PureBlogging

In my building a business blog series, I have told you how to choose the right host for your business blog, discussed how to create content, gave tips on how to make your business blog Search Engine Friendly, and last week I revealed tips about some of programs that could help you make more money with your business blog. This week, for my final post in the series, I’m going to discuss a few of the many ways you can promote your business blog. After all, you have built it, and now I am sure you would love for people to discover it.

Networking

1. Connect with other business owners as well as potential customers through social networking sites. For a great list of social networking sites, see Social Networks for Businesses.

2. Register for social bookmarking accounts. Through social bookmarking, you can bookmark your own posts and invite your friends and blog readers to do the same. In addition, you can place the social bookmarking links at the end of every post (see the links at the end of this post as an example). If you write quality and informative content, then many of your readers will click on the social bookmarking links to share it with their friends. After all, word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising.

Some popular social bookmarking sites to consider are Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and Digg.

3. Take time to visit other business blogs and leave comments. When leaving a comment, share any additional tips they may have missed or let them know if they helped you learn something new. If there wasn’t a place on their comment form to insert a link, then leave the link to your business blog at the end of your comment. Remember, don’t spam!

4. Networking also takes place through forums and message boards. Search the internet for forums and message boards related to your business blog. Then, after you become a member, offer advice and answer questions. Again, don’t spam. Instead, create a signature that includes a link to your blog. Your signature will appear at the end of all your posts and replies. If you offer advice and answer questions, other members will want to check out your blog to see what other helpful information you provide.

Become a Member of Entrecard

Just this week I became a member of Entrecard, and my blog traffic has already doubled. I have even had a few newcomers leave comments. To discover more about Entrecard, read Entrecard: A One Month Review, by Sharon Hurley Hall. Sharon gives a great explanation of Entrecard and its features!

Use the Internet to Promote Your Business Blog

1. As soon as your business blog is ready to go live, distribute a press release announcing the launch of your business blog through sites such as PRWeb, Pressbox, USA News ($10 fee) and I-Newswire. Also use press releases to announce any contests you run on your business blog, sales and anything else you feel is newsworthy.

2. Advertise in newsletters, e-zines and e-mags relevant to your business blog.

3. Submit your business blog to web and blog directories. This will also help get your business blog picked up by search engines more quickly.

Promote Your Business Blog Offline

1. Every time you send out a letter or promo materials, include a link to your business blog on the letterhead.

2. Place the link to your business blog on your business cards, brochures and flyers, then follow the advice in On the Road Website Promotion.

This concludes my series on Building a Business blog. If you missed any of the posts or would like to save them to refer back to later, see the Table of Contents below. As always, feel free to share any tips you have on how to promote a business blog in the comments area. Best wishes and happy promoting!

Table of Contents

Introduction: Building a Business Blog
Choose the Right Host for Your Business Blog
Creating Content for Your Business Blog
Making Your Business Blog Search Engine Friendly
Make More Money With Your Business Blog
Promote Your Business Blog (This Post)

About a week ago, entrepreneur and blogger Jeremy Schoemaker caused a bit of a stir in the SEO community when he said that he doesn’t like 95 percent of SEO experts. It got me to thinking a lot about the whole concept of SEO and search marketing, and how it’s perceived in the online community overall.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of unethical SEO practitioners out there. Hell, I’ll do more than admit it — I’ll embrace it. There are plenty of people on the Web who perform only the bare minimum required to squirm, limbo-style, under Google’s anti-spamming guidelines. There’s an abundance of optimizers who think the road to high page rank is paved with nothing but keywords. It’s an emerging business based on concepts that are difficult to understand and predict, so it’s certainly going to attract its fair share of jerks. It stinks, and it results in a lot of crappy content taking up bandwidth that could otherwise be used for something more useful, like humorously captioned cat pictures.

But then, I’m new at the SEO game. I’ve been at it for less than a year. I’ve still got plenty to learn about the art and science of optimization. So you should definitely take the things I say with a few shakes of Mrs. Dash.

