Real Web Marketing Blog

Comment Spam on Blogs

by John Eberhard

If you have a blog, one thing you’re almost certain to run into these days is “comment spam.” These are comments that are posted to your blog posts that are generic in nature, meaning they could have posted that same comment on any blog in the world, and the comment is posted only so the person could also post his web site address. It is a rather cheesy form of link building. The person is trying to improve the SEO of their web site by creating a link back to it.

While I am totally in favor of link building as an important activity that raises your search engine rankings and increases traffic, I am not in favor of comment spam.

The whole idea behind blogs and especially the feature of allowing others to comment on a blog post is to start a conversation. And the etiquette of commenting on a blog is supposed to be that you post a comment if you have something of value to add to the conversation.

You can tell comment spammers because their comments tend to be things like “Love your blog,” “This is a fantastic blog, can’t believe I have found it,” or “I really agree with your article here.” While I’ll admit that these types of comments are better than “Your blog really sucks,” they are purposely generic (not related to your post) and so they don’t further the conversation in any way. You will usually not find any part of the comment that specifically mentions you blog post or the content of the blog post. And terrible spelling and grammatical errors are the norm for some reason.

Here’s what Typepad says about comment spam:

“Spam comments are unsolicited and anonymous, and often contain links or offers. TypePad AntiSpam catches most spam; however, if you do receive one, please mark it as spam immediately.”

There are software programs that facilitate this type of comment spam, i.e. help people post comments on lots of blogs.

I supervise several blogs and these types of comments have really increased lately, and I had one client email me this past week asking what to do with these comments.

First of all, I recommend setting up your blog so that you can moderate blog comments, meaning you will get an email when someone leaves a comment, and it will not appear on the blog until you log in to your blog and approve it.

Second, make a decision yourself on how you want to handle comment spam. You don’t necessarily need to delete these comments, as most of them are complimentary at least (or they are complimentary of some blog somewhere anyway).

The sheer proliferation of these types of spam comments on the blogs I am supervising has caused me to decide to delete them all. So I look for whether or not the comment is totally generic, meaning it does not mention anything in my article and the same comment could have been posted on a hundred other blogs (and probably was). With any comment that does relate to my article or does mention specific things about the article, I publish it.

There are plugins for Wordpress that assist with the handling of comment spam, but I have not checked any of them out yet.

A blog is a powerful vehicle for getting your message out and driving traffic. And it is fun to see people responding to your articles and posts, and to see how what you write has an effect on people and helps them. Comment spam, however, is an annoying thing that you just have to put up with and deal with at this point. 

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Blogging Basics

by John Eberhard

So you want to start a blog? Where do you go and how do you do it?

First of all you have to decide whether you want to do this as a professional business or if it’s just a hobby. That will determine how you set it up.

Free Blogging Sites

If you want to start a blog as a hobby and it’s not something where you want to sell products or services as a professional business, you can start a blog at one of the five free blogging sites:

www.wordpress.com
www.blogger.com
www.posterous.com
www.livejournal.com
www.blog.com

Each one of these sites will allow you to start a free account and put up a blog, and to customize it to some degree. Each site has a selection of “themes,” i.e. stock designs that you can choose for your blog. If you really dig into the interface you can also customize the items that appear in your sidebar. In some cases you can customize the header graphic at the top.

All of these free blogging sites will set up your blog address so it has their name in it, i.e. http://yourblog.wordpress.com, or http://yourblog.blogspot.com.

Of the five free blogging sites I like www.Wordpress.com the best, because it is built on the Wordpress architecture and gives you the most options.

Wordpress and Typepad

If you want to start a blog for a professional business, then I recommend that you use either Wordpress or Typepad to set up the blog, as these are both professional blogging platforms.

Setting up a blog with Wordpress is different from setting up a free blog at www.wordpress.com. You have to have a hosting account, or you can set up a blog in a sub-directory on an existing site. Doing it this way will give you quite a bit more customization options. You can set it up via your hosting company (on their web site or calling them), or you can download the files from www.wordpress.org (not .com), and upload them to your site. Doing it via your hosting company tends to be much faster. And of course doing it this way with Wordpress allows you to choose your own site address.

