The Benefits of Blogging

The benefits of blogging may not seem obvious to you if you are new to online marketing. A Blog is an amazing tool. If you think blogging is only for those who have nothing better to do, you are very wrong! Here's what a Blog can do for your business:

• Fill your website with relevant content
• Target numerous keywords
• Bring loads of traffic (potential customers) to your site

I'll give you a personal example. I operate a traditional business that has a website. Once I understood the benefits of blogging I set one up for our business and within three weeks the number of visitors to our website had increased by 30%. All of those additional visitors land on our Blog after typing in a variety of search keywords and phrases related to our services. That's a 30% increase in visitors (every week, ongoing) that does not cost me anything but a little of my time! The more relevant content I add to that Blog over time, the more potential clients will land on our Blog. The more I Blog, the more that percentage will increase.

You can post as many items as you can think of, with each one giving your potential customers information they might find useful. Do a little keyword research, pick out a few keyword phrases you'd like to target, and start writing Blog articles around them.

As a writer, I find this very easy. I think of endless ideas for Blog topics. I understand keywords and how to use them, and I can write Blog items very quickly. Not everyone finds it so easy. Affiliate marketers and other website operators often pay writers to post regular blog items for them. Why? Because if each Blog article brings 100 visitors to your website every month, over and over again, what you pay the writer per Blog item will soon seem like chicken feed!

If you'd like a writer to post relevant articles to your Blog regularly, drop by my website Article Writers Australia and we can have a chat about your Blog strategy and the benefits of blogging once a week. For more information about what a blog writer can do for you, read Finding the Ideal Blog Writer

Squidoo

Squidoo if a fabulous site, especially if you are trying to learn about the Internet, Internet marketing, website building and traffic generation. It's free to join and you can set up what they refer to as "lenses" which are essentially individual web pages. It's very user-friendly. Members build web pages on topics they know about or are interested in. You can advertise your own business on lenses and also sell affiliate marketing products. Some do it just for the fun of it.

There is a huge volume of information on Squidoo. If you want to know about something, simply search for it and the chances are you'll find that someone has created a Squidoo lens to tell you all about it. Many of the lensmakers are contactable so it's yet another networking tool.

There are guest books on many of the lenses so you can drop by and leave a comment. This can lead to you chatting to some interesting people and can bring people to your own lenses and through to your business.

I'm an amateur at it but I have several Squidoo lenses. If you'd like to see what Squidoo has to offer - http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/Leo9

Advertising Online - Many Ways

There are many ways of advertising online. Once you've paid for your website and optimization, you have a fabulous amount of free advertising. You can choose to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, you can pay other websites to display your advertisements and get affiliate marketer to advertise and sell for you. Still, there are more free ways to advertise.

One of the best ways of advertising online is to find forums related to your product or service. This is basically a networking tool. It might be a forum where home renovators exchange information, or a new mother forum. If you join the forum you are likely to find you can give quality advice to some of the forum members. You may even learn a thing or two yourself! Forums can also be a great networking tool. Many a business relationship has been formed after a forum chat. Where the advertising comes in is that most forums permit you to have a link to your business website in your post signature and some allow you to put a profile on the site.

Yet another method of free advertising is online classifieds. Many of these don't have a lot of readers. If you're in Australia, one of the best is Gumtree. I have sourced work and found rental tenants with lightning speed using Gumtree. It's a well known site and one of the best ways of advertising online.

If your product is suitable for it, you can sell on EBay. EBay allows you to have a "shop front". It's yet another way of getting your name out there and bringing people to your business.

You can also hire an article writer to write articles relating to your products or services. Those articles usually contain a link to your website at the bottom and can be submitted to numeorus article directories. Website owners with readers who would be interested in the article can place those articles (with the link to your site) on their website.

Then there is social networking - Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo and Twitter to name just a few. More on social networking in antoher post. This can be time consuming for a small business owner but it's all worth investigating.

As there are so many ways of advertising online, you need to evaluate each of them and decide what is likely to be effective for you, and which ones will fit in with your level of Internet knowledge and your time schedule! (Don't forget - these days, a teenager in the family is a handy thing indeed! Many will be only too happy to help out the 'olds'.)

Advertising Online - Google Adwords

If you have an existing website and are not coming up well in organic searches, you really should be looking at optimizing your website (SEO) however, in the meantime, you can use PPC (pay per click) advertising to bring interested visitors (otherwise known as targeted traffic) to your website.

When people type a phrase or word into a search box, there are the organic listings that come up centre page, and advertisements which come up on the right hand side, and often at the top of the page. These advertsiements are PPC adverts. Website owners are paying to have their advertisement listed when people type certain keywords into the search box. It's a competitive bid based system. How much your advertisement costs you per click and where it is positioned will depend on how much you bid, how many others are bidding for the same keywords, how relevant your advertisement is to the keywords, and how relevant your website content is to the keywords.

If you haven't done so, sign up for an Adwords account and have a look around the site. There is plenty of 'how to' information on there. It is relatively easy to set up and get going. You can monitor your campaign and set daily budget limits.

You need to select keywords that people may search for when looking for your product or service. You write an advertisement using the template they provide. Use your keywords in the heading and try to keep the advertisement as relevant as you can. Choosing the most popular keywords may not be the best idea - these will be the most expensive due to the competition.

