Launching a blog and waiting for people to arrive is not as easy as it might seem. You could find yourself writing for months and even years without mass amounts of traffic. Often times it takes much more than just writing to market your blog, even though that is the most important part of owning a blog.

You will run into many mental battles when you start writing. You will want to put nice short witty titles and use creative verbiage in the post but you know that you run the risk of having a harder time to be found by search engines. You will definitely want to always write for humans first but search engines should also be a close second. At the end of the day you have to ask yourself what the goal of your blog is. Do you want people to find it? Or do you want to just write for the sake of writing? Sure you always want to the flow of words and language to have a natural feel so when people read it does not sound foreign. You also want to write so search engines find you. Before every blog post do some quick keyword research on whatever topic you are writing. Take two or three words or phrases and naturally incorporate them into the blog post. Don’t forget to add some keywords into the blog post titles as well. Will this work to get your post ranking every single time? Probably not but if you don’t apply any type of SEO efforts to your blog than you can guarantee no search engine traffic. if you are a blog that is just starting out and you don’t really have a following to back yourself you will have to apply some of these techniques to your daily or weekly writing.

With so many blogs out there it seems more and more difficult to keep with them all. Blogs pop up everyday discussing various new things and touching upon old news topics that from a different angle than its competitor. With so many blogs what do you do to stand out?

You can get up on your desk and kick and scream to get people to see your blog but you need to be creative with your writing. It is no surprise that search engines read words. They don’t care about how great your design is or how pretty those photos on your layout are. It doesn’t matter to a search engine that your blog is severely outdated design wise. A search engine is kind of like Pac Man, they run around eating and feeding off words. The better your copy and text is within your writing the better chance you have of being found by some searching. When I say this I don’t mean you have to be an English major for search engines to find you but rather tie in keywords and phrases specific to your industry in the title and body of your blog post. I know for many this creates a road block for creativity but unless you have a following you will find that you are the only one reading your blog and that doesn’t do anybody any good. When introducing your industry keywords and phrases into your writing style it is important to continue writing for humans first and search engines second other it will be difficult for readers to read through your posts. If readers have a hard time reading through your blog posts they will simply not return to read anymore. You have to take a quality approach when trying to optimize blog posts.

Remember that it doesn’t matter how pretty your blog looks in order to get traffic. It comes down to the writing and use of keywords to get search engines to find your posts. Once you have built up a following you can go back to getting creative with blog post titles and copy.

If you run a business and maintain a website then one of the most daunting apsects of an online presence is whether or not to include a blog. Some people see it as a waste of content, a waste of resources and a waste of time.

If we reverse that list and check each one out, the chances are we can refute them.

Time: Time is a killer for all businesses, small, medium and large. Maintaining a blog can take some time, but is does not need to dominate your day.

Resources: This one is easy. Blogs take little in the way of resources. Time and money are the two biggest resources and they can be managed.

Content: Many website owners have difficulty with content. Their preference is to put together a comprehensive website so they don’t see the need for a blog. Besides, a blog is hard work. Writing content that is to posted every day is too much effort. The solution is fairly easy to implement – share the load.

Most businesses have more than one staff member. You can schedule one or more days per week where each staff member is required to write a post related to their position in the business. This takes care of both the time and content issues.

You should still have a comprehensive web site. A blog adds value to that web site and provides an opportunity to fill in the gaps from your website. Blogs can be hard work, however, if you share the load, blogs become easy and valuable addition to your online presence.

A post on ProBlogger describes three methods you can try that may help you get your site featured on one of the major news sites. Don’t get excited, by featured they are not talking about having a nice article written about your blog, they are however talking about getting a link back with some exposure which could increase your traffic.

IAs the probloger post says:

Did you know that you can get your site featured on major news sites like CNN, CNET, Newsweek, USA Today, and even the Wall Street Journal. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the blogosphere and I’m going to reveal it in this article.

id you know that you can get your site featured on major news sites like CNN, CNET, Newsweek, USA Today, and even the Wall Street Journal. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the blogosphere and I’m going to reveal it in this article.

Do you fancy a link from Reuters, USA Today, Fox News, or the Houston Chronicle, then join a blog syndication network called BlogBurst. If your blog is accepted then you may gain increased visibility, branding, and perhaps even traffic.

If the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal is more up your alley then you will need to get noticed by BlogRunner. This is not a site you join; this is a site that finds you.

BlogRunner is a news aggregator so the easiest way to get noticed by the news media is to blog about stories in those newspapers and to draw attention to your post.

If CNN, The Wall Street Journal, or Newsweek appeal then a trip to Sphere may help. Mainstream media is really starting to embrace blogs. The search engines like these online media giants so they can and will rank well.

Writing a blog that is targeted to other businesses rather than the general public requires a different style of blog content. Rather than short whippy content that is easy to consume or share, B2B content is often more involved.

Blog content that is designed for the general public often needs to follow some ‘rules’. For example, one ‘rule’ often quoted is to be careful with your language. Most readers will not be familiar with ‘shop talk’ or jargon that is often used within industries.

B2B blogs are the opposite. They need to use jargon and other ‘inside’ language, first for credibility, second for easier understanding. If a green widget is called a gwidget, then you need to use that term. If you don’t, others may doubt your credibility.

Another aspect of B2B blogging that is different to standard blogging is in size. B2B blog content tends to be much longer in length compared to standard blog. This is because these blogs often need to go into much deeper explanations compared to standard blogs.

In a B2B blog, if you write about a specific topic, the reader wants the details – often all of them. With standard blogs, we don’t want the details – we want a brief summary and perhaps a link to more info if we want it.

B2B blogs will be probably be one area of growth in the future. The online society already uses them; you only have to visit one of the many blogs that cover SEO or online marketing to see how much depth they actually provide on a topic.