If you’re looking to market your business or your trade, you might want to reconsider spending thousands of dollars on a pricey marketing campaign. For a fraction of the cost, you could set up a blog to spread the word about your services. Setting up your own blog on the web is about as easy as making an account on eBay. Blogging can indeed help you market your business for free online.

Blogging to market your business

If you want to properly utilize a blog to market yourself, your business, or a certain product, you have to do what everyone else in the marketing business does to achieve success, in or out of the web: work for it. Despite the legions of bloggers praising the ease of blogging as a marketing tool, the truth is that you’ll have to commit yourself daily to your blog if you want to see any substantive results. Blogging is not a set it and forget it idea.

First things first—you need to set up your blog. Do so by choosing a clean, professional (and free) blogging platform like those offered by WordPress or Blogger.

So what’s next?

Start cranking out market-worthy content

Let’s assume that you took to blogging on the basis that you’re marketing your professional services consulting small businesses. You have a local office and you’re looking to the web to massively expand your reach in the field.

In this case, the best way to start your blog is to write regularly occurring posts offering free and substantive tips for small businesses looking for management advice. Make your blog posts pithy and informative—remember you’re looking to lure readers (and customers) browsing for services similar to yours. The last thing you want to do is bore them with writing too much content.

Aim for content that engages the reader so they can relate to your message quickly. Informative anecdotes or problem/solution posts about the industry are good examples of blog posts that hook readers.

Consider the problem/solution post: imagine a minor management issue for a small business—like a dispute between employees—and then offer a short, effective solution that would disarm the situation. This way a reader would glimpse your services in action, and may then be more inclined to contact you about in-depth consulting for their company.

Do everything to expand your readership

Blogging is about interaction. In order to further expose your services on the web, take advantages of social media networks that could spread your name to related business and professional circles. Set up accounts on services like LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter as mobile web marketing tools to reach out to potential customers.

Though social media services differ in their interface, they all serve the same function of uniting likeminded web users. Your task as a blogger is to use your social media account to search out viable customers and business contacts that can help spread awareness about your services.

When you make an account, be sure to add detailed information about the nature of your services, your professional experience and your education background. And most important of all, post your blog url! Once you’re set up with your account, take some time to familiarize yourself with the format of the social media network’s interface.

Bear in mind that you’ll search out users on each service by using their comprehensive search features. You simply type in the topic of your choosing or the name of a prominent person in the industry, and you’ll be presented with a host of users who reference or discuss them in detail. Sift through the search results and follow the users who you think could help you the most.

You can also raise awareness for yourself and your blog by offering to guest post on blogs that talk about similar issues. Guest blogging is a very effective way to get exposure. As a guest poster, you may write about topics on other blogs to showcase your knowledge or, industry savvy, putting your spin on a particular subject.

Most blogs will tell you up front whether or, not they accept guest posts in their “About” or “Contact” section.  As compensation for your guest post, ask the blog’s webmaster to include a byline about your services and your blog so interested readers can follow your work in the future. It’s an easy chance at huge exposure to a new audience, so don’t pass it up!

Patience is a virtue, even in blogging

Just because blogging’s free doesn’t mean it’s easy. While blogging may exist in the fast-paced and constantly variable realm of the web, don’t expect your blog to become a success overnight. In the same vein, don’t expect your blog to acquire a handful of readers even in a month’s time.

Blogging requires time. The cultivation of a popular and reliable blog takes time, patience, and persistant hard work from the blogger, no matter what your subject may be. You have to be determined that your initially low (or nonexistent) readership will grow as you continue to write and network your blog.

If you’re willing to stick out months of blog posts with zero comments while maintaining a steady stream of high-quality content, you might just make it in the blogosphere. All it takes is to have one or two readers refer another reader to your blog, who refers another reader, and so on.

A blog’s an investment just like any other business venture; with time, it has the potential to yield great returns.

About the Author

This guest post is contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who writes on the topics of online universities advice.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: katherynrivas87(at)gmail.com.

Don’t forget to let us know how blogging has helped your business by posting your comments below.

This is a guest post by Adam on improving blogging efficiency. You can check out the guidelines for guest posting on our write for us page.

You can’t escape it.

No matter how passionate you are about your blog, if you’re looking to drive traffic and actually make money from the process, there will be things that feel like “work”.

Probably because it is.

