Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

I was asked this question not too long ago and I really couldn’t give much of an answer because I was very new to blogging. I remember when I installed wordpress on my server about a year ago and thinking what the heck, am I supposed to do with this thing. I had no idea what a blog was or what it was for. Needless to say I deleted wordpress and went back to my familiar html website where online life was easy to understand.

About 3 months ago I reinstalled wordpress back on my server and imported all of the information that I already had on my html based website into my new blog website. One thing that I had to my advantage that most people don’t have starting out was quite a bit of content. Most start with nothing and have to build their blogs from scratch. I only needed to pick up where I had left off. That’s a big advantage considering that a blog is a content based website.

A blog can be a very powerful marketing tool and there are quite a few things that happen with a blog that I would never have expected in the beginning. Here’s the biggest value that I found in having a blog and the advantage it provides

The biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that I’ve gotten quite a bit of traffic from the search engines for unintended keyword phrases. For example, I have been found on Google for the keyword ‘paidsurveyprogram’. That’s not a misspelling. That’s how the keyword was searched. The funny thing about it is that I have been found many times from different search engines for this exact keyword. The thing is that I have never written, nor do I promote anything about paid survey programs on this blog. I was found because one of my readers commented about a survey program that she had to pay for. That is the only reference to pay survey program on this blog. Google found me through that keyword because someone simply commented about it.

I wrote a nothing post about the fall of the gurus manual and it certainly wasn’t one of my better posts but I am found through all of the major, and smaller, search engines for the keyword phrase, ‘fall of the gurus’. I have gotten hundreds of clicks with that one keyword phrase which was not my intention when I wrote that post.

You may be thinking that those are not targeted clicks. I thought that myself, at first. I have changed my mind on that because while those keywords have nothing to do with the content on this blog it did drive a lot of people who do want to learn about marketing on the Internet. I know that because many of those clicks stayed here for long periods of time and many come back over and over again. While neither of those keywords is targeted, the results are the same as if they were. There have been many other instances as well. The two that I mention here are the most prominent.

Commenting on other blogs is not only a great way to get incoming links to your own blog, it’s also a great way to make some contacts with other like minded bloggers that in return can get your blog mentioned on their blog not to mention the traffic that it will drive to you as well.

I could go on about this forever but I think you get the idea. The bottom line is, the biggest value of a blog is that it is a mean, lean, content driven, traffic machine.

The nicest thing about having a blog is that you can do so many things to help make it successful. Here are 5 that you should do from the very beginning to get your blog going in the right direction. The five tips here are what all bloggers should be doing. I’m surprised at how many don’t.

1. I know that this may sound obvious but I want to remind everyone of its importance. I have been to so many blogs that really have a lack of this that I feel that it needs to be said.

Your blog should have lots of good quality content. You need to have a fair amount of written content on your blog before anyone ever sees it. If you send people to your blog and it has just one or two posts on it you can bet that those visitors will never come back. The last thing that you want to do is send people to a blog and have nothing to read. What good is a blog without content.

2. Register your blog with technoratti and make sure that you claim it after registering it. Technoratti is a great tool for any blog because they will notify the search engines by pinging them when your blog has been updated. You will also get some decent traffic directly from their site as well. Bloggers are always looking for new sources of information and a lot of bloggers do run searches on technoratti.

3. Blog often. The more you blog the more people you will attract to your blog site. I try to blog everyday. It doesn’t always work out that way but for the most part I do post on a daily basis. If you can blog every day or even several times a day you will get much better results than if you only blogged occasionally.

4. Post on as many like minded blog sites as you possibly can. I try to post on blog sites that are highly ranked because higher ranked blogs will have a higher volume of traffic. Other blog sites can drive some immediate traffic to your blog.

I’ve noticed that a lot of bloggers use cutesy screen names. I prefer not to do that. To me it’s better for people to know you by name because that’s what you are trying to do when posting to other blogs, is to make a name for yourself along with your blog. How are people going to know who you are if you don’t tell them?

