How to Start Blogging

You can easily begin your online business with an effective online scalable blogging platform. Marketing Mania 2012 provides an easy way you can blog about your favorite interest(s) and help pass your knowledge onto people seeking answers to the questions you may already know.

Some people may consider this is a very controversial topic; however, I am of the belief that blogging is simply one of the most fun ways to earn money. Quite simply, blogging is the best way to get new and original content out into the world wide web. You should feel really good about publishing content you've taken the time to present to the rest of the world.

How do you know if you can blog? What are you good at? Have you ever done anything and finished first? Have you been involved in a terrible accident and found a way to overcome it? Have you ever done anything? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you can become a blogger. Don't worry about the technical proponents involved with completing and submitting a blog online as it will come with time, just start writing. You'll eventually learn about optimizing your blogs and what the article submission criteria are later. Start off by writing about whatever it is you're passionate about. I will outline a couple things you can do right away below.

One thing to keep in mind when you are writing a blog is where do you start? Well, like I said above, just start writing. When you write your first blog, don't make it too long. Keep it to around 500 words and no more. This way you won't get burned out and you can have plenty of content to write about on future posts. After you've written your blog, take a second to read it over and look for words that come up more than once. Identify these words as your keywords. These are the descriptive words that you will use to "tag" your article or blog with and this is called optimizing. Also, when you submit your blog to various articles, use these same keywords to describe your article. These are the keywords that are relevant when someone searches for this information in a search engine.

After a while, you will start recognizing how to start writing your blog posts with optimization in mind, you won't have to worry about restructuring the article as much. In the good old days, people wrote articles for the newspapers and magazines. They didn't have to worry about someone keying in certain words in Google to find their article because they were already there. Nowadays, if you don't have keywords associated with your writing, then you might as well not worry about getting found.

Another tip is that you should find a good platform to blog on. There are many out there and here are a few sites you can check out to get started that are free:

blogger
wordpress
freeblogspot

Although these services are free, they do take a little getting used to. However, as long as you devote a little time going through the motions and watching the videos explaining the services, you shouldn't have that much of a problem. The site I use is the Empower Network. This is a paid service (only $25 per month); however, the platform is already all set up for you. It is integrated with WordPress, but you don't have to go through all the learning curves and there is no need for you to build a website. The blogging system is scalable, meaning that you can grow your site as large as you want it over time, and provides you with a platform to generate income based on any topic you want to write about.

Don't make this a race. Don't think that as soon as you publish your first blog you'll be running to the bank to cash in all the money advertisers will be throwing at you (i.e., Tebowing) to get placement on your blog because of all the traffic you generate because chances are%u2026that just won't happen. That being said, if you enjoy a certain topic, write about your experience within that niche and overtime, you'll gain a following around what you are passionate about. It's simply amazing what will happen when you are doing something you love. It doesn't feel like work, that's for sure.

Well, in case you don't know what blogging is, I'm going to attempt to explain it to the best of my ability. According to ask.com a blog, which is short for a Web log, is an Internet service that allows people to post a sort of journal entry that is usually centered around a theme. In my case, I enjoy blogging about search engine optimization and how to get ranked using meta-tags and the like.

I definitely don't want to get off on a technical rant; however, I really want to tell you how important a blog is to your business. If you really want to get recognized, you need to consistently post new content every day. Yes, I said every day%u2026ugh, sigh%u2026I hear you. It's really not that bad, as a matter of fact, blogging can be a lot of fun. It is for me. I use it as a platform to help people who are interested in learning about what to do in order to get their information seen online. All you have to possess is a little patience and passion for whatever it is that you are interested in and the rest will come.

The reason I say you have to have some patience is that it typically takes approximately 90 days for your blog to really start gaining traction with the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. The search engines crawl your site with what are called spiders. These spiders love fresh content and that is exactly what they get when someone is constantly updating their blog. With so much information on the net, not everyone submits fresh content%u2026yes, I know, a lot of people copy content from other sites and blogs, but that's not what you are going to do, right? Think of it like this, the more time and effort you put into your posts, the more rewarding it will be for you. Just keep at it. Just when you think you've had it, stick it out for another two weeks and you will enjoy the benefits of having organic search results like you wanted. FYI: Organic search results are the results seen in search engines that get ranked without having to pay for them through advertising like pay-per-click (ppc) campaigns.

