This is a guest post by Kristi Hines, social media and blogging enthusiast, on the benefits of business blogging, best practices when starting out a business blog, and ways to find topic ideas for your industry with some examples.

When I first began blogging almost ten years ago, blogs were used almost soley for personal diaries and online journals meant to be shared with only friends and family, or kept private. Within the first two years, however, blogging as a source of income started to rear its head with affiliate programs being pitched to the most known personal blogs. Fast foward to today, and blogs are not only used for individual gain but also for businesses.

Benefits of Blogging for Business

Business and corporate blogs can be valuable assets to a company’s website. They can help a business:

• Build their brand identity and positively manage their online reputation by putting positive content linked to their name out on the web.
• Help them go beyond simply offering products or services to gaining credibility by becoming experts in their industry.
• Allow them to build a stronger relationship and community with their customers, potential clients, and even others in their industry through blog comments and social sharing of new information.
• Give their site fresh new content, inviting visitors and search engines to return to their site again and again, boosting overall traffic.
• Get them ranked for long tail keyword search terms and phrases.

These are the main benefits of business blogging. Now, let’s look at how to make a business blog successful.

Questions to Ask When Getting Started

Probably the most important benefit is, if a business blog is done right, blog posts can lead to conversions and sales. What are the main things to keep in mind when starting or maintaining a business blog?

Who is Your Audience?

B2B businesses will want to write posts targeted towards businesses who are in need of their products and services, whereas B2C businesses will want to write posts geared toward their targeted customer demographic.

When corporate bloggers are coming up with post ideas, it is essential to put themselves in their targeted reader’s shoes and ask themselves:

• What would I want to learn about this business and industry?
• What hook would make me want to subscribe?
• What topic would make me want to comment?
• What kind of post wold make me want to inquire about products or services from this company?

Asking yourself these questions will help you determine just the kind of writing that you need to do to get a good response from your future blog community.

What Do My Competitors Do?

Business bloggers should do a bit of homework to see which of their competitors also have a corporate blog, and look at how well it goes over with their audience.

• Do they get a lot of comments?
• Do the posts do well in search?
• Do the posts get a lot of social shares? A quick way to check is by installing the Topsy bookmarklet or Delicious Bookmark history bookmarklet (all the way at the bottom of the page) to your browser and seeing how many tweets and bookmarks the posts’ acquire.
• What elements of the posts and blog do I like? What elements do I dislike?

This kind of “competitor research” will help you more easily determine what results you want to get from your blog as well as what will help you get your results.

Blogging Best Practices

Whether you are blogging for personal or business purposes, there are some basic best blogging practices that you should always keep in mind.

• Make each post easy to share and more socialble by using social sharing buttons and comment plugins to encourage more interaction.
• Write like you are talking to your audience – business blogging should be professional, but is also less formal than press releases and article marketing.
• Don’t think of your blog (or social networking) as just an advertising platform. Blog readers like information, how-to’s, and, once you have built their trust, occasional recommedations. If they feel like they’re being pushed to buy something in every post, they will likely not come around again.
• Link out to other sites that are informational as well. Remember your goal is to create a valuable resources for your readers. Seeing you share quality information will make them trust you even more.

Business Blog Topics

Probably one of the biggest hold-ups in a business creating a blog is what to write about, especially if the business is in a very tight niche.

Finding Inspiration

If you have answered the above “Who is Your Audience?” questions, then you will have a general idea of what topics will interest your potential readers. Other ways to generate ideas include:

• Using Twitter and HootSuite (or other Twitter management tools) for monitoring influential twitterers in your industry and what is being discussed by the general public about it.
• Does your business have a support department or help desk? What questions are commonly asked by your clients or potential customers? These might be good topics to answer on your blog.
• Cover your views on current events and other hot topics in your industry by following major blogs on specific niches using major news networks and sites like Alltop, Technorati, or PostRank.

You might think that some subjects have been covered over and over again and can be found pretty much all over the internet, but what you want to realize is that, when someone is on your site, you want them to be able to find as much useful information possible about your industry on your site without having to go elsewhere (and possibly end up on a competitor’s blog instead).

Specific Examples

Using some of the sponsors of the recent blogging contest by Famous Bloggers (another great resource on how to blog) and The ComLuv Network (home of one of the most comment generating plugins for WordPress), we’ll look at some businesses that do not yet have blogs, and some topics they could be talking about.

Claims.com

Claims.com, the accidents at work specialists, handles personal injury, traffic accidents, and work-related injury claims. There are ton of great topic ideas I can see just from perusing a few pages into their website, including:

• Top 5 Most Common Workplace Accidents – What they are, and how much they generally cost if you are not insured.
• What is Sofa Rash? – What is it, how can it develop, and what you can do to prevent it.
• Whiplash – Where Can it Happen – Whiplash does not just happen when you are in a car wreck. Find out common ways someone can get whiplash, what the symptoms are, and what kind of treatment will be necessary to correct it.

