Posting on guest blogs is a great way to get new traffic to your website from people you have never heard of your business before. If your website is only getting a certain amount of visitors, the exposure of a guest post can help drive more customers to your site.

A lot goes into looking for the proper blogs to post to. An internet marketing manager needs to be able to search for the right blogs to contact: ones that have the right targeted consumers that would be interested in your product or service. After identifying the correct market, the manager has to be able to locate the best contact information and get in touch with the blog owner. Without the proper skills, getting a response to your inquiry can be difficult.

If you get an affirmative response, the manager will then have to put together the proper content that brands the business, educates the readers and properly leads the prospect to the website. This takes expertise in content marketing, copywriting, image management and basic HTML skills such as making an anchor text link.

What are blog owners looking for from guest posts? Good educational content, content that is complimentary to what their readers are already used to and content that is not too long or too short. By spreading around the content for your business or the business you're working for, you can see drastic and immediate results in the amount of qualified traffic to your website and start making more money.

Do you have what it takes for being a content marketing manager?

Just about every business with an online presence has a blog. It's a great way to stay in touch with your prospects and customers, letting them know of new products and changes in your business. It gives your customers a way to comment and be a part of the goings-on, increasing your interactive marketing and client loyalty.

Some blogs do better than others and I'll show you why. Attracting new traffic to your company website is the main reason for blogging. The keywords you use in the post titles are important for search engine optimization and attracting new customers. Keyword research is probably one of the most critical parts of writing a successful  blog. How disappointing would it be if all of your hard work and postings were seen by literally no one?

Keyword research needs to be conducted ahead of time — before you start writing your posts. Look at the title of this post for example: Blogging For Business. Using the keyword suggestion tool from Google, I found that nearly 8100 searches a month are conducted for this phrase.

That's pretty good. I try and pick words or phrases that don't have too high a search (1,000,000), because the competition is too high as well. I also don't want to pick a word or phrase with too little searches (87), because no one's really looking for it. 8100 to 15,000 is just about right. That's a lot of potential traffic I could attract to the website.

Besides paying attention to and writing good, compelling content, the title keywords are your most important priority for a successful blog.

Top professional bloggers are living the dream of working from home…

We get this question all of the time.

It's all about customization. Both blogging platforms have the potential to draw subscribers, get good search positioning and drive traffic to your websites. Both create engaging posts using images, audio and video.

The difference is in what happens after the visitor arrives at the blog itself. With WordPress, you have many options for engagement that are not easily available for Blogger sites. The most powerful option is a side-bar widget for opt-ins. An opt-in form is critical to marketing anything on the Internet. Building a database can lead to many more sales above and beyond just traffic coming and going on the blog. The Blogger platform theme doesn't support side-bar widgets and for the most part, is not at all able to support other popular plug-ins such as store widgets, lightboxes and polls.

The major difference that most people recognize between the two services is the ability to make the site look any way you want. WordPress themes are 100% customizable so they can look exactly how you want it to. Most of the time, you can't even tell a website is using WordPress software unless you look at the code behind the scenes. Blogger, while it can be somewhat customized, still uses the same basic template without the ability to make drastic changes.

I've seen both platforms look great, engage visitors and come up high in search engine results. But because of the vast array of plug-ins available, WordPress wins hands-down in its ability to be a fully customizable tool for your marketing needs.

Writing guest posts is a productive way to get noticed. Many blogs are looking for fresh content and some have even started forums where blog owners and writers can meet and exchange posts. One such site is http://myblogguest.com/

This process skips the tedious task of trying to find out who to contact to get published, and makes it easy to upload content for guest posts. The members of this forum are here because they want content from people like you. Some of these blogs get a ton of traffic that can lead back to your own blog. This tactic can help struggling blogs get a blast of fresh visitors and even help make you money.

Publishing a guest post hasd the additional advantage of spreading your expertise around the web. Getting search results for your name can help build business for your blog. Whether you're a speaker, an author or have a simple online business that needs traffic, guest posting is a way to quickly advertise yourself or your products. You can get a lot of exposure and traction by accepting guest posts from other writers for your blog. http://myblogguest.com/ is a way to connect to those professionals who can supply you with great content for free that you may not have the time to write or research yourself.

Starting your own professional blogging business is only a click away…

When posting to your blog, don't forget to put a clickable link towards the bottom of the post with a call to action. This call to action can be a text link saying for example:

* Get Your Free “Killer Website Designs” Ebook!
* Make $5000 Every Time You Speak!
* Learn The 7 Steps To Leadership Success!

or any call to action that relates to your business. The point is, your blog post is full of great content. Reward your reader with additional content such as a free white paper, report or special training that they will reward you back with by leaving their email or buying a product. You should at least get the visitors email to build your database, so that you can market to them throughout the year.

What happens if there is no call to action link? The reader may read a few of the posts, get reminded of something they read somewhere else and disappear. What about your opt-in box at the top of your blog? As they scroll down to read additional posts, that box disappears from their line of sight, and they may forget all about it. Those opt-in boxes at the top right corner of your blog are notoriously weak for sign ups. A link to a “freebie” or further training embedded in the post, while they are still engaged in the material they are reading, is far more effective.

Don't let the reader get away without giving you their email address. It takes alot of work to get them to your blog in the first place. The blog is not the “end point” of your marketing, your opt-in or sales letter is. The blog creates interest in your business or service, and quality posts can entice the reader to make a further decision or conversion. Not only that, the search engines love “anchor text” or clickable links made of keywords. Don't leave links that just have your URL or “click here.” Use a strong call to action and reward your reader with addtional quality info and they will give you something in return.

