Top 4 Ways To Apply Your Marketing Knowledge To Blogging

From the marketing perspective, a blog is not really that different from an “old-fashion” media form. Surprisingly, some people, including your typical business and marketing majors don’t know this. Sure, the medium has changed, but the same marketing principle is still valid. As marketers, we need to strike a conversation with our audience. The tools and knowledge gained from marketing classes can just as easily be adopted to be used on blogs. Below, I have compiled a list of the top 4 lessons that I believe you can take out of marketing class.

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7 Deadly Sins of Blogging

Guest blogger Jimi Olaghere is a young business owner who runs Broke Tycoon, a blog and forum with advice for business and marketing techniques.

Seems like everyone is a blogger these days, publishing articles on personal or freelance business blogs, updating statuses on twitter – even commenting on previously written articles. Face it, we’re blogging. But how can we stand out in a sea of keyboard happy drones? Repent from these sins and maybe the blog Gods will forgive you.

1. Pride
You can’t do it on your own, or maybe you can; don’t get me wrong, self belief is a good thing. But when you are starting a blog, one of the fastest ways to increase traffic is to partner up with other bloggers. Link exchange, link backs, shared links, they all work; find one that’s compatible with your niche then blog happy.

2. Envy
All blogs are not created equal, there is never going to be another gossip blog like Perez Hilton’s. Many have tried, but it’s still not the same. The faster you realize that you can’t imitate other successful blogs, the sooner your blog will become successful. So go out there and do your own thing, in fact look at what everyone is doing and do the exact opposite; you’ll be surprised with the results.
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Blogging for Cash

A new trend in American employment now is blogging part-time or full-time to make money. Many people have taken up blogging only to find themselves not only having lots of fun, but making more money than they did on their nine to five job. So they quit and just blog full time. It’s a real phenomenon.

There are a few ways that bloggers make money:

(1). The most common way for bloggers to make money is through ads. When blogging first started, Adsense and Blogads were the way to create income. But since that time loads of other ways have emerged. Some of these are Chitika’s eMinimalls, Adbrite, Adgena, AVN, and many more.

(2). Sponsorships are another way to earn money with your blog. Once a few bloggers and a few companies figured out how lucrative this could be for both sides, it was on from there. They found it was an excellent way to advertise and to sell.
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Why Guest Blogging is a Powerful Way to Gain Exposure for Your Blog

Every blogger has been there: you’ve been blogging for a few weeks, but not many people other than your close friends and relatives every stop by.

You ask your readers a question, and the response is a resounding silence. You need to find ways to gain exposure for your young blog.

And guest blogging is one of the most powerful ways of doing that.

When I first started Zen Habits, I faced this challenge, just like everyone else does. “I’m writing great stuff,” I would say to myself, “but no one is reading it. What do I do?”

I tried guest blogging, and it paid off big time. I now regrettably have to turn down requests to write guest posts elsewhere, just because I’m so busy writing. I wish I didn’t have to, because every time I do, I miss an opportunity, but there’s no question that guest blogging has been a major part of my success.

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Ten Practical Tips for Writing in English

Online opportunities are not created equal. Although access to the Internet is open to everyone, and the cost of publishing your thoughts are minimal, language gives a huge advantage to those who have learned English as their first language. They can reach the whole world by writing in their own language. For the rest of us, it requires a bit more work.

I’m from Finland, a country of 5,2 million inhabitants at the northern end of Europe, right between Sweden and Russia, so when I started blogging, my decision was easy: if I wanted to reach more than a handful of people, I had to go with English. If you speak French, Spanish or Chinese, there is a bit more incentive for writing in your own language, but even then, the only way to reach the whole population of our planet is to write in English.

It’s not always easy, so that’s why today I am sharing with you the ten most useful and practical tips for writing in a foreign language that I have learnt during my blogging career.
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Good to Great, Why some Blogs Succeed and Others Don’t

Have you ever wondered why some blogs engender the success that they do? Why Techcrunch has 1/2 of a million subscribers and charges $10,000 a month for a 125x125px ad? Or why more than 20,000 blogs have chosen to link to BoingBoing and 1,500 people have listed it as a Technorati favourite? Why the DailyKos received more than half a million visits a day and every post receives comments number with three digits? What sets these giants of their fields apart from the rest and why have they become some of the most well known blogs in the world? And how many questions can I ask in one paragraph?

What follows are my observations on what sets these blogs apart…

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Announcement: FreelancerMagazine and NorthxEast.com to Merge

I am pleased to announce that NorthxEast.com and FreelancerMagazine.com will soon be merging and operating as one site. Our combination unites two complementary resources, with NxE aimed at providing advice and resources for independent bloggers, and FM providing additional resources on marketing, productivity, self-management, and more.
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