In addition to patience, make sure you have a lot of passion about the topic you choose to write about. If you like gardening, then you have to know about gardening or else you won't have much authority to speak of. Just pick something you are passionate about and you'll be turning out 400-500 word blogs without even realizing it. Btw - 400 to 500 words are perfect amount for your blogs as many article sites that you can submit to want articles written with at least that many words.

Here are a couple things to keep in mind while writing your blog:

Make sure to use keywords relative to your topic. Think about it as if you were someone searching for your topic, what would you type into a search engine in order to find out what you know?

1. Don't overuse keywords, (This is called keyword loading), as this may be considered as spamming when the spiders crawl your site.
2. Make sure to use links when blogging. It's always a good idea to reference other sites, could be your own, or a previous blog you've already written, because the spiders love links.
3. When you come across a keyword that you want linked, simply highlight the word.
right-click the word
click on the hyper-link button
name the link and you're done

4. Don't forget to "tag" your posts. Always type approximately six to eight keywords into your meta-tags prior to publishing your post. If you don't know what meta-tags are, these are the keywords written into the html of your site. All you have to do is make sure your web designer gets them and he will know what to do from there. If you are working off a site such as WordPress, then you simply add your keywords to the "Post Tags" section and separate each keyword with a comma.

So, now that you know to be a professional blog writer all you have to do is be patient and have passion about your topic and that's it, right? Wrong, it can't be that easy or everyone would be doing it. Although, both these components are very important, you still need to get the word out over and beyond just posting the blog. If you dedicate about an hour of, what I call "blog therapy" a day, it will definitely help to keep the web doctor away. I mean, get used to writing about what you love and it will become a habit before you know it. In addition to the actual content that you write, let people know about it. Here are five places on the web you can post a link to share your blog that will help get you some traffic:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Digg
4. StumbleUpon
5. Delicious

If you don't have an account with any of these sites, then I highly recommend you get one. They are all free, but the amount of leverage you pull by maintaining a presence on these sites, the more traffic you will generate to your blog and that's the goal, right? I sure hope so. Oh, btw, you can import these bookmarks to your other social networking sites like Facebook and twitter. Just click on the help menu on the site to assist you on how to do this.

Insider Tip: Here's some software that you can purchase that I have used that will really help you blast your message out a lot quicker if you really want to get the ball rolling. http://www.TrafficGeyser.com/cmd.php?af=55965 - this is my affiliate link and you can get an introductory discount if you use...but you don't have to. You can simply go to traffic geyser.

Well, I hope you were able to learn a lot from my posts today. Let me know if you need help with any of it by posting a comment. Have an awesome day and I am committed to my goal of helping 2012 people grow their business in 2012!

No, I'm not talking about the extra roll around your belly or the obese upstairs neighbors that wakes at all hours of the night making their 20 trips to the fridge. I'm talking about promoting your name out into the world wide web responsibly and ethically. It's a very difficult thing to do, but I am going to give you a few hints that will help you to promote your site.

First things first. Don't think about conquering the entire world, country or state when you are starting off. Try conquering your town, city, county or specific area that you know well. Why? Well, because you want to get good rankings on the search engines and the less competition you have%u2026the more chances you have of getting a high ranking on the first pages of the search engines. Here's an example:

Keywords: Internet Marketing - Google Search
About 282,000,000 results (0.25 seconds)
Keywords: Internet Marketing Springfield
About 1,560,000 results (0.36 seconds)

As you can see, I would much rather be going up against 1.5 million competitors versus 282 million competitors. Wouldn't you? This is a great example of creating a "long-tailed keyword". Internet marketing is probably one of, if not the most competitive market to get involved in. If you start marketing locally and move your way up, then you will become successful.

