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1. Establish a consistent publishing schedule and stick to it. At least three posts a week is ideal.

2. Add an opt-in subscription box ‘above the fold‘ close to the upper, right-hand corner of your blog. Offer a valuable free product in exchange for their contact information.

3. Send weekly updates to your email list with a link back to your blog.

4. Make it easy for your visitors to share your blog posts on social media sites. Add plugins such as ShareThis and Wibiya to allow visitors to quickly share your content.

5. Brand your site along with your social media profiles so that your visitors recognize you on those sites and
click on your links.

6. Include a ‘Contact’ link on your blog.

7. Create a ‘Privacy Policy,’ and ‘Disclaimer,’ links if you offer affiliate sales on your blog. Providing up-front, full disclosure is now a requirement by the FCC, and it puts your visitor’s minds at ease when they are clear on exactly how you will be using any information that you gather about them.

8. Include a ‘FAQ,’ or ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page to answer questions for your visitors and provide them with everything they need to know when it comes to doing business with you.

9. Use your email subscriber list responsibly. Your visitors did not sign up for your newsletter to be spammed with ads. Offer them ‘susbscriber only’ specials and send them free ‘subscriber appreciation’ gifts to remind them of how valuable they are to you.

These are just a few tips and strategies you can use to keep your reader’s interest and keep them coming back to your blog. The main draw to your blog, of course, is your stellar content. Writing sparkling prose that is keyword rich, relevant and useful to your readers is the best way to keep them coming back for more.

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People create blogs for various purposes ranging from simply writing about what’s happening in their daily lives, trying to bring attention to a particular cause, selling products, for corporate outreach, or gaining increased exposure for the author, every blog works better when it has a clearly defined purpose. By the time you have finished reading this blog post, you will have a clear idea of the advantages of having a purpose driven blog and some ideas for refining and communicating your blog’s purpose to the world.

The blog seems to embody the spirit of new media. The blog has emerged as a great equalizer in the world of publishing and media. It provided the average person who might otherwise never get a book publishing contract the ability to get their message out to the world.

Anyone can start a blog for free, or you can purchase a domain name and hosting for minimal cost and potentially reach millions of readers. But in order to maximize this opportunity to reach your audience, you’ve got to make your blog’s purpose plain when visitors arrive.

People make a decision within about three to five seconds as to whether or not they like or find useful what you have to offer on your blog.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you begin to refine your blog’s purpose:

• What are you trying to accomplish with your blog?
• Clearly a blog whose purpose is to sell products will have a different layout and style from one whose purpose is to generate interest in a particular topic or cause.
• Can visitors tell what your blog is about in less than five seconds after landing on your page?
• The mission and goal of your blog should be clearly communicated in the title, and the content should not veer too far from the main topic keywords.
• Have you narrowed your focus sufficiently?

Some bloggers who are knowledgeable about and passionate about several topics try to cram all of them in to one blog. This can make it challenging to attract targeted traffic, and the search engines won’t be clear on how to rank your site with such a divergent array of keywords.

Are you creating value for your readers?

Regardless of your blog’s purpose, if you are not creating value for your readers they will not have much reason to stay long or return. You are competing with millions of other blogs for your reader’s attention. Do not squander the opportunity to shine by always presenting your best content.

LaShanda Henry, author of the Sistasense.com blog, among several others, says this about blogging:

“Blog like you’ve got an audience of millions reading your blog. Blog like everybody’s watching you”

Don’t wait and hold back your best content until you get ‘discovered’ because you will not get discovered unless you consistently provide excellent, valuable content that attracts readers, keeps them coming back and inspires them to share your posts with their friends and followers.

When you give valuable content away on your blog it communicates your depth of knowledge about your topic and it causes people to keep coming back because they are confident that you will always have something important to say that will benefit them in some way.

Do you love your topic?

When you love your blog topic, when you have a passion for what you are writing about, when an idea hits you and you can’t wait to get out your laptop and blog about it, that passion and enthusiasm is absolutely infectious and it comes across to your readers.

If you love your topic, chance are there are lots of other people out there who share your feelings and who will be thrilled to find a kindred spirit.

Clearly defining your purpose will make it easier for you to create excellent content because you will be delving deeply into a narrow topic rather than going all over the place on a variety of topics.

The purpose driven blog has a clear focus, it provides value for the reader, and it communicates the bloggers passion for the topic. If you are a blogger, take a moment and re-visit your blog’s vision and mission. Where can you make your purpose more clear? Try doing a quick poll for your readers to see if you can discover what kind of impression they are getting and what suggestions they might offer to make yours a more purpose driven blog.

