Marketing your Business through Blogs and Articles

Marketing your Business through Blogs and Articles

Guest Blogger, Corrie Petersen

Finding ways to put your business in front of your target market can be a challenge at times. One thing to remember is that you need to be consistent in what you do. Studies show you need to put yourself in front of your target market five to seven times before they will consider looking at what you offer.

There are several ways to keep your business in front of your target market on a regular basis. One way to do this is through blog posting. Running a blog is a great way to help your target market through tips, suggestions, and anything else that they may benefit from them.

One thing you need to do is add a subscription box to your blog and add an RSS feed to it. The subscription box will give your readers the ability to receive updates via their email. The RSS feed will help with blog submissions and you can use it with your social networking sites. Both of which are valuable tools for your business.

Another way you can keep your business in front of your target market regularly is to use article marketing. Article marketing is where you write articles and you submit them to article directories. Your articles need to be full of great content and you want them to be helpful to your readers.

You can use the articles as content on your blog or you can rewrite your blog posts and turn them into articles. Either way will work and will help you increase the content on the other.

Blog posting and Article marketing are two of the many ways that you can keep your business in front of your target market and increase your traffic. You should try to post on your blog three to four times a week and you should write and submit one to two articles a week. This will help you keep your target market aware of what you are doing and you will constantly be in front of them.

Corrie Petersen runs a successful Virtual Assistant business. She enjoys helping others
reach their goals and dreams. Check out her website at www.virtualfreedom4you.com

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Three Things You Must Do to Make More Money on Squidoo

Three Things You Must Do to Make More Money on Squidoo

Guest Blogger from I Squidoo, Do You?

Anybody can make money on Squidoo. Make enough lenses (the pages on Squidoo are called lenses), keep them updated, and eventually you’ll earn a few cents here, a few dollars there. But to make some noteworthy money on Squidoo, money that will impact your monthly budget, here are three things that you must do.

First, you must show passion. Do you love your topic? If you don’t, it’s pretty hard to interject the passion, the personality, the personalization that will draw your readers in. The best Squidoo lenses are far more than objective journalism. They reach out and grab their readers, getting them involved, making them want to read more. When it’s time to present a product, something that will earn a commission for the lensmaster (that’s you), make it a product or item that you can personally endorse, something that you’ve used, that you love. If your reader likes how that item makes you feel, they’re going to want to feel that way, too. I call this the Oprah effect. When Oprah talks, people listen, and people buy what Oprah recommends. Can you imagine Oprah being anything less than passionate about a topic or a product? Be yourself, but be passionate like Oprah.

Next, create a network. You’ve shown passion about one topic, how about another take on the same topic? Create a network of Squidoo lenses around a niche, a set of topics or products centered around a theme. If you truly love recipes and are able to put together a lens that is fun, interesting, and shows passion for a great recipe, make another lens about another great recipe. Link those lenses together. Then do it again. Sales are the byproduct of traffic; traffic is the byproduct of popularity. If one lens in your niche-network is popular, chances are that your related lenses will become popular, too.

Finally, to earn more money on Squidoo you must think like a customer. Visitors to your lenses are your customers. Look at your lenses objectively, as a first-time reader would. Is the lens interesting or just a bit boring? Does it answer the questions you would have if you were looking for information about that topic or product? Laziness is a trap that is very easy to fall into when making lenses; it’s easy to just leave out an element that could be the difference between converting a reader to a customer or having that reader look elsewhere. Go the extra mile. Take some time to find the dimensions of the product you’re selling, or show pictures of the item in all of its available colors. Provide an answer for every question you would ask before you spent money for something for sale on your lens.

While no one can make guarantees about income from Squidoo, putting these three suggestions into practice will go a long way in making successful, popular lenses that get traffic, then sales that make more money for you on Squidoo.

Susan52 is a baby boomer, a WAHM, and a passionate lensmaster on Squidoo. She’s earned membership to the Giant Squid 100 Club, which means she’s made more than 100 lenses! She writes about Squidoo on her blog, I Squidoo, Do You?