Once primarily a medium for everyday people to express themselves, Blogging has become a powerful tool for businesses. It’s very inexpensive, requiring only a domain and a hosting account to get started. Here are some of the reasons that women benefit so much from blogging for business.

* Blogging is a medium that Internet users can relate to. Blogs are usually less formal in tone than business websites, giving business owners an opportunity to really connect with their target markets. The ability to comment on posts adds to the community aspect.

* The search engines love Blogs. Due to their ease of navigation and frequency of updates, Google and company crawl them very often. This gives business Bloggers plenty of opportunity to get search traffic.

* There’s a sense of camaraderie among Bloggers, and especially among female Bloggers. Other women in the Blogosphere will add you to their Blogrolls if they like your Blog, and often link to individual posts they enjoy. By writing linkworthy content and linking to other Bloggers, we can harness the power of the Blogging community.

* There are tons of ways to promote Blogs for free. By adding links to our Blogs to forum signatures, social networking pages, and Blog directories, we can boost our search engine rankings and get click-through traffic. And if we’re targeting our efforts properly, that traffic will translate to sales.

* Blogging is great for public relations. It can help you build your brand, and it gives you an outlet to refute any false or damaging claims that others might make about your business online.

* Blogging can help people in business establish themselves as experts. Thoughtful and well-researched Blog posts let readers know that you’re serious about your business and know what you’re doing. This confidence in you will not only make your audience more likely to buy from you, it will also give them a reason to spread the word about your Blog and your business.

A business Blog is essentially a relationship-building tool, and an effective one at that. Blog readers from your target market could find your Blog through search engines or links, read it, and decide to see what your business has to offer. Prospects might arrive at your Blog from your business site, and reading it could give them the push they need to become paying customers. Either way, the Blog proves to be a wonderful asset.

Blogging offers a multitude of benefits for women entrepreneurs. If you don’t already have a Blog, you’re missing out on a grand opportunity to grow your business. It’s easy to get started, so what are you waiting for?

It is possible and recommended to diversify and avoid relying your business solely on one traffic source — and company, Google. However, search engine traffic converts and if you can get more of them to your site, and assuming everything is the same, you will increase the sales figures and revenue from ads.

The details about how search engine works may be beyond most of us — in search engines don’t reveal their exact algorithm — but the basic is not rocket science at all.

Here are 5 tips to help you grow search engine traffic. (If you are interested to learn more about SEO, I have a complete article series of blog SEO.

1. Know your keywords. Keywords are the building blocks of a blog and web site. Naturally, you should target just one keyword per blog post. Avoid creating content just for the sake of having the keyword on your blog. You should provide valuable content and impress the visitors. Only then will they consider subscribing to your content feed.

You should be thinking about what the visitors do on your site. Optimizing the result from the same amount of traffic is as important, if not more. But, I digress…

2. Optimize your blog design. You will be surprised that many bloggers claim their blog themes or templates as search engine friendly because the themes were advertised as such. Spend some time to check the template to make sure it has the right title tag, order of content, heading tags and so on.

Your time will be well spent. After all, it is most likely a one-time task. It may make a difference between ranking for long tail keywords and not getting found at all.

3. Restructure your site. Theming with silos is a great way to structure and divide your blog content into subtopics. Many SEO experts represent siloing as simple tiered content. They are quite similar in a few points but nevertheless you should thinking about making your content topics obvious to search engines.

4. Gain inbound links. There is more than one way to do it, from article marketing to link baiting, blog commenting, forum marketing and so on. When you are just starting out, every little tactic matters to grow your traffic level to a few hundreds a day.

Your aim is to reach more center of influence. Once you are at this level, every new post will result in a few more backlinks to your blog.

5. Patience As the age of your domain increases, your blog will also be considered more valuable, especially if you keep it active throughout the time.

Search engine optimization doesn’t produce flood of traffic immediately but it is often worth the effort. Giving up too early in the process is one of the biggest reasons why people fail at this.

Another thing to keep in mind is that traffic from organic search grows gradually. As you target more keywords within your content and gain more authority through backlinks, you will only grow your traffic.

Blogs can function as online diaries, soap boxes, journalistic ventures or internet scrapbooks. They can cover any number of subjects from pop culture to politics to what you had for lunch yesterday.

2. Decide: To Host or Not To Host
When it comes to starting a blog, your biggest decision will be whether you want to host the blog yourself, or use a free blogging service that is hosted for you.

• Free Blogging Services
  You can host your blog for free, but you have to remember there are limitations to hosting with a free service.  When you start a blog with a free blogging service, you don’t get your own domain. You get something like myblogname.blogspot.com (where there are a million other blogs at blogspot.com) and you don’t actually own the blog. If you decide to move your blog to your own hosting account, you have no way to take your readers or content with you, because you have no control over the site.
• Host your own blog using Wordpress on your own Hosting Account.
  This is the method I suggest, because it offers much more flexibility and freedom to do what you want. You will have your own domain name, like myblogname.com. You can get this for as little as $50 per year and get a free domain name. In my experience, Wordpress is one of the best blogging software and its so easy to use.