Local Proud

Local Proud is a discount card program that helps you start your own business that will not only help vitalize the local economy, but also promotes going green. Some great blog posts for this site include:

• Why Go Local? – A look at the struggles of local businesses, and why it is more important than ever to support small businesses in your community.
• How Does Local Proud Help the Environment? – Describe how this program helps a community be more green by keeping things closer to home and not requiring printed out coupons. (Great link bait to possibly get on environmental blogs.)
• Case Studies – Go beyond a short testimonial and get a business owner to describe their experience with this kind of business, as well as how it has helped them boost local businesses and help the environment.

Online Recruiters Directory

The Online Recruiters Directory is an executive search firm that allows job seekers to connect with those seeking executive talent. This site actually has a small database of articles for jobseekers that could easily be turned into a blog for more interaction and traffic. Some other topic ideas include…

• What Do You Need to Get a 100k Job? – A look at the top earners in the most popular 100k+ careers and what they have in terms of college education, certifications, and experience.
• Top 100k Jobs for 2010 – A list of the most popular 100k jobs available this year.
• You’re Hired – Now What? – What to expect on your first days at a new job for career changers, from those who have transitioned from one field to another. (Could be a great interview series for those who successfully found a job through this service.)

ANS Gear

ANS Gear carries a huge line of paintball guns & gear at discounted prices. Coming from the perspective of someone who has never been involved in paintball, but has heard some very interesting stories, a few topics that would get me interested include:

• Paintball 101 – What essential equipment do you need to get started.
• Best Places to Compete – What are the top rated places to play in major metropolitan areas.
• Top 5 Common Paintball Injuries – What they are, how to avoid them (ie. protective gear), and if avoidance isn’t possible, how to treat them.

Now Relevant

NowRelevant.com is the best new search engine, an alternative to the major search engines for finding relevant niche information. Some interesting things to know about this search engine would be:

• What Makes Now Relevant Different? – Expand upon the information in the about us page and show some examples of search results for Now Relevant compared to the other major engines.
• PPC 101 – How does it work, and why advertisers should choose Now Relevant’s pay per click program over Adwords or others.
• Comprehensive Guide to Using Now Relevant – Cover everything from advanced search operators to where Now Relevant pulls its information from (blogs, social networks, etc.).

Your Thoughts on Business Blogging

Do you have a favorite business blog that others should follow the example of? What are your likes and dislikes about corporate blogs? If you have a business and have a blog, what positive results have you seen? If you are a business that doesn’t have a blog, what is stopping you?

Kristi is the author of Kikolani, a blog which provides blogging tips for successful personal and business bloggers alike, and an Internet Marketing Specialist providing link building services.

This post supports the some of the sponsors of the Famous Bloggers and ComLuv blogging contest. Please visit Kristi’s entry for powerful tips on how to promote your articles for more traffic, link value, and earnings.

Look for the GrowMap Avatar

With all the great  research, information and links I read every week I have been pondering a way to get more of the best ideas out to my readers faster.

I have decided to publish a different weekly column for each day of the week.

Most of these will be short, useful posts with tips or links to quality information.

Here is my new schedule with the names and topics for each of these columns and a hashtag for use on Twitter:

• Social Media Marketing Monday (#SMM)

• Affiliate Tips Tuesday (#AffTips)

• Word of Mouth Marketing Wednesday (#WOMM)

• How-to Thursday (#How-to)

• Follow Friday Friends (#ff)

• Support Small Businesses Saturday (#BizLuv)

• Soul Searching Sunday

I hope my readers enjoy getting these short, regular posts. If you have particular requests please let me know in the comments or by using the information on the contact tab at the top of this blog.

Most Valuable Keywords FOR SEO and PPC ~ Image Credit SitechGroup.com

Keyword tags are used for two very different purposes and how many you use depends on that purpose. Most of what you read will be related to selecting keywords for SEO or Pay Per Click (ppc) purposes.

For SEO you want to target one phrase of two to three words

This is because search engines use an algorithm with percentages in it. Here is an example of how that percentage affects your content being found:
If you use two words, each word is worth 50% in that algorithm (equation). If you use four words each word is worth 25%; 10 words = 10% and so on.

If someone searches for affiliate marketing and you have targeted that exact phrase with 2 words your site is 100% for that part of the equation.

If you used four words and their search hits on two of them your site is at 50% for that part of the equation and all sites at greater than 50% will be ranked above yours (for that one factor – yes there are other factors but this one is very important).

If your page uses 10 keywords you are only at 20% – more than that even less. I know that many advise using lots of keywords. Either they don’t understand simple math or they are intentionally misleading others to make their own ranking efforts easier to attain.

