Internet Marketing Blogging Tips

©2008 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

While many thought blogging was a passing fad, it’s now obvious that blogging is a practice that is here to stay as a powerful Web 2.0 marketing and traffic-generation toolset - and marketers are definitely profiting from their blogging efforts. Blogs are especially attractive to Internet marketers, for a variety of reasons.

First, installing and operating a blog is very simple. There is no need to learn HTML, and you can have a blog set up and operating in a matter of minutes. For popular blog software, such as WordPress, there are numerous templates available all over the Internet to help you make your blog attractive. And most professional hosting sites offer almost instant WordPress installation through Fantastico in your cPanel options.

You can blog even if you don’t have your own website, by using a hosted blog such as that found at Blogger. However, you should ideally set your blog up on its own domain, with a professional domain name and webhosting.

Blogs are especially important for search engine optimization purposes. When you add a blog post to your blog, simply include a link or two to your main website that your blog pertains to - over time link to both the homepage and at least a few of the main interior pages of the site. This adds inbound links for your website, and may help to boost your rankings in the search engines. Be sure your blog template includes an appropriate robots meta-tag or use a ‘Do Follow’ blog plug-in though, or you may be wasting your time.

The important thing about marketing blogging is that you provide content that is of interest to your niche - not to the industry that your niche is in. You must stay tightly focused on your niches’ concerns, problems, and desires and ignore the rest of the market as a whole. You can’t please the entire market, and that isn’t what you are trying to accomplish anyway.

If you have various areas or sites to promote that aren’t tightly targeted to that same niche, set up a separate blog for each one. For example, an Internet marketer may have one blog for mainstream marketing, one for affiliate marketing, one for niche marketing, etc. Or an Internet marketer targeting the golf niche, as another example, might have one blog that discusses golf swings and how to improve them, one on golfing equipment, and a third that discusses and rates golf courses around the world.

Always keep in mind that the more tightly focused the blog, the tighter the targeting of the traffic it attracts - and highly-targeted traffic is the lifeblood of your sales process and list-building online. In the previous example, all 3 blogs might lead to the same web site - but one would lead to the page where you’re selling golf instruction videos and e-books, the second to your section on golf equipment, and the third to a page promoting golf vacations and packages.

That same example shows how easily blogging can benefit affiliate marketers as well - each of those three blogs might send traffic to two or three links each, tightly targeted to that blog’s subject matter. Yes, all 3 deal with golf, but by handling it correctly you could be tightly targeting 6 or 9 different affiliate opportunities within the golfing industry online.

It is also important that you blog daily, or several times per week at the very least. Don’t worry about how many people are reading your blog. The more you update it, the more popular it can become in the blog directories and search engines. Over time, you should be able to build a good readership, and you will make sales to those people as time goes on. Add a sign-up form for your opt-in mailing list and you’ve created a really powerful marketing & profit center for yourself, one that can generate an ongoing influx of new traffic into your sales funnel.

To ensure you get maximum exposure for your blogs, use as many of the Web 2.0 services as you have time for. Use the ‘auto-pinging’ function built into WordPress to maximum advantage, list your blogs with services like Technorati and MyBlogLog, and use the online ping services like Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic to update even more directories each time you add another article (post) to your blogs.

Of all the Web 2.0 methods open to marketers, the combination of ease of use, low or no cost, and potential returns available makes blogging a must-have tool for Internet marketing, and it’s especially well-suited to those just entering the field. In fact, we’re seeing more and more fledgling Internet marketers beginning with, and sometimes staying exclusively with, blogging instead of traditional site building.

Get YOUR Internet marketing blogging going today!

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Doug Champigny is a recognized expert, author and speaker on the subject of driving highly-targeted traffic using Web 2.0 technologies and sites, and is the author of How to Become A Blogging Pro“. Doug recently assembled the Massive Traffic Bootcamp to help Internet marketers, bloggers and affiliate marketers drive more targeted traffic by integrating Web 2.0 techniques with classic Search Engine Optimization.
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Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, traffic, building traffic, Massive Traffic Bootcamp, blogging, Internet marketing blogging, profitable blogging, Web 2.0 sites, Web 2.0 techniques, Search Engine Optimization, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, Doug Champigny

Article Marketing Meets Search Engine Optimization!

© 2008 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important on your web site – but you already knew that, right? But did you know that search engine optimization is also an important part of your article marketing, vis-à-vis the articles that you will distribute and submit to the various article directories too? You must keep SEO in mind during all of your article marketing efforts…

You may think that the only part that article marketing plays in search engine optimization is that it provides numerous one-way back links to your websites, blogs and affiliate promotions. While this does help in the optimization of your own sites to an extent, there is more to it than that. You want your articles to become as viral as possible – and performing search engines optimization on your articles accomplishes this feat in two very important ways.

