For many website owners, running an online (and perhaps offline) business leaves little time to create their own blog content, at least on a daily basis. There are number of ways deal with this situation.

The first and most obvious is to only post to your blog two or three time per week. In today’s world, it can be quite acceptable However, if you are looking to leverage your blog for search engine traffic then the more content you have, the faster your search engine rankings may climb. It is not only the search engines; the more blog content you can provide the faster you can gain a reputation within your niche.

Other options include buying content. This can be done on a post by post basis, as a series of posts, or as full contract where the blog content is not only supplied; it is created and published on your behalf. They basically manage the blog on your behalf.

What many organizations don’t realize is that you can combine both. You can create your own blog content, say two or three times per week whilst using a bog content service to fill in the gaps. This may be a better alternative for many business owners as they can maintain their own contributions yet have the benefit of daily posting, for less money.

There are many blog content services that will happily negotiate posting timetables and relative costs. You just need to determine how much of your time you can afford to dedicate to creating content. Place a realistic figure on that time and then do a comparison with various content providers. You may be surprised at the low costs involved.

Social bookmarking and blogging have built a reputation for unreliability and high bounce rates. If you approach social bookmarking sensibly, this does not need to be the case. You can develop a flow of regular readers over a period of time.

Most bloggers forget the original theme behind social bookmarking – and that is the term social. For many bloggers, they sign on and try to accumulate as many ‘friends’ or contacts as possible. They then spend their time submitting their own content and sending it on to all their friends in the hope they will vote it up.

To be effective, you need to be a little more social. Rather than promoting your own content, you should be on the lookout for content that may interest those you have befriended. Over time you will gain a reputation for only promoting the best content.

Once you have developed the reputation for submitting quality content, slipping your own posts into the submission process will not be a problem, so long as it is quality and of benefit to all. There will be times when you won’t need to submit your own content. Because you are seen as someone who only submits quality content, those who visit your site are quite likely to submit for you if they think it is quality.

Social bookmarking is all about being social and interacting with others on the various sites. Sites such as Digg work very much on a reciprocal basis. If you Digg their quality content, they are likely to Digg yours. Be social and social bookmarking may work for you. Be selfish and the only visitors you get will be the high bounce rate type.

If you decide to run ad units as part of your blogging income, you need to determine where you are going to place them. If you are being paid by the placement then you should have an agreement as to where that ad unit is placed. If you are running affiliate or PPC ad units, then placement can have a huge effect on your results.

With pay-per-click (PPC) ad units such as Adwords, you will need to play around with the various types and placements of your ad units. The most popular is generally considered the 300×250 text/image ad unit placed within the body of a post. However, different blog layouts will require testing to see the best placement.

When testing ad unit placements, give each placement a reasonable time frame. Ten days is probably a minimum to test for effectiveness. Make sure you record the ad units placement and number of clicks and income received. After ten days, move the ad unit to another place and test again.

One mistake that many bloggers make it to decide on an ad unit and test it in three or four places. They then select the best out of the three or four and run with it. You nay be losing a lot of blogging income if you quit your test regime to early.

You should test in four or five different places on your page, and you should test several different ad unit types including the text only ad units.

If you want to capitalize on any possible blogging income, you will need to test, retest, and test again until you find the best ad unit and the best placement for that ad unit.

If you are an Adsense publisher then you will want to publish your ad units in the most effective places possible. You may also want to have control over when you publish those ads. For example, if you also undertake affiliate marketing and you write the occasional blurb on one of your affiliates, the last thing you should really do is include an Adsense ad unit.

If you install the Adsense plugin WordPress you can control when your ad units are inserted into your posts. To use the plugin, you need to setup an ad unit through your Adsense account. One the best for converting into clicks is the 300 x 250. You can play around various ad unit sizes until you find one that converts into clicks more frequently.

Once you have downloaded the plugin, you will need to unzip it and edit the adsense.php file – notepad or similar is useful for this task. Find the following section of text:

<b>Your Google Adsense code should be here, but you forgot
to edit the plugins/adsense.php file and replace the code
there with your own.</b>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “client-code-goes-here”;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “468×60_as”;
google_ad_channel =””;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

Replace this text with the following:

<div style=”float: right; margin: 10px;”>
Your Adsense code that you have retrieved from your Adsense account
</div>

This will float the ad unit to the right. If you would prefer to have it on the left, replace the word ‘right’ with the word ‘left’. When you are creating a post, place your cursor at the beginning of the line where you want the code placed and then click on the Adsense button. The code will be inserted and the ad unit will appear after the post is published. Now you can chose when to insert the code.

When it’s Blog Catalog of course – or MyBlogLog for that matter. These two appear to be in a head to head race to see who can outdo each other as alternative social media sites as well.

To the outsider it may appear they are competing for blog owner traffic. The reality is that most blog owners, if they are active on one, are also active on the other. The major difference is the level of activity on each of the sites. There is no doubt that most users prefer one over the other, that doesn’t stop them using both.

This is probably a good example of brand loyalty. No matter how many features each of these blog directories add, users are remaining loyal to their favorite. Since the beginning of this year, both sites, more notably Blog Catalog, have added a lot of different features – all aimed more at the social networking aspect than as blog directories.

These two sites are hard to categories now. They are blog directories and they pick up your blogs feeds and deliver them to your profile. They are also social networking sites with forum style discussion streams. There has been talk of live messenger style chatting. While all of this is going on, you can also have a twitter style feed of all your social media activities. What you have dugg, thumbed or promoted in any way – all shared with those that want to share.

As for generating traffic – like anything social, the more you work for the community, the more traffic you will generate.