Using Blogs To Bridge To
Your Website
The Importance Of A Bridge Site
If you are like most Internet
entrepreneurs, you start to collect different
websites or web presences that are useful for generating traffic back to
your site. Some of these places, like Digg, Facebook, or article archives
can be a great resource in
advertising your sales website on the Internet to specific demographics. However, many third-party sites have specific rules about the types of pages that people can use in
their comments, their articles, and/or biographical
information. Ezinearticles, for
instance, won't allow you to link back
to a sales page, and yet, this is at the heart of Internet marketing. You wouldn't
be out there, if you weren't trying to get someone to buy something from you. So, what do you
do?
That's where you start to
realize that there are ways to get around the rules that others put in place
to limit your Internet
marketing activities, and bridge sites are an important strategy to
exploit. Even when a third-party
doesn't ban you for linking to a
sales page, there are also other times when it's just jarring to go from a link, say like in Facebook, to a sales
page. In some ways, social networkers will judge such a move as “too
commercial” and you can lose
credibility in your authenticity that way. So,
again, you want to implement a bridge
site to smooth the way.
Why Blogs Are Ideal Bridge
Sites
Web logs, a.k.a. “blogs,” are an
excellent way to bridge from a site like a user-interactive
social networking site to a commercial sales page. That's because they
tend to be a mix of both. You have
your daily blogs that you post, that
are typically informal, casual in tone, and friendly, and you have links that are put on a blog that are
expected to link to more commercial endeavors. The casual style is much in keeping with
the style of social networking, and
so it is less jarring to people who can be harvested from these sites and do not realize
that they have begun to be marketed.
This gives you an edge because
there is less buyer's resistance on this format. Also, as long as you own the blog, you can
link to anything that you want to
link to, so that makes it ideal as a bridge site. And, the major search engines
love to crawl blogs frequently because of the way content is updated more regularly, so you
get a wider audience.
In addition, you can put links
in your blog posts that send people to different sales pages. You can set
up a
blog anonymously or with a pseudonym, and
thus, no one has to know that the
links you promote are from your own website. Once someone visits your blog, they should
have an easy to remember URL that is all yours.
Blogs can be addictive because
the information should be updated once daily,
if not more. As long as the
information is informative and entertaining, you can get people to subscribe to your blog. This converts them from an anonymous
viewer to someone who is now basically entering your sales funnel.
You can then begin to
offer them some deals or introduce
them to the product lineups on
other websites you own, that can convert them from subscriber to customer.
WordPress Is The Gold Standard
So, now you see the value in
having a blog as an intermediary from third-
party sites with massive traffic streams, to get potential customers
into your sales pipeline. But, where do you start? WordPress is the gold standard of easy to implement blogs, and there are
even some hosts that will put a site for
you, which you end up customizing. However,
there is a bit of confusion with WordPress that is important to clarify.
The WordPress.org is a
shareware software package that anyone can use for free. Some commercial people took that software and built
WordPress.com, the .com extension
signifying it is a commercial endeavor. That's
a community of bloggers with
WordPress blogs with limited features and heavy-handed guidelines.
Some of the guidelines on
WordPress.com don't allow you advertise the way you would want to do on a Internet marketing blog. In particular, you can't make any money off Google ads from your
blog using WordPress.com. So, you want to make sure that you are using
WordPress.org hosted on a site where
the rights to add Google ads to the blog is not banned. That way you can make
money through advertising too and you get all the features that are important to develop your Internet marketing blog.
Some Plug-Ins You Want
To Use
WordPress features can be added
through the installation of third-party software called
“plug-ins.” There are many different plug-ins
that are
beneficial to the Internet
marketer as there are numerous developers who
are interested in pushing this market forward. The following list is far from
comprehensive, but it gives you a good idea of some plug-ins you
definitely want to get and install:
·
Akismet
This plug-in is a spam filter and
can save you loads of time moderating
comments. It follows a database that
is regularly updated of known
spammers, so you don't have to read every single
comment that comes to your blog. It
will automatically filter the spam out and put
it in a spam folder
where you can look at it at your leisure.
·
Adsense Deluxe
This plug-in lets you even add Adsense code directly into your blog
posts, not just the
sidebar.
