Having your own blog is one of THE best ways to grow your Internet business due to the variety of methods you can use it, including…

• Building community
• Distributing presell content
• Growing your list
• Mobilizing your affiliates
• Monetizing the design elements
• Establishing a brand
• Creating loyalty and credibility

The list could go on and on.

If you have a blog, then one of your biggest obstacles to using it effectively is promoting the blog, i.e., generating traffic.

[If you don't have a blog, then it's past due ... it should immediately leap to the top of your "to do" list.]

Jimmy D. Brown just released a new 23-page report that you can download below at no charge.  It's entitled, "30 Minutes Per Day Blog P.R.O.M.O." and in it you'll learn how to drive traffic to your blog in about half an hour per day.

The report reveals a different daily strategy to implement for each of the five workdays.

You can download it immediately at…

http://affiliates.muscle-build.com/go/blog-promo/

There are no lists to join.  No hoops to jump thru.  Visit the site and click on the download link. End of story.

However, this free offer will permanently "retire" on Friday, April 9 at 10PM CDT.  At that time it will be removed from the Internet and will no longer be available for download.

It is truly a "complete" online business builder, offering not only site building and hosting, but domain name registration, the best brainstorming and niche-finding tools, as well as a comprehensive guide to building your online business.

It does NOT promise overnight riches; though, judging by the testimonials, there are quite a few folks earning a living with the sites they've built with SBI. In fact, I use it for Muscle-Build.com.

I will admit that I don't use it for most of my other sites, like Hardgainer Manifesto and The Muscle-Build.com Blog. It is pricey; however, for building your very first web site, it is the perfect companion. If you just follow the Action Guide, you will lay a solid foundation on which to build the rest of your online business.

Additionally, SBI covers blogging, building traffic, monetizing your site, sitemaps, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), among many other useful and overwhelming tasks. Give it a look. You will be blown away by all it has to offer. I simply cannot tell you everything it does; it's just too much to list. And it's been invaluable in giving me a start on the muscle-building niche.

By the way, I do nearly nothing, other than tweeting the occasional page, for Muscle-Build.com – and I'm getting over 15, 000 visits a month. So somehow it magically builds traffic, too.

Site Build It

Of course, you don't want thousands of people flooding your website and never buying. But look at the alternative: Zero visitors and zero purchases. Which would you rather have?

If you create compelling content (i.e., a reason for people to read your posts), you will find buyers who keep coming back.

So how do you get people to come to your site?

There are 2 main ways to drive traffic to your site. One way is to pay for it with cold, hard cash. Cash that you probably don't have because you're just starting out. We'll explore paid traffic in a future post. But it's really for experienced marketers who have some money to invest and time to spend learning how to do it properly.

The second way to attract traffic is the free route. It's really not free, however. You're just spending time (which you have more of) instead of money (which you don't have).

However, there are some free methods for driving traffic to your site that give you a really good bang for your time buck.

One thing you should embed in your head is this: EVERY time a visitor visits your site, it's from a referral.

Think about that for a minute. Let it settle in. Visitors don't randomly type in your URL. They see it somewhere. It could be from:

• Google, Yahoo, or Bing (or another search engine).
• Another website. The author may like your site or a particular post and linked back to your site. He may have linked to your site in a post or he may have liked your site so much that he put you on his blogroll.
• You may have made a comment on another site and the reader of that site wanted to know more about you or your site.
• A visitor may have found you in a Directory. There are directories all over the web, from places like Yahoo, Google, and other search engines to site directories to niche directories.
• The visitor may have found your site through a forum. Perhaps you made a good post or answered a question and the visitor wanted to get more familiar with you.
• Perhaps your visitor found you on twitter, Facebook, or some other social media site.
• Article directories. Did you know you could post articles on ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, and Searchwarp.com with links back to your site? These directories get loads of traffic and it's not too difficult to get these pages indexed and ranked on the search engines. Plus, depending upon the rights you give, other website authors may post your article on their sites with links back to your site (they have to attribute the content to you or else they're guilty of violation of the TOS of the article directories as well as plagiarism).
• If you participate in blog carnivals, you can attract visitors to your site if you post compelling content.
• If you run a blog, your RSS feed might be picked up by a feed directory and visitors may find you through this route.

There are many more ways to attract visitors with free methods like this. These are just a few of the big ones – these offer a huge bang for your time buck.

Just note that all of these backlinks do not happen by accident. You can strategically place backlinks on other people's sites through various methods, such as by making forum posts, submitting comments on other blogs, creating your own blog that links back to your main site, or by submitting your articles to directories.

You can learn more about these methods by picking up a copy of Guaranteed Free Traffic System. This inexpensive report will give you the tools and knowledge you need to build a lot of targeted traffic to your website.

Of course, I will make specific posts in the future about various tactics and strategies that will build your web traffic.

1. FeedFury
2. FeedBomb
3. Plazoo
4. RSS Micro
5. 2RSS
6. FeedsFarm
7. RSS Feeds
8. Feeds4all
9. Postami
10. Feedest
11. MySpace RSS
    
12. DaytimeNews
13. RSS Feeds Submission
14. MillionRSS
15. Yahoo RSS
16. More News
17. Find RSS
18. Feed Base
19. RSS Motron
20. Octora
21. Blog Digger
22. Feed 24
23. Findory
24. Feed Boy
25. Chordata
26. Golden Feed
27. Read A Blog
28. Newgie
29. Jordo Media RSS
30. RSS Network
31. Ice Rocket
32. Blog Pulse
33. Feeds2Read
34. Feed Shark
35. Feed Plex
36. Blog Burst

Business in a Blog really does a great job for newbies and seasoned Internet Marketers in showing the how and what to do when building an online presence. It’s very good.

Well worth the price you pay for it (FREE)!

Paul has another great resource that he makes available for free, and that’s his online newsletter that he’s been publishing since the dawn of the ‘net!

Sign up for that here. Includes a free ebook called, “What You Need to Know.”

Here's my ping list. You'll want to make sure you use a good WordPress plugin like cbnet Ping Optimizer so that your blog isn't creating a nuisance with the pinging services.

Just copy and paste the links below into the ping section in the Settings –> Writing section of your WP dashboard.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp
http://blogbot.dk
http://blogdb.jp
http://blogmatcher.com
http://bulkfeeds.net
http://mod-pubsub.org
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net
http://rpc.blogrolling.com
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.weblogs.com
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://topicexchange.com
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net
http://www.blogroots.com
http://www.blogshares.com
http://www.blogstreet.com
http://www.lasermemory.com
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com
http://www.popdex.com
http://www.snipsnap.org
http://www.weblogues.com
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Stumbled across Tweepular tonight. It’s AWESOME for bulk following and unfollowing! Beats the heck out of the manual way. Takes some time, though, to update Twitter with the requests.

Needless to say, social networking is here to stay and I need to start figuring out how to leverage it. So do you.