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If you want to know what blogging can do for your business just take a look at the Envato network of blogs. I’m sure you are all familiar with PSDTuts, VectorTuts, AudioTuts, NetTuts, AETuts, FreelanceSwitch etc… and who knows how many more in the pipeline. Clearly, there’s a pattern here.

I know there are quite a few of you here that maintain your own website, and even have a blog. But how many of you actually use your blogs to market yourself on the web, and ultimately drive more traffic to your files here on FlashDen?

I’ve been blogging since 2006 and it has done nothing but catapult me from one extreme to the other. In fact, blogging helped me start my own design company. The barrier to getting started today with your own blog is next to nothing. All you need is a hosted domain name and you can begin the process of giving yourself a serious income boost.

Here are 10 tips to help you make more sales with blogging -

1. Do not get a free blog from blogger.com, wordpress.com or other such services. A domain and hosting won’t cost you more than $15 - $20 to get started. It is an investment, make it.
2. Blog about anything you are passionate about. You do not have to specifically talk about Flash to get visitors to your blog. If you like scuba diving, blog about scuba diving. You can always throw some Flash goodies in there too.
3. Make an awesome “About” page. This is one of the most important point of having a blog, it is after all about YOU. So take the time to make your about page as creative and as informative as possible. Just don’t make it an essay.
4. Create a portfolio page. Showcase your work, implementations of your files by your customers and anything else that you want to show off.
5. Get people signed up to your newsletter. Use promotions like “Be the first to know about my new files“, offer any work you are willing to give away for free {people love freebies}. Once you have built a list you can promote to them whenever you publish something new on FlashDen.
6. Promote what you do prominently in the sidebar of your blog, make it known that you sell all your work via FlashDen { don’t forget the referral link }.
7. Use social network sites like twitter to further the reach of your blog posts, read this post for more on twitter. Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are also great sites to use for expanding your presence and driving tons of traffic that could potentially lead to a lot of new customers.
8. Post regularly. Updating your blog at least twice a week is important. I know some of you may not have the time to do it, but try to make it a point to post something at least once a week. One trick to keeping your frequency steady is by writing a lot of posts in one sitting and saving them to be published later. This way you will always have stuff to publish.
9. Offer advice, tutorials, best practices and anything else you are willing to share about your core work. It doesn’t matter if you are a developer, illustrator, designer or just like to make pretty preloaders - try to offer as much as you can to your readers. Think of it as building equity.
10. Last, but not least, visit other blogs and interact with the community there. I used to do this in the beginning to get more visitors to my blog/s, it worked like a charm. The trick is to be helpful and leave insightful comments rather than just “Cool post!” kind of stuff.

There are plenty more tips that you can use to further your blogging prowess, here are some blogs that you can read to catch up -

• Problogger
• Performancing
• The Blog Herald
• Blogging Tips
• Blogging Pro