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If you are blogger then you no doubt include an RSS feed of all your posts. If not - you should and while you’re at it, include an option to receive the feed via email. Once you have your RSS feed in place, don’t waste it - put it to work for you.

Your RSS feed can offer a lot of opportunities to increase the value of your blog - to both your readers and your self.

If you are looking to monetize your site, including advertisements in your RSS feed is fairly easy to setup. If you use Feedburner then you can include Adsense ad units in your feeds. An alternative, particularly as your blog becomes popular, is to sell advertising space on the feed. You may never make a fortune from advertising on your RSS feed, but every dollar helps.

Aside from advertising, your RSS feed is a terrific opportunity to promote your blog. In this day and age your RSS subscribers will be continually dropping off with new subscribers joining every day. Including links to related articles may encourage those new readers to visit some of your older posts. If they like the content and find it helpful, you may even earn a link or two to that post.

One of the most important additions to an RSS feed is a copyright notice. You can include your name, the name of the website or blog and any other relevant information. If your content does get scrapped, this information, including a link back to your site, gets scrapped as well. Search engine spiders will see this information and often classify the scraped post as duplicate and not return it in search engine results. One way to thwart scrapers and protect your content.

If you create e-books or have products of your own for sale, the footer of your RSS feed can be an ideal place to promote them. Ensure the promotion has a clickable link through to more information on the e-book or products to make it easy for your readers to take action. This may increase sales more than any other single activity - and its free promotion.

RSS feeds are very popular. If you have 100 subscribers to your feed, you have an audience of 100 to promote your blog, your products or services, or the products and services of others. Use your RSS feed wisely without abusing it and your readers will welcome some of the changes. In the meantime, your blog is receiving free promotions - more so if you submit your feed to the RSS feed submission sites.

Let us help you with your blog configuration to ensure maximum results

It’s important to keep traffic flowing to your blog. Traffic is what makes you money. Without traffic you are simply writing into a vacuum.

But a blog doesn’t necessarily have to be the place where you close the sale. You want to talk to people, if possible. Or at least get them to visit your web site. A blog post is really about getting them interested in you. Then, you and your sales team can close the sale.
We had a real estate agent who let us write her blog for a while then she left because we didn’t make her any sales. But she did tell us that we sent her more traffic to her web site than anything else she’d ever done. Still, she was disappointed that we didn’t close any sales. Sorry. That’s not our job. Our job is to drive traffic to your web site so that you can close the sale.

That’s not to say that we won’t ever close sales with blogs. Sometimes we do. But we don’t make that our primary effort because most people prefer to speak to someone and visit a website before they buy something. Especially in real estate. People aren’t going to buy a house from a blog.

So keep your expectations realistic. And keep in mind these 5 ways that you can drive traffic to your blog so that you can get their attention and close the sale:

1. Search Engine Optimization - There is no substitute for SEO. Have a list of keywords that are important to your business and use those keywords in your blog posts. Link to your website pages in your sidebar using those keywords.
2. Social Bookmarking - Pick some popular social bookmarking sites and make friends. Bookmark your blog posts and bookmark your friends’ blog posts. Be a social butterfly. It works.
3. RSS Feed - Set up an RSS feed for your blog and invite your readers to subscribe.
4. Use A Blog Promotion Newsletter - Not everyone understands RSS. But they will read your blog from an e-mail or newsletter. Offer them one. For free.
5. Write Articles - Articles are a great way to drive traffic to any website, even a blog. Write articles and include your blog’s URL in your author resource box.

There is a lot of advice online. Most of it is bad.

I, for instance, was reading an article today and one article writer suggested that bloggers should “hide” their AdSense ads. Not a good idea. This is against Google’s guidelines. You don’t want to hide your AdSense ads. You can play around with sizes and colors to see which ones work best for you. But don’t get too crazy with hiding them and camouflaging them. Tricking people to click is not good. You’ll lose your credibility.

That’s just one example. Here’s a point of fact: Most bloggers are not making money. If they were they wouldn’t be looking for work. I received an application just the other day from someone who has a website on which they sell one of those “Let me tell you how to get rich online” books. Why would she be looking for a job as a blogger if she knew enough about online marketing to sell how-to books on the subject? I didn’t hire her.

