Creating a blog is not enough

To continue our discussion of how to use blogs to generate traffic and generate income for you, it is important to note that it is not enough to just create a blog.

Since affiliate and Internet marketers have realized the power of blogging, blogs on all sorts of topics virtually litter the Internet.

The key to having a successful blog is two fold

• Find a good niche. You need to be very diligent about your niche research. A still popular tool for assessing keywords is the overture keyword tool. Although the site is no longer updated, search results for January 2007 can still be viewed. Get a great niche and find your low hanging fruit.

• The other factor is your unique selling point. The explosion in affiliate marketing has resulted in blogs in virtually every profitable niche. That means whatever niche you have uncovered probably already has a handful of blogs catering to it. You need to make your blog distinctive, have a unique selling point, USP. For Domino's pizza it's delivering hot pizza within 30 minutes, for DHL it's next day delivery before noon. You must have your own USP and deliver on that promise.

To find your own USP,

• Look at other blogs in your niche. Try to find the missing key on those blogs and fill that hole on your blog
• Let your blog reflect your personality and keep hat flair consistent in all your posts. Your visitors may just keep coming back because they like the way you write. Your style, so to speak

You also need to continually build and maintain your site. If you stop posting to your blog,

• Your content becomes stale or ceases to be relevant
• Your blog will lose ranking with the search engines

You must aim to build a blog that captures the interest and attention of your visitor. Make sure your content fulfils a need that your visitors may have.

Learn how to create a blog here