Blogging about blogging may seem a bit incestuous but as the lines between social networking, business networking and blogging become increasingly blurred you might want to think about starting your own blog as a means of generating awareness about you and your business. As with any comms medium there are some key rules and best practice guidelines you should follow - we've put together a ‘Top Ten' below.

1. Identify your audience and decide what you're going to say that will make them want to read what you write.

2. Choose a blog service that has features to help build traffic, such as trackers that identify recent posts and the most popular message threads.

3. Don't just vent marketing-speak about how great your business is, or chatter about news and current events for which you offer no expertise. Instead, aim for a fresh, unique take. Provide a perspective that is heartfelt, compelling, and has the potential to help you market yourself and your business.One way to get up to speed on what to say is to read other blogs and, in turn, offer your own viewpoint on an industry or business topic for which you know something about.

4. Building traffic between blogs is another central element to luring repeat visitors. Here, ‘blog-rolling' is an effective tool. This, in essence, is a set of links on your blog site that identifies other sites on the Internet - related to your business, industry or expertise - which you find valuable.

5. Emphasise keywords. Search engine hits are another element of generating traffic. One strategy to attract search engine interest is through careful use of keywords in both your headlines and blog copy. For instance, if your topic focuses on marketing a business overseas, use of the words "marketing" and "overseas" as often as possible and in varied permutations can help push your blog site toward the head of the search engine line.

6. Blog often. Nothing is more discouraging to prospective readers than returning to a blog site to find old or outdated material. So, be prepared to work at keeping your blog as fresh and current as possible.

7. Watch your traffic closely. Monitor the amount and quality of the traffic you receive. If things seem slow or stagnant, don't be shy about varying your themes or subjects to boost interest, but don't stray too far from your business or expertise.

8. Use a human voice - be yourself

9. Follow the New York Times rule... How would this post look if quoted on the front page of the New York Times?

10. Respond to comments, blogs work best when they are two-way

If a starting a blog appeals to you, take a look here for a summary of five free blog services. Also, check your local newspaper - a lot of local papers are online now and some offer a free blog to local residents.

For More Info visit:
http://blogs.technet.com
http://deepikabajaj.spaces.live.com/blog/

Get a free blog: here's 5 of the best services

When blogging services started cropping up on the web, making it far easier to keep an online diary and not worry about how it all worked. In fact, it has become so popular that now there's hundreds of blog services, and all claim to be the best one out there. Fear not, though. Instead of picking the wrong one and being confined to blogging in the dark basement office of the Internet, follow our advice as we highlight the best ones for you.

 Live Spaces - spaces.live.com

Windows Live Spaces aims to rival the dominance of MySpace in the social online networking world. It offers a drag-and-drop interface that can add everything from your favourite web sites to a photo slideshow, and it looks great. It is a little overwhelming if you just want to create a basic diary, though. You can tie it to your sign-in name, and your updates are available to everybody in your contact list.

Blogger - www.blogger.com

Blogger offers users a dedicated service and an excellent host of options to make your blog look slick. You can choose from lots of backgrounds and styles, with a variety of colours. Pictures can be uploaded from your desktop, and you have full control over their position on the page. Compared to MySpace, people are less likely to find your blog by accident, so you will be relying more on people linking to you.

Facebook - www.facebook.com

Registering with Facebook can be a disturbing experience. Within seconds of logging into the site, it knows more about you than your mother does, and wants every piece of information you hold dear. Beneath the M15 overtones, though, it’s a nifty way to stay in touch with people: a neat combination of Friends Reunited and MySpace. However, the profusion of different options means that the site is confusing to use and the actual blogs take the form of short messages nobody can find. You can import an existing blog, but nobody will be able to find that either.

Wordpress - www.wordpress.com

This site works on a similar basis to Blogger.com, but offers more control over your blog. There are more appearances and designs to choose from, and videos can be embedded from YouTube or other sources. However, the site has little community feel, and the controls are very fiddly for inexperienced bloggers.

