With the recent rise online business, blog marketing becomes a trend that has been implemented by many online internet businessmen. There are basically two types of blogs over the internet, one is the personal blog and the other is corporate blog. The personal blog are mostly about the author’s activities, thoughts, inspiration, ideas and everything that happen around him. A corporate blog as known as business blog usually used for the benefits of a company, for instance as a method to marketing, advertising or enhancing communication. No matter what kind of blog, bloggers simply need to try their best to drive readers to their blog and will be able to make money with them.
Best solution to create your blog
In this day and age, it is rather easy to create a blog thanks to the development of web technology. There are simply a couple of basic elements you need to prepare for your blog, profession hosting as well as blogging software. Both of them have free and paid offers over the internet. Which type would you choose? If you hope to create a professional-looking blog with a lot of features, the best solution is to use free blog software, like WordPress and host it on your own blogging server. WordPress is a great platform since it provides you with powerful features, hundreds of templates and great flexibility to customize the blog yourself. A paid blog hosting allows you to apply FTP to integrate your blog on your own domain so that visitors will see it as being a part of your own site.
Tips to marketing your blog
Just write content for your blog and expect people to come is not enough. To market your blog successfully, there are some aspects you should take care of to make your blog well-known among your target audience.
1. As mention above, it is meaningful to have a standalone domain name for your blog, or at least a sub domain under your own domain name.
2. Customize the blog look and optimize the template. After you have installed the core WordPress software, there a number of things you can do to customize your blog. Logo and design modification to match your branding, RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, unique title tags as well as sitemap.
3. Post unique content regularly. Try to figure out a best post frequency, maybe 3-5 times per day or per week and maintain your readership. Keep your post original and valuable. Fresh content is welcomed by both search engine and your readers.
4. Trace inbounds links, traffic, comments. If anyone leaves you a comment on your blog, you should always be responsive to give a reply. Of course, you can also keep contact with other related blogs via comment, exchanging links, social networking services or forums, which will bring visitors to your blog.
5. Posting as a guest blogger is another way for you to market your blog. Do not post any article within your own realm. If possible, it is a great practice to submit your article to the more honored blogs, which have a large number of followers. This is the best and easy way to gain more visitors for your blog.
Most common strategies to make money from blog
With the detail tips above, you are now can start blogging without too much difficulty. Then there is one question remain unanswered. That is how to use the blog to make dollars for you? If you are business-minded folks and expecting to bring in a little or even a big amount of extra incomes, followings are some methods that you could turn your blog into a moneymaker.
1. Apply affiliate program. Affiliate program is very popular practice among blogosphere. Under such system, you place other’s products or service on your blog for generating a sale and you get the commission. For instance, if you are running an affiliate program about the movie niche, it may be a great idea to write some movie review with links to that movie. When a reader click through that link or banner and break out the checkbook, you will receive pay as well.
2. Sell advertisements space. Once you have received a fair amount of traffic, then selling advertisements space can be your choice for leveraging blog to generate incomes. It is very important for you keep a record of your website traffic to convince the advertiser. And you should also make sure that your design of your blog allows space for future advertisements. The major downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.
3. Monetization Widgets. Besides placing advertisers’ ads on your blog, you can also make money by monetizing your website widgets, which is becoming more and more popular these days. For example, free ad service WidgetBucks allows you to make money from blog. The major difference lies in the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.
Search the internet, you will find many other strategies to make money from blogging. As your time and energy is limited, it would be wise to choose only a few that provide the greatest income generation. Whatever path you choose, it is important to know that success will not come without putting your time and effort as a constantly learning blogger.