When blogging first started, it was mostly personal diaries and real weblogs that just kept people updated on things that were going on with a particular topic like the development of software.

Then the opinion blogs came right after that along with the bloggers who became citizen journalists like the Drudge Report.

Now companies have discovered how valuable blogs are as a way to communicate with employees, investors, current customers, and potential customers.

We know all those reasons to own a blog, but something that is not talked about much is how blogs can be used as an SEO tool.

Besides all of the other reasons to own a blog, here are some of the SEO reasons having a blog benefits you.

1. A blog in a folder within your website gives you the opportunity to add fresh new content to your website daily, bringing the search engines back to crawl your website more often and increasing your search engine saturation.

2. A blog on a separate domain name and c class IP block can help increase link popularity for your website by linking to different pages within your website from different blog posts.

3. The best reason to own a blog is that a blog can make you more sales. Every time you post to your blog, you have the chance to sell something. Either by including an affiliate link, using ppc, linking to your products pages, and by directly pitching your products and services to customers.

I may look at things differently than some of you, but from a commercial standpoint, every web page you build is an ad. Not your home on the web. Not your store on the web. Not your address on the web. Every page is simply an ad.

If you think about it, the Internet is the newest advertising medium. When radio came along people were slow to accept it as an advertising tool. When tv came along, advertisers were slow to catch on to that too. Compnies were also slow to catch on to the Internet as an advertising medium.

But even those who do know about Internet advertising, think only of buying links and banners on websites and using google adwords or other ppc programs as the forms of advertising that are available on the Internet.

Most do not really realize that the real ad is the webpage you are building. With organic SEO, you are distributing that ad to more people through the search engines. When you also buy ads or participate in ppc, you are really just paying to distribute your webpage ad to more people.

If that is the case, and each blog post you make becomes a webpage of its own, then every time you make a blog post you are creating an ad.

Now, before you protest, I said this applies to people who use the Internet commercially. People who are selling products and services. If you are a commercial entity, you need to be thinking of every page you build as an ad.

Now, that does not mean you cannot still be helpful and provide useful infomration to people for free. You do not have to build nothing but squeeze pages and landing pages that use a lot of hype and a strong, pushy sales pitch.

Subtly advertising your products and services in the sidebar and at the bottom of each post, while providing helpful information is one of the best sales methods there are. You are providing value to your readers for free. They will want to do business with you as a result.

So, when I say every blog post is a sales page, that does not mean you should write your blog as if you are a used car salesman. Just remember to structure your blog and the posts you make to give you a chance to also sell product. Those pages are found by searchers and you could be making sales.

If you have not done so, I suggest you upgrade to the newest version of wordpress. It doesn’t take too long and security fixes are always worth having.

Before you get started, make sure you meet the minimum requirements (http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/).

Instructions for upgrading your wordpress blog here

Might as well do it now. Don’t put it off until later or if you are like me, it will never get done. I just sent an email to my coder to get this done for me as I wrote this blog post.

If you have not read 10 Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Pageviews - Part 1 you should do that first.

6. Write once per week special projects. These are a series of articles on a particular topic. You will be offering it once per week giving readers a week to comment on it, then have them hanging on for next weeks special post in the series. Each time add links to previous posts in that series.

7. Using your content from your other websites or blogs is also a great way to get more pageviews for all of them. Use the target new tag and refer to material on your other blogs and websites. It will open a new window leaving the current blog open while they visit your other website or blog. You can quickly double up your pageviews while also introducing your readers to your other websites and blogs.

8. Make a list of 10 previous posts and the links to those posts. Make a post in your blog about 10 things you want your readers to know and read in case they have not done so before. At your suggestion they will at least go see if they have read those posts before, increasing your pageviews once again plus bringing old material to new readers. That also lets them know they should browse the archives for things they have missed.

9. Using that same list of 10 posts or a new one, visit other blogs on your topic. Find posts that talk about something similar to one of those 10 posts, then instead of adding a link in your signature to the home page, make a comment there and refer to the post that is similar and that contains helpful information to that blogger and their readers. You will also be increasing your link popularity while doing this. Do not spam the link. Make sure it actually contains useful information. Don’t be trolls or spammers and you will end up with new readers and more page views for your blog.