MySpace - www.myspace.com

MySpace has become so popular over the last few years that it’s almost shorthand for social networking web sites in general. The benefit of blogging through MySpace is its vast interconnected user network – your musings will be read by your friends, their friends, and weird Uncle Geoffrey. It suffers from a lack of options, though, and this means that your blogs can become bland and one-dimensional, because you have little control over their appearance.

For More Info Visit: http://deepikabajaj.spaces.live.com/blog/

What is RSS? To begin with, it's one of those things everyone says is easy to understand. However it is not so.

The easiest way to explain it is to make you understand a live example. We are not trying to explain everything on the subject, but this should help get you started.

Let's sign you up for the Excess Voice RSS Feed

If you want to read the Excess Voice newsletter every two weeks you can either read it in your email inbox, or read it in your web browser.

You already know how it works when you subscribe to a newsletter via email. You sign up, hope the spam filters don't block some or all issues, and then read the newsletter in your email program.

With RSS, instead of subscribing via email, you subscribe via a web page.

Let's walk through the subscription process

If you have a Yahoo! account, or even if you don't have one you can go to My Yahoo! and click the Add Content page. On the right side of the 'Find Content' area you will see a link, Add RSS by URL. Follow that link and, to add the Excess Voice RSS feed, simply paste this url in the field option, http://www.excessvoice.com/excessfeed.xml (Don't click on this link. Cut and paste it.).

Now click the Add button and you're done.

If you don't use Yahoo!, register at Bloglines.com and follow the same process. Bloglines is a free service preferred by many users.

What happens now?

Now, whenever you go to My Yahoo! or Bloglines, you will see when the Excess Voice feed has been updated. In Yahoo it tells you how many hours or days ago the search rss feeds was updated. In Bloglines the feed name will appear in bold, and a number displayed after the name tells you how many items the feed has been updated since you last checked. (Bloglines is one such service.)

What you see...

When you check the Excess Voice feeds, you will see that with each feed, you don't get the complete content...you don't see the whole newsletter, the complete article or the whole review. You see the title and the first ten lines of the content. If you want to read the whole article, for example, click on the link and then it will navigate to the page on the Excess Voice site.

Online Paid Advertisements

Online paid advertisements are advertisements placed by online advertising networks on webmasters WebPages with permission of the webmasters, so that the viewers of the website may click on the adverts and the webmasters get paid for ads when any visitor clicks over the advertisement. This is fiscally highly profitable for the webmaster - who owns the website. There are many programs that offer this kind of novel income opportunity. The webmasters get paid for ads that have been clicked by visitors to his site.

Types of Online paid advertisements

Online paid advertisements come in different formats and shapes, starting from banner ads. Other formats include pop-up ads, pop-under ads, text ads, and news letter ads. Each online paid advertising format is unique by itself, i.e., every ad format has its special purpose. Looking to each format in detail will give a clearer picture.

Banner Ads

Banners ads, as the name implies is a banner that has ads within it. There are different types of paid banner advertising. Some of the standard formats are horizontal banner - leader board (480x60) and vertical banner - skyscraper (120x600). Other formats include half banner (234x60), button (125x125), wide skyscraper (160x600), square (250x250), large (336x280) and small rectangle (180x150). The webmaster can choose to display between image ads and text-only ads on his/her webpages. If he/she likes to display image ads, then it will cover the entire banner. But if one would like to display text-only ads, you may have from a minimum of one text ad to four or five text ads within the banner. Banner ads are also displayed in paid email advertising.

Pop-up Ads

Using Pop-up ads is a very conventional form of online paid advertising. Whenever a webpage loads, a pop-up also emerges. Before a visitor can see the webpage he has to view the pop-up -provided by the online advertising network. The online paid advertising networks such as Adsense, and Adbrite -, provide small HTML codes that can be into host webpages.

