blogging:

Starting Your Blog

There are two main ways you can get a blog going.  The first is by purchasing some web hosting space from a hosting provider, such as the one I recommend here. Or, you can get a free blog by joining a blogging community, such as blogger, MySpace, etc. Here are the differences between the two.

While there are a lot of different blogging software available, I recommend WordPress for the following reasons.  It’s free, it’s the most widely used, and it’s open source – which means that there are a lot of additional components available via plugins that will allow you customize your blog in a number of different ways.

Community Blogs

Joining a blogging community will allow you to get a blog started without paying any hosting fees, however there are some definite disadvantages to choosing a free blog.  Some of the disadvantages are:

• Can’t Integrate It With Your Site
• No Custom Domain Name
• Follow Their Terms of Service
• Not as flexible (templates, plugins, etc)

With that said, if you still want to use a free blog for your business, here are some places you can get one:

• http://www.wordpress.com
• http://blogspot.com
• http://www.myspace.com

Just for your information – I do use a WordPress blog and love it and my web designer has integrated it to my website!

Link Building by Commenting On Other Blogs

Finding Blogs to comment on:

Go to Google.com and search for blogs that are related to your product / website, etc.

• • Example: Skiing Blog
  • Browse through articles, if you like a blog post, make a comment by doing the following:
    • Name: keyword phrase
    • URL:  website address that corresponds to the keyword phrase you entered into the name field.

Build links by posting comments on others blogs.

Syndicate Your Blog

Syndication is simply the sharing of content.  Either you’re sending your content out where others can use it, or you’re receiving content from other’s via RSS.  If you’re using syndicated content  on your site, then every time the blog that you’re gathering information from is updated, the content of your own site will be updated automatically via the RSS feed.  So, once you create a blog and you begin to add content to it, then you can begin to syndicate it’s content.

Once you locate the appropriate RSS feed button, you can click on it and it will take you to a page that provides you with your feed URL. In Firefox browser, most of the time you can click the little orange RSS box on the far right of the blog URL. One great thing about most blogging software is the ability to make a submission automatically update and post.  This automatic syndication is called “pinging.”  Within the blogging program you will need to reference the different directories you would like to ping with your blog.  You can also go out and manually submit your site to directories using your RSS feed URL.

Here are some different syndicating directories you may want to submit your blog to:

›› Blogpulse (http://blogpulse.com/)

›› Feed24 (http://www.feed24.com/)

›› Weblogs (http://weblogs.com/)

›› Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/)

As you learn to syndicate your blog, you will better understand how to market your site, and reach a larger target audience.  You will also learn to effectively utilize your blog for SEO purposes, and increase your search rankings within the major search engines.

So, to summarize this long excursion into BLOGGING, my suggestion for you is to

1. Start a blog on WordPress and consider contacting your host to see how to integrate a WordPress blog into your site.
2. Set a goal to blog as frequently as possible. 3 blogs a week are a good average! Make sure though to provide good value content!
3. Now, go out and blog..  This will help your SEO tremendously if you build links on keyword phrases!
4. Also, search for 5 blogs related to some of the ideas, products, or services you offer.  Make HELPFUL comments on their blogs, and leave your URL in the space provided. Do this on a regular basis.

Any questions, drop me a line!

To your success

Your Kasia G.

I hope you had some time to relax and to enjoy!. I have taken the time to think over different issues I want to tell you about; the great news from the Online Marketing School that are ready to make you rok’n roll on the Internet … and while having all those thoughts flowing around my mind … I thought: and what about the BLOG? Why not a daily newsletter or a simple mail? … and so, I have decided to dedicate this blog post here today to the importance of blogging.

To the question: “Is a Blog Key to your online Marketing Streategy?” – well, in my opinion, a simple YES would be enough as an answer … but let me exploit this a bit further …

Having a BLOG has become kind of a fashion. It has become an easy–to–use and very fast tool for informing the world about yourself, about your plans, about your products and services. Turning this information into a steady online income stream is the right strategy and mindset for your successful internet business and online income stream. Body Blogging for success could be the mode to describe your easy start into the big world of online business and internet marketing strategies. Blogging for Success is also training at the same time.

Each time that you post a blog, you will receive a training on the three main aspects of your business:

1) The product or service you offer

2) The Internet Tools that you use versus the others available

3) The Online Business Evolution – a very fast moving and changing business environment where it is not always easy to keep up the pace.

Writing about your product or service, you have to think about the product or service you offer. You will want to enlighten it from different perspectives to attract new customers. You might find new ways to market your product or service simply by writing regularly about it and elaborating any comments you might get.

Another important source of information for your blog, to be a successful marketing machine, is to visit competitors’ blogs and sites and identify there what comments customers (that eventually are also your potential new clients) leave there. If clients like the other services due to a specific format, tool or whatever it might be, evaluate the possibility of implementing it yourself as well, of adapting your service and offering, or maybe only the wording of any of your announcements or ads. On the other side it is your blog that will start – if you write regularly your posts – bringing you traffic to your site, free traffic!

Having and feeding a blog is an enormous opportunity for driving massive traffic to your site. It is an easy-to-go method out of so many available in the vast world of online marketing. By being on Google, or simply online you will be always informed on new techniques and strategies, on Adwords offers and Search Engine Optimization Tools. You will get hundreds of mails and notes on new studies and offers. This does absolutely not mean that you will need to get all of them or study them one by one. This will give you the important background information of having heard about, ready for the day your customers or your competitor’s clients start asking for it. It is part of competitive advantage that you can earn here through knowledge and interest. And as it comes to Google and all the other search engines, they like new content and they like to know that you and your site are active regularly and not just then and now.

There are six points, one the normal consequence of the previous one, that make your blog a success for you:

1) Show Google and all the search engines – by blogging regularly, meaning that you post a minimum of two entries a week – that your Blog is always actual, which they like and which will lead to

2) a better placing at Google and therefore

3) more impressions – meaning how often people have seen your ads, your links to your blog

4) more clicks , meaning

5) more visitors,

6) and so on, and you know the story, as it goes on!

Happy Blogging and a Happy 1st December Day!

Your Kasia G.