3. Pick a Domain Name
Once you come up with a topic for your blog, you will need to decide on a domain name. Think of a name that relates to your blog. For instance, if you were blogging about WINE, use a domain name like:  mywineblog.com, ilovewine.com, myblogaboutwine.com

4. Find a Web Host for Your Blog
By far, the easiest way to get a blog is to go with a hosting company that offers “One click installs”. This simplifies the installation process, in fact you do not need any skill whatsoever, you just have to click the install button.  I suggest that if you do not have a current hosting company, to use LunarPages.com. Their hosting plan is only $4.95 per month and you can host an unlimited number of blogs each with their own domain name (of course you have to pay for each separate domain name). This website is hosted with LunarPages.com and I use WordPress as my blog software.

2. Decide: To Host or Not To Host
When it comes to starting a blog, your biggest decision will be whether you want to host the blog yourself, or use a free blogging service that is hosted for you.

• Free Blogging Services
  You can host your blog for free, but you have to remember there are limitations to hosting with a free service.  When you start a blog with a free blogging service, you don’t get your own domain. You get something like myblogname.blogspot.com (where there are a million other blogs at blogspot.com) and you don’t actually own the blog. If you decide to move your blog to your own hosting account, you have no way to take your readers or content with you, because you have no control over the site.
• Host your own blog using Wordpress on your own Hosting Account.
  This is the method I suggest, because it offers much more flexibility and freedom to do what you want. You will have your own domain name, like myblogname.com. You can get this for as little as $50 per year and get a free domain name. In my experience, Wordpress is one of the best blogging software and its so easy to use.

3. Pick a Domain Name
Once you come up with a topic for your blog, you will need to decide on a domain name. Think of a name that relates to your blog. For instance, if you were blogging about WINE, use a domain name like:  mywineblog.com, ilovewine.com, myblogaboutwine.com

4. Find a Web Host for Your Blog
By far, the easiest way to get a blog is to go with a hosting company that offers “One click installs”. This simplifies the installation process, in fact you do not need any skill whatsoever, you just have to click the install button.  I suggest that if you do not have a current hosting company, to use LunarPages.com. Their hosting plan is only $4.95 per month and you can host an unlimited number of blogs each with their own domain name (of course you have to pay for each separate domain name). This website is hosted with LunarPages.com and I use WordPress as my blog software.

For complete details on installing WordPress with LunarPages.com, please click here.

1. Get Your Domain Name

The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. A domain name is the name you want to give to your website. Choose a name that best represents your business or organization. While a short, concise name is generally preferred, sometimes a longer name may be remembered by potential users and thus be a better choice.

When selecting names, come up with several alternatives because your first choice may not be available. Name availability can be checked quickly at places like: http://www.cheap-domainregistration.com and www.networksolutions.com.

I recommend that you stick with either a .com, .net and .biz extensions as most other extensions will not be remembered by your users.The Cost to purchase a Domain Name  is approximately $5.00 to $30.00 depending on the type of extenstions. If you are only registering a .com name, you should not pay more than $10 per name.

HINT: Check with various Web Hosts prior to paying for a domain name because several Web Hosts offer FREE domain names if you register with their company.

2. Choose a Web Host

Your website can be hosted on one of many servers throughout the country including several local companies. Keep in mind that the location of your web server is insignificant to the user. Pick a Web Host that you feel is both affordable and reliable. A basic hosting plan should not cost more than $10.00 per month. However, if you are looking for an e-commerce hositg plan, you could pay well over $60..00 per month.

In addition to cost considerations, choose a Web Host that has a reliable track record. Most hosts will provide data on the “Down Time” and you should beware of using any host that is unable or unwilling to share this information with you.

HINT: Before choosing a Web Host, call the company on the phone to see if they have a LIVE customer service person and also to see how long it takes to get in touch with customer service. I’ve talked to a lot of people who choose a Web Host and when something goes wrong, the company is impossible to get ahold of.

3. Design Your Website

Once you have your domain name and web host, your next step will be to design your website. The cost to develop a webpage is affected by the amount of content, the complexity of the site and the web designer you hire (unless you plan on doing the design work yourself). Because of these wide ranging variables, it is very difficult to estimate what might be considered reasonable design costs. However, a simple site that is essentially an online flier can be created for as little as $50, while a more complex e-commerce site can easily cost thousands. Don’t be afraid to ask several companies for pricing estimates before making a decision.

HINT: Find simliar websites to the website that you want to create, look at these sites to see who the Web Designer is. A lot of times, web designers will put a link at the bottom of websites that they have designed. 

Following these simple steps will allow your business or organization to establish a presence on the World wide Web. If you have any further questions, feel free to email us at:  contact@bummarketing.com