Virginia Emmanuel   Graphic Designer
I have been promoting my business of Graphic Designing on Blogger.com for a long time. I see that my blog gets hits.
Oct 17th 2010 04:45   

Slamet Paminto   Internet Marketer
I am just create my blog and promote it
Oct 20th 2010 20:06   

Louise Venison   TE owner, affiliate marketer
Yes, from my experience blogging is a good way to promote your business, but you have to be prepared to be consistent and for it to take time. Also, it's important to provide useful content on your blogs that will keep people coming back to read more. If you just post business pitches, you'll put people off and you won't get any regular readers or subscribers. I have 2 blogs that I started 2 or 3 months ago. I haven't promoted them hard - just put them up on some traffic exchanges - and I have around 50 subscribers on one and 100 on the other. I haven't offered any incentives for people to subscribe other than receiving an email every time I post. Another site you might be interested in looking at is Instant Blog Subscribers. This allows you to mail out to random members every 3 days when you add a new post, and I've got some good results using it.
Oct 21st 2010 15:08   

Jacqueline Taylor-Adams   
I've just created my first formal blog. Blogging is an excellent way to promote your business. Many people are now using blogs as websites. I just added a services page to my blog to use as my marketing site. Wordpress has some great professional and creative design themes. Also, starting out its good to host your blog on Wordpress.com, it's easier to set-up and the Wordpress platform drives traffic to your blog. The better your keywords, the more targeted your traffic.

As in any internet venture, SEO is key.
**Make sure your main keywords are in your title, url, and throughout the blog. Keywords are king - Detailed Keyword Tips http://del.icio.us/HubSpot/article5
**Keep your entries fairly short
**make your format is easy to read
**use images to help tell your story (no more than one imageper blog entry)
**make creative use of your sidebars

Hope this information helps :)
Oct 27th 2010 00:44   

Jacqueline Taylor-Adams   
Article link: Detailed Keyword Tips del.icio.us/HubSpot/article5 (add the http://)
Oct 27th 2010 00:46   

Louise Venison   TE owner, affiliate marketer
Wordpress.com will remove your blog if you post affiliate links on it as this is against their ToS.
Oct 27th 2010 04:42   

Jacqueline Taylor-Adams   
Regarding advertising and affiliate links on WordPress blogs, the specifics are posted here (http://)en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/ - what hosting platform is best for your blog is dependent on what type of business you are promoting. Again, your goal is always to be where your target market is or frequently visits. There are many options to hosting blogs. If you have your own site, you may want to host your blog on your site, or use platforms like Blogger.com, typepad, even MySpace, Ning are viable. Again, it depends on your audience. Different platforms have different features. Do Your due diligence and find what works best for you.
Oct 27th 2010 08:33   

Louise Venison   TE owner, affiliate marketer
This is the part of the ToS that Wordpress.com are using when they remove blogs containing affiliate links: "does not contain ... unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites". This section is highlighted in the ToS.

Quite understandably, Wordpress.com don't want people using their free service to promote affiliate sites. I wasn't aware of this when I first set up my blog on Wordpress.com, and I was told to remove the links as they were against the ToS, which is when I moved the blog onto my own server. I left the old blog up for a while to tell people who had bookmarked to to change their bookmarks, but it was removed by Wordpress.com about 3 weeks after they sent me the email about it.

So, if you do decide to host a commercial blog with Wordpress.com, be aware that this will probably happen to you at some point.
Oct 27th 2010 09:22