Blogs work amazingly well in bringing in the traffic in our present Internet age; even the search engines are predisposed toward giving more prominence to blogs in comparison to mere websites.

What are Blogs?

Blogs are chronicled websites, i.e. they are websites where you post content and it is maintained in the order of the dates that you submit. A single piece of content that you submit, which is no different from an article in its size and structure, is known as a post. Visitors are free to make comments on your article. You can reply to these comments. Hence, a blog is a very much interactive tool. Moreover, a blog provides you with the possibility of posting your business website URL on your post, which helps in the traffic generation. If someone likes the post you have made, they will want to click on this link and visit your website for more information.

Blogs are known for their regularly updated, meaningful content. People are looking for some information here; it could be about how to do a particular thing or some interesting facts and figures on something, or some reviews about a product, etc. It is a great place for you to advertise your business in a subtle manner.

How to Make Blogs Work

The first step is building the blog. Using tools such as Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/), you can build your own blog within a matter of minutes and have it up and running. If you don’t want a free blog (the only reason you might not want one is that you will have to contend with their ads on your blog), then you could go for a WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com/) blog.

Once you have your blog, you being sprucing it up with good content. You mustn't include any direct links to your website because readers don’t like that. It could seem to be blatant advertising which you should avoid at all costs. However, you can put links in the small byline that follows your name as the post creator on the blog.

Blogs work because the search engines love them. And the search engines love them because people are always visiting them for content. Search engines today, especially Google, are looking for providing people with the best results they can and blogs certainly fit the bill.

So the main things that you need to make your blogs work are:-
- Good content
- Regular updates
- Replying to user’s comments
- Subtle advertising to your product

Sometimes, giving away free products helps. If you promote a free eBook download, people will definitely be interested in downloading that. When they click on the advertised link, you could make them go through a lead capture page (also known as a squeeze page) where you ask them their email address for verification or to send them more such offers directly. When you get this list ready, you can use it to market your products to them directly. You must realize that this list is of hot traffic, i.e. people who have been interested in your product and even gone ahead with a download. It would be easy to convert them from visitors to customers.