Blogging as a Resource

Your Blog is potentially a very valuable resource, are you making the most of it? If you have an active blog then you potentially have a very valuable resource that you should be making the most of. The first thing is to monetize your Blog. This could be as simple as adding some advertising banners on your blog (one across the top and one on your navigation pane). If you have some affiliateships or some of your own products your can also provide links to these on your blog.

If you also have your won website then your Blog should be integrated into this. You should have a link from your website to your blog and links from your Blog to valuable pages or resources on your website. Ideally these should be links to deep pages within your site as your Blog can help you overcome the problem of the search engines not indexing deeply enough into your website. The reason is this: If you have a Blog then all your older posts are archived, but these have the same website border as your current blogs. As a result you have a large number of copies of any links your've added to your blogs on multiple pages. This looks good to the web indexers and as a results they will index these pages (often very quickly).

The only hurdle to being indexed in this manner is that of actually getting your Blog crawled and indexed. If you're posting frequently then you can use 'ping' services such as pingomatic or pingoat to perform this task for you. Your new content will be posted to a number of Blog indexes and will be seen by the Search Engines and included in their indexes. However, as I've previously posted this may only be a transient inclusion. If you really want your Blog indexed on a premanent basis (along with all those pages the Blog points to) then you will need to treat your Blog exactly like any other web page.

What does this mean? Essentially you need to play the 'indexing' game. This means that you need to get sufficient in-bound links pointing to yor website that the serach engines can't help but index the pages and also have to maintanin them in their indexes. This means that you have to get your Blog included in as many Blog directories as possible (a good starting point for doing this is the RSSTop55 directory. This lists almost 185 blog directories and RSS feed aggregators.).

The other thing you need to do is to get your Blog published as an RSS xml feed as well (most blog generators do this for you) so that you can also add the content of your Blog to the various news aggregators out there.

This is only a brief outline of the advantages that a good Blog can bring you. For more information see my article on Blogging.