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Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start?

You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn’t become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”. Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to…but only when you need to!

Sponsored Links

Last week’s post about the new Thesis WordPress theme from Chris Pearson resulted in a ton of happy new Thesis community members. This week, we want to invite you to join us as promotional partners as well, with the brand new DIY Themes affiliate program.

When you join the program, you’ll receive 33% of all sales you generate. This includes the personal and developer memberships to Thesis (currently priced at $87 and $164, respectively), plus all the new designs, add-ons, and other new products we’ve got planned for the near future.

Sign up for the DIY Themes affiliate program here. Thanks!

P.S. If you want to keep up with what’s going on with Thesis, the RSS feed is yours for the taking.

At ClickZ’s Online Video Ad Forum yesterday, a fantastic line up of two dozen speakers offered up examples of their latest creative work and some shared info on tips and tools they think are worth watching.

During the day-long program at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, participants picked up intelligence on these things:

*Deep Focus’ Ian Schafer credited a subtle change in an ad-serving format with improving results for one video ad campaign he worked on. Historically when video ads ran on a site, a loader screen would appear and then the ad would start. A change in DoubleClick’s technology, he said, enables the video ad to launch immediately — without the loader screen. That change, he said, resulted in a 30 percent increase in the interaction rate for a video ad promoting “Recount,” an HBO film.

* In looking to the potential for a richer future for online video ads, Dorian Sweet, a digital strategist, pointed to a cool tool called PicLens. Using this tool, a Web site visitor can view photos or videos from a site such as YouTube on a “3D wall.”

The Hottest New Advertising Craze To Hit The Internet - Pixel Ads
 by: Rebecca Gilbert

Every website needs traffic in order to generate business. Without traffic, your product will never be seen by the general public and your Internet Business is doomed for failure.

I generate traffic to my website through traditional channels such as writing articles, submitting to directories, link exchanges, Search Engines, etc. I also have supplemented this traffic through paid advertising methods such as Pay per Clicks (PPC), paid inclusion, and banner rotations to name a few.

I remember a few years ago when I could target a high traffic keyword through the Pay per Click search engines for .01 cents a click. Wow! Those were the days. Now, you’re lucky to get that same keyword for less than a $1.00 a click.

While some of these advertising methods bring decent traffic, most are becoming oversaturated with advertisers, which automatically brings the price up and the effectiveness down.

Recently, I stumbled across another advertising method that is affordable (and sometimes free) that is highly effective. In fact, I’m seeing these sites Alexa rankings shooting from 800,000 to the 1,000’s in less than a months time. The upward trends on the Alexa charts are without a doubt astonishing.

Guest Post By Michel Fortin

A forum post on my copywriters board suggested that too many italics, bolds, underlines, yellow highlighting and the like are not good. One referred to them as “speed bumps,” which reduce usability and readability.

I don’t necessarily agree with this premise.

First, understand that formatting tricks help to drive important points home, or emphasize key points in the copy you want your reader to read, focus on and remember.

When in a face-to-face encounter, a sale is not only made on what you say but how you say it. Including inflection of your voice, rhythm, tone, volume, pausing, nonverbal communication and others.

Because “how” you say it can emphasize, support or contradict your message.

Lower your voice during an important point in your sales pitch causes people to lean forward to make sure they hear everything. Inflect certain key words or phrases can help drive important ideas home. And so on.

Now, on the web, there’s no face-to-face interaction. You don’t have the same luxury. And therefore, formatting can be used as an effective tool to underline (and I mean that literally and figuratively) important points.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about some ways you can keep your reader’s attention. But I didn’t mention one of the most important techniques–one that requires no particular writing ability, no creativity to think of a great hook, and no hours of research to find the most compelling facts to tell your story.

This easy technique is infinitely versatile. I use it in nearly every piece I write. But it’s so deceptively simple, you might not be taking full advantage of it.

My super (simple) secret weapon is the lowly, underappreciated subhead.