·
DoFollow
If you have a “do follow” blog
you are more likely to attract visitors and
blog commentators. That's because no
follow blogs do not give credit for
a backlink, which is why many people post in the first place.
·
Email Users
If you are going to use your
subscription list as an email contact list for your Internet marketing activities, you will need to add this
plug-in. It lets you send email to your registered users.
·
Gregarious
This helps you to connect to
other site by giving the option for social
bookmarking posts to places like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and more.
·
WordPress e-commerce
You can add a shopping cart to
your blog with this particular plug- in.
·
All In
One SEO Pack
A “must have” plug-in for
Internet marketers as it optimizes your pages
to get great search engine page results. It's
a great way to attract a lot of
attention from search engines with minimal time investment.
·
Subscribe To Comments
This plug-in helps people
to track a comment stream
on a particular post and keeps them coming back to
your blog.
Grabbing Traffic From Third Party
Sites
Once you've set up the blog and
understand how you will take people from there
to your website pages, either via links in your blog posts or sidebar, you still need to get people to visit your
blog from other third-party sites. And,
which third-party sites should you try to get a web presence on? Let's
go over a few of the different places you can begin to cultivate a web presence for the purpose of grabbing
traffic, and how to use each one with your blog to lead people
from that area to your own.
Other Blogs
Once you've set up a blog, the natural place to start looking for traffic
is other more high profile
blogs in your market niche. If you
don't know who these people are, you
need to visit Technorati.com and put in a few keywords that are in your market niche to determine who the big players
are. You should make it a point to build a list of blogs that you can add
to your blog roll and see if by doing
so, they add you to their blog roll. The
blog roll is a list of blogs that
other bloggers recommend and by getting added to a blog roll on a popular blog, you'll automatically get more traffic
from the target niche that you've
selected.
Another way to get more
traffic from blogs is to comment on the top profile blogs and leave a link to a blog post that addresses some aspect
of the post. This way you play off
on an already popular topic and you contribute to the conversation too. It's
not considered spam to put your URL in a comment if it points to something that contributes to the conversation, not
just a sales page. Again, you are using the bridge of your
website to grab eyeballs and then once they get to your blog, you can market
them there.
Finally, you can also go
to blog communities like WordPress.com and look on their
featured stories and categories. Find
one or two blog postings that you can
reply to and contribute to the conversation.
Once these blog posts are put
on their featured page, you will get a lot of traffic if you post something interesting with a link back to your own
blog. Since you're dealing with people who already to subscribe to blogs,
it's a natural for increasing your blog subscribers too.
Digg.com
Digg is a social news site
where people submit stories and other people vote on them. The more
popular the news story becomes, the more it is highly ranked by Digg. It can
even land on the front page of Digg, which will provide a megaboost of traffic for anyone who happens to land there.
You
can submit your story to Digg and
get your friends and associates to vote for
it. It can be a story you put
on your blog on a popular subject. It
doesn't matter than you're not an
expert, as long as you can talk about the subject intelligently and make the story entertaining. If you know what subjects are generating controversy on the web, those
are always a good subject to try to get
into Digg, just be careful not to draw negative attention to your blog instead
of positive attention.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Delicious.com is social
bookmarking site that allows you to add different pages of your blog to a site where others can view it. Just be sure to use a permalink to a particular story, and not
the entire blog URL. That way, you can tag each story with different tags and
people will be able to zoom to them
when they search the social bookmarking sites.
There are many different social
bookmarking sites, like Reddit too. They tend to have a large
number of people and can be searched very easily.
Social Networking Sites
Facebook and MySpace are two
examples of social networking sites. These sites tend to have strict rules about what
you can post online on your profiles. Facebook, in particular, does not want
people using their profiles to spam
or soliciting other people on their business offerings and this activity can get you banned. However, there are ways to mine the rich vein of users that
come to social networking
sites to mingle online.
First, you will have to set up a
profile with your own name, not your business
name. You can put up a
Facebook page for your business, as a newer feature for those people who are trying to use
Facebook to market.
However, the Facebook profile
should be all about you, not your business. There
is an area in your profile where you can list your URLs of interest, and that's
where you can add some of
your business sites.
