Here are 5 great ways for driving more traffic to your blog for free that I personally use with great results:

1) “How To Start A Blog” Videos – These step-by-step video training tutorials show you not only how to set up a WordPress blog, but also exactly how to configure it using FREE plugins that will automatically notify search engines, feed directories and social networking sites as soon as a new post is made to your blog.

Even if you (or your webmaster) have already set up a WordPress blog, these videos will show you how to go beyond the default WordPress blog installation and set up an automatic “set-and-forget” traffic-getting system for your blog that can help you grow your business online faster and save you a lot of time and effort. Click here for more details …

2) Publish Articles – Submitting articles regularly to article sites like isnare, Article Marketer, Article Dashboard, Goarticles, etc … can get you lots of traffic, visitors and new blog readers. Just make sure you have a link pointing back to your blog in your article’s “resources box” (e.g. “for more information about [your-area-of-expertise], visit the author’s blog here: [insert your blog URL]“.

Some of the main benefits of creating useful content like articles, is that you can then reformat and reuse the same information in different ways to help you not only drivet more traffic to your blog, but also target potential new customers, educate existing customers and generate more sales of your products and services.

Some of these ways, for example, are as follows:

• Publish the articles directly on your blog or website. Just make sure you change approximately 5%-15% of the article content to avoid any “duplicate” content penalties.
• Add them to your Newsletter
• Reformat them into Ecourses or mini-courses (e.g. a 7-day course on whatever topic your business focuses on)
• Autoresponder content (e.g. customer training emails – if you need a great autoresponder service, check Aweber)
• EBook compilations
• Special Reports

In a previous blog post I share some excellent blog content creation shortcuts that will help you save time and effort creating and publishing articles.

3) Traffic Generation Club – This is a great membership site full of tips, information and cutting-edge techniques for driving lots of traffic to your blogs or web sites.

You can go here for the paid version, or sign up to our newsletter to receive a FREE Silver membership pass (worth $27) to this site. You can also get a FREE Silver membership to TrafficGenerationClub.com (and access to several other excellent membership sites dealing with all other areas of growing a business online successfully) by purchasing our “How To Start A Blog” video training tutorials.

*** STOP PRESS *** – If you have a Twitter account, simply tweet about this blog using the special “Tweet N’ It’s FREE” box at the bottom of this page, and we’ll give you FREE Silver membership access to TrafficGenerationClub.com

4) Comment Kahuna – This is an excellent free traffic-getting tool that I highly recommend you download. Comment Kahuna is a very powerful FREE software that can deliver unlimited, high-quality, targeted backlinks to your blog or website, without using any risky tactics that can destroy your search engine rankings.

Go here to download it: Comment Kahuna

5) TweetMyBlog – This is a FREE Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the power of Wordpress blogs and Twitter to drive lots of traffic to your blog.

TweetMyBlog will automatically post a tweet whenever you update you blog. The tweet will link back to your blog, driving new interested readers your way. It also highlights your latest Tweets on your blogs sidebar, which helps to increase your Twitter following.

Additional Tip: I have previously written an article that lists seven great ways to get lots of free advertising for your site. A couple of the methods discussed in this article have been listed in this blog post, but some of the other methods not listed here are also great ways to drive lots more FREE traffic to your blog. To read the article, go here.

I hope you have found the information on this post useful and don’t forget to claim a FREE Silver membership to TrafficGenerationClub.com simply by tweeting about this blog using the special “Tweet N’ It’s Free” box below:

Wishing you great blogging success,

Martin

The tragedy is that he had not gotten around to backing up his site files and data. This is somewhat understandable, as most people wouldn’t think of backing up their site or blog as soon as they get it up and running. It is highly recommended, however, to back up your data on a regular basis (e.g. at least monthly when you first start, then weekly or even more frequently as your blog starts to grow and more content gets added to it.)

My client also let me know in his email that his hosting provider had informed him that his “wordpress crashed” and there was nothing wrong on their side.

I sent my client an empathetic email and suggested he try a couple of things first, before deleting the site from his server and starting the blog installation process all over again:

1) First, make sure that you’re hosting your blog with a reliable web hosting service provider.

Wordpress is a very stable blogging platform used by tens of thousands of businesses and bloggers and it doesn’t “just crash” easily. I have no idea who my client’s hosting provider is, but I used to experience many frustrating crashes and service interruptions that affected my web sites and blogs with my previous hosting provider until I switched to my current provider and I have not experienced any problems at all since I switched providers earlier this year.