I personally know many top SEOs and have listened to them discuss getting top rankings for really tough industries like mortgages and insurance. I guarantee you they always target only ONE phrase of 2-3 words per page. They just don’t admit publicly how they do it.

If you’re still not convinced or would like more details on that specific recommendation, Pay Per Click Strategies just wrote about the very strategy for selecting meta tags in their recent post simple B2B Search Marketing Tactic to Beat the Competition.

Tags used for other purposes are different. On Social Networking sites you want to use as many relevant phrases as each site allows. They aren’t calculating percentages for search rankings. They are using them to decide how many different places to put your content.

For WordPress tags and most Social Media purposes More Tags = more opportunities for visibility.

Note that you have to know what a site is doing with the keywords to know whether to use one phrase or multiple phrases. If they are searching and ranking the way search engines do, use the most important 2-3 word phrase only.

If a site uses keyword phrases to put what you share in multiple locations the way StumbleUpon or Delicious does then use many phrases.

You can either test to see which works best on each site or decide what is more important to you: maximum laser-targeted traffic or more less targeted traffic.

Here is a real life example so you can be really clear on the difference between the various uses for what are called keywords, keyword tags, meta tags or simply tags.

I just wrote a post about Deadhead Sinker Cypress for Good Millwork.Notice that I used the phrase Deadhead Sinker Cypress as my anchor text in that link and that is the primary phrase I’m targeting for SEO for that post.

When I run pay per click ads to that page I will target multiple similar phrases because there are many different ways someone would search for that type of wood.

When I selected the WordPress Post Tags for that post those tags are totally different than the Keywords aka Meta Keywords aka Tags I entered in the SEO field in their blog or the keywords I selected for their AdWords ads.

If this were a WordPress.com hosted site instead of a self-hosted blog, the Post Tags would decide who at WordPress will see that post. For these tags we want to think very broadly about who we want to reach.

For that post I chose the tags for architecture, construction, green building, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, Lumber and specialty woods. Anyone interested in construction, architects drawing up plans, builders interested in green building or LEEDs and those searching for lumber or specialty woods would all be a good target audience for that post.

None of them are likely to be searching for Deadhead Sinker Cypress right now and it is unlikely that there is a WordPress category that is so narrowly defined. The point of Post Tags is to show your posts in the categories where the target audience for that post is likely to see them.

NOTE: WordPress global tags pages only display the blog posts that are hosted on WordPress.com and NOT self-hosted blogs.

Even though posts on self-hosted WordPress blogs do not appear in the WordPress global tags pages, those tags are still important because search engines and sites like Technorati crawl your blog and use those anchor-text links to categorize and index your content.

While researching links for this post it became very obvious that not everyone agrees with me about the best uses for tags and categories. Some excellent bloggers like Lorelle and I have different points of view and in the end some decisions are personal perference.

Lorelle wrote that she prefers to use a very limited number of categories so she would never have a list of categories and sub-categories in blogs she manages  like the one I intentionally created in this blog.

Lorelle and I are both very serious bloggers who research and test what works.  I like having all the categories and sub-categories in my blogs visible because I use blogs as a reference resource and want to quickly hone in on exactly what I want to find.

I mention this now because I want all my readers to remember to make their own decisions about what they feel is best for their own blog or Web site. There is always a pro or con to how we decide to do things as those who are following the KeywordLuv CommentLuv dofollow debate have seen.

In the end each of us must decide where are priorities lie, who we are, and what is most important to us.

These two other posts are particularly useful for Understanding Anchor Text and Selecting Keywords First to Make Your Content Easier to Find.

WORDPRESS HOW-TO:

NOTE: Many posts below mention an Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin. It is no longer supported and since tagging has been incorporated into WordPress a plugin for that function is no longer necessary.

• WordPress Global Tags
• WordPress Support: Categories versus Tags
• WordPress.tv Adding Categories and Tags to Your Posts VIDEO
• WordPress Training Managing WordPress Tags VIDEO
• WordPress.org Official Getting Started with WordPress how-to information
• Categories Versus Tags; What’s the Difference and Which One to Use For What – If you only read one of these posts read this one
• Lorelle – How to Decide What Blog Categories to Use. 
  
• FreeWPTraining How to Use Tags in Your WordPress Blog Posts – Detailed post on using tags
• Lorelle on Tagging and Tags in WordPress – If you really want to understand tags versus categories read this post.
• Lorelle on WordPress Tags are NOT Categories
• Lorelle The Problems with Tags and Tagging – Another excellent post on how to effectively use tags
• Playing Tag with WordPress
• WordPress Training
• DevDuff WordPress Tags versus Categories
• Lorelle: WordPress Tagging Bookmarklets for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress

• Theme Lab How to Add WordPress Tag Support to Your Theme
• Simple Tags WordPress Plugin for Technorati Tags

TECHNORATI TAGS:

• Use Technorati to Search Specific Blogs
• Technorati The State of the Blogosphere 2009

SEO WORDPRESS:

There is far too much disinformation about what does and does not work. Use what you read to gain information and then VERIFY that information by your own observations. If you are not doing your own testing be careful whose advise you rely on. Here are some sites I have found to report honestly:

eMarketingMatador ~  Keith Hagan aka eMatador

• eMarketing Search Engine – Searches and filters content from the top related sites; search engine for all Internet Marketers whether you are an Affilate, Blogger, in MLM or just looking to learn.