You can either pick an existing Wordpress theme and then customize it, or you can have the blog customized by a Wordpress expert so that it looks just like your existing web site. Or you can have a brand new design done by a web designer and then have that converted into a Wordpress theme. Using an existing Wordpress theme is the less expensive way to go. Having a design converted into a Wordpress theme will add significant cost.

Setting up a Wordpress blog has many advantages, such as the fact that the Wordpress system has quite a few plugins that can give you added features or functionality to your site, such as search features, nice looking photo galleries, connection with Facebook or Twitter, or search engine optimization functions.

Typepad is another very professional blogging system. You pay a monthly fee (either $9 or $15 depending on what service you choose). The $15 per month option allows you to have unlimited blogs, and you don’t have to also pay a hosting fee. The default is that the blog address will have Typepad’s name in it (http://yourblog.typepad.com) but you can register a URL and set it so that that URL goes to your blog (http://www.yourblog.com).

Typepad has quite a few themes you can choose from, and it is relatively easy to customize your graphic header at the top and your sidebars, and put in pictures of yourself or products you sell or whatever. Typepad also has a good selection of plugins to add special functionality.

Summary

I think it is a good idea to decide BEFORE you start on whether your blog is going to be a pro thing where you will be selling something, or just a hobby blog.

If it will be a pro thing, it is better to select Wordpress or Typepad in the beginning, and set up your own custom URL. The reason is that having a web address with “wordpress” or “blogspot” in the address, sort of indicates that it is not a professional thing. It makes it look sort of amateurish. Not that a lot of companies don’t do it. They do, but I think it looks cheesy.

And I have seen some people start a blog on Blogger for instance, and then build up lots of traffic and fans for it, and then they are stuck with being on Blogger. Because to move the blog would for the most part result in having to start over with traffic building.

Good luck with your blogging.

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Promoting Your Blog

by John Eberhard

One of the axioms of website marketing is that you can have a great web site or blog and great content but if nobody knows about it, it won’t do you any good.

With a blog, the ideal frequency for writing and posting something is once a week or more often. But with blogs, you can be writing great blog posts once a week and if you don’t let anybody know about them, you will get little to no benefit from it. Basically nobody will come and see your blog posts.

Luckily, with blogs, there is a free mechanism that allows you to promote your blog post broadly. And this mechanism does work and does drive volume traffic to your blog when used properly.

First of all, there are about 30 search engines that are specifically geared towards blogs and their content. The largest of these is www.technorati.com. And there is a way to send out a notification, called a “ping,” to all those search engines after each of your blog posts.

Once the blog search engines receive the ping, they will send an automated “spider” to your blog and index, or include, your new blog posts into their engines. Then, when someone goes to one of the blog search engines and enters a search phrase that fits with the content of your blog post, your blog post will come up in the listings. Thus you can see that it pays to do keyword research and know what search phrases people are commonly using, and to include those phrases in your blog posts. That way more people will see your blog posts.

If you have a Wordpress blog, or if you have a free blog on Wordpress.com or Blog.com, you can configure your blog so that it sends out pings to the blog search engines automatically every time you post something.

Other blogs such as Typepad, or other free blogging sites like Blogger, Posterous, or LiveJournal, do NOT send pings automatically, broadly. But you can use a great free service called www.pingomatic.com which allows you to send out pings to all the blog search engines and takes about a minute.

I have been doing blogging for about two years, putting new articles up on the blog religiously, once a week. About a year ago I started accounts on all the free blogging services: Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, LiveJournal.com and Blog.com, and I use Posterous.com to send out my blog posts automatically to all my blogs. I post it once on Posterous.com and it goes out to all the blogs.

Once I post any new content to my blog, I go to www.pingomatic.com and send out pings to all the blog search engines for all the blogs that do not do automatic pinging.

My main blog (www.realwebmarketingblog.com) and all my free blogs have links to my main web site (www.realwebmarketing.net), and this system drives more traffic to my main web site month in and month out than any other source, including Google, Yahoo or MSN.

So writing regular content, once a week, and pinging the blog search engines does work and does drive volume traffic to your blog. And that way more people see your blog posts, and a certain percentage of them will then decide to pay you money and buy whatever product or service you are selling. Not a bad deal.

 

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How Blogging Benefits Your Web Site

By John Eberhard

Many people don’t realize that there are some great benefits to blogging. By writing regular articles (300-500 words) or shorter blog posts (100-200 words) you can drive a significant amount of traffic to your blog and then to your main web site. And unlike many other types of promotion, both online and off, it’s free.

