So what is a Blog?
A blog, is short for a weblog, which is basically a type of journal where the individual may describe events, products, services, opinions or even offer tips and advice on any chosen topic. Many businesses have started to see the real potential of what blogs can do for their businesses.

Do you need a business Blog?
So, why would anyone need a business blog? Other than the obvious reasons of easy to update and being another channel for your customers to find your business, a business blog can also attract free search engine traffic to your main website. The way that the Blog system was designed, allows the published contents gets indexed a lot faster than normal HTML websites. This means your articles (or blog posts) can get in front of people much quicker than your competitors. For example, if you are selling a certain product, advertising it on your blog would be more likely to be seen than if you put it on your new website.

Put ads on your business blog.
Unlike many article directories, you are allowed to advertise your services or products on your business blog directly. This is your very own personal space, and you can advertise almost anything you want here. Blogs are also extremely versatile, and this allows you to easily add, remove or feature products with just a few clicks of the mouse. This feature is extremely useful to business owners like yourself as most of them cannot afford to spend hours fiddling with their website. With a business blog, you can make changes in a few minutes, or you can even hire some college students to do the work because it’s that easy to use. You will more time to focus on the other aspects of the business.

Make your business blog look professional
It’s very easy to make a Blog look professional as there are many “ready to use” templates that you can download from all over Web. If you look deep enough you should be to find some very well designed templates that are created by professional web designers. If you found a template that you really like, you could try contacting the web designer to find out if you can buy the exclusive rights to the template design.

Choosing the right blogging platform can be difficult for someone who has never had a blog. If that sounds like you, then WordPress is your safest option. You can find a lot of information about WordPress on the net. It’s one of the most popular Blogging platform today. Many web designers are familiar with this Blogging platform, so if you run into problems you should be able to find solutions to them in no time.

Business blogging can increase the number of your website visitors, brand awareness and sales. The time and/or money you invest in a good business blog will be an invaluable asset that could potentially work for your business each and every day without you spending anything on advertising.

A great blog post can easily attract thousands of visitors per day, and this could lead to many unexpected sales or opportunities for your business. If there are enough people talk about your post on the net, you will be receiving a ton of traffic to your website, so make sure your hosting server can handle this before the marketing starts.

One thing that you should never do is to treat blogging like writing an annual report. What this means is that you should use simple words and keep things as short as possible. If a paragraph can be written in three sentences instead of four, then do so. Most people have very short attention span on the Internet because there are so much information available to them now days.

When you have found the topic you want to write about, you can start writing in a word processor like Microsoft Word. A good word processor can save you time and more importantly you can doing things spelling checks and formatting before uploading the post to your blog.

Try to post at least once per week. This will give you the benefit of repeat visitors as well as search engine rankings. A lot of businesses are using blogging as part of their sales/marketing process to “get closer” to their existing customers and attract new ones too.

So what do you do if you can’t think of something to write about. Even if you are an expert in your field, you might have the writer’s block from time to time. So here are three tips that can help you to find interesting topics:

1. Have a look at what other bloggers have said about the subject. An easy way to do this is to use www.technorati.com. Look around the places like forums, chatrooms and social networking sites to see what people are talking about in your industry. This is an effective way to discover interesting topics that could go viral.
2. Offline mediums like newspaper, TV, radios.etc can be great sources when you are looking for interesting topics to write about.
3. Pick up the phone and have a chat with your friends. Don’t try to find the perfect ideas from them directly; just have natural and fun conversations with them and you will be surprised with what ideas they could give you or lead you to!

Become the Expert In Your Niche
Writing and submitting articles that are related to your business, product or service can be a wonderful way to build credibility, increase your search engine rankings, and be seen as an expert in your field.

Writing quality articles is all about using keywords that are related to your product or service. The SEO tools and robots pick up your keywords, which in turn, increases your search engine rankings.

Getting Started In Article Writing
So, how do you write a good quality article? First, think about your keywords that you want to use. For example, if your product is selling environmentally friendly garbage bags, you could use keywords like ‘garbage bags’, ‘environmentally friendly.’ How about ‘earth-friendly’,’ green’ or ‘waste.’ Write your article around these keywords. Perhaps you could provide tips on how to cut down on waste, or tips on how to make sure that the bag is really environmentally-friendly. Use your imagination, and let the words flow.

