Blogging for Dollars Blog

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Blogging pays off for small businesses. As you might expect, real estate agents are blogging with a vengeance.

In Highly Entertaining: Realtors Suing Other Realtors TechCrunch says of active rain “It launched in June 2006, and by March 2007 had 20,000 bloggers, 12,000 of whom were real estate agents.”

Now, according to the masthead, it currently has over 50,000 members, which means they gained 30,000 members in the past six months..

The benefit for a small business which is blogging with an established presence like active rain is that it gets the business attention they’d struggle to receive otherwise. It doesn’t mean that they can’t set up their own blog of course. But starting out with an established presence is a good idea.

Of course agents with blogs will establish themselves with active rain too, because they can link to their own blogs and other sites from active rain - active rain is already a PR 6 site.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, make money, how to blog, pro blogger, small business

If you own a small business, consider a blog. Many small business people are finding that a blog can kick their Web site to life.

“To blog or not to blog, that is the question” says that “In less than five months, inquiries for services originating from my blog were equal to the number of inquiries made from my “regular” website, which has been up for more than five years.”

This has been my experience too: you need a static Web site as a sales tool, but you need a blog too, to drive traffic to your Web site. I encourage my copywriting students to blog, whether they have a Web site or not, and the comment I hear most often from students is: “I wish I’d started a blog years ago!” A blog can make an amazing difference: in many cases, it can even kick start a moribund business.

A blog or a Web site?

It’s not a case of either/ or. You may want to create both a blog and a Web site. If you’re selling products and services online, a Web site is vital.

However, if you just want to attract clients to your services business, a blog is all you need. Your blog can even mimic a Web site. Most blogging services, including Typepad and WordPress, will let you set up your blog with pages, so that it looks much like a typical Web site, but benefits from the frequent updating of a blog.

A blog helps your Web site to gain visibility in the search engines, especially in Google. Google has developed Universal Search, which means that Google now offers searches across all its vertical databases (images, video, blogs) as its default search option. This makes it harder to gain traction in the first page of search results.

Because a blog is updated frequently and provides a lot of information, it will help you to rank for “long tail” keywords: the words that searchers are using, and which relate to your industry. This means that more people will find both your blog and your Web site.

If you’ve considered adding a blog to your site, now’s the time to do it. Typically your blog posts will appear in the blog search engines within an hour. They can start appearing in all search engines within a few days. This means more traffic, and more business.

Technorati Tags: blogging, small business blogging, Web site, rank, SEO, search engines

Over the past six months I’ve noticed an interesting shift.

More and more of my blogging students are coming to blogging from small business. They see blogging as a way to increase sales in their online and/ or offline business, whatever that business happens to be: a service business, or an ecommerce/ online store.

Partly this blogging trend is being driven by the ever-greater competition in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. If you have a small business site, you need PPC to drive traffic and sales. But as the cost of PPC goes up, it becomes too expensive to absorb.

When PPC becomes prohibitive, blogging is an alternative. Yes, you still need to hire a blogger, or if you do it yourself it takes time, but blogging is still much less expensive than spending money on a PPC campaign.

So, since small business blogging seems to be a trend, I’ll be spending more time in the coming months talking about small business blogging on this blog. The posts will be aimed primarily at do-it-yourselfers, but I’ll discuss out-sourcing blogging too.

Of course I’ll still be discussing making money directly from blogging by monetizing your blogs, and pro blogging (getting hired to blog) as well.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, pro blogging, how to blog, get started blogging, small business blogging