But fear not, because you’re about to discover seven tools which free up your time to do what you love: create more quality content and thus improve overall blogging efficiency.

Ready? Then let’s roll…

Link Assistant

Link Assistant is a God-send. It lets you quickly compile a list of authoritative sites in your market. Then, you can send an email to each website (Link Assistant automatically stores contact info). It even tracks responses, and lets you track your status with each.

Which sites responded? Who is interested in your offer? Who requires followup? Link Assistant lets you know all these detail in its simple interface.

I routinely use Link Assistant for blogger outreach, hiring contractors (developers, designers, writers, etc.) and offering strategic alliances. In other words, I use Link Assistant for everything but link prospecting (which it’s designed for).

Here’s an example: let’s say you’ve created a DYNAMITE eBook for your subscribers. Using Link Assistant, you can contact authoritative websites in your market and let them give it away to their subscribers, too. This helps build your brand, and will drive tons of free traffic to your site.

And speaking of traffic…

Rank Tracker

Sure, Google Analytics will show you what keywords are sending you traffic. But what about keywords which could send you traffic – and lots of it – if your site moved from page 3 to page 1 in Google?

Enter Rank Tracker. Simply enter keywords into the program, and it routinely checks the search engines to see where your site appears. It even graphs your progress over time.

And if you’re not certain about which keywords to enter, go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter your website URL. It then spits out 300 (or more) keywords related to your site. Then download them into Excel and paste them into Rank Tracker. Boom. Instant overview of your site’s performance in the search engines.

The next step is to build links to those pages that already appear high in the search engines, but not quite high enough.

SENuke

SENuke is an incredibly powerful, misunderstood and abused piece of software. Powerful, because it automates many link building tasks; misunderstood and abused because people use it to spam the Internet.

Here’s how it works: you write a piece of content. Then, using SENuke, you can quickly distribute it to dozens of article directories and social network sites like Blogger and Hubpages. It even submits videos to 30+ video sharing sites like YouTube.

But that’s just the beginning. Because once that content is distributed, SENuke lets you bookmark each of those pages, then take the RSS feeds from each bookmark and submit those to over 30 RSS feed directories.

Whew. That’s a lot of links!

Now you can see why people use it to create spam. But here’s the thing: used properly , it’s a very powerful tool. The key is to create valuable content, and use SENuke as a launchpad for getting it noticed.
Used this way, you can quickly build your site’s authority.

My Blog Guest – Unique Blogging Efficiency tool

MyBlogGuest is a brilliant idea for bloggers. Basically, you upload a post, and website owners request exclusive rights to publish it on their site. It’s a win-win: they get free, unique content, and you get links and traffic to your site.

But how do you decide which website to give your content to? For that, you need the…

SEOMoz Toolbar

The SEOMoz Toolbar lets you tell at a glance how authoritative a website is based on a scale of 1 – 100. It’s logarithmic, which means going from 20 to 30 is much easier than going from 70 to 80.

Authority counts for a lot in SEO. Higher authority links will increase your own authority, which in turn increases your rankings for keywords.

Aweber

Aweber is an autoresponder. It lets you capture visitors email address, and send them unlimited follow up messages at pre-determined intervals. For example, you could create a 7 day training course, where subscribers receive one lesson each day for seven days.

There’s another feature called “broadcasting”, which allows you to send an email to everyone on your list, no matter when they signed up. This is usually reserved for product launches or special time-sensitive announcements (e.g. 48 hour discounts, live events, webinars, etc.)

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is my favorite analytics tool. It records people visiting your site, then displays their interaction via heatmaps.

This is essential for optimizing your website’s use experience, sales funnel and other conversion factors.

For example, how many people even see your opt-in form? Crazy Egg shows you where people are focused on your site, which lets you put premium content, ads or buy now buttons right in front of them.

If you use WordPress, this heat map plugin is a cheaper, limited alternative (but still worth it; I own this plugin myself).

So there you have it: seven simple tools to improve blogging efficiency and make your blogging life easier. Now get to work!

This is a guest post by Nadia. You can read the guidelines for guest posting at our write for us page.

With thousands of blogs strewn throughout the internet, it is fairly evident that several misconceptions remain about blogging and its money making potential. Many individuals enter the blogging world hoping to make an easy buck, underestimating just how much work successful and profitable blogging can be.