I manage dozens of websites and blogs and so I host on a dedicated server with Liquid Web, which I highly recommend and have nothing but extreme praise for. If you are only starting out, or planning to host one or a few blogs, however, then I recommend using Hostgator. They are extremely reliable and offer great support and affordable blog hosting packages.

2) Visit the WordPress forum for support and to view similar instances where other users may have experienced the same problem you are experiencing. Generally you will find a solution, or at least be able to narrow down what may be causing the problem in the WordPress user forum.

3) Log into your hosting account and see if you can make a backup of your MySQL database.

Sometimes the problem may be caused by a corrupt file in your server that doesn’t affect the data stored in your database. If you can save your MySQL database data, this will save you a lot of time if you do have to reinstall your blog files. Reimporting your blog data from an uncorrupted MySQL database file will restore all of your blog configuration settings, posts, links, etc ….

Some other things you can try to do are:

1) Login to your server via FTP and try deleting the .htaccess file (make sure you back up the file first), then refresh the site. If this does not fix the site, or you get a “500 internal server error message”, then just reupload the .htaccess file and move on to something else.

Please note: If you don’t know much about .htaccess, then it’s best to just avoid messing around with the file or file settings altogether.

2) If the above doesn’t fix it straight away, then try opening up the config.php file and see if all of the settings are correct (i.e. if they are pointing to the right database, URL etc…)

3) You can also try disabling all of the WordPress plugins by deleting them from your server and see if that helps. If your site is restored after deleting the plugins from your wp-content plugin folder, then you will need to reinstall each plugin one at a time to identify which plugin is causing the conflict in your site.

4) If you have a downloaded copy of your WordPress installation files, then try overwriting the files in your server using FTP. Be careful not to overwrite your config.php file or wp-content folder. Make sure to overwrite your files with files from the same WordPress version as your original installation, or it may end up causing problems.

If none of the above solutions restore your site, nothing else works and you simply cannot fix your site, then it’s best to reinstall your entire WordPress blog from scratch. If you have already purchased my “step-by-step” how to create a blog video tutorials, simply follow the instructions and tutorials again to quickly get your new blog up and running, then visit the training section for videos and instructions on how to back up your blog files and WordPress database and just count this as an invaluable learning experience for doing business online.

As I said earlier, having your site crash immediately after getting it all set up is highly unfortunate, but not as tragic as failing to back up your site files and database on a regular basis, especially once your site really starts to take off.

For more information on how to grow your business online faster using a business blog go here: Start A Business Blog

In previous posts I have listed some of the many topics you can write about – all of which are designed to help you build trust with potential new customers by educating and informing your blog readers about the benefits of your products and services and why they should be doing business with you instead of your competition.

Now, whenever I talk about this with other small business owners, most of the responses I get tend to fall into two main categories:

1) “I don’t have time / I’m too busy”
2) “I don’t know how to write”

Business owners, small business owners and micro-business owners listen up!

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you spend 15 mins, 30 mins, even an hour or two on the phone or at a function explaining some aspect of your business to another person? Most of us have. Now … have you ever had to explain the same thing again when a different person asks you the same question?

Many of us have been in situations where we get trapped in long conversations with people about our business, giving the same pitch about the benefits or advantages of our products, explaining over and over again the same technical point, issue, problem, challenge or solution that our business addresses, provides, or solves, and so on.

You do have the time, you are just not using it wisely. Using your time wisely in business means implementing systems that help you leverage your time. Systems that eventually help you spend more of your time working on growing your business, instead of remaining trapped in your business all the time.

A business blog can serve your business as a powerful sales, marketing, customer service and time-saving system. Someone calls you or asks you a question about your business at a social event because they’re on a preliminary fact-finding mission and thinking about doing something at some point in the future that may involve buying your products or using your services? Get their email address and refer them to the pages on your blog where you explain all of this in more detail, with links to the faq section, additional resources, a special report they can download, etc … then ask them to call you after they review the information you have sent them if they have any further questions.

Think about all of the time you will save (and gain) once you start posting information about your business to your blog and people start researching about what your products and services can do for them in their own time, not on yours.

Now, let’s address the second issue most small business owners have when it comes to starting a blog, which is not knowing how to write or feeling like you have to be a professional writer in order to get content about your business out to people.

