This interaction is what “social networking” is all about – with the most glaring examples being platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They provide you the opportunity to interact with an ever-broadening network of people who share your interests, or are interested in what you have to say.

Those of us interested in using these social networking sites as marketing tools can find it a bit overwhelming. Keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, ActiveRain, and many others is difficult and time-consuming. And if there is no comprehensive strategy for our social networking it will eventually become tiresome and of questionable value.

As part of a sensible online social networking strategy, most “experts” agree it is important to have your blog at the centre of things. Your blog is where you can express yourself in greater depth, and without worrying that you are being too pushy or sales-oriented.

Generally speaking, your friends and followers on sites like Facebook or Twitter do not like to be bombarded with a sales pitch whenever they read your entries. But using your tweets and Facebook entries to point them to interesting stories, articles, videos, or special offers is perfectly acceptable. The easiest place to point them is your own blog.

This strategy is no mystery and it has been discussed many times by marketing experts: use your blog to build your online identity, publish your opinions, and present your special products and offers. Use the other social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to drive traffic to your blog.

In other words, as I said above, your blog should be at the center of your marketing strategy. Looking at it this way may encourage you to reconfigure your whole online marketing strategy. But that is probably a good thing.

Youtube.com – This is one of the most widely used and easiest places to find blog content. Say you have a “golf swing tips” blog. Just go to Youtube, search for “golf swing tips” and pick the one you want to include in your blog. Find the embed code and copy it into the appropriate place in your blog. Make sure to accompany the video with a short commentary of your own. You can add links to your commentary, just like an ordinary blog post.

EzineArticles.com – This is the best article site on the web. Search for articles using keywords. Pick the article you want to re-publish. Copy it into your blog, making sure to publish it just as you found it. That includes retaining the author’s “resource box”, links to his or her websites, and all links within the article.

Google News/Yahoo News/Bing News – If you occasionally want to publish a current “news” story, then one of the high profile news sites will give you lots of ideas. For example I just did a search in Bing News (bing.com) for “electronic gadgets” and found:

- Third of teens use cell to cheat
- Sony CEO says restructuring steps on track
- iPhone to hit stores as Apple awaits Jobs’ return

…and many more.

Most of these stories provide good fodder for blog posts. Remember, don’t just copy the news story, and be sure to add your own comments.

Free Original Articles with reprint rights – About the only place you will find top quality free articles is in a membership site of which you are a member. For example, if you are an AgentMapIt member we provide free articles ideal for use in blogs and newsletters. These are high quality, original, “free” PLR articles (PLR stands for “Private Label Rights”). For example, see Free Green Tips.

PLR Articles – You can buy groups of articles that have been written by someone else and bundled as a package of PLR articles. PLR stands for “private label rights”, which means that you can publish the articles as they are, modify them, just use parts of them, and put your own name on them as the author. Most PLR packages are poorly written – often by non-English speakers – and often 5 or more years old. They have probably been recycled several times, so if they are any good they have probably been published elsewhere a number of times. I don’t recommend using PLR articles.

Outsource your blog post writing – There are all kinds of people out there prepared to write quality short articles for next to nothing. For example, if you are using the Categorize and Cycle approach (where you have 4 or 5 categories and try to write on article a week in each) you could have a ghost writer create 5 articles for each of 4 categories (20 short articles). Chances are you can find someone to do this for less than $150. Often they will do it for as low as $5 each. Stretch those articles out over two or three months (you can add your own stuff between outsourced articles) and you have a pretty inexpensive way to create a totally original blog.

Of course different writers will have different areas of expertise, and the writing quality will vary from writer to writer. A good place to find writers is on forums such as The Warrior Forum.

Outsource your entire blog – Finally I would be remiss not to mention our own blogging service. Our Blog and Mail service includes setting up and maintaining your blog, writing and posting unique articles at least once a week, helping you create a contact list, and sending an email to that list at least once a month. In other words, this is an entire marketing program built around having your own blog and regular email campaign. You really don’t have to do anything. We do the entire thing.

This approach is even more effective when integrated with an aggressive Twitter campaign.

