You’ve heard it time and time again that blogging will help your business’s online exposure.

You’ve probably got your blog set up ready to go but there’s a question lurking in the back of your mind…

How do I start blogging?

If you’ve got this far you’ve probably already answered the question “why do I want to blog?” Just in case you haven’t, you need to think about it carefully.

A blog is an online platform from which  you can give your opinion and offer tips and advice. It will add value to your customers and provide a rich source of back links for your website.

If your answer was “because everyone else is doing it”, forget it. Blogging takes stamina – it’s not something you can do every now and then. If you want it to be effective you have to blog regularly – and that means at least weekly.

To illustrate this point you may be interested in a post that I came across on socialmediaexaminer.com outlining The 5 Pillars of Business Blogging Success which shows that blogging is about far more than writing random posts and sending them out into cyberspace.

In essence you must:

1. Plan  - define your target audience and write for them using your chosen keywords. Decide why you’re blogging and what you want to achieve from it. 

2. Content -  write your posts in simple language (no jargon). Make them interesting and relevant to your audience and pay attention to your headings to make sure they’re eye-catching.

3. Design – looking at the bigger picture, the design of your blog should be attractive and make people want to hang around. Make sure it’s clean and uncluttered.

4. Marketing – if you want people to read your blog you have to tell them it’s there. Promote your post through social media and get an RSS feed showing the latest posts of your website.

5. Engage – write to your reader (use the second person). This makes it personal to them as though you are confiding in them.

There’s a lot to think about when blogging.

If you are going to be successful you have to be committed and be able to generate a constant stream of valuable information.

Not only will it benefit your customers by giving them advice and tips it will also help your SEO strategy by building links to your main website.

Have you had success blogging? If so leave a comment and share your experiences.

Every business that uses the internet wants to get found.

So how do you do it?

Search engine optimisation is obviously a big part of online visibility one aspect of which is building back links.

What’s a back link?

The best way to get people to find your website is to have loads of arrows point to it – back links are arrows.

Look at the third sentence in this blog post. You can see there’s a link – search engine optimisation – which points you to a blog post on my other blog (www.freelancecopywritersblog.com) . If I were to write about being a copywriter who would be able to boost your businesses visibility and sales by producing eye-catching sales writing that inspires customers to buy, that is a link to my main website.

How do you get back links?

Encouraging people to link to your website takes work and requires the generation of a lot of high quality content. By providing great information regularly, people will want to link to you. Creating hints and tips in your chosen field will also help elevate you to expert status, and with that comes more links. 

But there are ways you can also generate links yourself.

Blogging and article marketing are two very effective ways of building back links, especially the most sought after type – the keyword hypertext link.  When you post an article and insert a keyword hypertext link into your text, you are effectively funnelling a bit of link juice to your website. That might sound a bit strange, but this is how it works:

Using an article site with a high Google Page Rank (e.g. ezinearticles) and you add a hypertext keyword links (a follow link as opposed to a no follow link), a little bit of page rank is also passed along the link. Therefore the more links like that, the higher your chances of increasing your own website’s page rank.

You can also generate back links by guest blogging, using social media and social networking sites. There are some sites out there that will let you create your own micro-site which gives you even more exposure. 

Although back links are very important to your SEO strategy, you mustn’t forget about the other elements of SEO – you must also consider your website’s structure and content.

As the diagram above illustrates all three elements are essential if you want your website to be found online.

But you must remember that SEO is an on-going process. Your strategy must be constantly reviews and tweaked to generate the most traffic and conversions possible.

Your competitors will be doing all of this, so if you stop you’ll gradually become invisible to online customers.