10. Do not stop being creative. Use the tips in this article, plus invent some of your own ways to interlink your blogposts together. Create pages. Don’t just post and forget. That content is valuable, use it. Do not make people search your blog. They are lazy and busy. Bring it to them. That is just good customer service.

I hope this helps you learn there is more to blogging than just writing a post once in awhile or even daily. If you employ the tips I just gave you into your blog I guarantee you will increase your pageviews which in turn will increase your revenue if using an ad program in your blog.

For those who were beginning to think that the lights were out and no one was home at the ODP, it turns out at least a lone blogger still lives there and has started the DMOZ Blog.

I have to see how long that lasts. So many people are disatisfied with DMOZ that the blog comments are going to be really rough. I hope they chose a blogger with a very thick skin!

Here is what they had to say about the rumors of their death.

With Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher, having people click onto more pages helps your revenue immensely, but how do you get them to read more than one page when they visit your website? Here are a few tips.

1. Create pages within the blog that contain reference material you refer to often in your posts. These static pages will also get crawled and indexed by the search engines and as you write posts about your topics you can refer people to these static pages as references to what you are posting about.

2. Use articles as static pages. You can reprint articles on any topic for free by visiting one of the many article directories like http://www.articlecontentprovider.com/articlesubmit/ Then refer people to read the articles that relate to the post you are making. You could even add one article as a new page every time you make a post.

3. Refer to other posts you have made on your blog or on another one of your blogs while posting. This gets the reader to click over to previous posts. You can even decide your posts by browsing previous posts and deciding which one to follow up on. Those archives are not to be lost and forgotten. Its great material, (you wrote it right?), so use it.

4. Create a page that links to your favorite posts that are timeless. You browse your old posts, find posts that you want readers to find easily, then build a links page with those posts directly linked. Then add a link to that page from your front page. Call it favorite posts or whatever and you will benefit by those that click through and follow those links.

5. I’ve posted before about the “more” tag. You write your post as normal, then decide where you want to break the post up onto a new page. You put the more tag in and readers have to click to a new page to read the rest of the story.

Part 2 tomorrow with the other 5 ways to increase your blog’s pageviews. So subscribe to our feed or bookmark us and come back for more tips on blogging.

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Have you tried the ddAddSig plugin for your wordpress blog? If not, you should. It’s like having css for your website. For those of you who have code they want to put into every blogpost, signature lines, links, etc., this wordpress plugin is essential.

Once you upload and activate the ddAddSig wordpress plugin , all you do is put the code and text you want at the bottom of each post into the text box which is found under options in the ddAddSig tab.

Every time you post to your blog the ddAddSig plugin adds the code and text you put there. It also adds it to all of the blog posts you have made previously.

The problem with that is that ddAddSig is going to add that to all the code and text you put into your previous posts, so if you have already added the same code before, it will be there twice.

This small inconvenience is far outweighed by the benefits of the wordpress ddAddSig plugin. Let’s say your phone number changes, you want to promote a new website you built, or your email address changed, etc.

What usually happens is that all of your present and future posts will have the correct information, but all of the old posts will not, unless you go back and edit every single one of them.

With the wordpress ddAddSig plugin, you only have to change it in that one text box for it to change throughout the entire blog.

For us the ddAddSig plugin has become standard in all wordpress blogs we own or manage.

I know feedburner has been around for a long time, but I just started using it on a couple of my blogs. I think feedburner is pretty amazing. The number of ways you can customize the feeds you offer allows you to reach more users and look more professional.

Feedburner makes it easy for subscribers to sign up and follow your blog. You can even monetize your feed through feedburner making it profitable as well.

You can add images to your feeds, summaries, widgets, affiliate ads, and more using feedburner. I just wish I had started using it a long time ago. But speaking of time, it takes about 30 minutes to set up, add it to your blog template, and customize all the options feedburner has for you to choose from.