I have several blogs: one for posting my marketing articles, one for press releases about my company, and one for client news, which contains press releases from my clients. I post something to my articles blog a minimum of once a week. Once I post that article, I send out a notification, called a “ping,” to a group of about 30 blog search engines.

Once that ping goes out, all those search engines will in short order come to the blog and get the new content incorporated into their search engine content. So when people go to those search engines looking for content on the topics I write about, such as website marketing, blogging, pay per click advertising, social media marketing, and so on, my articles will come up.

This drives a significant amount of traffic to my blogs. Then, my blogs are set up with sidebars that have links to items of interest on my main web site. Like my services, a book that I sell, and some free eBooks that I offer. So a certain number of those people will come to my main web site. Plus I also have a newsletter signup and direct contact information on the blog itself.

In my case, in the Internet marketing field, my blogs generate three times as much traffic to my main web site as does Google, and in fact the blogs are the single largest source of traffic to my main web site.

On the other hand, it is important to realize that blogs are good for some people and maybe not for others.

I personally think that blogs work better for companies that sell products or services nationally or internationally, as opposed to a business that serves one small local area. It’s not that a blog can’t work for a local business – I have a dance studio client with a blog that does well with it – but it’s just that by pinging the blog search engines, you can’t guarantee you’re going to get all local people. The people coming will likely be from all over.

And a blog works best for a business that is willing to write new content regularly. I put up something every week, and I think that posting something once a week or more often is ideal.

But on the other hand, you don’t have to write 500 words for every article like I do. You can just write 100 words or even less. You can find some video of interest that relates to your industry and post that, using the embed code on YouTube so the video player will appear right in your blog. You can post links to articles of interest written by other people that you found and thought would be of interest to your public.

Using these methods, blogging can be a powerful tool to generate traffic.

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Blogging Options

by John Eberhard

I have been doing blogging for almost two years, and have found it to be a great way to get messages out, promote my business, and drive traffic to my site. I have also designed and set up over 30 blogs for my clients, and I continue to manage the content on some of them. So I thought I would write an article laying out the different options for blogging systems and sites.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is a free blogging site, and you can set up a free blog there. They offer a fair number of themes you can use to customize the site, but you are somewhat limited in how the blog will look. You are also limited in how much you can customize the graphics of the theme with your logo and branding.

The URL of the blog would be something like http://nameofyourblog.wordpress.com.

You can see a couple blogs I’ve set up on Wordpress.com here:
http://realwebmarketingnet.wordpress.com/
http://maloneeditorial.wordpress.com/
http://julianconstruction.wordpress.com/

Typepad

Typepad is a paid blogging site that costs $8 or $15 per month (depending on level of service) and offers quite a bit more design options and features. You can have your blog URL be something like http://nameofyourblog.typepad.com or you can put it on a separate URL like http://www.nameofyourblog.com.

You can see some Typepad blogs I’ve designed here:
http://www.novelloblog.com/
http://aeromarinetaxpros.typepad.com/
http://caldancearts.typepad.com/
http://cartandkiosksuccess.typepad.com/
http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/

Typepad allows you plenty of design themes, and plenty of options in terms of using your own custom made graphics header, and customizing the content of the sidebar or sidebars.

Wordpress.org

Wordpress.org is also a system for creating a blog on your own site. The blog address would then be http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog. You could also set up a blog as the main thing on some web address that you would select, such as http://www.nameofyourblog.com.

Wordpress.org, as opposed to the free blog site www.wordpress.com, is the gold standard of blogging design, and offers the biggest selection of design templates and features. You can pick a theme and then customize the graphics that come along with it to add your logo and branding. You can also have a customized Wordpress theme made to your specifications.

Wordpress also gives you many options to add what they call plugins, which give you lots of functionality options, including such things as fancy photo galleries, music, search, statistics, polls, or events lists. (Typepad has many plugins too.)

Here are a couple blogs I have designed recently using Wordpress:
http://www.samsonmotorworks.com/newsletter-blog/
http://www.samsonmotorworks.com/press-blog/

There is no monthly fee with Wordpress.org. It will usually cost more to have someone design you a blog using Wordpress.org as it is more involved.

