More Visitor with Blogs

Blogs (short for web logs) are not only free and easy to create, but they can be awesome traffic generating tools if you use and promote them properly.

If you haven't learned by now, the key to building free search engine traffic is to get as many related, high-quality sites to point back to yours. Search engines like Google take this into great consideration when ranking your website.

You can create your own blog that can act as that "related website" to point to your own, and in the long run your blog can not only attract its own traffic, but will help you build traffic to your main site.

My Blog Example
I have website creation blog that I created on Blogger.com where I offer tips and tricks on website creation and promotion that may not be found on this site.

As I add new content, this blog suddenly becomes a website of its own because Blogger.com creates a new page each time you add a new entry.

As I mentioned before, search engines look for related websites that link back to you, so I link the blog back to my main site's homepage to help with search engine rankings. It's sort of like a "vote" for my main website.

Use Blogger.com
There are a lot of good, free blog hosts out there but I chose to use Blogger.com because I like that each new post creates a search-engine friendly web page.

It's easy to use and they offer a lot of cool features such as visitor comments, customizable templates, archiving options and more.

Let People Subscribe to Your Blog Feeds
Another benefit of creating a blog is that people can actually subscribe to it. You may have heard of RSS feeds (RSS stands for really simple syndication). It's a growing Internet trend where people can receive updates/feeds from their favorite sites all in one place.

They use a reader (or the Firefox browser) which allows them to manage and browse all their feeds at once.

So let's say you subscribe to CNN.com and USAToday.com's news headline and sports feeds. You can open up your RSS reader and quickly browse the latest headlines from these sites without even visiting their individual homepages.

Blogger.com will automatically create your blog's RSS feed URL so people can subscribe to your feeds. Now when they open up their RSS readers to get the updates from their favorite sites, any new posts on your blog will show up in their reader.

Here's the URL to subscribe to my blog:
http://createyourwebsite.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Again, this URL was automatically created by Blogger.com.

The above link is not meant to be viewed directly. You should first download a free RSS reader and add that link as a "new subscription" and it will feed my blog's content into your RSS reader automatically. It's pretty cool.

Now go to your favorite sites and see if they offer RSS feeds or perhaps they have blogs that you can subscribe to like mine. Look for the orange RSS or XML buttons. Almost all of the major news sites have them.

Add Adsense Ads
Once your blog starts bringing in traffic, you'll want to maximize the revenue potential by adding Adsense ads. If you aren't familiar with Google's Adsense program, go here to learn about it.

Free Blog with Every Domain Name

In case you missed it at the beginning of this article, you can get your own free blog if you register a domain name (yoursite.com) with WebsitePalace.com.

That way your blog will have a nice, concise web address instead of a long, hard-to-remember address that you receive with the free blogging sites.

If you already have a domain then you can register one just to house your blog and create something like myblogwebsite.com. Now your blog will have its own domain.

In Conclusion...

As you can see, a blog can really help increase the traffic to your main website if you continue to update and promote it. Many webmasters are finding that search engines sometimes index (list) blogs faster than some websites giving them that added boost of traffic.

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that the key to having search engine success is to get as many related websites to link back to yours. Having a blog in your posession is like creating another vote for your site.

Be sure to update it often with relevant, unique content so the search engines will visit frequently. Happy blogging!