Pop-under Ads

Pop-under ads are ads that are displayed when an user visits a website, but unlike pop-ups these ads tend to stay minimized so that the visitor does not get annoyed. On closing the active window, then pop-under ads will be displayed. This type of advertising is gearing up pace in the online advertising market, as it is quite non-intrusive and doesn't irritate the visitor or internet user. Many online advertising networks are currently offering pop-under ads and the webmasters are paid reasonably well when compared to pop-ups.

A squeeze page is a web page designed to do one thing and one thing only: to obtain or gently “squeeze” your visitors’ information so that you have their permission to email them with your newsletter or other information.

Most squeeze pages will convert at 30 to 50% but a really good squeeze page might convert visitors at 60% or even higher. The conversion rate will depend not only upon the design of the page but also upon the quality of the traffic coming to the page.

Here are the key components of a good squeeze page.

An Attention Grabbing Headline
Immediately under your web site title or logo you need a bold headline that grabs your visitors’ attention. It’s best to come up with two or three good headlines and then test each to see which has the highest conversion rate.

Your heading or subheading should also promise to deliver something valuable that your visitors want or need. One of the statements I have used is “Learn the Secrets of Driving Traffic To Your Web Site Like Crazy!” If your visitors believe that you will deliver what you promised, and it is something they want, then they will sign up. It’s as simple as that.

Offer a Gift
Offering a free gift such as a free report or free e-book is one of the most powerful techniques to entice people to give you their name and email. If you don’t have an e-book to give away, write one. It doesn’t need to be 100 pages. Many e-books given away like this are just 16-25 pages. Try it and watch your conversions soar.

Below are some Keyword Research Tools; apart from manual tactics:

1. Overture: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
2. Word tracker: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
3. Rushmore’s Keyword RT: http://www.keywordenchanter.com/
4. Adwords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
5. Keyword Spy: http://www.keywordspy.com/

I read a Blog post recently that gives advice to advertisers looking for an SEM. The Blogger insists that in today's world an SEM firm must have a solid background in global equity markets and hedge funds.

Before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars; consider the following free advice:

• Know your advertiser's objectives. Does the advertiser want to increase brand awareness? Does the advertiser have an ROI objective? Does the advertiser have a set budget, or is the sky the limit as long as the ROI target is being reached? Finding clarity regarding goals and objectives with your client is essential to building a successful online marketing program.
• Break campaigns into focused Ad Groups. Make sure that the ads in each Ad Group are appropriately paired with the keywords. Start with the advice provided by your search engine representatives, and adjust from there, based on performance and ingenuity.
• Develop and maintain relevant ad copy and landing pages. Bid management is only one factor among several which affect ad ranking. Build compelling, relevant copy that attracts consumers to click on your ads. Keep the content up-to-date. Test copy variations in distinct Ad Groups and compare performance. Make sure that the landing pages are relevant to the copy and to the keywords.
• Use the Geo-Targeting tools provided by the search engines. Make sure the ads are appropriately targeted towards geographic regions. Don't waste budget targeting ads towards geographic regions which don't match your target audience.
• Use match types intelligently. Explore broad, phrase, and exact match types. For each keyword, test the various match type options. Some keyword/match type combinations may result in too many clicks that don't convert well for you -- identify these combinations and eliminate them from your program. Also use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant matches.
• Study the interaction between keywords and conversions. Just because a consumer searches for "flight to Vegas" doesn't mean he or she will book a flight to Las Vegas. The consumer may end up purchasing a bus ticket to Yonkers. Know the profit margins associated with the various conversion types so that you can set CPA or ROAS goals accordingly. If there are wide variances in profit margin in your product mix, make sure you are using a bid management system that allows you to assign goals based on the conversions as well as the keywords.
• Make sure you are using a tracking, reporting, and bid management tool with a data accuracy policy. You need good data to make good decisions. Your technology provider should give you timely and accurate click and cost data, taken directly from the search engines. Make sure your technology provider does not use unreliable referrer data for bid management calculations.

