By now there are Amish people who can tell you blog marketing can work wonders driving traffic and leads to your business. But after you take the time to build one on your site, don’t expect Shoeless Joe Jackson to immediately show up and start hitting runs for the home team. Blogging is hard work, and the internet is littered with the bones of thousands of abandoned ideas, usually with “ramblings” or “musings” somewhere in the title.

Momentum is a tough thing to perpetuate. For every day you don’t post on your blog, you can almost devise a mathematical formula that will exponentially measure the traffic you’re going to lose forever. If you aren’t naturally prolific, and you’re not paying someone else to keep your company blog oven fresh, there’s some easy rules of thumb that will help you through.

1. Write what you know: Start a blog on a topic on which you’re passionate and that you’ll be able to maintain without losing momentum. Your business is a darn good start, obviously. If you can’t write passionately about your own business, you should probably be collecting shopping carts in your local mall parking lot.
2. Find your niche: Focus on one topic, and don’t blur your subject matter. Use a sniper rifle, not a shotgun, and you’re more likely to attract and keep an interested audience. If your website sells a wide range of electronics, for example, pick one related facet of what you do and focus on that. Product reviews, free digital photography tips, etc. Maybe start a new domain that’s just a branded blog which links back to your retail site.
3. Make time to write: Not every entry needs to be the Winds of War. Link to an interesting article you’ve read and write a sentence or two summarizing or sharing your thoughts about it. You can even quote part of the original article Ask for some reader feedback on a topic relating to your business. Talk about a recent happening within the company or repost a press release. But, for the love of Bo Jackson, just do it!

Maintaining a company blog is a lot like having a puppy. If you don’t give it water it will die. Don’t adopt a blog until you realize the responsibility attached to keeping it alive. And if you’re still interested afterwards, remember my three simple tips. Housetraining WordPress is up to you.

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Arranging reciprocal link partnerships with other websites used to be an extremely effective tool for bolstering your organic search engine rankings. As webmasters figure out how to manipulate algorithms, however, those algorithms will inevitably be updated by the powers that be. Currently, search engine algorithms give far more credence to one-way incoming links, and the art of facilitating these is commonly referred to as link building. Link building methods are extremely diverse and the term should only be considered as an umbrella over a variety of specific strategies, including:

1. Paid links: Links can be purchased through link brokers or manually sought out one at a time by webmasters or web marketers. Brokers will provide you with a network of sites to choose from whereby you can customize the ever-important anchor text and select publishers relevant to your subject matter for a monthly fee. If you’re more traditional, don’t send out the wedding invitations just yet - doing it the old fashioned way is a long process, involving many emails or phone calls to prospective publishers, but may ultimately lead to the best value.
2. Link baiting: Writing original, catchy content and submitting it to news sites and social media sites has become a popular way of garnering one way incoming links, and is commonly referred to as “link baiting”. Particularly effective are “how-to” articles, top 10 lists and video clip collections. The catchier the title, the better. Should you strike gold by becoming the next viral marketing darling, the huge number of links you’ll receive from other sites, blogs and networks will be priceless.
3. Topic and content networks: Sites like Squidoo, HubPages and WetPaint can be categorized in a number of ways – content site, social media, etc. – but one thing is for sure – they are free and easy ways to create links pointing back to your website. If, for example, your website sells Slap Shot merchandise, you can build a resource lens about your company or a relevant topic and link using your choice of anchor text. The more your lens, hub or canvas is perceived as being an objective resource, the more traffic and incoming links it will get from other members of the network and people who stumble across it via search engines, passing the “link juice” on to your main site.

These points are a high-level starting point, but specific examples help paint a good link building picture for the uninitiated. Simply put, high quality and original content, coupled with a base knowledge of the emerging social media and voting sites that have been rushing onto the scene, can do wonders towards encouraging the outside world to link to you. Build it, and they will not come. Build it and make it helpful or entertaining to the right person and they will link to you in a heartbeat.

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