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

If you’re looking for ways to sell and ways to promote what you’re selling, Squidoo lenses are great tools. They’re a lot like HubPages.  These sites allow you to set up a robust looking page with all sorts of tools to help you promote including:

• polls
• pictures
• text boxes
• sticky notes
• eye catching headline boxes
• RSS feeds
• links
• and more

Not only can you use Squidoo lenses as a free online tool for link building to your other  websites but you can also monetize them.  You can add affiliate links, Google ads, Amazon links and images and more. While HubPages lets you use your Adsense ID to get paid directly, Squidoo pays you via PayPal when you reach a specified payout level.

Having a tool kit of promotion and monetization tools is a great idea. If you’re article marketing, you know that most sites won’t let you put affiliate links into your resource box. You can, however, put a link to your Squidoo lens which could contain calls to action or hoplinks.

Squidoo also has a great user community so encompasses monetization, article marketing, off-page SEO and social media.

Have a most outstanding day.

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

Ryan from HubPages popped by in our last post when we talked about using HubPages to promote your product and site.  Ryan reminded us in comments that free sites like HubPages are looking for unique content.

Content Pays

The more content you’ve got out there pointing to your site, the better! But in your quest for online success you might come across online content spinners that take your articles and mix them up with the idea that you can submit the same article to multiple places.  You might also think it’s ok to take one article and send it to 35 article directories. Be very careful of this type of philosophy.  While you might be able to get some backlinks and traffic, you could also get your online wrist slapped. Sites like HubPages and E-ZineArticles want solid, unique content so could simply reject your articles as well.

Maximum Google Juice

There’s a testimonial right on HubPages every time I log in that talks about Google Juice. Sites that will publish your content for you want to be unique otherwise it dilutes their Google juice online so do yourself a favour and take the time to bring something unique to the table when posting online.  While a little bit of regurgitation could save you time and effort, if you don’t provide enough value to the reader and take the time to put effort into your off-page SEO efforts you won’t get much out of them.

Have a most outstanding day.

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

If you’re interested in promoting a product or service online, you need all the free IM  tools you can get!  Today’s featured tool is HubPages.  Here’s what I like about this self-promotional and monetizing tool:

1. It’s like a free article site except that you don’t have to give anyone the right to re-publish it elsewhere.  While other article directory sites can give you great backlinks, they can get you the duplicate content wrist slap because other sites are promoting your content.
2. It has great SEO potential with the ability to put your RSS feeds, your links and tagged photos plus get you indexed in search engines for your targeted key phrases.
3. You can earn money through ad sharing from HubPages via Google Adsense and other publishers as well as put various affiliate links in the pages.
4. HubPages has a social aspect as well with the community that posts there which can help you get more exposure for your hub!

The more you have in your marketing arsenal, the better.  Tools like these can help you get noticed, get subscribers and make sales!

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