So you’ve got a website or a blog…great. You are already one step ahead of millions of others who don’t even get to that stage (i’m not even kidding).

The biggest misconception out there is that by simply putting up a new blog or website that you will suddenly get bucket loads of traffic and visits quickly. I won’t beat around the bush on this point – that’s not how it works.

Having a blog is a great way to improve your online presence for both business and also personal reasons. You can build a blog for free using tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and begin posting content right away. However, if nobody is reading that content that you spent ages creating, then what’s the point of it all?

I hear people saying things like “blogging doesn’t work” all the time. It turns out that they tried blogging for a few weeks, published a few random blog posts and then expected the traffic to pile in. No wonder blogging didn’t work for them! My advice, which is hardly rocket science, is that you must treat your blog/website almost as a business in itself: you need to put the time and effort in and treat it seriously to make a success of it.

Here are ten things you need to be aware of when blogging for business or personal reaons:

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The iPhone…officially the greatest gadget of the 21st century to date.

If somebody ten years before the iPhone had said that one day you would be able to run your entire business from a device that fits into your pocket…and is also a phone, most if not everyone would have laughed it off or just ignored the prediction.

The iPhone is not just a phone. It’s a mini-computer that allows you to maintain productivity for your business whilst on-the-go.

Below are the apps that I use on my iPhone to run my business. You will see that if I didn’t have an actual desktop computer, it wouldn’t really be the end of the world and I could still carry on my business as normal.

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I have spent many days at a time researching different options which would allow me to implement the membership site model into my clients’ and my own websites & blogs.

The two options that I would recommend using are Nanacast or WishList Member, depending on your needs.

Below, I will outline some reasons as to why I only recommend these two options if you want to create a membership based website.

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My very good friend Lee Rickler of Point and Stare who specialises in web development, in particular WordPress development wrote the “A-to-Z of Web Development” which really demonstrates his expertise of all things web dev. Everything listed is a technique and/or tool that Lee and his web development company employ when working for their clients.

Some of Lee’s clients include Apple, Microsoft, Canon & Nokia – i’m not just name-dropping but that tells you how good this guy is at what he does. Lee has kindly allowed me to re-publish his article here for the Internet Marketing Highway readers and will be providing more articles for us as a guest author.

Point and Stare specialise in WordPress development in London and I highly recommend visiting their website to have a look at the rest of Lee’s work.

A – Accessibility
This needs to be built in from the off, giving functionality and benefit to as wide an audience as possible.

B – Brand guidelines
Adherence to these promotes good front-end structure and balance throughout.

C – CSS
A Cascading Style Sheet is used to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.

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Any blog owner should have a few reliable ping sites that they use to feed their RSS updates to, in order to let the Internet know that their blog/website has something new on it.

Here is a list of reliable ping sites that I and other leading Internet Marketers recommend for use with your blogs… Read the rest of this entry

I just read a fantastic article on the StartupNation website which outlines what the Internet marketing trends for 2010 are going to be. They were pretty accurate with their 2009 predictions about the Internet marketing world which included video blogging, recession marketing (i.e. “click here to save money” type offers), social & mobile marketing, widget marketing, long tailing and a boom in the home-based Internet entrepreneurs.

I for one am taking serious note of their predictions for 2010 and will be looking out for the following predictions.

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Affiliate marketing is a big part of my Internet business and the way that I make money online. This blog is monetized using affiliate schemes that I am a member of and I get a small commission if a visitor or reader of this blog buys a product through one of my links. Can’t get much more honest than that.

Affiliate marketing is probably one of the more well-documented areas of Internet marketing, yet so many people don’t make any money through this model.

Do you “know somebody” who uses affiliate schemes to make money online but doesn’t actually make any money at all? If so, read on…

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So today I got myself a new iPhone 3GS with the sole purpose of making my Internet marketing work more mobile. Infact I am writing this very post from the WordPress app for iPhone which was so easy to set up (I’ll post a quick how-to guide asap).

Using this app I can see, amend, approve & trash any comments, blog posts, categories and pages on this blog. I can also add photos!

I will be posting a separate post showing you which apps can improve and increase your productivity online using iPhone.

In the meantime I’m off to download more apps and see how I can make my IM activites easier using what is now officially the greatest gadget of the 21st century to date.

I know that business owners in today’s environment are always looking to self-implement and do things themselves in order to save on costs and fees of getting things done professionally. Whilst I don’t agree with that model of business (I believe you should do what you love/know and get somebody else doing the rest) I like to see people learning more about things like SEO so that they can try to do it themselves.

I’ve written a quick elements guide here which shows basically how a website is structured, from an SEO point of view. It is intended for those who are new to SEO or who are trying to learn more about it.

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One of my favourite tools that I use to update my Twitter and Facebook accounts easily is TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is no secret software and it is used by thousands (maybe millions) of Twitter users but I really think it is a fantastically easy way to boost your social networking productivity.

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