Most people who start a WordPress blog for their business purposes think that they will not have to dabble much with the design on the blog because of their impression of running a “serious” blog and not a pop fan site. However, the truth is that commercial websites, such as your website, need attention to design much more than a fan site. After all, it has to have appeal if you want to attract people to doing business with you. The best part with WordPress is that it helps you do this.

The beauty of WordPress is that it is an open source application. It has not been designed by a team of developers who have just unleashed it to the world and forgotten about it. WordPress is being developed each and every minute by thousands of users on the planet and they are making their WordPress developments available for general global use. This is how any open source project works. The advantage for you here is that you are free to make use of any of these developments and the icing on the cake is that most of these developments are free!

This is especially applicable to the various WordPress templates and themes that you will get so abundantly on the Internet. You only have to make a general Internet search for free WordPress templates and you will see that you will be bamboozled with options. There are complete sites dedicated to WordPress templates. Click on some and see if you like something.

From the completely frivolous to the hardcore professional – you are going to find all kinds of options here. You will find that you will have to take your time to decide which of these themes to use. You can also change themes later on if you want.  The installation and usage of these templates is quite simple and if you have started your WordPress blog yourself, this should definitely be no big deal for you.

Just a note – Before using your WordPress theme, think carefully. It should be in tandem with the impression of your business that you are trying to create. So you should give some thought to it and choose wisely. Also, remember that it is bad for business if you change the look of your blog too often. It speaks of instability. So make your choice wisely. The thing that helps you here is that there are a thousands of free options for you to choose from.

One of the best advantages with a hosted blog is that you have the freedom to enhance it in a variety of ways. With WordPress blogs, there are numerous plug-ins and themes that you can use to make your blog not only more beautiful and customized to your purposes, but actually more functional for you and the reader. It is not at all necessary to use any of these actually – you can start with your WordPress blog without the plug-ins and themes – but definitely when you are into the blogging activity, you will want to do it. So here is a little information on how you go about with the plug-ins.

What are WordPress Plug-Ins?

WordPress plug-ins are simple software applications that allow you to install interesting features on your WordPress blog. Plug-ins ensure that the feature you install on the blog is done quite easily, literally at the push of a button. Installing plug-ins on WordPress is free.

Where to get the WordPress Plug-ins?

You will find WordPress plug-ins at the WordPress website itself. You have to visit here – http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. The link tells you what plug-ins are currently available and there are various featured plug-ins on this page itself that you can decide to choose from.

Which Plug-ins to choose?

There are thousands of plug-ins, which means you will have to pick and choose the ones that will be most profitable to your needs. The following are the plug-ins that you can choose from:-

1.     All In One SEO Pack – This plug-in helps in search engine optimization by helping you to add keywords to your blog.

2.     All In One AdSense – This plug-in will add Google AdSense ads directly into your blog posts. Many people who are monetizing their blogs through Google AdSense use this plug-in because it makes their work easier. They could very well add the ads manually. However, that would take a great deal of time. Use this plug-in if you intend to monetize your blog with AdSense.

3.     PHPBayLite – This is another plug-in that people who want to monetize their blog use often. The plug-in is great help if you intend to showcase some eBay products on your blog and provide affiliate links to them.

4.     Twitter Tools – If you have a Twitter network, you can link it with your WordPress blog through this plug-in. If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, having one is a good idea. This is a social networking site where you can meet a lot of people and can even prospect them with your MLM proposals.

5.     DMSGuestbook – This is a crucial plug-in for commercial blogs such as yours is. The plug-in enables visitors to fill in certain bits of information about themselves. The plug-in allows you complete management of their entries. You can edit their entries before they show up on the blog.

These are just five of the best WordPress plug-in. You can check out the Internet and find information about many unbeatable plug-ins that you will like to have on your blog.

Setting up a hosted WordPress blog may sound technical to most people, especially people who are looking at blogging for their business, but if you go about it systematically, you will find that it is not all as difficult as it is cracked up to be. In fact, a little down the line you will begin to enjoy blogging as well as tweaking the blog in order to make it better and better.

Here are the main steps you will need to follow to set up your own hosted WordPress blog.

