Do you publish a blog for your business? If you do…..I’d like to talk about some humiliating mistakes you should actively avoid, especially if you are trying to position yourself as an expert. As someone who helps maintain, publish and promote the business’s of others, I’ve learned the HARD way that it’s often MUCH easier to embarrass yourself (or your clients) if you aren’t careful.

(And I’m NOT talking about the pictures of myself drinking a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 out of a beer funnel from 1995 that were circulating around my Facebook friends list last year). I’m talking PROFESSIONAL embarrassment. And the kind of things, that if you’re maintaining and publishing blogs for traffic, publicity and profit, you MUST avoid to keep your sites ranking well, and raking in the cash.

- Check Your Blog Settings Before You Publish Your Very First Post: Depending on what platform you are using (I exclusively use WordPress and recommend you do, too) and what version you are running, you MUST check to make sure you’re blog is set to be “public”. Want an example of why? I was working on a campaign for a client a few months back and we had created all sorts of killer content to promote their newest offer. Articles, press releases, social strategies, link building techniques, you name it, we did it.

Yet, a few weeks later, the client emailed me to tell me that their site STILL wasn’t indexed in the search engines. And when I checked, he was right….all of the STATIC HTML pages were up and ranking, but all of the work MY team did, wasn’t showing up at all. Anywhere. Guess what? I totally forgot to change the initial setting that even ALLOWED the engines to “crawl” the blog. I had it set on “make this blog private”. Not good, right? Thank god I’ve got caller id, because I was able to avoid getting screamed at for a few days until we got the whole thing straightened out…:-) Don’t make this mistake if you are a professional blog consultant – it IS embarrassing!

- Respond to Your Comments! I think this is embarrassing. Maybe you don’t…but I was sort of taught at a young age that when people ask you questions, or say nice things about you, or compliment your work, it’s polite to respond! It amazes me how many people don’t….or how many “gurus” will tell you that they don’t even read their blog comments. (after asking people to leave them for the latest “launch” nonsense) I’ll tell you what: Last night?

I listened to an hour long interview with Seth Godin, the marketing genius behind the “Purple Cow” and “IdeaVirus” theology – and he said he gets 5-600 emails a day. And responds to each personally. That’s what being “remarkable” is all about…and while we all may not get there, taking the time to interact with people who care enough to comment is a GREAT way of saving face, making friends…and BUILDING a business blog that people truly love.

So you have set up a fantastic website with a great offer, I mean this website has a professional look and has the potential to make you some serious money. You are excited about this, and you think you will be living the good life and raking in cash in a few weeks. Unfortunately this does not happen because you are not getting any website traffic. At this time you my ask how do I get people to my website?

1. First off you need to be writing articles and submitting them to article directories. This will drive traffic to your website or blog and have people wanting to buy your products. Best of all this method of website promotion is completely free.

2. Also use Google AdWords to get some immediate website traffic. Bid on some low competition keywords in order to keep your costs down, because often times people overspend on AdWords and this really hurts them in the long run.

3. In addition to the two aforementioned methods, eBay classified ads are a great method to answer the question how to get people to my website. eBay ads are inexpensive, fairly easy to implement, and can bring you tremendous results. These factors combine for a powerful website promotion method!

So use these three methods in order to increase your website traffic and get more sales. If you are struggling for traffic just combine the three methods. Start out small, and scale the methods accordingly to which one works best for you.

If you are looking to find and maintain readers, you need to make sure that you are offering informative and up to date information. Regardless of your topic, if it is non-informative and out of date, you are going to lose readers quickly. You want your readers coming back often to read your blogs, so make sure that they get what they came for. Here are a few tips on making sure that your content makes your blog successful.

• Invite your readers to suggest topics. This way you are sure to have a following of readers. If they know that you will take their suggestion, research it and write about it, you will have a more loyal following of readers.
• Take the topic of your blog and subscribe to Google News Alerts. Keep it in regards to your topic, and this will automatically send the latest news regarding to your topic straight to your inbox.
• Seek out some volunteer writers for your blog. You don’t have to do all the writing yourself. There are writers out there that will voluntarily write for your blog. Just make sure that you let your readers know that you accept reader submitted articles, and you could have some potential writers on your hands.

Follow these simple content tips for your blog, and you will find that your site generates more traffic. You will also find a loyal following of readers. Keep it simple, informative, and fun to read! And last but not least, your income will tell you how good you’re doing.