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Getting Free Traffic to Your Home Business Blog

Michael Laleye

November 01, 2006

Having a blog isn't quite as simple as if you build it, they will come. Certainly, web crawlers such as Google will eventually pick up on your content and may return a link to your weblog if someone searches for relevant keywords, but there are more surefire ways to get your blog noticed.

First, it's critical that your blog content is valuable to your audience - you should know your members or audience and have some idea of what they will want to read. Your aim is to inform, entertain or otherwise engage your audience to such an extent that they will be inclined to return on a daily basis (or at least frequently) to see what you have to say. Finally, it's important to understand the concept of popularity on the Internet. Quite simply, the more links to your web content there are on the Internet, the more people will find you through search engines and other websites. Listed below are a couple of enterprising ways to accomplish that:

Track Backs and Link Backs

Start by using your own web pages to link back to your blog. Post comments on other website's blogs. Link to hot topics and comments in other blogs. A little effort from you will be reciprocated with links from others.

Blog Carnivals

Blog carnivals are like magazines. They gather links to blogs on the same topics and publish an edition (an article) of a blog carnival on a particular topic, offering commentary on the various blog articles mentioned. The editor or organizer of the carnival chooses how often the edition is published and people subscribe to topics they're interested in. Networks and blog rings work in a similar manner.

Blog Search Engines

Imagine Google for the blogosphere. By using specific tags, your blog and its contents become easier to find by one of the blog traffic providers.

Pinging

A Ping is when you set up your blog so that people tracking your blog get instant notification every time you update the blog.

Whichever blog system you're using, you simply set up your preferences to notify specific blog tracking sites whenever your blog has fresh content. Blogging isn't a difficult task to learn, but the upkeep of providing constant content can have a draining effect on you if you're already pressed for time. Make sure your audience knows how often you'll commit to updating your blog, and then find a way to have several weeks or more of blog entries readily available when you need them.

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