SEOWizz ~ Tim Grice

• SEO Must’s When Blogging
• Google SEO – Using Keyword Proximity Correctly

Don't Hide From Your Market! - Photo Credit PRactical Ramblings

Many seem to be following the “if you build it they will come” business plan.

That simply does not work.

Most of your market is trying to find you by searching somewhere – whether that is on a search engine, blog search, on their favorite Social Networking sites, using search tools like FeelTipTop or in Local Search Directories.

The key questions you must answer when building traffic for your Web site are:

1. WHO is YOUR target audience
2. What exact words and phrases (your anchor text) are they using when looking for what you offer

The very first thing every business, blog, or ecommerce site needs to know is what their most important keyword phrases are – because how you write about and promote those phrases determines whether your Web site gets found online and by how many.

Make this task your highest priority today.

1. First identify your target audience – who would look for what you offer and where do they look?
2. Brainstorm – ideally with others – how your target audience would go about searching for you online.
3. What exact words and phrases would they use? Remember that many will NOT know your industry jargon or the specific names you use.
4. Check your existing positions for those phrases (see tools below). Your target is to be found on the first page of results at Google, Yahoo and Bing.
5. Identify your very best page or post for each phrase. If you don’t have a compelling pillar post for that phrase create one.

Here are some tools to assist you with the above:

FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS:

• WordStream Free Keyword Research Tool – my preferred tool – makes it easy to edit and save keyword lists
• WordTracker (free version) – best for checking actual search volume
• Google Keyword Tool External US
• Google Keyword Tool External UK

There are many others but the first two are what I use most and the last two are what Murray Newlands recommends on his Affiliate Marketing Blog.

SEARCH ENGINE POSITION TOOLS:

• Free SEOBOOK Rank Checker – How to use Rank Checker to check your search engine positions.
• If you have the SEOBook Toolbar the RankChecker is built into it.

One you know what they are, use your most important keyword phrases:

1. To write posts that target specific keyword phrases
2. When leaving comments in blogs using KeywordLuv or that allow you to add links with your own anchor text within the body of comments
3. Share them with your blogging buddies, blogger alliance, blog club, or collaborators so they know precisely which posts are most important to you and what keyword phrase to use as your preferred anchor text
4. Focus on them when doing blog outreach

If each of us will take the time to share this type of information with our collaborators, it will make a HUGE difference in the results we will see and how fast we attain them. Once we have this information we can select the best anchor text and landing page to use whenever we link to each other. When I blog I also add Twitter IDs and I recommend doing that too.

In case anyone doesn’t know, anchor text is simply the words that are used in hyperlinks you create. Instead of always using someone’s blog name or their name start LINKING their optimum anchor text phrases because your target audience includes the masses who don’t know your business name or blog yet.

OTHER WAYS TO BUILD TRAFFIC:

• NEW: 101 Essential Traffic Building Resources
• List your business in Local Search Directories
• 27 Ways to Seek Out Customers

Related articles by Zemanta

• SEO Tips, Directing Increased Hits to Your Website (ronmedlin.com)
• Tracking Blog Traffic (dickstersrandomthoughts.blogspot.com)

Greg Rollett

We are very pleased to share this exceptional guest post from Greg Rollett of Rock Star Lifestyle Design and Internet Marketing.

Greg is behind the new Rock Star Business Series 2.0. Read more about Greg Rollett and follow him at Twitter: (Greg Rollett).

photo by Mexicanwave

There has been lots of talk of blogger alliances and blogger outreach recently. I think this comes from the realization that we can all grow faster together than by going at it alone. I know for a fact that leverage in online marketing can be the difference between hoping for some sales to come in and seeing sales come in.

For bloggers looking to use leverage the most important thing you can do is guest post. It may seem crazy in the early days of developing your own site as you may be having trouble coming up with content for your own blog, however reaching out to others is valuable for a number of reasons.

Leverage Their Audience

By writing this guest post I am leveraging the Grow Map audience and exposing my writing to everyone that sees this post. Most of the readers are not subscribers of my site and are unfamiliar with my work. If people like the post there is a good chance that they might click over to my site, add me on Twitter or ReTweet the post exposing it to even more people.

When people leave comments it opens you up to continue that conversation and build relationships with the readers of the site for which you guest post. This adds value for the site and their readers as well. It’s a win-win for all parties.

