After the presentation, I was approached by a local business owner who told me that his business was not attracting enough clients and offered to pay me to build him a business blog to help him better promote his business and generate more leads.

I spent a few days helping my new client set up a web hosting account and getting his business blog built, and even agreed to visit him on the weekend to show him how to manage his blog. When I arrived on Saturday morning for our training session as arranged, my client introduced me to a local neighborhood teenager and asked me to train this young person instead, telling me that she was going to run his blog as he found the whole “internet” thing too technical and overwhelming. He then left the room, and I spent the next half hour or so showing his young “assistant” how to post articles to his business blog and how to access and use the training area containing the step-by-step videos and tutorials.

This morning I received an email from my client. In the email, he conveyed his dissatisfaction at getting – and I quote him directly here, “ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSE/RESULT ! If I got even one or two inquiries/calls that would have been enough. But I got absolutely NOTHING !!!”

After going over his email a couple of times, I went to get myself a cup of coffee, then came back to my desk and thought about this. I have built over 70 blogs this year using the exact same system I used to set up my client’s blog and I have gotten very positive results (i.e. visitors, newsletter subscribers, sales, etc …) with every single blog I have set up.

So, I decided to investigate things a little bit further and take a look at the results my client’s blog was getting before sending him a reply.

The visitor tracking system I set up for his business blog (which I show how to set up in my “how to start a blog” video tutorials), showed that his site received over 90 unique visitors in the past 30 days.

I state on my blogging video tutorials sales letter that even blogs installed on brand new domains usually get indexed in the search engines within 2-3 days. I also point out that, once your blog is fully set up and configured as shown in the tutorials, the only work required to start growing your business online is to make a habit of posting regular content to your blog. In other words, just write short articles educating people about aspects of your business and post this information to your blog once or twice a week, and your business will start growing online.

Since the traffic analytics results showed that visitors were coming to my client’s blog, this, to me, was a good indicator that the system I set up for his blog was clearly working. So … no problems in this area.

I then decided to see if he was doing the work required, which, as I have just stated, consists of simply adding a new post to your blog about your business on a regular basis.

My client’s blog has been running for around 3 months as I write this post. I expected, therefore, at the minimum rate of 1 new post a week to see at least around 10 – 12 posts on his blog. When I looked at his blog, however, I saw that only 5 articles had been added to the blog by his junior assistant. I then looked at the actual content of his blog posts. A couple of entries were incomplete, with paragraphs just ending abruptly in mid-sentence with no continuation. More importantly, there was no call to action at the end of the articles asking visitors to take the next step (e.g. contact the client for more information, book an appointment, etc …).

As I did end up pointing out in my reply email to this business owner, it is completely unrealistic to expect a site with rather poor, or very little information to produce positive results in a highly competitive market, especially when the content has not been checked before being published and actively fails to “sell” the visitor into taking any type of further action.

I then pointed out to my client that I have not only built an entire step-by-step training and support system to help those who purchase my product or avail themselves of my services, but I have also included hundreds of dollars worth of free resources that show you how to grow every important aspect of your business online.

The issue here, then is not that business blogging doesn’t work. Like most proven systems, it works if you work it and it doesn’t if you don’t.

It takes a great deal of effort, commitment and perseverance to make any business work – online or offline. So, when it comes to starting a business online, or even just a business blog, here is what you absolutely need to know before you begin on your journey:

1 – The World Wide Web is not a magical, mystical realm where hungry customers suddenly appear out of electronic “cyber-thin-air” and come running madly towards you waving their wallets and credit cards in the air, desperately eager to buy your products and services just because you’ve set up a web presence. Cyberspace is governed by the same laws that govern the rest of the universe and if you are not going to put in the work, time or money required to learn how to use the medium successfully, then absolutely nothing is going to happen, either for you or for your business, no matter what anybody tells you or tries to sell you.

2 – Doing business online is more often than not extremely challenging, frustrating and sometimes even downright monotonous. Servers, sites and computers crash, internet connections go down, equipment fails, security measures get tested consistently by hackers and malicious users, software scripts have limitations, or require bug fixes and need to be constantly updated, data needs to be regularly backed up, customers get confused, lost, disappointed or extremely irate if your business processes are not clear, new technologies, strategies or competitors seem to come along just about every hour of the day to threaten your very business existence … and everyone expects you to be available online 24×7x365! If you’re not prepared to deal with all of this on a daily basis, then you really need to seriously question your decision to grow your business online.

