Building Your Credibility and Income with Blogs

In the past few months, I have published many articles relating to blogs:

• Choosing the right blogging platform for your business
• To have a strategy to use your blog as a marketing tool
• Best Practices for your Business Blog
• How to create a Content marketing strategy for your blog
• and many more…

Today I want to share how blogs can help you build your income. Most businesses, large and small, have websites. It used to be sufficient to have a website as your only online presence, but nowadays you need more.  You need new media, like a blog and social media tools integrated with your marketing plan. If your potential customers cannot find you online, you may just as well not exist for them.

Blogs are a fantastic way to make money.  They perform well in search engines, they’re easy to promote, and they can offer very sticky content.  If you blog often, and you’re good at what you do, you could develop a pretty large following of readers who subscribe to your RSS feed and read your content on a daily basis.

One of the biggest keys to success with blogs is posting in them regularly.  Posting frequently also keeps your content fresh, and search engines love fresh content.  The more often you post, the more often the spiders will visit your site.  And every time you post, you can ping your site at the various ping locations.  This can also bring in more traffic.

Another major key to blog success is creating sticky content.  This means you have to write posts that people will actually be interested in reading.  Offer content that is related to your industry and that is particularly useful for your readers.

Blogs are great for people who sell services.  If you’re a graphics designer or writer, having a blog is a good way to keep in touch with your clients.  You can offer updates on your schedule and availability, current prices and special offers, and when you’ll be taking some time off.  You can also post samples of your latest work.

People also tend to follow blogs more carefully than websites.  If you’re going to start a blog, you need to be prepared to commit yourself to growing the blog, posting often, keeping it updated, and not giving up on it.

Blogs offer multiple selling opportunities – from text links woven throughout the content to image ads like banners you strategically place in between blog posts.  The sidebar can also be utilized as affiliate or direct sales revenue space. See an example of such a WordPress theme, called Multiple Income Streams Blog Theme.

Make sure you take the time to transfer your blog over to your own domain instead of hosting it within the blogging community. This makes it more professional to the person who lands on your website and lends credibility to your efforts as a thought leader.

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