The real value comes when you can leverage a very large site. I love looking for sites with 100k+ readers and writing guest posts for extreme leverage. The best real world results of that came from a guest post I wrote for Mashable a few months back. That resulted in over 500 ReTweets, over 1,000 new Twitter followers and 100 RSS readers. Now bad for a few hours writing a post. If I wanted to do that on my own site, with no leverage, it would take weeks or months.

Leverage Their SEO Power

Gail recently wrote about the impact of leveraging a site like Murray Newlands blog to increase her rankings in the search engines. This is one of the unknown secrets of guest posting. If you can write a post with strong anchor text that relates to your products, services or writing it increases your Google juice through incoming links.

Google eats this stuff up because links are what keeps Google’s spiders flowing throughout the Internet. The more links it finds for your site with specific anchor text, the higher your site will rise in the rankings.

Again when I wrote the Mashable post, I leverage their site which has a Page Rank of 7 to instantly begin ranking for terms related to my sites. The ripple effect is that the Mashable posts ranks high for the search term, as does my own post, so I receive extra listings that point people back in my direction.

You can gauge the Page Rank and other characteristics of a page by using the Search Status Firefox Plug in or the SEO Moz Tool Bar. These are all free tools and very helpful for SEO and looking at how you can maximize your rankings.

Leverage Their Promotional Tools

When you guest post, you know that the blog owner is going to promote your post too right? They want traffic, don’t they? By guest posting you know that you are going to receive a mention on their Twitter feed, their Facebook Feed and maybe even Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites.

The key here is that you reciprocate and promote your buns off to help drive traffic. If the site gets a good number of impressions, there is a good chance you will be asked to write again, opening the door up to more people seeing your work.

Create Relationships

The key to effective guest posting is to really create a relationship with the other site. It’s great to get all the benefits listed above, but really its better to know that you have a new friend in the online world that is going to help you down the road, and that you are going to help them. Relationships are reciprocal in the online world for those that are really looking to grow and be the best they can be.

I know that some of the best relationships I have in the online world were as the result of an outreach to that person or from someone beneficial. If you are creating great value and are looking to share that value with the world, good things will come.

And with that said, I’d like to thank Gail and GrowMap for letting me hang out in this guest post and I look forward to talking to you in the comments. If you want to learn more about me here is the info you need!

This guest post was written by Greg Rollett. Greg writes about Lifestyle Design and Internet Marketing and can be found on Twitter chatting about all sorts of things. He is also releasing a course for young entrepreneurs called the Rock Star Business Series.

GUEST BLOGGING:

• Jonathan Volk: Utilizing Guest Posts: A Basic How-To
• One Cool Site: Blogging Tips: Guest Blogging Arrangements – how to get those guest posts published
• Inconsequential Logic: Why Aren’t You Guest Blogging?

Look for Our GrowMap Avatar Across the Web

Please Spread the Word ~ SHARE these GrowMap Resources to Grow Businesses, Blogs and Causes!

Every blogger has posts they feel have really hit the mark; what many call pillar articles or foundation content. When Liz Strauss (Liz Strauss) decided to celebrate the 4th Birthday of her Successful Blog with a Bring ONE Link offer she motivated me to compile these links for my readers.

There are now so many posts I wish every regular and new visitor knew about here that I decided to write this compilation so YOU don’t miss some of the most important information I’ve researched and shared.

This would be a great post to save in your Delicious or StumbleUpon account so you can return to it for reference. We will continually update and add to these important resources to keep them current just for you. Is there anything else you would like to see here? Just let us know.

HOW TO GROW or SUPPORT SMALL BUSINESSES:

• MEME: BizLuv in Support of Small Businesses – Why the economic crisis makes this essential
• BizLuv MEME: Specifically What Bloggers Can Do to Support Businesses, Causes and other Bloggers
• Marketing is NOT Evil – It is how we find what we desire. Read about how Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) can benefit buyers and sellers alike
• KEYWORDLUV: How Using KeywordLuv Benefits Us All

LOCAL SEARCH DIRECTORIES:

• How Businesses can get FREE Business Listings in Local Search Directories * Best Local Search Post *
  
• Why Local Search is so important. Use our shortcut to getting any business or Web site with a physical address listed in Major Local Search Directories including Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Bing, SuperPages and many more.
• Scan the Local Search Categories in the right sidebar for comprehensive information on and how-to obtain listings in specific Local Search Directories

HOW TO MAKE MONEY BLOGGING:

• Top How to Make Money Blogging Resources; Who REALLY Makes Money and Teaches Their Methods Best
• How to Create a Successful Blog Based Business – All blogs are not created equal; what you need and how to get an optimized blog even if you don’t have technical skills.
• Super Thesis Resources and why we wish we had installed Threaded Comments from the beginning.