Plan it Out First!

Don’t be in a hurry to start your blog. Think what you will do with it. Think of a suitable subject, even though you are working within your niche, you want it to be special. Think of what name you will have for your blog and even a catchphrase which you will use for the promotion.

Get the Domain Name

You can buy a domain name from many websites. You can even buy a domain name and give a subdomain name for each of your WordPress blogs. There are many places that you can purchase your domains from, I like to support a local company, so I purchase all my domains from HudsonValleyDomains.com.  They are a reseller for GoDaddy which is one of the most well-known domain vendors, but they are a local company.  I would appreciate you supporting HudsonValleyDomains.com, but you can always go directly to GoDaddy.com.

Buy Hosting

You will have to host your WordPress blog. You can get the domain name and hosting as a package, however that may not be the most cost effective option. If you intend to have multiple blogs, look for shared hosting options. However, in that case, you will have to think which blog will be your primary domain.  I highly recommend a HostGator as a hosting company, this is who I use for this website and hundreds of other ones that I operate.  You can get hosting for a virtually unlimited number of websites on a shared server for one very low price (sometimes under $5 per month for all your sites combined).  If you go with HostGator, you’ll be able to skip the following steps because they essentially do it for you.

Download WordPress

Go to WordPress.org. You will find an orange button on the right side for downloading the WordPress folder. Click on it, the download takes place automatically. Then click on the downloaded folder to decompress the files in it.

Upload WordPress Files on FTP Server

Open the root folder of your FTP server and copy the WordPress files onto it. Wait for the files to upload completely.

Set up MySQL

WordPress requires the MySQL database to run. This is where the blog will store the necessary files for its operations. The database will manage the content on your blog and make things simpler for you. For setting up the MySQL database you will have to go to the hosting control panel and set up the MySQL database that you will find there. You can give this database a name of your choice.

Install WordPress and Set it Up

The installation of WordPress begins directly when you type in the name of the domain that you have chosen. This is a self-leading process. Once the installation is done, you can give it a proper web address and you will be prompted to select a username and a password, which you can change later.

With this much, you are ready to post on your WordPress blog. However, you can definitely tweak it further with themes and plug-ins to make it more appealing to your visitors.

If You’re Using HostGator

Once you get your account setup at HostGator, you can just click on the “Fantastico Control Panel” and then click on “Install WordPress”.  This will automatically do everything outlined in the above steps and setup your entire WordPress system for you.

If you are intending to start your own blog for your business, you will find out that there are two types of blogs out there – the free blogs and the paid blogs. The paid blogging services will require payments to be made per month or per year to keep maintaining the blog alive on the Internet. Also, these paid blogs may charge for additional services that they provide, such as allowing you to post affiliate ads on your blog (and thus make money out of it) or even to give you a domain name that you use for your blog. Free blogging services are as their name suggests – you do not need to pay for any of these services.

That is what sets people thinking. Shouldn’t going for free blog services and paying nothing to maintain the blog be a better option than paying for the same? That would seem so, but in reality it isn’t. Here are some points that tell you why.

Policies of Blogs

All blog sites have their policies that you have to adhere to or your blog faces the risk of getting deleted. Now, with paid blogs, these policies are designed to be more attuned to the needs of the blog owners. They are quite in line for creating promotional blogs and even monetizing them in various ways. If you want to do all of that, these paid blogs with clearly defined policies will be good options for you.

The free blog services, on the other hand, do not need to cater to the blog owners because they are not making their income through them. Most of these sites will change their policies quite often to suit their own tastes, often disregarding the needs of the blog owners. This could be quite disadvantageous to the interests of a commercial blog like yours will be. Consider this – if the blog service you are on suddenly decides that they won’t have blogs that do affiliate marketing anymore, where does that leave your blog that already has such a service?

The Impression with the Visitors

They may be beneficial to you in the short term, but free blogs take a toll on the overall impression they create for your visitors. Many visitors who come to your website will be Internet savvy and they will understand the difference between a free blog and a paid blog. If you have a paid blog, it spells a better stability and viability of the opportunity to the visitor.

A paid blog will win over a free blog any day when it comes to commercial blogging. You have to see your long term goals and not mind the few dollars you will be spending on maintaining your blog on a paid service.