There are several steps to creating a successful blog (many of which are covered here by Dilip Kumar) that must be taken before any monetary advantages can begin. Blogging requires time, practice, and patience. All too often, an individual will develop a blog and start posting, expecting to become an instant sensation. However, fame and success in the blogosphere come slowly and with much hard work.

While blogging can be a lot of work, it can also be extremely worthwhile. Use these four web applications to help you earn money from your blog.

Ego

This application is only for iPad and iPhone users, but it can be extremely useful for understanding web statistics and improving your site’s traffic. Ego provides one convenient and centralized location for you to check all of the web statistics that are important to you and the success of your blog.

Check the amount of hits you have to your website, follow the feed subscription totals that you have, and organize how many Twitter followers you have, all in one easy to use location. Saving bloggers a significant amount of time and stress, Ego can help you keep track of your blog’s popularity without having to login to various websites throughout the web to check statistics. Ego collects all the statistics you need for you and then displays them in one simple interface.

One of the most important aspects of making money from blogging is upping your blog’s traffic. Ego can help you maintain a grasp of where your blog stands and how your blog is progressing.

PingDom

One of the easiest ways to lose money blogging is by having a site that performs poorly. For technical problems, Pingdom can help. Pingdom will notify you when your blog is not working properly or is down completely. The best way to deter readers from your blog is by running a site that is unreliable. No one wants to visit a site that doesn’t run properly or consistently.

Pingdom will help you monitor your site’s health and keep it up and operating at its fullest capacity, alerting you whenever there are any technical mishaps with your blog.

Pantone

Though many people overlook its importance, one of the key aspects of a successful blog is attractive design. Many bloggers enter the blogosphere thinking that stellar content can make up for an ugly site. However, with the way in which we utilize the internet aesthetics are as important as substance.

Pantone is an application that can save the design of any site. With multiple features for color inspiration and color scheming, Pantone can help any blogger design the perfect look for their blog. Though this app is a little on the expensive side at almost $10, its design advice could be the key to getting your blog noticed and the paychecks rolling. Use this app to create a beautiful home for your excellent and interesting blog posts.

Though it can be tempting, no blogger can rely only on their writing abilities to make a successful and profitable blog. Make something that is interesting and insightful to read and something that is pleasant to look at for your audience.

ShoZu

This marketing app allows you to comment on all of your various networks from one easy-to-use location. Social networking is a great way to promote your blog and gain more readers.

ShoZu can help you keep track of and manage all of the various social networks you use to market your blog to the public. ShoZu collects all of the comments, messages, and action from your many social networks and displays it to you in one place. You can then use this app to post a picture, video, or text to each network in one step. Successful marketing is key to a money-making blog. Use ShoZu to stay on top of your essential communications between you and your readers.

Any of these apps can help to jumpstart your blog on the path to financial success. Look up any of these apps online to make sure they will be useful for you and your individual situation. Blogging can be both a fun and profitable adventure to embark on. Have patience, accept help, and watch your blog (and pocketbook) grow.

This is a guest post from Rahil. You can read the guidelines to guest posting on our write for us page.

A very common problem with the majority of mankind has always been the ‘impatience’, patience is a virtue, and it pays off in the longer run, everybody knows that but very few are able to put this rule into practice! We find logics in other’s action and we are quick to tell others that they are trying to bite more than what they can chew, however when it comes to our own actions, we try to grab any kind of opportunity with four hands, but because we have only two hands, it mostly results in injury, in form of stress or financial loss.

The same applies to blogging and bloggers. Looking at the myriad of opportunities in the field of blogging, many go for launching more than one blog at the same time to earn as much as they can. The problem however, is that the more quantity you have the more you will have to put up with the low-quality, hence little or no rewards and lots of stress.

1). One good Blog can earn more than 2 low quality blogs combine

There are a number of get rich scheme proprietors trying to sell different products that will help you launch a plethora of blogs and promise riches in next to no time. There was some money to be made in such schemes some time ago (not as much as what they claim though). Remember if there really was a method of making thousands without doing anything, they wouldn’t be selling that method for $20 bucks? Real world examples tell us that one quality blog can create more opportunities to earn than two automated blogs combined, with both searchers and Google getting more and more severe on low quality content producing website.

2). Good Blogs require nurturing like a plant

Thanks to the toughening competition, a newly launched blog requires a lot of nourishment before it grows into anything of substance, just like a plant! You have to patiently build the readership, back links, post count, and last but not the least, the earnings. For quite some time, you will have to patiently write and update your Blog with good quality posts, while taking home little or no rewards. Unless you have some helping hands or contributors, it isn’t possible to nurture and establish more than 1 – 2 quality blogs at a time.

