The first question is what kind of blog? Although there are alternatives, the most popular blogging software packages are Google’s Blogger and Word press .For more details visit to www.rss-announcers.com. This offers you four blogging options, and three ways of creating a blog to get traffic to your website.

Why four from just two blogging packages? Here is the answer to that question, and how if you create a blog using each, you will maximize your earning potential from your products:

BloggerBlogger is blogging software owned by Google. Most people run their blog from Blogspot, Bloggers blogging host. When you do that you have less control over your blog than if you operate it from your own IP address. Blogger is very easy to use, and very easy to get started with, and is popular with those who don’t want to worry about templates, plugging and designing their own blogs.

Word pressWord press can also be run from the Word press hosting site. However, where Word presses scores over Blogger is in the fact that the software can be uploaded to your website, and can be run from there. This enables you to use any of the thousands of Word press plugging and templates that provide an almost unlimited degree of functionality in your blogging that will help to drive traffic to your website.

When you create a blog with any of these two different packages, whether run from your own computer or from the blog host, you are able to provide fresh content daily to your virtual website. Because that is what a blog is: it is in effect a web page, in the same way that a Squidoo lens and a page on a website is a web page.

Bogging and Search EnginesBlogging allows you a presence on search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and allows those with little idea of SEO or even of web design, to sell products online. There was a time when blogs were a rarity and something new, but blogging is now a way for anybody that knows how to create a blog can drive traffic to their website or to their blog page and help they make money through free advertising.

However, even a blog has to be advertised. Blogging in itself is not an advertising technique, but one of displaying your thoughts, idea, products or advertising your products. Now, you might think I am being a bit duplicitous here, stating that blogging is not a means of advertising yet can be used to advertise! Yet both statements are true. Let me explain why.

Is Blogging an Advertising Technique?Yes and no. You can create a blog in order to get traffic to your website, and in that respect you are using your blog for advertising. You can place a link to your website: your squeeze page, sales page or just a content page. The question is, how do you get people to read your blog, and then click on one of these links? The link could be placed at the bottom of every post, and on a permanent page on your blog, but how do yet get traffic to your blog: you have the same problem now as getting traffic to your website!

What you have here is that blogging can be use to promote another site, whether it be a website, another blog or a social networking site such as Face book, My Space or You Tube. You can use all of these to promote and sell products. However, how do you get people, to find your blog? Creating a blog is fine, but that is only the start.

Use Article Marketing in BloggingThere is one way, and that is article marketing. By writing articles about your niche or product, and then including a link to your blog in the article, you can use the article to advertise your blog .For more information logon to www.feed-reader-links.com. If you can persuade a reader to click on your link, they will reach your blog on which you provide them with links to your website, your other blogs and your Face book and My Space home pages.

Perhaps you can’t write, and maybe don’t know how to use articles properly, or even where to get them. Well don’t worry. If you want to make the best use of the internet than create a blog, get blogging and then use the help provide online to make best use of your blog make money.

Blogging and traffic go together, and it is easy to create a blog to drive traffic to your website or any other online web page (such as another blog). You only need to know how.

I can show you how: check out Article Czar for information on how articles can be used to make money from your blog, and also to receive a free gift for visiting. I also include a small file that shows you how to set up your Word press blog on your website. Also check out Create A Blog for more general advice on creating your own blog.

www.instant-blog-and-ping.com www.bloggers-guide-to-profit.com

Google trusts blogs. Google has trust issues with Internet marketers. This is unfortunate but understandable, since so many marketers make so many spammy, cruddy sites.

Internet marketing has been around as long as the web has been around. In fact, sales and marketing pages were among some of the first pages out there.

But blogs have a different chain of evolution. They started out being written by everyday users, and have only in the last few years been used as marketing tools.

It’s a shame that Google doesn’t trust marketing tools any more than it does. And while the people there know that blogs are sometimes used this way, they also know that most blogs are still used by the average everyday user. You can use this to your advantage by turning your favorite blogging platform (like WordPress or Blogger) into a cash-generating supertool.

Blogs are easy to use. Unlike standard websites, blogs don’t require you to upload a file every time you make a new page. This makes blogs more convenient. Plus you don’t have to learn how to upload pages via FTP or some other system (an often frustrating experience).

