A business blog can be much more than just a newsletter – it can become a money-making venture for your business. A business blog can be used to promote your products through product reviews and through ‘how to’ articles ranging from how to use, how to maintain and how to upgrade, amongst others. What a business blog can also do is help with the general search engine optimization of your whole site, leading to increased visitors and profits for you as well.

First Step – Optimization!

To fully optimize your blog for the search engines you need to start from the top which means getting your blog post’s title spot on. There are two reasons for this. First, the title is going to be your advertisement for the blog post – you want to get as many readers as possible onto your blog. Secondly, having keywords in the title increases the importance of those words which raises their rankings within the search engines – the higher the ranking, the higher up your page will appear in the search results.

Once you have your title optimized, you need to work on the post itself. Your blog post needs to be interesting enough to keep the visitor reading and to entice them to come back. The post also needs to relate to the keywords and have a keyword focus. The keyword used in the title should appear as close to the start of the first paragraph as possible. The keyword needs to be used repeatedly throughout the article whilst not detracting from the article’s readability. It is also a good idea to use some form of text enhancement on the keyword such as bold. Your article should be unique and, with the correct use of keywords, be on the road to high search engine rankings.

Finally, include graphics where ever possible ensuring the keywords are used within the graphics labels and ALT tags. Graphics are now starting to become very significant in SEO practices.

The final step in a SEO program is to try and get backlinks onto your pages. This will occur naturally over a period of time with good content. You can speed the process up by having your blog added to various directories and by participating in social sites. You can also promote your blog and receive backlinks by visiting blogs in the same niche and leaving practical comments on their articles.

Traffic Will Follow

Once optimized, your blog will attract visitors, and with carefully placed ad units on your page and with carefully worded articles that link to your web site you will find your sales increasing. Include snippets from your best ‘how to’ articles on your web site with links back to the articles and the traffic becomes two-way. Over time, you gain a reputation for quality which hopefully then transfers to your product or service.

Now it’s Time to Monitize

Your blog can also be an extra source of income when you sell the empty space around your posts. There are many different types of income that can be derived from this empty space. All revolve around advertising either through pay-per-click (PPC) programs or through affiliation links. Affiliation links work reasonably well so long as the affiliated products have some relevance to your business. There are many affiliate managers in the market who have a wide variety of affiliation programs to select from. Alternatively, you can source out your own affiliates and enter into private agreements with them.

Pay-per-click has been a popular revenue stream for many blog publishers. The downside is that no matter which advertiser you use, you are relying on your visitor to click on one of the ads and in doing so leaving your blog. One of the latest advertising managers is Rubicon who now provide to publishers a single ad unit that can display ads from a wide array of advertisers. Instead of having many accounts and ad units scattered around your page, with Rubicon you have the one account with a single ad unit (you can have up to three).

Your blog is a window into your business. If used wisely it can promote your business, increase your website’s ranking on the search engines AND become an extra source of revenue for you as well!