SEO Trainers

Why Blog for Promotion?
Blogging is very popular right now. And having a business weblog that provides good information for your customers while being timely and fun can add a new dimension to your Web site.
Blogs are a powerful tool for marketing and promotion. Because the entries are short, and often full of links, they are more keyword heavy than standard articles often are. Plus, being short, they are easy for your customers to read (and you to write), so they are more likely to come back daily to see what you might have to say on that day.
If your company is very formal, a blog is a place to show your customers that it is made up of people just like them. You can do this without becoming too personal or diary-like.
Using a Blog for Business
There are lots of ways you could use a blog in a business:

• Frequently Asked Questions
  If you get a lot of mail to your webmaster account, you can post the common questions up on a blog. This will provide your customers a place to go to see questions and answers, and as new questions come in, you can post them to help more people.
• Promotions
  If you do promotions every week or few days, you can use a blog to highlight them.
• Contests
  Daily contests and games are a great promo in a blog. They are fun, and bring your customers back.
• What's New Pages
  If you add lots of new articles, information, or products regularly, sometimes it can be difficult for your customers to find out what's new. A quick blog entry can show them what's updated on your site.
• What's Coming
  You can use a blog to peak interest in future products or projects. It's also a great way to keep notes about what you're planning for your customers, the entries are archived so nothing is lost either for you or your customers. Plus, if your blog tool has a comments feature, you can use that to judge interest before it goes live.
• Photo Blog
  Rather than writing, you could put up a daily photo for your customers. A photo and a short description can be very compelling.
• Developer Notes
  If you're a software company, this can often be fascinating for your customers, to see what the software developers are doing and how new projects might be moving forward.
• News
  The most common use for business blogs is news, usually about the specific topic relevant to the company.

Blogging…
It seems everyone is doing it.
In fact, I asked someone the other day, “Does anyone create websites anymore?”  It seems that when given the choice between a blog and a website, most people opt for blogs these days.
If this describes you, I certainly understand your reasons.  Blogs are much easier to setup than websites.
They are dynamic, which means the scripts allow you to display content in many different ways (by date, category, tag, most commented posts, etc.)
The search engines love them, and the free plug-ins (if you use WordPress) can give you even more flexibility and increase your blog’s coolness factor.

One Problem With Blogging

Even though there are many positives with blogging, there’s one thing I’ve noticed about many who choose a blog over a website.
Blogging can often discourage beginners from learning the fundamentals of website creation and design.  Unlike a website, you don’t need to learn anything about HTML, CSS or uploading files to publish a blog.
You might argue the same could be said about websites if you use an editor.  However, even if you use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup for a website, you still have to familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of HTML at some point. (At least I had to.)
With blogs, everything can be done through a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) control panel that comes with your blogging platform.  You don’t have to look at a lick of code if you don’t want to.
Of course, this is no big deal if you find a blog template/theme that you want to use “as is”.  But what if you want to customize large sections of your design or change it completely?
Staring at a gazillion lines of CSS code can be quite intimidating.  In fact, most people will tell you that in order to learn CSS, you should have a basic understanding of HTML first. (And I agree.)  So with no HTML background, I completely understand why some bloggers cringe at the thought of going near the code.
Many people choose blogs because they are easier to setup, but many don’t venture out and learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS so they can freely update their designs.
I have nothing against blogging. I own one myself, obviously.  But I do believe that if you are going to blog, you should spend time learning the basics of HTML and CSS so you have the freedom to update your design beyond the standard template.
Of course, outsourcing a designer is always an option too.  However, you don’t want to become completely reliant on a third party.  I’ve heard too many nightmare stories with this scenario.
About once a month I get an email from someone who’s paid a designer to create and design their site, but they’ve lost contact with the person and have no idea how to make edits to the design.
As I say all the time, I am far from being a designer, but I have learned enough to maintain and customize my site.  You should too.
Even if you buy the premium WordPress Thesis Theme that I use for this blog, it still helps to know the basics of CSS so you can juice up the standard, out-of-the-box template.

A CSS Tutorial Minus The Techie Talk

If you haven’t viewed my newest 4-part CSS tutorial on YouTube, you can watch all four videos in the playlist below.  I even provide a very simple, 3-column template that goes along with the video.  You can tweak it as needed.
Even though this template and tutorial is for a website instead of a blog, it will still help you grasp the basics and make more sense of your blog’s template code.
Give yourself the freedom to design the kind of blog you want.

Follow these Steps for free traffic
1. Submit to open directories like dmoz
2. Open twitter/facebook account and use automation softwares to add new followers instantly
3. Leave hyperlinks in forums after commenting
4. Write guest post to blogs
5. Buy customised content at cheap rates and put it in your site if you are out of ideas to write.
6. Follow expert blogger sites like dailybloggingtips,mashable or fastgush.

There are a lot of things that one can do to boost the traffic they get to their website.
Here are some of the techniques that I found helpful in increasing my site visitors:
- writing articles and submitting them to ezines
- using pinging services
- submitting my content to blogcatalog
- getting involved in blog carnivals
- commenting on other blogs
- building backlinks
- using social bookmarks to build relationships
- using web 2.0 websites such as hubpages and squidoo
I hope they are of help to you

  To Getting other sites to link to yours is easy when you have content worth linking to. It
really is that simple in some cases. Your content should be original, but it doesn’t need to set
the world on fire.
The more content you add to your site, the more likely people will link to it, today or in the
future. I’m still getting links from stuff I wrote years ago.
So first thing you should be doing is, er, adding content to your site. I personally think How-
To articles or articles that discuss a common problem often discussed in forums etc – some
call it timeless content – is best suited to linkbait (and visitors!). This is always going to get
linked to at some point if it’s presented slightly differently, and interesting. Once you get
enough links and you feature in the top 3 results, you’ll find you start to pick up more and
more natural links – it’s a reinforcing effect.
Where to start? See that crap little FAQ on your site? Those frequently asked questions
nobody asks about? Those need expanded – each FAQ should be its own page with a good
page title and in a well structured site. You need to ask yourself what people want to know
about your products, or your industry – not necessarily YOURbusiness.
Having content on your site makes it so much easier to pick up links. If you have no content,
while you can still rank in Google via links alone, you’re limiting yourself in a way you
might not recover from.
So first lesson in linkbuilding ….. Add content to your website that’s not strictly about
your boring company.

Buying links that are search engine friendly is against Google TOS. If you buy links to take
the risk Google will penalise you (from a reduction in your toolbar pagerank, up to removing
your site from its index).
If buying links was ineffective, it wouldn’t be against Google TOS. Think about that.
I can’t remember the last vertical I checked there weren’t people buying links to improve
search engine placement – so the competition is doing it. Last time I checked, they were
ranking pretty good.
I can’t advise you to buy links but I can’t honestly advise you not to – although I will point
out again Google will take you down if it finds out.
If you are buying links, make sure your links aren’t obviously paid links, though. That is,
don’t buy links from obvious places. If Google gets better at detecting these, it’s the obvious
paid links that will be hit first.
I can say, I don’t buy links. Not at the moment anyway.
There are still plenty of ways to get links without paying for them: SEE  How I Got 500 Real
Backlinks In 2 Minutes for example.