Using Blogs to Drive Massive Traffic To Your Web Site

Have you considered using the power of Blogs to entice more visitors to your web site? Blogs can be an excellent way to generate web traffic, and are usually surprisingly easy to setup and start with.

Before I continue, let's start with a definition of just what a Blog is.

Think of a Blog as a simple, public, online diary that you can write in (post). These entries or posts can be viewed by anyone arriving at your website. A good blog can have many thousands of daily readers, literally hanging on the authors every word.

Not only can you use regular text, you can also enhance your Blog with Audio and Video, making it a rich and interesting experience for the visitor.

The process of setting up a Blog is often very quick and painless. There are online blogging sites that require no setup (other than registering on the website). One of the most popular blogging sites is http://www.blogger.com (recently purchased by Google). It's literally possible to be posting within minutes using this service.

Even better, most blogging sites have the mechanism to "announce" your posts to many other blogging sites automatically, which could drive visitors to your blog very quickly.

Having the mechanism to automatically tell other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it's getting you known on the Internet, without the need for you to submit your blog manually to a large number of sites, or to use other methods to get your site found.

If you planning to use your Blog as a sales vehicle, many experts would tell you not to do so. Instead, leaving any "selling" to your regular website and sales pages, and instead allow the visitor to find out more about the real you on your blog.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a "real person" and not a nameless website or corporate identity and this can only assist you in future sales with these people as it builds up a level of trust.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post comments on your posts, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs "write" messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.

One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they contain relevant and quality content. Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine success.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may decide to make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It's vitally important that you don't just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories. Decent blogging software usually allows you to separate your posts by categories, making it easy for your visitors to find the information they are interested in.

Search engines may view your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together, so this is another good reason to ensure you use categorize your posts correctly. Search engines very much prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorize correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress see: -

http://www.wordpress.org

This is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do as well.

This software can be downloaded for free and installed onto your web host. In fact, many web host companies offer a free automatic install to do this for you.

I hope you have now realised the power of using and maintaining a Blog, it can be the ultimate web site promotion and give your visitors an insight into the real you, which helps them trust in your products and services.

Tim Buchalka describes a fantastic way to generate web traffic using the power of affiliate programs. Visit his site to obtain a free 20 chapter guide to increasing web traffic.