Buying cost-per-click advertising should be a part of any blog marketing plan. People tend to get scared off because they think they will rank up huge bills, but there’s a strategy to it: Bid the lowest possible amount you can. Sure, you may not get many clicks due to so-so placement, but you’ll get impressions which are, technically, free.

The whole idea is just to get the name of your blog out there, so if you bid low, you will at least be getting an increased number of impressions. Here or there you will get a click, which will cost, but you will also get numerous impressions. Some folks will remember you, some won’t. It’s a tricky game, but it’s worth a shot.

My recommendation is trying Yahoo Search Marketing. It’s not as popular as Google’s ads, which will actually work to your advantage in the form of less competition for the better words. Give it a go, bid a $.01 if need be on certain keywords, but remember it’s all about gathering impressions, not clicks, in the early days of your marketing.

With the number of search engines out there nowadays, you would think people would have no interests in posts that are nothing but a lot of links.  For whatever reason though, they do well, and they can become “viral”.

Lists are a simple concept: Just come up with a theme, and then go and gather as many links as you can related to that theme.  Give it a title such as “21 Ways To Bake Bread” or “Top 21 Ways To Bake Bread”, something that sounds authoritative,  and you will probably end up with a winner.  These are great types of posts to get yourself on sites such as Digg and the social bookmarking sites.

Now, there is one step you do need to do beyond just putting in links, and that’s to add a short description for each entry.  What makes that site stand out from the rest of the list?  Do they have a feature the others don’t?  Do they charge for their service where others don’t?  The list has to also be useful to the users, always keep that in mind.

Personally, I think it stems from people don’t want to do the leg work themselves.  Sure, they could go out and hit Google, but why should they when you’ve already done all the leg work for them?   It can take some time, but the potential extra traffic makes it all worthwhile, I feel.

Starting a new blog is no different than starting a new magazine if you plan on running with the big dogs. So why shouldn’t you get a press release out about it? If positioned correctly, and you hopefully have found an under serviced niche, you stand a chance of getting picked up by other sites as a news item.

The question is, once you’ve written your press release, how do you get it out there? And that’s when you really should leave the work to the professionals at sites like PR Web Direct. Writing your press release is one thing, knowing how to properly distribute it is a whole ‘nother matter. A PR distribution site can help you get on to places like Google News and Yahoo News, both of which will make any amount you spend on the distribution worth it.

I know in this day and age of the Internet that everyone thinks they can handle everything themselves, but there are some times where it truly is best to leave it to the pros.

While platforms such as WordPress has numerous (actually, thousands) of free blog themes, the problem is, everyone uses them. How do you stand out from the crowd? Part of it will be your own voice, but everyone’s first impression will be how it physically appears, so getting a theme designed for you by designers is always a good idea.

The problem comes from finding designers and getting quotes from all of them. That’s when sites like QuoteCatcher.com come in handy because you can get up to five quotes at once. Fill in the information of what you are looking for and you will receive quotes based on that.

If you’re looking to go cheap, then use the free themes, but if you want to invest in your blog, and stand out from the crowd instantly, make sure you go with your own look.

A lot of people focus on the plugins that your users can see, but what about the ones that they don’t see? There are a wealth of them out there that will help you run your site more efficiently, and won’t do one thing to change the physical appearance of your blog.

One that you should certainly look into is a cache plugin. This will allow the site to pre-load certain items so that when the visitor comes to your site, it will load the most recent save of a section of your site, allowing for a faster load for the visitor, and less strain on your server. While the server part may not sound important, it is. If your blog becomes popular, and starts causing too much strain on the server, it is possible your webhost may fine you depending on your contract, or go as far as to close you down.

If you are using WordPress, I would highly recommend you download WP-Cache and get it installed as soon as possible. It’s easy to load and set up, and shouldn’t take you more than a couple of minutes.

Get on it, and start relieving some of that stress on your poor server!

Last week we discussed how a domain name can be an important part of your blog design, but how do you find out what’s still out there? Here is a list of tools that will help you do just that. Enter words, letters, keywords, all sorts of information, and these sites will help you locate unclaimed domain names that fit your parameters.

