Here are a few rules to help you create your commercial blog. The
rules are based around making a blog that has a high traffic rating
whilst keeping it sincere enough so that people will not be deterred
from re-visiting in the future. Traffic and promotion may be the first
thing on most commercial bloggers minds, but these rules will help you
to see past those concepts. They will enable you to create a long
lasting and well attended commercial blog.
1. Your blog must be of value and use to your target audience
The biggest mistake that so many commercial blogs make is that the
blog is beneficial to the business and not the user. The users are the
ones that should come first because they are the ones you want to keep
coming back. You want them to tell their friends about you and to share
your content. You want them to talk about you on social media, to sign
up to your RSS feed and comment in your comment section. No user will do
this if your blog is not of any value or use to your target audience.
You should also remember that your target audience is the one you
should appeal to. It is very easy to get a lot of traffic if your blog
appeals to baser instincts (sex and violence), but if your target
audience are not interested in such things then the traffic you attract
will mean nothing.
2. Unless you are blogging for your affiliate advert revenue, you should avoid affiliate adverts
If you wish to blog in order to gain affiliate advert money then by all means add some affiliate adverts onto your blog. If you are blogging
to promote your company or products, to send people to your website or
to run your own adverts then you should avoid affiliate adverts like the
plague. Not only will they take the focus off your message, they will
also make your blog look over commercialized and tacky. They also lower
your SEO rankings by slowing down your page loading times.
3. Brand your blog
This is an absolute must if you want to run a commercial blog. Your
brand logo should be on every blog post, and the reader should never be
in any doubt about whose blog they are on. Your blog post should be
saturated with branding to be sure that the user knows who you are and
what you stand for.
4. Always be positive in your blogs
You must always be positive in your blogs, even if you are
writing about things that are negative in nature. If you cannot avoid
writing about negative things then you must place them in a very
positive light. You must explain what the readers can learn from the
situation, and how such a thing can be avoided if we apply these lessons
in the future.
5. Do not badmouth your competitors on your blog
It is very tempting to use your blog as a little soapbox in order to
tell the world how great you are and how bad your competitors are, but
there are two good reasons why you should not. Firstly, your competitors
may retaliate, which is going to mean negative PR for you. Secondly,
many people will not trust your negative comments because you have a
vested interest in saying it. Just like you have a vested interest in
saying you are the greatest. The reader knows that you are extremely
biased on the subject and so will have a lot of trouble believing you or
taking you seriously when it comes to negative comments about others.
6. Do not promote yourself on your blog posts
Nobody in their right mind is going to keep attending a blog
every month or week so that they can be marketed to. Just do not promote
yourself, your products or your services on your blog. On the other
hand however, if your blog posts mention your company, products or
services naturally then they should be written about in a very positive
light. Write with an almost reverence of your company, products or
services.
If you are planning your blogs correctly then your company, products
or services should appear naturally in your text. You should not promote
yourself, but if your target audience is the ones who would normally
purchase your products, then your topics should revolve around the
things that interest them.
Do not try the old trick of doing on promotional post and then three
none promotional posts. All you will do is immunize your target audience
against your promotional posts. If you post them at the same time every
month then they will know which posts to ignore. If you release them
randomly then they will learn to recognize them and simply ignore them
when they see them.
7. Put small picture adverts for your products or services at the bottom of each blog post
This is such a simple and yet underused idea. All you need to do is
create your own small affiliate style adverts at the bottom of each post
so that people can click on them when they have done reading. The idea
is so inoffensive that many people click on the adverts as a way of
simply investigating the issues brought up in the blog post. They are a
great way of getting targeted traffic to your website.
8. Link to your main website at the bottom of every post
These links should be within your picture adverts at the bottom but
even if you do not have picture adverts at the bottom, you should still
link to your website. Do not link to the same page every week or you
will be wasting the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value of your links
every week.
Original article in http://idealtechblog.com
Blogging For Commercial Purpose