B2B Marketing Blog, Web 2.0 Social Media, Business Blogging Tools, Micromarkets and Interactive PR

Everyone who writes a business blog ultimately wants the same thing—more traffic. The posts below, some of the best of the past year on business blogging, provide helpful guidance on launching a new blog successfully; techniques for increasing visits to an existing blog; sources of free and cheap images to help your blog posts stand out; increasing your exposure through blog directories and RSS sites; and developing relationships with other influential bloggers in your industry.

How To Launch A Successful Blog In The First 90 Days by Influential Marketing Blog

Rohit Bhargava provides a list of tasks for new bloggers to focus on in the first three months of the blog, broken down into discrete time periods—for example, days 1-15 (find a good name, match your blog name and URL), days 15-30 (establish your blog "brand," get it listed in the major blog directories), and days 30-60 (reach out to other bloggers).

5 Ways To Optimize Your Blog and Capture More Repeat Visitors by ProBlogger

Rich Page recommends practices like tracking your internal search results (to help determine what topics are most important to your readers), surveying your readers, and building an online community into your site in order to increase repeat visits. All good ideas, though you'll need fairly substantial traffic to begin with for these techniques to be practical. A more broadly helpful post from this blog is 7 Steps to Better Business Blogging guest contributor Ann Handley of MarketingProfs. Among Ann's quick tips: be "scan friendly" by using bullet points, link to other blog posts on the same topic, and engage your readers in conversation by responding to comments.

The Lazy Blogger’s Guide to Finding Great Post Images by Copyblogger

This guest post from the brilliant Sonia Simone provides both thoughtful guidance on how to choose relevant images for your blog posts and links to a couple of her favorite sources for free or cheap yet high-quality images.

5 Sources for Free and Legal Images by The Blog Herald

Copyright expert Jonathan Bailey offers detailed reviews of five services, such as Photo Dropper and Zemanta, that "will not cost you a dime to use and, if used correctly, can let you fill up your blog posts with as many images as your heart desires." Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but the primary benefit of all of them is that they simplify the licensing requirements for using free, high-quality images.

TopRank Best List of RSS Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog and Feed by TopRank Online Marketing Blog

An outstanding list of blog directories, RSS and ping sites to help spread the fame of your blog. There are a few dead links in here and a few service with strange terms of use, but most of these links are active and useful.

Networking 101 – Building Relationships with Bloggers by Blogsessive

Alina Popescu provides an invaluable roadmap for establishing relationships, starting with commenting on their blog and actively participating in the conversation, through connecting on social media sites, linking, contacting directly, and writing guest posts. As she notes, "It (building relationships with other bloggers) doesn’t work like magic! Networking takes time and effort. Ongoing effort!" But the payoff can be well worth it, in terms of new relationships, higher blog traffic and increased exposure for you and your blog.

Previous posts in this series:

Best of 2008: SEO Guidance, Part 1
Best of 2008: Interactive PR, Part 1
Best of 2008: SEO Tools, Part 1
Best of 2008: Search Engine Marketing
Best of 2008: Web Analytics
Best of 2008: Email Marketing Tips
Best of 2008: SEO Keyword Tips & Tools
Best of 2008: Sales & Marketing Copywriting
Best of 2008: SEO Link Building
Best of 2008: Website Design
Best of 2008: WordPress Tools and Tips
Best of 2008: Web & SEO Copywriting
Best of 2008: SEO Guidance, Part 2
Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 1
Best of 2008: AdWords Tips and Tactics, Part 1
Best of 2008: SEO Tools, Part 2
Best of 2008: SEM Landing Pages
Best of 2008: Blogging for Business, Part 1
Best of 2008: Interactive PR, Part 2
Best of 2008: SEO Guidance, Part 3
Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 2
Best of 2008: AdWords Tips and Tactics, Part 2
Best of 2008: Strategy and Branding, Part 1
Best of 2008: Cool Web Tools, Part 1

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