It could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Search marketing is complex, but that's not a good excuse to abandon common sense.

• The names and emails of private link brokers and link sellers whose networks are still passing value.
• IP lists of the search engines' cloak-detection bots and methods of identifying potential human quality raters.
• Ways around penalties, bans, or other search issues.
• Email access to the right people at search engines, blogs, social media sites, & large web properties.
• Access to email or online lists of effective social media voting groups.
• Methods for scalably grabbing large amounts of competitive intelligence data from the engines or other sources.
• Data on traffic, referrals, and other competitive intelligence information for big brands, sites, and verticals.
• CTRs, CPCs, CPMs, ad payouts, & conversion rates for specific keywords and phrases.
• Lots and lots of other super secret stuff.

Getting your site to rank highly in the search engine results and getting searchers to click through to your site is one of the first objectives of B2B search engine optimization. In the B2CSEO world, conversion can happen in a matter of minutes. In the business-to-business realm, however, conversion can take months or even years.

The goal of most B2B searchers is research. Your goal is to identify who the site visitors are and to develop a relationship with them. First of all, you should be analyzing your web traffic as it can be a rich source of leads.

While you likely won’t generate a B2B sale in a single visit, there are a number of strategies to help begin converting site visitors into customers. In business-to-business realm, your job is to increase the number and quality of those encounters by offering opportunities for them to engage with you.

The primary intent of business-to-business searchers is research and education. Your site should contain a generous amount of optimized educational content. This helps prospects both find you and get to know your firm and your approach in a non-invasive, largely anonymous environment. While much of your web content should be open to all, you should reserve a certain amount of valuable content available by registration only. That registration will give you valuable lead information.

There are a number of tools you can use to drive engagement, accelerate conversion, create leads, and measure the return on SEO. Here are some of them.

Newsletter Sign-ups: Newsletters are a great way to stay in front of B2B prospects and develop an ongoing relationship with them. Keep newsletter registration simple. E-newsletters are ideal. Most importantly, make sure your newsletter has great content.

White Papers: White papers are a great way for prospects to see how you think, to evaluate your knowledge and perspectives. Be careful not to turn the white paper into a blatant promotional tool. Links should be limited to those whose destination provides other objective, educational material and information.

Podcasts: B2B podcasts are an easy way for people to assimilate what you have to say. Keep podcasts valuable and short, and use newsletters and blogs to promote them.

Webcasts: Business-to-business webcasts are non-invasive forums in which to share research, information, and product demonstrations. They’re much cheaper than on-site seminars, and you can use webcast registrations for leads.

Your Blog: A blog serves as another touch point for your brand. Business-to-business blogs are a great medium to further engage prospects. If you have a related blog, refer visitors and allow them to your main site to click through to it.

Site Analytics will let you evaluate your conversion efforts in terms of depth of visits, length of visits, and whether time spent on specific pages and the number of repeat visitors is increasing. In addition to continuing to convert visitors into customers, the number and quality of leads from each of the conversion strategies above can be used to evaluate return on investment for B2B search engine optimization.

SEO ability to meet prospects exactly when they’re forming the intent to buy makes it one of the most attractive marketing strategies for B2B. Yet most business-to-business companies have not begun to implement search engine optimization. For many, it’s not even on their radar and that can represent a competitive advantage for your firm. If you understand B2B search engine optimization and how to engage visitors each time they find your site, you can create a rich pipeline of prospect relationships and sales leads.

Microsites are focused, high impact sites useful for advertising an event, launching a campaign or in promoting a brand. Cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. If you are looking for a new way to acquire customers, a microsite is a solution.  Typically 5 to 10 web pages - your product or service is featured, along with key features, description, your offer and a call to action. In many ways, it's an electronic version of direct mail - except there's no throwing this promotion away!