When it comes to blogging and online marketing, don’t believe everything you read. Not all advice is good.

If you check your blogs statistics you can see whether or not your content is holding your readers attention. If you have a high bounce rate and a low page read, your not selling your content and quick glance doesn’t hold their attention.

Your blog should be set up in such a way that a reader can quickly see what is on offer. Most visitors scan and if the scanning shows value, they will either bookmark to come back later, or settle back and start reading. The key to catching their attentions is a simple as black and white.

White Space

The first key is white space - not plenty of it, but carefully balanced. The idea of white space is to enable the important information to stand out, particularly paragraph headings. White space around graphics can also be important. To get white space around your graphics, include the vspace=”x” and hspace=”x” at the end of the graphics code: the number in brackets represents pixels. For example, your code may look like the following (I have omitted the opening and closing < >)

img src=”http://yourimageurl.jpg” alt=”suitable alt tag” align=”alignment” vspace=”10″ hspace=”10″

That code will place a white space of 10 pixels around your image.

Black Space

Black space of course is your text. You need to highlight the important sections, such as paragraph heading by using bold or a strong color. If there is sufficient white space, the ‘black’ section should stand out. Another example of using ‘black’ within whitespace is by using bullets or numbering. These work particularly well for short sentences as their use creates plenty of white space.

The use of black and white space has been a technique used successfully over the years by marketing consultants, particularly when it comes to flyers and business cards. Used carefully, a quick scan of your content should be enough to sell the opportunity to stop and read. Let us check out your white space with a free blog consultation.

When it comes to business blogging, or commercial blogging, it’s not the same thing as personal blogging or blogging to make money. You are blogging to make money, but you are not trying to squeeze out revenue from your blog. You are using your blog as a marketing tool to lead people to your website so that you can close the sale and make money on your products and services. Your blog is the lead generator; your website is the salesman.

So what does your lead generation blog need in order to do its job well? Here are the three absolutely essential ingredients to make sure your company blog stands out and drives traffic to your website:

1. Quality, original content - Every day. We’re not talking about private label rights or recycled eye candy. Graphics are nice, but content is better. Eat a meal and not just a snack! Take your company talking points and turn them into a blog by getting into a real conversation with your customers about their needs and your desire to fill a niche within the marketplace. It all starts with quality, original content.
2. Links - You need to link to your website. Not just the home page either. I’m talking about real links to every page that is important on your website. And your links need to be in the body of your blog posts as well as in your sidebar blogroll. Take your important keywords and turn them into anchor text and link to each page on your website using the appropriate anchor text.
3. The right template - It can be custom-made, but it doesn’t have to be. An off-the-shelf template works just as well as long as it is SEOd properly. Your blog template needs to be crawlable so making sure that the code in your template makes it easy for the search engines to find what they need is absolutely essential. Your blog template must be able to attract a reader’s eye quickly and not drive them away, so attractiveness is important but even an ugly template with the right SEO will get you the traffic you are looking for. When it comes to getting ranked in the search engines, SEO is far more important than being pretty.

These are the three most essential elements to a successful company blog. Other things are nice, but without these three things going for you, you might as well hang it up. Everything else is gravy.

The most successful blogs are those that are able to create a sense of anticipation; a desire to come back and read more. There are many ways to achieve this and in today’s post I would like to highlight three effective ways to create that anticipation.

• Controversy:
  If your blog is often controversial then readers will come back just to read and perhaps participate in a controversial debate. The key to being controversial is finding story lines that are current, will have a ‘life’ and can be written without being too offensive - blog writers can/have/will be sued. People often appreciate debates and will often appreciate a controversial spin on a topic simply because they agree with you, but have not been willing to put pen to paper on the topic.
• Series:
  Writing a post that extends of several days can be a great way to create anticipate on your blog. Obviously the content needs to be on a topic and of a standard that fulfills a readers needs. ‘How to’ type posts can fit this category quite well particularly if the concepts involved require time and practice before moving onto the next steps.
• Promoting:
  Write today for tomorrow. If you are able to plan your posts you can use a magazine style of promotion. By writing today for tomorrow, when you publish today’s post, you already have tomorrow’s post written and saved. Before publishing today’s post, add a short preview to tomorrow’s post to the end. Readers can then see what is coming tomorrow. This can be very effective in bringing readers back.