To create good quality content for your blog, you have a couple of options. You can assign the task of creating content for your blog on a regular basis to someone in your team who really understands your business – i.e. you (the business owner) or another person who has a high level of knowledge, authority and expertise – or you can outsource the work to someone who knows how to research and write professional, quality articles, such as a professional freelance writer, ghost article writer, etc.

Furthermore, if you want to save time, you can use certain tools to help you create quality content for your blog faster. I discuss some of these article writing tools below.

Finally, there is the consideration of how to keep adding regular posts to your blog. You can do this manually (i.e. log into your blog every time you write a new article, click on “create a new post”, paste your content in and publish), or you can use certain tools, services and plugins to post content to your blog automatically.

It all depends on how you want to run your blog. If you want to keep a close rein on your blog, then just write all of the content yourself with or without the aid of article writing tools and post manually to your blog after writing each article. This is how I am running this particular blog at this stage of my business-building process.

If you are not too fussed about when content gets posted to your blog as long as it is being posted on a regular basis (to keep search engine spiders like Google coming back and visiting your site often), then there are certain ways to partially or fully automate this process, as I will explain shortly. I use blog automation tools to help me run several other blogs that I own (I even own some blogs where I do absolutely nothing at all – other people post great content to it on a regular basis and I make sales of affiliate products and collect advertising revenue!)

Blog Content Writing Tools And Resources

If you want to write your own blog content (I personally recommend this option if you want to provide your blog readers with the highest quality level of information about your business), then here are then time-saving tools I recommend you take a look at:

Article Assistant -  This free software allows you to create content on any topic for your blog in just a few minutes. I use this powerful tool when I need to come up with new ideas for content quickly, or when I have an idea for a topic I want to write about and want to gather useful content I can edit into an article very quickly without spending lots of time doing research.

For more details about this free tool go here: Article Assistant

Content Composer – This powerful content writing software is made by the same developers who created Article Assistant, but it takes things to a whole new level. It is a serious content writing tool that allows you to create many unique variations of the same article for posting content on many different sites without getting penalized by search engines as being “duplicate” content. It also comes with a host of built-in features, such as allowing you to set up permissions for giving ghostwriters access to the tool to create articles for you, checking to see if your content is being used on other web sites without your permission, integration with the Article Announcer software (see below) and a whole lot more.

For more details go here: Content Composer

Outsourcing Your Blog Content Creation

If you don’t want to write your own content and you don’t feel someone in your team can do this, then you can always outsource the task to a professional article writer.

There are many professional freelance article writers that can deliver you well researched and clearly written content on a regular basis, as long as you provide them with a clear brief and the keywords or topics you want them to write you articles about.  If you don’t know where to begin, you can try using online outsourcing sites, where you post your project and then get freelance writers to bid for the work, or just straight freelance work sites.

Here are a few sites I use that you can try for outsourcing your content creation:

• Go Freelance – A great place to find professional freelance writers for all kinds of  content creation outsourcing.
• Elance – Post your project on this site and interested freelance writers will bid on it.
• Rent-A-Coder – Again, post your project here and get service providers to bid for the work.

Note: Before you decide to use freelance article writers to create content for your blog, check out a free report called GhostWriters Suck! that will teach you how to avoid getting scammed by poor quality writers and help you understand what to look for when searching for a professional article writer.

Get the report here: Why 99% Of GhostWriters Suck! – Free Report!

Private Label Rights Content

Often, a cheaper alternative to outsourcing your article writing to a professional writer, is to use Private Label Rights, or PLR content. This is content that is often written by professional article writers, but instead of the content being written exclusively for one client, the same content gets shared among a number of users who can then claim it as their own and do anything they want with it (e.g. turn it into a report, an e-book, website articles, blog posts, training emails, etc …).

You can think of most PLR article services as a co-op for people who need content. Many PLR services allow up to 150 – 400 users or more to access and use the same content. The main benefit for you as a PLR content buyer is that you can generally get access to a lot of content for your site or blog at a much lower price than if you were to pay someone to write all of the content for you.

Some of the drawbacks of PLR are that the content obviously will not be 100% unique to your site (you should always rewrite the content a little anyway), the accuracy of facts and figures in the articles can sometimes be questionable (or just plain inaccurate) if you don’t know who is actually writing the actual content, the content can sometimes be copied from other sources then passed on as original, and in some cases, you don’t get much of a say on what the articles are about.