With a lead-generating microsite like these, the goal is to acquire leads the way that third-party lead providers like Dealix and Cars.com get theirs.  They create generic sites that give customers the ability to get a price quote from their member dealer in the area.

Advantages of Microsites

• Actionable results - Microsites drive action. Lead generation, information requests or orders can be generated with a microsite.
• Continuous promotion – As content is still the king on web. Once you create online content, it takes on a life of its own. Sure it needs to be updated, but now you have a promotion that can generate a continuous stream of new business.
• Customized - A chance to promote your business with your own personalized design, choice.
• Optimized for Conversion
• Customer Focused
• Normally built around – One Campaign, One Brand or One Product Line.

Disadvantage of Microsite:

Sometime not able to generate Leads for which it is built – but still it helps in bringing Traffic, Branding & Customer Retention which is also very essential.

Keys to Success

• Telling your story quickly and succinctly. Many users arrive at a web site and look at one page. If the content is not relevant, they're gone.
• Continuous improvements - Like exercise, an ongoing effort to maintain and improve your site is the best way to succeed
• Effective promotion - If you don't promote it, you might as well not build it. Cost-effectively promoting your microsite can drive powerful results.

Thus we can say:

“A good microsite can be your most passionate sales rep, working 24 hours a day.”

Here below is an important link to go thru, if one is looking to stand in Google Listing’s:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality

“+”: Forces words to be included in search results. Useful with stop words that otherwise will be discarded.

“-“: Prevents a search term to show in results, for example searching for online -marketing can help you to avoid creamy doughnuts

“OR”: Returns documents with one of the given terms, like online OR marketing. You can also use | instead of OR: online | marketing

“*”: Means every word. Try SEO SEM*

“” “”: Using quotes forces google to search for the exact phrase (including stop words), try "online marketing India" and online marketing India (actually, using quotes is similar, but not equals, to online-marketing-India… it would be interesting to know what is the exact difference in SERP)

“~”: Allow to search also for synonyms of the given word. Searching for SEO ~SEM finds also pages with the word help or guide etc.

 “..”: Used to search in a range of numbers, 1..5 Seo companies will find pages containing “5 Most Common Lies Told by SEO Companies”.

These operators can be combined to create advanced queries, for example “I work 1..7  SEO OR "online marketing" companies*”

But the foremost step beneath website promotion is website announcement. Announcements and publicity are key components towards this endeavor, and are the least costly. It varies from site to site depending on the type of content on your site but it's safe to say that in most cases announcements and search engines are the most common way that users will find your site.

Announcing a website on the net is the act of putting information into public arena but its online. It’s like a process of giving formal notice to the world of web, about the landing of new website. Website announcement is a much wider term in itself, and even it’s self-explanatory. It is more or less just the announcement about the website, which is either launched or to be launched. Also is a notification or declaration by or for an individual or organization.

Online announcement of website is the way by which we can publicize our new web site as the way we announce new products or services online. There are many methods and resources where and how we can submit our new web site announcements. Some of these are announcement sites and require that you subscribe in order to submit your announcement. Signature or registering to the lists pertaining to your target market is a good way to keep track of what is out there. I use some of these lists for forming joint ventures and alliances with others in targeted fields.

If you blaze to make a sale, you’re probably not going to be as successful as if you advertised to get a lead. Your goal from your advertisements should be to get the lead and from the lead create a personal relationship so you can obtain the sale. 

From planning for your new website to creating your website and finally various ways of promoting it and its products or services henceforth, all that requires is the complete acquaintance of website promotion.

Next issue is where and how we can announce and promote a website.

Here are some methods and resources:

• Email mailing lists for Announcement lists:

Announcement lists are used so that one person or group can send announcements to a group of people; much like a magazine publisher's mailing list is used to send out magazines. For example, a band may use an announcement mailing list to let their fan base know about their upcoming concerts. Example: http://e-target.com/

• New Groups:
  

A news group message, or more accurately a newsgroup control message is fundamentally news posting with a few special headers, and usually some extra information in the body of the message. A newsgroup is a repository, usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. The term is somewhat confusing, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read newsgroups.