There is no reason why you cannot use two or three of the above techniques at once. The third tip can also help with your blog SEO as you can go back and turn the preview into a link once the preview’s post has been published. This will also help readers find that post a later date.

Creating anticipation is one of the most powerful tools in your armory for delivery repeat traffic to your blog. If you are able to capitalize on it you will find an ever growing legion of loyal return visitors.

I see blogs every day that simply copy posts from other blogs and link back to them. Some blogs are just lists of links to other blogs and that’s it. Do these blogs do well in the search engines? Generally, no. There’s no original content.

These blogs mostly rely on traffic from other, more popular, blogs in the form of trackback links. They copy your posts and link back to it as a trackback hoping that you’ll approve their comment and your readers will click the comment link and visit their blog. They then sell advertising using traffic numbers gained from these trackbacks. Sometimes they slap AdSense ads on the blogs and hope to scrape a few bucks that way. Is this ethical?

Probably not, but even more important than the ethical issue is the business model. If the company can make more than $10 on AdSense or ad revenues then they’ve run a profitable business. Many of them do. That’s why they do it. But all they really do is scrape a few dollars over the course of a year. Imagine selling a $50 ad to a handful of businesses over the course of a single year. Payout = $10; income = $100 or more. Not much, but if you do that enough times then you’ll have a decent income just from scraping other people’s content. And you can do that with no rankings.

But why would you? If you’re lazy, OK, it’s a lazy way to steady income. But don’t count on anyone ever really doing business with you if you are trying to run a legitimate business. If you use these lazy tactics and word gets out about it then your customers will not want to do business with you. Short term gains = long term credibility issues.

Legitimate businesses trying to run legitimate blogs need to have original content in their blog posts. Write about important issues facing your industry. Attract real traffic within your niche. Don’t play games with other people’s content.

I titled this ‘generate and write’ as there is a difference between the two. Generating is the art of finding a topic and developing the content. Writing is the final act of putting onto paper what you have generated. So how do you ‘generate and write’ good content? Here are a few keys:

1. Enjoy what you are doing.
   There is nothing worse than sitting down to try and come up with a post when your heart is not in it. You are better off walking away for awhile and coming back when you are ready to start. If your heart isn’t in it - it will show when you do finally come to write the content.
2. Prior knowledge is gold.
   Select topics or subject areas that you have a reasonably working knowledge of. Research is much easier and your knowledge of the subject matter will shine through when you do write your post. Using prior knowledge often means you can sit down and plan an article in minutes rather than hours.
3. Experience.
   If prior knowledge is gold then experience is the diamond in the crown. You can generate so much content just from your experiences in a particular field. Putting together a ‘how to’ article is so much easier when you have actually gone through the process yourself.
4. Research.
   The final key. If you are generating content from experience or prior knowledge then the research part becomes so much easier. You know what you are looking for and more importantly, you will know when you have found it - your not floundering around in the dark trying to find answers that ‘might sound good’.

It all comes back to point number one. If you generate and then write content based on what you already know, the research comes easily, and you enjoyment level rises and the results flow through to your writing. If you are trying to generate content in an area that you are not familiar with, you find frustration creeping in and with it a dislike of the process. It all becomes a chore and, believe it not, that mindset makes the job harder and eventually flows through to the writing.

Generating and writing good content should flow easily from the mind through to the keyboard and onto the page. If it doesn’t flow naturally or if every word has to be dragged out then perhaps you need to go back to square one and find a more suitable topic.

The secret is out: Trackbacks make great links. And it’s a really simple thing. Someone writes a blog post that you like and you respond on your own blog. If you use WordPress, you can copy the permalink of the blog post that you are responding to in the trackback field below the Write Post field. Your blog post will appear as a comment on the other blogger’s software Admin panel. They can approve or reject it. If they approve your trackback then your blog post will appear as a comment on their blog post, giving you a reciprocal link. If they reject your comment then you will be providing their blog with a one-way link and no reciprocal link love. Should you ever do that?

You bet. Keep in mind that one-way links are more valuable than reciprocal links, especially from relevant sites. It is considered tacky to reject trackbacks just because you want that highly coveted one-way back link. The content that appears in your comments is important too, for several reasons. But that doesn’t mean you should approve every trackback. There are times when you’d want to say “No” to that trackback. When are they?

