Blog evangelists, professional bloggers, and blogging purists are all a group of happy little campers telling themselves lies about New Media, and then living them out. That would be fine… if they kept their thoughts, theories, and practices focused on building their own backwoods network of off road trails. But, unfortunately that’s not the case.

As we shared in Part One of this article series, it’s become apparent that far too often blogging purists let their comfortable habits (voiced as advice and rules to newcomers) spill over as dangerous debris onto the superhighway of capitalism. And these hazards are causing business owners to skid off the road into drainage ditches filled with wasted time, money, and effort.

Now in the continuing effort to help clear the muddy waters of blogging for business, here’s filter #3.

Filter #3: all your traffic is to be jealously guarded

Professional bloggers want to generate traffic, just like you. But that’s where the similarity ends.

Your main goal is to build a prospect list with names and contact info, not just generate traffic or RSS subscribers. Traffic is important, but how you monetize that traffic is dramatically different than professional full-time bloggers. You make money off of your products or services. They make money off other peoples’ products or services, so the number of outbound links is basically irrelevant to professional bloggers.

Professional bloggers and blogging purists say that you “must link deep, link frequently, and link often.”

Excuse me!? If you’re a business owner looking to market with blogs this flies in the face of reason. You’re going work your butt off and/or dedicate company resources to an endeavor that is going to send people away from your site once they find you? That just doesn’t make sense.

Don’t fall prey to the blog evangelist rule that you have to have outside links scattered all over every post either. Most intelligent visitors find that annoying as all hell anyway. Instead of interrupting the flow of an article or post, concentrate your links in a convenient resource area at the end.

Limit your outbound links ONLY to resources that truly benefit your visitors/subscribers. And link to others who compliment your own products and services. If your source for an article or post is referencing a news story, another blogger, or if you’d like to help readers find more info elsewhere — well of course that’s only professional courtesy that you provide a live reference link.

And most important of all — when you work hard to generate the highly targeted traffic that business blogging creates, you don’t want to send those people off your site with an ad sense ad, Amazon ad, or to any other competitors site. That’s literally being penny wise and pound foolish.

In the next installment of this series you’ll get another filter to help clear the muddied waters of business blogging.

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John-Paul Micek is a Business Acceleration Coach with four multi-million dollar businesses under his belt and over 8000 hours of experience helping entrepreneurs like you get the profits, performance, and lifestyle you want from your business. He’s a published author (Secrets Of Online Persuasion,) a weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and professional speaker. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].

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