You will also make sure you have access to all the great features that can make your blog popular, such as RSS feeds. Finding the right platform isn’t always easy, but with a little bit of research, you will be on your way to finding the perfect blogging platform that suits your needs.

Deciding what your priorities are in terms of ease of use versus customization and features. Most highly customizable blogging platforms, like moveable type, are a bit more difficult to use than very automated platforms like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. If you are new to blogs and to internet technology, you might want to sacrifice the ability to create a custom background design or to integrate a unique font into your template in order to find a program that will be easy for you to work with.

On the other hand, if you are a veteran web designer with knowledge of html or javascript, you will probably find the limitations of a user-friendly platform annoying.

There is no such thing as a blogging platform that is objectively the best platform, because every blogger has unique needs. The blogging movement is very much about individuality, so it makes plenty of sense that there would be many different platforms available that are designed to meet the needs of different kinds of individuals undertaking different kinds of projects to express their unique voice.

This diversity is a good thing, because it means that you will almost certainly be able to find a program that suits your level of technical expertise.

However, the fact that no two bloggers need the same thing from a blogging platform can make your search for the right platform a painful task. When you are reading reviews of different platforms, try to keep in mind the reviewers point of view and the features you really need.

For example, a negative review written by an accomplished software designer who complains that a popular platform is too limited may tell you that the platform in question is ideal for a beginning blogger.

There is no such thing as the perfect platform for everybody, so instead of looking for the “best” platform, look for the best platform for your specific criteria. If you are starting and do not want the hassle of web hosting right now, you can use www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com. Later, if you want to host your blog, you have the option to easily do it.

There are millions of blogs online today and everyone is practically tripping over each other to start their own. My question is why?

You can answer that in word. Money! People think blogging is the magic bullet they have been missing to make money for the first time in their life. The other thing is blogs are so simple to start that a child of 10 could do it.

Of course after a few days the new blogger begins to realize that the money is not flowing in and this is going to become work. They sure are spending a lot of time working on their new blog and they have not made one penny off of it yet.

This is the bad side of blogging. It takes a lot of work to get traffic to your blog and it takes even more work to convert some of that into a paying customer.

If you value your time you lose money every time you set down and post in your blog. Let’s say you spend 30 minutes writing a 400-word blog post and you do that everyday for 1 month. You have just spent 15 hours and you may not have even made any money yet.

That’s the rub right there. First of all most people will never write 30 posts in the first month or maybe ever. The Internet is cluttered with blogs that were started with good intentions and abandoned like an orphan.

Someone should start a blog orphanage for abandoned blogs that we could adopt and offer tender loving care to. The bad side of blogging is you may be the next victim of ‘blogging is work’ syndrome. Another blog started and abandoned because blogging is work and is not the easy road to riches you hoped it was.

A really good blog is one that is started by someone who would keep it up if they never made any money at it. The reasons for this are that the topic of the blog is a passion for the blogger. They have an interest in the subject matter. They may even be an expert in what they write about and their expertise shows.

The reader comes back over and over to see what the blogger will say next. They pull out their credit card to buy a product the blogger recommends. They click on a Google ad or subscribe to a newsletter. It is all so easy when the blog is kept up to date with useful information. The blogger has avoided the bad side of blogging.

Owning a niche blog can be very profitable if you are able to supply the niche audience what they are looking for. A niche blog is focused in on a specific subject or sub subject within an interest group. They can cover hobbies, sports, health etc the key is that they focus in directly on that subject.

The result of this focused can make the target audience small, if any audience on the internet can be called small, but very dedicated and willing to spend large amounts of money on their passions.

When you are researching niches for you to blog about make sure you establish what the niche audience is looking for. To start it is better to blog about a subject that is closed to your hart and where you understand the audience.

It is also important for you to do some in-depth research in to the topic of your blog. You may be blogging about something you enjoy doing but there will always something you don’t know or new you need to find out about.

Fill you blog with relevant and unique content so that the search engines will give you high page ranking. Additional to that your audience will consider you the best place to come for up to date information in their niche.

Once you start getting visitors to your blog it is important that you make them come back time and time again. A great way to do this is to run an email newsletter capturing the visitor details though a subscribe form on your blog. Another way is to promote your RRS which allows subscribes to keep up to date with your posts.

Keep this in mid when looking to build a niche blog.

So how do you create simple methods of interaction and communication to keep your visitors keep coming back to you?

1.Blogging

When you have your own blog, what you should do is to write the content of your blog as if you are having a personal conversation with your visitor. This is a situational context of ‘direct communication’. Let your readers feel engaged in what you are trying to tell them. Share with them the content that they are looking for and have them build their trust in you.

