Improving Page Rank with Blogging and Forums

 

The golden rule of internet marketing is to remember that the web is not just a marketplace, it is a collection of communities. As with real-life community, you will find that the more you put in, the more you will get out. This does not just mean offering a good product at a good price, it means identifying communities that are a focal point for your customers and other businesses in your field.

Online forums are ideal. Apart from being an excellent way of contacting customer within your target market, most offer a certain amount of free advertising by allowing you to customise you signature strip, (the short section of text that appears automatically at the end of every post you make). A good signature strip should be short; your website address and a sentence or two summarising your business and the main benefit you offer customers. When you sign up to a forum, it is also useful to complete your forum profile page. People who are serious about doing business with you will want to find out more by looking at your profile and website before contacting you.

Blogs are a good example of community-oriented nature of the internet. If you write a blog to promote your business, you should encourage other members of the web community to come along and add useful comment to it. The best way of doing this is to attract attention by adding constructive or helpful comments to other people’s blogs. If you are adding a valuable contribution to someone else’s site (and maybe their business), the chances are that they will come and do the same for yours. This kind of activity builds a ‘buzz’ around your website. You will steadily get more visitors, and if those visitors find your business website useful or interesting, the ones that themselves own blogs or websites may well put a link to your site on theirs. Most blog providers will host your blog on their servers if you wish, though this will under their domain name, for example, www.youbusinessblog.blogger.com

Many providers will also allow you to upload static blog pages to your website, so you can have an address like www.yourbusinesswebsite.com/yourbusinessblog. However, some providers such as the open source WordPress, allow you to upload the blogging software to your web server and blog dynamically, meaning visitor comments and discussion can take place in real time. Some services charge a fee for enhanced membership, which offers additional benefits.

Blogging sites/software

www.blogger.com
www.movabletype.org
www.squarespace.com
www.typepad.com
www.wordpress.com (blog hosting)
www.wordpress.org (open source software download)