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You set up a blog for your business, but you don’t see any visible signs of it making you money. Could it be that it is earning its keep, but you just don’t see it? Here are some ways you can make money on your blog without promoting the competition:

• Search Engine Optimization - SEO is a form of payment. Whether you are increasing your page saturation with the search engines or driving up your PageRank with links, you are indeed paying yourself with SEO benefits. By capturing key phrases in the search engines for your important keywords, you are keeping your blog in the limelight for years. Keep blogging and benefits will be there. Just remember, SEO is payment.
• Sell Advertising - But not to your competition. If you look around on your blog you will likely find some real estate that is just sitting there not earning a dime. Maybe you sell that space to a partner, supplier, or other industry player that doesn’t compete with you directly.
• Pay Per Click Advertising - It can be Google AdSense, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or one of the other PPC providers such as AdBrite. Contextual advertising is here to stay. Instead of selling ad space to industry players, just put up some ads that will pay you by the click. This is less lucrative, but easier to set up and less work. But make sure that this isn’t the main focus of your blog. You still want to drive traffic to your website and close sales.
• Affiliate Programs - Join a few affiliate programs and place affiliate ads on your blog. Again, these shouldn’t be your primary focus, but it doesn’t hurt to capture exit traffic and make money on them. They’re leaving anyway, right? Why not capture them as they leave?
• Sell A Digital Product - Create an e-book or a podcast and sell it through your blog. This can be an additional offering that you make through your blog posts and in your sidebar.
• Promote Your E-zine or Newsletter - If you publish a newsletter or e-zine, place your opt-in box prominently on your blog. Then you can use your e-zine to sell and promote your products, services, and affiliates. This is highly effective.

Keep in mind that the primary purpose of your business blog is to drive traffic to your website to close the sale. Anything else you do may run the risk of diminishing that goal. It is usually best to limit the exit holes on your blog and focus on driving traffic where it will be most effective in closing sales. But it’s your blog.

We had a real estate agent as a client who was getting more leads from our daily blog posting on her blog than she’d ever received before. She stopped using our service because she said she wasn’t closing any sales. Hey, agent! That’s not my job. It’s your job. But if I can drive traffic to your website and make people pick up the phone to call you from your real estate blog then it’s the best marketing tool you can have.

This article explains it very well:

Do You Need a Real Estate Blog?

By Alyice Edrich

Every real estate agent should have his (or her) own website and with web hosting fees and domain registrations so affordable, there’s no reason not to “get with the times”. Websites are more than business cards or lead generators, they’re customer relation tools. By adding “search listings” or “featured listings” to your website, it becomes a dynamic tool that allows your customers to know firsthand what’s available on the market. And with the advanced technology of blogs, you can keep your customers informed without pestering them.

Blogs are social networks that work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They never close for holidays, vacations, or sick leave. And if it’s good enough, there will always be someone recommending you via a link exchange, a reference post, a forwarding email, and even word-of-mouth.

Realtors® are probably the slowest group of individuals to embrace the idea of blogging to generate leads, and who can blame them. We’ve all been taught to “get out there and sell”, “you’re not making money if you’re sitting behind your desk”, and finally, “person to person networking gains more leads than any other type of advertising and/or marketing method”. But times are changing and you need to change with them. People are growing more and more accustomed to “trusting” people they’ve only met on the Internet-which makes blogging a great lead generating tool!

And if that’s not enough to convince you to give blogging a try, think about this: People turn to the Internet before they open their telephone books, before they call 4-1-1, before they read their daily newspaper, and before they hit the bookstores.

Don’t you want to be the first person they see when they type in “your city, your state, real estate agent”? Don’t you want to earn their trust and gain their business?

Alyice Edrich is the author of Tid-Bits For Making Money With E-books. Learn how you can earn $10,000 a year or more selling information you already possess-from the comfort of your own home. Visit http://thedabblingmumpress.com to order a copy today!

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

Seriously, a blog can drive traffic to your real estate blog and increase your business. A blog isn’t used to close sales. It’s used to generate leads and communicate with the market place. Why not look into ways that you can use a real estate blog today, and join the ranks of the dozen real estate professionals we have as clients.