5. Get as many back links to your blog as you possibly can. There are so many ways that you can do this for free. Posting to other blog sites would be one, submit to free directories, and submit articles to article sites, just to mention a few.

The more inbound links that you get to your blog the more people it will drive to your blog not to mention that it will help you rank better with the search engines and in turn send even more traffic your way.

The nice thing about a blog is that it is a pretty informal place for people to go and read whatever it is that is written there. Because a blog is setup to be like a personal journal and is as easy to use as a journal, many new webmasters are attracted to the idea of starting up a blog site opposed to a more traditional website. Blog sites have become a very popular place for Internet surfers to go because they are usually more entertaining.

Because a blog interacts with it’s visitors by allowing them to leave comments or an opinion on any given post, gives the blog a personal touch. A blog helps make people feel like they are part of the something instead of just being a reader. I’m sure that there have been times that you wished that you could reply to something that you have read on a website but the site didn’t allow for it. Well, most blogs allow people to do this. As long as people are not using the blog to spam it, the blog owners usually welcome any and all comments from his or her readers.

Because the reader needs to leave his or her information in order comment, adds to the feeling of a blog being a place where everyone knows one another. Because the blog owner can interact with his or her readers through the comments that people leave on the blog site makes it a more familiar place for people to visit.

A blog is a more informal place than a normal website. Make sure that you write in a way that is informal. Talk to people and not at them. Respond to any comments that require a response. Don’t ignore your visitor’s comments because you will drive them away if you do. Don’t be afraid to use the smiley’s that come with your blog software. Using smiley’s will add to the informal nature that a blog offers. Just make sure that you don’t over use them and use them only when your content calls for one.

The commenting feature is a really nice tool for the visitor and the blog owner because it allows the visitor to ask a question about a certain post that he or she may not understand which actually makes your blog a built in customer service.

Hopefully, you can see the value that a blog has to offer. The built in features that a blog has should keep your visitors coming back and staying longer than they would on a traditional website and will give you a better chance of making money if your blog is a commercial blog site.

If you are using wordpress or are planning on installing wordpress sometime in the near future, here are some great plugins that you may not know about that will help make your wordpress blog more powerful and user friendly. I will give you a short overview of what each plugin does but I won’t give you any instructions on how to install or configure the plugins. You can download or view the documentation from each of the respective plugin websites.

User Sitemap Generator

The user sitemap generator plugin is a human viewable map of all the posts and pages that you have on your blog site. When the user clicks on the sitemap link on your blog, he or she will get a list of links of all of the posts and pages on your blog site. If you want to see what the installed sitemap looks like, you can click the sitemap link on the sidebar, under “Highlights”. This plugin is available here. user-sitemap generator:

Google Sitemap Generator

The google sitemap generator plugin is a map that allows the google spider to find all of the posts and pages when it crawls your blog. Simply put, it is a sitemap for the google robot. google sitemap generator:

Spam Karma2

Spam karma2 is a plugin that prevents users from spamming your blog through the comments system in wordpress. You really should install this plugin, otherwise you could end up with a blog full of adverts instead of content rich information. Without it, you could find yourself constantly deleting spam comments on your blog. comment spam filter:

New Visitor Invitation

The new visitor invitation plugin will display a message on your blog the first time a visitor comes to your blog inviting him or her to subscribe to your email alerts, or RSS feed. This message will be invisible to return visitors. This plugin is a great way to remind your first time visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. new-visitor invitation:

FeedBurner Plugin

The feedburner plugin detects and sends all of your traffic information to feedburner and will detect all ways to access your feed so that you can track all of your subscribers. This is a plugin that you really should install. You can get more information about feedburner from the feedburner site. http://feedburner.com and you can get the plugin here.
feedburner (RSS tracking):

Mighty AdSense

Mighty AdSense is a plugin that will automatically insert your adsense ads in your posts and on your blog pages so that you don’t have to copy and paste your adsense code every time you post to your blog. The plugin will insert it for you. The nice thing about this plugin is that you have the option of displaying your adsense ads where you want them to show on your blog pages. This is a must plugin if you have adsense ads on your blog. You can get Mighty AdSense: here.

