One you have a site up and running it becomes very important to get some solid traffic to it. No traffic means no sales, customers... no business, really. Depending on your kind of business, this can be quite difficult. If you're selling things that other people are selling it can be very hard to get your pages ranked. This is especially true if you're just using standard descriptions rather than creating your own, or if you have a company generated webpage that gives you no control over these things. One of the simplest ways to handle this is to start a blog. If you have your own domain, I strongly recommend getting the free Wordpress software (one click install on most hosts) and using that. But if you don't have a way to put a blog on your site, there are many free options. Blogger is quite popular, partially because it is from Google, and people feel it may get spidered more often, but also because they don't mind you advertising on it. Some other free blogs do not want you using their sites for commercial purposes of any kind. The danger to any free blog is that it can be deleted at any time, with little or no notice. But so long as you follow the rules this will only rarely be a problem. Hosting your own is far safer. On your blog, you want to write posts and articles that will bring people to your blog and get them interested in your products. It is not so easy as writing blatant ads, which most people won't read. You want to write articles that will make people want to use what you have to offer. Free tips relevant to the products are generally a very good idea. They can be fun to write, and if you get creative and think of unusual uses, you can get people who might not have purchased your products to try them. Most blog posts are fairly short. You don't have to write a novel. Sometimes even just a few sentences will do... just so long as those sentences have something interesting to say. One of the most important things about blogging to promote your business is to make sure that you post regularly. Weekly is a bare minimum, but most successful bloggers post more often than that. Some even post many times throughout the day, every day. You just have to figure out what works best for your business. Posting on your blog is not enough. You need to ping as well. If you're using the Wordpress software, it can be set up to ping automatically. You at the very least want to ping one of the services that will ping other sites for you. Ok, ok, I'll tell you what pinging is. Otherwise that last paragraph will be just nonsense to some people. A ping is a signal sent to sites that accept them, that lets them know that you have new content for them to look at. You can do this manually by visiting sites as well. One of the most popular sites to ping is Technorati. If you sign up for an account and claim your blog, you can go in and manually ping it if you can't figure out how to do it on your blogging software. On Wordpress software, you just have to go to Options - Writing to tell it where to ping. Once your blog is up and running, it can be a huge help to your other site in building both traffic and sales. And you might just enjoy the blogging part of it too.
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