Blogs (A subset of Link Building)

These great tools act as duplicate websites that are extremely
easy and free to set up, and can generate traffic very quickly.
All you need is some content, not even very good content,
and you’ve got a great “Second site” for the search engine to follow your links to
and from.
Ever since Google bought Blogger.com, Googlebot has paid a lot of attention to
what’s happening in “the Blogosphere.” Search engines still love to spider Blog
content more often than other types of websites, since blogs were invented to be
easy for SE Spiders to traverse in the first place.
A unique feature of even the free blogs like Wordpress & blogger is that you can
set them up to automatically “ping” certain Search Engines or even social
bookmarking sites to request that the spider comes out for another visit every
time new content is added.
However, the hype about blogs has mostly died down now. (Thank goodness!) At
first it was well justified, and then a method of website marketing called “Blog and
Ping” was overused in early 2006 by most of the Internet Marketers of the time.
It involved making tons of blogs with almost no content in them except a link to
their website, and then setting them all to ping immediately… This caused
Google to hold an emergency war council and now the Ping feature is only
marginally better than not at all. –It is still an advantage over normal websites
though!
The other great thing about a Blog is that you can get attention to it, not just by
pinging but with any of the thousands of social bookmarking tools, per POST, not
per website, which is a powerful thing. There are many marketers who are using
Wordpress blogs installed on their own servers to generate 4,000 unique visitors
every day right now! –Not peaks, but Constant traffic… Although they do have to
come up with good content daily for that to stay at that level.
You can read a lot more about Web 2.0 and Social bookmarking in later
chapters, including how they relate to blogs, but the thing to decide at this point is
if you want to build a huge, high-tech blog yourself, or if you just want to use
other’s blogs for some easy traffic.
Check out this service by none other than Mike Filsaime: The Free Advertising
Blog. It’s an interesting example of a blog turned into a free-for all ad posting
site. He’s basically just allowed anyone to sign up for free and start posting their
ads, even in full HTML. –With a few hundred or thousand blog postings a day, I
get the idea that no one’s ever going to read these things… But since it’s a Blog,
you know Googlebot will!
A BLOG with thousands of posts a day?? Let’s just say that the jury is still out on
how long this will last. –But you might as well sign up and get your free one-way
link to your sites with it while they’re still valuable.
The reason I mentioned Free Ad Blog wasn’t just to build downlines, but I wanted
to demonstrate a point; it’s easy to find blogs that are watched by search engine
spider constantly, so you can submit one-way links back to your site. This is by
no means the only blog online that will let you post for free.
So, a big bloggin’ operation or simply small blog hit n’ run jobs; It’s up to you how
to use weblogs. They are extremely flexible & powerful when coupled with social
bookmarking tools, and the Blogosphere is growing exponentially, daily. But no
matter which you choose, I recommend you start somewhere, because we’re all
going to be blogging eventually if we still have a need for any traffic.