I think feedburner is worth the time and effort and recommend you set up an account there as well.

Some people don’t really think of what they write into their blog as blog content. Most people who blog do it because they enjoy it. They write about their topic naturally and try to engage their readers. They do not worry so much about optimizing their blog posts for keywords.

This is perfectly okay. It all depends on what you are blogging for. If it is your personal blog of random thoughts and ideas, maybe you do not care about how well your blog ranks in the search engines.

But if you blog to make money, you are concerned about ranking well and this post is about optimizing your blog posts for the search engines.

I still dare anyone to prove to me that they know the exact percentage of text on a webpage or in a blog post that should be keywords. I don’t believe anyone other than a few google insiders could know that. They work for google and aren’t about to tell us.

Your first objective is to write content into your blog post that engages and interests your readers. Optimizing the content on your blog comes second to this. Getting a lot of people to visit your blog does no good if your blog content is obviously written more for the search spiders than for your readers.

The method I like to use is to first write my blog post for my readers. Then go back over it to try to catch all the misspelled words, reword what doesn’t sound good when I reread it, and to see if there are places I can insert my keywords without bordering on spam.

By doing this, the blog post is more natural. You will naturally use your keywords and keywords related to your topic by posting about your topic. If you just write each post with a key phrase in mind for that post, you will find ways to use it without going overboard with it.

Another thing on blog content. You can optimize each blog post for just one key phrase. Each blog post becomes a page. So each time you blog, you are creating one page that is optimized for that one key phrase. The next day, target a different key phrase, and so on and so on.

You will soon find you are optimizing your blog content while still remaining interesting to your readers. It becomes second nature.

The bottom line is that of course your readers come before seo, but you do not have to sacrifice quality blog content your readers will like in order to optimize your blog content.

Do you think that having a company blog is something you can put off until later when you have more time? Do you believe a blog has little effect on your sales conversions? Do you think a blog keeps visitors on your website longer? Do you believe having a company blog keeps people coming back to your website?

According to this study done by clicktracks.com, the answers in order from above are

1. No, you should not wait to start a company blog.
2. No, having a blog can have a major impact on your sales conversions.
3. Yes, vistors stay on your website longer.
4. Yes, a company blog keeps visitors coming back more often.

Any of those last three sound like a bad thing? As for number one, if you do not have time to blog, hire someone to do it for you. From the study;

LuckyOliver: To Blog or Not to Blog
Stock photography company LuckyOliver (www.luckyoliver.com) gives designers, small business owners, consultants and marketers an affordable resource for finding the perfect royalty-free image. With high-resolution images starting as low as $1, LuckyOliver offers a viable alternative to high priced stock photography and low-quality (or ‘copyright challenged’) free images.

In this startup organization, there was certainly no shortage of things to do—only a shortage of time to do them. Founder and chief instigator Bryan Zmijewski* had a hunch that one of the first things they should do after the site went live was to create and maintain a LuckyOliver blog. But with so many tasks on everyone’s to do lists, should blog activities—adding posts, replying to comments and encouraging interaction—be something that was treated as a priority? Bryan turned to ClickTracks to see if a corporate blog would be a good use of the company’s time.

There is that old “I don’t have time to blog thing again”. But wait, there’s more;

Dozens of Blog Posts, Zero Comments
“When we first started the blog, I encouraged all of the LuckyOliver staff to post, at least once or more a week. And they did—but after two weeks of posting, I found myself relatively alone on the blog. When I asked folks why they weren’t posting, they told me that they had other things to do and didn’t think anyone was reading the blog anyway. I think that the initial lack of comments was discouraging to them, so I had to figure out if the blog really was valuable, even if no one was actively commenting.”

No comments? Oh my goodness! No one is reading my blog! Sound familiar? For every person who comments on your blog, you need to figure there could be as many as 100 people reading the blog. We use to call them lurkers on forums. They come in everyday to read. They do not like to comment. It does not make those visitors less valuable. It also does not mean that your company blog is not helping you from an SEO standpoint either. So do not quit blogging just because you “think” no one is reading your blog.