Ideally, you want to setup your own domain name (URL) and have a hosting account with a program like WordPress installed for your blog.  As a side note, MarketingBum.com is built in WordPress, this is an extremely versitile program.  I’ll be adding a lot more information about using WordPress in the future.

If you play your cards well with your blog, you may very well end up fashioning a niche authority center that people from all over the world will want to visit to find out what the concept is all about. For you, the Internet may be a channel of promoting your business, but for the vast bulk of Internet users around the world, the Internet is still a source of information.

If you do things right, you can make your blog the source of all information about your niche. You can very well imagine the great benefits that can bring to you. It will make your business immensely credible and visitors will look to you as a source of information.  Also, you can then branch out into niche information products, membership sites, coaching, mentoring, or more.

However, the onus lies on making your blog an authority center. This is not as difficult as you think. The search engines help you greatly. If you can make a blog that is nicely search engine optimized (SEO), it will figure prominently in the results and you will get a lot of visitors. The key definitely lies in proper SEO then.

Most people do not check out beyond the first page of the search engine results and they believe that the links on the first page belong to authority sites. Hence, you have to use all white hat SEO tactics that you can to figure here.

There are many other points though. It is important what you put on your blog, because that is what the lasting impression will depend upon. Here are some tips that can help you:

1.     Make highly informative posts so that people understand you know what you are speaking about. This is extremely important if you want to make your blog an authority center.

2.     Reply to all comments that you get, especially the queries. Apart from making you seem quite congenial (people enjoy doing business with friendly folk), it will also create the impression that you know your stuff. Only a knowledgeable person will make prompt replies and clarify points.

3.     When your blog becomes popular with the search engines (make 3 to 4 posts a week initially and this will happen), you will see other experts in your niche visiting your blog and making posts there. Be sure to make informed comments on these people’s posts. This kind of interaction is very impressive for a visitor.

4.     Also, go and blog on your visitor’s blogs, especially if they are also about your niche. This cements your impression as an expert in your field.

5.     Compile eBooks and promote them through your blog. The casual visitor holds eBook authors in high esteem and you are going to benefit from that impression.

6.     Video is also an excellent resource for you to use.  You can essentially create your own television station, with you as the star.  Look for some upcoming posts from me specifically about this subject.

You have to give time for this, but it is very much possible to make your blog an authority center.

When that happens, there will be no looking back for your prospects, clichéd though that may sound.

Do you know that there a large number of people who are making money on the Internet only through blogging? Now, you may be having a blog only to promote your main venture, i.e. your business, but you should not downplay the potential of the blog itself in making money for you. After all, why are you in business? Surely to make some good money! For that kind of objective, the blog fits the bill quite nicely. There are ways to monetize your blog and at the same time improve the potential for getting prospects for your business through it. What can be better than that?

Let us see some of the ways in which expert marketers use their business blogs to make money for themselves:

Affiliate Marketing

When you agree to promote someone else’s product on your blog or website and get paid for the same, you are into affiliate marketing. You can surely do that with your blog. Pick out a product that you are comfortable promoting and ask its owner to allow you to promote their product. You can chalk out a method of compensation on a per-click or per-sale basis. However, it may be difficult to get affiliate sponsors in this manner.

The simpler way is to sign up for Google AdWords. When you do that, Google will match you with affiliates who are ready to promote their products through your blog. You will be given a code of their website that you can place on your blog. When any visitor clicks on the URL mentioned in the advertisement, you will get paid. This is known as pay-per-click advertising, because you are paid on the basis of clicks you are giving the advertiser.

The key is to popularize your own blog. If your blog is popular, it will get more visitors and you can send more visitors to your affiliate sponsors too. Also, Google pays out better for blogs that are better search engine optimized.

Opt In Lists

This is an indirect method of monetizing your blog but it sure works. Compile an eBook from all the matter that is present on your blog or get one specially written. Promise this eBook to your blog visitors for free. Make an advertisement for this and put it up on your blog. Give them a clickable link within the advertisement. However, this link must point to a lead capture page and not the direct download page for the eBook.

