Unless you're very new to the internet or you've been hiding under a rock for the last year, you already know about blogs.

You know that:

• Blog is short for weblog.

• They should be updated frequently.

• You can have 1 or more for free - no domain name or hosting account required.

• You can use them for almost anything - including marketing.

• You can get them indexed by the major search engines for free.

Why?

The answer is obvious...

There are thousands of blogs and getting traffic to a blog requires (Do I dare say it?) promoting it.

Now I almost said, promoting it just like a website but didn't because blogs have 3 additional ways to be promoted that websites don't offer:

1. Blog only traffic exchanges

   While many website traffic exchanges will allow you use your blog to get visitors, there are also new traffic exchanges designed for blogs only. And even though I don't update my blog as often as I should, I still get traffic to it by using BlogExplosion

2. Blog directories

   There are directories set up just for blogs. I must admit that I haven't researched this fully but do know that if you go to a search engine like Google and search on "blog directory" you'll get more than 8,000,000 results. I visited the top 2 listings and found that both allowed free submission, had high Google page ranks and good Alexa traffic ranking.

3. Blog and Ping

   Ever wonder what pinging meant?

   Pinging is an old computer term that meant sending a request to another computer or server over a network or the Internet to see if the remote computer was responding and it was used for verifying that all computers on a network were set up properly and for troubleshooting problems.

   The use of the pinging technology has now been expanded to include a method of informing others that your blog exists and also to let them know when a new post has been made. Most free blog sites are set up to ping at least 1 update service so make sure you have your blog settings set properly and are using that feature.

   In addition you may want to use a free service to quickly ping several places. Here's 1 I use: http://pingomatic.com/

• pick an "appropriate" name

• use keywords properly

• get links pointing to it

• drive traffic to it

Susan Carroll owner of http://www.friendswhocare.us has formed a global community of online business people through her weekly newsletter.

Susan recently finished a free report about adding automatic content to your website that search engines can see. It's available at: http://www.friendswhocare.us/content.htm

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