This leads me to my next topic of keywords. Now, you may or may not of heard of keywords before, but they play a very important role in helping the search engines rank your site. Keywords have also been referred to as "tags", that's what they are called in WordPress. Since you are authoring your blog and/or website, you must be familiar with regard to the content you are writing about. Otherwise, why are you writing about something you don't know? It makes no sense. Anyway, I digress, you probably know more than others regarding the topic you want to write about; therefore, you probably know a lot of the keywords associated within that industry. This is a good thing as you need to make sure you reference industry-specific words.

If you go to Google and type in "keyword tool", you'll see the first result for this tool from Google. Once you click on the tool, you can search for keyword ideas by entering a keyword related to your business or service or a URL to a page containing content related to your business or service. This is just another way to generate additional keywords to use in your content and when you are developing your meta-tags and keyword descriptions.

Here's a free service that will give you ten free keyword searches:

http://www.wordstream.com/keywords.

I hope you learned a couple solutions to the Big, Fat Problem today! Let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to hearing your comments.

PS - A couple things that I forgot about%u2026make sure to not have more than eight keywords in your meta-tags (these are the keywords associated with the web page. If you don't know HTML, just make sure to give all this information to your web-designer and they will make sure that your keywords or meta-tags and your keyword description are put into the HTML). Also, make sure your keyword description isn't over 160 characters long. This description is very important as it describes your website and/or blog using the keywords to describe what your page is all about and this will be a big reason as to how your site is ranked according to the data entered for the search.

If social media isn't the most popular subject associated with online marketing, then it's has to be right at the top. It's so challenging to differentiate yourself from the pack with regard to the online social aspect; however, it still an integral part of this process. Notice: I said "part", meaning that you still need to have a complete marketing strategy in addition to the social marketing.

So, how do you integrate the social element into your business? This is the million dollar question. I admittedly don't have all the questions; however, I do have a couple tips you can easily implement to help empower your social media. Here are a couple sites I would recommend you set up prior to launching your marketing campaign (a cool site to find out the best social networking sites according to Alexa.com is ebizma.com.

List of Social Media Sites
Facebook
twitter
stumbleupon
http://Ning
Google+
Squidoo

Okay, so now that you have identified what social networking sites you want to be affiliated with, it's time to make sure they are all connected. Often times, this can be done by signing up for a service either through twitter or facebook. If that option is available to you, definitely take advantage of it. The reason you want to sign up for a new service using your facebook or twitter accounts are (1) it saves time by keeping you from having to enter a bunch of personal information and (2) it links your services together. This means that if you post something in your StumbleUpon account, it will also automatically post to your facebook and/or twitter account simultaneously.

Tip
"Go to the site bit.ly to shorten a long url like http://www.empowernetwork.com/almostasecret.php?id=jaimek41 to http://bit.ly/vxTKT9 when posting to Twitter so you don't use as many characters since you are limited to 140."

There are a couple good services to look into that can help you with multiple-channel distribution. Multiple-channel distribution is creating and submitting content to several different sites that will include a link to your site (also known as a back-link). The more back-links you have on other sites such as twitter and Facebook, the more authority your site has. Every site is rated on its authority. A site gains authority be several things, that I will go into at a later date, but one of the main factors of authority and ranking are the number of links for your site found on other sites.

I didn't mean to get so dang technical; however, you need to understand the basic foundation as to how certain things happen in the world wide web. Don't worry too much about the technical aspect, just focus on what you can control. In order to effectively market your site, make sure to always reference your site by incorporating a link to your page in all your marketing efforts. Yes, posting on Facebook and Twitter are considered, in my opinion, "marketing efforts".

One last tip I think will greatly assist you with your marketing efforts is to create all your posts and copy them in a word document separating out the title/subject, body and tags. That way, when you go to upload your copy, you can cut and paste the content from your word editor to help speed up the process. So, if you are using a service such as Ning or StumbleUpon, you can simply reference the subject/title by copying and pasting that section of the post separately from the body of the message and the tags (keywords describing your post to help people searching for the answers your content provides).

If you have any additional questions just make a comment below. If you want to be a part of my Empower Network, simply watch this video to learn more about establishing your very own marketing platform. I also included a link to "Traffic Geyser" below that I can't recommend enough. This software helps to submit posts to multiple sites at once%u2026great time-saver and right now, by clicking on the icon below, you can get a trial for only $1.00.