On this lead capture page (also known as squeeze page), which is actually a form, you ask the visitors to mention their email addresses so that you can send them a newsletter or more informative stuff like the eBook. They will mostly opt in because of the freebie they are getting. When you get the id, it adds up to your opt in list.

Now, how do you  monetize this? You can use a lot of methods, but email marketing is the best. You can send them regular information and slowly interest them in your opportunity. A lot of them will eventually sign in, if you provide them with quality stuff, and you get business because you added something free on your blog to build your opt in list.

It is too much to expect that you will be able to blog as much as you want, even if it is to take your business ahead. There are too many things that are going to occupy your time soon and you won’t find time to blog properly. Also, you may not really have the literary talent needed to rivet a potential visitor’s attention onto your blog. These things can but really take a toll on your business prospects. So, what can you do?

The simple answer is that you can outsource. You will find a ton of online marketplaces where freelance writers sell their services for worthwhile remuneration. They will blog for you and relinquish the rights of their works to you. Such ghostwriting can be great to keep your blog going. You get professionally written stuff in a time-bound manner and the post will be made in your name. If you did not know about it already, this is the way more than 90% of the business bloggers of the world are doing their things right now. Outsourcing is not a bad thing if you get the right person.

But yes, this is where we come to the stumbling block – Where do you get good writers? What are the things that you must look at? To answer the first question, you will have to sign up for an account on any online freelance website and make a post stating your project requirements. You can mention the timeframe you expect the deliverables in and the budget you are working with. The following are links of five of the top freelance websites where you can get expert writers from all over the world, ready to work for you.

• Get A Freelancer (www.getafreelancer.com)
• ScriptLance (www.scriptlance.com)
• Elance (www.elance.com)
• EUFreelance (www.eufreelance.com  – this one is specifically for European requirements)
• Guru (www.guru.com)

Now, to get a good writer that meets your requirements, you have to look at the following:

1.     Insist on checking samples of their previous work. However, there are writers who will pass off already existing work as their own, so you can have them write a paid sample post for you and then think of taking things ahead from them. It is great if they have past writing experience in your niche, but that isn’t required if they’re good.

2.     See if the writer is acquainted with blogging. Some of them will do the posting for you too and will handle the replies that the blog gets, i.e. keep it updated. This is of great help; you can keep your blog completely operated through them.

3.     Make sure that they will stick to guidelines. Take a commitment from them on the same.

4.     All the sites mentioned above have reviews of providers. These could be a parameter to base your decision of recruiting them on.

5.     Mention to them that they will have no rights on what they have written once you have made the payments to them.

It is highly necessary that you keep your business blog updated as often as you can, but at the same time, it is not easy to get ideas to make these posts as often as you would like to. Even professional writers have their writer’s blocks, so it is not surprising that you, who are writing only for your business, will have these blocks too. But you have an advantage over professional writers and authors. You at least know the direction in which your post needs to be made. You are sure of what you want and you can use that knowledge to make effective posts.

The following are the five important characteristics of an effective post on a blog. Keep this in mind and you will see the ideas flowing in your mind.

Originality

Every post should be original. Now, you do not have to make an invention and patent it here; it could very well be a post taken from some other related blog, but you have to rework it so that it projects your point of view. This can be easily done. Read a post on another blog, see what you think about it, and then write an original post inspired from that post but with your idea about the topic. This counts as an original post in the world of blogging, because blogs are about giving personal information.

Thought-Provoking Appeal

This is a very important aspect that every blog post must have. Your post must be well-thought out so that it makes the readers think. You can write something that is actually a question, like “Should an Effective Business Market to Specific Customers?”. You will see a lot of comments pouring in. You have to give your own idea about the topic and then people will either agree or disagree and give their own justifications.

The Interest Factor

One thing that every blog post must have is that it must be interesting to read. Take a blog post of someone else’s but rework it in a way that it becomes easier to read, like use bullets, give interesting headlines, etc. You can even rehash your own old stuff to make it more interesting to read and with a more contemporary perspective.