KEYWORD RESEARCH / SEO:

• ANCHOR TEXT: Are You Playing Hide and Seek with Your Market? Identify your most important goals and the keywords and pages related to them.
• SELECTING KEYWORDS: The Importance of Researching and Selecting Your Keywords First to make your content easy to find and keep your posts on topic
• TRACKING SEARCH POSITIONS: Tracking Search Engine Positions: Free, easy way to track

BLOGGING BUDDIES, BLOG OUTREACH, GUEST BLOGGING:

• How Guest Blogging Can Change Your Life – Guest post by Greg Rollett of Rock Star Lifestyle Design and Internet Marketing
• Blog Outreach: 8 Compelling Reasons You Should Be Doing It NOW – Guest post by Affiliate Marketing Expert Murray Newlands

DOFOLLOW and BLOG COMMENTING:

• KEYWORDLUV: How Using KeywordLuv Benefits Us All
• Use our DoFollow Lists and Tools to increase your incoming links
• How We Increased Our Blog Traffic Over 76.63% in one month by first commenting and then sharing other bloggers’ content across Social Networks
• How We Encourage Community and Comments

AFFILIATE MARKETING:

• Merchant Affiliate Marketing Management – What businesses who offer affiliate programs need to know.
• Massive Affiliate Reference Resources with links to Power Affiliates, Affiliate Forums, Affiliate Training – includes How to Evaluate Merchant Ecommerce Stores so you know which will convert BEFORE you promote them. This post uses an excellent gift affiliate program as the example store.

PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING:

• How Not to Lose Your Shirt on PPC Advertising
• My Step-by-step Method for Evaluating Your AdWords Account – what settings to use and why
• Why PPC Summit is the Very Best PPC Seminar EVER

ORGANIC SEARCH SEO SEM:

• Why You Can NOT Rely Solely on Organic Listings for Traffic and Revenue

BLOG DIRECTORIES:

• Coming eventually: Which Blog Directories are most important and why. Start with PostRank, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog and the blog directories reviewed by Keller Hawthorne  at FresheVenture.

WEB ANALYTICS:

• REVIEW: Mastering Google Analytics: Easy to Understand Free e-Course

LOGO and WEB DESIGN:

• What Makes a Great Logo – How to create or buy one; the differences in deliverables between $50 and $1000+ logos.
• What NOT To Do With Your Existing Web Site When You Upgrade or Remodel

SOCIAL NETWORKING:

• Social Networking is NOT Chat – How to get your content shared by others, where you can find us and what to do if you would like us to comment in your blog and send you traffic in our daily travels across the Internet.
• How Monetizing Social Networking Sites THIS Way Benefits Everyone
• Twitter FriendFeed Quick Start – How to get up to speed right away at Twitter and on FriendFeed
• Coming soon: Our process for maximizing our reach across Social Networks

Although I have been answering all comments here I have decided that I will stop answering short comments that do not require replies. I doubt anyone would object but wanted to let my regular readers know of this change.

I will still answer all questions and reply to all substantial comments for as long as that remains possible.

There are few places a business owner or blogger can find such extensive experience and thoroughly researched proven strategies for growing their business AND get a personal reply and answers to any questions they may have. Can I ask a favor of you? Would you please share this blog with any business, bloggers, or affiliate marketers who could benefit? Thank you.

I would love to see more WordPress bloggers add a Twitter ID field in the comments of their blogs. It is fast and easy to install using the WP-TwitIp-ID Plugin created by Andy Bailey who also created the CommentLuv plugin we recommended for making your blog more interactive.

Why would you want Twitter IDs in your comments? Here are the benefits:

• Save time searching for Twitter accounts
• Makes it easy to find out if you are following your readers
• Follow up on comments or let readers know you have replied or updated a post they were particularly interested in
• Easily find and follow interesting commentators
• Another way to reward your commentators – lets your readers find and follow them at Twitter

This plugin “auto-magically” adds your commentators Twitter IDs to all of their previous comments, providing them with far more visibility in posts that are already indexed in the search engines. Anyone serious about adding readers and followers could visit existing posts, make intelligent comments, create a dofollow link with their choice of anchor text and thereby use this blog to drive traffic to their own blogs and businesses.

Something spammers don’t understand is that only quality comments relevant to the post where they appear work for generating real people to visit!

What some don’t realize about power Social Networking users is we automatically pay it forward by sharing whatever benefits others. When someone else takes up our causes we seek out worthy causes they support and share them with our users. Have you ever wondered what gets shared online and why? Now you know!

THIS is how the few can improve the world. You can join us by simply sharing what helps others. When you take action for them, we will take action for you.

