Online Marketing for your home based business can be a time consuming process and trying to complete with millions of other online businesses can become disheartening.

However, there are ways to simplify your online marketing or “get more bang for your buck” with your efforts.

I have had a MyBlogLog account since March ’08 and have seen a fair amount of website traffic stats from people finding my site from the network. So, I decided to put a little more effort into learning how to use this free resource and here is what I found. Please note this is an introduction to MyBlogLog. Like all tools and resources you can get into heavy details but this is high level, beginner application stuff.

What is MyBlogLog?

Easy way to define MyBlogLog is by the Wiki:

MyBlogLog is a social network for the blogger community that is based in part on interactions facilitated by a popular web widget that many members install on their blog.[1] Bloggers sign up for free accounts on MyBlogLog and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they author. Other registered members can subscribe to these communities, effectively bookmarking them for future reading and sharing them with their own contacts. Bloggers can then display widgets on their sites which show MyBlogLog online community members who have recently visited their page. These widgets also contain links to visiting members’ community pages, and are one way in which users connect with one another. All members can see certain basic information about how many people visit their blog, what links they clicked and where they come from. Members may also view more extensive information about traffic on their site for a small monthly fee.

One more side note: Yahoo has acquired MyBlogLog and I think that offers good insight not only into the uses of the site but as an indicator of how Yahoo views social networking potential.

How do you use MyBlogLog?

When I originally joined MyBlogLog I thought it was only a way to see who visited your site in a nifty little widget in my sidebar.  However, I have recently learned about the various other “powers” of this tool when used the right way.

Visit MyBlogLog and when you select the “Join/SignUp” button you will be given the below screen.

That’s right! You are seeing it right, you can simply sign in with your Yahoo ID since they are owned by them it does make sense.

The benefit of using your Yahoo ID is you will find when you hop from one blog to another it automatically recognizes you, as long as you are signed in to your account.  I’m sure you have seen a blog that has the MyBlogLog widget on the sidebar that shows the latest visitors and once you have your own MyBlogLog account, Voila! You will show up there too!  It’s an easy and fun way to see who is actually visiting your website.

Adding MyBlogLog Recent Visitor Widget to Your Blog

If you have a blog, and a MyBlogLog account you can create the above widget and customize the colors and options to fit your own theme, well, as long as it fits one of their seven color options.

For the Self Hosted WordPress Blog, this is sooo easy by simply adding the WordPress MyBlogLog Recent Visitor Plug-in.

If you don’t have a Self Hosted WordPress Blog you can follow the instructions that will fit your blog set up by following the instructions on MyBlogLog.

As you may have noticed by now, I am a big fan of conversational marketing. So, how can you use this as an effective, community building tool?

Now that you can see WHO is visiting your blog and it’s not just an IP address in your web stat counter you have a couple options to take it a step further.

If the person leaves a comment, return the favor and visit their site if they leave a site url in the comments as most do.

Or as Pixelhead suggests: “If the person does not leave a comment, but shows up on your widget, click on their avatar and either: leave them a message on Mybloglog or visit their site and leave a comment. Mybloglog requires you to add them as a contact before you can leave them a message on their profile page. In the message thank them for visiting your site and I would suggest making a comment about their site after you have visited it of course.”

Your MyBlogLog Profile

When you login to your MyBlogLog profile you will need to add your blog under “My Sites and Services”

VERY IMPORTANT:  You also have the option to add your RSS Feed- take the opportunity and add your Feed both your original feed and your feedburner feed!

Once you have your blog settings created and the system works on your screen capture move along and click on the “ADD SERVICE” option.  This is where you can add all your other social networking and make your own mini-powerhouse!

Add as many of your accounts as you can, and if you don’t have an account with one of the options, make one.

Connect with Cyber Friends

If you are interested in using social networking to create a group of followers and grow your network you can use this site to help you connect the pieces. You can find your fellow cyber friends with these easy steps:

1. As I stated above add your profiles. They make it easy for you by even making the list and providing the initial part of the url for you, all you need to do is enter your personal username for that account. So go pull up that spreadsheet I told you to make earlier and just copy and paste. It took me about 10 minutes to populate all the fields.