3 – A blog is an extremely powerful tool and it can help you grow your business online fast, but it is not a “Big Red Button” that you only need to press once, then sit back and wait for it to generate you endless leads, customers and revenue. You still have to learn how to plan, design and implement sales and marketing systems, do effective keyword and online marketing research, test and analyze your results to improve your business performance,craft effective ads, emails, blog posts and sales letters that convert internet users into visitors, visitors into prospects, prospects into customers, customers into clients, clients into referrals, etc … and every else that a business requires to run successfully.

4 – If you’re NOT getting the results online that you were expecting, then ask yourself if your expectations are indeed realistic or not. Make an honest inventory of what you have put into your business in terms of planning, effort, time, learning and money. Look at your online business systems and decide if there are any tools, resources, membership sites, information guides, courses or expertise you need to purchase to help you leverage your time and efforts, or help you achieve better results faster. Avoid blaming others for any lack of results and look for the hidden opportunities in your mistakes.

5 – If you’re serious about making a success of your business online, then make sure you have systems in place that will give you an accurate measurement of your performance. Start the process using your best possible estimate (from whatever market research data you have available), and keep readjusting and finetuning your direction and efforts by realigning your performance results (i.e. where you are) with your goals and objectives (i.e. where you want to be).

6 – If you’re business blogging, check your results to see what search phrases visitors are using to find you, then find related keywords and synonyms and expand on that topic. By writing more content on a range of similar or related topics you can start to increase your blog’s visibility in a particular niche, or micro-niche and gradually help your blog gain prominence in your specific industry.

7 – There is a difference between delegating or outsourcing work to others and abdicating on your responsibility as the business owner. Successful delegation happens when you first build a system that produces measurable and consistent results in some particular area of your business, then train someone else to run your system so that you can focus on other important areas of your business. Abdication of your responsibility as a business owner happens when, instead of handing over a system for someone else to manage or improve upon, you simply hope that someone else will take over and handle, run, or solve some problem or aspect of your business that you would rather ignore or avoid dealing with.

8 – Having an active online presence has become an absolute necessity for businesses of all sizes in the new global economy. If you don’t know how to market your business online, then someone competing in your market space who does know how to promote themselves using the new available technologies will either end up putting you out of business, or at least make it harder for you to survive or even prosper financially.

9 – Don’t assume or expect that the journey will be smooth, easy, or cheap. There is a steep learning curve ahead of you and if you’re not mindful of this, it can quickly end up becoming a costly way for you to travel around in circles, or start going backwards.

10 – The bottom line: Don’t be seduced by the idea that there is a “big red magic button” you can press that will shortcut your path to business success online. Learn how to grow, market and promote your business online. Invest wisely in tools, resources, systems and expertise for hire that can help you achieve results faster, measure your results, and use these to improve your online business knowledge and your marketing skills.

If you need help getting started, I have created a step-by-step video tutorial program that shows you how to start a business blog that will help you grow your business online fast, and have also included hundreds of dollars of excellent business-building resources for FREE to help you through each of the different stages of growing your business online. For more details, please go here now: Starting A Business Blog

So why did I title this post “How To Start A Business Blog For Less Than $100″?

Well, for a start, many (if not most) small business owners are not internet marketers – they’re full-time business owners who don’t have the time to keep up with the growing volume of information on the web about internet marketing related topics like search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, opt-in list building, pay per click management, and so on. And they don’t want to learn technical stuff outside of their area of expertise.

So … although it’s true that anyone can start a business blog for around $15 (I explain how to do this further below), what most business owners would end up with if they did this, is a default blog that isn’t really going to do much at all to help them grow their business.

Let’s face it … it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, if you think the competition for your products or services is bad “offline”, try taking your business online with the aim of actually getting some of that “multibillion dollar” online share of the pie that everyone in your market space is fighting for.

The world wide web is littered with “brochureware” type websites that were built either as an afterthought for the business, or as a hopeful “big red button” solution that would somehow automagically deliver new customers without requiring any commitment of time and effort, without crafting an online marketing strategy with clear goals and objectives, and without a focused and consistent plan of action aimed at helping the business achieve specific results.

If all you want is to have a “me too” online presence so you can put a web address on your business card, letterbox flyers and the back of your car and then hope for the best, then none of what I’m going to say in the rest of this post matters to you.

If what you do want, however, is a powerful business tool that will help leverage your time and effort, that requires no technical skills, and that will help you grow your business online fast starting in just a few hours from now, then keep reading. I am going to show you how you can achieve all of this with a business blog for a total starting cost of less than $100.

There are only 3 basic steps involved in starting a business blog.

How To Start A Business Blog For Around $15

The first two steps of the 3-step process I am going to share with you will get you a business blog set up for around $15.

