The world has gone mad for blogs over the past few years; if you don't already have one you'd better catch up since they're essential for search engine optimization (SEO).

A blog, or "web log" is a simple a web site featuring multiple articles organized in chronological, or more often, in reverse chronological order.  Originally, blogs were more or less used as a sort of personal diary.  Because blogs were deemed so useful they have become the principle source of news on the internet.  To learn more about blog basics you should read the article about blogs on Wikipedia.

Most news sites are blog based, or at least mimic blogs in appearance.  Many corporate entities now also have blogs on their website, or even dedicated websites exclusively for blogging.  They are used both externally and internally by companies... they appear on government sites... and entire social blogging communities exist for the sole purpose of perpetuating blogging.

Ok, so how do you tap into blogs to get more eyes on your site?

More content for Search Engines

First and foremost, blogs are extremely search engine friendly.  Blogs are all about content; write an article and the search engines will have a lot of content in the form of text to spider.  As long as the content is relevant to your site the blog will improve your search engine results immensely over time.  To keep the search engines coming back for more write at least 3 articles per week (most SEO experts agree on this) and try to write at least 400 words in each article.  Use all the basic rules of good content when writing your articles: use keywords at the beginning and end of your story, link from within the story to other parts of your site, use bold type for keywords, don't use the same keyword more than 3 times whenever possible, etc.  Finally, make the article interesting!!!  You can do this by providing insightful information, links to useful related services, or by making the article controversial.

More backlinks for Search Engines

Second, submit your blog to social bookmarking sites.  In doing so, these sites will generate backlinks for you automatically.  These backlinks will be crawled by the search engines... this coupled with the new content benefit described above is like a double whamy for increasing targetted search engine traffic.  In addition your bookmarked articles (those that you wrote) will be searchable by all other members of the bookmarking service.  This equals even more free traffic.  Don't expect to have a flood of traffic when you publish your first article.  It takes a long time to build up your credibility; months or even years.  Visit the social bookmarking sites often and bookmark stories you like from other aurthors to establish yourself as a good citizen of the community.

There are dozens, ok there are probably hundreds of social bookmarking sites competing for your articles.  The first step is setting up accounts on those you choose to utilize.  Which you choose will depend a lot upon what kind of website/blog you have.  For starters you should consider the big 5 which are Google Bookmarks, Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, and Furl.  Don't chastise me if the top 5 are different tomorrow, this is a pretty new industry.

To make bookmarking your articles to multiple services easier there is a great tool that will post your link to up to 22 bookmarking services at once.  The OnlyWire bookmarking service is free and easy to use.  Once set up you just open a special link from the page you want to bookmark, type in a few comments and press go.

Build your audience

Third, offer an RSS feed for your blog that can be added to virtually any news reader.  RSS feeds are basically a stripped down version of your articles that just show xml formatted text, and sometimes images, but no other parts of your site such as navigation menus, ads, or logos.  These feeds can be "subscribed" to using modern browsers, desk-top gadgets/widgets, personalized web pages, email clients, and a variety of onlines services.  While this won't produce backlinks for your site it will most certainly keep pushing new articles to your readers, even when they aren't visiting your site.  Pique the interest of an existing reader and they'll click on the article in the RSS feed taking them right back to your site.

Republish your content in the four corners of the web

Fourth, use a multitude of free services to publish your blog all over the place.  That sounds complicated but it's really not.  There are a number of free tools available that "ping" all the publishers at once notifying them that you have new content they should scan and publish.  There is no guarentee that your articles will be published, but it's worth a shot and costs you nothing to try.  I personally use the Pingoat pinging service which I find pretty reliable and generally up to date.  It's worth noting that some publishing services do require that you register your site before they will accept pings. 

Leverage your visitors to get even more links

Fifth, make is extremely easy for site visitors to add your articles to their own bookmarking services and RSS news readers.  Virtually all these services offer a button which you can insert on your site that automatically links back to the visitor's user account.  That can add up to a lot of buttons, especially if you have to manually place them on each page of your site.  Instead consider using the AddThis social bookmarking widget.  The widget lets you place one button for RSS syndication and one button for social bookmarking on your site.  Clicking on a button opens a window showing the user dozens of services to choose from.  AddThis keeps their list of sites up to date so it's one less thing for you to worry about.  In addition it removes a lot of clutter from your page.

Show me the money

Finally, if you wish, monitize your blog.  The title of this article is "blogging for dollars" so it makes sense that you want to generate some money if you're reading this.

The easiest way to monitize a blog is to add context sensitive ads around the article or embed ads right in the content of the article.  Google Adsense is the obvious choice but there are many options out there.  I will cover monitization techniques in another article.  Suffice to say for now that if you follow these guidelines for setting up your blog you will have plenty of traffic to cash in on.

To make blogging easier consider using a content management system set up specifically for blogging.  Systems such as Drupal and Wordpress manage virtually everything for you so all you have to worry about is creating great content for your blog.

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