Using Blogs to Bridge to Your Website (P-1)

The Importance Of A Bridge Site 

If you are like most Internet entrepreneurs, you start to collect different websites or web presences that are useful for generating traffic back to your site.  Some of these places, like Digg, Facebook, or article archives can be a great resource in advertising your sales website on the Internet to specific demographics.  However, many third-party sites have specific rules about the types of pages that people can use in their comments, their articles, and/or biographical information.  Ezine Articles, for instance, won't allow you to link back to a sales page, and yet, this is at the heart of Internet marketing.  You wouldn't be out there, if you weren't trying to get someone to buy something from you.  So, what do you do? 

 

That's where you start to realize that there are ways to get around the rules that others put in place to limit your Internet marketing activities, and bridge sites are an important strategy to exploit.  Even when a third-party doesn't ban you for linking to a sales page, there are also other times when it's just jarring to go from a link, say like in Facebook, to a sales page.  In some ways, social networkers will judge such a move as “too commercial” and you can lose credibility in your authenticity that way.  So, again, you want to implement a bridge site to smooth the way. 

 

Why Blogs Are Ideal Bridge Sites

Web logs, a.k.a. “blogs,” are an excellent way to bridge from a site like a user-interactive social networking site to a commercial sales page.  That's because they tend to be a mix of both.  You have your daily blogs that you post, that are typically informal, casual in tone, and friendly, and you have links that are put on a blog that are expected to link to more commercial endeavors.  The casual style is much in keeping with the style of social networking, and so it is less jarring to people who can be harvested from these sites and do not realize that they have begun to be marketed.  

 

This gives you an edge because there is less buyer's resistance on this format.  Also, as long as you own the blog, you can link to anything that you want to link to, so that makes it ideal as a bridge site.  And, the major search engines love to crawl blogs frequently because of the way content is updated more regularly, so you get a wider audience. 

 

In addition, you can put links in your blog posts that send people to different sales pages.  You can set up a blog anonymously or with a pseudonym, and  thus, no one has to know that the links you promote are from your own website.  Once someone visits your blog, they should have an easy to remember URL that is all yours.  

 

Blogs can be addictive because the information should be updated once daily, if not more.  As long as the information is informative and entertaining, you can get people to subscribe to your blog.  This converts them from an anonymous viewer to someone who is now basically entering your sales funnel.  You can then begin to offer them some deals or introduce them to the product lineups on other websites you own, that can convert them from subscriber to customer. 

WordPress Is The Gold Standard 

 

So, now you see the value in having a blog as an intermediary from third-party sites with massive traffic streams, to get potential customers into your sales pipeline.  But, where do you start?  WordPress is the gold standard of easy to implement blogs, and there are even some hosts that will put a site for you, which you end up customizing.  However, there is a bit of confusion with WordPress that is important to clarify.   

 

The WordPress.org is a shareware software package that anyone can use for free. Some commercial people took that software and built WordPress.com, the .com extension signifying it is a commercial endeavor.  That's a community of bloggers with WordPress blogs with limited features and heavy-handed guidelines. 

 

Some of the guidelines on WordPress.com don't allow you advertise the way you would want to do on a Internet marketing blog.  In particular, you can't make any money off Google ads from your blog using WordPress.com.  So, you want to make sure that you are using WordPress.org hosted on a site where the rights to add Google ads to the blog is not banned.  That way you can make money through advertising too and you get all the features that are important to develop your Internet marketing blog. 

Some Plug-Ins You Want To Use 

 

WordPress features can be added through the installation of third-party software called “plug-ins.”  There are many different plug-ins that are beneficial to the Internet marketer as there are numerous developers who are interested in pushing this market forward.  The following list is far from comprehensive, but it gives you a good idea of some plug-ins you definitely want to get and install:

  Akismet  This plug-in is a spam filter and can save you loads of time moderating comments.  It follows a database that is regularly updated of known spammers, so you don't have to read every single comment that comes to your blog.  It will automatically filter the spam out and put it in a spam folder where you can look at it at your leisure. 
 
 AdSense Deluxe  This plug-in lets you even add AdSense code directly into your blog posts, not just the sidebar.  
 
 Do Follow  If you have a “do follow” blog you are more likely to attract visitors and blog commentators.  That's because no follow blogs do not give credit for a backlink, which is why many people post in the first place. 
 
 Email Users  If you are going to use your subscription list as an email contact list for your Internet marketing activities, you will need to add this plug-in.  It lets you send email to your registered users. 
 
 Gregarious  This helps you to connect to other site by giving the option for social bookmarking posts to places like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and more. 
 
 WordPress e-commerce  You can add a shopping cart to your blog with this particular plugin. 
 
 All In One SEO Pack  A “must have” plug-in for Internet marketers as it optimizes your pages to get great search engine page results.  It's a great way to attract a lot of attention from search engines with minimal time investment. 
 
 Subscribe To Comments  This plug-in helps people to track a comment stream on a particular post and keeps them coming back to your blog. 

Grabbing Traffic From Third Party Sites 

 

Once you've set up the blog and understand how you will take people from there to your website pages, either via links in your blog posts or sidebar, you still need to get people to visit your blog from other third-party sites.  And, which third-party sites should you try to get a web presence on?  Let's go over a few of the different places you can begin to cultivate a web presence for the purpose of grabbing traffic, and how to use each one with your blog to lead people from that area to your own. 

 

Other Blogs 

 

Once you've set up a blog, the natural place to start looking for traffic is other more high profile blogs in your market niche.  If you don't know who these people are, you need to visit Technorati.com and put in a few keywords that are in your market niche to determine who the big players are.  You should make it a point to build a list of blogs that you can add to your blog roll and see if by doing so, they add you to their blog roll.  The blog roll is a list of blogs that other bloggers recommend and by getting added to a blog roll on a popular blog, you'll automatically get more traffic from the target niche that you've selected. 

 

Another way to get more traffic from blogs is to comment on the top profile blogs and leave a link to a blog post that addresses some aspect of the post.  This way you play off on an already popular topic and you contribute to the conversation too.  It's not considered spam to put your URL in a comment if it points to something that contributes to the conversation, not just a sales page.  Again, you are using the bridge of your website to grab eyeballs and then once they get to your blog, you can market them there. 

 

Finally, you can also go to blog communities like WordPress.com and look on their featured stories and categories.  Find one or two blog postings that you can reply to and contribute to the conversation.  Once these blog posts are put on their featured page, you will get a lot of traffic if you post something interesting with a link back to your own blog.  Since you're dealing with people who already to subscribe to blogs, it's a natural for increasing your blog subscribers too.

Digg.com 

 

Digg is a social news site where people submit stories and other people vote on them.  The more popular the news story becomes, the more it is highly ranked by Digg.  It can even land on the front page of Digg, which will provide a mega boost of traffic for anyone who happens to land there.  You  can submit your story to Digg and get your friends and associates to vote for it.  It can be a story you put on your blog on a popular subject.  It doesn't matter than you're not an expert, as long as you can talk about the subject intelligently and make the story entertaining.  If you know what subjects are generating controversy on the web, those are always a good subject to try to get into Digg, just be careful not to draw negative attention to your blog instead of positive attention. 

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