Internet Marketing Blog

Are you using widgets on your blog? Remember the plain old WordPress themes like Kubrick? Today blogs can be much fancier.  WordPress is the industry standard in blogs and can be great for monetization and SEO and it’s quite widget-friendly.

What do widgets do?

Widgets can simply dress up your blog or they can provide function as well. They’re simple to insert and generally you can just paste the code into a text widget and place it where you like.  Many sites offer widgets for you to grab and use.  They can help you put advertising on the site as well as direct your traffic elsewhere. Here are some examples of blog widgets you might consider using:

Twitter or Plurk

These widgets can sit on your site and tell people what you’re doing. You can get the widget from your user settings and it’ll allow your website visitors to read your statuses, click to subscribe or follow your updates as well as let them see others on your friends list.

EzineArticles

Ezinearticles.com has a widget that feeds your articles to your site which can be great for your marketing efforts.

My Favourite Widgets

I’m a bit of a self-professed widget junkie.MyBlogLog has one of my favourite widgets. There are a few to choose from that look great and can show people your various blogs or your activities in social marketing so people can see the sites you Digg or Stumble as well as links for new posts in cyberspace. Wink offers my other favourite options as it also lets people check out a lot of different aspects of your online activity and is customisable so it’ll blend well into just about any template.

Social profile sites often have widgets you can use that can help you with social bookmarking and networking as well as dress your blog for success. There are also functional ones that feed internet marketing ads and other blogs for advertising and link exchanges. What widgets do you use and why?

If you’re using a niche blog to make income through various revenue streams like affiliate marketing and Google Adsense,  make sure your blog is friendly to humans and to search engine spiderbots.  Here are a few tips for making it both search engine friendly and reader-friendly.

SEO Tips For Your Blog

On your blog you’ll want to do on-page and off-page search engine optimising. This means that on the blog you do things that make search engines want to crawl you such as having blog tags, categories, using links inside your blog to other blogs posts as well as links to outside sites through your blogroll and your blog entries.

In terms of off-page SEO, you might consider visiting other blogs in your niche and linking back to your blog through blog comments.  Also use sites to catalog your blog such as Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog which can draw visitors in from other pages. Being friendly to search engines with SEO will get you more rankings and more visitors.

Visitor Tips

Once the visitors arrive, give them a warm welcome! Talk to your visitors in a friendly tone in your posts and stop by and visit their blogs to return the favour when they’ve been kind enough to comment or to link to you on their blog.  When someone leaves a comment that asks a question or compliments your site answer them and consider leaving a comment on their site as well.

Don’t overdo it on the advertisements. You may be in the blogging business for the ad revenue but if your blog doesn’t provide any value, you won’t have many visitors and you definitely won’t get any subscribers. Carefully managing your blog to appeal to the people and the search engines will help increase your chances of online success.

A blog is only as good as the traffic it gets. Trading links with other bloggers in your niche is a good idea. Even those in competition with one another will often share one another’s links, especially in the blogosphere. Many people blogroll others as well as do guest posts, post blog comments or create a links page. This can be great as it can help you build your search engine rankings because it is like getting into a clique where every one involved gets to be a bit popular.

Finding Blogs in Your Niche

If you want to find people to trade links with and you’re a blogger, check out other blogs in your niche. Have a look at tools such as MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog which can help you find blogs to check out. You can find plenty of blogs with similar tags and join their neighbourhood. By doing so, you’re also increasing your own profile. Comment on other blogs and link back to your own blog (without spamming, of course) and join blog neighborhoods through the Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog tools. By doing this, you’ll also get interest from other people interested in your subject matter

Link Love

If you give other some link love on your blog by posting a link to their blog, they will often return the favour. They might write a post featuring something you wrote and they might put you on their blogroll. The blogosphere is a vast place but within specific niches is actually quite a tight knit group and when people like what they see and think they’ll get something out of your blog (whether it’s link love reciprocation or valuable information) they’ll probably visit often.

Should you do social bookmarking on your blog? Today’s post covers the how and the why? Having a blog of your own is fabulous and can build your SEO on your site as well as sell your wares as a marketer but only if people find it and read it.

Why Use Social Bookmarking?

Today, the web is all about Web 2.0 and the social side of the Internet and that’s one of the reasons blogs can be so effective and profitable. Not only does the way the web works with social bookmarking give you the ability to get more exposure for your blog but it helps you find more relevant websites to link to and to gain knowledge from as well. Web 2.0 tools can be integrated into your site and you can also use them yourself after you’ve created a new blog entry. Here are a few tools you can use and a few tips:

Technorati

Technorati is a blog directory. Once you list your blog, people can find you. The more popular you are, the more potential new visitors you get. Technorati is a robust tool worthy of a full post about it which we’ll explore another day but for today, let’s just say that by using technorati tags in your blog, you can increase your blog visitors based on people who want the information you’re sharing. This is also a great tool for keeping up with blogs you are interested in reading.

Blog Catalog or MyBlogLog

Joining Blog Catalog or MyBlogLog gives you access to another directory of blogs and people can find you in those directories. There are also some great widgets you can display to dress up your blog and by visiting other blogs in your niche, you can display your face on other blogs and entice new visitors.

Digg

Digg is a great tool for getting traffic to specific articles. By logging into the tool and submitting specific articles, you can bring traffic to your site. When you put a digg button on your post, you also get the bonus of letting your blog subscribers or visitors show their appreciation by giving you some social love.

There are dozens and dozens of social tools out there to help you maximize your blog and website’s potential which can help you make more money online.