The real benefit of hosting a blog and maintaining it has been a quick way to spread your business across the internet audiences. It has been proved by the search engine marketing specialists and bloggers in the past few years that a blog can benefits your website or business in very effective ways.

When you decide to host a blog on your website, the first question that comes up is where to setup a blog on your own website or separately. Each one has its own advantages that will help your website.

Where to Host Your Blog on Own Website or Separately?

There are two ways you can host your blog, either by creating an account on the blog platforms like Blogger or WordPress or simply installing your own blog software on your own website. Hosting a blog as a sub-domain of your own website looks like a professional approach and often preferred by those who want to boost their website ranking on search engines using blog as a tool.

Search engine ranking benefits

Setting up the blog in as a sub-domain on your existing website also benefits to your websites search engine ranking. Any new content that is added to your blog will be treated as new content part of your main website. Every new blog posts that you create are easily and quickly indexed than regular web pages. It thus helps promote better indexing and visibility of your main website, if the blog is hosted on the same domain name.

Backlinks benefits

If you spend some time and efforts on writing quality contents on your blog, you can easily attract the quality backlinks using those articles. If you host your blog on your main domain then all back-links will benefit your main domain. If your blog is on an external domain then back-links will not be directly passed on to your main website. However, you will still get the benefits if you are able to pull the PR and links from your separately hosted blog to your main website by cross linking. But, in order to get benefits via cross linking from your externally hosted blog it will need to be successful.

Brand targeting for business owners

Some business company’s or website owners can choose to start a blog on a completely new domain name. This can help if you wish to differentiate between the branding of your website and that of your blog. If the blog you are setting up is not directly related to the content on your main website, then you may not wish to combine the two on the same domain name.

If you wish to target on enforcing a collective brand for your company rather than creating a new brand for your blog, installing a blog as a part of your main website will help. If a blog is installed in a sub folder of your existing website, the blog URL will include your primary domain name in the address bar and appear as a cohesive entity.

Technical resources

If you are setting up a blog on your main website or domain name, you will require a certain level of technical skills in order to install the blog and add the database. If you are starting a blog using one of the free blog platforms then no software installation is required and a blog can be set up in a few easy steps.

Cost benefits

Another common reason for setting up an external blog outside of your main company website is the possibility for using one of the many available free online blog hosting services such as Blogger or Word Press. Most leading social networking websites such as Facebook also allow users to set up their own blog using their website platform. These services are usually free whereas setting up a blog on your main website or private domain name will require web hosting space and technical infrastructure.

So, decide your own where to host your blog, if it’s similar to your website and hosting it to boost your search engine rankings then definitely host it as a sub-domain of your own website.

ew days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and

best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers.

These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the

moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to

help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is

called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you

no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers.

Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to

teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very

practical tips or advice.

This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical

and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current

(it isn”t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight.

The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum.

Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same

time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing

here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if

they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new.

This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed. You don”t have to produce

one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new.

Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will

be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so

the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call

your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily

rememberable domain name.

People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world

(that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them

to spread the word and pass on your URL.

Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry

about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember

then you”ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller

articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of

reader for your blog is to comment on other people’’s blogs.

You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers

there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you

leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always

have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and

hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog

conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another

blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry.

What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’’s sort of like

your blog telling someone else’’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks

often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another

blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the

attention of another blogger.

The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They

may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time

down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone

to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If

they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since

you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about.

To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always

respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that

summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to

collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to

a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike

in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of

new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog

Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it.

You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit

back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with

this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to ArticleBase.com. This is another tip that doesn”t bring in hundreds of

new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you

simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your

pillar articles and submit it to ArticleBase.com.

Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their

website or in their newsletter. How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource

Box”.

You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two

sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your

article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large

newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find bl
og readers however all

of the techniques I”ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you

do everything above you may bring in readers but they won”t stay or bother to come back.

Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of

over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

Warmly,

Gary Neame

It’s not really difficult to make money online with a free blog from Blogger.com if you are getting some decent amount of traffic on it. In today’s post, I will share some ways to monetize your blogger blog:

Google Adsense: Join Google Adsense publisher program if you already don’t have an account on Google Adsense and add Google Adsense textual and image ads in your blogger blog header, footer, sidebar or in the post section where you want them to appear. Adsense ads are highly customizable and can mix with your blog look quite easily. Text link ads: if you have a blog with good page rank and decent Alexa rankings, you have a chance to make some real money by selling text link ads on your blog. There are some text link selling and buying marketplace available on internet like text link ads, TNX, Linkworth, Linkadage etc that you can use for this purpose. Paid blogging websites: there are many paid to blog websites where you are paid for every article that you wrote for them. Some of paid blogging networks that you can try to make money online with your blog are SponsoredReviews, ReviewMe, Smorty, Blogsvertise, LinkWorth etc. Affiliate products: You can make some good amount of money with affiliate sales if you have a blog about a particular niche or some specific product. Some of popular affiliate’s sites that you can try for selling affiliate products are Amazon.com, ClickBank.com, LinkShare, Commission Junction etc. Private Ads: You should create a ‘advertise here’ or ‘your ads here’ type of page on your blog if your blog is very popular in your targeted niche. There will be lots of advertisers in your niche who will be interested in placing some text or banner links on your blog for some fixed amount of money for a month or so.

These are some of methods that I’m using with my blogger blogs to make money online with them. Am I missing something in this list? Please share it in the comment section.