StatCounter for WordPress

StatCounter is a must have plugin. This plugin is installed to your wordpress blog and sends your stats to an outside source where all of the stats for your blog will be kept. You will need to register a free account with statcounter. You will have to read all of your stats from statcounter. Simply login, to your statcounter account to get your stats. This is an excellent tool that allows you to see where your visitors are coming from, how long they are staying, whether they are returning visitors or not, and way more statistical information than I can tell here in this post.
StatCounter for WordPress:

All of the above plugins are open source and are free of charge. These plugins will make it easier to manage your wordpress blog and will allow you to see first hand how your blog is performing.

If you want to keep your visitors coming back to your blog on a regular basis you have to keep it updated with new posts. How often you post to your blog is really up to you. However often you decide to post to your blog be consistent with it. For example, if you decide to post three times a week to your blog and do it on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you should post on these days every week because that’s what your visitors will expect you to do. Be consistent. Don’t change up on the days that you post.

The more often you post the better. To me it is better to post something everyday because it will get you return visitors everyday to see what you have posted for them. The more often your visitors come to your blog site the better the chances of you converting them to paying customers. I know that it is more work to post everyday but the rewards far outweigh the additional work.

Don’t post a bunch of garbage on your blog. Post quality, helpful, information that is relevant to what your blog is about. Keep your categories and your posts related to your original blog. That’s what your visitors came to your blog for in the first place. Don’t post something that will keep them from coming back.

So start blogging on a consistent basis and you will have a growing number of newcomers as well as return visits to your blog. The more you blog, the better you’ll do.

If you are new to Internet marketing or don’t want to mess around with html, a blog site is probably a better way to go. Blog is short for weblog. A blog is a journal where people can write down their thoughts and publicize them on the web for everyone to see. Blog websites were used as private journals in the beginning. When Internet marketers saw how much traffic these blog sites were getting many got onboard and started using blogs to promote their products. There still are a lot of private blogs on the net but there are more and more commercial blogs running on the Internet everyday. If you want to know what a blog looks like, you need not look any further. You are reading this post from a blog site.

If you have a lot of content or are planning to have a lot of content on your website, setting up a blog is the best way to go because you won’t have to write any html code for your web pages which will save you time that you can spend on writing the content for your website. Blogs are especially good for people who don’t know html at all because using blog software doesn’t require any knowledge of html or php code at all. The blog will write it for you.

You add your content to the blog from the admin in the form of a post. The nice thing about blog sites are that members of your blog can comment on any of your posts which will add free content to your blog site without any required work from you at all. Content is the name of the game. The more content that you have on your blog website will drive more traffic to you. Blogs were created with adding content in mind and can handle your content much easier and better than any html based website can. A blog site will help you organize your content by allowing the admin to categorize the content by topic. If you look to the right on the sidebar of this blog you will see a list of categories. This post is under the blogging category on this site. Having your content organized by category will make it easier for the search engines to list you and for web searchers to find you.

There are many plugins available that can be downloaded to perform specific tasks for your blog. You will want to download some of them because they will be very important to your online business. There are many themes that you can download so that you give your blog the look that you want. Changing a theme is just a matter of selecting the one that you want to use from the blog admin and submitting the change. Your theme will be dynamically changed immediately after submitting the change. What could be easier than that?

There are a couple of ways to start your own blog. There are hosts that will provide the blog for you for free. If you can host your own blog on your domain you would be better off doing so because you will have to abide by the rules on the hosted blog site which will limit you to what you can and cannot do. With your own hosted blog you’ll be able to run it the way you choose to. You make the rules, not someone else.

Wordpress is one of the best blog software. The great thing about wordpress is that it is open source. Most of their plugins and themes are open source as well. Wordpress is a very powerful software that is very easy to setup on your website and only takes about five minutes to install. If you are interested in getting wordpress for your website, you can get it here. http://wordpress.com

Here’s a hosted blog site if you’d rather have your blog hosted by someone else. http://blogger.com You can also run a search engine search to get a list of hosted blogs.