Having said this, probably the best PLR services company I have ever used is Spin Ready PLR. They are truly a cut above the rest when it comes to creating PLR content. What makes their membership service unique, apart from using a hand-picked team of professional article writers who do research and write great quality content, is that their articles are written in such a way that they can easily be turned into almost completely original articles very quickly.

Spin Ready PLR does not focus on one specific subject, however (e.g. health, business, travel, etc …), so each month members get a whole batch of new articles which may or may not suit their business. I have personally used lots of Spin Ready PLR content to create a range of blogs covering many different topics, then simply added the content to the most relevant or appropriate blog dealing with that topic and this has worked really well for me. They have enough articles covering just about any topic you can think of, so even if you just use what you need and leave the rest, it could still work out to be a fairly affordable time-saving solution for getting content for your blog.

Then again, if you plan to stick to just growing one blog on one specific niche market, PLR content may not be for you. For more details about this PLR content creation service go here: Spin Ready PLR

Automating Your Blog Content Posting

Independently of whether you choose to write your own articles, get them outsourced to a freelancer or become a member of a PLR site and just use PLR content to grow your blog, another time-saving option to look at is whether you will post your articles manually to your blog, or automate this process.

The main benefits of automating the process of adding posts to your blog at regular intervals, is that:

1. Search engines will keep coming back to index your site’s pages if new content is being regularly added to your blog, and
2. You could spend one day loading articles into a “drip feed” system and have new content being automatically added to your post on a regular basis for the next several weeks, months, or even years. For example, if you were to set up things so that 50 new articles would get added to your blog at the rate of one article per week, your blog would be getting new content added to it on auto-pilot for the next year, leaving you free to work on some other aspect of your business.

If this aspect of saving you time interest you, then here are a couple of tools and services I recommend you look into:

Zip Poster Wordpress Plugin – This Powerful WordPress plugin lets you post hundreds of articles at once, with future date timestamps so your site can continue growing automatically for a very long time.

This plugin takes advantage of a built-in WordPress feature that allows you to schedule posts to be published on a future date. So, if you wanted to take a week long vacation without your site suffering from the lack of attention, you could pre-load content and set it to “publish” each and every day, even though you’re not physically pushing the publish button while you’re away on vacation. Zip Poster also allows you to load up articles in seconds using a “point and click” feature and then automatically schedule the publication of your articles with random time and date stamps, allowing your site to grow organically.

For more details about this blog automation plug in, go here: Zip Poster Wordpress Plugin

Syndicate Kahuna – This powerful service automatically finds and posts fresh, targeted, unique, and good-quality content to your blog for free. It also allows you to syndicate your blog content to a growing network containing thousands of other blogs, which will create more links and drive more traffic to your site. I personally use this tool to grow traffic to all of my blogs and other web sites. In fact, some of my blogs grow exclusively from content syndicated to it using this service.

For more details about this content syndication service, go here: Syndicate Kahuna

Additional Time-Saving Services, Tools And Resource For Business Blog Owners

Article Announcer – Posting articles regularly on article directories can help to significantly grow your business online. Article Announcer helps to automate this task.

Even more powerful, is combining unique content created using tools like Content Composer or Spin Ready PLR, then posting completely unique versions of your article to your blog, syndicating it to other sites using Syndicate Kahuna, and publishing it to various article directories on the web, using Article Announcer.

Power Copy Club – If you want to combine writing articles about your business with learning how to write content that sells your products and services, then I suggest you look into becoming a member of Power Copy Club.

This site will teach you how to develop copywriting skills and craft compelling ads and sales letters that will attract visitors to your site, improve your sales conversions and turn blog readers and site visitors into new customers.

We include free Silver membership access to Power Copy Club (plus 10 other equally valuable membership sites) as part of our “How To Start A Blog” video tutorial product, but you can check out the benefits of purchasing a discounted membership pass to this site here: Power Copy Club

Hopefully this article has given you a better idea of ways you can save time creating content and posting articles to your blog. All of the tools and resources described above can form the basis of a powerful promotion system that you can use to leverage and automate the growth of your business online.

If you are thinking of starting your own business blog but don’t know where or how to start, check out our step-by-step video tutorials that show you how to set up and configure a WordPress blog that helps you grow your business online fast: Business Blog Video Tutorials