The Power of Blogs for “getting targeted traffic” – “low cost seo” Tip 6

If you don’t have a blog, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Simply put, blogs open up doors for you to certain aspects of web promotion, and make it a lot easier to rise up in the search engines and get “top rankings”

Blogs are one of the most successful ways of expressing oneself one the Internet. The whole concept of blogging revolves around the need to express ideas, share opinions, spread news, promoting products or to simply have fun. A blog is actually a small individual web page more like a diary that you keep online.  The beauty of blogs is that they are easy to update and allow the blog owner to easily publish links, photos, videos, documents and more.

Blogs often receive more traffic than other web pages. Why? The answer lies within the way the major search engines work.  Search engines like fresh and high quality content. This is the main benefit of blogs and why they often rank ahead of normal web pages.

Blogs started out as web diaries but have taken on other dimensions, one of which is the commercial aspect. I’ll give you an illustrative example here: let’s say you you’ve started your own home business promoting an internet based business opportunity like Infinity 100 (http://infinity100.teamwork10.com).  A blog about Infinity 100 and why it is
such a great business opportunity would meet the requirements of other people who share your interest and it is also a great promotional tool for the development of your business.  (Disclosure: I am was an affiliate with Infinity100.)

Therefore, web marketing and the need to easily and informally communicate with others fits right in with blogging.

If your main website isn’t a blog, you should consider adding one, such as: http://mywebsite.com/blog//

By adding a blog to your website you will be able to draw traffic towards your actual website.  Plus, most blogs are free.

You can set up your own self-hosted blog or you can get a free blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com. (For now, we won’t go into how to set up a blog.  We shall cover that in future tips.)

One of the great things about WordPress blogs, especially self-hosted ones, is that there are many plugins that you can install (also free) that will further enhance your blog. This makes it possible to do things like notify the search engines when you have posted new content, automatically bookmark your post to the social bookmarking and networking
services, create a community of subscribers, setup future posts to go live automatically, and more!

ACTION ITEM: Get a Blog in your area of interest and start publishing.

YAHOO ANSWERS is a great way for “getting traffic” to your website and generating leads.

Yahoo Answers is a community-driven website, launched by Yahoo in 2005. Since then it has come to be known as a ‘knowledge market’ where users can submit questions, get answers, suggest, comment and browse for leads for almost any question.

Yahoo Answers is a great way to get good backlinks to your business website and blog, and can also generate some very highly targeted traffic as well.

Yahoo Answers is located here:

http://answers.yahoo.com

Yahoo Answers can be a marketer’s goldmine because it contains thousands of people that are looking for information and in many cases advice on what they should buy!

The first thing you need to do is set up your profile (put a link back to your website in the About Me section) and then start answering questions.  You can search for topics that are relevant to your area of interest.

When you leave answers always leave an educated, professional, informative, and genuinely helpful answer. Do not just leave a link to your site and don’t come on with just a sale pitch. You need to offer information and your sales message needs to be indirect.

As an example – let’s say you come across a question that asks: “Are there any legitimate work at home based businesses anymore that aren’t scams?”. You can answer this with: “I know what you mean. The internet is full of work from home scams.  However, I work at home and work with a stable company that has been in business for 10 years and provides me with consistent income and great training. Please visit my website or email me if you like.”

Be careful not to go nuts and over post on Yahoo Answers because submitting too many answers a day and leaving the same link too many times may result in Yahoo suspending your account. Also, don’t rush out to Yahoo Answers and answer every question with a link to your website at the end! Answer relevant questions by adding value to the conversation.

Add Yahoo Answers to your daily routine and use it with discretion. Try answering about 10 questions on a daily basis. Look for the most current questions or ones that have not been answered yet (using the advanced search capability).

When you provide an answer, be sure to list your website like this:

http://mywebsite.com

HINT: If you are using a blog spider web for “getting traffic”  back to you main website or blog, you can use some of those websites as well in order to mix things up a bit.  If you don’t know what a blog spider web is, don’t worry about it, you will find out in future posts.)

You cannot use anchor text at Yahoo Answers, it is not allowed. Make sure to remember that!

EXTRA: WikiAnswers, at http://wiki.answers.com/, is another place to consider and has roughly the same number of US visitors. The dynamics are different, mostly because it’s a wiki, the traffic is more SEO based (and therefore comes in over time and not in a surge), etc. But the essentials are the same. Provide quality answers, add a related link to your site if applicable, fill out your bio page, build relationships, etc.