Blogging on Purpose for Home Business Entrepreneurs

Blogging is quite popular these days for promoting a home business online. Everyone says get a blog, right?

The idea is that a home business blog is a great platform for building your own presence and personal brand online. So maybe you decided to start a WordPress blog. Congratulations, you have made a great decision! If you haven’t done it yet, now is the time.

A key to successful blogging is knowing why you are blogging, and having a clear and firm understanding of what you need to have in place to make it effective for you.

Let’s look at some things that are important when preparing your blog to serve its purpose, which is to build and enhance your personal brand AND encourage visitors to purchase products from you or consider your business opportunity.

1) Define your niche – why are you blogging and who is your target audience? For example, my content is aimed at network marketers and other home business builders who are working hard to build their dream, and are looking for effective ways to take advantage of the power of the Internet for prospecting and growing their business.

My target audience is looking for ways to get found and get noticed online. By providing consistent value over time and developing new relationships, many people will buy something from me or join me in a business partnership. This is what it’s all about, and it’s the key to what I mean by “blogging on purpose”.

2) When you create your home business blog posts, focus on providing unique content, never just copy and paste from other peoples’ stuff. You CAN get ideas from what others write, in fact you will often be inspired by what others write. The key is to take what you learn from someone else and write about the concept they illustrated or taught in your own words and from your personal perspective.

3) Make sure you have some sort of free offer and an opt-in form. It’s critical to build your own list. This is a big topic that is beyond the scope of this post, but I can give you a couple of useful thoughts.

First, I think it’s best to create your own content as a giveaway. A lot of home business bloggers, particularly network marketers, use webinars and training materials provided by lead generation programs as their free offers. There is nothing wrong with these, as I have used them myself and they can be quite valuable.

Problem is, they don’t really brand YOU very well, they brand and build the reputation of the leaders and trainers who are actually producing the materials. That said, use this type of offer to build your list if it makes sense for you now, but strive to produce your own unique offer that nobody else has as soon as possible. It will make a difference for you in the long run.

4) When creating your posts, build them around keywords that people actually search for, as much as possible. This gives you the best shot at getting search engine traffic. There are some very complicated keyword tools out there, but I encourage you as a network marketer to keep things simple.

A very easy to use keyword research tool is provided by Google. It is called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can enter a concept, such as “network marketing success”, and it will give you lots of suggested keywords related to that concept and show you a rough idea of how many people are searching for it. You can use that information to create a keyword to build your post around.

Keep this logical and focused on your readers. Decide the basic topic you’d like to blog about and enter a broad keyword phrase that describes that topic, and build your post around one of the suggestions that come up. Look for those that show low competition and a decent number of monthly searches (1000+). You can be very creative about this and enhance your chances of getting found in searches.

There are tools that help you optimize your home business blog posts for your chosen keyword phrase. One that I use is is a WordPress plugin from Copyblogger, called Scribe SEO.

5) Keep your blog professional. Avoid having too many ad banners, especially if your blog is fairly new and you are still building your brand and reputation. I know this can be controversial, as part of the purpose of blogging is to sell products and services.

Two or three are fine, but have you visited a blog with sidebars full of ads…and lots of links in the content to ads….etc….and come away not really impressed with it?

This is fine for sites that are focused on selling advertising space or marketing multiple affiliate products to a specific niche, just be careful with ads on your personal branding blog.

A good alternative is to do in-depth reviews of products you are selling and present these as blog posts with links to your affiliate site. When I talk about toning down the ads I am speaking to network marketers and direct sellers, primarily, who are seeking to build a professional brand. If your blog looks like a flea market, you probably won’t leave the impression you’d like to with visitors.

6) Make it easy for visitors to share your content. There are some good WordPress plugins for this. The one I use now is called Digg Digg, and there is another I’ve used with success called Sociable. Whichever one you choose, just do it because you want people to share your content and you need to make it simple for them.

7) Remember that each of your posts should have a definite purpose. Always write your content with these things in mind:

• provide answers or solutions to questions/concerns/problems that your target market is facing

• post something entertaining from time to time that they will enjoy reading, sort of a lightening up moment – this could be a post about a trip you are enjoying thanks to income from your business, or something else that shows the advantages of your network marketing lifestyle for example

• lead readers to interact with you through joining your list, purchasing a product from you, or checking out your opportunity

You can use a WordPress plugin to create a basic signature that always appears with a link to your opportunity for example, then at the end of each post (depending on the topic and angle) you can gently guide readers to check out a product or join your list as well. If you have provided strong value in your post, this will be well received. This is what makes it work.

Also good is to encourage your readers to bookmark and share your content….so while you are here, if this information has been helpful to you, please see the Digg Digg bar to the left and share with others! I appreciate it.

Think professional, and provide consistent value to your readers with an end in mind. This is blogging on purpose, and your home business blog will attract more readers and be more successful when you do this.

Did you get some value from this post? If you did, I would really appreciate you sharing it with others! And, your comments are welcome below!

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