3). Blog Maintenance & Marketing:

In order to have a successful blog up and running, not only you need to constantly update it, you also need to go through the chores of maintenance and marketing, not to forget dealing with the menaces known as content spam or content scrapping. The short cuts and inexpensive marketing methods like article marketing or blog commenting are fast becoming more and more futile, and it is not easy to market a Blog via quality means like guest posting or social networking, even though these methods are totally worth the effort. Apart from the marketing, you’ll have to spend some time on Search Engine Optimization, keyword research, link building, taking care of the on-site factors and all that. Given that you are pursuing Blogging as a part time activity, it will be difficult to do all that for multiple blogs.

4). you can always start another one – Later

Remember that the emphasis on this post is to avoid starting multiple blogs at the same time; however you can always start more once you have established a successful blog that earns good enough and allows you to pay for some assistance.

This is a guest post by Susan. You can read the guidelines to guest posting to know more.

Website conversion rate is a measurement or a metric defined as the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action. This metric helps you estimate how well your website is doing. The exact definition of website conversion rate depends on the type of website in question. For instance, in case of retail eCommerce websites, conversion rate is the numbers of visitors who make a purchase from the website as a percentage of total number of visitors. To increase the conversion rate of a website, business blogging is an amazing technique.

What is Business blogging?

Business blogs are corporate tools meant for communicating with customers or employees in order to share knowledge and expertise. In addition to serving many other important purposes, they can go a long way in increasing your website’s conversion rate. It is quite an effective technique to ensure targeted traffic to your website and they are designed to publicize your website.

Upon launching a new website, reaching out to your targeted customers is not at all easy. Via business blogging, you can easily achieve this purpose. If you have a flair for writing, you can utilize it fully well for the purpose of popularizing your website and hence increasing its conversion rate. Blogging can greatly help you improve the link popularity of your website. Business blogging can considerably improve your search engine ranking.

Business blogging can help you differentiate your business, products and services from the competitors. It helps you attract prospects and develop new business opportunities. It is an excellent way of promoting your business by means of media and online public relations. By performing all these services, a business blog can certainly help in increasing the conversion rate of your website.

By means of your business blog, you can carry out two way communication with your prospects and customers. It is also employed for the purpose of carrying out general marketing and business development. A business blog can help you develop new markets, products and niches. All this will serve to boost your business to a great deal, and hence collectively serve to increase the conversion rate of your website.

Business blogging is a quick, easy and inexpensive way to increase your website conversion rate. Business blogging serves as one of the most powerful marketing weapons, which is worth its cost. Managing a business blog enables you to repeatedly mention the name of your business and thus make the readers remember your business, so that they are likely to turn to your website whenever they need a particular product or a service. Several things for communication between you and your customers are required for a business transaction to take place. Business blogging provides for this communication between you and your customers, and hence accelerates the conversion rate of your website.

In order to build relationship with your customers, you need to build a rapport with them. This rapport can be developed via business blogging as it enables you to speak openly and frankly, which ultimately makes your customers feel as if they know you. As your customers get to know and like you more and more, they are greatly inclined to visit your website and purchase your product, and hence contribute to enhancing the conversion rate of your website.

Yet another way by which business blogging enhances the conversion rate of your website is by making you and your business appear much more accessible. This is more so if you allow the blog readers to post comments on your blog. Many potential customers prefer to deal with businesses offline because of lack of accessibility in case of online businesses. Business blogging successfully alleviates this concern, and causes more and more blog readers to visit your main website.

Do you see how fast my blog loads?

I have had the problem of slow loading for quite some time and was unable to figure out a solution to it. My Google Analytics report shocked me, when I saw about 60% bounce rate on my blog. The average time spent on my blog gave me a fair idea that the bounce could primarily be because of the slow load time. My blog took a pathetic 20 seconds to load.

It was too much time. If I were the visitor to such a blog, I would obviously browse away, if the blog doesn’t load in the first 5-7 seconds. No wonder I had such a high bounce rate.

I had to spend some time to analyze the reason for the slow page load. One of the resources that helped me a lot in this was http://www.whichloadsfaster.com. They allow for a comparison between 2 sites and analyzes the reasons for the slow page load.

