Building a blog for your network marketing business is key to your success. Don’t believe me?

Here are a few reasons you should be build your blog asap:

Build Your List- A blog is a great way to start building your email list. You can ad an optin box in your sidebar (like the one you see here). The other option is to have a popup display with your optin box when your visitor comes to your site or when they leave.

Get Traffic- You will find that your blog will start to gain traction in the search engines, which can get you fresh quality leads. (more on this later)

Attract Backlinks- By writing quality posts on your blog people will begin to naturally link to your site. When others link to you they indirectly give you a vote, and the search engines count these votes when factoring how you rank in they’re search engine results pages. (SERPS)

Attraction Marketing- Having a blog makes it easier than ever to become an authority in your marketplace. If you give your readers quality content and use social media correctly, you can gain the attention of your market leaders. If you can gain the attention of market leaders with your blog, you may be able to form partnerships, and get them on board promoting your site or products.

Understanding Your Audience- Engaging with your audience through your blog comments is a great way to really understand your audiences wants & needs. With this knowledge you can develop products for your audience that they actually want!

Building Social Proof- Another advantage of quality content & your blog is you will get testimonials and other social proof posted to your blog. This is invaluable as you can use these testimonials for your own products and it will also help your other visitors look at you as an authority.

I’m sure you can see now that having a blog is a crazy valuable tool in your marketing arsenal and shouldn’t be missed! Lets now get into actually starting your blog…

Naming Your Blog

Your Domain name is how your blog will be known in your market, so I would recommend either branding yourself or use one of your main niche keywords in your domain.

I strongly suggest regersting a .com domain, for one people remember .com’s better and two for seo reasons. I use Godaddy to register all my domains, you can see if your domain is available there by doing a search.

Hosting & Setting Up Your Blog

You are going to need to get hosting for your blog, I use Hostgator for all my hosting and would denfinately suggest them for all your needs. Hostgator is reliable, and they have great support. They also have a control panel called CPanel that you definitely want with your hosting.

Within Cpanel is a program called Fantistico, this makes installing a new blog on your domain super easy even if you have no tech ability. I used wordpress for all my blogs, wordpress has tons of advantages, its the most widely used blog platform and Google loves WordPress blogs.

Follow these 4 simple steps to install wordpress on your hosting account:

Step 1. Log into your cpanel account. The details should have been emailed to your. If you didn’t use hostgator make sure your host supports Fantistico.

Step 2. Scroll down towards the bottom of the page and locate Fantistico.

Step 3. Once inside Fantistico click WordPress, then click New Instillation.

Step 4. Follow the instructions, in Fantistico. I recommend installing your blog in the root of your domain vs. a directory.

Plugins

One of the greatest benefits of WordPress is the huge community behind it that have created thousands of plugins you can use on your blog. A plugin is a script that you can install that adds features and functionality to wordpress without having to touch any code. As I mentioned there are thousands of free plugins, below is a list of plugins that I suggest you look into:

Akismet- helps protect your blog from spam

Contact Form 7- lets you add a form to your blog

Disqus Comment System- adds pictures to your commenters names

Tweet Old Post- randomly tweets posts on twitter

WordPress SEO by Yoast- helps control all your seo efforts in one easy to use plugin

WordPress Database Backup- backs up your website data

Permalinks

Seeting the correct permalink structure for your blog is very important for SEO. The permalinks are basically how your pages and posts are named- by using a good permalink structure and titleing your posts well your will be way better prepared for the search engines.

The Structure I recommend is:

/%category%/%postanme%/

* Copy and pasted this into the custom box at – Settings–> Permalinks

Posting to Your Blog

You are now ready to post content to your blog. Adding content to your blog on a regular basis will help increase your audience and build a strong following. Here are a few content posting tips:

Target Keywords- When posting always think of relevant keywords you can target, use the google keyword tool to find keywords worth targeting. When your just starting out I would suggest targeting keywords with less than 60,000 competing pages in Google and include the keyword phrase in your post title if you can.

Tag Posts- Make sure you add your keywords in your tags, but don’t over do this. I never add more than 6-8 tags per post.

Post Regularly- I would recommend you post atleast once per week, but it would be great if you could post every day.