As you can see, even if you have very few ideas and have limited writing skills it is not that difficult to create your own interesting and effective blog. However it is important to remember what I said at the beginning of this report: without traffic your blog might as well not exist. The very first thing
you should do is think through how you intend to get traffic to your blog.

In my estimation the traffic generation methods discussed by would-be blogging gurus usually come down to SEO and they do not work for local business blogs. The only method I have found that does actually generate traffic is the Blog and Mail method outlined elsewhere in this blog.

1. Pick an interesting topic for your blog
2. Write interesting posts with catchy titles
3. Optimize your blog posts for the Search Engines
4. Promote your blog on blog directories and bookmarking sites

If you do these things, the forumula says, you will get the attention of the Search Engines (especially Google), and they will send you a “stampede of targeted traffic”.

In case you haven’t noticed, this formula relies almost exclusively on the Search Engines for traffic, and because of this it is seriously misleading. I can state with no hesitation at all that if you use this formula to get traffic to your blog you will almost certainly be disappointed by the results.

Yes, there are bloggers who get tons of traffic, and much of that traffic is driven by the Search Engines. But what you’re not told is that these bloggers have built up their list of followers over quite a long period of time, usually using a strategy other than simply relying on the hit and miss results you get from the search engines.

And if you are a local business – a real estate agent, accountant, lawyer, chiropractor, restaurant, landscaping company, etc., etc. – you are addressing a narrowly targeted local niche where the fact is only local followers matter to you. You will soon find that to rely on the search engines to deliver a lot of traffic from such a relatively small target market will be extremely disappointing.

For more ideas on traffic strategies that do (and don’t) work, get this free report called Blogs That Work.

Getting traffic to your blog is the biggest and most important issue for bloggers. Not topic, not content, not design.

Traffic. That is where your blogging strategy should start. If you don’t have a traffic strategy you’ll be spending a lot of time writing stuff that very few people will ever see.

There’s no doubt that a blog can often be the best way to put a consistent face on your business. Rather than a static website that makes no attempt to invite visitor interaction, a blog can be a perfect way to engage your people and build a relationship with them.

But there is a problem with blogs, and we might as well state it right at the beginning. Your blog will only be effective if it has two things: good content and quality, targeted traffic.

And of these two things (content and traffic) traffic is by far the more difficult issue. Getting quality traffic is the problem for web marketers. In fact, if your website or blog has no traffic it might as well not exist.

– Blogs That Work – Get The Free Report

So, this may sound odd, but it is really the place to start in developing a blogging strategy.

Ask yourself: “How can I generate traffic to my blog?” If you don’t have a good answer to this question you should probably stop before you go any further.

The two critical ingredients that make a blog work are content and traffic. You need content that people want to read, and you need a way of driving traffic to it. Otherwise all the time and effort you spend creating, maintaining and promoting your blog are wasted.

Can blogging be an effective strategy for finding new leads and developing new customers. Yes it can.

Download Blogs That Work.

In many cases the improvements from upgrade to upgrade are minor, and sometimes do not seem to justify the hassle involved in doing the upgraded.

But version 2.7 – the newest upgrade released near the middle of Dec. 08 – has some important improvements that make it worth doing. Most of these improvements are to the user interface. They’ve made it easier to get around inside of WP, easier to install plugins, and added some things that give it greater functionality.

For a somewhat comprehensive discussion of these improvements see this article called “16 Must-Know Features in Wordpress 2.7″.

What I consider to be the most important improvements are:

1. The user interface is nicer. It is easier to get around in WP and faster.
2. Plugins can be added right within the admin area of WP. No need to upload via FTP and then activate.
3. The StickPost plugin has been built right into WP. This allows you to put a post in a specific spot (usually the 1st) where it stays while other posts fall in below as they are added.
4. Updating Wordpress has been made easier with the built-in Wordpress Upgrader – The WordPress Upgrader will give you the option of downloading, installing, and upgrading to the latest WordPress version right from your Administration Panel.

Say your blog is about real estate in your local community. A typical blog skimming post will read something like this:

I found this great post over in The Real Estate Blog called “When Will Real Estate Values Begin to Appreciate Again?” by Aubrey Clark. Aubrey claims that the current slump is forcing us to return to values held by our parents’ generation. In his opinion the cheap credit of the last decade actually devalued our homes by making it much too easy to get into home ownership.