• 123finder.com
• BustAName.com
• Domain-Generator.net
• Dot-O-Mator.com
• Dyyo.com
• Geek.name
• MakeWords.com
• Nameboy.com
• SnapItNow.com
• Web 2.0 Name Generator
• Webmaster-Tookkit.net’s Domain Name Generator

And once you’ve found a name, what do you do then? Well, you need to register it to claim it as yours. One of the best known registrars is GoDaddy.com. For $9.99 a year you can keep your domain name under your control, and even if it may be awhile before you get your blog up and running, it’s a good idea to secure the name for yourself so no one steals it out from under you.

What are you waiting on? Start researching those names!

One of the ways to improve your blog’s traffic is to make sure you are choosing the right “keywords”. These are words that are more likely to be hit on by web surfers when they go to a search engine to look something up, and hence turn up in cost-per-click advertisements.

Course, the next questions is how you discover which keywords you should be using. There are several services out there that can help you discover the best words for your needs.

KeyCompete.com - Enter words you are interested in running campaigns around and see what your competition is like. Will also give you suggestions of alternate words.

KeywordDiscovery.com - While not exactly for CPC advertising, will give you insight in to the words people are searching for when they look for products and services, which easily translated in to your CPC campaigns.

Wordtracker.com - While researching what words will work for you, you may also get suggestions for an under served niche topic, which could be a perfect opportunity for you to start a new venture.

These are just three that you can try, but you should definitely research your keywords. I have never heard of anyone regretting the time they spent doing just that.

There is nothing more important in the blogging world than good SEO (search engine optimization). How in the world are people ever going to find your blog out there if you aren’t properly ranked in the search engines? And trying to learn what to do to get properly indexed can be a nightmare.

That’s why the world invented books and software to help you, don’tcha ya know.

On the book side, I’d say one of the best out there would have to be SEO Book, A 328 page ebook that you can download right away and get to work the SEO gurus swear by. Best of all, if you don’t see actual improvement in your listings, they have a money back guarantee.

For software, the standard and professional editions of the WebPosition 4. These all-in-one packages will take most of the heavy lifting off of your shoulders, and do the work for you. They’ll report your current standings, suggest keywords, submit your URLs and more.

What are you waiting for? Don’t you want to get more traffic to your site?

Most bloggers still obsess about their page views, but with RSS (Real Simple Syndication) becoming more and more popular, the number of RSS readers is getting to be that much more valuable.

Bloglines, a popular RSS reader, has started posting what their top 1000 RSS feeds are.   While not exactly a blog directory, it is an interesting insight in to what people are looking for in the blogosphere.  Go over and take a look, see if any of the blogs come close to matching what you’re trying to do.  Is there anything they’re doing that you’re not?

I am of course not suggesting you copy any site verbatim, ever, but why not at least learn from them?  What makes their RSS feed so attractive to readers?  Is it frequency of posting?  Content?  Something is making those people sign up, and this seems like the perfect centralized resource to study it.

Is your blog SEO reaching the 79% of adults that are now online?

According to a new study, nearly 8 out of every 10 adults is on the web for up to 11 hours a week. That’s a good amount of time for them to possibly be finding your blog, and learning about your company.

Without search engine optimization, it’s not going to matter how many people are online, because the will never find you. And considering the labyrinthine like qualities of trying to get good SEO, that’s why it’s a good idea to sometimes turn to search engine optimization services like what we offer. Sometimes it’s a matter of weighing the learning curve vs cost, and, if you’re anything like me, you just simply don’t have the time to sit down and “reinvent the wheel” when someone has already created a perfectly good one.

It may seem sometimes like every domain name has been registered, but there are ways to do it and not resort to things like skazy.com. (if someone owns that, my apologies, I picked it at random)

Sure, shorter domain names are nice to have, but anymore people are buying whatever combination they can find, and they are ending up with some just downright silly names. Who would have ever thought a site for watching online videos would be named Hulu.com? There is nothing wrong with picking a longer name so long as it’s either A)descriptive or B)easy to remember.

Take this blog for example. You can’t get much more to the point than BlogMarketingJournal.com. It’s what we do, and even though it’s a tad lengthy, you aren’t going to forget what we’re about.

