This is one of the best and easiest methods of getting traffic and links, yet it is also the one that is most often done wrong. All too many blogs for ecommerce sites are nothing more than "product posts."
So, let me say emphatically that:
People don't care about you, your cat, or your products!
That may sound harsh, but it's true, they don't. What your potential customers will care about is their problems, wants, and desires. Therefore, your posts should play to the customer but target the niche to which you market.
Blogs should contain articles that will be of help and interest to your target market. They should contain links to interesting news stories or bits of information. In other words, your blog should be a valuable resource to your target market independent of what you sell. Additionally, you should post to your blog every day (and twice a day is better).
Once you're doing that, you need to make sure that your blog is also "pinging" pingoat.com and that each article on your blog can be submitted to Digg, Reddit, and/or Del.icio.us.
The reason for this is simple. Those services will help to get your blog articles read, and therefore improve the number of links to your site. Pinging your blog will help to get it indexed by the major search engines that much quicker.
However, if you really want to rank well (and particularly rank well quickly), blogging isn't enough. You need to go to the next step and embrace Web 2.0.
But just trying to dive right in to social network marketing is likely to be a waste of time unless you already are heavily involved and active in one of the big services.
You see, before just trying to submit something to one of the social networks, it helps to know what works.
Sittin' in Front of the 'Tube
My favorite traffic and link generating service on this front is YouTube. Now, just submitting funny home videos may result in you getting your videos looked at, but it may not result in your site getting any traffic, let alone any links, so let's talk about a strategy that does both.
First, I'm not a big fan of trying to put together my own videos as a general rule. Instead, I want other people to do it for me. This is largely because creating a truly viral video requires an odd imagination and more than a little skill ... so I leave it to them (time being money and all that).
So what I do is create a contest around the "best," "funniest," "sexiest," or whatever I'm going for with the market. Videos are posted to YouTube, but you have to visit a location on my site to vote for it (and I have the software for this which I'll give you free; see my site for details). The video with the most votes wins. I usually give the winner a few hundred dollars -- enough to make it interesting but small enough that I'm not breaking my own bank in the process.
Of course the page where the voting occurs also contains some "ads" for my main site.
What's happening with this technique is more than you might think. You're turning your company into the "cool" site that is playing with web 2.0. Links will come if for no reason than because the folks that submitted videos will want others to vote for their video.
And you're tapping into the power of viral videos without ever needing to know how to create one yourself ... how great is that?!
Now, if you stopped there, you just might make it. However, you really should go one step farther.
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