These steps are as follows:

Step 1 – Get A Domain Name

Forget about setting up a “FREE blog” on someone else’s domain (e.g. Blogger). This is not only a really bad idea, but it could end up costing you a lot of money in the long run. Here’s the reason why:

First of all, you are not building your own asset, you are building someone else’s asset. Second, if you take your business seriously, a time may come when you finally realize why you should have been hosting your business blog on your own domain name and not on someone else’s (you may, for example, decide to sell your business and include your online properties in the package as a way of increasing your asking price). You will then discover after moving your business blog over to your own domain name, that all of the links that have been built over time pointing visitors to your “FREE blog” are now lost to you. You can try putting up a “we have moved” sign on your old blog, but all this is probably going to do is make people click somewhere else when they arrive at your site, until eventually the search engines start dropping your site lower and lower in their results pages due to lack of new content being added.

So, if you’re just starting out, do yourself a favor and register a domain name for your blog. You can purchase a brand new .com domain from a reseller like GoDaddy for around $10. Just make sure the domain name you want is available and try to include the main keyword relating to your business in the domain name. GoDaddy has a great domain name search feature that shows you different available options if your desired domain name is taken and excellent domain name management features.

To search for an available domain name, go here: Register A New Domain Name For Around $10

Whilst on the subject of domain names, here’s a brief video I recorded below showing you a very clever and free way of quickly finding an available “keyword-rich” domain name that you can register for your business blog or web site:

Click here to search for available keyword-rich domain names

Step 2 – Get Webhosting For Your Blog

Once you have your domain name registered. the next step is to set up a web hosting account for your business blog. Choose whatever hosting provider you prefer, but I recommend hosting your site with a company like HostGator, as they offer a reliable and inexpensive webhosting service that is ideally suited for running a professional business blog. The reason for this is because their hosting accounts use cPanel and come with Fantastico installed. cPanel allows you to easily control most aspects of your hosting account and Fantastico is a powerful program that makes installing blogs on your site a breeze.

With Fantastico, you can literally install a full featured WordPress blog on your site in less than a minute with just a couple of mouse clicks. You simply log into your hosting account, click on Fantastico, then select the option to install a WordPress blog on your domain, and follow the simple screen instructions to complete your installation.

The hosting package I recommend for most small businesses costs less than $5 a month (Hostgator’s Hatchling Package). You can learn more about it here: Blog Hosting Service

As I stated earlier, the two steps above will help you start a business blog for around $15.

What you won’t get for around $15, however, is the functionality, the automation and the system that helps you grow your business online successfully and that gets you results with the least amount of effort, time and cost involved.

To get this, you generally have to either pay for a professional internet marketer’s expert knowledge, or be willing to do what internet marketers do to gain their knowledge and expertise, which is to invest considerable time, effort and money going through a steep and often costly learning curve.

Fortunately, there is an alternative solution available that will give you everything you need to start a business blog right, and that is designed to get you guaranteed results without going through the learning curve.

It’s called “Step 3″.

Step 3 – Copy The Proven Formula Used By Many Successful Business Blog Owners

For less than $100, you can:

a) register your own domain name,

b) have reliable web hosting for your blog, AND

c) set up a business blog that will get your business blog indexed very quickly in the search engines (usually in 48-72 hours), deliver you a powerful business marketing system and results with no technical knowledge required to run, and help you grow your business online fast with very little time invested on your part.

Our Step-By-Step Business Blog Video Tutorials will show you how to do all of this in just a couple of hours. You simply watch over my shoulder as I show you exactly how to install a blog on your domain in minutes, how to add and configure all of the system components we provide with your video training package (we supply everything you need) and how to kickstart your blog to start automatically driving visitors to your site.

And don’t worry, everything is explained using plain and simple English. The videos are designed for business owners, not computer geeks. I promise that if all you know how to do with a computer is move your mouse around and click a button, then you can set up a business blog just like I will show you how to do in our video tutorials.

Not only is our “How To Start A Business Blog” video tutorials package extremely affordable, it is also completely guaranteed to work for you risk-free. What makes your purchase risk-free is that you are covered by a 60-day 100% “no questions asked” money-back guarantee, which is actually enforced by our payment processing company, Clickbank (one of the most trusted online retailers of digitally delivered products).

The video tutorials package also includes over 50 professionally designed themes for your business blog and all of the components you need to transform your blog into a powerful business marketing tool.

But we go even further than just showing you how to start a business blog. The specially selected bonuses included in the package are designed to help you create a complete online business success system – giving you access to everything you need to know to drive massive traffic to your blog, write powerful sales copy that converts your visitors into customers, grow your business with email marketing, set up additional sources of online revenue, learn how to create new products and services, set up membership sites for recurring income, and so much more. And we do this all without overwhelming you with too much information.

