Blog's value for Business

At first glance, a blog is really just an online journal that displays a series of posts, displayed in chronological order. These posts are typically written in a conversational, informal tone, and don't contain any overt advertising messages.

So if you sell widgets on the Internet, why the heck do you need a blog? What value is it going to add to your business, aside from being one more thing to put on your "to-do" list?

Here are the two main reasons you need to have a blog as part of your online business:

1. Blogs add personality to your business!

The Internet is an extremely impersonal business medium, and any opportunity you get to give your business some personality will increase your sales.

Fact: People like to buy products from people (not machines!).

If you use a blog to give your business a "voice," your customers will get a better sense of who the guy or gal behind the business really is. That'll help you build a stronger relationship with your customers -- and that will improve your sales!

Just remember: Your blog should not be written in fancy business lingo! It should be extremely conversational and personal.

Your readers should feel as if you're speaking directly to them -- sharing personal stories, useful tidbits of information, your thoughts on new developments in the industry -- whatever your readers will find useful and informative.

Also, your blog posts don't have to be long articles! In fact, you'll be better off if they're not. Most popular bloggers keep their posts to 400-500 words maximum, and many of their posts are often much shorter.


2. Blogs help you get listed in Google quickly!

The 'Net's top search engines love sites that have new, original content being added on a regular basis -- and that means they LOVE blogs.

A properly optimized blog post can show up in Google's top 10 listings in less than 10 days!

Everyone in online business jump on every opportunity they come across to capitalize on free traffic from Google. You should, too. And right now, blog are one of the easiest ways to legitimately explode your free traffic numbers.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tips/ Strategies for Google

Why "submitting" your site to Google does NOT work!

If you go to www.Google.com/addurl, you'll find a nice little page where Google lets you submit your URL to be reviewed -- and if all goes well, you will be listed in their database under the keywords you've optimized your website for.

So it only seems logical to go to this page and submit your site when you want to get listed in Google's database, right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, "logic" and "Google" don't always go hand in hand. The fact is, if you optimize your website and submit it to Google, your chances of showing up in their database any time in the next century is slim to none!

However, all is not lost! There are some little-known SEO strategies that will help you get listed in Google as quickly as possible. And today I'm going to tell you what they are.

Now, for the following strategies to make sense, you need to shift the way you think about "Search Engine Submission."

In the past, all you needed to do was go to the search engine and fill out a submission form, then the search engine would send its "spiders" to your website to review your content and index it accordingly. That's how it still works for many of the smaller search engines -- but not for Google.

These days, in order to get your site listed in Google, you don't want to submit your website directly to Google. Instead, you want Google's spiders to "stumble" across your website on their travels through the Web.

But you don't have to sit back and wait helplessly for the spiders to come!

By putting links to your site on high-traffic web pages, you can make sure that Google finds your site in a matter of weeks -- instead of months.

This doesn't mean you should put your URL all over random websites on the Internet. In fact, if Google finds a link to your website on a web page that's using malicious SEO strategies, it can actually do you more harm than good.

So your goal is to find websites that have what in the SEO world is called "High Authority" and to get your site listed on their site.

What is the easiest way to identify a High Authority sites? Simple... PageRank. The higher the PageRank a site has, the more value you'll get from a link at that site.

Where do you find these elusive "High Authority" sites, so you can get yourself listed on them? Well, here are a few places to start: Submit your site to the top Web Directories

Google is constantly scanning the top Web directories to see what new sites they have listed. If they find your website in one of these directories, there's a good chance they'll add it to their own listings.

Google's assumption is simply that if a human reviewed your website and placed it in their directory, then it must be good.

Here are just a few of the top directories to start with:

Yahoo Directory
Best of the Web
Go Guides
DMOZ
Gimpsy


All of these directories (except DMOZ), do charge a submission fee, but it is typically money well spent.

Write quality articles and then submit them to the Web's top article directories

Just make sure you include a link that leads back to your own website. A great place to do this is in an "About the Author" blurb at end of the article.

The beauty of this strategy is, not only will you get a link pointing to your site from the article directory, if anyone decides to post your article on their site as well, you'll get even more links!

If you know of any high-traffic websites that are popular with your target market, you should contact them directly and offer to write an original article full of great content they can post on their site. Chances are they'll go for it -- most webmasters understand the value of regularly posting fresh new content on their sites!


Comment in popular industry forums and blogs

This is a great free way to get more links pointing back to your site. All you have to do is include a link to your site in your signature block, and then post away!

Note: Google doesn't take links in blog comments into account when it's determining your PageRank. However, its spiders will follow such links to see where they lead -- so if your primary goal is simply to get indexed by Google, this is an excellent strategy.

If you do these three things, you will dramatically increase your chance of getting your site listed in Google in as short a time as possible. You can even use these strategies to dramatically increasing the rankings of an existing website!

Once you have accomplished these three things, make sure you head to our exclusive Search Marketing Lab to get all of the other tips and strategies that are absolutely essential to your success in the search engines!