There are literally hundreds of different ways to undertake a blog marketing campaign. You can submit your site to directories, you can submit articles to article directories and you can spend time on the various social sites promoting yourself and your blog.

It is that final aspect that can often be the stumbling block. Rather than trying to promote your blog, stop thinking of it as a blog and start thinking of it as a website.

Admittedly it is a blog - if that is all you want it to be. Websites come in all shapes and sizes. Whether they are static single page sites, sites with multiple page, catalog sites or ecommerce sites, they are all websites. You just happen to use a blog as the delivery method.

Blogs often get either too personal, that is, they start talking about what they had for breakfast when they run out of things to say, or they become too narrow in their focus. Websites, on the other hand, have a specific focus and try to cover every aspect of that focus. You can do the same on your blog - perhaps even better.

Whilst it is only a modification of your thinking, by consider your blog a website it may open your eyes to many other marketing opportunities - in this case, blog marketing opportunities, but only because you are marketing a website that just happens to be - a blog.

Inside Adsense has published a post that should be of interest to anyone publishing Adwords units as part of their blogging income.

If the content is good quality and brings in a good supply of traffic, your click through rate is going to improve. If your click through rate improves the chances are your traffic that moves onto an advertisers site will convert at a higher rate. The end result - advertisers will be willing to pay more to advertise on your site. As the post states:

Overall, you’re likely to earn more revenue with your site if advertisers are generating conversions and receiving quality leads from your site.

The opposite is also true. If the conversion rate from your site is low, advertisers will not want to advertise. The end result is less competition for the ads you do publish.

On the other hand, if your website performs poorly for advertisers, they may be less inclined to display on your site.

This is fairly straightforward and a double edged sword. If your content leads to increased conversions for publishers, they will pay more. You will receive a per-click return. Add to that an increase in the number of clicks due to the better targeting of ads and you’re a long way in front.

Blogging income - more clicks and a higher rate per click sounds like a win win situation to me - and it is you who is winning!

The recent release of Google’s own version of a browser, Google Chrome, appears to have issues with CSS when it comes to some blogs. If the browser takes off then many blogs will need to have their blog design checked.

In the past, it was always advisable to check you web pages out on both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Now it may be necessary to check them out on Chrome.

Websites, your blog included, are representative of you and your business. If a visitor arrives they expect to see a properly formatted page. There are times when a page will look good in Firefox and look terrible in IE6 - or vice-versa. Since these two browsers make up 75-90% of all traffic, it makes sense to ensure your pages render well in each browser.

With a third browser coming on line, it has the potential make live even harder. Microsoft through Internet Explorer has tried to re-invent internet standards. Internet Explorer doesn’t recognize many of the current standards which can cause problems.

The question that many have asked is whether or not Google Chrome will be written in the future to a standard that forces publishers to choose. Render your sites IE compatible or Chrome compatible - you won’t be able to have both since the code required for both will be different.

Time will tell. First, the general public has to take up Chrome and use it. Until then, it is only a browser puppy. Even puppies grow however.

I have been involved with computers for a long time. During that time I have also gotten used to the frequent software updates and upgrades that occur at regular intervals. Microsoft was infamous for their annual upgrades and almost monthly updates. They pale under the history of blog software giant, WordPress.

WordPress is not happy with an annual upgrade. No, they have to upgrade every six months, then provide updates every six to eight weeks. WordPress 2.6, or is it 2.6.1 now? is not even hot on the hard drive and now they are discussing version 2.7 - and they say it is going to be bigger than the 2.6 upgrade.

One question is does raise is their version system. In the past, major changes resulted in a change to the first number. Version 2.6 should have been version 3.0. If this is another big upgrade then it should be version 4.0. Smaller upgrades take the first decimal point. Version 2.6.1 should be 3.1 although it is such an insignificant update that perhaps 3.0.1 may have been better. It’s all semantics so let’s move on.

WordPress 2.7 is slated for release in November. It does appear to have some changes that may make it look nicer, perhaps feel easier to use, most likely a little slower again. Change for the sake of change is no good. WordPress needs to work on ways to speed everything up, particularly when in the the dashboard. WordPress also needs to learn two other lessons, first, don’t fix what isn’t broken and second, you cannot please everyone so stick to what you do best. Both are cliches, but when it comes to a blog software package like WordPress, they really do suit the situation.