Other Free Blogging Sites

One technique that I have followed in the last year is to set up a main blog for a client using either Typepad or Wordpress.org, then set up additional blogs for them on the free blogging sites. There are six free blogging sites I have used including Wordpress.com.

The purpose of doing this is to get the client’s message out more broadly. Also each blog post contains keywords that we want the client to rank well for on the search engines, and we make each of those keywords into a link to pages on his main site. So each time you post an article or press release on your blog, and it goes out to six or seven blogs, you are multiplying the new links to your site by that number.

I have had some people ask me about duplicative content and a “duplicative content penalty.” While I have seen some prominent people worry about this, I have checked it out thoroughly and there is no duplicative content penalty, which Google even says on its web site. This, apparently, is an urban legend. There is no problem with taking one article and putting it on seven blogs or on a couple hundred article directory sites.

The free blogging sites are:
www.wordpress.com
www.blogger.com
www.posterous.com
www.tumblr.com
www.livejournal.com
www.blog.com

Posterous.com has an added benefit, which is that once you start accounts on all these blogs, you can hook up all your other blogs to it so that when you post something on Posterous.com, it goes out automatically to all the other blogs. This fits nicely with my overall marketing strategy, which is always to take one item or action and have it go out as far and wide and hit as many people as possible.

Pinging

One important action to do whenever you post something to a blog is to send out a notification called a “ping” to the blog search engines, of which there are over 20. This is not needed with any Wordpress blog or Blog.com (built on Wordpress architecture) as Wordpress has a feature to do pinging automatically.

I prefer to do it manually with a website called www.Pingomatic.com, as it gives me more control and it sends out a ping to all the blog search engines. Whether you do it on an automated basis or manually, it is vital to ping after every single blog post, as this puts your new content into all those search engines and drives good traffic to your blog.

Good luck with your blogging efforts.

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Website Marketing Made Easy, Part 2

by John Eberhard

As I covered last week, most people who have a website for marketing their business have one of three problems with it.

1. The website is producing no leads or sales and they have no idea what to do, or whether anyone is even coming to the site.
2. The website is producing a few leads or sales, but the owner doesn’t know how to increase it.
3. The website is producing a decent flow of leads or sales, and the website owner wants to increase that, but doesn’t know how.

Website Marketing Made Easy

There are essentially four methods of driving people to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising (PPC)
2. Non-paid, or “organic” traffic from search engines
3. Driving traffic to a blog, then referring visitors over to the main website
4. Social media marketing

Last week I covered PPC and organic traffic. In this article I’ll cover blogs and next week social media.

Driving Traffic with a Blog

Most people don’t realize that blogging is a powerful tool for driving traffic to a web site.

A blog is a special type of web site that makes it easy for you to add new content on a regular basis. New content gets added at the top, and you scroll down to see the older content.

Wordpress is one of the most common blogging systems, allowing you to put up a blog within your web site, as a subfolder (http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog). Typepad is another common blogging system, allowing you to either having it set up under Typepad’s URL (http://yourblogname.typepad.com) or you can set up a separate web address for the blog (http://www.yourblogname.com).

There are also several free blogging sites, where you can set up a blog, such as Blogger.com and Tumblr.com, and then your blog URL is something like http://yourblogname.blogspot.com or http://yourblogname.tumblr.com. But these sites are much more limited in the features and design templates you can use. It’s much harder to customize the blog to your needs than with Wordpress or Typepad.

Blog design: When setting up a blog it is vital to design it with one or two sidebars, then add your contact information, and several links to features on your main web site. For example you could link to your home page, your “about us” page, your services page, and so on. If you sell any items such as books you can put an ad for the book in one of the sidebars. You want to set up the blog in such a way that as many people as possible who come to the blog also go over to your web site.

Now, you should put new content up on your blog regularly. By regularly, ideally I mean once a week or more often. Content can be anything from a long article (700-1,000 words), to a press release, to a shorter post or comment about something related to the topic of your blog (100-200 words).

In the case of blogs there are over 20 search engines that are geared just to blogs. If you notify them, with what is called a “ping,” those search engines will all stop by your blog immediately and include your new article or other post in their search engine listings. There is a site called www.pingomatic.com that allows you to easily send a ping to 22 of these search engines.