If you took my other piece of advice on trying to keep your usernames the same or similiar then MyBlogLog even has a button that you can click that will search all the sites for you using your common username and populate the fields for you.

Privacy Note: At the bottom of the screen you will see that they state “Account information you share on this page will be used to retrieve your publicly-available updates from those sites for re-distribution across MyBlogLog.com and Yahoo!. Public updates are also available to third parties via an RSS feed of your profile as well as the MyBlogLog AP”

2. At the bottom of your profile page you will see the link for the “friender”

You will have a few options under different tabs. The image above shows the “connector” tab. This tab shows all the services that I added to my profile and what other friends interact on what service with simple Green X’s. This means that they also have an account with that service.

If you want to connect with that person on that service simply click the Green X.  You will then get a blue check mark in that square to show that you have connected there as well.

For anyone that has created multiple social networking profiles you will see how powerful this is. Instead of wandering aimlessly and searching and adding one here one there, boom, you can create a very solid network very quickly.

Now, in addition to the “connector” tab you have the “friender” tab. Click on the “Find my Friends” tab and you will see all the cyber friends that you can simply click a button and add to your network.

The downfall of this tool, as all tools and resources have potential downfalls, is the ability to have those people that don’t really care about you or your blog or your business and just want to make as many contacts as possible and get a really big number in their profile or worse use it for spam or porn. I can’t make them stop but I think the advantage of easily connecting with like minded people outweighs this potential issue.

One more important feature: I BELIEVE, I saw a post somewhere, and now I can’t find it (don’t you hate when that happens?) that when anyone you connected with updates any of their services you are notified automatically.  I’m going to experiment with this one a little bit because obviousely, if that is true, then that has a great potential- like if you have 300 connections and you make a blog post and it updates your Facebook and MySpace page and notifies all 300 of your connections that you made a new blog post.. all automatically… are you catching my drift on the potential here?? So if you know about this feature or see another post about it, please leave a comment.

Blog Traffic

Depending on your blog you may have little traffic or a few thousand visitors a month, that’s the honest truth about blog traffic. While you can do your best to stimulate and promote your blog, you never know if readers will catch on or not. However, using MBL can help by performing a couple easy and fast steps.

Utilize the Search Box

• Enter your keyword or blog topic and see what other blogs are closely related to yours.
• Click on the profile avatars of members that show up and add them as contacts after you visit their sites and determine they are a good match to network.
• Click on the communities that show up for the search term, and join the communities.
• Visit the sites and join in the conversation on these blogs by making meaningful comments. This will result in visits to your blog from both the site owner and visitors to the site that may like your comments.

RSS Feeds

Take the work out of tracking your MyBlogLog account by subscribing to your own RSS feed in your reader or adding the RSS feed of those in your community you like. RSS has so many great opportunities that many people haven’t even started to use. But, for more traffic and backlink potential you can add your MBL RSS feed to RSS directories. And by the way, you can add the RSS feeds to your community members as well because they are all in one place in your profile.

Tools

If you are a serious blogger with multiple blogs then finding your real community and connecting with your readers has big potential.  Here is a great option for you, and I’ll be honest I just found this but can’t believe the potential it offers. MyBlogLog Tools by SoloSEO. This company has created tools that specialize in MBL that allow you to:

• Compare your visitors
• Compare your communities
• Compare your communities between contacts

I mean really, talk about getting to know who your contacts are!  Why keep spending hours and months on what I call “hopeful marketing” when you can have the people that actually have the same interest and you already know like you delivered to your inbox?

Analyzing

Back in your profile, under your sites you will see the option for “statistics”.

They will provide you with a piece of code for you to copy and paste into your blog template.  Once you have it in place and it can start tracking your site details.

In the future that link will bring you to a page showing you some great details and insights into who is visiting.