Blogs are easy to update. Blogging software is made for the average Joe to be able to put his pages up on the Internet You don’t need to understand HTML or know how to use complicated page creation software like Dreamweaver.

Blogging software is set up so that it’s even easier than driving a car! It may not look this way to you at first. But once you become familiar with your blogging software, you’ll see why the user interface is called a “dashboard” instead a “control panel” (or a “cockpit”).

Search engines like recent material. The Internet thrives on speed. This is why the big three search engines often include how recent a piece of content is, when deciding how to rank it.

Keep in mind that this is more true in some niches than in others. Recent news is highly important if you’re trying to rank well for a celebrity or entertainment keyword, but not so much for something like antiques or ancient Chinese history.

You can get a blog for free! You don’t have to worry about buying a domain name or shelling out up to twenty-five bucks (or more) a month for hosting. Just go to one of the many free blogging sites online–WordPress.com and Blogger.com are the two most popular–and get one for free!

Another great thing about both of these sites is that they tend to do well in the search engines. They are huge sites that the search engines visit every day, so your content should be available in no time. (New sites can takes WEEKS to get indexed in the search engines.)

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years then you know that blogging has become a formidable force on the internet and has allowed many people to get an online presence that may otherwise have been unable to do so. Many of these people are making their living by blogging and some like Jason Calcanis have become wealthy from it. Jason built a network of blogs over about eighteen months and sold them to AOL for nearly $30 million! That’s a pretty good ROI. Anyway, I digress, back to our discussion on web hosting.

If you have decided that you want to operate a blog your next choice will probably be what blogging platform or software you want to use to accomplish you blogging. Relax, it’s easy. Most of the blogging software out there today is open source which means it’s, you guessed it, free! In this instance free is not a bad thing, I use Wordpress almost exclusively, it is free and has more options that I care to learn or use. There are other blogging software options available, but I won’t go into them here because this article is about web hosting.

As far as web hosting for your blog you can choose free web hosting or paid so let’s take a closer look at our choices. First off, you can choose Blogger which is owned by Google. Blogger is a good program especially for beginning bloggers because it is easy to use, it is web based, and the price is right. It’s free. With that said however, if your intention is to blog professionally and possibly run a large number of blogs with automated content then Blogger is not for you. I have seen Google shut down many blogs because they considered them to be spam. If you want control over your own destiny then you want to use paid web hosting and have your blogs on your own server, or at least a shared server.

Still in the realm of free web hosting you also have a fairly new option from Wordpress who now offers a free web hosting for Wordpress blogs at their .com site as opposed to the .org site where you get the software and plug ins. The problem is that like Google, they are very restrictive with what you can put on your blogs and how you update them.

Another big issue with free web hosting is that you will usually have to display advertising of some sort which “pays” for your web hosting. This is great for the web hosting companies because it gives them tons of virtual real estate out there with their name on it, not so great for you. If you are blogging professionally, and if you are trying to make money for it then you are blogging professionally, you do not want any distractions on your site that leads visitors away from your site unless you are being paid for it like you do when someone clicks on an Adsense ad or affiliate banner.

My recommendation is that you pay for your own hosting because it gives you a wealth of choices, much more storage space, and takes almost all restrictions off of you within reason. There are still some web hosting companies that will not allow you to host gambling or porno blogs but other than that you are pretty open. Paid web hosting is not that expensive. You can get an account that will host as many blogs as most people will want to deal with a few bucks a month. So for the cost of a domain name and your hosting you will probably be around $100 a year. That is a pretty cheap investment for something that enables you to plug into all the ways of earning money on the net.

The beauty of this software lies in its comprehensive feature list that includes

• Multiple blogs

• Multiuser with different access levels

• Antispam tools

• Trackbacks and pingbacks

• Timezone handling

• RSS and ATOM feeds

• Image file organizer.

• It is also multilingual; a feature that can be attributed to its originator, Francois Planque—who was a Frenchman.

In addition to that, the latest version of B2 evolution has been enriched with many more interesting features:

One of the most talked about point in the new release is its parting with the feature of configuration file editing. From now on, all configuration tasks are going to be handled through the installer or administrative back-end.

In addition to that, this software allows an admin user to lock himself out permanently. What he needs to do is to redirecting the admin.php page to a nonexistent URL on the root domain.