But here’s the thing I think the SEO haters haven’t seemed to figure out.

At least one blogger who responded to Schoemaker’s assertions seems to claim that companies can easily perform SEO in-house. And overall there seems to be a general feeling that anyone who claims that they can raise your page rank is a snake-oil salesman feeding you a service you could easily do yourself.

Now, the company I work for has a whole list of SEO clients for whom I need to write keyword-rich copy, great meta descriptions and page titles, and attractive PPC ads. Most of these clients are anything but tech-centric: We’ve got building contractors, hotels, hometown pharmacies and paintbrush manufacturers. All great companies with great products. But not exactly the IT crowd.

Something the geek community has never been really good at grasping is the notion that there are people out there who are not geeks, and who have no desire to be geeks. The waste management company I write for isn’t really prepared to run their own Google AdWords campaign. They’re too busy, y’know, collecting people’s trash. Thank God they’re not spending time and energy running their own AdWords campaign. Otherwise we’d all be drowning in scrap lumber and empty Fiddle Faddle boxes.

(I’m not saying AdWords is an arcane and mystical discipline requiring years of harsh, ascetic training on the ghats of the Ganges delta. I’m saying that just because your doctor knows how to answer his phone doesn’t mean he’s not going to hire a receptionist.)

Anyway, all this was geared toward asking all you gentle readers a question, which (spoiler alert) is right there in my headline: What SEO rules do you follow? What SEO ethics do you think everyone should follow?

I’ll start the ball rolling with my own ironclad rule: Provide compelling, useful content, and the rest will follow. Oh, and anyone who uses the phrase “content is king” doesn’t actually think content is king; they just want you to believe they give content more than a passing nod. What they really care about most is text messaging David Allen’s blog posts to each other.

Take the Thirty Day Challenge

It’s almost time for the start of the next 30 Day Challenge.  Ed Dale and Dan Raines have set up a free program that walks you through the “How to Make Money on the Internet” process.  The concept is simple; sign up for the challenge, work through the process, and try to earn at least 10 dollars within 30 days.  I know, $10 for a months worth isn’t worth crowing about, but in this instance it’s more about the journey than the destination.

The problem with most money making ventures is that the promise of big bucks draws your focus away from the process of how it all works.  This is true of eBay selling programs, affiliate programs, or online stores.  it’s even true of blogging.  No matter how many times you’re told not to expect to hit the big time anytime soon, it’s hard not to look at the Darren Rowse’s of the blogosphere and dream of yourself in that position.  Then when you do finally start to see a little income, it seems a bit disappointing in comparison to your dreams.  Too often people loose heart and give up before they have given themselves a good opportunity to succeed.

The 30DC takes the disappointment factor out of the picture by setting the expectations so low that it is easy to achieve.  You focus more on what it takes to make good decisions that will help you succeed, and not on realistic dreams of instant wealth.

The challenge starts with a “pre-season” that walks you through getting signed up for sites you will be learning how to use for marketing, and gives some great suggestions of some very useful Firefox extensions.  Even without going through the challenge, you’ll find these extensions very useful.  Once you get into the challenge, Ed and Dan will take you through how to find a niche, how to use social media sites for marketing, how to use links, even how to use your blog as a marketing tool.  You’ll also learn how to effectively look at your sites states, and what your sites traffic patterns mean.

Did I mention that it’s free?  Yes Dan and Ed both have services that they charge for, but they don’t push those programs on you.  All you need to complete the challenge will be provided.  There hope is that after you see what they have to offer you will gladly sign up for there service, but there’s no hard-sell.

It’s worth checking out.  It’s a great way to get a free education.

Because I live in San Francisco, I have used Craigslist for almost everything in my life. Searching through the classified ads on the site – or posting ads of my own – was how I got my apartment, my furniture and many of my friends. As a freelancer, Craigslist used to be one of the primary places I found my jobs. And Craigslist was also a tool that I used to drive a surprising amount of traffic to one of my main blogs.