First, when your article is search engine friendly, using keywords that you hope to target in the search engines, it is more likely to appear higher up in the search engine results when those keywords are searched. Furthermore, when people do searches at the article directories using your keywords, your articles should come up better in those results as well. Search engine optimization and article marketing really must go hand-in-hand at all times!

Second, there are hundreds of thousands of people building AdSense sites. They want articles that cause specific types of AdSense ads to appear on their site. An article with the right search engine optimization accomplishes this, which means that more of these publishers will want to use your articles on their site – and that wider exposure can boost your article marketing results significantly.

Unfortunately, most online marketers don’t understand the importance of making their articles search engine friendly - and even if they do, they aren’t sure how to achieve sufficient search engine optimization in their article marketing efforts. Many sites and e-books go into long, complicated explanations, but it is really quite simple.

First, use your keyword phrase in the title of your article. This is extremely important. Next determine the keyword density that you want to use. Experts say that a keyword density of 2% - 5% is good. This means that 2% or more of your article should contain your keyword phrase. So if your article is 500 words long, your keyword phrase should appear at least 10 times (500 x 2% = 10). So your keyword phrase should be used twice in the first paragraph, six times in the body of the article, and twice in the last paragraph.

Article marketing is one of the most powerful ways to promote your web sites and your blogs, and to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing links. Hopefully your on-site search engine optimization is already bringing you in solid levels of targeted traffic from the major search engines, and now you know to keep off-site search engine optimization foremost in your mind when you next sit down to your article marketing tasks!

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Since starting out online in 1996, Internet marketer Doug Champigny has become a recognized search engine optimization expert, and has generated millions of page-views for his 100+ websites & blogs. He shares a lot of what he’s discovered at the Internet Marketing with Doug Champigny blog.
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Why Affiliate Marketing?

©2008 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

Each of us has its own interest or has a hobby. Some love all kinds of books, music, and movies while others are into sports and traveling. There are also people who love to grow flowers and loves pets. These things help us to relax and forget our everyday problems and troubles and these things are common to people. But not everyone has a hobby that makes money for him/her except if you love your job.

A good money-making hobby could let you treat your family and friends with the extra cash or you can even quit your current job that you almost certainly hate. That is why many of us today go online to start a business; their reasons are either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their offline income from their job. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start in making money online.

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing partnership between a web merchant and one or more affiliates. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, leads or most often sales to the merchant. An affiliate’s advantage is that he can make money in a business where he doesn’t have the upfront costs of creating his own product, and he doesn’t have to worry about e-commerce, bookkeeping, or even customer support for it is the merchant’s responsibility.

Now, for sure you want to be an affiliate marketer with all that benefits an affiliate could get. But, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer? Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, you need to decide first which area interest you. What products do you know the most and which products you could do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty, perseverance, patience, determination comes next. These are the qualities you should possessed to be a good affiliate marketer.

Too many online business prospectors lose out because they become impatient. You also have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at and your capabilities and abilities related to your chosen streak. And the most important thing is you have to have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing.

To be an affiliate marketer is not an easy task. You have to learn the techniques of marketing your product or service. You shouldn’t be looking at every chance because marketing is all about attracting you to look at this or that particular opportunity. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you should learn how to listen and to be taught because in life we need to learn skills to get by.

For an affiliate marketer, you should know how to market your site effectively, in will enable you to get thousands of visitors coming to your site which transforms into more sales. This only means that the faster you set up a website, the bigger your chances of making money online faster. You should avoid the same mistakes some affiliates make everyday, they are only building a short-term business where they just make a small sale. Make sure you do understand that you should be building a long-term affiliate business and not just something that makes you a few dollars on one sale.

It is also better to have knowledge on how to upsell your visitors for expensive services. This will in turn make you become recognized as an expert in your field and making money will be easier. There are some people thinks that just by having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. This can have some truth to it, but then most successful affiliates still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns for their affiliate programs is still important. But affiliate marketers become much more successful when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site. It is very important for an affiliate marketer to have a good business relationship with customers or visitors.

You should also be creative. The real key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to develop a good content based website and weave your affiliate links into all your content. You have to provide your prospects with good, quality content to keep them coming back to your site. So, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer?

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Doug Champigny is a popular Internet marketer, blogger, e-zine publisher, mentor and speaker - and a noted Affiliate Marketing expert, in thanks partly to his Affiliate Marketing Blog and his sites like the Affiliate Marketing Special Report and Affiliate Marketing Revealed. A partner in the popular PDCBA Affiliate Alerts service, Doug recommends affiliate marketers build their own opt-in lists using the Power List Pro software.
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Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, super-affiliates, making money online, Internet marketing, Doug Champigny