Once you have written your article, you need to submit it to various article submission services. A Google or Yahoo! search will bring up dozens of sites for you to submit to. Most of them are free and easy to use. You will need to create an account before you start submitting your articles.

If you really aren’t much of a writer, there are several writing services that will write for you, using the keywords that you provide. They usually write in batches of 10 and most are reasonably priced. Do your research and find someone who you feel will do the best job for you.

You can also submit your articles to ezines or online newsletters. These are publications that publish content online and email to their distribution lists. Most ezine publishers love receiving new content and articles. Look for ezines that relate to your product or service. Using the sample above of environmentally friendly garbage bags, you would look for ezines that are ‘green’ related. A simple search should yield you dozens of results.

Don’t forget to include your resource box at the bottom of your articles. This will include your name, email, website and business name. When someone reads your article and wants more information, or wants to order your product, they just click on your link and visit your website.

When you regularly submit fresh articles and content to various sites and ezines, more and more people start visiting your site, and your traffic numbers will rise steadily month by month. In a relatively short period of time, you will see your rankings and your product orders increase, as well as your profits.

Choosing a good website design company is something that should be taken seriously. There are so many web design companies that offer similar services. Finding the right one can be a real challenge; but when you are able to do so, you will see the benefits of their web design service.

Here are some tips on how to find a good web design company:

Identify Your Needs
Before you set your eyes on finding the right company to do your website design, you have to identify the needs and requirements of your business. You must be clear on what role your website will play in enhancing your online presence as well as contributing to the growth of your business.

These are some of the questions that many web design companies would ask you:

• How do you plan to use your website?
• Who is the target audience of your website?
• What is your budgetary allocation for the website?

Your website will depend on your expectations as well as the information that you want your website to contain. It will help to determine these things in advance to make it easy for you and your web designer to conceptualise and implement a good design for your website.

Gather a List of Web Design Companies
When you have already identified your needs as well as how your website will cater to the requirements of your business, you can start creating your list of your potential web design companies. You can do this at the comforts of your own home just by going online and patiently search from the internet.

You may also want to ask for referrals from family or friends, or if you come across a website that catches your attention, you may inquire or search the web design company that have created that website.

Choose the Best Company
You can now narrow down the list of your potential web design companies based on the following criteria:

1. How they meet the four Cs – Capability, Credibility, Consistency, and Cost.
2. Have a look at their website portfolio and see if their style is suitable for your business.
3. Length of experience in the web design industry.
4. Turn-around time.
5. How they respond to their customer needs and queries.

Evaluate Their Proposal
A good website design company will send you a proposal for evaluation. To be able to get the best deal, compare the proposals you have received with the following considerations:

1. Over-all soundness and feasibility of the proposal.
2. Strength and limitation.
3. Package including value-added features.

When you have done the above, you will be able to pick the best from your list. If there are still gray areas or some questions in mind about their service, then by all means phone them up and clear all your queries about their website design service.

If you do run out of ideas you could always review other people’s products or services that are related to your market. Only review those that you like and would use yourself. After you have done a few reviews you can send the Youtube video links to the original owners and they like what you done they will ask you to review their next product, and this time, most of them would offer you a free “copy” of their product or some payment. Before you accept their offers, try to find out if they have a strong customers list or a popular website/blog. If so, ask them if they would promote your product or service on their website or to their list.

So now you have your first video on Youtube, but how do you get people to view it? The best way to go about doing that is by commenting and rating. You need to find related videos that are popular and leave comments on them. Try to make your comments relate to the video content, and avoid short comments like “nice video”, “thanks alot”, “cool stuff”…etc You can also comment on other people’s comment if you have nothing interesting to say. When you comment on someone’s video, other people will click on your username to see who you are. When they are on your profile’s page they will see that you have uploaded similar videos. Keep on doing this and you have more and more subscribers.

To make Youtube work for your business you have to use all available options, and commenting is the next best thing you can do after uploading your videos. The next thing is rating, to do that you need to view a video. Once it’s over you can rate it by clicking on the yellow stars.