Blog marketing is really nothing new. It’s been hitting the mainstream pretty hard for the last two to three years, however. But we’ve still got years to go before we saturate the Web with too many blogs. Every minute a new blog is started and probably three times as many are abandoned. What can you do to make sure yours isn’t one of those left high and dry?

For starters, you need a plan. You need to define your blog’s purpose and hit it strong. Who is your target market? What do they want? And how will you move them to being customers?

While a blog is not the answer to every problem, it can become an integral part of your online marketing strategy. But you shouldn’t miracles. A blog is a pre-sales tool. It isn’t your primary closer and you shouldn’t expect it to be. A blog can, however, be used as an SEO tool as long as you don’t overdo and use it to spam the search engines with useless content. First and foremost, you’ve got to provide your human readers with valuable and helpful content. When you do that you increase your visitor count and you can drive traffic to your most important landing pages. But first you have to capture the traffic.

That’s where a professional writer comes in. To make sure your blog attracts traffic and drives traffic to your most important landing pages, you need an experienced blogger who understands SEO and sales strategies to get your blog to perform its mission. Do you have one your team?

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.

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.

Many small businesses and companies entering the blog marketing arena for the first time are a little bit confused about the purpose of blog marketing. While it possible, and we’ve had some success with it, that blogging can lead to sales, that is not the primary purpose for starting a company blog. Most consumers are not going to make a purchase from a blog. That’s not what they read blogs for.

Blog marketing can be seen as a lot of like TV and radio advertising. No one buys an ad on TV or radio expecting the ad to sell their product - that is, unless they are in mail order. Local businesses that have a service or product to sell - especially retailers - use TV and radio to drive consumers to their businesses, either in person or by phone call, to discuss business opportunities. That’s when the sale is made - in a face-to-face or voice-to-voice meeting over the phone.

Blogging is a lot like advertising on TV or radio. The purpose is not to close the sale right then. You really just want to spark enough interest in the consumer to drive them to your website and that’s where you’ll close the sale. So what needs to happen before that?

How A Blog Fits Into Your Sales Cycle
Successful companies build their sales funnel then chart their strategy for making sure the sales process is followed. Do you have your online sales funnel drawn out? If not, then isn’t it about time?

For most businesses, the company website is the place where the sale is going to be closed. If you have a local retail store then you might use your website to provide information to people in your community who will drive to your store to purchase an item, or they may place the order online and pick it up in person. You may want them to call you to place the order. That’s fine. Whatever your sales cycle is, you need to define it and make it work for you. But where should your blog fit in?

Your blog should be seen as a pre-sales tool. Whether you close the sale on your website, use the website to drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar store, or have your customer call you, you’ve got to get them to the website. A blog is a great tool for driving customers to the website. Here’s why:

1. Your website is a static tool that doesn’t change often
2. Your blog is updated every day, increasing your chances of getting your website crawled daily
3. A blog can be used to add new pages with fresh content to your website every day; that in turn brings the search engine spiders back to your website to crawl it more often
4. An off site blog can be used to build link popularity for your website, which in turn affects the search engine rankings and authority of your site within its niche
5. The longer you keep your blog running, the more effective you’ll be in gaining a loyal readership over time; that loyal readership can translate into increased links and traffic for your website
6. Your blog can drive targeted traffic to your site as the traffic to your blog increases

So, to boil it all down, your blog can be used for three overarching purposes:

• Search engine saturation
• Link popularity
• Traffic

And, of course, all of that translates into branding.

Two More Tools To Make Your Blog More Effective
Your blog fits into your overall sales funnel by being a conduit between the search engines and your website. As more and more websites compete for your key terms due to more and more businesses going online, adding a blog can give you an added advantage in your niche. New businesses entering your niche to compete are less likely to start a blog so you’ll be ahead of the game. Your blog can be most effective in achieving the three stated purposes above if you make it effective in these three areas:

• SEO
• Social Media Marketing
• Viral Marketing

We’ve talked about SEO - remember? Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity? - but what about social media and viral marketing? The key to social media is to use sites like Digg, Technorati, and StumbleUpon to reach traffic that you might not find through SEO. Plus, SEO and social media marketing reinforce each other. When fellow Stumblers and Diggers see your website in the search engines, they’ll recognize it because they’ve seen you on the social sites. Again, that’s branding. That’s why we offer the additional service of social bookmarking, to add to your edge.