Make your blog user-friendly so that they can direct themselves to posts from previous months or posts that are organized into a category. For example, if they want to look for a couple of posts on fabrics, your blog may want to group them under the category of ‘materials’. Additionally, what you can do is to add a search box on your site so that your visitors can type in keywords to find the exact blog post they want to read.

You can further engage your visitors with your blog by letting them comment on your posts. To encourage comments you can pose a question to them, ask for their opinions and so on. These comments create interactivity and your visitors will feel ‘cherished’ knowing that their opinions are appreciated. Thus the more you post, the more you give them the chance to interact with the blog.

To encourage repeat visitors, you HAVE to promote your RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. How RSS works, is by ‘crawling’ into your blog and find the latest updated content you have placed in your blog and let the people who have subscribed to your RSS feed know that you have updated your website, giving them a reason to head down to your website and read your updated content.

2.Create a Forum

When you feel that you have a lot of users who keep coming back to your site for content and socialization, what you can do is to create a forum for them. There are forums that you can create for free and these forums can be linked from your blog.

You can organize your forums into different categories to allow your users to give inputs in different subjects. For example, if your blog is about cooking, your forum can have different categories such as ‘Chicken’, ‘Fish’, ‘Asian Dishes’, ‘Mediterranean Dishes’ and so on.

Through interactivity, socialization and engagement you are actually earning trust from your visitors. Earning trust on the Internet is not what many Internet marketers can achieve. Now that you know the steps and tactics to generate trust, make full use of it and make it a part of your business strategy.

Post Writing – Content Creation Discipline

By that, I mean you want to draw in people who want exactly what you offer. That requires a disciplined approach to content creation;
- Research and consider carefully what your post is about, and know why you are writing it – the objective!
- Identify the keyword phrase/s that people are using to find information relevant to the topic you will write on.
- Ensure you place keywords in the post title, and early in the first paragraph, with some additional emphasis on the words, such as bold / italics.
- Include “exact match” keyword phrases throughout the body of the article.
- Add tags/slug i.e. a short list of specific relevant keywords – this may be used in the post page Keyword meta-tag.
- Write a concise Excerpt, loaded with keyword phrases – this may be used in the post page Description meta-tag.
- Use the Spell Checker!!! This article may be the first introduction a potential client has with your business.

Remember that “You NEVER get a second chance to create a first impression!”

Business Blogs Should Inform & Educate

In a business blog, which is there to inform & educate potential clients about aspects of your business, try to provide useful information, without a blatant sales pitch. By all means, encourage readers to “Inquire about Free Personal Advice” or “Contact us for More Information” but don’t overdo the sales pitch. Your goal is to convey your depth of knowledge and experience, and build credibility.

Blog Search Engine Optimisation

To maximise the penetration of your Blog posts, it is not sufficient to just write it and forget it. You need to ensure that your Business Blog is properly “optimised” to produce unique, accurately categorised, and clearly labelled content. This requires a SEO package implementation on your blog to ensure that your Posts, static Pages and Category pages are UNIQUE! We think Wordpress is the fastest and easiest blog platform to customize. It also has a comprehensive array of free SEO options, and following comments are specific to Wordpress.

This is best done dynamically, with installation of plugins that provide automation of;
- HTML Page URLs – using mod_rewrite to generate verbose, keyword-rich page file names.
- Page Title Tags – if you write good post titles, these can be used verbatim in the Title Tag.
- Page Description Meta-Tag – uses the post Excerpt, or the first 20 words of 1st paragraph.
- Page Keyword Meta-Tag – used the post Tag or Slug to generate keywords.

Accurate Content Cataloguing Pays Dividends

The combined impact of attention to detail in posting generation and publishing, plus Search Engine Optimisation finesse on the page production, will deliver dramatic improvements to blog traffic. At the same time, it wil ensure that visitors get exactly what they were seeking due to the resulting accuracy of your content cataloguing efforts.

That will encourage them to bookmark the site, or specific page, and to come back looking for additional details.

Keyword phrases are the building blocks to your website’s success. People are generally confident that they know the ideal keyword phrases for their websites. However, this is not always true. Sometimes the same keyword phrases give different implications to different websites. The best means of refining your keyword phrases would be by allowing your customers to suggest keywords that will best describe your business or company.

You will be surprised at the varied types of keyword phrases that you may receive. Sometimes, you may even feel that your customers speak a completely different language from yours! However, once you have a list of potential keyword phrases for your website, you could try adding some variations, plurals, and derivatives to the existing keyword phrases.

Then, looking at the keyword phrases, you could evaluate each of them to learn which is most probable to draw in maximum traffic to your website. The main criteria to use to decide on the best keyword phrases would be popularity, specificity, and the motivation of the user. Popularity is the best means of refining your keyword phrase. This is because it is basically not subjective and can be found out using keyword search tools like Word Tracker.

