Marketing your business using a blog is a great idea. The question is how do you get started? This is a list that will help you get going. Completing the steps below will help your blogging experience be one that is enjoyable and profitable.

1. Topic Choice – The topic that you are going to write about is important. Make sure and write about something that you are passionate about. This will prevent boredom. Your passion will come through in your writing. Choose a portion of your business that truly excites you.
2. Be aware of competition – If your topic is very common then moving up in the search engines will be difficult. Look at the topic from a different angle. Attempt to find something that addresses the same thing but in a different manner. An example is that the topic of cars or automobiles has lots of competition. The topic of antique cars has less. You want something that has an audience but is still limited in competition.
3. Start your blog – Getting started with a blog is easy. There are services that can help you do that. You can us sites like https://www.blogger.com/ . Free to use but you will be on your own. http://wordpress.org is another example that is free but again you are on your own. There are sites like http://blogzombie.net , and http://powersitepromotion.com that will provide different levels of help based on your budget. The Blog Zombie has programs for you to get paid or offset your cost.
4. Cross linking – Link to other authoritative sites. You can determine the PR of a site by installing the google toolbar. You can also check the site out on Alex to determine the amount of traffic. The higher the PR the more authoritative the site. The lower the Alexa score the more traffic the site has. This will help you determine what sites to link you blog to. You can use the side columns to add six or seven links to authoritative sites. When your site is visited by search engines you will benefit from the association.
5. Keep it simple – Write in simple language, use short paragraphs and use bullet points. Make sure your posts are easy to read.
6. Link to sources – Linking to your sources is good etiquette and helps promote your blog. You may also get a link to your site in return. A better option is to use three way links. Site A to Site B; Site B to Site C; Site C to Site A.
7. Proper grammar – Using proper grammar and spelling is important. Read over the article and do not rely on spell check.
8. Categories – Create categories that describe what your blog is about. Make sure and place posts according to the proper category.
9. Be involved – Get involved in forums that discuss your topic. This will help you promote your business and learn what others are going through.

10.  Bookmarking – There are sites that are used to bookmark sites. If you encourage your readers to bookmark your site this will help you. Make sure and allow this option.

11.  Tags – Make sure and add tags that will help search engines determine what the topic of the article. If you do not do this the search engines could classify the article incorrectly.

12.  Number of posts – The more the better. The more frequent you post articles the more readers will come back. Set you blog to ping search engines and services every time you post an article. At least once per week you should post

new content. You will also want to keep as many posts on the main page as possible. This will help pages get indexed by the search engines.

13.  Generate income – Use Google Adsense, Infolinks and sites like PayPerPost to generate income. The first two are

passive income generators

that will create textual links on your site. The third is a site that will offer sponsored conversations. All of these are ways to generate income for you site. These should only be used after you have at least 200 posts on your site.

Sharon Denise Talbot

www.sharondenisetalbot.com