• Have an “Advertise” banner on your blog: This is very important. It should be linked to an advertising page and have an easy way to contact you for more information and rates.
• Prepare an ‘About’ section: You must clearly explain who you are and what your blog is about. You need to show why anyone should care about what you have to say.
• Show your blog stats: You must show a few basics for your blog’s statical information such as monthly unique visitors and total number of impressions. You can also mention your blog’s Alexa rank and PageRank.
• Keep the ads specific to your blog: No need to have gambling ads if your site is about working at home.
• Keep your blog professional and on topic:Focus on one core topic, and keep your posts professional. Use Twitter for sharing your daily personal experiences.
• Show your potential advertisers the banners:If you currently have no paid placements on your site, put up a few partner ads in the same spot you would run a paid spot.
• Put a free advertisement on your site:  If you put a free advertisement on your site, you will not only encourage similar ads or competitors to that product, but the company you added for free may decide to advertise with you.

If you run a small company, you may find that the world of blogging for business owners is a world that you want to be a part of. Blogging is a great way to get the word out to your consumers about your service or product, and it can even be useful for inspiring employee loyalty and helping you keep your workers at peak morale. If you are looking for a way to take your business to the next level, consider what starting a blog might be able to do for you.

Blogging for business owners has a lot in common with all other types of blogging, but it has its own unique pitfalls and strengths. The key to having a successful blog as a business owner is keeping your goals clear and concrete at every step of your blogging adventure. It can be all to easy to get sidetracked, especially if you are just learning about the exciting possibilities of blogging technology, but if you want your blog to succeed you need to stay focused.

You must write up a plan for how often you will update, how you will promote your blog and retain readers, whether you will feature video or photograph, and other aspects of your blog, and then stick to it with the same kind of determination that you used when you built your company.

If you are interested in business blogging, then you must read WordPress for Business Bloggers.The book is full of advanced strategies and techniques to improve your WordPress business blog. Whether you have a blog, or not, this book shows you how to use WordPress to create a highly successful business blog.

The book is not covering the basics such as WP installation. The author assumed that most readers already have an established WordPress blog. Some basic WordPress knowledge is a must in order to follow the book.

The author is using a case study  based on a fictitious blog  to demonstrate the concepts the readers will be learning. It is the basis for most of the tutorials in the book. The purpose of the lessons is to transform that blog from a mediocre blog into an all-singing all-dancing traffic magnet.

The book provides very detailed and useful  information about business blog marketing , SEO for blogs, blog monetization, advanced image and video handling techniques, content creation, advertising and affiliate programs, and more. If you are serious about business blogging, WordPress for Business Bloggers must be in your library.

When starting a blog, it is discouraging when there is no participation occurring in your posts by your readers. Actually there are some simple changes you can implement in order to give your readers that extra incentive to provide their own input on a topic. Here are a few simple ideas to get you started:

• You must make it easy for your readers to comment on your blog posts. If your blog requires user registration, that will simply prevent readers from commenting your blog at all. There is no need to make it too difficult to comment on your blog. Let your readers have their say.
• Let your readers to be notified by email of new comments on a post when they submit a comment of their own. All you need is to install Subscribe to Comments WordPress plug-in.
• You must write your blog posts in a manner such that it encourages participation. Ending with a question that your readers can answer is usually the most effective way of encouragement.
• You must reward your commentators. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by providing a top commentators list including a link to whatever website URL they provided when commenting on your posts. You can use show top commentators plug-in for this purpose. Show Top Commentators plug-in.

Now it is your turn: what are some things you’ve done within your own blog to encourage your readers for their participation? Share your experiences with us.

The financial crisis in the global economy is leading to a sharp slowdown in growth all around the world. Many people already lost their jobs. During the great depression of the 1930’s, you can not make money with blogs, but today you can. If you take some serious steps from today, you can make regular income from blogging by 2009.

We analyzed the blog mentoring programs for you. You may consider joining in these programs if you want to make money with blogs..

Expert WordPress

Today WordPress is the blogger’s standard blogging platform. If you use  WordPress perfectly, you can make more money with blogs. Alex Sysoef’s Expert WordPress program is a must if you want to make money with blogs. A custom script does the full WordPress blog configuration and customization based on a few answers you provide on web page. Watch the video Expert WordPress to see how to create a blog in less than 4 minutes from start to publish.

Blogging in Action

Shaun Taylor’s Blogging in Action consists of a huge 260-page e-book. The book also comes with companion videos, keyword tools, bonus administration videos, 10 Internet Basics videos, and a 16-volume QuickStart video series. This is the kind of program you can read over and over again during your blogging journey.

Blog Mastermind Program

Yaro Starak’s blog coaching program, Blog Mastermind is less than $100 a month to become a member, and you get direct access to your mentor Yaro Starak, plus podcasts, all kinds of videos, e-lessons to make money online.

These days “make money with blogs” is one of the most popular search terms on most search engines. Many people are suffering from the financial crisis, and looking for ways to make money online all around the world. Even though make money blogging looks like a very good opportunity, not every blogger will succeed in it due to its dependency on having a high-traffic blog.  You must take full advantage of blog carnivals if you really want to have a high-traffic blog.

What Are The Benefits of Blog Carnivals?

• Getting quality links fast and easy
• You will get high traffic if you regularly join blog carnivals
• Free marketing for your blog
• You will get  new RSS subscribers from each round of carnival submissions

How To Join a Blog Carnival

• First, sign up Blog Carnival
• Then sign in with your email and password
• Select the carnivals that are related to your blog
• Start submission.

If you join blog carnivals regularly, you will enjoy the increasing traffic. You should not spam the carnivals that are not  related to your blog. You may also help blog carnival owners spread the word about their carnivals.

