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You may already know that a blog allows you to attract new customers, build brand awareness, and inspire more prospects to buy from you. Did you also know that the average blog attracts 55% more visitors and gets indexed 434% more by search engines than a traditional website?

Even if you’re already sold on the value and benefits of blogging, however, launching a blog for your own business and jumping into the blogosphere can be a daunting prospect. Starting a blog and then turning it into a successful online venture requires careful planning and strategy.

Our step-by-step blog tutorials will show you exactly “how” to install, set up and configure a blog that will help you grow your business faster. If you want to know “why” you should start business blogging and how to plan for success before you go ahead and start a blog, however, then I have found just the perfect guide that will explain to you why merely having a web presence today is not enough to drive your business growth, why, in fact, a static site with no regular new content and no engagement with visitors might even work against you, and why blogging is the simplest and most effective way for your business to deliver what your customers are after.

Renowned speaker, author and internet marketing consultant Chris Garrett has recently teamed up with WordTracker (the keyword research company) and written a fantastic 162 page electronic guide for creating, writing and promoting a successful business blog called “Business Blogging – 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales”.

The plan outlined in this book is a valuable roadmap for blogging success and comes from Chris’ own real life experience as a sought after professional blogger. “Blogging For Business” is a straightforward guide to business blogging and will help any business understand how to create a popular and profitable blog.

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If you have already installed and configured your blog correctly, then, by simply continuing to post great content to your blog on a regular basis (assuming, of course, that you are providing real value and information to readers), you should find that the number of visitors to your site will increase over time.

If you don’t know how to set up a blog to automatically drive new visitors to your site, then please subscribe to my “insider tips” newsletter (see form at the top of the sidebar), or go here to learn more about my “step-by-step” tutorials on how to set up a blog.

Now, if you have been involved in any type of business marketing before, then you are probably familiar with the concept of lists, e.g. customer lists, email lists, prospect lists, opt-in lists, customer database, etc.

And if you have ever subscribed to any newsletters or update lists from professional internet marketers, you will soon also become familiar with the popular list building edict that “the money is in the list”.

In other words, if you are not building a list for your business, then you’re leaving money on the table. A lot of money!

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In my previous post I talked about using Twitter to grow your business and showed you a simple strategy for driving more traffic to your sites with a couple of tools that automate the process for you.

I’ve just come across a great new service today that I just have to share with you.

Everyone on Twitter uses shortened URLs. With only 140 characters to say your message it only makes sense to use the shortest possible links.

For example … here’s the full link to the blog post I wrote on using Twitter to grow your business online:

http://www.selfpublishweb.com/demo/online-business-automation/238-growing-your-business-with-blogs-and-twitter

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Social media is becoming increasingly important for businesses today. Sites like Facebook and Twitter offer not just fantastic social tools that allow you to chat and meet new people, follow the latest news and trends and generally stay connected with other online users around the world from the comfort of your own home or while at work in the office, but more and more businesses are discovering that, if done correctly, social media can also be a very profitable way to spread information about your products and services and grow your business.

The main problem for most business owners when it comes to using social media to grow their businesses (and especially small business owners), is that there is too much new information to take in and so little time, that most people end up feeling either overwhelmed, or frustrated that they are missing out on some powerful ways to expand their business online and take advantage of all these new emerging technologies.

Take Twitter for example. Everyone’s talking about it. Many businesses are using it quite successfully to get their message out to a growing number of potential prospects and to keep in touch with existing customers, and some very successful Twitter marketers have even created guides on how to make money with Twitter (see Twitter Marketing Product Reviews for a review of some of the more popular guides on Twitter marketing.)

Part of using Twitter successfully to grow your business online is to get people “following” your tweets. To achieve this, however, you’ve gotta be tweetin’ often and follow some of the people who are following you. This means that there are tasks you have to perform on a regular basis (e.g. writing and posting tweets and clicking on links to follow people), which means piling on more work on your daily “to do” lists.

In this post, I am going to share with you a couple of simple strategies I use to help grow my businesses using Twitter that you can easily duplicate by following the instructions I am about to give you. At the very least, the automated strategies I am going to share with you will get your finger in the “Twitter pie” until you can devote more time to learning how to maximize the benefits of using social media for growing your business.

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Mass Automation Tools has just released a brand new plugin for WordPress blog owners called WP Membership Tool.

This plugin turns your Wordpress blog into a fully fledged membership site. You will be able to easily restrict specific pages or posts to your subscribers and start collecting automatically recurring subscriptions from your members.

The main features of WP Membership Tool are as follows:

• Easy-to-use tags to separate free content from premium one
• SEO optimized
• Support for unlimited user levels
• First click free feature
• No change needed at blog level
• Payments: support for ‘Subscribe’ and ‘Buy Now’ Paypal buttons
• Registration: seamless integration with internal WP user system
• Terms &conditions approval feature.
• Feedback from members feature
• Membership and subscription cancellation automation

For more details about this brand new WordPress plugin click here to visit their website: Mass Automation Tools

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Whether you’re planning to host a web site or a blog, I recommend using cPanel hosting. cPanel makes managing your blog hosting very easy, especially if, like me, you’re not a “techie” but would like to manage your own blog, web site or business online.

For this post, I am going to assume that you have done your research and found a reliable webhosting company that is customer driven and that offers excellent support. If you’re looking for a great blog hosting service provider but don’t know where to start, then the two companies I highly recommend you look into are:

Hostgator – This company offers great value for money hosting for most blogs and websites, especially for small businesses.

LiquidWeb.com – They’re not the cheapest host, but they offer superior web hosting services and heroic customer support. I recommend this hosting company if you need a dedicated web server for your web presence with 24×7 support that will guarantee your peace of mind.

I use both of these companies for hosting my own sites as well as those of my clients and I am more than happy with the excellent service and value for money they provide.

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Are you thinking of starting a business blog? If you are, then one of the first and most important decisions you will have to make during the planning phase of your site, is the aspect of blog hosting.

Blog hosting generally refers to companies that provide a hosting service better suited to a blogger’s specific needs while also offering all the regular features you would normally find in a typical webhosting company. Some of these needs might include special requirements for adult blog hosting, audio blog hosting, video blog hosting and so on.

Other features of a blog hosting service allow you to install a blog software such as wordpress, typepad, b2evolution, nucleus, pmachine or lifetype directly from your hosting control panel.

Another benefit of using an exclusive blog hosting service, may be that popular blog hosting providers already rank highly in search engine results and can thus give your blog exposure to a greater and wider audience faster because of factors like their authority and the automatic encoding already included in their service.

When researching blog hosting services look for sites that offer blog hosting comparison charts, where the charts are divided into categories (e.g. starting with cheap blog hosting options and moving up towards full-featured hosting packages), as well as information on the main blog hosting platform differences you can expect.

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