Google Blog Search is a great tool for helping you to:

1. Get information about your niche
2. Assess your competition
3. Find blogs to network with

Google Blog Search is a search engine for blogs. Reading blogs from your peers and from mentors in your industry or niche can be very enlightening. By searching on a keyword or phrase you can find people to follow and subscribed to and you can get information that helps you in your own career.  Whether you’re a blogger, an internet marketer or a Jack / Jill of all trades online, the blogosphere can be very helpful.

Assess Your Competition

If you want to be a professional blogger or online marketer you can see how other people are selling what you want to sell. This can spark ideas for your own strategy.

Find Blogs To Network With

It’s no secret that commenting on blogs in your niche can help you multi-fold. It can help you get visitors to your own blog and help you with your SEO by sending search engine spiders your way.

Tools:

On the Google blog search site you an also create Google alerts from the page, subscribe to a RSS feed in Google Reader and add a gadet to your home page for quick access.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Here at SeanSEO.com we know that commenting on blogs can help your site’s SEO. We knew this already but we especially know this when we look at our spam filter in the back end of this blog!

If you’re not already commenting on blogs, you might consider doing so because:

• Blog commenting can get you relevevant links pointing to your blog which is good for SEO
• Blog commenting can get you reciprocal comments from the blog owner you visit
• Blog commenting can bring you new visitors to your site (when you post in relevant topics to your topic)

Some people go off and try to get their links at any cost. They simply go off and comment with links in their comments and little other value.  Chances are that when you do that, the blog owner is going to just zap your comment out into spam oblivion instead of approving it.  We get all sorts of comments from adult themed blogs as well as non-sensical comments and paragraphs filled with weird links or strange characters.  We don’t approve them.  We love Askimet (a free anti-spam WordPress plug-in! as it catches a vast majority for us so we don’t even have to look at 90% of the spam that comes in.

When we do get comment notifications, what we do approve includes:

• Interesting comments that provide value to our readers or the topic
• Questions that are genuine, not just an effort to get a link published
• Comments that aren’t filled with obvious self-serving links
• Comments relevant to our niche here at the blog

P.S: Don’t build nofollow into your comment. Talk about obvious!

When you go out into cyberspace to promote, look to related blogs and provide value when you comment. Not only does that value help you get your comment approved but you may also get interested people clicking on your link so see what your site is all about.

Happy promoting!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Watching blogs about SEO is smart.  You can get the latest and greatest info as well as learn new tactics you might not have thought of. SEO should be something that is a constant in your online career.

Here is some reading for budding and for experienced online entrepreneurs:

SEO Flow Chart by Aaron Wall.

Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook is always worth listening to and this flow chart is definitely something that should be on your must-read list.

SEO Tops Recession Internet Marketing Tactics Poll Results

Wondering what others are doing about recession proofing their online business?  Take a look at these tactics and see how important SEO continues to be.

Good SEO During A Bad Economy

Sure seems like the economy is on all our minds, huh? Get some solid SEO advice in this post.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

3 things you should use with blogging we talked about a magical traffic formula for your blog traffic.  There are things you need to do to your main blog site to get constant traffic but with each entry you write, you should do a few things to bring in extra traffic.

Today we’ll give you a few tips on coming up with your own formula to use each time you post a new entry.  You may choose to use some of the tools listed below or you may have some of your own but developing a routine (or several alternating routines) can help you get traffic each and every time you post a new blog entry.  These methods will improve your site’s SEO as well!

What’s the formula for getting traffic?

You have to do some blog SEO! While pinging services and search engine spiders will help you get some hits, you also have to devise your own traffic formula to get word out that your blog has got something new that people might be interested in. It can make the difference between a few hits and a lot of traffic with actual subscribers

After each awesome blog entry you write, encourage further traffic by doing a few quick things.

Here are some things you could do:

• Go to Twitter.com and update your status
• Sign up for a service like Ping.fm which will update multiple social services
• Give yourself a thumbs up on StumbleUpon
• Visit your friends at Plurk.com and tell them you’ve updated your blog
• Update your MySpace, StumbleUpon, Tumblr and Live Journal blogs and update those
• Use the bookmarklet Onlywire which updates several services for you
• Digg your post
• Submit your post to Yahoo Buzz
• If the entry is really a good one, you can get a lot of mileage out of it and write an article, Squidoo lens or Hubpage (or all three!) with resource box links to your new blog entry.

If you use Firefox and want to save some time, you could create sets of tabs with these sites home pages loaded so that you can simply write a blog and then open up a new set of tabs to perform the actions quickly and easily.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

If you blog to make money online, here are three tools you need to use straight away. If you’re not already using these tools, they can make a difference to your traffic and your earnings.  If you’re using them already and have some other tools that you find indispensable, we’d love to hear what they are!

RSS

A lot of blog templates have RSS built in. If not, you should add it. Really Simple Syndication can help you feed your blog to other places and have people subscribe to you.  In a future post, we’ll talk about some of the things you can do with your feeds!

MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog or BOTH

I’ve talked a lot about these tools here on SeanSEO and it’s because they add a level of interactivity to your blog. Using these interactive tools puts you in a directory and provides you with colourful widgets for your blog that allow you to see who’s visiting.  When you click on a widget you can be taken to blog communities, ratings pages, tag clouds and individual member lists which can help you find more followers to network with and is a great tool to use for finding places in your niche to comment and trade links with.  There are many benefits to using these services  as they’re a combination of a blog directory and social marketing tool.

Magic Traffic Formula

Now you should go ahead and follow your own magic blog traffic formula to get people to that blog post.  Do you have one yet? This kind of formula will include a handful of actions that you do after each blog post that will bring traffic to your website.  The tools mentioned above will start you off but your little formula for getting extra traffic will help you significantly.  Do you have a formula yet?  If not, stop back tomorrow and I’ll give you a few tips to help you brew up a formula for getting maximum mileage out of each blog post you write.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008