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Cashing in on the Blogging Community

Blogs are, at their heart, nothing more than websites featuring a solid content management system allowing for the frequent and easy addition of new material. However, if you approach a blog from this purely "clinical" perspective, you may be missing out on some great opportunities to maximize your blog's profitability.

Blogging grew as a means of communication, community building and online journaling. These very personal sites created a larger blogging community that continues to increase in population every day. This spurred the creation of several services and opportunities unique to blogging that traditional static sites cannot utilize.

Blogging gives one a chance to grab a great deal of traffic that is often unavailable to traditional sites. We all know that traffic is a critical component to profitability. The more people you get to your blog, the more moneymaking chances you experience. Thus, it is important for any for-profit blogger to understand some of the unique ways they can improve their numbers simply by virtue of their sites structure.

One example is the blog directory. There are search engines and directories that service blogs exclusively. These sites can be well-visited and can supply a healthy stream of traffic that other sites cannot access. Some of these blog-only opportunities, like Technorati, can drive huge numbers to a blog.

Blogs also have the unique opportunity to "ping" these directory sites. A ping is the equivalent of advising the search engine or directory that your blog has been updated. By pinging, one can increase the visibility of their blog and the traffic it receives.

The blogging community also created the commenting system embraced by most blogging platforms. Blogs can be structured to be a community exercise and comments are welcome. Bloggers tend to visit those blogs that visit them, and comments on a blog are likely to read by its visitors. Thus, one can take the time to make high-quality, relevant comments on other blogs as a means of creating visitors to their own offering.

This kind of community participation can do wonders for search engine placement, too. That's because bloggers are notoriously generous when it comes to providing backlinks. Bloggers are prone to add other blogs of interest to their list of links. These links do generate traffic directly, but perhaps even more importantly, they also provide backlinks the search engines interpret as a sign of an authoritative site. Your blog is thus rewarded with higher placement in search engine results.

The effect of these links is amplified by the structure of most blogs and blogrolls. The list of links becomes part of the blog's overall template. They are reproduced not only on the main page, but on each of the individual "post pages." Although many of those individual pages will lack powerful page rank, the sheer number of backlinks produced can be incredible.

By tapping into the legacy of the blogging community, one can increase the profitability of their blog. As traffic goes up, so do profits, and blogs offer some very handy ways to nab visitors!

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