You also need to think in terms of a logo. Will it look good as a logo? Will it fit in with your theme?

There is a lot that goes in to coming up with a domain name, and I am sure we will be coming back to this more than a few times.

What have you done to market your blog as of late?

Are you out leaving comments on blogs that cover similar subjects as yours?  If you can find to do this every day, making sure to include your URL in the appropriate area, this can lead to a lot of eyeballs on your domain that may have missed it before.

Have you made sure to get registered with Technorati?  You want to make sure they’ve got all the correct info on you, and it also doesn’t hurt to go around favoring other blogs so they’ll favorite you back.

While some people question Alexa’s methodology, it still counts.  It works a little oddly as it requires users to download a toolbar to monitor the traffic, but people still look at it to see how important your blog it.  So have you made sure to download it yourself so when you visit your own blog, it counts?

All three are fairly simple steps to marketing yourself, and it sounds like a good way to kill some time on a Sunday afternoon to me.

You can write your heart out on a blog, but if no one visits it, does it really matter? Sure, your content should be enough to draw your readers in, but how do you get them there the first time? There are 10’s of thousands of new blog created every day, how do you not get lost in the shuffle? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the first line in that battle.

One of the first steps you can take is trying to cram as many keywords as you can in to an article, but try to do it in a natural fashion, you don’t want to be too obvious. How do you know what keywords you should aim for though? Luckily there are two good free tools out there for you to get started with.

First up is the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. This one uses Yahoo’s results and tries to predict what is going on at Google and MSN. Not 100% accurate, but will give you a good general over view.

Then you also have Google Trends which will allow you to enter up to five words and compare them to each other. This one will only let you look at Google’s results, but in this day and age, the others are just nice add-ons compared to the king of the search engines.

So I’m not saying go nuts and put in every keyword you can think of, but try to get a coupe in to each post if you can.

A while back we talked about how you can blog with your busy schedule, but there was another idea that we should have mentioned, and that’s pre-writing.

Some may call it a cop out for a “daily blog” to pre-write entries, but what do you do if you get sick? Get called out of town on business unexpectedly? You should always have a few timeless entries saved to your drafts so you can post them quickly. (Don’t set the date to publish later as that messes with the ping services)

What do I mean by timeless? Anything that applies to your blog that is age old, and never changes in your industry. Also, things that don’t go out of style like top 10 lists of useful sites to your field of work. Something that you would find useful no matter when you read it.

But if you’re already busy, how do you find time to write “spare” articles? Try to write a few days worth in one sitting, when your mind is already engaged on the subject, and pick one of them to save for the future. Do this at least once a week and by the end of the year you should have 52 saved posts. More than most people need, but it’s a good idea to have at least a week sitting around for emergencies.

It’s always better to be prepared, even if you don’t ever need them.

A long time ago, WordPress decided to include the “nofollow” tag for the comments section of all WP powered blogs. What this does is tell the search engine spiders to ignore the links in the comment section of your install, providing no search engine love for people nice enough to leave you comments. The idea, at the time, was to combat the tremendous amount of comment spammers out there who were trying to advertise their gambling and medicine sites.

With much improved anti-spam plugins out there now, and WordPress’ own Askimet spam system, it’s not really needed any more, but the code is still in the system. There has been no mention of it ever being removed, and that’s just a sad state of affairs for people who leave legitimate comments on your blog(s).

So, someone decided to write a plugin that removes the “nofollow” command, and allows your commenters to get their links to their sites counted by the search bots. It’s fairly small in size, so it shouldn’t hurt your content-to-code ratio much, and it’s just a nice “thank you” to those folks who leave you a comment. If you’re worried about spam comments still getting through, you can change the options on the plugin to remove the code after X number of days so that you have time to go in and delete the comment before it counts. (My rule of thumb is two days)

While you may ask “Yes, but what does this do for me?”, it’s just an easy way to build goodwill with your readers. And if enough people do it, and you then start leaving comments also, you will receive the backlink counts also. And, as it is in comments, it shouldn’t do anything to harm you with the new Google PageRank system either.

Give it a shot, show your readers that you appreciate them.