You might reject a trackback for the following reasons:

• The comment is from a known spam site - If you know that a particular site is a known spam site, even if their trackback seems legitimate, then you might not want to approve their trackback comment.
• The trackback itself appears to be a form of spam and not really a true comment - Sometimes legitimate bloggers are guilty of spam too. It might be inadvertent or blatant. Either way, you have readers to protect.
• You are being linked to from a site whose mission and purpose you don’t agree with entirely - You have to be careful with this one. Just because you don’t agree with what they are doing doesn’t mean that everyone will disagree or that their business model is a bad one. But if it is obvious that what the blogger is doing is unethical or illegal then you shouldn’t promote it.
• The site is a non-relevant site and you don’t want to lose your blog readers to a non-relevant site - Sometimes you’ll get a link from a non-relevant site and you just don’t want to lose your visitors to that site.
• The blogger linking to you links to you too often - Some bloggers just overdo a good thing.
• The trackback is inconsistent with your comment policy - If you have a comment policy and a trackback blatantly is in violation, don’t make an exception just because it’s a trackback.
• The trackback is from a site that exists primarily for advertising - If the only content on a blog or website linking to you is advertising, other than content that you created, then don’t link back to them; this is just like spam.
• The site is a malware or warez site - Don’t send your readers anywhere you wouldn’t want to go.

These may not be the only reasons you’d want to reject a trackback comment, but these are good reasons not to keep those trackback comments alive on your site. You have readers to protect, so protect them. And protect your own reputation as well.

Sometimes it helps to have someone else say it. I recently found a great article on blogging and use your blog to generate leads. This coincides with an earlier blog post I wrote on the same subject.

This is an article by David Hugh that confirms our own philosophy regarding blogging and sales:

How to Use Blogs - Blogging to Generate Leads For Your Home Business - Network Marketing?

By David Hugh

Blogs can be a terrific source for leads for your home business &/or mlm business. Here is how you could do that. First of all, you can add a sign up form on the side bar of your blog to collect the name and email address of your blog visitor. You could offer a free report or ebook or something of value in exchange for their contact information. Maybe your upline or the company you are an mlm distributor for has something for you to give away also.

The key point is you are trying to collect names for further follow-up and you can use your blog as a way to accomplish that. You would need an autoresponder too. This gives you a chance to deliver the free information you promised.

It also gives you the opportunity to follow up and present more useful information. This is called relationship building and is an essential part of building a successful mlm business and converting some of your subscribers into distributors. It has been said a person has to hear about something up to 11 times before they act on it.

So now you have the basics down about how you do it. Let’s go back and talk some more about blogging. You can successfully use your blog to talk about your home business &/or mlm business as well as other topics related to MLM as an industry, internet marketing, and other things related to home business and work at home.

Incorporating a strategy of offering free training and information is a great way to generate leads from your blog and the traffic you get to it. This is a very soft sell approach to giving first and receiving later.

Getting traffic to a blog is for another training article, but suffice it to say that you will need traffic. That means promoting your blog with every free, nearly free, and paid advertising method you can come up with and afford.

Generally setting up a Blogger.com is the fastest and easiest way to get a blog up and running. It is owned by Google and is very user friendly. For a little more comprehensive blogging platform look at setting up a hosting account and using WordPress. It offers many plugins that are very search engine friendly and make adding social bookmarking to your articles easy as well.

Because of the many benefits of blogging you should get one started and use it to generate leads and to build a mailing list for future new distributors as well. In addition, you may want to obtain an Autoresponder to automate your business via email marketing to bring your business to greater heights.

David Hugh is an expert internet marketer and writes on various topics of work from home business & home-based business. To get your secrets & tips for work from home business, visit: http://www.workfromhomessecret.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Hugh

Blogging is a good form of lead generation because it’s about building relationships. You don’t have to make every single blog post a knock-down world-changing event. The idea is to use it to build relationships with your target market and customers. Effective bloggers are consistent with their message and provide a place for people to go to build community and learn about a particular subject they are interested in. If you don’t have the time to write your blog yourself, you can always hire a ghostwriter. But it’s essential that you have a tool that helps you generate leads.