Now it’s your turn. Go ahead and leave a comment about your blog along with the URL. Visitors who read this post will visit your blog and leave you a comment about their impressions of how effectively your are communicating your blog’s purpose.

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If you are using article marketing to drive traffic to your blog, and you have not yet tried Scribd.com, you are missing out on a fabulous traffic source. Scribd is also a good resource for selling your eBooks, and establishing your credibility as an expert in your niche.

Called the, “Youtube.com of documents,” by Business Week, Scribd.com is a document sharing social media website where you can upload documents in several formats including .pdf, presentation or word processing documents for anyone to discover and read online or on mobile devices. After you have published a document you can get live statistics on page views and downloads.

Scribd.com is a vibrant community of users that make up the largest social publishing and reading website in the world according to their ‘about’ page. Through connections with Facebook and Twitter, and search engines like Google, a vast variety of free and paid documents are shared around the globe.

Discover a new audience for your articles
What this means for you as an article marketer is that you’ve got a whole new audience with which to share your articles and get exposure for your blog and your products. One of the limitations of the traditional model of article marketing has been the strict limitations that some of the better article directories place on writers.

Get more back links and targeted traffic to your blog
When you use social networking sites such as Scribd to publish your articles and eBooks you can put anchor text links in the body of your article allowing you to get more back links along with some nicely targeted traffic. If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization you know that the more, high quality, relevant back links you have to your site, the more important Google considers you to be.

Here are five quick tips to help you to make the most of scribd.com in your article marketing efforts:

1. Use a different profile for each topic/niche that you publish in. There is a ‘More from this user’ box on your profile page that allows viewers to see all of the previous documents you have published. If you have some articles on list building, some on fly fishing and another on porcelain doll collecting, you may come across as a dabbler and not a knowledgeable expert in any of those disparate topics.

2. Format your articles so that they are visually appealing. There will be a snapshot of the first page of the document. Make sure that you spell check and format the document so that it looks clean, professional and error-free. Use images where appropriate. Use Keywords in the title.

3. Tag documents with relevant keywords. Use the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool and enter your main keywords. Select 20-30 related keywords appropriate to your article’s topic and add them to the ‘tag’ field separated by commas.

4. Write a clear, thorough description using keywords. People will read the description to decide if they are going to click on your document to read it. The description will accompany the title in the search results, so make sure it contains a brief synopsis of what they will find in your article.

5. Integrate with Facebook, and Twitter. There are buttons that you can click that will integrate your profile so that your Facebook profile and Twitter feed are updated whenever you add a new document to scribd.com.

Follow these five tips and you should see a nice flow of traffic to your blog when you publish documents to scribd.com. If you’ve used Scribd.com, please share your impressions.

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I came across this video on my colleague, Vincent Wright’s website. Watch and learn. The future is now.

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Facebook began in 2004 as a social networking site for college students, but it has emerged on the social media scene as a giant that is not overturning Google’s reign over Internet advertising and searches. They won a U.S. patent this year for their news feeds helping them to become the most frequented website at 400 million users, and 39 billion page views per month.

The exciting thing about Facebook users, and what makes this such a dynamic audience is that they actively use the site. Of those estimated 400 million users, 50% of them log in at least once a day, and about 35 million of them update their status daily.

If it is your goal to get your offer or ideas in front of as many pre-qualified people as possible, then it’s really time to consider using Facebook as a part of your marketing efforts.

Using Facebook Ads
If you want to get started using Facebook ads, your first step should be to read through their content guidelines:
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/

Facebook is strict about what kinds of ads they will allow on their network. But the good news is, you don’t need to worry about coming up with a huge list of keywords, and there is no quality score to concern yourself with as with other Pay Per Click services.

A good way to get started testing the waters is to do a search for ‘free Facebook Ad coupon codes’ so that you can learn how everything works before you start spending your own money.

Facebook ads can be laser targeted so that only the people who are interested will see your ads, and they are as much as half the price of other PPC ads.

Are you finding success with using Facebook ads? Leave a comment and let us know your experience.

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Today I attended the CHAMPS Links Lunch, which is a local small business networking group that meets once per month at a local restaurant. They meet to network and discuss the challenges that local small businesses face. As a ‘solopreneur’ writer who spends the majority of her time in the house in front of the laptop, this was a fabulous opportunity to get out and mingle with other small business people.

Washington, D.C. might appear to be a big city from the outside, but you don’t live here very long before you discover that it is a city of several distinct neighborhoods. I live near the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I lived ‘on the Hill,’ when we first moved here, but I have since moved just a few blocks away, and over a bridge that is a dividing line, which in many ways, can be compared to a ‘Berlin Wall’ of sorts in this city.

