A blog can be a crucial part of building a brand for a small business operation. This is especially true for professional or sales businesses, in which the public persona of the business owner is a vital element in the success of the business. It helps build your company's personality -- its brand. This puts you up front and personal and lets your customers, clients or patients feel like they know you, and, as any business consultant will tell you, people are always more at ease buying services or goods from someone they know.

Many beginning business owners make the mistake of choosing one of the free blog hosting services to host theirs in the belief that the free ones are easier to set up and just as good as a blog hosted on their own domain name. Others believe that hosting on a large blog site gives them a bigger audience for their posts. All three of those beliefs are wrong. In fact, the only advantages that free blog hosting offers over hosting your blog on your own domain is the price -- and even that is a mixed advantage. When you choose the free service, you're giving up the most important advantages blogs offer for building your brand: design freedom, name recognition and SEO advantages for the sake of a few dollars a month.

A blog hosted on your own domain is more professional. Any branding expert you ask will explain that a website or blog with its own domain informs customers that you are serious about your business and value its image enough to pay for hosting. Hosting your blog on your own domain also makes it much simpler for your customers or clients to remember the address and find your blog. Your blog address becomes one more brick to cement your brand in the eyes of your buyers.

You have more choices for designs and branding it when you choose blog hosting on your own domain. You are not confined to a few templates provided on a free hosting service. In addition, Google along with other search engines consider the domain name of your blog when they pull up results to search inquiries. Blog hosting on your own domain name gives you a boost in the search engine rankings.

As far as ease of setup, most web hosting services feature one-click blog installation for nearly all of the major blog platforms, which makes blog hosting on your own domain every bit as easy as putting up a less professional free blog. With all of those advantages, why would any business owner choose free blog hosting over your own self-hosted blog?

If you're searching for Dedicated servers or interested in Hosting a domain name log onto phphosts.org.

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3 Tips on How to Blog

By Leah Evans

How to Blog to Drive YouTube Traffic?

Tip #1: You can blog about your passion of cooking gourmet meals. Start with what you have. How much information do you know about cooking gourmet meals? If you love cooking, you can start a blog about it. You can have someone video tape you with a smart phone or iPad. Or do it yourself and use a web came or flip camera and upload a snippet of your video onto your YouTube channel. Write a description with a link to drive traffic back to your blog. Don't post the entire video on YouTube, just give them the sizzle not the whole steak. Your objective should be driving the viewers back to your blog where they can potentially subscribe to your list.

How to Blog to Build a List?

Tip #2: You can create a subscribers list for your community members who want to learn how to cook the gourmet recipe that you began sharing on YouTube video. You can share a weekly recipe with your subscribers. List your ingredients, what to do, how to do it, what temperature to set the oven on, and how long to keep it in there. Your list of blog members will be enlightened to learn a new recipe each week.

How to Blog to Make Money Blogging?

Tip #3: If you want to monetize your blog record you preparing gourmet meals that will make peoples mouth water. Start with shopping in grocery store or farmers market and meat or fish markets. Gather the ingredients, prep the food for cooking and cook the gourmet meals so your buyers can see exactly what to do and how to do it. Make sure you show the before and after shots once the food is done. Do it once, record and download it onto a private page on your blog or burn it onto a DVD and sell it over and over. In your weekly recipe sharing newsletter create a sales funnel to sell your video or DVD of the gourmet meals you want to sell on your blog. Create a products tab on your navigation bar and list your menu and price your meals to sell to your viewers who want to learn how to cook gourmet meals. There are many people who don't know how to cook gourmet meals and want to learn. Your blog can be the go to blog to show people how to cook gourmet meals. These are just 3 tips on how to blog. There are several components you can add to this example to monetize your blog and make more money blogging. I hope this stirred up your creative juices.

I look forward to hearing about how well your business is doing online.

Stay tuned, I may post a Part II to the 3 Tips on How to Blog.

Best Regards

Leah R. Evans

The Entrepreneur | How to Blog tips, tactics and strategies http://InetEntrepreneurs.com

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Blog post writing has become a very lucrative skill...but not everyone has the ability to tap into this profitable marketing tool...some are just launching their first blogs. If you are one of these people...there are few things you need to learn in order to make your blog popular. And unless you have the experience to provide people with useful information...you'll only get so far.

Here's some advice on writing blog posts that get traffic:

1. Show your readers who you are when writing your blog posts. What you can do for them...and what type of information can they expects from your posts? Don't try to be someone you're not. Letting people in is a great way to gain their trust. You'll be surprised at how many people will visit your blog if you open up a little.

2. If your posts are boring...how long would you expect someone to stay on your blog? My research has shown that people will only spend about 3 seconds reading your blog post before they decide if it's good or not. So make sure to capture these people's attention right away. Appeal to emotion if you have to. Offer some free videos on your topic...do whatever you have to do to get them to read your posts until the end.

3. Find a topic that has lots of search volume. OK...this is something that many people neglect to do, and it's ruining their chances for success. If you ever hope to get your blog posts on the first page of Google...you'll have to only write about what people are dying to know about. You can literally take them by the hand and guide them to your posts if you write about the current hot topics in your niche.

4. Something that I've noticed works really well for building credibility and trust with your readers is to interview someone well known in your niche. So you'll want to make sure you have some good questions to ask this expert...then give it to your readers as a free gift. This is great for establishing your blog as the go to place for information.

5. Blog posts are much more effective at getting search engine traffic when they are full of media and images. Not only will this get your blog better rankings...it will also make it more fun for people who read your posts. So try to include relevant images and videos for your readers and consistently look for new information to share with them.

6. Keywords are very important for your blog posts. If you focus on targeting specific keyword phrases, the chances of your blog coming up on the first page of Google are higher. So optimize your posts with relevant keywords that target the specific needs and wants of your audience. Make sure that you include a relevant key word in every paragraph of your content.

By the way, do you want to learn more about using articles like this to drive traffic to your website and increase online conversions?

If so, I suggest you check this out: article marketing skills

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