Reason for the slow page load

A few of the reasons I noted for the slow page load were -

1. Plugins
2. Images
3. Hosting Bandwidth
4. Social Media buttons
5. Other external scripts

Plugins – I had close to 17 different plugins installed on my blog. All of these plugins were extremely important for my blog and I couldn’t do away with them. The loading time for a few of these were extremely high. But I had to make that decision. I prioritized the plugins based on their criticality and deactivated and uninstalled a few of the plugins. In order to further reduce the page load time, I used a content delivery network about which I will discuss later.

Images – Another major reason for the slow page load was the images on my blog. There were a lot of advertisements that had the image hosted on the advertisers hosting and in order to pull the images and load it, it took a lot of time. I downloaded these images and hosted them on my hosting and this reduced the page loading time considerably.

Hosting Bandwidth – The hosting bandwidth plays a very important role in you page load time. My hosting with Hostgator has not given me any problems but it was a shared hosting and I had quite a lot of blogs installed on the same shared hosting. This problem was resolved by using a content delivery network.

Social Media Buttons – Social Media buttons on your blog could increase you page load time considerably. Facebook buttons in particular are the major culprit. You can resolve this problem by using techniques which can ensure that these buttons load only after everything else on the page has loaded.

Other external scripts – If you have a lot of scripts on your blog that are called from a different server, it could also lead to slow page loads. For eg: Mybloglog badges, blog catalog badges etc. call scripts externally and increases the page load time. I removed all such widgets and it considerably improved my page load time.

Using Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers from around the world that stores a copy of your website data. Since your website is delivered from different servers it gives you the advantage of a larger bandwidth which in turn reduces page load times. Whenever there is no dynamic content involved, a CDN delivers a cached page of your website thus further reducing the page load time.

In case your blog has readers from around the world, using a CDN is the best option because it will make the website available to the visitor from a server that is closest to his location. All of these together helps reduce the page load time of your blog.

Normally CDNs charge you a monthly charge and you have to make a few changes in your domain’s DNS. But one service that I found extremely useful and was free of cost was Cloudflare. You might want to check out their services.

The first thing that attracts any visitor to your blog and keeps him engaged in your website is its design. There is no doubt to the fact that “Content is the King”. But at the same time, in order for your readers to stay at your blog, your blog’s design has to be reader friendly.

What is the definition of “reader friendly”? How can you make it reader friendly? I am sure these are normal questions, if you are new to blogging. Read on as I talk about essential elements in any design. At the same time, I would also recommend that you keep noting down things that you found attractive and user-friendly while you were browsing other websites.

Essentials of a website design

Almost all successful websites have these elements in them. This is one of the main reasons why these websites have so many readers. They are successful in keeping their visitors glued to their sites, thus pushing them to become permanent readers to their blogs.

1. Appropriate Navigation – The biggest flaw that I find in quite a lot of website is inappropriate navigation options. Website do not have a “Home” navigation button and if you want to return to the homepage, you will have to keep clicking on the back button or, if the option exists, click on the LOGO to go back to the home page. The lack of appropriate navigation buttons on a website breaks the flow of a visitor, normally called as visitor journey. So one of the most essential aspects of any website design is to have a proper page navigation in the form of buttons.
2. Faster Page Loading – This needs no explanation. I have browsed through to numerous websites which has a loading problem. These sites have almost everything in place yet the reader experience is destroyed because the pages take too much of time to load. I do not have the patience to wait until the page loads and would normally choose browse away. There are numerous ways to resolve slow page load problems especially if you are on WordPress. One such way is to cache old pages by using a plugin like hypercache.
3. Search Option – Your site should have a search option which is an integral part of any website design. I might not want to browse through the hundreds of pages on your website to find that one thing that I am looking for. I would instead prefer to search for it and move away in case I do not find it. If the search option is unavailable, I might just choose to browse away. It is here that a search option comes in handy. Place it somewhere it is clearly visible.
4. A Contact Form – Your visitors might need to contact you. There could be numerous reasons for it. Feedback, suggestions, ad requests etc. are just a few such reasons. You would not want your visitors to be searching all over your website to find an email address to contact you. The easiest way to facilitate this is by using a contact form on you blog. There are a lot of plugins that can do the job for you in WordPress. Since there are loads of customization features available, you can create any kind of form. What ever you create, just ensure that you have a “contact” tab in your navigation menu which could lead your visitors to the contact form.
5. Bookmarking  buttons – Social media is the order of the day. There are thousands of social media and bookmarking websites which help you get more exposure to your blog or, website. When networking is what is in vogue, why shouldn’t your website have bookmarking buttons. Every visitor coming to your blog will be associated with some or, the other social media service and would want to share what he saw and read on you blog, with his friends. Bookmarking buttons help them do this. Hence it is essential that you have bookmarking buttons prominently showing up in each and every posts in your blog.
6. Link Management – There are a lot of websites out there where you find a link on some useful aspect and when you click on it, you find that it is either broken or, leads to some irrelevant site. It is important to manage your links properly. I recommend installing something like a “Broken Link Checker” which can find broken links and help you fix it. It is also important that you link to correct webpages. While linking is extremely important, ensuring that these are relevant links are also essential.