UPDATE: 9/19/09 ProBlogger Guest post I Came, I Saw, I Commented: Was It Worth It by Josh Hanagarne – The World’s Strongest Librarian – provides this additional confirmation that commenting does indeed work. He gives these stats:

The numbers after commenting:

• A 100% increase on RSS subscribers (160-320)
• Over 40 newsletter subscriptions
• A second traffic spike due to people returning to answer my comment on their own blogs

Note that HIS strategy was commenting on the blogs of those who commented on his previous ProBlogger guest post. Imagine what could happen if he had used the additional strategy explained below. Maybe he’ll read this, try it out, and let us know what additional growth his blog sees from it.

Want proof this strategy works for others too? Check out these two Tweets I received today (Mar 23, 2009):

PaulHassing@GrowMap Thank YOU! Yesterday my site traffic was double what it was last Monday. All I did differently was follow your advice. Great stuff!

PaulHassing@GrowMap It’s nice (& rare) to see an approach which is ethical & practical having an effect. For once, good guys don’t finish last!

Here is the step-by-step method responsible for the increase in traffic here:

1. Visit your favorite blog, preferably a dofollow CommentLuv blog.
2. Leave a high quality comment.
3. If the blog uses CommentLuv select the most relevant post to share or a post you wish to promote.
4. In a CommentLuv blog you can leave two links in a comment by changing the primary link JUST BEFORE you click submit. When you’re ready to send the comment paste the other link into the box and immediately send the comment BEFORE the CommentLuv system loses your selected post.
5. AFTER you’ve left your comment share the post at Twitter, FriendFeed, cliKball, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us or on any other favorite Social Networking site or reader.
6. When sharing use an excerpt, image and title illustrating what YOU feel is the most pertinent information in the post. This will increase the number of new visitors the post will receive – and the number of readers who may read your comment or be interested in your featured post.
7. I often also share the best comment(s) or additional thoughts at cliKball and FriendFeed.

We all have limited time and the same number of hours in any day so maximizing the return on how we spend that time is critical to our success. If you already have quality content on your blog and a recent post worth sharing it is time to focus on getting quality backlinks from commenting to greatly increase your traffic.

NEW: If you don’t fully understand how CommentLuv works or haven’t registered your blog take the time to read this excellent post with screen shots on How CommentLuv works and the benefits of registering your site.

Combine our strategy above with the one from that last link to Peter Lee’s Work from Home blog and your time is guaranteed to generate incoming links, better search engine placement, higher visibility and more traffic to your blog.

For a more advanced strategy read How I Doubled the Pageviews of my Blog in Two Week – That post opens in a new window to make sure that BEFORE you do that you START immediately increasing your own traffic here:

The best way to learn something is to do enough of it that you will remember how and it will become a habit. The great thing about this strategy is that you can easily get started RIGHT NOW:

1. Just leave a comment in this post; the early commentators get the most exposure so go ahead and leave it now. It won’t take that long since you’re already here.
2. Be sure to include a link to your blog post. Make it your most recent post, the most related post, one you want to promote most OR one that your readers like best.
3. If you have a Twitter account here is an easy way:  Just click this Tweet This!
   
4. Then share it in your other Social Networking accounts and share it in your reader. The more you share the more it benefits you and everyone else.
5. BONUS VISITORS: If you want even more traffic publish your results and link to this post. We’ll find your new post, leave our own comments, and share it at Twitter, FriendFeed and cliKball.

BLOG COMMENTING:

• NEW: Internet Marketing Blog of Vance Sova – Increase Blog Traffic Using Blog Comments
• NEW: Social Media Training blog Velvet Connect – (Keith Jenkins) – Boost Your Reader Base by Commenting
• WordPress How To Spotter (TheSpotter) 3 Reasons Why Blog Commenting is Important
• FMS SEO Company – (Follow Karl)(Follow Kelly) – Blog Commenting for Traffic Generation
• ExtremeJohn - (Twitter) – 16 Reasons Commenting on Your Blog Sucks
• OES tsetnoc – (Twitter) – Blog Commenting – High PageRank

DoFollow CommentLuv KeywordLuv Blogs With Comments Moderated by GrowMap

I approve more comments to support small businesses, good causes and bloggers than most bloggers so being active in our blogs is to your benefit. They are all 100% dofollow from the first comment and have both CommentLuv and KeywordLuv installed:

• GrowMap (This blog) – Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Blogging, Supporting Small Businesses, Local Search. See Best of GrowMap.
• GoodMillwork – Wood Products Manufacturer of architectural moldings including crown moldings, door and window trim, baseboard, chair rail, wood siding, exterior shutters. They can match any existing woodwork of any age for historical restorations, sell rare woods including cypress and genuine mahogany and mill mahogany moldings and ecofriendly TimberSIL.
• ExecGiftsBlog Personalized Gifts ~ Gift Affiliate Program ~ Wedding Store
• NoBogies Golf Store and Blog
• GrokHorses Horse Information Blog
• PSPLiving Living Healthier

Few realize yet how many decisions go into the best way to add every single feature to a Web site. Where you place it, whether you use text or icons, which plug-ins or widgets you select – each and every one of these factors contributes to how successful your blog, site or store will be.