Both commenting and rating are great way to get your username out there, especially with commenting because human beings enjoy chatting, therefore if your comments are interesting people will want to start a conversation with you sub-consciously, so they reply to your comments. Another good thing about commenting is that your comments will be there permanently.

1. Pay Per Click (Google Adword)
   This is by far the best way to get highly targeted traffic. You get instant traffic to your website at the cost of only 0.10 per click, and you can always track those clicks in Google Analytics. When you first start the pay-per-click method you should set the daily budget to a small number. Once you’ve found a few profitable keywords and ads, you drop the ones that aren’t profitable and then you increase the daily budget.
2. Article Marketing
   You write some “how to” type of articles that may interest your customers and submit them to article directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Alternatively you could use Article Submitter to simplify the process. Be sure to include your website link in the about section. Don’t try to sell ANYTHING in the articles.
3. Forum MarketingFind forums which your customers would go, and join the community. The easiest way to find these forums is to type in “fishing + forums” in Google if your business is related to fishing, if not, just change the first word. Look at the number of posts on the forum, if it looks fairly busy and related then register. Post valuable information often, let them know that you’re the expert in your field. Again, don’t try to “hard sell” your products or services, it just doesn’t work. All you need to do is put a link in your signature and let that do the work for you.
4. Sponsored Blog Reviews
   You can find blogs that are related to your industry in websites like BlogCatalog or Technorati. Visit each blog to check the quality of their content, the relevance and traffic. Go to Alexa.com to get the blogs’ traffic details. The ranking system is reversed, which means low the number the better. Try to look for blogs that are below 500,000 (that’s around 100 visitors per day). Once you’ve got a list of blogs that you like, you can write to the owner and ask for a sponsored review of your products or services.
5. “Steal” Other People’s Customers
   This method can be used both online and offline, it’s very powerful and cost effetive if done properly. You need to find businesses are related to yours but not the same. They’re not your competitors, but their customers can be your customers too because your products or services can benefit them as well as the other business. For example, if you sell fishing rods and baits you may want to approach companies that sell fish tanks, fishing clothes, fishing books…etc and then ask them to promote your website once in their next monthly newsletter, if they don’t send out newsletters then just ask them to send out an email to their customer list. And in return you will promote their website in your newsletter for a whole year (or whatever you think is good). Now if they have a good customers list you should get many sales, as well as subscribers (you should have a opt-in box before you start this)!

So how do you get an opt-in box onto your website? This is actually easier than you may think, all you need is some basic Internet and computer knowledge, you certainly don’t need to know anything web programming language. There’re online list building management services like Aweber, which does 95% of the work for you. The cost is very reasonable, its user friendly interface allows you setup multiple campaigns, manage the list, setup auto responder, customise your email template, track clicks and many more. I highly recommend you to customise your email template and opt-in box to match the look and feel of your website.

Do experiment with different ways of getting people to opt in. One of the most popular opt-in offers is giving away free eBooks or reports. This method works better on some industries than the others. If your target audiences are not so computer savvy he/she might never heard of the term eBook, if that’s the case you have two options: 1. Name it something else. 2. Try a different offer. Test, test and test again, the key is to let the results to show you what works and what doesn’t.

1. You can use a blog to keep your customer up to date about your latest products/services. For example, you can name the blog “Our Weekly Special Offers” and update it once a week.
2. You can use a blog to provide valuable information that relate to your industry – information which your target audience would be interested in. For example, if you’re in the music instrument business and you sell guitars and drums, you can use the blog to write tutorials on how to play guitar, how to choose a good guitar, how to tune a guitar, review a new guitar once a week ..etc
3. You can use a blog to improve the search engine ranking of your existing website. Search engines doesn’t rank websites, they rank pages, a link from one page to another would be counted as a vote and the more votes you have the higher you will be ranked in the search engines. Of course, not all votes are the same, there’re many factors that determine how much a link is worth in the search engine’s system. I won’t go into the finer details of how search engine works, for now you just need to remember that the more pages you have (must be related), the higher your website will rank and the more traffic you will receive. You don’t need to do anything special, you just need to write quality contents that are good for humans, not search engines. Never try to stuff keywords in articles because it will do more damages than goods in the LONG TERM. This does take time and you probably won’t see any significant results in the first 6 months, stick to it for another 6 months or so and you will see your website traffic and business improve dramatically.