In addition to the above, there are quite a few other aspects, like categorization of pages, ensuring that there are no obstructing ads, proper color combination for your website etc. that are to be kept in mind while designing your website.

What are your views? Do you think there is anything else that you might have noticed on some website or, blogs that leads to a poor visitor experience? Then, let us know of these by adding your comments below.

People take to blogging the moment they hear about one of those thousands of success stories of ordinary people becoming millionaires on the internet just by blogging. Most of these people have very little or, no knowledge about blogging and their blogs become a disaster.

Even more disappointing is the fact that there are thousands of blogs out there on the internet which do well in terms of their search engine rankings and pageranks. But these blogs offer little or, no reader experience.

What could be the problem with these blogs?

The problem is that they are not reader-optimized.

What is Reader Optimization?

This is what I call “reader optimization” -

A blog that is optimized to provide the reader a smooth navigation through its pages giving them a systematic flow of information through the content is one that can be called “reader optimized”.

It is extremely important that your blogs maintains a systematic flow of information. You would come across a lot of blogs that has a lot of information in it, but you are left clueless as to where to go and how to go to the information that you are looking for.

I am of the opinion that if you have to click more than thrice to reach a point where you actually wanted to reach, then the blog is not reader optimized.

One of the most important aspects to consider when you are optimizing your blog for the readers is the pages that you create and the way it is displayed.

Pages you blog should have to be reader optimized

There are 5 pages which essentially every blog should have if it is to be optimized for the reader. These are as follows:

1. Archives page – You do not often see an “archives” page on blogs. If you are to see the archives from the blogs, either you have to scroll through the sidebar for older posts or, keep clicking on the link at the bottom of each page saying “older posts” to reach a point where you find the content you were looking for. It is an extremely bitter experience for me as a reader. Hence it is important to have an “archives” page where you have neatly laid out your older posts year-wise, month-wise and date-wise.
2. About Page – You wouldn’t want your reader to be a one time reader. You would want him to come back to your blog again and again. But this is possible only if you connect with him. The “about” page is what can create this connection. This page should have a detailed story about yourself and the objective of your blog. Your story is what can help your readers identify themselves with you. They will know that you are not here to joke around.
3. Contact Page – WordPress gives you a thousand options to create contact forms on your blog. A contact form solves 2 purposes. Firstly, you don’t have to publish your email address anywhere on your blog and give away an open invitation to the spammers to spam you. Secondly, it gives your readers an option to contact you. They will have a lot of queries and questions which they would want to get answers for. It would be a wonderful experience if they can simple enter this information on a contact form and send it out to you instead of opening up their emails to write an email to you.
4. Subscribe Page – One of your objectives with blogging is to build your list – a list of dedicated readers and customers. You want your readers to be long term associated with you. You build this long term association by asking them to subscribe to your newsletter and feeds. Will displaying a feed ICON somewhere on your blog solve this purpose. NO, it will not. You have to explain it to your readers. You have to tell them about the benefits of subscribing to your blog. This can be done on a “subscribe” page.
5. Advertise Page – You are into blogging to make money (not at the cost of your readers, of course ). Advertisement is one of the primary forms of income from any blog. Though there are a lot of blogs out there that still manage to do without advertisements, I would always recommend any blogger who has established themselves, that you should invite advertisements on your blog. The way of inviting advertisements is by putting up an “advertise” page on your blog.

It is also very important that you lay down these pages clearly in your tabs so that you readers have easy access to it and they can browse thorough the different pages.

In the interests of making your blogging career a little easier, here are my top tips to make the process of starting and running a blog a little easier.