Make a Start

The best thing to do when you are stuck with ideas is to start writing. Write about your niche or business in general and as you are writing, new ideas will flow out. Sentences have a way of leading you. If you sit and think, you will probably not write anything, but if you let those fingers flying on the keyboard, you will see stuff coming out of them. You already know a thousand things about your business; all you have to do is write it down into an effective post.

Keep it Focused

Now, I don’t mean for you to not get your message out there or to cut it down.  By keep it focused, I mean just that.  Try to communicate a single thought, topic, or list in one blog post.  It will be much easier for your readers to comment, and get involved in the discussion if there is a single theme or message to your post.  This will also make it easier for the search engines to find and list your post, since it will tend to me more keyword dense if you keep it focused.

Any person who has read the A-B-C of blogging will know that the readers of a blog can be increased by making as frequent blog posts as possible. There is a reason that has to do with search engine optimization. Search engine spiders are always interested in finding the most regularly updated blogs and websites because they are of the opinion that these will provide more qualitative content to the searchers. For that reason, search engine spiders crawl blogs better. Now, if you have a blog for your business and you are not updating it, it is already dead in the water. The search engines are not going to rank it.

The crux of the matter is that you need to regularly update your blog. But how often should you do it? This is a good question too. I’m sure that your business is a very time consuming business, there are a lot of things to attend to, and even though the blog is potentially one of your biggest promotional tools, you cannot spend as much time as you would like to once you are into the thick of things. Hence, what you need is to draw a balance here.

The words of the marketing wise suggest that you need to make at least 3 to 4 blog posts a week when you are starting out. This is quite an achievable target. Since you are starting out, you will be highly enthusiastic in building your following, so it is practical too. As your following builds, you can reduce this a bit and if you are fully satisfied with the stability of your network (which may be several months or even years down the line), you can keep things running with just 1 blog post a week too.

However, it is not just the frequency of the blog posts that matters; you have to make sure that these posts are good too. If you make an impactful post, it will set people talking about it. Make a post that explains a misunderstanding about your business or something like that. Many people will keep commenting on this and your blog will keep getting updated with their comments. The search engines will be happy too and you will not have to make as many posts too.  Also, if you’re using WordPress for your blog, there are a number of plug-ins that can help with getting the search engines to pay attention.

The only point of interest here is to keep the search engines happy with the kind of updates the blog is getting. If that happens through your visitor comments and posts, you need not make as many posts yourself. But, at the same time, you must know that this could take a long time coming.

Prospecting has immense importance in the world of network marketing. But at the same time, your prospecting must be fruitful, because everything depends on the size of the network that you build. When you are prospecting, the following three points become of the highest significance:

• You need to convey the details of the opportunity you are promoting to the prospect.
• You have to make them see what profits they stand to earn from it
• You have to interest them in the idea so that they become a part of your network.

Any MLM prospector will agree that the first two points are relatively simple to achieve, but when it comes to the third point, most of them draw a blank. It is a quantum leap from explaining your prospect everything that they must know to really make them want to be a part of our team. You have to make a connection here. Only that will influence them in joining your network. But how do you make this vital connection?

If you have been in the MLM game since some time, you will know that there are many ways to make this connection that tells your prospect that this is the opportunity that they should really be thinking about. However, among all these various methods, the one that truly stands out is blogging. Your MLM blog can work wonders when you are trying to inspire your prospects to take up your opportunity. Let us see how.

With your blog, you can invite your prospects to put in their own ideas and opinions about your opportunities. If people are really interested, they will surely make short comments about what they think. That way, you can know who have some genuine interest in your business and you get a list of targeted prospects.

Now, you will get both positive and negative comments. However, remember that the blog is a two-way interaction vehicle. You have the chance to answer the negative comments and rectify misunderstandings or even express your desire about overcoming flaws. You can use the same blog to inform them when the shortcomings have been looked into. This helps in improving the credibility about your business too.

Shortly after its inception, your blog will become a vehicle for other MLM bloggers to post their comments too. The readers who comment will slowly begin comparing different opportunities on your blog and this will help highlight the positive points in your business. This will have an impact on the new visitors.

Your blog is your instrument to invite targeted prospects to comment about your MLM opportunity and popularize it. You have to hone this talent so that you begin seeing the results with your prospecting ventures.