Washington, D.C. is made up of distinctive neighborhoods, and Capitol Hill is one of the most close-knit, exclusive, ‘clickish’ neighborhoods in the city, and I love it. It is very much like a small town in the shadow of the larger city. I have learned that many of the small businesses in Capitol Hill are very insular and they tend to be a bit leery of outsiders at first. But once you’ve been around for awhile and they get to know you they are wonderful, warm people who are willing to be supportive.

I want to feel more apart of this vibrant community, so I decided that it was time to get out of the house, come from behind my laptop and mingle with some real people for awhile. My typical workday consists of writing and marketing, talking to clients on Skype, emailing other clients and marketing my blogs and my clients’ sites. I would love to be able to offer my services to some of the small local businesses, who are riding out this recession just like the rest of us, and might benefit from getting increased exposure online.

At Today’s CHAMP meeting, I met a health & fitness instructor, two financial planners, a wardrobe stylist, an attorney, a local ISP, an acupuncturist, and an ad executive. We had lively discussions about how one might get their foot in the door in the Capitol Hill business community, the advantages of owning your blog verses starting out on a free platform such as Blogger. We talked about how to leverage Linkedin as a way to make connections and reach the right people, and, of course, we discussed the vagaries of Twitter and how you can use it along with blogging to get your message out and gain exposure.

I plan to join CHAMPS and participate in more of their activities because it’s just a great way to meet other local business people. Another unanticipated bonus was that I got so many article ideas from that meeting my mind is fairly bursting right now.

Bottom line–local networking is a good thing. My recommendation is that you should look up your local small business networking organization and attend a meeting. Join your local Chamber of Commerce and get involved locally. It’s an opportunity for you to contribute your knowledge, meet other local business people and learn a thing or two in the bargain.

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Blog traffic equals money if you have monetized your blog. There’s no use in mincing words about it. If you’re blogging to generate revenue, then getting more traffic and exposure for your blog should be your primary task.

Blogging is a great way to promote ‘Brand You’, and your products and services. It’s a great way to engage with your market and create a dynamic conversation between you and your prospective customers.

But when your blog is one out of millions of other blogs on the Internet, you’ve got to find some creative ways to stand out from the crowd so that your sparkling prose can actually be appreciated by the masses.

Here are five tips for getting more eyeballs on your page:

1. Write excellent content
Content is what blogging is all about, so make it worth reading.
Keep it clear and concise.
Write in short paragraphs.
Edit ruthlessly.

2. Make it easy to share your content
If a visitor really likes one of your posts, make it easy for them to share it with one click. Use a plug-in that allows them to post to several social media sites without any hassle.

3. Participate in social media
Create a profile and a Fan Page on Facebook and be active in groups on the topic of your blog. Join Networked Blogs on Facebook and visit, comment on and rate other blogs.

Create a profile on Twitter and link back to your site. Selectively follow people that have an interest in your blog’s topic or related topics. Share useful information and be a resource.

4. Be a guest blogger on other blogs
Find popular blogs on a similar topic to yours and develop a relationship with the author. Offer to do a guest post on their blog. You’ll get exposure from a new audience and if they like your post they’ll visit your blog.

5. Submit your blog to popular blogging directories

• Technorati
• Blogcatalog
• Blogtoplist

The most important tip of all is to have fun with your blog. Don’t be shy about revealing your passion for your topic. Your genuine enthusiasm will radiate out and attract visitors in droves. Your authenticity is a magnet to those who share the same interest, so let it shine and you’ll see a steady flow of visitors to your blog.

You’re invited to subscribe to my email update list where you’ll get lots of free tips and resources in your mailbox.

What are your most effective ways of getting traffic to your blog? Speak your mind.

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I created this slide-show video for one of my clients using http://www.animoto.com. If you have not yet tried this website for creating beautiful slide-show presentation videos you’re totally missing out.

Please take a second and watch this video and leave a comment if you would. Thank you!

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If you’re active on Facebook for business or personal reasons you’ll want to listen up. Starting at 12:01 am on Saturday, June 13th you’ll be able to sign up for your own custom username on Facebook. Whereas now you get a randomly generated number as your URL, now you’ll be able to get something like: http://www.facebook.com/jane.doe.

This is one of those times when I am thankful to my parents for not giving me a common name. Amongst the 200 million plus members on Facebook, there are only 4 members with the name Evelyn Bourne, so I think there’s a fair enough chance that I can snag my own name–unless the other Evelyn’s are quicker on the mouse than I.

The new usernames are being given out on a first come, first served basis so get ready to pounce at midnight. Also, you can’t change or transfer your username, so think it through before you select it.

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