· Newsletters:

A newsletter is a publication generally about one main subject or topic that is of interest to its subscribers. This publication is then sent out at different periods of time, to inform the subscriber about the requested topic. Email Newsletters are an excellent vehicle for communicating with small to large audiences. Called as Email Newsletter or eNewsletter.

Many questions should be kept into mind while subscribing for newsletters:

1. How many subscribers does the newsletter have? Many feel that the bigger the subscriber base, the more people will see your ad. However, this isn't always the case. Some smaller subscriber based newsletters are read by more subscribers, so it depends on the newsletter.

2. Are the subscribers 100% opt-in? Did the subscribers ask to be subscribed to the newsletter?

3. How many ads are in each issue? Sometimes the more ads there are, the less chance your ad will be read. This isn't always the case, however.

4. How often is the newsletter published? Some feel that a newsletter published once a month pulls better response than one published on a weekly or daily basis. The main thing is to test, test and at last test.

5. Does the newsletter focus on your target audience?

· Press Releases

Press Release is like a public relations announcement issued to the news media. Commercial newswire services are used to distribute these news releases. Sometimes news releases are sent for the purpose of announcing news conferences, etc. A press release is a promotion tool designed to achieve maximum exposure, publicity with minimum time, effort and cost.

No other device can garner as much attention for you, your product or service, for the price of a first class stamp, fax or email. It is the one of the most relevant source for promotion, announcement. And any having something news worthy to tell the world and need free publicity can make use of this. Now the question is where to send your press releases. Some of these are pay-for services and some are free.

Internet News Bureau http://www.newsbureau.com/

PR Web http://www.prweb.com/

PRLeap http://www.prleap.com/

PR9.net www.pr9.net

I-newswire http://i-newswire.com/submit_free.php and many more...

· Free Submissions – Search Engines and Web Directories

Submission to Search Engines

Significant factor in promoting a site is search engine submission. Online directories serve as a major source for rankings in different search engines. It is highly recommended to have the website listed in the major directories so as to increase the chances of search engine visibility. The main directories include DMOZ, Directory, and Alltheweb etc.

Submission in Second Level Directories

There are some directories which are a good source of direct visits from the customer base and serves as a source of quality one way links. As the website doesn’t have many/adequate links pointing to it, it is recommended to go for some directory listings.

Submission in Specialized Directories

There are some specialized directories which instead industries, focuses on one particular subject. Submissions to these also lead to the promotion and so as the announcements.

Submissions of websites to search engines, general directories and specific sites leads to the promotion as well as announcement, as we provide the Title, Description indicating the announcement we want to make.

• Magazines listing websites
  

There are many online magazines that used to list out the new websites, giving announcements and promotions to the newly built sites, before or after launch.

• Books listing websites
  

Similar to online magazines there are many online books that also list out websites offering them promotion and announcements. Like

http://www.coriolis.com/

http://www.vmedia.com/ira.html

• What’s New too!

A new site announcement service that allows you to customize the type of sites you see, the verbosity level, and number of days to view. Example: www.nu2.com

• Commercial Services
  

There exist many online commercial sources providing online promotion and announcement services. Some of them are AAA Internet Promotions an interesting and easy way to online promotion. You can go for regular directories listing, and even go with them for press releases etc.

• Banner Exchange
  

Dozens of organizations, like those featured below, allow you to participate in their free banner exchange programs to bring additional customers to your site. Each program requires you to create a banner advertisement (at your cost) and place a reciprocal banner link on your page. Then every time their banner is advertised from your page, you get credits to have your banner shown on other pages all over the Internet. The best part is, it's FREE! E.g. 123 Banners, Banner Bazar, and Banner Express.