How business blogging can increase income

Can you use a blog to help you increase your affiliate income? Of course you can. Blogs can be used by businesses of any size to enhance the overall value of a site to its visitors, not to mention increasing its traffic.

Here are a few ideas you can use to create a blog that helps you sell.

1. Use your blog as a traffic generator for your lead capture page.
One clear advantage that a blog has over other ways to manage content is that there are specific website traffic opportunities open to it that you just can't get for a static commercial site. When you start using those methods, link from every page to your lead capture page and build your list at the same time.

2. Use your blog to create a resource site and multiply your income streams.
If you're really serious about blogging, you can end up building a resource site. Going over a few hundred pages happens fairly quickly if you blog a lot, and when the girth of your site increases at about the same rate as its quality, guess what?
Your site is now a resource site, which has many advantages. People are more apt to link to you, search engines may favor your site, and the mass of your site becomes so overwhelming on a first visit, that it makes sense to your new visitors to subscribe so they won't miss anything.
You can also get away with joining several affiliate programs and link to them from all from your site, as well as in your ezine. The trick is to know how to set it up so that you won't be overwhelming your audience with choices. As we all know, a confused prospect doesn't buy, they go away.

3. Optimize your blog and get better search engine traffic.
While it's true that if you pick the right topic, format, and update systems for your blog, your ability to get traffic from search engines will be a lot easier, there are certain tricks to the trade that can
increase your traffic from search engines, and your traffic, exponetially.

4. Be a good blogizen and comment on or about other blogs in your neighborhood.
You don't want to comment or use trackback (a kind of remote commenting) to place links back to your site on other blogs. In fact, that's really just a side benefit. The real return on your time investment will be in networking with other people in similiar markets. These valuable connections are worth a lot more than a one-time link back.

5. Lead the conversation with helpful, linkworthy and newsworthy posts.
Anyone can install WordPress and start blogging, and that's part of the peril. People who become successful bloggers, whether that success comes in popularity or cash, are the people who create unique content, in diverse areas, on topics that people are interested in.

6. Get closer to your audience, and let them tell you what they'll buy.
I had an experiment at my blog recently where I asked my readers what kind of product they'd like to see from me. They told me exactly what to create and how much they'd pay for it.
If you're selling products that are already created by someone else, you can still do this. You have expertise and tools that other people don't know how to use, don't have time to learn, or would rather pay someone else who has figured it out for them.
Save those people time and money, and they'll keep coming back.

7. Combine the forces of your ezine, RSS, and your blog.
Not only can you bring people into your blog via the power of RSS, you can also use your blog and RSS feed to cycle traffic between various other parts of your site, and as we mentioned before, to increase the traffic to your newsletter.
Blogging also increases the points of entry to your site, and helps you organize the topics that are related to your product. With this organization, you can also use a blog to funnel different types of
visitors to various autoresponders you have set up for any number of related products.
If you are promoting products that aren't of the same vein, however, you'll want to create several blogs to cater to each audience for best results.

Blogging is for every type of business - it's the strategy and implementation that varies. Use your blog wisely and it can enhance your income in unlimited ways.!