Other things the study found;

1. Blog Increases Average Time on Site by 60%
2. Blog Readers are 22% More Likely To Sign Up for an Account

A visitor who saw the blog was 22% more likely to sign up for a LuckyOliver account than one who hadn’t. Additionally, the average time on site and number of page views for those newly signed up blog viewers was double that of the average visitor.

I would say the benefits of having a company blog far outweigh the time and/or money spent to maintain it. What do you think?

There are a ton of bloggers who have gotten into the habit of posting about what everyone else in the blogosphere is doing every single day.

Do you want to be the one that is reporting what other bloggers are doing on their blogs or do you want to be the one others are talking about on their blogs?

Be original. I’m not saying that you should never talk about things that are being written or done on other blogs. However, if the majority of your blog posts are about what other people are doing, you may want to rethink why you started a blog in the first place.

We all want our blogs to be successful. We all do blog marketing, blog pings, blog trackbacks, blog directory submissions, blog seo, etc. etc. etc. So we work hard to promote our own blogs.

Then why would we want to do all of that work just to send all of our readers elsewhere? Be the one doing something that people talk about on their blogs, not the one promoting everyone else.

Spend at least as much time planning original things you can do on your blog as you spend marketing your blog. Make it unique. Make it interesting. Get people involved in what you are doing. Invite guest bloggers. Do interviews. Add a bunch of pictures and videos. Come up with a whole new look and feel for your blog once in awhile.

Get people excited about things you are doing on your blog. Write your blog posts in such a way that you inspire people to do something. Motivate them. Make them Laugh. Make them Mad. Make them Sad. Make them Happy. Make them Love you. Make them Hate you.

Cause them to have an emotional response to your blog and they will keep coming back for more. It doesn’t matter which emotion you cause them to feel. It only matters that you make your readers feel SOMETHING!

The definitive way to make sales is to cause emotion by using emotional trigger words like love, hate, sad, angry, hate, etc. “Don’t you HATE when that happens?” Don’t you just LOVE this?” Doesn’t this make you ANGRY?” Good sales people will tell you these triggers do work.

It is no different if you want to cause a reaction from your blog readers. Use those triggers in your post. Be controversial. Have a call to action. In every blog post, ask or tell your readers to do something. Ask them to click a link, write their congressman, make a comment, buy a product, see a movie and come back and post a review, something, anything, but you need to have a call to action.

If you want a successful blog, you need to do the following;

1. Be original.
2. Cause a reaction or emotion in your blog posts.
3. Have a call to action in every post.
4. Be creative.
5. Don’t make too many posts about what others are doing. get them to post about what you are doing.

There are a lot more things that could be added to that list. And it does not aply to everyone. Some blogs may be setup exactly for the purpose of reporting what others are doing and that’s ok. But for many of you, this blog post should hit home and make you look at your blog again to see how you can be more successful.

Happy Bloggers are good bloggers. Enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about what other bloggers think about the way you blog too much. It’s your blog. If they get Angry because you do it your way, too bad for them. It would be a Sad world if all bloggers always did the same thing.

Now, I’d Love to hear your comments about this blog post. Tell me what you think makes your blog stand out from the crowd. Help others by posting about ways they can be more creative on their blogs. Let’s all get original!

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

For those of you who have been submitting stories to netscape as a social bookmarking tool, things have changed without notice, at least without notice to me and I’m a member there.

Up until today, you just went to netscape.com and clicked submit story to bookmark a blog post or article you liked. Now if you go to netscape.com, it redirects to netscape.aol.com and you get your aol page with no submit story option.

Netscape must have been getting too popular and aol.com wanted the traffic going to their domain name or something.

Not to worry though, the old netscape.com can be found at www.propeller.com

Funny, it looks just like netscape.com looked yesterday, with a submit story button and everything. So your stories are still around and you can still submit. It just isn’t netscape.com anymore.