The key to Facebook is to join
in the casual atmosphere and network your way
to more contacts. You can do this
through groups, pages, friends, and networks. You should try to meet people who are in
your market niche, but not to solicit
them directly on Facebook. Instead,
you can email and network through different commenting areas to get people interested in your blog.
There are different applications
that can help you insert your blog into your
profile too.
There is a Blog Network
application, now formally called NetworkedBlogs, that allows you to post your blog, claim it, and get people to become a fan of it. You can network with other bloggers on
Facebook too, by visiting their blogs and becoming a fan of them too, since it
lists them too. It allows
you
to see blogs in your category
fairly easily and to promote your blog to readers
through the network. Send them a
friend request to anyone that becomes
a reader, to any other bloggers in your market niche, and now you have
access to some of the audience
that is in your market
niche.
When you comment on the wall
of people you have friended, all of their friend's
will see your comment and it can lead them to your blog. Just be careful not to spam their wall and make
any comments relevant and not a solicitation. The blog network will take them directly
outside Facebook to your blog and
provide a steady stream of new people looking at your blog who are involved in your market niche. It's actually pretty simple when you know what applications to use.
Another great feature on
Facebook is the ability to create a page for your business, a brand or product, or if you are a performer, you can
create one as an artist, band, or
public figure. The difference between
a Facebook page and your profile
page is that you are allowed to actively promote your business on the page, but not the profile. And, your profile is limited to 5,000 friends, whereas the Facebook page
is not. Some people even create a page for themselves when they hit the
5,000 friend limit, so they can continue to network on Facebook and add fans, if
not friends.
Another feature is groups,
where you can add a group on any topic and get
people to sign up. Like the
Facebook page, people will become a fan and then
you have a captive audience there. You
may not have their email address, but
it's the perfect place (both on the page and in the group) to promote your blog and get many people to
go from Facebook back to your bridge, so that
you can start to collect their email addresses.
The funny thing about Facebook
is that they are super paranoid about having
marketers harvest emails. So,
they don't add the email contact information
in as text, it's an image. You
can write the email down for each friend that
you have, if it is showing in their information tab, but even sometimes it's not
there either. So, it takes a bit of
work to collect an email list from Facebook and if they catch you spamming
or soliciting people with it, you risk losing your account. The smart way to do this is to simply
entice them off Facebook back to your
web log, where you have an offer that gives them something for free for
providing their email.
And, since Facebook has a culture of
non-commercialism, the blog is a perfect
intermediary step from Facebook to your sales page eventually. If you were to link in to the
sales page directly, you might end up being
banned by Facebook or at
least dropped by a few friends. No
one really wants to be marketed
harshly on Facebook, and it takes some finesse to get people to trust you enough to buy from you. So, don't spoil it by being overenthusiastic with your business on
Facebook. Master the art of the soft sell, and use
an intermediary space to
set the stage for your marketing
offer.
Article Directories
People all across the web are
in search of quality content. Sometimes
they go to article directories where
anyone is allowed to post free content, as long as it meets the criteria of the article directory. EzineArticles is one such directory that you can sign up for and
start creating content for other people to grab and post on their websites.
While it may seem
counterproductive to create free articles that people can add to their own sites, as long as they
reference back to you or the original article,
it is just because of this feature that it makes it a great way to get traffic
from many different
places, not just the article
archive. If your article
becomes very popular, you may have several different places on the web linking to it, excerpting it, and all
pointing back to you or the original article.
This is in addition to the tons of traffic article directories naturally
get from their own readers and the high placement in search engine
result pages.
Now, every article directory
gives you, the author, a resource box where you can link to your own enterprises. You probably won't be able to actively promote your links within the article, as there are strict rules
forbidding linking from an article in
an article directory to a sales page. However,
you can post a link in your resource
box pointing to your enterprises there and you are typically allowed at least two
links.
As your articles grow in
popularity, they can generate third-party traffic to your sites for an extended period of time. At first, you will get an instant boost because the article will
automatically go on the front page for a period of time. After that,
it will depend on how well you optimized it for Google keywords and popularly searched topics, as to how often it is
read or accessed. So, you do have to do a little extra work
to get your articles to be highly
searchable for a period of time. But,
after that, once they're up, you can
forget about them and let the article directories, the search engines, and the topic do the
work for you.