This means that if your article was about how to lower your golf score, and someone went to one of these blog search engines and typed in “how to lower your golf score,” and your article contained that phrase, your listing would come up, allowing that person to click through and come to your blog.

I have two blogs for my marketing business, one for articles and a separate one for press releases. I post something to one of the two blogs a minimum of once a week. And I always send a ping to all of the blog search engines after every single post.

For the entire year of 2010 up to today, my two blogs have generated more traffic to my main web site, than any other source. In fact, if you add them up, it is three times the traffic that I got from Google.

So blogging can be a very powerful way to drive traffic to your web site.

Next week I will cover driving traffic with social media.

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How a Blog Creates Traffic to Your Site

by John Eberhard

Every web site owner would like to increase the amount of traffic to his or her site. I have been pushing the idea for a year or so that creating a blog, and then posting content to it on a regular basis, drives traffic to your web site. But I find that even people for whom I have created and set up blogs don’t get how or why this happens. So I am devoting this entire article to explaining how this works.

First of all, a blog is a special type of web site that makes it easy for you to add new content on a regular basis. New content gets added at the top, and you scroll down to see the older content. It also allows visitors to leave comments, and older content gets automatically archived.

Wordpress is one of the most common blogging systems, allowing you to put up a blog within your web site, as a subfolder (http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog). Typepad is another common blogging system, allowing you to either having it set up under Typepad’s URL (http://yourblogname.typepad.com) or you can set up a separate web address for the blog (http://www.yourblogname.com). Typepad charges a monthly fee.

There are also several free blogging sites, where you can set up a blog, such as Blogger.com and Tumblr.com, and then your blog URL is something like http://yourblogname.blogspot.com or http://yourblogname.tumblr.com. But these sites are much more limited in the features and design templates you can use. In other words, it’s much harder to customize the blog to your needs than with Wordpress or Typepad.

Blog design: When setting up a blog it is wise to design it with one or two sidebars, then add your contact information, and several links to features on your main web site. For example you could link to your home page, your “about us” page, your services page, and so on. If you sell any items such as books you can put an ad for the book in one of the sidebars. You want to set up the blog in such a way that as many people as possible who come to the blog also go over to your web site.

OK, now your blog is set up, with contact info and links to your main web site and all that. Now what?

Now, you put new content up on your blog regularly. By regularly, ideally I mean once a week or more often. Content can be anything from a long article (700-1,000 words), to a press release, to a shorter post or comment about something related to the topic of your blog (100-200 words). You can also post a link to some other content on some other web site or blog that you found that you want to tell your readers about. You can also post a video right in your blog, by taking the code that appears to the right of a video on YouTube.

OK, now there’s new content on the blog. So how is that going to drive traffic? Just putting up new content is going to drive people to the blog, right?

Well normally that would be true, but in the case of blogs that are about 20 search engines that are geared just to blogs. If you notify them, with what is called a “ping,” those search engines will all stop by your blog immediately and include your new article, shorter post, or whatever you put up there, in their search engine listings. There is a site called www.pingomatic.com that allows you to easily send a ping to 22 of these search engines.

This means that if your article was about how to lower your golf score, and someone went to one of these blog search engines and typed in “how to lower your golf score,” and your article contained that phrase, your listing would come up, allowing that person to click through and come to your blog.

So you can see that it is important to include high traffic keywords in your blog posts, and it is important to do some research and find out what the high traffic keywords are for your topic or industry.

So this is all nice theory, but does it really work?

Well I have two blogs for my marketing business, one for articles and a separate one for press releases. I post something to one of the two blogs a minimum of once a week or more. And I always send a ping to all of the blog search engines after every single post.

I checked my Google Analytics statistics for the entire year of 2009 up to today, and my two blogs have generated more traffic to my main web site, than any other source. In fact, if you add them up, it is three times the traffic that I got from Google.

So yes it does work, it is very powerful, and you can do it. But if you do set up a blog, remember, you have to post to it once a week, to get regular benefit and build up momentum. Good luck.