Another important feature relates to the spam protection for which B2Evolution receives adieus. It is provided with community-wide spam filters. This helps the B2Eevolution sites aggregate and “tag” spammer IPs into a central blacklist. The other B2Eevolution blogs get benefited from this spam filtering.

Then, B2Evolution is famously packed with a fully skinnable interface. Traditional blog, knowledge base, bug tracker—-any type of skins can be easily downloaded and installed to render a new look and feel to your blog site.

It also offers localization into a number of language packs which can be easily downloaded. Already available languages are: Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. Even if you can’t find your language, just use the localization toolkit to easily localize B2Evolution to your language. With B2evolution it’s really easy to translate to your own language too.

The software helps to integrate a truly efficient workflow.

How does it work? When a user posts an article, it can be assigned to an editor. Editor may then assign them to reviewers for final approval and then only the article is published on the site. Thus, the actual permissions and statuses remain with the site owner.

In its course of development, the B2Evolution also introduced 3rd party plugin features that allow further expansion in its feature list. Some of the most popular plugins from the users perspective are Textile, Auto-P, Greymatter, BB code, Texturize (text formatting plug-ins), and graphic smilies.

B2Evolution has built-in support for RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom feeds for both posts and comments.

No matter whether you are going to step into the world of professional web publishing or just want to start a fun filled family blog, the comprehensive b2evolution platform can give you an easily installable, free, feature rich, extensible blogging solution. Unless with B2 Evolution, your transition from a novice to seasoned blogger could never have been so quick and smooth.

So how do I host my own blog, anyway?

The easiest way to do this is to install and run a blogging software from another company on your web site’s server. One such software that is popular is WordPress. It’s fairly easy to install and works pretty good on your site. Other blogging software options include:

Apache Roller

Blosxom

Geeklog

Textpattern

LifeType

Whatever one you choose, be sure to follow the instructions provided by the company so that the installation goes smoothly.

Where should I put my blog on my site?

Most people who host their blog to help their site get listed quickly don’t put the blog on the main page of the site, because the site isn’t all about the blog. Instead they put it in its own folder at mysite.com/blog/. But you can really put your blog anywhere on your site, so it’s your call.

What is pinging?

It’s a question that many ask, so don’t feel silly if you don’t know what pinging is. Pinging is essentially a tracking program installed on your blog that will notify the site which it is from whenever your blog is updated. Search engine spiders usually visit newly pinged sites most often, which is why pinging is such a crucial part of the equation to get your site listed quickly. Sites that are newly “pinged” will be visited by search engine spiders. A visit from the spider equals a listing on the search engine.

How do I get pinging on my blog?

You’ll have to register with a site that offers weblog pinging. The most popular pinging program around is weblogs.com. Other programs offered include Yahoo’s Blo.gs, BlogRolling, and Technorati. Once you’ve decided on a pinging service, you’ll have to follow the instructions to install it on your blog. When you’ve done that, your blog will start getting pinged and visited by search engine spiders.

What is linking?

Linking is basically having another blog or site link to your blog. When search engine spiders visit that site and see a link to your site, they’ll visit your site. Linking is effective both for sites with blogs and those without it.

How do I get linking?

You get it by visiting sites/blogs that are relevant to what your site is about. Then you contact the owners of those sites/blogs, asking them to post a link to your site on their site. In return, you will probably have to link to their site on your site. That way, both of you are able to benefit from the linking.

Why is the use of keywords important to my blog?

Spiders love to visit sites with a good amount of keywords. People who read your site won’t mind the use of keywords if they are lightly spread throughout the content of your pages. The key to this is to make a list of keywords relevant to your blog posting and then to try to use those keywords throughout your content. It is important to make sure, however, not to overuse keywords. Spiders have been trained to ignore sites with excessive amounts of keywords, so if you use a whole lot of keywords in the hopes of getting spiders to visit your site, it’s not going to do you any good. Generally speaking, using between 2-6 keywords per 200 word piece of content is a good ratio. It’s pleasing to both readers and search engine spiders.

That’s really all there is to it. Apply the above techniques to your blog and you will net your site a quick search engine listing.

There is no quicker way to get your site listed than to use a blog. So install a blog on your site today and you’ll be listed sooner than you could have imagined!