Here are some of the ways that you can use Craigslist as a (free) tool for blog promotion:

• Community. The community section of the site, located in the top left corner of the main Craigslist screen, provides many opportunities for publicizing your blog. The blog that I was promoting was for artists, so I would post about once a week in the “artists” section of the community. I made sure to provide interesting information, usually about a local artist, with a link to the full article on my site. The “general” section was good for the same type of promotional posts and “local news” worked when I had something on my blog that was particularly newsworthy for the city. I also solicited guest bloggers for the site through the “volunteers” section here.

• Classes. This section can be found in the community area of the site but can also be reached through the calendar on the lefthand side of Craigslist. To use this as a blog promotion tool, I held an online class about a topic related to my blog. Using online conferencing tools, I invited people to attend a short twenty minute online class about my topic. I was surprised by the number of people who turned up to the online class and the surge of traffic that came to the site afterwards. I imagine that an in-person class or event would do even better. If you have enough knowledge on a topic to have a blog, you have enough to teach a short class.

• Barter. I posted in the barter section on several different occasions. A watered-down version of this post was something like: “I have a blog about xyz and am seeking someone to promote it for me in a creative way. Send me an email with your promotional idea and what you’d like in exchange.” I received many interesting responses and creative ideas that I would never have come up with on my own, including a musician who offered to host a party with my blog named on the fliers as the sponsor. What I exchanged for this was a series of blog posts about the event. Other barter posts that worked for me were link exchanges and other more direct blogger-to-blogger trades.

• Services. Advertising about my blog in the creative and computer services seemed to drive a moderate amount of traffic to the site. I used posts that offered the service of blog writing and listed my link as an example of my work. I also used posts about the service of my blog’s industry (services for artists that I do as a writing consultant) and pointed to my blog as a way to contact me. There are many services listed in this section so various blogs would be able to use different parts of this section of the site.

• Gigs. Writing and creative gigs is the section where I frequently found my initial freelance jobs. Sometimes these jobs included a byline that gave traffic to my blog. On occasion, I also posted asking for guest bloggers in these sections, offering either a byline or moderate pay in exchange for quality posting. The bloggers who were guests on my site always drove traffic my way.

• Forums. I never made use of the Craigslist forums myself. However, I am guessing that a creative blogger would have no trouble generating interesting conversations on the forums that could translate to blog traffic.

Craigslist is a staple of San Francisco life so it was easy for a blogger from the area to use the site for traffic. However, the potential for blog promotion through Craigslist isn’t limited to Bay Area bloggers. There are Craigslist sites for many cities throughout the country. And if your blog has nationwide appeal, you can post on one of the major city sites (like San Francisco or New York) to gain a new audience.

Be aware that there are rules that need to be followed on Craigslist to keep the community useful to everyone. You shouldn’t post your promotional materials in sections that don’t suit it. And you should use promotion in conjunction with offering services and information to make yourself useful to the community there. Being helpful and respectful are always the best ways to get good traffic to your blog through any community. Check out the Craigslist “help” section before posting to better understand the rules of the site.

Question of the Day: Do you have any other Craigslist blog promotion success stories to share?

photo link

Not long ago the blogosphere was seeing a lot of posts about how Page Ranks were going down, apparently as a result of blogs using monetization techniques that conflicted with Google AdSense. Within a few days, there was an adjustment, and many of the blogs recovered their previous page ranking, it does make you wonder why it happened in the first place. It also makes me wonder, does Google reward blogs that use AdSense and/or punish blogs that don’t?

In many ways, and for a lot of reasons, Google rules the internet world. While it is possible to not do well on Google and still make money, it is a hard way to go, and I don’t recommend it. Ranking well on Google can send hundreds of paying customers to your blog on a regular basis. It’s hard to ignore that amount of trafic.