With such tools, you not only learn about the popularity of the keyword phrase, but also learn about some additional key phrases and variations. The higher the popularity number, the higher the traffic the keyword phrase should pull to your website. However this is not the only way of deciding on the right keyword phrase to be used.

Besides being popular, you should use the keyword that is most specific to the content of your article and website. This means that the keyword should be more descriptive to the subject matter, and not just a general keyword. For example, instead of “debt”, the term “credit card debt” is a better keyword phrase; keeping in mind that it is the longer keyword phrase that pulls in more traffic to your website. With longer keywords, you have less competition with the search engine queries.

Another important point is that you need to keep the motivation of the user in mind. If you have a choice between two keyword phrases, you should use the keyword phrase that the internet user is more likely to use in search engines, and will most probably prefer. Sometimes even subtle changes in keyword phrases will play a difference in the traffic to your website.

Today, with the help of some tools, you can decide which keyword phrases are more popular on the internet. Using this software, you can determine the type of people who usually visit your website. You can learn who does downloads, who asks for demonstrations you have, and which type of people fill out your contact information.

With this information, you can find out which keywords drew these visitors to your site, and thus eliminate unwanted keywords. You can then refine your keyword phrases to use which can drive maximum traffic to your website.

With that in mind I created my step by step Blogging Blueprint, which you can find below:

1 While writing a blog, think like a visitor, as this helps immensely. If a blogger dons the visitor’s thinking cap, there is more likelihood the words a visitor will use to query search engines will be present in the blog.
2. Add a good layout and catchy adverts to a blog. This helps because the visitor might want to stay longer reading the blog, rather than scooting away to another site.

3. Once the blog is published, it is a good idea to ‘visit’ the blog assuming to be a visitor. Going over links and various pages can give a feeling of how a visitor will react to the blog.

4. Inspect the site regularly, as this can uncover any broken links. Likewise, it is also a good opportunity to do some site maintenance as well. Jotting down points like what can be added to augment site appeal and what else could be added to the FAQ page can be of immense advantage.

5. Use key words that are more likely to be used by visitors to search for your blogs. If there are individuals who want to read about, lets say, power gardening tools, then missing out key words like power or gardening can be a huge mistake. This is because search engines will give the blog a go-by and opt it out of the listings.

Further, the visitor may even chance upon the blog in the listings, but may choose to avoid the site, because the keywords were not highlighted in the large search engine listing.

6. Posting articles about 700 words in length is considered good if taking into account search engine indexing tactics. You can make the post search engine friendly by inserting relevant keywords and links at the right places.

7. You can incorporate specific key words, which are adored by search engines. Integrate keywords into title, meta and alt tags to entice the search engine spider to give the blog a higher page rank.

8. Listening to feedbacks and visitor complaints can be a blessing for you. Despite a lot of effort, a blog might contain obvious technical glitches or perhaps the content might require further elaboration or alterations.

9. Spamming can sometimes be disguised as intelligent comments, which might include further links or invitations to a spammer’s website. Niche blogs might wish to opt out of the custom of inviting comments.

10. If you are into business blogging, picking up good categories like skin care, dry skin care, skin care specials, exclusive skin care products, etc can be particularly rewarding. A good post on niche products can improve keyword density while providing wholesome reading material for visitors.

11. Many bloggers give up after publishing a few blogs. Although there is no right answer to how often you should blog, the secret of profitable blogging is to publish regularly and as frequently as necessary while avoiding both extremes.

12. Use permalinks (permanent links) where servers allow their use. Permalinks allow the use of words as path names, unlike regular links to articles that may contain percentage signs or shorter cryptic pathnames. The secret is to use key words as path names on servers where the use of permalinks is allowed. This makes the site more appealing to those search engines that also look at links for indexing.

This encourages people to start blogging, because the fact that one of these sites can provide you with all of the tools that you need to get your blog up and running without spending any money means that you have nothing to lose by starting a blog.

The fact that it is so easy to find a way to blog for free is one of the reasons why so many people who have never had any other kind of web presence before find themselves drawn to blogging.

By signing up with a free blogging web site, you may find it easier to get listed in search engines that you would if you were starting your own blog from scratch.

For example, google runs the free blog hosting site blogspot and crawls its pages very often looking for updates, so if you have your site hosted by blogspot you are almost guaranteed to be listed on google’s blog search engine.

This easy access to search engines can take some of the work out of promoting your blog, and can help you gain a following with a minimum of marketing effort.

If your blog attracts a large readership, you may want to consider moving your site. Many people feel that being hosted by a free blogging web site gives a blog a kind of amateur flavor that is fine for a new member of the blogosphere, but is not appropriate for a high-profile blog.