Subheads make your work more readable

Direct response marketers (those who measure to the penny which techniques sell products and which do not) like to say “the more you tell, the more you sell.”

The more questions you can answer for your readers, and the more time you take to paint a wonderful picture of the benefits your customers enjoy, the easier you make it for prospects to realize they can’t live without your product.

This isn’t just true for sales copy. Blog and newsletter readers want meaty content, something that’s worth the time they take to read it.

There are today search engine and internet marketing services, in fact a new industry has materialised to exploit the fear of low search rankings.

This is not a new trend, back when simply resubmitting your website to the engines resulted in keeping your site at the top of the index, there was an accompanying boom in resubmitting “companies”, as we know, these were just men in back bedrooms with a host of CGI and Perl submitting scripts and a timetable.

Search Engine optimisation or “SEO”, is the latest incarnation of this bedroom profiteering, the important difference is that now the webmaster’s are not just passively involved but are being forced to adopt totally artificial and unsocial practices that ultimately serve only to help damage the Internet!

SEO is supposedly the methodology and processes related to designing search engine “friendly” web content, the basic premise is something like “If I follow all the engines formatting and connectivity criteria, then my website will rank higher then a comparable website that does not”.

All other things being equal, this seems quite positive given that the quality of a search engines database (index) directly effects its output; then webmaster’s optimising their content so that search engines can correctly categorise the internet should logically improve the speed and quality of “the crawl”.

If your home based business depends on niche marketing, keywords are your best friends. If your answer to the first sentence was no, you are missing out on a lot of potential business. This is because keywords are what people search for on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Excite, and if the keyword being searched on matches keywords provided on your Web site then your web page will be returned as a result.

The results that are returned from the search engines are ranked in order of correlation between the keywords searched for and those on your site. You can easily see that you will want to have as many possible keywords pertaining to your home based business niche market on your web page in order to drive more people to your site. Even though there are thousands of keywords and combinations of keywords, not to mention misspellings, that potential customers might search for, you will want to make sure you have all of the most popular search terms and as many of the others as possible. These keywords equal web page traffic, which equals income and is certainly worth your time to put forth the effort to find out what the most popular keywords are for your niche business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Boost Your Website Traffic
 by: Rory Canyon

Search engines bring more than 80 percent of the traffic for small to medium websites. This tells exactly how important it is for small and medium websites to optimize their web structure and pages for search engines. Optimization of your website for search engine includes many aspects: website content, keywords, URL, meta-tag, back links, etc. Let’s explain it one by one.

Select the right keywords. You can pay a visit to your competitors’ websites (only those with top-ranked search engine placements). Through analyzing their web contents and meta tags, you can easily find out the keywords they are using. Overture keywords selection tool can also provide you valuable information. Open your favorite browser, enter http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/, type in the search box your keywords or phrases and see how many times they were searched last month. Select those with high search frequency. Google also has a similar keyword selection tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox. You can have a try of both of them and balance the search results.

I’ve got two teleclasses for you to check out, and neither one will cost you a dime. The first involves online video marketing and how it relates to copywriting, and the second is all about copy.

First up, as promised Dave Kaminski and I will be doing a live call this Thursday evening at 7:30 Central (8:30 Eastern, 5:30 Pacific). Dave is the founder of Web Video University, and the topic is Web Video Marketing: Trends, Techniques, and Copywriting Tips. Check out the event page here, and you might consider printing out that page as a reminder. We’ve got room for 200 people on the call, but any number of people can listen via the Flash web cast.

Next up is a teleclass hosted by A-list copywriter David Deutsch. David has been doing an entire series of free calls called Quick Start Copy, and this week he has the infamous Dan Kennedy as a guest. Dan may be a bit grumpy, but he’s also a marketing genius, so I’m betting this call is well worth your while. You’ll also be able to catch the next two free calls in the series… Brad Antin of Centerpointe Research, and then the wrap-up with the legendary Jay Abraham. You can register for the calls here.