Learn how the “new media” revolution can be the beginning of a great career!

The Internet has brought many new terms and practices to the business world. One of these is tag clouds. If you are a frequent Internet surfer, you may have used tag clouds. Tag clouds are trendy navigation tools that make it easy for site visitors to jump to the most popular links on your site. They also add some visual fun to the web page or blog, often appearing as a group of words stacked on top of each other, with some words much larger and bolder. The visual prominence of the words is determined by the popularity of the word.

What is a tag cloud? Basically, tags are related hyperlinks that allow the user to drill down into your site. The more frequently used tags are often represented in larger bolder fonts and stronger colors. Typical tag clouds have between 30 and 150 tags.

Types of tag clouds:

There are three primary types of tag cloud applications, characterized by their meaning rather than their appearance. The tags can appear in alphabetical order, in random order, sorted by weight, or in clustered according to the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence or text.

* A tag cloud for each item:  With this type, there is a tag cloud for each item. The size represents the number of times that tag has been applied to a single item.

* Global tag clouds:  This type, which is more commonly used, involves multiple tag clouds combining the frequencies of all items and users. The size represents the number of items to which a tag has been applied, indicating each tag's popularity.

* In the third type, tags are used to categorize content items. The larger tags represent the quantity of content items in that category.

If you would like to create tag clouds, WordPress has many plug-ins. For a list and description of available plugins, search the WordPress Plugin Directory at https://wordpress.org/plugins/. Be sure to check out the WP Colorful Tag Cloud plugin. WP Colorful Tag Cloud allows you to display an attractive tag cloud using a variety of customizable colors. Colors depend on tags weights and sizes.

Here's how to install the WP Colorful Tag Cloud plugin.

1. Unzip and upload wp-colorful-tag-cloud directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins' menu in WordPress.

3. Customize your settings using the menu item under Settings, Colorful tag Cloud.

4. Remember to save your settings.

Learn to create professional looking blogs for yourself or a business! 

If you can't seem to write enough blog posts, Tweets, Facebook updates, email blasts, Youtube comments and even produce online videos to promote your business, get other people to do it for you. By running a contest, you could have thousands of folks all over the web spreading the word of your products and services. This is a form of content marketing, and using the power of social networking, has never been easier.

This can be a powerful way to advertise a new product launch or to just get more people to your website. It creates a ton of links that can drive traffic to your site from all of the most popular places on the web. It can generate a ton of Google searches for your name or the name of your product. It's more content than you could ever post yourself, coming from hundreds of different accounts. Some links, like ones from blogs or Youtube videos, could work for you for years, as they stay archived in search results. Some links, from Facebook or Twitter, although short lived, could generate a lot of buzz and excitement in the short-term.

In today's world of interactive marketing and strong networking ties, it's time to use that strength to spread your advertising bucks across the web. If you want to know more, or start a new career as one who conducts and manages these contests for someone sales, IMTC is the place to get started.

One method to Add Audio to Your Blog.

This method uses Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a dirt cheap place to store large files like audio and video.

Get a free player to put on your blog. The player connects to your amazon s3 account.

Connect the player to your Amazon account using your public key and secret key given to you by your amazon s3 account.

Copy the code for the player into your blog.

Amazon S3

We use Amazon S3 for our video storage needs. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is used by many people to store files, any type of files they want; including web hosting, image/video hosting, and as back-up systems. This service offers a cheaper option to storing files compared to uploading them to your own server.

Here's the steps you need to take:

1. You open up a Free Amazon S3 account. You will need an Amazon account to use S3.

2. You set up your S3 account, including your Access Key

3. Download either Cloudberry Explorer or Firefox Organizer (or both programs) to organize your files.

4. Start uploading files. ATTENTION: Since we are using S3 for video storage, there is one more step we take. Depending on what you use Amazon S3 for, you may or may not need to do this step.

5. We use a program that takes our video file, uploads it to Amazon S3, adds a player to the video, and then gives us an embed code for us to use on our sites. We just embed the code onto a page and that's it, people can view our video.

There are a couple program options you can use if you want to do the same thing. Two of the most widely used programs are EZS3 and the other is Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player. EZS3 is a monthly, “in the cloud” service. They charge $20 a month. Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player is a downloadable application and costs a one time fee of $249.

We use Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player and are pleased with the results. It's very easy to use; three steps is all it takes to get the embed code. The nice thing about Amazon S3 is that the files you upload to the server are available to you anywhere in the world as long as you can connect to the internet.

This is a prime example of cloud computing*.

Another nice thing is that Amazon guarantees S3 to have a 99.9% uptime. Probably the nicest thing about Amazon S3 however, is the price. Amazon S3's pricing is based on a tiered system starting at .15 cents a Gigabyte(GB) per month for up to 50 Terabytes(TB) of storage.

If you have over 50 TB of storage, the price per GB gets lower. You can see the whole pricing structure here: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

And the best part is you only pay for what you use, nothing more. Make sure you check out Amazon S3 and decide whether it'll work for you.

*Cloud Computing, or “in/on the cloud computing” is the term used to describe Internet-based computing. This is where software programs, services, and files are all available on servers on the Internet. As long as you have an Internet connection, you will be able to access and use these programs, services, and files anywhere in the world. Many experts believe Cloud Computing is the way of the future, thereby eliminating the need to install software on your machine and/or keep files on your hard drive.

Thinking of being a professional blogger?