As he says, “I cannot predict when the real estate market will bounce back, but I can tell you what needs to happen before it does. America needs to reinvest in herself by getting back to solid buying and selling principles.”

In other words, we need to start caring about the value we ourselves have invested in our homes, and less about how much we can make by flipping them.

This sounds like very sound advice to me.

Just make sure to give credit where credit is due. Give a direct link to the posts you are skimming. The other bloggers will very likely return the favor some day. And don’t just lift the content. Include a short summary, a quotation, a link to the original, and then add a comment or two of your own.

There’s no easier way to create really interesting and useful content for your blog.

The pitch was in the form of a blog post and the claim was that if I received less than 1000 visitors a day and 300 subscribers then I obviously needed help. One of the topics was “How to write posts that get comments.”

I had a closer look at the blog and I noticed that the very post that I was reading had only two comments.

So how can this be? If this person is using her own strategy and getting at least 1000 visits to her blog every day; and if she is applying her own strategies for generating comments how could a post have only two comments? Shouldn’t this post have hundreds of comments? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Well, yes it does. Because she was obviously bending the truth. The 1000 visitors a day was just another figment of the fertile imagination of a “successful” internet marketer.

A blogger who I had come to respect as offering the occasional bit of useful advice and whose recommendations I had followed from time to time, had crossed the line and become just another snake oil salesman.

Be Truthful – The 1st Rule of Blogging

If you are considering creating a personal or corporate blog you should give some thought to developing your own “code of ethics”. I don’t mean to sound overly moralistic about this, but the fact is your blog will (or should) become your voice, your channel, and to a large degree the purveyor and shaper of your identity. So it is important that you think about how you intend to conduct yourself when shaping that identity.

As with all channels of communication your first commitment should be to honesty and sincerity. That means there is very little room for exaggeration and misrepresentation – no matter how badly you want to sell your products.

If you intend to do serious blogging aimed at developing a loyal readership who trust what you say to be an accurate reflection of what you really believe, then resist the temptation to exaggerate or make misleading claims.

Search Engine Optimization is all about building a website or web resource (page, video, article, etc.) that gives the search engines what they are looking for. The better you do this, the better your chances of getting high search ranking for your pages.

The first thing you should understand is that “content is king” with the search engines. Not just any old content, but the content that is focused on the specific topics that people are looking for. A blog allows you to create hundreds of pages that each have a very specific focus.

These pages are self-reinforcing – which means that they all reinforce the main general theme of your blog. So as you are creating many individual pages you are also creating an “authoritative” body of material that the search engines view as a valuable resource. This results in better search engine rankings for the site as a whole.

Second, your chances of scoring well with the search engines are magnified even further because now each of your posts can be optimized for different search terms, and each of them has a chance of coming up high in search engine rankings for its own keywords. For example, your blog’s general theme may be “Memphis real estate”, but the focus of a specific post or series of posts might be “mortgages in Memphis”. Now you have a chance of scoring well for those search terms too.

Third, blogs are updated regularly. The search engines assume that a regularly updated resource has more value to viewers than one that is not updated regularly. So your site is given more priority when they are crawling the web – in other words, they visit your site more often and keep their indexes up to date with the changes and additions you make.

Fourth, the search engines look for interlinking with other authoritative sites that share your theme. For instance, if your site is about “dog training”, then links from other dog training sites and links to other dog training sites will strengthen the association of your site with all the other sites you link to. This will enhance your site’s prominence within the whole “neighborhood” of dog training sites. Obviously a blog gives you unlimited opportunities to create these associations. Each post can (and should) link out to other posts about similar topics. And each post also serves as “link bait” attracting inbound links from other bloggers and webmasters.

And fifth, the search engines look for other evidence that people value your content. Increased traffic to your pages, and interaction with them (comments and questions) are signs to the search engines that your site is a valuable resource within your niche. As traffic and interaction increase, your rankings within searches will go even higher.

So as you can see, having a blog that your add posts to on a regular basis, and one that focuses on a range of interesting topics within your main niche is a great way to build your credibility with the search engines. This can’t help but push your search rankings up for all the topics you discuss within your blog.