Starting out in something new is often times very intimidating. I say this from personal experience starting out as an internet marketer without a list of emails, website or product to sell. It's overwhelming not knowing where to start, but knowing darn well that you need to make some money.

Many people have illusions of grandeur when it comes to making money, or better yet, making a living online. It's difficult at best without any guidance and/or direction. So many people get nickled and dimed to death with empty promises of "Get Rich Quick" schemes. So many people say things to get you to buy their product, but once you've spent your hard-earned money, there really is no direction or guidance after the fact.

It's one thing to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars and get a full-blown internet marketing product from one of the many "Guru's". It's a completely different story for those of us who don't have that kind of money to take a chance on starting a new internet business in the hopes we can make our investment back, at the very least, right? This is why it's taken me nearly a year to find a product that I didn't have to take a loan out to actually learn about internet marketing without having the added stress of simply "not knowing".

The Empower Network is a simple, three-step viral blogging system that clearly defines everything you need to do in order to effectively build a business online. Don't get me wrong, it's going to take work, but at least this system provides the much needed and scalable platform that enables you to succeed.

Although this system is designed to get you up and running in a quickly, without requiring you to know HTML or and special programming skills, there is still a fair amount of work that needs to be done prior to launching your marketing campaign to build your list and ultimately, generate revenue.

Based on my experience (take that as you may, LOL), I put together a semi-general checklist that outlines some of the preparations you can expect to work on prior to the launch of your marketing campaign:

1. Try AWeber's Email Marketing Tool Risk-Free

2. Spend the $25 it takes to become an Empower Network member.

3. Think of a cool name you would like for your business and make sure you match your username with the name of your online business.

4. Visit GoDaddy.com and purchase a domain name for your new online business.

5. Make sure to search for a domain name that isn't taken already before you choose your Empower Network username.

6. Google "Godaddy promo code" to search for a domain name discount you can apply toward the purchase of a new domain name. You can usually get a 20-30% discount.

7. Set up an email with your domain instead of having a general email account like yahoo or gmail. This provides you with instant online authority.

8. Set up a "Facebook Page" with the name of your internet marketing business.

9. Create your first blog post and post a minimum of one blog per day.

10. Go through your new blog site and update and personalize all the content to the best of your ability.

11. Find a good auto-responder service and set yourself up as an affiliate if possible.

http://marketingmania2012.aweber.com. aWeber is my favorite auto-responder service, but there is a monthly fee attached to it and you are limited, based on the program you have, with the number of emails you can send out.

http://www.listwire.com/mmania. This is a free service; however, you can only load one email at a time and it's a little challenging for the beginner internet marketer. The landing and squeeze pages are available; however they are limited with regard to design and layout. It's a good service if you are strapped for cash like I was when I started out.

12. Start researching social bookmarking sites you can upload your site information to: i.e., stumbleupon and reddit.

13. Register with the major search engine directories.

14. Register with article submission sites such as 101articles.com and 365articles.com.

15. Register with general search engine directories such as DeeMX and Famhoo.

16. Review the Google standards for submitting your site to generate traffic at http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tech.html

17. Review Alexa submissions at http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tech.html. This link will provide you with a general overview of the who, what, where, when and why of Alexa and shy it's so important to know this.

18. One of the most important parts of setting up your business online is to make sure that all the links you are using work. It's a total bummer and the spiders that crawl your site to learn more about it hate it when links are broken.

19. Maintain consistency and spend about an hour a day on your business. Don't spend too much all at once and up front or you'll run the risk of burning out.

Although there are several other things that you will need to consider, I understand that you may prefer to work in a different way or set your business up differently. This is how I started out and it worked okay for me. It took me about a week to get everything up and running before I really started my marketing campaign. I highly recommend you take the time to get your internet business set up prior to marketing your site so you can double and triple check your work so that once you roll out your launch, (I'm not saying it will be smooth and nothing will break or be broken), you will be familiar with your system and how it works to provide the best service to your future clients.

Let's make some money and have some fun! Simply comment on my blog with any questions you may have and I look forward to seeing your campaign on a website here soon!