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More Advertising & Traffic | Article #14: BLOG ADVERTISING

Okay, let me start off by saying that blogs by themselves are not really advertising. You need to combine them with some other form to make them effective. But blogs as a tool to get people to either another site, or just to buy something right there and then, are excellent resources.

I made my first blog about 10 years ago before the word blog was even in the dictionary. It was my own personal online diary. I had no intentions of making it known to the outside world. I just put it up to say, hey, I have a site on the Internet.

But then something weird happened.

The blog was on members.aol.com. Well, it turns out that members of AOL can actually browse through site listings to see what's out there. I didn't realize that JUST by putting my site up, AOL knew it was there and included it in their directory listing. Anyway, one day, I got an email from another AOL member. He saw my site and complimented me on the design. It was really nothing, especially by today's standards. Anyway, we exchanges emails for a while until eventually he asked me if I would design a site for him. He said he knew nothing about HTML and was hoping I could help him. He even offered to pay me. I figured, what the heck. So I designed a 1 page site for him and charged him $10. He sent me a check.

Then I got to thinking. Maybe I could do web design for a living. So I took courses and yada, yada, yada, one thing led to another and I ended up doing web design for www.inetwebservices.com for about 2 years. Eventually I just couldn't handle the hassle with customers changing specs on you every 5 minutes so I gave it up. Point is, if it weren't for my little blog talking about my daily activities, I might have never thought of doing this.

Today, blogs are quite sophisticated. You have many blog services such as blogger.com, offering you some really nice looking templates. Or you can go with something like Wordpress. Point is, blogs are now popular, and with the pinging services like pingomatic and king ping, you can let the entire Internet population know about your blog in an instant.

The key is to make the most of it.

How?

Well, for starters, you can place articles on your blog about various subjects. At the end of each article you can maybe recommend a product or service that relates to the article itself.

For example, let's say you wrote an article on web design. You can then suggest good authoring tools that maybe have an affiliate program where you can get a commission for each sale you make.

Or, you can use your blog to simple post announcements of when content on another one of your sites has been updated. I do this with my blog here:

http://homebizhelpcenter.blogspot.com/

I don't give them the article here. I make it so that they have to go to the main site to see it. That way, they have to see all the other things at the site as well.

There are many other things you can do with blogs. We'll cover this a little more in depth in future articles, but for now, this should give you a few ideas.

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