There are two major business models that entrepreneurs use to make money with blogs. The most common way to turn a blog into a profit making machine is to sell advertising space to different brands and companies who want to reach that blog’s audience. The second method is to help a single brand improve its image by writing positive reviews and creating positive associations between the blog and the product in the mind of consumers. Both methods can make a lot of money, especially if the owner of the blog is good at marketing.

If you are blogging for selling advertising, there are two methods you can follow to find sponsors who want to put ads on your blog; let someone else do all of the work, or do the work yourself and keep all of the revenue.

For the first method, many bloggers make money blogging by selling space via Google AdSense. There are numerous advantages of this program, as it requires very little effort on the part of the blogger. But most bloggers discover that they make less money with this method than they had expected that their blog would earn.

It will take more time to sell advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog. However, it is certainly more lucrative. If you have contacts in industries that are related to your blog’s main topic, you should try this method.

If you have a strong background in sales you can make quite a bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies.The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build a good reader base before you can attract advertisers, which means that you have to do at least 6 months of work before you start to make money blogging.

A lot of established companies are also considering how they can get into the action after having seen that blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, . The companies are capitalizing on the blog movement by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Usually, a company will employ an established blogger to create a blog that is designed specifically to appeal to that company’s customers and to create positive associations with the brand in the consumers’ minds. More than one writer who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite good money for this kind of gig.

Until 2008 personal blogging used to be the most popular way to communicate with your friends on the Internet. Due to information overload bloggers found out alternative communication ways, and microblogging was born. Today hundreds of thousands bloggers use microblogging sites like Twitter to socialize with each other. Let’s take a look at microblogging today.

Microblogging

It  is a new form of communication in which users can easily tell about their current status in short posts distributed by email, mobile phones, instant messages, or the Web. Twitter is the most popular microblogging tool.  Facebook also has a microblogging feature which is called “status update”.

FriendFeed is yet another microblogging site. In reality it is a social aggregator.  It consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites such as blog entries. Twhirl allows cross connection between microblogging sites like Friendfeed, Twitter, seesmic, or identi.caseesmic.

Lifestreaming

It is a new way of sharing the activities happening in your life with your readers or friends. Your activities are documented using a chronologically-ordered collection of information.

Word Spy defines “lifestreaming” as:

“An online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos.”

Some bloggers prefer lifestreaming as their main blog content. Jullia Allison is one of the most popular ones. Her blog consists of collection of her photos, random thoughts, videos, links, and copy-and-pasted emails. Visitors are allowed to scroll horizontally at her site which reminds a timeline.

Lifestreaming For Your Daily Blogging

Julia Allison’s  style may not be convenient for you. But  you may still want to post daily updates about your daily activities, services, products, or promotions. You can easily add lifestreaming into your daily blogging if you have a WordPress blog. All you need is to install below plugins:

• SimpleLife WordPress Plugin
  
• RSS Stream WordPress Plugin

Some other useful lifestreaming applications:

• Tumblr
• OnaSwarm
• Jaiku

Top blogs are usually well ranked for some specific keywords in main search engines like Google and Yahoo. You can not compete with them at those keywords. But you can apply some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to increase traffic to your blog. Here are a few SEO techniques you can apply for your blog:

- Optimum Permalink Structure

This is the key when it comes to SEO for blogs. Use below permalink structure for your blog

• Login to WordPress
• Click on “Settings”
• Click on “Permalinks”
• Select “Custom Structure”
• Insert this “/%category%/%postname%.html”
• Go to “Sitemap XML”, and click on “rebuild the sitemap”

- Tagging

Not enough importance was given to tagging by many bloggers. Actually tagging is very important if you want to increase your blog’s search engine traffic. Make it a habit, and think about the tags first before writing a blog post.

• Start with asking this simple question to yourself “If I were looking for this post in Google or Yahoo, which keywords I would be choosing”.
• Answer this question, and then put those keywords into your blog post.
• Do not forget to add those keywords as your blog post tags too.
• Only use the tags that exist on your blog post.
• Do not to exceed 5 tags per post.

- Use Platinum SEO plugin

This simle yet brilliant plugin generates all SEO relevant META tags automatically. It automatically avoids duplicate content.

• Download Platinum SEO Plugin from the WordPress plugins directory.
• Unzip the files, and upload them to your blog’s `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
• If you are already using All In One SEO, deactivate it. Do not worry, your current All In One SEO settings will also be imported to Platinum SEO.
• Go to Plugins menu.
• Activate the Platinum SEO.
• Go to Settings>Platinum SEO, and then make necessary adjustments.

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The most popular bloggers are also good copywriters.  Every blogger is selling something to his readers with his words and writing style. If you write compelling blog headlines your readers will buy your posts, and continue reading the full post.

How Can You Write Killer Blog Headlines

Here are a few simple techniques for writing blog headlines that get attention:

• Try to solve a common problem: You should address a  problem that your readers might have. All you need is to take a look at your reader’s comments to your blog posts. It would be easy to find out the  most common problems. This blog headline can be used in this case “Here’s a Quick Way to…………. “
• Try to use quotes: Try to find a quote related to your blog post. It will draw attention.
• Use How-To formulas: Everybody likes a good how to post.
• Try to ask tricky questions: You should try to ask questions which your readers can not answer without reading the full post like, “10 Must Read Blogging Books?”.
• Always use human psychology: “Who Else Wants……?”  formula is based on social proof, and subliminally tells  your readers that so many bloggers already read this post.

You will find other formulas all around the Web. If you regularly use above mentioned strategies, you will draw a lot of attention to your blog posts. This will drive incredible traffic to your blog.