If you really want to use your blog to get more business from online marketing, you might want to seriously consider the following:

1. Short – Write short snappy informative posts that make people curious
2. Personal – Be you, people like people who are honest
3. Easy to Find – Use directories, post to other people’s blogs and link from your main website
4. Commonplace – forget all the formalities and write as you would speak in the pub!
5. Interesting – So what makes your stuff interesting – slip in your unique value in a way to catch attention
6. Frequent – Keep doing it and do it often, people love new stuff
7. Interactive – Turn off moderation, allow people just express themselves – then you know what they think
8. Content – Make it real, with great content that adds value to the reader so they want to come back

After you have succeeded in bringing customers interested in your to your website, and maybe got them to read a few of your pages, in order to bring them to the next step, which could be for example contacting you about a particular product, you might need to keep in touch with them and make sure that they keep you in mind.

One of the options of involving visitors into happening on your website is to invite them to join your mailing list, so that you will be sending them a monthly online newsletter with free your tips – with links back to your website.

Writing a newsletter is an excellent way to stay in touch with your customers and to keep them updated on your special offers and news.

1. Write an article and create a special offer for the newsletter
2. Setup http://www.getresponse.com account
3. Create newsletter template and put together your first online newsletter
4. Upload your contacts, who will get a verification email with a link to confirm that they agree to be included in your list
5. Setup a sign-in form and send the code to your web designer who will put it to the website – preferably to every page to the upper half
6. Broadcast your first newsletter
7. Create a tracking sheet for the newsletter
8. Write up newsletter articles, broadcast monthly and track responses

Here all general rules for writing content apply, so don’t forget about using benefits, testimonials and irresistible calls to action as outlined earlier in this chapter.

If you are looking at a very interesting and smart way of building links to your website, commenting on your blogs will be an answer for you.

It’s easy – you find a blog that deals with your, or customers in general, you read a post, and you comment on it by clicking “Add a comment” at the end of the post.

However, anything like “Thank you for the advice, it’s really good” will not do. You need to say very specifically what you liked about the article, and maybe ask a few questions or suggest some new and unexplored solutions. Never promote your company in the comment itself.

In the comment form, you are given an option to add your website URL, and this is the place where you add your URL, and once the comment gets approved by the blog owner, the name you provide will be hyperlinked and going to your website.

Some SEO experts recommend using your main keyword phrase instead of your name, since then you will have a keyword hyperlinked, which is the most effective way of building links. However, some blog owners might easily recognize this as SEO and promotional efforts, and they might not publish your comment then.

To get the best results, you should find blogs with high page rank, and also check whether their comment links are not rel=”nofollow” tagged. You can check this by viewing the page’s source, and in the HTML code, search for the previous comments and see whether in the HTML code of the link there is no rel=”nofollow” tag.

There is not much use of a link which is marked rel=”nofollow”, because this tag simply tells Google not to follow the link for SEO purposes. That’s why you don’t get much SEO value from building nofollow links.

A blog is basically a special website which enables you to publish a post (an article) as often as you like, with an option for readers to sign up and comment on the individual posts.

It’s highly interactive, and these days there are lots of free blog software and web space providers, such as Wordpress, Blogger etc.

For your companies it is a great way of “showing the friendly face” of their business to people and talking to them in less official way, while offering invaluable content. If done well, customers will read your blog regularly and they will keep coming back to your website. Who knows, they might even contact you one day and become your customers, because you will build relationship with them through your valuable blog posts.

Google and other search engines love blogs because they are updated regularly with fresh content and it is also a great way of building external links to your website. Here is the how-to:

1. Download Wordpress free at www.Wordpress.org and send it to your web designer who will upload it to the server, put a link to it to the website and give you the login details.
2. Login, pick a template, update your profile and start posting regularly.

Once your blog is up and running, you can post comments to other websites/blogs with your blog profile or with a link to your website. So aim at having your comments with a link to your website displayed on high ranking websites. Of course, don’t forget that, if possible, all links back to your blog should look like this:

<a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com/blog” title=”Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a>

Another way of promoting your blog is to submit its link to blog directories, which is very similar to normal web directories – and it’s free.

Click here to see a few most important blog directories where you definitely should submit your blog to.