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Want to see proof that what we show you in our tutorials really do work?
Then click here to watch a video we recorded showing you the results of a blog we set up on a brand new domain after only 60 days.

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If starting a business blog for less than $100 interests you, then here are some useful tips on what to do next:

1) Go here for more details about the business blog tutorials and what’s included in the DIY package.

2) Decide who is going to set up your business blog. The tutorials are easy enough for anyone to follow and no technical skills are required, so if you’re too busy to put in a couple of hours into setting up the blog yourself, then get one of your staff members or your partner to go through the videos and training tutorials and outsource the task. I know one business owner who paid a local neighborhood teenager to come in on a Saturday morning after sports to help him set everything up. It won’t take long, since each video tutorial just gets straight to the point and covers only what you need to know to get your business blog up and running very quickly.

3) Log into the member’s area after completing your purchase and register for the customer training emails. These are delivered around every 7-10 days straight to your email inbox and guide you through the process of growing your business, just as if you had a business coach working alongside you and helping you every step of the way. There’s also a forum and a customer help desk available to answer your questions and provide you with all of the support you need.

4) Don’t get distracted by all of the bonuses in the members area. They’re there to help you take your business to a whole new level AFTER you have set up your business blog and are getting results.

5) If you purchase the business blog tutorials package and then decide that you really want us to set it all up for you, just upgrade to the “full installation, set up and configuration” service. You will pay a few hundred dollars more to upgrade to the “we set it all up for you” service, but the good news is that you will be reimbursed for the FULL value of the package ($127) after the 60-day money-back guarantee period has passed, even if you have purchased the DIY package at a discounted or special offer price. And we also guarantee to have your blog completely set up and running in 4-5 working days.

So … there you have it! You can start a business blog for around $15 but then you’ll have to figure out how to actually make your blog work, or, if you want to save money and avoid wasting valuable time, just invest a few dollars more and get our complete ’step-by-step’ video training tutorials that show you exactly how to start a business blog the right way first time around, and in just a few hours from now you will have a powerful tool that’s ready to help you grow your business online fast.

For more information, click here –> Start A Business Blog

In the video below, we look at the results we have achieved 60 days after setting up this business blog on a brand new domain name, simply by following the same instructions we provide to small business owners in our “how to start a business blog” tutorials.

The video above shows that, with only 16 posts made to this blog since we registered the domain name “selfpublishweb.com” 60 days ago, the number of pages indexed in Google as well as the number of visitors to this site has increased by over 400% since we made our previous video, documenting the growth of this blog.

Search Google for terms like “blogs”, “blogging”, “business blog”, “business blogging”, etc … and you’ll find tens of millions of competing pages. As stated in the video, gaining any kind of search engine traffic in a market as competitive as this one for a site that is barely 60 days old and that was set up on a brand new domain, therefore, is quite a challenge.  Nonetheless, as the video shows, we are steadily increasing our exposure in the search engines, and attracting visitors to our blog, using the exact same methods and strategies we share with our customers in our videos and training emails.

Something that I didn’t mention in the video, is that 51 days after launching this site, we made our first online sale. In fact, we have made a few more sales since then. As we have not started promoting this site in any way other than by following the same basic strategy we recommend to all of our clients – set up your business blog as per our instructions, then simply write about your business and post content regularly to your blog – all sales have come purely from doing simple things that anyone can learn how to do, and which don’t require any technical web skills.

The video shows what you can expect to happen to your own business blog after 60 days, simply by writing and posting just a little more than a dozen articles or posts to your site. The system we show you how to set up in our tutorials automatically goes to work for you when you do this.

In case you are thinking that a whole lot of work is required to start growing your business online using a business blog, consider this: 16 articles in 60 days is equal to posting one article every 3 to 4 days. So, let’s do the maths … by getting a blog set up in a couple of hours and then committing to writing a couple of paragraphs about your business once or twice a week, you can start driving new customers and making new sales in 60 days or less. This represents a commitment in total hours spent  of about … one day!

I know many small business owners who, after 60 days of endless discussions with web developers and web designers, are still waiting for their web sites to be finished. Sites, by the way, which often end up costing them several thousand dollars and offer way less than a blog in terms of functionality, automation and ease of use. With a blog, we can show you how you can be forging ahead of your competitors, establishing your presence online and driving new visitors and potential customers for your products and services in as little as a few hours from now. And all of this can be achieved for less than $100.

For more details about starting your own business blog and growing your business online fast, go here: Starting A Business Blog