That being said, it raises the dilemma of how to monetize your blog. While AdSense is very easy to use, it certainly isn’t the only option that is available. It is a great place to start, and some bloggers claim to have seen a lot of income from AdSense, but most bloggers will agree that it isn’t good business sense to put all of your eggs in one basket. Just like investing, diversity is the smart way to go. Chitika and Text Link Ads are two very good options that you can use to compliment your AdSense campaign. There are also other options like Amazon, or one of hundreds of affiliate programs you could sign up for. You could also make money off of your blog by selling your services as a consultant or by doing paid reviews. There are many different possibilities.

If you are using one of the different as choices, remember to keep a log of the changes you make to your advertising. Experiment not only with the types of programs you are using, but also with location on the page, color schemes, and size of the ad. When you make a change, log it and then track the results. Don’t just track your click through rate; also track what it does to your Page Rank and your position on the search engines. If your position begins to slip, you need to ask your self if the change is worth making. You may have a higher click through rate, but losing your position will result in less traffic, and lower profits.

For those of you that have already experimented with your advertising, I’d love to hear your opinion. Does the type of advertising you use affect your position on Google? What has worked for you? We could all benefit from your experience.

Social networks can be very beneficial for your business. Social networks allow you to not only connect with other businesses, but they also let you interact with your customers and other business professionals, as well as share tips, discounts and special offers, gain knowledge from other business professionals, and much more. “Where do I find social networks for businesses,” you ask. One way is to search the Internet, but today I will reveal five social networks for businesses to save you a little time.

Apsense

This new social network for businesses offers you the opportunity to build your business while getting paid, and best of all: it’s free. Yes, that’s right: you’ll earn revenue from content you create as well as from content your contacts create! Some of the many benefits Apsense offers its members are as follows:

• Send and receive messages
• Join business groups that share your interests
• Vote on content written by fellow businesses
• Learn from business blogs and create a blog of your own

Ecademy

Ecademy, founded in 1998 by Penny Power, will enable you to connect with over 100,000 businesses. In addition to being able to network with others, you’ll also have the privilege of seeking support and advice, advertising your services, joining up with business networking groups that relate to your business, attend offline networking events and much more.

Ecademy has three memberships to choose from: Basic membership, which is free; a Power Networker membership for $5 a month; or for $100 month, you can enjoy all of Ecademy’s social networking features with a BlackStar membership.

Basic membership allows you to:

• Create a profile
• Search for contacts
• Learn from free networking guide
• Join clubs
• Respond to messages
• Attend networking events

As a Power Networker you can:

• Enjoy the same benefits as a Basic member
• Respond to and send unlimited messages
• Create your own clubs and events
• Post unlimited blogs
• Gain higher visibility on search engines
• Post unlimited adverts on Marketplace
• Save up to 10 searches and alerts

With a BlackStar membership, you’ll get:

• The same benefits as a Power Networker
• Automatic posts in the Marketplace as well as follow-up tools
• Unlimited saved searches and alerts
• Your company’s logo or banner placed on Ecademy’s pages
• Accelerated private networking in clubs, groups and exclusive events

LinkedIn

Join LinkedIn, a popular social network for businesses. As of this post, LinkedIn has over 7 million members! If you become a member of the LinkedIn social network, you’ll be able to connect with over 8 million businesses, ask and/or answer questions, share your expertise, request recommendations, create a profile and much more.

Merchant Circle

Would you like to gain more local customers? Then head to Merchant Circle www.merchantcircle.com. Merchant Circle, founded in 2005, was designed to connect small businesses with local customers. Through Merchant Circle you can create a blog for your business, send out coupon offers to potential customers, create newsletters, add photos and videos, increase your visibility in the search engines, create ads through Merchant Circle’s Ad Wizard, track what’s being said about your business, connect with other businesses to help your business grow, and more. Membership is free.

Xing

Xing, the first Web 2.0 company to go public, gives members the abilities to market their business and interact with other business professionals. They offer a free Basic membership and a Premium membership.

The above are a select few of the many social networks for businesses. If you’d like to discover more, Google “social networks for businesses” and “social network directories.”