1. Find the Right Platform – There are many, many blog platforms out there. Some are free, some are paid for. They vary from the technical, to the super simple, with some requiring more knowledge of how the internet works, and others using simple drag and drop interfaces. If you’re not using the right platform to run your blog, then you could be spending a lot more time than necessary just trying to figure things out.
2. Write About Something You Love - When you start looking at blogging as an alternative to having a full time job, it’s tempting to look only at niches that seem to be making the big money. However, if you try to launch a financial blog, and the thought of financial management nearly puts you into a coma, you’re not going to set the world on fire with your blog! Rather pick a topic that you love, and you’ll be able to bring the best information to your readers, and still have fun doing it!
3. You Can’t Write - What most people don’t realize about blogging is that you don’t have to be a potentially Pulitzer Prize winner to write great content. In fact, if you tried to write stiff and starchy, academic style posts (unless yours is an academic blog) you’d probably find that you don’t get all that many visitors. As long as you can write in a conversational style, and you know how to use spell check, you should be fine.
4. You Don’t Have Time to Create Content - I always find this claim amusing. With all the time people waste every day, can you really, honestly say that you can’t find fifteen minutes to write one or two posts, and upload them? The truth is, while the initial setup may take some time, keeping your blog content fresh and interesting really only takes a few minutes every day, and everyone can do that!
5. No One Is Visiting Your Blog - When you first start out with blogging, chances are you struggle to gain visitors – that’s the way it goes for most people. The trick is to devote a little of your time to marketing your blog too. You could try any one of the following:
   • Joining forums that your readers are likely to frequent, and including your blog URL in your signature.
   • Social media marketing
   • Posting answers on Yahoo Answers, including your link
   • PPC campaigns, whether on Google, Yahoo or one of the social networks
   • Guest posts on other popular blogs in your niche

Those are just a few of the blog marketing ideas you could try – I’ll write about them in some more detail sometime. The trick is to pick a combination that works for you, and to stick to it.

6. It All Just Seems So Much! – Starting a blog can be daunting. You have to choose a niche, get set up, create content, find images, market your blog and more. However, I find a good idea is to treat your blog like a business, and write a business plan for it – even if it’s a very rough one. Itemizing everything that needs to be done, in the form of a checklist, can also work, and the more things you tick off that list, the less daunting it becomes.

There’s a lot to learn when it comes to blogging, and, like the internet in general, things keep changing. New marketing strategies emerge, blog trends change, and what works today might not tomorrow. However, you have to start somewhere, and if you just relax, breathe, concentrate on learning as much as you can, and have a little fun with it, you will find that over time it becomes easier.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a blog, but it can be done – if you put your mind to it!

This is a Guest Post by Sarah Harris from Adiamor. Read how you too can guest post at dkspeaks, here.

With each passing year, more and more people have come to count on the internet to provide them with things in which to keep them occupied. But despite the growing number of visitors, many websites, be they blogs or business sites have a difficult time keeping and maintaining a steady readership. Thankfully, there are steps that can be taken in order to engage your readers or customers.

1. If room allows, consider making a discussion forum for any and all who come across the website. Forums are a popular way of keeping in touch with people of similar interests, engaging in daily discussions ranging from the newest update of the host site to their favorite movie. Use this to your advantage; get to know the people who come and the information could prove to be quite valuable. If nothing else, having a forum will pull in those who would not otherwise visit the website, leaving the potential to sell your wares in the future.

2. Another way to keep them coming back is by posting polls for people to partake in. The subject is not set in stone; you can create the polls about anything you like, as long as they are appealing. Readers and customers will be happy to know that you are concerned about their opinion and care about what they think. As an additional bonus, people are naturally curious to see the results of a poll, and by putting them up on a frequent enough basis, the interest will continue.

3. Keep a steady communication with your visitors. If somebody were to click on the link to your site, and see that you have yet to respond to the comments in your blog, it will no doubt leave a bad impression. Therefore, any time you receive a message from somebody, be sure to respond to it as soon as you are able. When you do this, you will be perceived as a business that makes an effort to stay current and keep in touch who those who would desire to exchange dialogue. This is a method of engaging readers that definitely has its benefits.

Guest post by Sarah Harris of Adiamor Diamond Engagement Rings. Adiamor offers a large selection of loose diamonds and engagement ring settings at affordable prices.

Photograph Courtesy Gilbert Rondilla