How To Outperform Most Of Your Business Competitors Online - 3 Simple Steps

Published By Martin Aranovitch

Setting up a blog and maintaining it fresh with regular content is really something you should prioritize as part of your business marketing strategy. The long term benefits of promoting your business using a blog are simply too many to mention, and if you are not blogging about your business, then your competitors who are blogging about their business may already be outperforming you and getting your share of the profits online ...

If you are a small business owner, listen up!

In this article, I want to share with you a simple 3-step formula for outperforming at least 60%-75% of your business competitors online.

Based on my research and experience, it's pretty safe to assume that most small business owners today have some form of online presence to help promote their business, like an email address and either a web site, web listing (e.g. on a business directory) or a domain name.

Okay, so far so good.

Now, ask yourself ...

"How many of my business competitors are promoting their business using a blog?"

Do you have a blog set up for your own business?

If you're not even sure what a blog is, then YOU may be the one who is being outperformed by your business competitors right now!

A blog (short for "weblog") is a revolutionary business tool. If you don't know what a blog is, then you need to find out ... and quick!

Here are 5 reasons why, in most cases, using a blog to promote your business is better that getting a web site built:

1. A blog is easier to set up than a web site.
2. A blog is cheaper to set up than a web site (most blogging applications are FREE! ... how cheap is that?)
3. A blog lets you interact with customers faster, better and more personally than you can using a web site.
4. Not only can you do everything in a blog that you can do in a web site, but you also have complete control over when and how you publish your content, and you don't need to have any technical knowledge of areas like web design, HTML, etc ... to create and publish content online.
5. A blog has a few "secret" advantages over web sites when it comes to getting indexed faster in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc ... (I discuss this in more detail further below.)

Now ... don't worry too much if you don't really know what a blog is or how you can use the power of blogging to gain a huge advantage of your competition. For now, let's just focus on the big picture.

The 3-Step Formula For Outperforming Most Of Your Business Competitors

1. Set up a blog
2. Optimize your blog for search engines
3. Make regular posts to your blog

That's it! Pretty simple, huh? But I guarantee that if you stick to the above formula, you will soon start to outperfom most of your business competitors and gain a greater market share online.

Let's examine these steps in a little more detail:

Step 1 - Set Up A Blog

There are some very good reasons why you will want to set up a blog on your own domain name.

First, you are building up your own asset, not someone else's, and secondly, if the blog is on your server, you won't have to worry about something happening to your account which could cause you to lose all of your valuable content. (Please note: remember to regularly back up your content EVEN if you are hosting your blog on your domain name!)

There are a couple of ways you can set up a blog:

• You can set up a blog INSTEAD of a website (e.g. when people go to www.yourdomainname.com, they go straight to your blog's home page)
• You can set up your blog in a directory of your main site (e.g. www.yourdomainname.com/blog)
• You can set up your blog on a separate domain name (register a new domain name to set up your blog on, then create links from your site to your blog and vice versa).

If you need to register a domain name for your blog and don't know where to go, then I recommend registering a domain name with GoDaddy. I don't host my sites with them, but I buy all of my domain names there. They have excellent domain name management facilities and their price is reasonably cheap (around $10 for a .com, .net domain name).

What's The Difference Between A Blog And A Web Site?

Not much really. A blog looks just like a web site ... in many cases it even looks better and more professional than a web site. So, if you're thinking of getting your next door neighbor's nephew to build you a cheap (or, as often is the case, cheap-looking) website, then get them to help you set up a blog instead. There are many professionally designed blog themes you can download for free.

*** Very Important Tips ***

I recommend hosting your sites, blogs, etc ... on a server that uses "cPanel" with a program called "Fantastico" installed. cPanel makes managing sites very easy, and with Fantastico, you can install a blog on your domain with a couple of clicks. You will also need to have access to a MySQL database for storing all of your blog's content (e.g. posts, links, comments, etc ...)

If you are not sure whether or not you have access to cPanel, MySQL and Fantastico on your server, just ask your hosting provider.

If you need a reliable and extremely affordable hosting provider and don't know where to go, my recommended blog hosting provider is Hostgator. 

Click on the banner below for more details on their special deals for blog hosting services:

What Blogging Platform Should I Use?

Although there are a few great blogging platforms available (and the great news is that most of them are FREE!), the one I use for all my blogs is WordPress.

Wordpress is FREE! It is also extremely flexible and easy to use and a very powerful blogging tool. Thousands of people use WordPress and hundreds of developers have created many great applications ("wordpress plugins") to enhance blog functionality. As mentioned earlier, there are thousands of FREE themes that you can choose from to give your blog a unique and very professional look.

There are tons of great resources online designed to help you set up and get maximum use of WordPress blogs. If you want to set up your own blog but don't know where to start, here are a couple of great resources I recommend:

WORDPRESS TRAINING - A detailed training course on how to get your blog up and running:

http://www.portalfeederpro.com/wordpress.html

SETTING UP PROFITABLE BLOGS - Learn how to 'monetize' your blog and create additional revenue streams:

http://www.portalfeederpro.com/blogging-reviews.html

Step 2 - Optimize Your Blog For The Search Engines

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a huge topic and it's completely beyond the scope of this article to address it.

There are many excellent tools, resources and tutorials on SEO. By far, the best resource I can recommend for anyone who is serious about building an online business, is to look at joining Portal Feeder.

Portal Feeder is an exclusive online community for web business builders and they provide you with everything you need to succeed online: training, custom tools, resources and support. I have been a member of Portal Feeder since they launched in 2005 and have written a comprehensive review about it here: Portal Feeder Review. 

