Here’s another excellent reason to start a blog if you haven’t already done so to maximize quality traffic. How would you like to earn quality backlinks from major newspapers like the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle?
Being authority sites, these backlinks are very valuable to any search engine optimizer. With the proliferation of spam, authority links generate trust and trust is all important when you want rankings to stay on top over time.
Publishers such as online newspapers are republishing topical content from pre-approved blogs via a service called BlogBurst. The publishers pay BlogBurst for the content being republished. Although none of the revenue is shared with the blog content provider, a byline and attribution/link back to the blog is included. At this moment, ads in content are not allowed but maybe allowed in the near future. The range of topics they are looking for at the moment is also fairly limited.
The backlinks and traffic generated from having blog content syndicated could be HUGE so it would far outweigh the need for advertising in the content itself or getting paid for the content syndication. As would be expected, such a program requires a strict approval process to select only the highest quality blogs that are regularly updated.
Blogging is big business. Weblogs Inc, which held the popular blog Engadget was bought by America Online for over $30 million dollars. Check out how the most-linked-to-blogs are connected.
I’ll cover how any business, online or offline, can start a blog easily and painlessly to take advantage of it’s traffic and social networking features in a future article.