Day Six: Connect the Bloggers

Posted by Bonny Albo Jan 9, 2007

If this is your first time visiting the thirty-day Make Money without Spending a Dime Challenge - Welcome! If you want to start from the beginning, you'll find the first posting here, and a list of all of the challenges to date here. Also, don't forget to join in the discussions.

Almost seven percent of the U.S. population read a blog in the past thirty days, according to Mediamark Research Inc.'s Fall 2006 survey. Sure, that's nowhere near the saturation rate of say, shopping (34.2%) or reading the news (40.2%), but it marks a one-year increase of over 150% of users. Fad or otherwise, blogs are big business and only have room to grow. Therefore, it behooves all entrepreneurs to get one, fast, for their business and start using it.

Why Blog?

If you aren't already convinced, here are some more benefits to blogging for your business:

• If you keep your blog current and full of unique and interesting content, you will quickly position yourself as an expert online in your niche of choice.
• By focusing on your blog, you are telling your customers that your relationship with them is important - almost as much as making a sale. Build those relationships to build your business for the long term.
• Send out a press release to the media and they may call you for questions. Post a link to your blog and they may just find the gold mine of information they need without lifting a finger.
• Blogging is an excellent marketing tool for testing new ideas, products, services and theories. Your readers will quickly tell you if something is amazing or a bust, and you don't have to invest anything more than a couple of minutes typing to find out.
• Search engines love updated content. Your site will rank higher with your chosen keywords when you use a blog.

Getting a Blog

There are oodles of free blogging sites that allow anyone to sign up and start blogging immediately (WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal) using their own interface and hosting space. It takes, literally, minutes to get started. For those looking for a more seamless transfer from their own business site to a blog, look at WordPress to download their open source option, or TypePad for their paid services.

Once you've set yourself up, create links back to your site (and vice versa) and start blogging as soon as you can. If at all possible, blog every day, even if it's only a couple of sentences. If you want more guidance, visit Business Week for a great article on the subject.

Blog Marketing

Just like with your website, you need to let the world know your blog exists.

First, find out what your RSS feed [definition & how-to] link is. Then do a search for submitting your RSS feed [I used this link myself] and get to work. Yes, you could purchase a program that does this for you - but we're making money without spending a dime, remember?

Next, you'll want to find the big blog directories or social bookmarking sites like Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us. I can't go into how to get listed on all of them here as they all differ dramatically. However, it is well worth your while to get listed at all of them - and once it's done, it's done. Your newest blog postings will be automatically updated at all of these sites each time you post. Pretty incredible.

After you've got a couple of blog postings that are really stellar in your niche, I highly recommend you join a blog carnival. Blog carnivals are blogs that post about other blogs in a similar topic area all at once - almost like a newspaper of information about your chosen topic all in one place. As an example, just today this entrepreneurs blog was featured in Benjamin Yoskovitz's Carnival of Entrepreneurs. If I'm lucky, I'll host one of the carnivals next month, bringing even more traffic to my and all of the other participant's sites.

You may ask - is this all worth it? Is blogging and blog marketing really something that will bring in customers and get them to spend money?

In my experience so far, the answer is yes. Although I'm finding it hard to track who is contacting me from where because of all of the buzz I'm creating with this challenge, I've had several who I know clicked on links from this blog to my email address, asking me if I'd look at some advertising copy or write an eBook for them.

I must say though, blog marketing is hard work. I think I may take a bit of a break tomorrow.

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