Jason Katzenback with Portal Feeder shares a short, to the point, and very valuable look at how to use Craigs List to boost traffic to your website or blog.

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Niche

In the previous article, we discussed how blogs can help you generate traffic for your main website. But what if you don’t have another site? Or what if you want your blog to be your main website, the exclusive carrier of your moneymaking ventures?

This can be achieved, of course. Such is the versatility of web logs.

Standalone blogs are best utilized for online businessmen or women who have decided to pursue what many people call as nicheing. Yes, the word is ungrammatical, but it is a term that many Internet marketers have come to embrace with fondness. Nicheing involves the creation of many sites that cater to particular niches. Niches, of course, are very specialized markets, most of which are so obscure that they do not garner the attention of businesses, hence creating high demands with low supplies. The purpose of nicheing is to find these markets and provide for their needs. These enterprising businessmen would earn through the following ways:

* Creating and eventually selling products that aim to serve the said niches.

* Selling existing products that the said niches need.

* Providing for information that the members of the said niches can access for free, and enrolling the site that contains the information in a Pay Per Click (PPC) program like Google AdSense.

Regardless of what path the online entrepreneur decides to take, he should first create a site that serves as the repository of his commercial methods. Niches can be very rewarding. Since there is but a few competitions in the field, your search engine placement is sure to be higher than usual. Traffic should also be at a sustainable level since the members of a niche have nothing else to visit. This will mean a greater possibility for more sales, if you’re selling a product, or a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) if you’re enrolled in a PPC program.

Now, making a site can be quite cumbersome. You have to deal with the aspects of web design, graphic creation, and content writing among other concerns. What more when you have to create numerous sites for numerous niches?

Thankfully, blogs will make things a whole lot easier for you. Every online marketer who has attained success with niche marketing can attribute this to their proper exploitation of blogs. Whereas it would take you a couple of weeks to come up with 10 websites, it would only take you a couple of hours to come up with 10 blog sites. The sheer convenience and ease of web logs have made nicheing a very potent business model.

Blogs can very much substitute for a regular website. As we have previously discussed, high quality content is, ultimately, what will drive traffic to your site, and this kind of content can easily be carried through a blog. Also, you don’t have to change the entire page whenever you want to update your content, as you would with a regular website. With blogs, all you have to do is to write your update in a designated box and press the publish button. Of course, different blogging software have various features, but none comes more loaded than WordPress (www.wordpress.com).

Blogging is the way to go if you want to create, and maintain, several niche sites. And WordPress is the weapon of choice for most Internet marketers. To fully realize the potentials of the medium, therefore, you should be able to exploit all the features that WordPress does offer. Again, David Pankhurst’s excellent report on powerful WordPress secrets (http://www.malkeenan.com/top10tricks) will help you excel in this area.

Look out for the next article, where we’re going to discuss how you could efficiently integrate the Google AdSense program into your blog, and make it a passive income generating machine.

Neerj Sidhu

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The eMarketing Association describes itself this way:

eMarketing

The eMarketing Association (eMA) is the world’s largest international association of emarketing professionals. Members include governments, companies, professionals and students involved with the emarketing arena. The eMA provides marketing resources, services, research, certifications, educational programs and events to its members and the marketing community. The eMA works with a number of organizations, companies and governments on issues related to eCommerce, multi-channel marketing and legislative issues. The eMA has members in over 40 countries around the world, and sponsors or manages over 30 events a year. Over 3,000 marketers have enrolled in eMA online courses and thousands of eMarketing professionals and students have achieved certification status.

Their 9th Annual Conference will be in San Francisco April 21st and 22nd. They describe their conference this way:

eM9-SF provides the forum for the very latest trends, best practices, processes and ideas that are transforming the future of marketing. Sessions contain new content and cutting edge actionable ideas and processes you can bring your entire team.

Enjoy a relaxed atmosphere, great networking, welcome reception, terrific breaks, and some of the best leaders in the marketing arena.

* Excellent Networking
* Interactive Forum and Panels
* Search, eMail, Website, Metrics, Mobile, Social, and more covered in this comprehensive conference.
* First class venue and conference facility
* Full course breakfast, lunch, breaks and networking reception
* Free wi-fi throughout event
* Free follow-up consultations available to all attendees
* Exclusive network group avaliable to attendees.
* All new presentations by top leaders in the eMarketing arena

I probably won’t be flying out to attend the conference, but I do wish it was being held a bit closer to home – I’d be there with bells on. Maybe it would be worth the flight for you, eh?

You can get more information about the group, as well as their certification in eMarketing at http://www.emarketingassociation.com/

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Metrics are ways of measuring things. Metrics in Internet Marketing could be the measurement of the amount of traffic a web site gets, the number of people that sign up for a newsletter, the number of Social Bookmarks a page gets, the number of comments left on a blog post, and so on.

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SMR is an acronym for Social Media Release. A Social Media Release is like a Press Release in Social Media venues, e.g., Facebook, MySpace, etc. It’s also known as a Social Media Press Release and as New Media Press Releases.

Download PR Squared’s Social Media Press Release Template (shared here with permission).

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