We haven’t discussed too much about how to make money blogging, but that will be the topic of the next few Marketing Monday segments. In some ways today’s online market is easier to sell to than even a few years ago. Social media has increased our audience. Yet in other ways, it’s more difficult because the online community has quickly learned to identify ads and sales pages.

The key to online marketing is to “pre-sell” your target audience by creating such a desire in your readers before you even launch a product that they have their credit cards in hand the day your sales page goes live.

So, how do we do that? Three steps: Continue reading →

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A couple of weeks ago, I listed 23 types of social media sites and mentioned that StumbleUpon defied definition. It’s not your typical social bookmarking site. StumbleUpon is a unique site that is part social-networking community and part personalized recommendation engine and allows users to “channel surf” the web. “Stumblers” set preferences to discover online content, and then give returned sites a thumbs up or thumbs down, which tightens one’s personal search parameters.

The more you stumble and vote, the more attuned to your likes and dislikes StumbleUpon will become. And the same goes for your target audience. This means that StumbleUpon actually delivers niche-targeted traffic to your site. And, that traffic isn’t just niche-targeted, these visitors are actively seeking certain content topics. Pretty cool.

Besides being a great place to discover great content and market your own stuff, StumbleUpon is fun. Here’s how it works:

Continue reading →

Article marketing is the process of writing and submitting articles to article marketing directories. Article marketing can increase traffic to your blog, establish you as a niche authority, create backlinks to your site, and promote products. Plus, it’s free.

Here are 21 tips to help you get started with article marketing:

Continue reading →

My latest post as the Little Rock area’s Blogging for Business Examiner shares 12 benefits of including video in your online content strategy, so I thought today I’d share with you a list of 40 places you can submit that content — and most of them are free.

Video-sharing sites are typically community-based, which means each one has a different personality and supports different video genres — from “crazy” to corporate. It’s best to visit them before submitting content to see which ones your videos will fit in.

Here’s the list: Continue reading →

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be discussing some of the free ways to market your blog online — blog exchanges, wikis, video-sharing, photo-sharing, podcasting, social networking, social bookmarking, microblogging, and business networking.

LinkedIn is a business networking platform that can help you get noticed in your niche market. What does a business networking platform have to do with blogging? When I read that the second-most connected person on LinkedIn is a high-profile blogger, I decided I’d better investigate what exactly LinkedIn was about and how I can incorporate it into my online media strategy.

Here are 18 ways LinkedIn can help you connect with others and therefore get the word out about you and your blog:

1. Continue reading →