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I’ve had a few friends ask me about blogging. What do I do? Why do I blog? How do I get visitors? What is required to blog? What programs are used?

Well I couldn’t possibly address all the topics that are brought up when talking about blogging, but what I will do is tell you what I do. Now of course, I am not a very popular blogger. I get about on average, 3 visitors a day to my blog, though my record at any one time is 27 people on my site. But that was once.

Okay, first thing:

Get your own Domain Name. Don’t use a blogger.com account or any other free account. Spend the dollars, and buy a domain name that is simple and easy to remember. Nobody wants to remember myblog.blogger.com. myblog.com is way easier to remember. godaddy.com sell cheap domains and allow for certified domains which protect you from spammers finding your personal information and doing the unthinkable: SPAMMING.

Now you will need a hosting account. There are a lot out there. I use justhost.com. A hosting account hosts the domain you bought on it. This will cost money too, but usually hosting accounts will allow multiple domains to be hosted on them. I know some even allow unlimited domains. You will have to search around to find one you like the best.

Now the next step is choosing a topic to blog about. Now if it’s a personal blog like mine here, which is more a place for me to vent and share my thoughts, then it is not such a big deal to choose a topic. But if you want to blog about cars for instance, then you will want to choose a domain name that is related to cars. A whole book on domain name choosing, and keyword research could be wrote just on this topic, but I’m just touching on it for the sake of keeping this article to a readable length.

Simply put, choose a focus for your blog. Sometimes more focused is better. If your blogging about cars, you may want to focus on American Cars, or Car tires etc. But Cars can work too.

Make sure your domain name is related to your topic.

Okay, to host your blog on your site, you will need a platform to host it on. WordPress is the best out there, and it’s free. They have an easy 5-minute install that will show you how to install WordPress onto your site.

So now you have WordPress on your site. I’m not going to delve to deep into wordpress. WordPress.org is full of information on how to use the program. It would be a waste of my time to show you how to use it. I will mention though that wordpress allows for plugins which can be installed on your site. These will help you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A couple plugins to download would be:

Platinum SEO
MB Ping Optimizer
Google Analytics

There are tons of others out there that will help you with managing your site, your visitors, your content, etc. Just do a google search for “Best WordPress Plugins” and you will find tons of plugins to add to your site that will help optimize it for efficiency, traffic, etc.

You can then search for these plugins by going to the plugin tab in your wordpress dashboard and clicking on plugins. You can then type in the name and install them to your site.

FTP CLIENT

You will need an FTP CLIENT to upload information from your computer to your blog. FTP stands for Fast Transfer Protocol and is used to transfer information from your computer, like files, web pages, etc, to your hosting account which you can then display for people to see. The FTP client I use is Filezilla. You can find it a filezilla-project.org The website will explain how to use it. If not, google “how to use a ftp client” and something useful will show up.

Okay, so you have your own domain name, a hosting account, wordpress installed, using filezilla.

Themes

Everything should be ready for you to start posting. Now of course wordpress will look pretty plain. If you went to wordpress.org and read the docs, you will have found out what Themes are. Themes are installed on wordpress to give it a specific look.

Any theme you use can be as complex as you want it, and as simple as you want it. It’s really up to you, but lots of people have found that simplest is best. It is easier for the indexing bots to read your information and get your site indexed in google where people can find you. But complex can also help you organize.

To find themes wordpress.org has a themes area full of free themes. Just follow their instructions to download and install them on your site.

Also you can just type in “free wp themes” in google and you’ll find a bunch as well there.

So now you have your looks up, your software installed. Now all you need to do is log into your WP dashboard and start typing up content for your viewers.

Now if you are setting up a topic specific blog, only talk about your topic. But if your using a personal blog like this one, then you can talk about whatever you want. The key point is to make sure your content- if your sites main goal is traffic- is interesting and what readers want to read.

“Content is King” is a very popular saying in the internet marketing world. Nobody will go to your site if nobody wants to read your content. Of course you need people to visit your blog to read your content. There are free ways to get traffic to your site, and you will get visits, but ultimately what really matters is how many of those visitors come back, and how many people they tell to come visit your site either by linking to your site (back links) or verbally to their friends.

Traffic

So to get traffic, first set your blog up with good content. Indexing itself will help you get traffic right off the start just by people typing in keywords and your site showing up in the organic results.

For an extra boost, setting up you blog so it syncs with your facebook notes helps as well. You can only sync one blog though, so you may want to leave that for your personal blog. If you start up a facebook profile just about your topic though, you could sync it there.

Writing articles, and submitting them on article directory sites gets traffic as well. Lots of these sites have good rankings with google as an authority site, so lots of times when your article shows up on their directories it’ll show up high in the listings of google gaining you lots of views to your article. You put a resource box at the bottom of the article, and after people read the article they will click on your link to your site which you will place in the resource box.

Videos on youtube and other video sites is another good way to gain traffic. Put together an informative video about your topic and tell viewers that more great information can be found at your site. Tell them in your video and have a link in your video description.

