As an Internet entrepreneur, you’re more than likely aware of the ability of blogs to increase the bottom line of your e-business. Most everyone who sells online, either their product or someone else’s, or runs a blog that they have monetized with ads from Google Adsense or some other source does some kind of blog advertising because it is free and eventually gets indexed by the search engines, especially when using Blogger.com blogs. However, there are a few ways that you can really use blogs to enhance your business online, and these tips can be used whether you are selling products on your own site or simply running your own monetized blog. The first thing you need to think about when generating new blog entries is “how do people know that I have any/new content available here?” Luckily, most blog servers and software automatically create RSS site feeds (in the form of a file called atom.xml) that can be sent to the many RSS feed servers available online. Think of it is an announcement to the world through Really Simple Syndication that an update has been made to your blog and everyone should come and check it out. These updates are then posted on thousands of other websites and seen by people who are watching the site feeds for up to date news. This benefits you in two ways: First, it gets automatic traffic flowing into your site (you posted your web address in your blog post, didn’t you?), and second many sites will carry your blog post creating one-way links to your web site. And just in case you don’t know, one way links are the most powerful types of links to have. However, doing so manually can be slow and extremely time consuming. There are many major RSS feeds available online, and posting your blog to each one each time can take forever. Fortunately, there is an easy way to automate it; a little piece of software called RSS Announcer. (http://www.easyrssannouncer.com) To use this software all you do is point it to the URL of your atom.xml file (which is created automatically with virtually all blog software and can be found in your setup), choose which RSS feeds you want to post to, and hit a button. The rest is taken care of for you automatically, and your blog posts are then syndicated across many thousands of web sites. Do you think that might make a difference in the number of visitors to your site? The next important part of running a blog is always having new and fresh content for visitors to check out. When someone comes to your site or your blog, you want them to keep coming back, and one of the best ways to do that is to constantly update content. The problem is that even the most prolific of writers can’t write more than one or two articles a day, and if you start running several blogs the amount of writing can quickly become overwhelming. I have run as many as 18 blogs at a single time and there’s no way I would ever be able to create enough new content to keep users coming back. This is especially important if your blogs are monetized with Adsense advertising. Let’s say, for instance, that you run a blog about Home Mortgages because it is a subject you know a lot about and are passionate about. In order to produce income you include Adsense on your site, and visitors to your blog read not only your content, but also see ads relating to Mortgages. Some of these visitors are going to click on your ads and generate income for you. In fact, if you’re really good, 20% or more of your visitors will click on an advertisement and put money in your pocket. Soon some money starts coming in and you decide to put up another blog about Refinancing. After a while the blog starts to take off, and more Adsense revenue starts rolling in. At some point, you will find yourself trying to run so many blogs that there is no way you can write enough content for each of them. Fortunately, there’s an answer for the problem as well. It comes in the form of a piece of software called RSStoBlog. (http://www.dimasenterprises.com/rsstoblog.html) RSStoBlog will automatically, on a schedule that you decide, post relevant content to your blogs either from News sources, RSS Feeds, or search engines. If you’re running a blog about Mortgages, instead of constantly writing new content for your blog, you can automate the posting of Mortgage information to your blog every day, several times a day. How does this benefit you as a blog owner? First, it relieves the burden of having to come up with so much original content by yourself. Second, it will send a “ping” to all the blog directories on every new post alerting them of new content at your blog. Third, if you are running a website relating to your blog, you can post the URL’s of different pages of your website in your blog content, and those pages will quickly be indexed by the various search engines. Have you seen those advertisements about “get your site indexed in 3 days for only $XX”? That’s how they do it: add your page to a blog and ping the directories. If you’re unfamiliar with this technique it is called Blogging and Pinging, and it is great for getting sites quickly indexed. RSStoBlog lets you do this quickly and easily. For all that it does, RSStoBlog is very under priced. It is definitely worth checking out if you are serious about marketing your websites or monetizing your blogs. The last problem I’d like to address is that of link building. We all know that one of the keys to a long term search engine optimization strategy is high quality link building. This can include reciprocal links, purchased one-way links with related web sites, or even free links with unrelated websites. Many search engine experts agree that having some links, even if they’re from sites totally unrelated to your own, are better than no links at all. Links to your site are like “votes” that the search engines see as your site containing real content. I assume that the people who run search engines feel that someone who takes time to build links to their site actually wants the site to stick around a while. However, as usual, link building can take a long time if it is not automated in some way. Now, you’re probably scratching your head and wondering “what does that last paragraph have to do with blogs?” Well, once again a piece of software comes to our rescue to automate our link building. It is called Blog Link Generator (http://www.cheapbloglinkgenerator.com), and can be used to quickly create hundreds or thousands of one-way links from blogs relating to your website (or even your own blog). It does this by searching for blogs relating to keywords that you input, and automatically posting to those blogs with a message from you and a link to your website. Let’s say, for example, that you have a website or blog about Car Insurance. You enter the keywords “car insurance” into the software, and it will search through many thousands of blogs relating to car insurance and on each of those blogs post a message from you saying something like “I really enjoy car insurance blog. I have a website relating to car insurance you may find interesting at http://www.whateversite.com. Please come and visit when you have a chance.” This is a piece of software you can use as little or as much as you want. There is no shortage of blogs on just about any topic imaginable, so creating one-way links to your site or blog on nearly any subject becomes extremely easy. Believe me when I say that you will quit before the software does. So as you can see, there are several ways you can add to the power of blogs to bring more revenue to your e-business. Whether it is getting more people to know about your site or simply automating tasks that would normally consume too much time, software products are available to free up that time so you can get to the business of doing more business. Suggested Resources: http://www.cheapbloglinkgenerator.com http://www.dimasenterprises.com/rsstoblog.html http://www.easyrssannouncer.com Yours in Success, Peter Dimas