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Blogs: Use Them or Lose Them

by John Eberhard

I have written a number of articles about the benefits of blogs:

1. You write something and post to your blog regularly.
2. You have your blog set up so there are numerous links back to your main site in the sidebars. Plus you write your blog posts so that you link back to your main site within each post.
3. Every time you post something new on the blog, you go to a site called www.pingomatic.com, and use it to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines like Technorati.com. This causes them to include your new blog post in their search engines right away.
4. The combination of posting regularly, i.e. once a week, plus pinging the blog search engines, drives significant traffic to your blog, which in turn drives traffic to your web site. I have two blogs for my marketing business and month to month the blogs routinely are the #1 or #2 driver of traffic to my web site, running neck and neck with Google.

So this is all nice and wonderful. But a major breakdown occurs here if you do not post something to the blog regularly. Ideally this is once a week or more. If you post something to the blog once a week or more, you will start to really drive traffic and you will develop fans who follow what you write.

Unfortunately I have set up blogs for some clients who have then posted one or two things on it and then forgotten the blog for months (you know who you are). This defeats the purpose of a blog and is really a waste of a valuable resource for driving traffic to a web site.

So here are some tips on generating content for that blog on a regular basis:

1. I find that in my work with clients, something that happens with a client over the course of each week will often be a good topic for a blog and newsletter article.
2. A blog post can be anything from a long article (300-700 words), to a short comment on something (100-200 words).
3. If you find a video on YouTube or somewhere else that would be of interest to readers of your blog, then post the video on your blog. On YouTube, to the right of the video you can find the HTML code. When you go to post to your blog, select HTML editing, then paste that code there, and the video player will appear right in your blog. If you want to post a comment about the video, type your comment in using the text editor, then switch over to the HTML editor and paste in the code from YouTube.
4. You can post links to interesting articles elsewhere on the web, that relate to your blog topic. However, I will say that I see some other people doing this, especially on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s all they ever do. My reaction is “Don’t you ever write any content yourself?” So this is good to do, but don’t make that the only thing you do.
5. You can do a Google search related to your topic and see what other items come up, or go to other web sites related to your topic, and get ideas for articles or shorter posts. You can also go to article directories like www.goarticles.com and search for articles related to your topic. But don’t steal an article or plagiarize it. Just use these for ideas.

Use these tips to write some new content for your blog regularly, at least once or twice a month, preferable once a week or more. The more often you post things to your (pinging each time), the more traffic you will drive to your blog and site.

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Blog: Under a Separate Domain or Under Your Main Website Domain?

I was recently having a discussion with fellow Internet marketer Andromeda Edison of Internet Image Management, on the subject of whether it is better to have a blog set up as a separate domain, or as a subdirectory within the domain of your main web site. Here's what she has to say:

"This depends and each situation I evaluate it newly.

"Some basic rules that I use to decide:

"1) If the keywords we are trying to get listed for are high competition then put the blog on the same domain as any link you an get to a blog post will help the overall site
"2) If you are working on a less competitive keyword you might want to do it separate (but if the competition is likely to increase with the popularity of the product or subject, you still want it on the same site)
"3) If you are working on reputation management for a name or brand then it should be on a separate domain.
"4) If you are going to use the blog only for "other" keywords than the one on the main website it can be separate though sometimes any PR you have on the main website will hep the other keywords - so this one can be a toss up.
"5) If you are working on a separate O/L or branding campaign for an individual in the organization it can be separate.

"I usually discuss this with the client and work out the long-term and short-term goals to help decide."

Making Money with a Blog

by John Eberhard

I recently had a friend send out an email asking specifically how to make money blogging. I think this is a relatively simple issue, although doing it is not necessarily easy. Here's my take on it and what I told him to do.

1. Start a blog that is specifically about some topic related to a product or service that you deliver.

2. Set up the blog with sidebars and with links to the website offering the product or service. If you sell products put pictures of the products in the sidebars. Also put a picture of yourself. Also ensure you have contact info on the blog.

3. Write articles that are about the topic of the product or service, but that give helpful information, not a full product pitch. If anything, at the end of the article give a very short product pitch.

4. After every article you write and post on the blog, go to www.pingomatic.com that sends out a notification to 25 blog search engines so that your post is immediately indexed in the blog search engines such as technorati.com.

5. As you write articles, check your visitor stats on the blog, so you can see which topics really connect with readers.

6. Put up a mechanism on the blog whereby people can subscribe and automatically be sent the new blog post.

7. Write something new and post to the blog regularly, minimally once a week, the more often the better.

8. Write compelling, interesting articles that will develop a following.