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

There are many reasons why your company needs a blog. Here are just a few;

Starting a Blog helps your business by:

1. Driving sales for your products and services.

2. Increasing your organic search engine traffic.

3. Building credibility for your company.

4. Supporting the SEO of your company website.

No matter what you need a blog for, a professional writer who understands seo and Internet marketing is something you may want to consider.

Managing a blog is time-consuming and some poeple are good at writing for both readers and search engines and some are not. Hiring a professional can be painless.

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

Many bloggers have a lot of knowledge they aren’t using to make money. You need to tap into what you know if you want to make more money blogging.

Do you know how to install wordpress, typepad, or other blogging platforms? I mean do you really know how, not I did it one time and it worked out okay.

If you really do know how, offer it as a service to your readers. You may find a reader who really likes your blog and you have inspired them to start their own blog. Why wouldn’t they just ask you to install it for them?

I can’t tell you what to charge for it. It depends on your skill level and what you think you can get for the service.

Beware of offering the service if you cannot answer all these questions.

1. Will wordpress or or the blogging platform you are talking about work on a windows server? Do you know how to do it if they have a windows server?

2. If they do not have cpanel and fantastico, do you know how to do a manual install?

3. Do you know how to set up a mySQL database on your own if necessary?

4. Are you experienced at solving all the problems that may arise during installation?

I’m not trying to discourage you from offering the service. I’m just trying to let you know that if you do offer the service, make sure you really do know what you are doing.

Another way to make money is installing themes for blogs. Your readers may want a blog but not know how to find or install their own theme.

If you know how to customize themes, offer that as a service.

Offer to install plugins for their wordpress blog and have a list of plugins that you will install for them for a fee.

The point is that you have likely had to learn how to do a lot of different things while managing your own blog. If you feel confident that you can do this for other people, your blog is a great place to offer the services and it can bring in a little extra income for you.

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

It is a lot of work to manage and promote a blog. Comments are one area that requires your attention. In wordpress there are several settings for managing comments. There are upsides and downsides to each of them.

First, in the options tab you have 2 checkboxes.

Anyone can register

Not sure if this one actually has a downside, unless you don’t want people to make comments. I check this box on most blogs.

Users must be registered and logged in to comment

Upside: You know only people that subscribe to your blog are making comments.
Downside: You will decrease the number of comments because people do not feel like logging in at the time. They just wanted to add a quick note.

In the options tab under discussions there are a lot more options to help you manage comments.

Usual settings for an article:
(These settings may be overridden for individual articles.)

Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article

Upside: People know that you are commenting on a story that appeared on their blog and they may in turn pay you a visit and comment.
Downside: Slows down posting, but not that noticeably.

Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)

Upside: The trackbacks and pingbacks become comments on your blog post and bring you more traffic.
Downside: Uhhh . . . none?

Allow people to post comments on the article

No-brainer. Check the box.

E-mail me whenever:

Anyone posts a comment

Upside: Helps you monitor the activity at your blog and allows you to answer back to them faster.
Downside: Puts more email into your inbox. If you are on your blog every day, it may be enough and you could uncheck that box.

A comment is held for moderation

Upside: Again, allows you to moderate the comments quicker. If you have your blog set to always moderate comments, then I suggest you check this box so you can reduce the time it takes for a reader’s comments to be approved and visible.
Downside: More email to deal with.

Now the last threee are the ones that can change how you manage your blog.

Before a comment appears:

An administrator must always approve the comment

Upside: You keep drive-by spammers and bots from posting a bunch of junk on your blog that you have to come and delete later.
Downside: Readers like to see their comments appear as they post them. Also more email and time spent moderating comments.

Comment author must fill out name and e-mail

Upside: You know who is commenting.
Downside: More trouble for readers to comment. I don’t find that this reduces the number of people willing to comment.

Comment author must have a previously approved comment

Upside: If you do not have your blog set to approve all comments, this makes it easier for your regular posters.
Downside: New users won’t be able to see their posts right away.

I hope that helps you review your settings to see if you can find a balance between controlling spam and making your blog reader-friendly.

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.