Welcome back, I hope everyone had a fun and safe Labor Day weekend. This will be the finale to my blog series on how to run a successful link building. Today I will be talking about how you can use blogs as a way to build backlinks. I could write a whole series on blogging if you really think about it, however, I’m going to try and keep it straight to link building and maybe my next series will be all about blogs.

Blogs are a great source for new and fresh content for your site.  Blogs help your domain by giving you more authority as well as providing potential customers with a source of information about the product/service you are trying to sell. You might ask yourself, “What if I don’t have anything to talk about?” Well if you don’t have anything to talk about I think you might be in the wrong business – you should always have something to discuss or talk about when it comes to the business that makes you money. Think of your blog posts as if someone at a party was to come up and ask you what you do for a living, or how your business is doing, or what’s new in your business. You should always have something to write about. If you are a little stumped check out this keyword question tool, type in a word or phrase that relates to you business (i.e.: vacuum) and you will see all the questions people put into the search engines; and viola you have yourself a blog post topic.

Now you just have to write a post that will capture your reader’s attention and keep them on the page. Here are some helpful hints when going about writing a blog post:

  1. Do Your Research: If you are writing a blog to teach your audience something or to inform them about something make sure you know what you are talking about. Do the research on the subject to be sure you don’t come across as ignorant or uninformed as this will have the opposite effect on you by hurting your reputation.
  2. Write using correct grammar: Make sure you write using proper grammar and check for spelling errors. You want to make sure you sound educated when you are writing your blog posts. If grammar or writing isn’t your strength, have someone check it over to reduce the amount of errors.
  3. Inter-Linking: Be sure that throughout your blog post you are linking back to your own site as well as linking to other blog posts you have done if they relate to what you are talking about. This helps by passing link juice through your site.
  4. External-Linking: What? External Linking? Doesn’t that pass my link juice out instead of keeping it on my domain? Well yes that is correct but at the same time, if their site helped convey your point why not link to them? I mean after all they did help you right? Think of external links inside your blog post as citations that we all used to love to do inside our English papers.
  5. Pictures/Images: Images are a great way to break up your content and keep the readers on the page. Charts and graphs are another way to keep people interested in your posts.
  6. Lists and/or Bullet Points: People seem to love ”Top 5” or “Top 10” lists.  This is something you can easily utilize when writing a blog. Bullet points also help with catching the reader’s eyes and make your content seem less intimidating.
  7. Length: If you take a look at the length of my last few blog posts you can see that they are quite long. I didn’t mean for them to be so long, but they just happened to become that long. The point being is that you should write enough to get your message across, regardless of how many words it is. If you have an excessive amount of content, you might need to break up the content into multiple posts or even a series.

Now blogging is not an easy task for anyone to tackle. As you can see there are a lot of steps that go into writing just one blog post. I recommend that you do a blog post at least once a week and if possible 3-5 times a week skipping over the weekend. This does take a lot of time and effort but the pay off will be worth it in the end. It can take a while to establish yourself as a great blogger and to build up a community that so many sites have, but remember, you have to start somewhere. Don’t let yourself get down if you see no new comments or page views, just keep pushing forward and before you know it you will see some great results. Also don’t forget to socially submit all your blog posts as we all know, social is a great way to get traffic.

Well that’s it for now about blogs; keep an eye out for a more in depth look into blogs and how to be successful with them. I hope you all have enjoyed my first blog series. Next week I plan to do a overview of everything we have talked about when it comes to running a successful link building campaign.