All
About Blogging
Blogging is another excellent way to promote ‘Half Marathon Training For
Beginners.’ If you already have a blog it can be as
simple as adding your affiliate link to a few posts.
By mentioning the program and adding your affiliate link in a number of places,
you can start sending traffic through to our site and therefore start to make
commissions.
You can add banners, product images or links etc to your posts and in the margins
or header sections of your site.
Please feel free to use any of our articles to fill out your
blog, but don’t forget to add your
affiliate link at the bottom of each one.
The search engines love blogs because of all the freshly published
content they contain, but the key is to post regularly and consistently.
Try to make sure that you maintain a freshly updated blog by adding new
information regularly, at least once or twice a week if possible.
With a little bit of initial work at the start maintaining a regularly updated
blog and building and nurturing relationships with other
bloggers and readers, it’s very possible to build a passive income that continues to bear fruit for
many years without you having to do anything at all to maintain it.
If you don’t currently have your own blog, you
can start blogging immediately for FREE by
going to www.blogspot.com or www.wordpress.com and signing up for a free
blog.
Ideally you’ll choose Wordpress as your blog software and then buy your domain
name and hosting account separately so that you retain complete control over
it.
The only catch with using Wordpress is that
you’ll have to host the blog on your own domain name to use it for affiliate marketing because
Wordpress doesn’t allow the use of affiliate links unless you host your blog on your own domain
name.
Putting a Wordpress blog on a domain name you own is really the best option
anyway.
Be very wary of using Blogger which is owned by Google, because doing this means
you’ll never have your own unique domain name and the hosting company (Google) will always retain
control of your site. If at some time in the future they decide to change their policies or
anything else then you may well be affected in some way or worse still lose everything you’ve
worked hard to build up.
One of the very first things you need to consider is what your blog will be
about. Will it be in a saturated niche where you’ll be constantly battling for visitors or is
there a unique angle you can use that helps to put you in control of a very targeted
niche... This is the best option.
However it’s also quite important that your niche isn’t too focussed as there’s a
danger that you could run out of things to write about. Another consideration worth thinking about
is whether the topic you choose will be evergreen or here today and gone
tomorrow.
Once you’ve decided upon the subject, you need to consider what your blog will be
called.
You could obviously use your own name, but there may be better options available
that could help to improve your search engine rankings. For example if you have a site all about
rabbit food and your blog domain name is also called www.rabbitfood.com then you may get a little bit of an extra SEO lift
from this so it’s worth thinking about.
Here are some things you need to consider when choosing a domain name for your
blog...
-
Is the name easy to
remember?
-
Is it easy to say and spell?
-
Will the name still be relevant as the blog
grows?
-
Are the main keywords in the
name?
-
Is the domain name available for
sale?
Once it’s created, you can submit it to as many blog directories as you
can.
A
very simple and quick way to do this is by using – www.pingomatic.com
All you need to do is to enter the details of your blogs title and the address of
your blog and your entry will be automatically submitted to a massive collection of the best blog
directories there is.
From there you’re off. Get started posting regularly. Here are some points that
you need to think about when writing your blog posts...
-
Make the most of the spaces on your site, be aware
that the most popular places to put banners, adverts and calls to action are at the top
of your pages as this is where visitors tend to click through the
most.
Once you have built your blog, then you’re going to need traffic. The following
article offers some great advice as to ways in which you can get eager visitors to visit your
website...
16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your
Blog
You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information
that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one
comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving
traffic to your site.
Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing
now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up an email subscription form on your blog and invite
everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients,
associates.
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly
spidered by the Yahoo search engine.
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target
niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with
a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time
you publish.
5. Submit your blog to traditional search
engines.
6. Submit your blog to blog
directories.
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours
when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for
you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature
file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your
website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to
your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all
outgoing correspondence such as auto responder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers,
etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and
flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe
to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple
Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for
syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news
readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and
summaries.
13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back
and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in
your posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog
posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another
server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your
blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the web in article
directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature
below).
16. Make a commitment to blog every day. 10 minutes a day can
help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar
as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique
visitors, how many page views, average length of visit.
And now I would like to invite you to claim your free instant access to my 5-part
video course to learn more about how to get the best out of your blog. Visit
http://masterbusinessblogging.com
From Denise Wakeman, Founder of The Blog Squad and Online Marketing
Advisor.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me
personally.
Jago Holmes,
Author and affiliate
manager
‘Half Marathon Training For Beginners’
http://www.halfmarathon-training.com
email: jago@halfmarathon-training.com
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