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  Half Marathon Training - AFFILIATE RESOURCE CENTRE

 

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...

  • Keep your blogs short and to the point, anywhere between 300 – 500 words is perfect 
  • Let your personality shine through the posts, don’t be bland or business like, this isn’t what blogging is about 
  • Post about interesting or current events 
  • Post regularly, at least two or three times a week if possible 
  • 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. 
  • Be original 
  • Be funny or controversial 
  • Add plenty of affiliate links all through your site but bear in mind that the only real place where people will be likely to click through is on your home page. 
  • Add banners or eBook images to your pages with your affiliate links in them as these help to break up the text and steer your readers towards clicking on them. 

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