What's nice about submitting
to article directories is that you can post multiple
articles on different topics, related but not exact. So, if you have many different
websites, you can post on different topics
without creating a new
account. Readers who like one story,
will see other stories you have written
and might be tempted to go further to look you up. Always give them a
reason in your resource box to click on the link you provide to your blog where they can find even more material that is
relevant to that article.
Social Search Engines
A great way to grab traffic is
to go to a social search engine like StumbleUpon. This search engine doesn't use keywords to
assign relevancy. All the pages
are submitted by users of the search engine who categorize
them and they can even give them
a “thumbs up.” Even if you don't get
that many thumbs up, just
submitting different posts from your blog can help to drive traffic there because the pages are randomly “stumbled”
when people search for different topics. So, you stand a pretty good chance of showing up on anyone's
pc if they use StumbleUpon as their search
engine.
As with many other types of
services that are social in nature, the less
commercial you appear, the better it is for you. And, you want to keep submitting
content to the search engine repeatedly to get more hits. That means your blog
is ideal for submitting permalinks that go to different stories
on your blog to attract attention there. Once people visit your blog, they can be lead to other areas of your web empire via links in the
blog post, links in the sidebars, or promotional offers
to subscribers of the
blog.
In order to use StumbleUpon,
all you have to do is install the toolbar into
your web browser. From there,
it's a simple matter to use the thumbs up button
to quickly add your submissions to the search engine. Just make sure you
add the permalink and not the entire blog URL, or you will have multiple copies of the front page instead of
multiple stories showing up. And, of course, the story on the front page of
your blog changes when new content comes
up, so the categories and tags change too. It's
always very important to use the
permalink that will identify a particular blog post when adding submissions to search engines
or other social
news sites.
Groups
Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups both have a number of different categories of groups where you can join up
to discuss particular topics. What's
nice about these areas is that they can have a very large audience that already are discussing a topic
relevant to your market niche, and signing
up is free. Many groups are
moderated, meaning you can't just sign up and
then spam the front page. That
will get you banned for sure. You
can, however, introduce yourself
and then set up a standard
signature file that you can use to close out a posting.
That's where you can put the URL to links to other
activities you are involved in.
So, don't just post a “come
see my blog” comment on a thread and expect to
get massive traffic. All that will do
is get you banned – very quickly!
Instead, join in the conversation and contribute to it.
It not only helps to get people
to see you as an expert, but will eventually create more interest in your signature links, without bashing
people over the head with your advertising. It's also
better received by moderators.
Web Forums
Web forums are set up by web
masters or niche marketers. They may require a membership fee to get in, or
they may be free to join like Digitalpoint
or Sitepoint forums. You have to
abide by the terms of the forum
posting rules. However, because they
are usually technical or business in
nature, you can get a large number of people who are interested in being referrals or affiliates, once they become
aware of your programs.
A really clever way to attract
traffic from web forums to your blog is to give away some tool, templates, or software aide that webmasters or Internet marketers are interested in using. It's not considered spam to post a link to your blog if what you are giving away
really is helpful to them. However,
if the giveaway is part of a
marketing promotion, that they have to subscribe to pay, it may be less welcome.
Use the blog as a bridge to
get them interested in your products or affiliate programs by showing them how they can make money using them. The audience
for web forums tend to be a bit more high level that just consumers looking for an entertaining product. Many of them are online to ramp up online businesses, just like you. So, anything you post to get them excited about your affiliate programs and referral
bonuses will lead them to your web log.
How To Bridge Successfully
It should be obvious now that you
can link from anywhere on the Internet to your web log
to bypass strict rules limiting marketing on third-party sites.
And, in fact, it's an ideal way
to build a contact list, more so than a sales
page. That's because the format
is much less commercial and people are eager to subscribe to information-packed blogs, whereas they may be a bit more suspicious about giving out email
information on a sales page.
So, here are a few more things
to make the bridging
form one area of the Internet to your sales offers, much more effective.
Pay Attention To The Audience
Since you are linking in from
various places on the web, you don't want to
just have a standard page where everyone gets pushed to. That would be like having a sales page that just tries to cram a marketing
offer down people's throats without
bothering to even find out what they're there for. However, once you visit some third-party sites, you'll start to
get a good idea of the type of
audience that they attract, and can write a blog post that will appeal to that audience specifically. That way, when you insert a link to go back to your blog, it will go to
the permalink that has that particular post.