Having your own domain can help you make your blog feel professional, and finding a company that will host your domain is not difficult or expensive. Once your blog takes off, you will probably be able to sell enough advertising space to be able to afford to buy a domain and pay for a hosting package, and still have money left over.

However, it does not make sense in most cases to invest in these glossy luxuries before you have a sizable readership.

Starting your blog on a free blogging web site is a great way to build a following before you spend any money on your blog. If and when your blog becomes popular and you are ready to take the next step and purchase your own domain, your readers will follow you to your new home.

The fact that it is possible to use a free blog host like blogspost, blogger, or eponym as a kind of incubator for your blog is great news for bloggers everywhere.

You will also make sure you have access to all the great features that can make your blog popular, such as RSS feeds. Finding the right platform isn’t always easy, but with a little bit of research, you will be on your way to finding the perfect blogging platform that suits your needs.

Deciding what your priorities are in terms of ease of use versus customization and features. Most highly customizable blogging platforms, like moveable type, are a bit more difficult to use than very automated platforms like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. If you are new to blogs and to internet technology, you might want to sacrifice the ability to create a custom background design or to integrate a unique font into your template in order to find a program that will be easy for you to work with.

On the other hand, if you are a veteran web designer with knowledge of html or javascript, you will probably find the limitations of a user-friendly platform annoying.

There is no such thing as a blogging platform that is objectively the best platform, because every blogger has unique needs. The blogging movement is very much about individuality, so it makes plenty of sense that there would be many different platforms available that are designed to meet the needs of different kinds of individuals undertaking different kinds of projects to express their unique voice.

This diversity is a good thing, because it means that you will almost certainly be able to find a program that suits your level of technical expertise.

However, the fact that no two bloggers need the same thing from a blogging platform can make your search for the right platform a painful task. When you are reading reviews of different platforms, try to keep in mind the reviewers point of view and the features you really need.

For example, a negative review written by an accomplished software designer who complains that a popular platform is too limited may tell you that the platform in question is ideal for a beginning blogger.

There is no such thing as the perfect platform for everybody, so instead of looking for the “best” platform, look for the best platform for your specific criteria. If you are starting and do not want the hassle of web hosting right now, you can use www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com. Later, if you want to host your blog, you have the option to easily do it.

Fees for pay-per-click are normally well under one dollar. But these small fees quickly combine to represent a lot of money. This happens more rapidly when the keywords that are used are very popular and general and create higher than average false leads. This method is a gamble and like casino gambling it is very easy to eat up a large advertising budget.

Fortunately, contrary to popular belief AdWords is not the only means of advertising on the internet; as a matter of fact, it is not even the most commonly used technique. There are many ways with which to skin a cat, and the internet marketer intelligent enough to step beyond the boundaries of AdWords will quickly find their profits growing without the continual draining of their budget.

The simplest and least expensive method of advertising without AdWords is to utilize the powers of social networking through blogs and forums. Each of these is a community feature, which allows web surfers to come together to discuss topics that are of great interest to them, and the exposure is unbelievable.

By posting a blog to a topic related to their product and including a link to the website in question an advertiser can exponentially increase the number of viewers their site receives without having to pay a penny.

Advertising on some other businesses website is another great marketing method. The trick comes in choosing the site to advertise on. The most important thing is to analyze with care his desired audience and find the sites they visit the most.

There are three ways you can go about advertising on someone else’s site.

For an advertisement you can create a text or banner ad for the site then pay them to post the ad. Use caution though, this might not be better then the ppc method; except if they will charge a normal fee based on the amount of time your ad is displayed.

Good web content is the basis for the other two methods. In the one way a writer is paid to write articles full of information on a specified topic, that ties in to the advertisers website, to post on the advertisers site to raise his sites credibility with search engines and thereby increase his traffic.

Instead of charging a fee the savvy advertiser will create an article in this manner and approach the creator of said website, offering to allow them to absorb the article into their website in exchange for including their name and site information on the bottom. This is what is known as link building.

Actually, link building works best when the reader in reality finishes the article completely. They also have to enjoy the article enough to want to see if the author has anything else available. But with how limited the attention span of the majority of internet users, the likelihood is low.

Instead, the author can write an article which will have links to key information locations on their own website scattered throughout the article. If the reader comes to a point where they wish to explore an idea more thoroughly or they cannot grasp what is going on they can select the link and it will instantly transport them to the other site.

This is called hosted web content and the majority of sites charge some kind of fee in exchange for displaying your article because a visitor can be taken away from their site.

With strategic use of these ideas you can be profitable and limit your use of the, sometimes dangerous attractions of AdWords. You can walk away with pride and wallet undamaged.