Free Marketing Strategies: Blogs Demystified

Blogs can have powerful uses when applied to affiliate marketing, or any other type of business. Blogging does a couple of inherent things. First it keeps you active in the subject matter of your blog. For example, my blog is about affiliate marketing, and in maintaining this blog I am constantly staying active. I am constantly searching for additional information that may help my business, and in so doing, I am also gathering subject matter for the blog. Because I am active in this way, I am growing in this area of expertise. Thus eventually one could say that they are a subject matter expert. Second, as you maintain your blog you will garner a following, as well as become part of the larger blogging community. Those that read blogs or are looking for the type of information within your blog, will also leave comments, either asking for more information on a particular topic, or asking about related information. All in all it really does help bolster knowledge in the subject matter of the blog.

I will restate the basics of how you blog should be formulated:

1. Blogs should stick to one niche and not deviate from it.
2. Blogs should be updated regularly. Decide on once or twice a week and stick to the same day if at all possible.
3. Blogs should reference other sites, blogs, articles, or material on what you are speaking about
4. Keep each blog entry relevant and interesting.
5. Be credible and always fact check.
6. Correct things that need to be changed.

There are a couple of good blog sites that are more widely recognized. One is www.blogger.com, and the other is www.wordpress.com. Wordpress is more commonly used by business, but blogger is as well, and may have a larger following overall. I chose Blogger because it is driven by Google, and it allows you to have Google ads on your blog via Adsense, which honestly is another means of making money with the blog. So, based on the words in your blog post, relevant ads will be shown. If ads are clicked on, you are paid for that. So the larger following that you are able to acquire, the better you will do with making money that way too.

When I got the comment to expand the information on free marketing strategies I noticed that I was missing something. The missing item was, how to drive traffic to the blog. One thing that I have come to understand is that publicizing your blog does not happen on your blog. Yep, I said it. It does not occur on your blog. What does that means is that you? Here are the basics:

Outbound links to other sites from your blog posts are seen by those sites as inbound links/back-links, and their authors may click back through to see what you’re saying and what you’re all about. That’s why it is important to pay attention to who links to you, and respond. As you write your own blog and link to blogs of others, that is one form of publicizing your blog.

Blogging in falls into the general category of social networking, and with that comes need to be active in the community. Does that mean going and talking to all of your friends, friends of friends, and so on? No, it simply means that you need to be mindful of the opportunities as you are looking for information on your own business, whether that information comes from other blogs, articles, and the like.

Bringing attention to your blog will happen in many ways:

• If you are part of other social networks such as facebook, linkedin, myspace, and the like each time your update your wall, status, or profile information, everyone in your network sees your updates on their network home page.
• When you happen to see a blog that has useful information in it, leave a comment. It will serve as a link back to your blog. Think carefully then about what you say in the comment.
• When you happen to see useful information in a forum, leave a comment to the post
• If you are not part of Twitter, you should join. When you post an update containing a link to your blog via tweets those following you or those discovering you will be able to see such posts. You should not however post every update. Your blog should be posted in your bio thus making it unnecessary to post every blog update. If it however something that you deem important, by all means post it.
• If you are part of StumbleUpon, as you stumble on useful information, leave comments. Oftentimes those you leave comments for will in turn leave comments for you. If someone stumbles onto your blog through stumbleupon and leaves comments for you, you should be nice and respond.
• If you are part of Delicious or Digg (very much like StumbleUpon) the same process applies.
• If you place your blogs link in the signature of your emails, that too is a way to publicize your blog
• When you pass out business cards which contain your blogs link, that is a way to publicize your blog
• When you meet people in networking events, business conferences and the like, and an reasonable opportunity arises to talk about your blog, bingo, another way to publicize your blog.

As you get more involved writing comments, responding to comments, bookmarking sites, leaving testimonials, your following will grow. I will further extend this in my next post. There are other thoughts on my mind that I just have to write down. I am still learning this as well, so as I come across information I will definitely write it down.

There were some sites that I ran across via stumble upon that really have helped me understand what must be done to attract attention to this blog.

10 Reasons why readers do not leave comments @ Sucessful-Blog.com. A very informative and witty understanding as to why post and comments threads sometimes run people off.

Blogging Basics: Getting Attention to your Blog @ everdotconnects.com. Very eye opening as to the many ways that one can attract blog attention.

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