Blogging to drive web traffic

Once you've built your new store, you need to find customers. Sounds so easy, right? Build it and they will come. In reality, getting traffic to your website takes time, energy and quite a bit of self-promotion. One way to help drive traffic to an online store is by getting out and about in the blogosphere.

The best way utilize the power of blogging to drive sales is by creating one of your own. There are lots of free blogging programs out there like blogger.com and wordpress.com. Using these free services, you can create your own blog in a matter of minutes. There are also some pay per blog services. If you plan to create and manage more than one blog, Typepad.com has a blogging service that's easy to use and only a few dollars a month.

Once you create your blog, link to it from your store, and put a reciprocal link from your blog to your store. That way if someone does a search on "Widget blog" he will find your blog and ultimately see the link to your store. If you create many interesting posts on your blog, that person may return time and again to read what you write and may add you to his list of favorite blogs. Blogging is a great viral marketing tool!

Another way to take advantage of marketing through blogging is to leave comments on other people's blogs. Now, you need to careful about this. Bloggers don't like spam comments. But if you find other blogs that you enjoy reading, leaving comments will enable other visitors of that blog to see your profile, and they may be tempted to view your blog as well. This works especially well if you are part of a blogging community that all writes about a similar subject.

Blogging alone probably won't drive to you to the top of the search engines unless you have an extremely popular blog in a niche market. But it's a great tool to help with marketing efforts, and it's fun too!

Roxanne Grandis is a Creative Director with BV Software, makers of the award winning BV Commerce Shopping Cart Software and other ecommerce related products. Roxanne has created content for some of the largest online stores including Godiva.com, Carolee.com and Ragu.com. She holds both a Master of Teaching and Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from NYU.