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What Do Visitors To Your Blog Think Of You?

Guest post by: Andy Acciaioli

Article Overview: The purpose of your blog is to be an extension of you. What image does it project? Is is cleanly designed or is it cluttered with affiliate banner ads?

What Do Visitors To Your Blog Think Of You?

Assuming that you do a pretty good job of presenting original, value packed ideas on your blog; what kind of image does it present to the world of who you are?

Have you added a mish-mash of colors and font faces in an effort to attract attention to your content? Or have you resisted adding these distracting features in an effort to better engage your readers?

I have been on some blogs that are difficult to read and even more difficult to navigate my way around them to see what other information it may contain that may be of interest. Recently I visited a blog dealing with one of my favorite online topics: search engine optimization. The first two postings were interesting and stayed on topic. Then out of the outer reaches of the planet blogosphere the third posting dealt with walking his chocolate brown lab through the newly fallen leaves on a crisp, fall Saturday morning. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m a dog lover. I have a yellow lab – which as anyone who has had a yellow lab could tell you that you can fill a daily blog with their antics. ) A walk in the leaves with a dog on a crisp fall day. Hello, I think we’ are just a tad off topic on a SEO themed blog.

Be sure to check all links that you include in a blog post BEFORE publishing your posting. I was on a network marketers blog and all of the links that were in the first few postings were broken links. In other words, error pages came up as there was something wrong with the links either they were copied incorrectly or a wrong letter was used. Now this was ridiculous given the fact that the whole purpose of this network marketer’s blog was to get the reader onto their company generated website to convert them to a hot to trot prospect. The only trotting that was happening was the visitor trotting to some other website with working links.

The best has been saved for last. Does your blog look like a network marketing Walmart? Today I was on a blog that had like a gazillion banner ads…most animated to attract attention. You had an add promoting a lead generation service, another one promoting a hosting service, there was one offering domain registration, two were promoting two different types of autoresponders, yet another one was promoting books on network marketing, blast emailing also had a banner… There were others but I guess you get the point. All of these were obviously affiliate programs that would provide a commission back to the blog owner provided someone would click on the banner and sign-up. here is a not so nice term for this: blog banner farm.

What are you attempting to do with your blog? Collect infrequent – at best – commissions from your banner farm affiliate programs OR are you trying to build your business by attracting top notch leaders?

Whenever I encounter a blog with a banner farm, my first thought is: this person is not making money from their business and they have to try and grab a few bucks from all these affiliate links leading to a cheesy looking blog. My second thought is: let me click off of this blog FAST.

You have worked very hard marketing your blog in an effort to drive traffic (visitors) to it. Why in the world do you want them to be attracted to an affiliate link which causes them to leave your blog and visit another website ? The object of the game is to get that visitor to stay on your site as long as possible…perhaps leading them to becoming one of your team members.

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Article Tags: blog affiliate links, blog marketing, blog technique, blogging techniques, internet blog



Related Forum Posts
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
EvanCarmichael.com suggestion - Maybe I missed it but I would like to suggest that a Blog be created to support the Forum. The idea is that in the blog you put in snippets of some of the biggest conversations with a 'read more' link to the forum itself. Setting up the Blog and clipping some conversations onto it wouldn't take very long.
Jen's Blog - Spam protection - Jen, I like the Blog and just posted a comment to one of your articles. From my experience you need to implement some sort of SPAM capture tools. i use them on my Blog and it's been a life saver as I'm getting hit by spam atleast 5 times a day. I use Wordpress and they have plugins like Captcha and SPAM Karma installed.
Blog Marketing Anyone? - Hi Kevin I suppose you could use the same SEO principles on a Blog as you can for a website but the more content you have within your Blog, the better rankings/traffic you would receive. Would you have time to write a full length article with tips in it every day or second day to get the article count rolling over every week? I would also like to know if anyone has had any experiences with marketing blogs and the traffic they received.


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