Here is one simple example. I requested Derek Semmler’s assistance in adding a subscribe to comments function on this blog. Here are the questions he immediately asked:

1. Do you want a simple text link or images? If images, what image?
2. Where do you want it placed?
3. Do you want to use the WordPress Subscribe to Comments plug-in (He uses it at DerekSemmler.com)
4. Or would you rather have your comments look like those on the Threaded Web Blog?

Those questions led to many more of my own such as:

1. Do we want to offer a subscribe to comments feed AND a subscribe to that specific post’s comments or is subscribe to a particular post enough?
2. Do we also need a subscribe to comments via email option?
3. Do I like the way Problogger displays their comments? Pros: I like that blog posts there show the number of comments at the top and provide a link to jump down to them because I often revisit to read the comments on a blog post I’ve already read. Cons: 1) I would prefer to have the time/date under the commentator’s link to make the comment space wider so long comments don’t take up so much vertical space. 2) They don’t display Avatars.
4. Many blogs now show your Avatar next to your comment. I like this but which plug-in / widget is required? Once again there are many. See CopyBlogger or DerekSemmlerDotCom for examples. Avatars can be pulled from MyBlogLog, Gravatar or Open Avatar.
5. Should I be considering Disqus for comments used by such notable blogs as LouisGray? Disqus pros: collects your Disqus comments in one place. Disqus cons: You can’t click through to a commentators blog or profile if they haven’t claimed it. I like to be able to visit the sites of those who leave intelligent comments anywhere I roam.
6. If you think BackType might become important do you want to ensure whatever you use is compatible?
7. I noticed Derek’s blog also uses CommentLuv and KeywordLuv. How do those interact with comment subscription? Shouldn’t I add those too? (Derek’s blog has a VERY loyal community and these are no doubt at least a small part of why he does. His use of a Top Commentators plug-in and also the Recent Comments plug-in are also part of the reason. That leads to another blog post: which widgets or plugins is he using and why – there are many!)
8. Do you want your subscribe to comments to default to have the box to subscribe checked or unchecked? Derek and I suggest unchecked to allow the comment leaver to opt in rather than opt out.
9. Which nofollow plugin should you use? LinkLove doesn’t remove nofollow until after X comments with 10 set as the default. Lucia’s LinkyLove also allows you to configure how many comments are required before nofollow is removed. Some dofollow plugins remove nofollow from every comment.

BEST PRACTICES FOR ADDING SUBSCRIBING TO COMMENTS:

• A comment RSS comment feed is probably not necessary because the ability to subscribe to comments in a particular blog post makes more sense. (On a busy blog getting ALL the comments would fill your email up!)
• Use a bubble icon with a link to jump down to comments with the number of comments.
• Ensure the comment area is wide enough for longer comments.
• Definitely include a do-followed clickable link to the commentator’s blog and preferably to the post they prefer to link in. For this you need to install a dofollow plug-in.
• Display Avatars to provide greated visibility for regular visitors and help them find each other. One option is WP-Gravatar which pulls Avatars from Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, and monsterID. Derek uses MyAvatars because he is an early adopter and there weren’t as many options when he selected that one. He’s off researching because I asked which was best.
• Use CommentLuv and KeywordLuv to reward commentators.

Although not specifically about getting a subscribe to comments function working on GrowMap, researching this reminds me that a blog wishing to build a strong community should also consider using Top Commentators and Latest Comments plugins or widgets.

Now you can see why I asked Derek for his assistance. After studying the issues I decided that what I would most like is precisely what he has used on his DerekSemmlerDotCom blog. While higher profile technical bloggers would do things differently, Derek’s style most strongly encourages community participation.

Here are the exact WordPress plugins we ended up using that pertain to comments:

• Akismet (This SPAM manager was already installed.)
• CommentLuv
• DoFollow (This also was already installed.)
• KeywordLuv
• Subscribe to Comments

Once again I’d like to make a call for collaborators. Instead of every blog reinventing the wheel why don’t we pool our knowledge in the WordPress Theme Joint Venture Room at FriendFeed.  Once a subject has been discussed the consensus views and how-to links will be posted at GrowMap and possibly elsewhere for easy reference.

WANTED: Your Participation! Would you use Derek’s methods or do you prefer Disqus or another comment tracking service? Which plug-ins or widgets do you use and why? Leave a comment and let us know.

REFERENCES RELATED TO INCREASING BLOG COMMENTS:

• How to Improve WordPress Subscribe to Comments
• Magic Formula To More Comments: Only Three Ingredients
• CommentLuv Plus DoFollow Equals Unlimited Link Love
• Content Is Dead; Conversation is King – Long Live Conversation