Your footer is the perfect place to put your internal links to pages that may be of value to your readers, but are not part of your blogs main direction.

These links could include privacy statements, disclosures, sitemaps and perhaps you’re about me pages. Why in the footer? Your blog has a reason for being. It may be a business blog that is promoting the products or services. It may be an information blog or could just be a personal blog detailing your day to day life. What you don’t want is to divert attention away from your blogs content.

With the exception of the ‘about me’ page, the other pages are really just polite policy pages. If people care, they will visit and read them. Generally speaking, these pages receive the lowest volumes of traffic, and that should be the way you want it. Your ‘about me’ page is a little different and may be a page that you want people to visit frequently. If so, place it higher on the page.

There are several ways to use the footer, the easiest being to use the theme editor. Rather than playing with PHP and trying to code the links from the database, use a direct link in HTML. This can be done by using the standard a href= code. To separate the links, just place the “|” symbol between each one. It looks cleaner and may just clean up some the clutter from your sidebars.

Using the footer to publish this information has been fairly standard for many years on web sites. As you tour around visiting blogs, check out where they publish the links. Many are now turning to the least used space on their blog, the footer.

Most bloggers don’t consider using ‘landing pages’, they leave their pages as they come out of the box, they only change from one page to the next being the content.

If you check to see where your traffic is coming from and which pages they are landing on you can capitalize on that information and flow of traffic to the greater good of your site.

As an everyday blogger you probably don’t want to get your hands dirty playing with code and changing the look of individual pages. You can however change how some pages look by changing the area within the content.

If you have popular pages and you have monetized your blog, the best place to put some of those ads, particularly the PPC and affiliate type ads is right in the middle of where the traffic is. The traffic that is arriving could be the traffic that can generate your income. By placing ad units within your content, particularly close to the top and bottom, you can catch the traffic that is landing and deciding to leave - hopefully through one of those ad units.

For blogs that like to collect subscribers for RSS or newsletters, having a call to action close to the top of the post can often convert quite well.

Find which pages are attracting the most traffic and work them as much as possible with your advertising and call to action strategies. Take the advertising to the masses. The masses won’t go where the advertising is without some help from you.
It does make sense. Rather than writing from a purely SEO perspective, write from the perspective of your every day reader. Believe it or not, you will actually enjoy writing a lot more - you may even be able to put your heart and soul into. Readers can feel this, relate to it, and come back for more.

For many website owners, running an online (and perhaps offline) business leaves little time to create their own blog content, at least on a daily basis. There are number of ways deal with this situation.

The first and most obvious is to only post to your blog two or three time per week. In today’s world, it can be quite acceptable However, if you are looking to leverage your blog for search engine traffic then the more content you have, the faster your search engine rankings may climb. It is not only the search engines; the more blog content you can provide the faster you can gain a reputation within your niche.

Other options include buying content. This can be done on a post by post basis, as a series of posts, or as full contract where the blog content is not only supplied; it is created and published on your behalf. They basically manage the blog on your behalf.

What many organizations don’t realize is that you can combine both. You can create your own blog content, say two or three times per week whilst using a bog content service to fill in the gaps. This may be a better alternative for many business owners as they can maintain their own contributions yet have the benefit of daily posting, for less money.

There are many blog content services that will happily negotiate posting timetables and relative costs. You just need to determine how much of your time you can afford to dedicate to creating content. Place a realistic figure on that time and then do a comparison with various content providers. You may be surprised at the low costs involved.

Social bookmarking and blogging have built a reputation for unreliability and high bounce rates. If you approach social bookmarking sensibly, this does not need to be the case. You can develop a flow of regular readers over a period of time.

Most bloggers forget the original theme behind social bookmarking - and that is the term social. For many bloggers, they sign on and try to accumulate as many ‘friends’ or contacts as possible. They then spend their time submitting their own content and sending it on to all their friends in the hope they will vote it up.

To be effective, you need to be a little more social. Rather than promoting your own content, you should be on the lookout for content that may interest those you have befriended. Over time you will gain a reputation for only promoting the best content.

