As a business owner, You'll not want to miss out on the additional revenue you can generate by using blogs to add revenue streams to your business . Displaying Adsense ads, affiliate banners and links, and developing another source of traffic to your core business are just a few of the benefits associated with blogging. Once you have a large consistant flow of readers, selling advertising space might become a viable option. This will of course depend on your marketing skills and your ability to provide quality and useful content.
Setting up a new blog with Wordpress is pretty simple and I'm going to assume you've already registered a new domain related to your blog. As well as having a web host that uses cPanel. Using Fantastico to upload and install your new blog is really a no brainer. It will do just about everything for you and gives pretty clear cut instructions to customize the look and feel of your new blog using available Themes and Plug-Ins. I want to add that Wordpress Blogs are free and you can set-up as many as you choose. Each should have its own domain or sub domain.
Some things to consider before you begin the blog set up process.
1. What will you name your blog?
2. What will its purpose be?
3. When and how often will I update my blog?
4. How will you use it to enhance your core business?
5. Will it be seperate from your business or will it be its own business?
6. How will you announce your new blog to the world?
Many affiliate marketers use blogs as their only method of promotion rather than using conventional websites because of the ease and simplicity to update and add content without having to get into text editors and ftp programs. Their blogs are' their business.
Once your blog is set up and you've decided on a name, what your target niche will be, and will it be a stand alone project or an addition to your core business you'll want to get the word out.
Social Bookmarking sites are an effective strategy for bloggers. You can reach a wide variety of bloggers and attract an avid readership to your new blog. I've put a small list below as well as an ebook that lists many other SocialBookmarking sites.
1. http://tagtooga.com
2. http://del.icio.us
3. http://furl.net
4. http://simpy.com
5. blogmarks.net
6. http://shadows.com
7. http://spurl.net
8. http://netvouz.net
9. http://lightninghotprofits.com/SocialBookmarkRolodex.pdf
10. http://lightninghotprofits.com/176BlogTraffic.pdf (This contains 176 Blog Directories you can submit your blog to.)
The sites above will hasten your attracting Googles spyders to your new blog and will get you indexed faster than normal. I don't need to say how important that will be in getting targeted traffic to your blog. But I guess I just did.
You will of course want to submit your blog to the Top 10 Search engines. Doing this every 30 days or so will certainly be beneficial to a solid marketing plan.
Don't forget to consider placing some sort of contextual advertising on your main blog page. Whether it be in the form of adsense, yahoo, 7search, etc. These can bring you much needed revenue in the begining growing over time.
Whatever you decide to do with your blog I hope I've supplied you with some food for thought as well as some tools for you to get started. The Social Bookmark sites, blog directories and the Top 10 Search engine submissions will almost guarantee attracting readers to your blog and if you supply them with relevant and unique content, word of mouth can most assuredly spread like wildfire.
Good Luck with your new blog!
and Happy Blogging!