Viral marketing is a bit different. Social bookmarking can be a part of that, and so can SEO. But viral marketing involves giving your customers a reason to do your marketing for you. One term that is used is customer evangelism. It’s a term that encompasses the idea of customers talking you up and driving traffic your way. One tool that is excellent for doing that is a newsletter. Some of our customers use a blog marketing newsletter to keep loyal readers. The newsletter goes out weekly and highlights that week’s blog posts so that busy professionals who don’t have time to stop by your blog every day and haven’t quite figured out the RSS thing (which is most small business people and new Internet consumers) can receive your newsletter in their e-mail inbox and visit the blog posts that interest them based on this unique viral marketing tool - and you can make it easy for them to share your newsletter with their friends!

So, you see, it’s all about your marketing funnel. If you have not added a blog to your sales cycle or you’re not quite sure what a blog can do for your company, find out more by paying a visit to Blog Content Provider or give us a call at 786-317-8774.

Our previous article post looked at 7 Reasons To Start A Blog and with this post I thought we could build on that list with these five uses to extend your online business.

1. Publish FAQ pages: A blog is a perfect place to publish FAQ pages. FAQ’s, or frequently asked questions can be a real waster. If you find yourself constantly answering the same group of questions then it is time to create a FAQ’s page that you can point customers to.
2. Publish Product How To pages: Internet users love how to pages. Whether it is how to use, how to maintain or how to upgrade, you will be surprised at how often these pages will be visited.
3. Publish Staff Profiles: If your business involves specialists then a staff profile page is an ideal way to introduce your customers to your staff. The profile page can be used to promote their skills by publishing their qualification, past work experience and career highlights.
4. Publish Branch Information: If you have more than one outlet then publishing branch information will save your customers time trying to find their nearest outlet.
5. Promote New Products: One of the most popular uses of blogs is to promote new products or services. You can include links to suppliers, branches and to staff members who may specialize in those products.

Why use a blog to publish this information when you could use your web pages to publish the same information? Web pages generally require knowledge of HTML or similar. Blogs require very little in the way of extra knowledge and have the added benefit of being quickly and easily updated.

Blogs are flexible, can be managed by any staff member and offer your customers the opportunity to provide feedback, even anonymously.

There is seldom just one way of doing something. But there are principles to blogging that can make your blogging experience more rewarding. First, you should keep in mind that your business blog is just that, a business blog. It is not a personal blog - unless you’re John Chow.

A business blog is not meant to be a personal journal. It’s OK to share some personal information with your readers if you want them to know you better, but you don’t have to discuss every aspect of your personal life. That could run into some safety issues for you if you get too personal. But the primary thing that makes a business blog a business blog is its emphasis on developing business relationships with your readers. You want your readers to view your blog as a relationship -building and pre-sales tool without it being a blatant advertising message through and through.

What that means is, you want to sell your products and services, but your blog doesn’t have to be a hard sales tool to be successful. In fact, it’s better if you use a soft sale. In other words, don’t stress closing the sale on your blog. Use the blog, instead, to drive traffic to your website where you’ll close the sale. While this isn’t the only strategy that you can use with your blog, studies show that it is the most effective. And I think you’ll see much better results.

Many a business owner starts a blog thinking it will catapult them to riches and glory. Understand that most people who makes purchases online don’t buy through blogs. That’s pretty significant, especially when you consider that most people who go online in the first place end up making their purchases off line. That’s a pretty established fact.

People read blogs for information. Then, if they are interested in a product or service and want more information, they’ll visit the blogger’s website. If they like your product they’ll either make a purchase or find the product at a local retail store. Affluent shoppers are more likely to purchase online. Given that information, it makes sense to write your blog toward a general audience with a slight lean toward the affluent segment. You want them to migrate over to your website and get more information on your product.

This is why the best strategy for your blog is to use it as an advertising or marketing tool, not a sales tool. It should be used much in the same way a television or radio is is used - to drive traffic to your retail front so shoppers can make their purchases their. Online, your retail front is your webite. The blog is your marketing mouthpiece. Therefore, most of your sales material should be on your website and your blog should be used as a pre-sales tool. It primary purpose is to drive traffic to your website, but I wouldn’t start that blog until your website is ready to take orders. Is your website there yet?

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