So to break down what I just said into simple form:

Buy a domain name related to topic

Host your domain name

Install WordPress

Find a good clean theme

Drive traffic

Now if your website is good quality, and the content is interesting, people will start linking to your site to share with others. This is the best way for traffic to generate, cause it means that people that click through these links to your site are interested in your content.

I hope this helps anyone that wants to start a blog. It’s not very complicated, but a lot of research needs to be done. I showed the steps I took, but there are lots of other ways to blog.

I’ve been doing some more research on internet marketing. A while back I bought the Traffic Secrets 2.0 package. In it came 2 discs by Frank Kern called Mass Control Syndicate. I watched both videos and I can tell you I was amazed with some of the things he said.

Basically what I got out of it, is whatever your marketing efforts are, they must be directed to the core personality of your customers. He also talked about finding your own core personality. There is who you are on the outside, who we believe who we are, but this is a lie. Who we really are, is who we really want to be. He calls who we think we are surface personality, and who we want to be, core personality.

So who am I on the outside, who do I live as? Well I’m a soldier, going to school at a military school, and I do soldier type things. Who do I really want to be? That is a big question, and he talks about how to answer that. But basically you can tell who you want to be by describing the perfect day. The perfect day is the day you want to live the rest of your life and it will describe who you really are and who you need to become.

A big thing to take away from this too is that people don’t buy things because they want the materialistic things, people buy things because they want a certain experience. He used his own example in saying that he became rich through his product launches, and he bought a Ferrari and a Porsche and a big house. He bought these things because he thought it would make him look cool, and he would be like James Bond. But the reality is, none of these things contributed to who he wanted to be, to what he wanted to experience. And he actually was miserable.

What you need to realize is that people really want experiences, they want to experience something, that is what life is all about. If you buy objects just for status and because you can, it isn’t going to contribute to an experience. He says now he has really nice cars, but he drives them because he want to drive them, because he has fun driving them, not because he is trying to look rich and cool and famous.

So if you are going to try and sell something, you need to look at the market you want to sell to, then look at the types of people in that market. He said to create a customer as a surface level person, then design the core person of the same person. The core person is who that character thinks about being all the time, the experiences he would have. Make the perfect day for that person, and offer that person the ability to achieve that perfect day, that core personality.

So something I’ve been thinking about then: Frank Kern is more into product launches and selling products. I don’t want to bother dealing with people dealing with customers, not yet anyway. I still want to be a soldier, get my schooling done. But I want to do internet marketing. Maybe make just enough money to make live a little easier. I like affiliate marketing.

So how can I take this knowledge and apply it to my affiliate marketing efforts. Well affiliate marketing can be done in a lot of different ways, but I am particularly fond of article marketing, creating a smaller site(a blog) that I can also post content on and advertise from.

What I should do is write content on my website that targets the core personality of the people that come to read it. Also what Frank said was that people respond better to decisions making when they are the ones making the decision. If I was to tell them that if they bought a weight loss book they would lose weight, they would be less likely to buy because they haven’t seen any implication that this is true. But if I was to imply by saying,” Well I was reading some information the other day that said one hundred people bought “x weight loss book” and seventy percent lost the weight they wanted to lose”, people would be more inclined to say, “hey this book looks good, I should check it out.”

That is then where I leave links and advertisements for people to click on. Also he talked about a formula that goes like this MB + P + LSESS. This means Magic Bullet + Proof + Low Self Esteem Selling Success. So if you can identify the core personality of the people in a market, find a way to provide them with this core personality- or at least part of it- which is the Magic Bullet, give them Proof that it works, you will establish that you are somebody who knows what they are talking about and that they don’t. This is the LSESS part, they have low self esteem in the topic, and you have great self esteem in the topic, so they should listen to you, buy your product, and they will be happy in that part of their life.

Applying this to affiliate marketing I don’t think will be difficult. Basically what I think I need to do is this. Build a blog in a market, find the core personalities of the people buying in this market, address these personalities in the content I create, imply that there is a way to achieve these experiences they want to experience, they make a decision, I offer the product in form of promoting a product that will solve their problems, they buy the product, I get a commission. We are all happy.

Keyword research is a very important part in affiliate marketing. How would this apply to the keyword research. Well I think I need to think about what somebody wanting to achieve a certain experience would type in to a search engine. Lets look at an example.

If I wanted to achieve the core personality of a guy that was a chick magnet, what would I envision. I would see myself with a great body, and a great personality. So what would I want to type into a search engine. Well I probably could split this core personality into two groups: Health and Charisma. If I want the body I would probably type in How to Lose Weight, Get a Muscular Body, Lose Weight Programs etc. If I wanted to develop my charisma, I might type in How to Attract Women, How to make women date me, how to make girls like me etc.

These are keywords somebody who wants to achieve the personality of a chick magnet might type in. I do my keyword research, and refine the search until I find the best keywords that have lots of searches, but not lots of content to feel the demand.

I then create the blog making sure it is SEO’d, write the content which is SEO’d, identify with the core personality and influence them that there is a product that will help them. I do this by not selling to them, but giving them great information. They realize I know what I’m talking about, and they don’t, so they are more willing to listen to my suggestions, or listen to my implications-which is better. They make a decision, click on my affiliate links, and buy the products I promote.