Once you have developed the reputation for submitting quality content, slipping your own posts into the submission process will not be a problem, so long as it is quality and of benefit to all. There will be times when you won’t need to submit your own content. Because you are seen as someone who only submits quality content, those who visit your site are quite likely to submit for you if they think it is quality.

Social bookmarking is all about being social and interacting with others on the various sites. Sites such as Digg work very much on a reciprocal basis. If you Digg their quality content, they are likely to Digg yours. Be social and social bookmarking may work for you. Be selfish and the only visitors you get will be the high bounce rate type.

If you decide to run ad units as part of your blogging income, you need to determine where you are going to place them. If you are being paid by the placement then you should have an agreement as to where that ad unit is placed. If you are running affiliate or PPC ad units, then placement can have a huge effect on your results.

With pay-per-click (PPC) ad units such as Adwords, you will need to play around with the various types and placements of your ad units. The most popular is generally considered the 300×250 text/image ad unit placed within the body of a post. However, different blog layouts will require testing to see the best placement.

When testing ad unit placements, give each placement a reasonable time frame. Ten days is probably a minimum to test for effectiveness. Make sure you record the ad units placement and number of clicks and income received. After ten days, move the ad unit to another place and test again.

One mistake that many bloggers make it to decide on an ad unit and test it in three or four places. They then select the best out of the three or four and run with it. You nay be losing a lot of blogging income if you quit your test regime to early.

You should test in four or five different places on your page, and you should test several different ad unit types including the text only ad units.

If you want to capitalize on any possible blogging income, you will need to test, retest, and test again until you find the best ad unit and the best placement for that ad unit.

If you are an Adsense publisher then you will want to publish your ad units in the most effective places possible. You may also want to have control over when you publish those ads. For example, if you also undertake affiliate marketing and you write the occasional blurb on one of your affiliates, the last thing you should really do is include an Adsense ad unit.

If you install the Adsense plugin WordPress you can control when your ad units are inserted into your posts. To use the plugin, you need to setup an ad unit through your Adsense account. One the best for converting into clicks is the 300 x 250. You can play around various ad unit sizes until you find one that converts into clicks more frequently.

Once you have downloaded the plugin, you will need to unzip it and edit the adsense.php file - notepad or similar is useful for this task. Find the following section of text:

<b>Your Google Adsense code should be here, but you forgot
to edit the plugins/adsense.php file and replace the code
there with your own.</b>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “client-code-goes-here”;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “468×60_as”;
google_ad_channel =””;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

Replace this text with the following:

<div style=”float: right; margin: 10px;”>
Your Adsense code that you have retrieved from your Adsense account
</div>

This will float the ad unit to the right. If you would prefer to have it on the left, replace the word ‘right’ with the word ‘left’. When you are creating a post, place your cursor at the beginning of the line where you want the code placed and then click on the Adsense button. The code will be inserted and the ad unit will appear after the post is published. Now you can chose when to insert the code.

When it’s Blog Catalog of course - or MyBlogLog for that matter. These two appear to be in a head to head race to see who can outdo each other as alternative social media sites as well.

To the outsider it may appear they are competing for blog owner traffic. The reality is that most blog owners, if they are active on one, are also active on the other. The major difference is the level of activity on each of the sites. There is no doubt that most users prefer one over the other, that doesn’t stop them using both.

This is probably a good example of brand loyalty. No matter how many features each of these blog directories add, users are remaining loyal to their favorite. Since the beginning of this year, both sites, more notably Blog Catalog, have added a lot of different features - all aimed more at the social networking aspect than as blog directories.

These two sites are hard to categories now. They are blog directories and they pick up your blogs feeds and deliver them to your profile. They are also social networking sites with forum style discussion streams. There has been talk of live messenger style chatting. While all of this is going on, you can also have a twitter style feed of all your social media activities. What you have dugg, thumbed or promoted in any way - all shared with those that want to share.

As for generating traffic - like anything social, the more you work for the community, the more traffic you will generate.

One of the most important aspects to running any business, online or offline is the reputation that business’ can build. In a bricks and mortar world, your customers are the primary starting point. There are other avenues such as sponsoring local sports or charities and promoting certain angles such as being green. For an online business, there is an opportunity to develop a blog - this can be a tremendous tool to developing a business’ reputation.