Use the Google keyword tool to look at the different keywords relating to what you are selling. Try selecting a few of the less popular ones and targeting those first. Try out the main keywords by all means, but the cost you pay per click will be higher - which is fine, if the results you get from your campaign are worth it.

Once you have a campaign going, monitor the number of enquiries it generates so you can work out what your advertising is costing you per enquiry it generates, and per sale.

There are numerous companies out there that will offer to run your Google Adwords campaign for a couple of hundred dollars a month. If you don't know anything about Adwords and you don't want to, then you probably should use one of these services. However, if you are prepared to do the research and establish which keywords are likely to be the best for you to use, you will probably be happier and often better off doing it yourself. I'm basing that on my own experience. I recently signed a six month contract with a major service provider to run a campaign I had been running for months. I quickly regretted it. Despite the low cost per click they offered, and their agreement to use my carefully selected keywords, about 75% of the visitors they generate don't stay on the site at all. Whilst running the campaign myself, only 25% of visitors clicked off the site immediately. This service generates far less visitors than I was able to and because so few of those are staying on the site, the real cost per click is several times more than what I was paying before. And, as has been typical of this company's customer service approach with other services over the decades, they really don't care how poor their service is.

I hope I've convinced you to have a go at Adwords yourself. Experiment. It may take you a few months of tweaking to get it right but you'll learn a lot along the way.

While you are running your campaign, don't forget to consider having your website properly optimized by an SEO expert - so your website comes up well in the organic listings. Once that occurs you won't need to spend money advertising.

Advertising Online for Small Business

For a small business owner advertising online can be confusing and frustrating. Having a website built is easy - having a successful website that will allow you to advertise effectively online, is another matter.

Once you have a website there are two ways to advertise online. One will provide you with almost unlimited free advertising and the other will cost you money.

1. The best advertising you can get is to have your website come up in the "organic" search results when people search for the product or service you are selling. This form of advertising is also FREE.

2. The second method is by using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Advertising this way will cost you anything from a few cents to a few dollars every time someone clicks on the advertisement.

In this article I'll explain how organic search results work. The following article will explain PPC advertising.

Organic Search Results - How They Work

When you type a phrase into the search box you'll see two types of results come up. There is a list of pages taking up most of the screen - these are called "organic" results. To the left and sometimes above are PPC advertisements. Most people look at the organic listings that come up before resorting to the advertisements. If you can ensure your website is amongst the first few listings that come up, you'll bring plenty of visitors to your website for free.

Unless you understand SEO (search engine optimization) you are unlikely to be able to get your listing high up in the organic search results without professional assistance. It may seem expensive when you get quotes but it will be money very well spent if the job is done properly.

Getting to the Top of the Organic Listings

There are two important aspects to improving the place of your wesbite in the organic listings.

1. The content of your website
2. Backlinks

The Content

Search engines monitor websites and match the content on those websites to what people are searching for. Search engines are clever but they are not people - if you sell wooden flooring, but your website content goes on and on about your business procedures, environmental policy and quality control, without mentioning the term "wooden flooring" more than once or twice, the search engines won't understand that your business is about wooden flooring. If you mention the words "quality control" six times and "wooden flooring" only once, the search engines may think your site is about quality control.

This is where the term "keywords" comes in. Keywords are the most likely terms and phrases people would enter in the search box when looking for something. Therefore, you need to identify the keywords that relate to what you are selling. You are likely to identify quite a few relevant keywords and knowing which ones to use and exactly where to place them is also a little tricky. You would think that using the most popular keyword as often as you can is the way to go but this is not the case - the competition from other businesses selling the same item is likely to be high and you still may not get a good position in the organic listings. The placement of the keywords is of more importance than the amount of times you use them.

You need to have a good amount of content on your website. Once you have all the website pages a business normally has, you can still add content. You want people to be interested in your website, have a good look around, and feel that you really are an expert in your field. Clever business owners add articles about their industry or trade to the website. For example, a wooden flooring business website could contain articles about maintaining wooden floors; how to choose the type of wood for your home; different types of wood and their advantages and disadvantages; doing it yourself; or skirting boards.

The other method of increasing your content is to have a "blog". This however, should only be done if you have time to regularly add articles to the blog, or you are prepared to pay an article writer or blog writer to do it for you.

Having a large amount of content gives the added advantage that you can use many less popular keywords in the articles and hence bring more visitors (called "traffic") to your website.

Backlinks

A backlink is when another wesbite places a link to your website on theirs. If you have several backlinks it gives the search engines the impression that your website is important, which in turn, helps you wesbite to move up in the organic listings.

There are two main ways to get backlinks. You can contact relevant website owners and ask for one, or you can submit articles about your product and trade to article directories. The articles contain a link to your website. Not only does this give you a backlink, but your article is distributed across the Internet and brings visitors to your site.

As you can see, if you know little about SEO, article writing and Internet marketing in general, you are better off passing these jobs to professionals. Another reason you might prefer to do this is to save time. If you are like most small business owners, you are busy enough attending to matters for which you do have the expertise.

Hire an SEO firm to optimize your website. The SEO firm will probably recommend having articles written by professional content writers as well as having the existing content re-written and optimized.

Here's a tip for finding the right SEO company - type "Search Engine Optimization" or "SEO" into the search box. Given what these companies specialize in, you'd have to suspect that the ones who come up first know best what they are talking about. The proof as they say, is in the pudding.

Once you have your website optimized and have filled it with great content, you're likely to find that advertising online is a tremendously successful tool for your small business.