Promoting Your Business Using Blogs

By Mal Keenan

Internet marketing using blogs has quickly gained a lot of popularity as a wonderful way to promote your business. There are many ways that blogging can help in the promotion of your business. Since blogs are usually full of links and contain a large amount of keywords it will give your site a much better chance of being picked up by a search engine allowing more exposure for your business. Taking a course on search engine optimization with help you determine the best keywords for your blog.



You can establish yourself to be very knowledgeable about the items your business carries and be influential in the decision making process of your customers. This will give you credibility in your field and generate leads for your business.



You can use your blog as a method of introducing the people behind your business to your customers giving your business a more personalized feel which will give you an edge on larger corporations. Also make sure that whomever you have creating the entries in your blog has suitable writing skills because by keeping the entries short and easy to read you will find it will bring your customers visiting often to see what is going on with your company.



Blogs can be used to run daily or weekly contests which is another great way to keep you customers coming back to your site. You can also highlight new business promotions with your blog. Blogs can be used to test out new projects or to get feedback on new products. If your blog contains a feedback feature you can judge the feedback a new product might receive before it goes live on your web site. Customers and potential customers will love to be able to give you input on the products or services of your business.



Photos are an excellent internet marketing tool to use on blogs. Having a picture and a short blurb describing the product can be a lot more effective then simply writing a descriptive paragraph highlighting the item. You can set up a frequently asked questions section to your blog and by leaving out a lot of the terms that public relations people use in their writing for large corporations you will be making your business a lot more personable which is what a lot of people prefer these days. You could add new questions you your site as you receive them if you believe they would be of help to your customers.



I personally have been making regular contributions to my blog over the last number of weeks. I am one of those slow learners who FINALLY caught on that these things do actually help increase traffic to my main sites and affiliate programs. I have been seeing excellent results and I've only just started. You can view my blog here: http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/blog



The possibilities of internet marketing with a blog are endless and with the current popularity of blogging you would be making an excellent choice of creating one to aide you in the promotion of your business.

Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of Home Business Tips Newsletter: Work at home business opportunities



Find a work at home business you can believe in visit: Work at home Opportunities & Ideas

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How To Hide Your Affiliate Link With This Simple One Line Code

How To Hide Your Affiliate Link With This Simple One Line Code

A significant problem affiliate marketers have in generating sales from their websites has to do with the affiliate identifier code that shows up in the status bar url of a hyperlink.

There are those who, once noticing that a link is for an affiliate, will determine that the website they are on has a vested interest in selling rather than providing honest information. Others will merely copy out the site and buy directly rather than use the affiliate link mistakenly thinking they will get it cheaper that way.

Why potential customers do such things is irrational but still loses you a sale and commission. There are several ways to circumvent this dilemma.

There are various programs and processes that can disguise or encrypt the affiliate identifier url address. Some programs will replace the link with ascii straight code and produce the address in a block of seemingly random characters.

Its only major drawback is that the browser status bar will often translate it back into its original readable form.

Creating a redirect page is another way to mask an affiliate hyperlink. There are programs that will generate an encrypted code of your affiliate information.

You would then load this page onto your website and instead of the affiliate link address, you would use a hyperlink to the page you created for your advertisement link. When the customer clicks the link it would take them to your encrypted page that would connect them with the product or sales page without your customer knowing they had been rerouted.

The only potential downside to this method is that you will have to create a new page for each of your affiliate links which is somewhat time consuming and subsequently your website's allotted space might be filled with a multitude of these small but accumulative files.

It is still cheaper to buy more hosting space than to lose the extra sales from people who don't want to deal with affiliates.

There are also solutions that can be written directly into the html code on your webpage. It is not a safe practice to frame any of your merchants webpages.

Most of them have strict rules against this as the address bar would show your site's name and not theirs. They feel it is misrepresentation and that it could be mistaken as an endorsement on their part of anything you have on your site.

You can, however, create a fake status bar message. This rather simple piece of code will still send the user to the appropriate page with your affiliate ID intact but will cause the status bar to show only what you enter in for it to say.

In this example note the "[" and "]" brackets need to be replaced with proper "less than" and "greater than" symbols for html tagging.

[a href="affiliate link url here" onmouseover="window.status='information for status bar here';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;"]what shows on the page here[/a]

With a few of these necessary variations protecting your affiliate link information, you should soon see an increase in sales and commissions from your efforts.

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