A blog is one area where, with a little careful wording, a business can blow its own trumpet. As a business owner, you can blog about your history, your achievements, your products or services and your personnel.

Being able to interact positively with customers or potential customers creates air of trust. Potential customers can see that you go out of your way to help customers and those seeking information.

If you include pages that show visitors how to use, update or service your products you will find visitors returning frequently. You can also add FAQ pages that are interactive, that is, you allow individuals to comment or add their own experiences.

The end result is a blog that is a perfect advertisement for your business. If you are ever in a situation where negative talk is generated around your products or business, your blog is the first place to start addressing the issues. A business blog is your own publication where you can publish material that may help fight any negative publicity.

Having a blog that has helped to generate a positive reputation is an asset to any business that cannot be measured in simple ROI or dollar terms. A positive reputation is an intangible, but it is one of the most important intangibles any business can possess.

How often do you check your blog for dead links? Doing a regular check is important as it can identify any broken or dead links within your blog, and any dead links leaving your blog.

Having a link that points to a site or page that no longer exists is a waste of a link. You are should remove and dead links and either leave them out altogether, or point them to content that exists.

More importantly, you need to be able to find broken or dead links within your own site. If you don’t delete or rename content, the only issue will be broken links. These are often caused by typo’s when you first created the link.

If you have modified URL’s for some reason, a link checker can help you find the links to the old URL. Update them to new URL and everything will be fine. Search engines don’t particularly like broken or dead links. Incorporating a good 404 redirect page is a must.

Internal links are of particular importance. You have obviously linked two pages together for a reason. If that link is broken for whatever reason then the link proves will halt at the breakage therefore not achieving your desired outcome.

One of the more common problems is the moving deleting of images. If you have used those images in a post and then moved, removed or renamed the image, it will appear on your page as a broken link.

There are several good link checkers:

Dead Links

404 Checker

Xenu

There are many others including plugins for WodPress. Try one out on your site and see how many broken links you have.

What is the purpose of a blog? More importantly, what is your purpose in hosting a blog? If your answer is purely SEO then I suggest you think again. Blogs can and do help with the overall search ranking of a site when optimized effectively, they are however far more powerful than simple SEO.

Blogs designed for pure SEO are often not terribly user friendly. In fact, whilst they may rate well early, overtime they will struggle to maintain high ratings. Because they are not user friendly, they can scare away more potential business than they attract.

You can often look at a blog as being your receptionist in your business. Most businesses look to hire an attractive yet very efficient person for this role. They are the first and often last person a visitor will see when they visit your business. They are certainly the first person they hear when they telephone.

Your blog is no different. Yes, you optimize it to rank well in the search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Because it ranks well it will receive endless traffic and where is that traffic going, to your blog. The first face the internet visitor is going to see is your blogs. Is it ready? Is it user friendly? Does it say “hi, welcome to …… what can I do for you?”

From your blog, you need to funnel your traffic to your website where the final act can be delivered, be it a sale, newsletter signup or contact form. How your blog is presented will determine whether or not your traffic is funneled to your blog, or back to Google for another search option.

Some people are quite fastidious about keywords and exactly what sort of percentages they have on their pages. Other people like to sneak keywords in wherever they can in an attempt to increase the number of keywords on a page.

Keywords are important. We suggest you include a keyword in the page title and that you spread your keywords throughout your posts. This works well for most websites and blogs. You can, however add one more keyword or set of keywords and that is through your WordPress login.

You will notice that this blog has “written by Brick Marketing” just below the post title. If you were an online business with several departments, let’s say furniture is your business and you have departments and keywords for ‘bedroom furnishings’, ‘dining room furnishings’, ‘living room furnishings’ and ‘outdoor furnishings’. Create logins for each department and you will have a post title followed by “written by bedroom furnishings” (if the post related to that department).

Of course you would need to ensure you logged in with the correct keyword every time. One additional benefit to using keywords like this as a login is that you can personalize your author. This works particularly well if you can get one person from each department to write their blog post. Your login and post author would like “written by Bob from dining room furnishings”.

This can look far more professional that just ‘written by admin’ that I often see. It is certainly more personal, it puts a name and department to a post whilst, if each department is authored separately, gives some pride and ownership to blog author.