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Free Blogs and Website Promotion

Free blogs are used by many Internet marketing experts to promote their websites and products. Free blogs can not only be a means of advertising your brand name, but they can also be used to funnel traffic which converts and results in more sales. And then, you can always use pay per click ads or promote affiliate products on your blog or sell sponsored reviews and earn more. In this article we will briefly see what is a blog, why blogs are so popular and how to setup a free blog which can then be used to promote your website.

To start from the basics, a blog or weblog is a website where the owner (or the blogger) writes his/her ideas just like a diary or journal. Blogs are very popular because they have a personal touch. People are always interested in what other people think/do. This is basic human tendency and this is what makes blogs so popular. In the beginning of the blogging era, blogs used to be solely about personal things. However, now things have changed. More and more business establishments have blogs where they provide customers with information on new developments and products.

Blogs have many advantages over traditional HTML sites. Blogs are supposed to be updated every once in a few days. For this reason, search engines like Google love blogs. You might have come across blog posts in the top 10 search engine positions for many popular keywords clearly demonstrating that fact that search engines really love blogs. Blogs also have other advantages like built in RSS feeds. And then, creating / updating a blog is very easy provided you use the correct blogging platform like Blogger or Wordpress. In fact, it does even need any knowledge in HTML: if you can use MS Word, you can blog!

Creating a blog is not rocket science. There are many free blog hosting services like Blogger [www.blogger.com] and Wordpress [www.wordpress.com]. There may be others, but currently these are the best. Blogger is owned by Google while Wordpress is owned by a company called Automattic. If you were to ask me to choose one of them, I will go for Blogger as it is well integrated with Adsense. Well! Since Google owns Blogger, when it comes to search engine rankings it must be partial to blogs hosted there! You also have a choice to host a blog on your own domain. All you have to do is create a sub-domain like blog.yourdomain.com and install a blogware like Wordpress there and get blogging. However, I would prefer a blog hosted on a free blog hosting service. I will explain the reason later.

Once you create a blog, the first thing you should do is to do reciprocal linking between your site and blog. If your site has already been indexed, your blog will get indexed too in a short period of time. Usually it takes a few days for the search engines bots to arrive and index the contents of your blog. You can also do a little promotion to get your blog indexed faster. I will suggest two time tested methods: 1) Join an online forum and put a link to your blog in the signature and 2) Submit your blog to a few web directories. Forums get spidered daily and so your blog will get crawled and indexed in no time. Forums can also get you some traffic as other forum members may be interested in your blog. When it comes to directory submissions, an important note: Don't submit to too many directories in a short period of time. Search engines may equate this to link spamming and blacklist your blog or even ban it altogether.

Next, you should concentrate on creating quality content. You should always target keywords that are moderately popular. If you develop content without targeting specific keywords, you will not get enough traffic. This is why you should always keep keywords in mind while developing content for your blog. There are many free keyword research tools available. I use the free version of Wordtracker [http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com] to do my homework. There may be other tools available but I believe that the free version of Wordtracker is more than enough to get an idea about the keywords to be used.

Update your blog often. Try to post at least 10 or more posts a month which makes one post for every three days. Also include images in your blog posts to get traffic from image search. Once you start getting traffic from search engines, try to funnel it to your main site. Apart from direct traffic, your blog will also act as a quality backlink to your site. As you may be aware, search engines rank sites on the basis of the number of relevant backlinks. If you use a free blog hosting service, the IP address of your blog will be different from that of your main site. Search engines give prominence to links from different IP addresses. This is why you would recommend using a free blog hosting service in place of hosting a blog on a sub-domain.

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Can You Easily Do Blog Marketing?

Blog marketing is among the most advanced styles of marketing on the internet. Known also as a web log, blogs are very hot because you are able to create a blog about whatever specific subject area you desire and post it for the public to have more information on any specified subject or product. If you are wondering can you easily do blog marketing then here are a few things you may want to know.

When you are first starting out with blog marketing, writing a blog can actually be simple to master. If you want to market essentially anything you want, anybody may register to get a free blog. Since blogs are entirely free to own and build, this will make blog marketing even more effective. If you don't already own a website and you want to market various products this way, you'd have to first purchase a domain, pay to have the domain hosted, and hire someone that knows HTML and even possibly pay a website designer. Since SEO (search engine optimization) loves most blogs, they usually are speedy to index them. Putting your blogs on the net for everyone to visit won't be all that grueling. There is a free tool you're able to use each time any new content is added to your blog that's called pinging. Pinging each blog whenever any new update has happened will allow everybody to know when a brand-new entry has just been added.

Hinging on your total outcome with blog marketing, you'll be able to add to your blog as often as you wish with any new content which may be daily or once a week, even once a month is alright. Whatever you decide, try to be consistent. If you begin by updating daily, try to stick by it, so your blog subscribers will know whether to check regularly for new content.

Since you are questioning precisely what you will be able to market with your blog, just know you can market anything you desire. Nonetheless, it's better to stay with one product on each marketing blog. Whenever you have numerous items you wish to advertise, and they don't actually go together well, you will want to produce a marketing blog for each product. Since the market isn't correlated, don't combine both on your blog. An example would be, say you had a marketing blog on toasters, in all probability you wouldn't try to mix hair dryers on this blog, since both toasters and hair dryers are separate markets. Now, it would be fine to mix hair dryers and curling irons on one marketing blog. Does this make good sense? You have numerous items you are able to market with your blogging. If you prefer to market your products or services or another persons to bring in a commission from whatever you market, the skies the limit whenever it pertains to selling on your blog. Affiliate links are super in blog marketing in addition to any other product. Signing on to market someone else's products and promoting them doing blog marketing is a bang-up idea.

Since you're debating whether you want a website or a blog, bear in mind it will work out whenever you provide sufficient information to cover both. Linking them together is a bang-up idea since you are able to create a website and a blog. If you utilize the website to accommodate your primary products and information and use the blog to advertise both you will have great success.

Questioning about hosting? Since you own a website, you will be able to host your blog with the exact server you already have for that domain, or choose to leave it wherever it is. The option is precisely your choice, either way you'll be able to create prosperous blogs that will start to bring in income for you on a regular basis. In your blog marketing, generating links for your blog will be a beneficial means to acquire fresh readers. An additional outstanding tool you'll be able to make use of is the RSS feed. Once you experience the RSS feeds, which allows for masses to subscribe to all of your blogs on their internet site, and reciprocally it will acquire you more traffic. (see my other blog on RSS feeds)

Blog marketing will be super powerful whenever it's executed properly. Nevertheless, you won't be able to write a blog and have the masses to encounter it unless you have your blog out on the net and advertise it to others the same way you would an internet site. Interchanging links with others can aid you, so can article marketing be used to promote any blog.

Blog marketing can be a lot of fun and anybody who desires can and will do very well. Putting your blog out on the net to be viewed can be your greatest challenge, first recognize the more arduous you work on your blog, it can pay off. Discover internet sites who are affiliated to the same market you are advertising, but never in exactly the same competition and invite link exchanges. So, now do you think you can you easily do blog marketing? Sure you can. Good luck and remember to relish what you're blog marketing!