If you want to improve your blog's SEO on your own, here are a couple of resources I highly recommend:

DIY SEO - A review of some of the best search engine optimization tools and training products available:

http://www.portalfeederpro.com/seo-reviews.html

BLOG SEO - A review of some of the best downloadable blogging information products on the internet:

http://www.portalfeederpro.com/blogging-reviews.html

SEO Elite - This tool is used by thousands of top ranking web sites to maintain their top positions in search engines:

http://www.portalfeederpro.com/seo-elite.html

*** Very Hot Tip ***

Blog applications like WordPress have a "secret" advantage over normal web sites when it comes to getting indexed in search engines like Google, Yahoo! MSN and others ... a built-in system for notifying (pinging) search engines whenever a new post is made or new content is added.

NOTE: To use this notification system effectively (including learning how to avoid getting banned by the search engines for abusing this feature), please refer to the blogging resources listed above, as most of them cover this technique (called Blog And Ping) in great detail.

Step 3 - Make Regular Posts To Your Blog

This is the simplest part of the process and one of the main reasons why blogs are such a powerful business marketing tool.

Once your blog is set up and fully optimized for the search engines, all you then do is:

1. Login to your blog
2. Create a new post (or just cut and paste to add your content into a new post)
3. Save to publish.

That's it! Your blog will immediately notify the search engines that new content has been added (if you have set up blog and ping correctly) and you will have fresh, new content to offer your visitors and customers.

Useful Tips

Develop a habit of making regular posts to your blog (e.g. once a week, twice a week, twice a month, etc ... ).

You can post educational and informative articles about your products and services, special offers, or the latest news about your company, or even just reply to comments that visitors make on your entries, questions, etc ...

Add a subscriber section to your blog and offer a FREE newsletter, downloadable report, gift, or any other useful information (e.g. a mini course, insider tips, etc ...) to get people to subscribe to your mailing list. This creates a growing asset of targeted customers for your business that you can contact whenever you have something special to offer or useful to share.

You can see how I've set up a subscriber form on one of my own blogs by going here:

http://www.socialbusinessweb.com/blog/

If you are interested in setting up an automated subscriber list and autoresponder (to follow up with subscribers automatically), then the service I personally use and recommend is Aweber:

http://www.portalfeederpro.com/aweber.html

Aweber are not only extremely reliable, but they are also the industry leaders in email marketing solutions, which means that they have a very high rate of deliverability (in other words, most of the emails, autoresponder messages and update notifications you send out to your mailing list will reach your customers inbox and not get eaten up by spam filters.)

One last tip: Once you get your blog up and running, it is important to get other forms of promotion going if you want to speed up the process. one way to increase the number of visitors to your sites and blogs, is to create backlinks from other related sites.

One way to do this is to promote your business using videos. YouTube.com is one of the best ways to receive high quality traffic to your website and it is completely free! Simply create and upload videos to your YouTube account and make sure that the videos refer back to your site.

Another great free traffic-getting tool that I use and highly recommend you download is Comment Kahuna:

http://www.commentkahuna.com/specialoffer/PFP

Comment Kahuna is a very powerful FREE software that can deliver unlimited, high-quality, targeted backlinks to all of your websites, without using any risky tactics that can destroy your search engine rankings.

Go here to download it: Comment Kahuna

In Conclusion ...

We all know that small business owners are some of the busiest people on this planet. Setting up a blog and maintaining it fresh with regular content, however, is really something you should prioritize as part of your business marketing strategy.

The long term benefits of promoting your business using a blog are simply too many to mention (e.g. attract new customers, develop better customer relationships, become known as an "authority" on the net on your area of expertise, etc ...), and if you are not blogging about your business, then I can almost guarantee that your competitors who are blogging about THEIR BUSINESSES will soon be outperforming you and making a profit from customers who could have been YOURS!

I hope you have found this article useful and I wish you great success as a "business blogger".

If you want to set up a self-managed web site or blog for your own business but don’t know where to start, SelfPublishWeb.com can help you.

We will build, install and configure for you a self-managed business web site using the WordPress web publishing platform that will be delivered to you “ready-to-grow” and already set up for optimal performance in the following areas:

• SEO Ready (Fully Search Engine Optimized)
• Automatically Notify All Major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) whenever you post new content
• Syndication Ready - RSS Feeds
• Social Bookmarking / Social Network Sharing Ready (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc …)
• Internet Marketing Ready (Add lead capture forms, monetization, affiliate marketing, advertising banners, etc)
• Information Systems Ready (Visitor tracking and analytics)
• Ready To Grow As Your Business Grows

Do you want to see for yourself how you can easily grow your business online with a SelfPublishWeb.com-built web site?

Then click on the video below to watch one of our actual customer  “quick start” video training tutorials, showing exactly what you need to do to grow your businesses online once we’ve done all the hard work of setting up your self-managed business site …

(Click on the image below to go to the video page.
Allow a few seconds for the video to load in your browser …)

To read more about our time-saving service for small businesses and our limited time offer special pricing, click here now: Self-Managed Business Web Site Service

***

About:

Martin Aranovitch is a successful SME (small to medium enterprise) business coach, sales trainer and web business entrepreneur. He has built several profitable online businesses, including www.AudioBookOne.net ,a downloadable audio book store containing thousands of best-selling audio book titles from the world's leading audio book publishers.

Source: http://www.portalfeederpro.com

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