The FREE option will only give you the top 10 results but you will see each tab with it’s own tab and they provide you with the link details of where your readers came from, what they viewed and where they clicked. They also provide a summary of how many readers and pageviews you had.

Upgrade to MyBlogLog Pro for $3.00 a month via PayPal and you will have access to real time stats and longer lists. I find the stats in the free version fine for my needs.

Summary

Like I stated in the beginning, this is a general overview of MyBlogLog to further your home based business reach and kick around the idea of conversational marketing, but I hope it now helps you see the potential for using this site is much greater then you expected.

Using this as a way to build your community and further your online home based business reach can be cheaper and faster then more conventional methods of marketing.

If I missed an important beginner point, please feel free to leave a comment.

Additional MyBlogLog Resources:

MyBlogLog Blog

TopRankBlog Interview with MyBlogLog CEO

MyBlogLog on Social Media Marketing Explained

home based business

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Your Personal Guide to MyBlogLog

Understanding the type of visitors to your site is a very important task because you can use that information to provide them with targeted content that fills their need and will keep them returning. Tools, like Google Analytic s make it easy to see who is stopping by and what exactly they were searching for.

The more detailed your customer profile is the better you can give them appropriate information as well as know what other services you can promote to them. By having a clear direction of what you want action you want them to take will help you get your desired end result.

Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.

When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.

Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Who is your Audience and What do you Want from Them?

Evaluate Your Online Business

Operating a home based online business comes with it’s own challenges that many don’t fully understand. The thoughts of being able to work at home when you want, wearing what you want or typing away wherever you want seem like the ultimate “work/life balance”.

However, the fact that you are a one woman show running an online business means not only do you need to wear the hats of mother, wife, daughter, sister, household manager, referee, housekeeper and taxi you know have to run the jobs of website developer, marketer, shipper, financial analyst and customer service to name a few. The trick is making sure you are not killing your online business while trying to be everything to everyone. Here are a few check points to evaluate when it’s time to ask, recruit or hire some help to keep your sanity while growing your business.

Questions To Ask Yourself

1. Am I building quality content? If you spend any time working to increase your website optimization and rankings you’ve heard it a thousand times, “CONTENT IS KING”. You need to be adding regular quality content to your website and blog.

2. Am I tracking my marketing strategies? You should have a clear and concise vision of what marketing tactics are working for you and what you need to weed out. This will save you time and money every month if you focus on what is giving you the best ROI, Return On Investment.

3. Am I wasting time in email and chat rooms? While conversational marketing is one of my favorite methods and I do love connecting with others for a little break from the kids, it is also very easy to get sucked in and have non-productive time. Complete the work that puts money in your bank account first, then use the email, chat and forums.

4. Am I trying to build links with sites that are not giving me “link love” or passing the “Google juice”? There are many ways to create a linking strategy that will be worth while do you know if you are using them? I’ll be sharing more information on this coming up in the next couple days.

5. Am I not tracking my conversion rates? Yes, you should know the numbers! How many sales are you getting for every 100 visitors? What is the purpose of your website or advertising campaign? Do you want your customer to BUY, Sign Up, Download something? You should know what your end goal is and how many visitors you need to get that action.

6. Am I not tracking my online efforts? You should have a spreadsheet that you track your articles, press releases, autoresponder messages, search engine submissions and have the dates and summary of each item. This will not only be a great learning tool to reflect on but will let you know what is working or not.

7. Do I have a clear advertisement budget or plan? Some recommend this be your first step, however, I’ll be honest, I have better luck tweaking and creating my budget last after I created a game plan on paper and then it helps me prioritize and find ways to adjust the plan to what I can afford.

If you find that you are not doing the above action steps on a regular basis, it may be time to evaluate if your ready for a little help even if it’s a virtual assistant for a few hours a month. Acknowledging that you can’t do everything may be your first step to outsourcing smaller mundane actions that allow you to focus on the bigger picture.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Are you Killing your Online Business?