How to Promote Your Blog and Drive Business to Your Site

Blogging has become a major pastime for Internet users but it can help your business as well. Depending on what type of business you run, a blog can get viewers to your site or business that you might not have been able to find otherwise.

Blog, blog, and then blog again. I run no less than 4 blogs for my business and believe me, I get a lot of customers from them. If you run a casual type business, it helps to put personal type information in your blog. People like reading about everyday people and even if you are using a subtle approach to advertise as well, they'll still read it and it might drive new customers to your site.

Link to other people. People read all kinds of blogs so it can only help you to link yourself to similar blogs. Potential customers will read someone else's blog and then perhaps link over to yours as well. Offer blog exchanges or link exchanges with people, even your competition. If your competition has your link up, you might get business or referrals from that person. Be fair though, if someone has your link up, make sure to add his or hers as well. It's only fair to exchange the correct way.

Tag words. Add relevant tags to your blog so that others can find you when doing a search. If you're selling crafts, add craft keywords. If you're selling a service, add those words that a customer would look for if they wanted to frequent your business.

Some very popular blogging sites today are:

www.livejournal.com

www.wordpress.com

www.blogspot.com

www.blogger.com

www.myspace.com

www.lostcherry.com

Now you might have noticed that I added MySpace. I know it's not for advertising but if you do have a personal blog, it can't hurt to add it here and then link it to your site. Just don't do any blatant advertising since that's against the rules. But do put your name and site out there as many places as you can.

I also found a site called www.blogsvertise.com where you can advertise your blog. Another one is www.crispads.com You might ask why someone would want to advertise their blog for their business when they can just simply advertise their site. I can't stress enough how many people read blogs and will stumble upon your business as well. Do a search for blog advertising or "advertise your blog" on www.google.com and you'll find plenty of sites specifically for this purpose.

You can also make money with your blog by trying out sites that pay you to put up ad space. One such site is www.inblogads.com and all you do is submit your blog to be approved, insert their ad code into your blog, they then sell text ads, and you get paid each month.

Most blog services generate an RSS feed. If your blogging software does not create an RSS feed, consider using software like FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com to create an RSS feed. Like blogs, RSS is growing in popularity and is a great way to spread the word about a new blog.

Syndication is conceptually simple. It allows publishers to distribute content that can be displayed in another location or context. Using RSS, publishers are able to easily create and disseminate content feeds that include news headlines, blog summaries and related links. RSS is the defined syndication standard that has become mainstream. All types of information are now available in a syndicated format.

I also found a list of sites where you can submit your RSS feed. http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm Click on the titles on the right and start submitting. It can't hurt to have your blog listed every place you can think of. All advertising is good advertising.