This will make setting up
different links to different pages in your web log easier and customized to the particular audience you are trying to attract.
Categorize and Tag Your Posts
Once you do get a visitor, they should land on the post that appeals to them as part of a larger audience (if you did
this right). But, after that, they
will want to check out other posts
in your blog that might be
relevant to them.
That's why you want to
categorize your posts as well as tag them. In addition, the tagging will set up
indexes that search engines use to determine what your
post is about and thus rank it.
The major categories that you
choose can be displayed on your sidebar by going
to the plug-in area and adding that in. You
can even put the categories in a cloud format
which is more visually
appealing than a list. If you
don't have a search box, you will need to add one to make it easy for readers to find different topics too, that
may not be categorized or indexed properly, for whatever reason.
Decide On A Layout Good For Advertising
Many people spend too much time
trying to get just the right look for their blog
without considering the fact that the layout may leave little room for advertising, the main reason you need a
bridge. So, instead of focusing on clean, one-column, formats that are more
like newspapers with stories, try to find
at least a two or three column format that will let you put links to other pages, embed images or buttons for your
referral and affiliate programs too. You want to optimize
the layout for the best screen
placement for your ads.
That should be the top portion of
the screen as well as the right and left edges
at the top of the screen. If your ads
end up at the bottom of your post or web log,
people will easily miss them.
Decide What Marketing
Programs You Promote
Some people want to do Google
Adsense to try to bring in money, but it can
also give the blog a cluttered look. Others
find that they make more money and
find customization easier with Adbrite programs. There are so many different
advertising programs that you will have to decide which you are using, if any.
Next, you will have to decide
which products and programs you have on other
websites that will fit into the market niche you are promoting in your blog.
Y ou can have one blog per website as a bridge,
or pick a wider niche
and try to get two different
website offers on the same blog. For
instance, say you have two websites:
one you sell clothing and in another you sell
jewelry. Your blog can be
about designer or luxury items and include posts on both. That way, it
is easier to bridge from places like Facebook back to two websites, using one bridge web log. You don't want to create multiple blogs that need to be updated daily each time you
put up a new website.
The ideal would be to combine
what you can in existing blogs to offer these
products and services
where they make sense in a larger market niche.
Offer Incentives To Bridge To Website
People have become desensitized
to advertising, so even sending them to your
web log first, it won't make them click the links there. If your ads look too
commercial, they may block them out. Other
readers are aware of what Google
Adsense ads look like and skip over them mentally when they are reading.
They may not even register. As
for the links on the side of your sidebar,
you will have to constantly bring your readers attention back to them to get them to click.
One way to do that is to offer people incentives for clicking
on your blog links. Say, you are
trying to get affiliates to join your program, you can offer the first 500 people some infoproducts
for clicking on a signup link in your blog and joining your affiliate program.
When you write your signature
line in some of the postings you are
doing across the web, you can even
say,”Click this link to find out where
you can get a free copy of “Best Affiliate Marketing Practices” or some other ebook you've written. They would click on the link, if they're interested, land on your blog, on the
post that relates to how a top-notch
affiliate program works, with your link either in the sidebar, the post, or both.
Contests are a great form of
incentive and can be a way to motivate people
to go from third-party websites to your blog. You can tell people that you
are having a contest to determine the most creative ways to make money online.
All people have to do is click on the link that takes them to your web post where you've detailed your choices. Then, they can add their own or vote for one of yours, by subscribing to
your blog and commenting. At the end, you choose the winner out of a random
drawing of the one you think is the
most creative, whether yours or someone else's idea and you send them a prize, which can be money, a book, a
product, or whatever. The prize description can be on your website where
the contest is more fully detailed too. Another
great way to bridge
them to a commercial site!
Contests tend to draw
tremendous attention to your site and can be a great way of introducing people to who you are. So, don't forget
to have an
“About Me”
section in your blog where people can get to know more about you, your business,
your products and services, and your
future plans. Also,
provide some way for them to
contact you, besides through the blog, for those
that want to email you in private. Any
contact that you make as a subscriber,
or someone that emails you, can eventually become a customer because once you have their email, they
have started the slide into your sales funnel
already.
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