I market coaches. One of the most successful ones really had her practice take off when she started a blog. It got 42,000 hits within the first 3 months, quite a bit more than her main websites. However, at the same time, traffic to her websites picked up. That’s because her blog has many links to her main websites, and pitches her products and services, along with great content she changes daily. In fact it’s so interesting, I check it out every day too. Some blogs, it's true are personal indulgences, sometimes for ranting and raving, emotional hemorrhaging, political issues and so forth, but your blog is what you make of it. I have a blog. Of course I have several main websites as well. They're the cornerstones of my practice. They've been up for years, and of course I’ve loaded them to place on the SEOs, but what if you've got a new website and Google has “sandboxed” it? “What’s that?” you ask. Your website will rank at first, and then suddenly it doesn’t appear. Google places it in some kind of holding tank, maybe to check it for content, or for legitimate links or to avoid spam sites. Maybe they just want to see if it will be around for a while – which is going to hard if you don’t get exposure, right? For an excellent article about “sandboxing,” go here: http://www.globalise.com.au/internet-marketing/google-sandbox.shtml . What can you do if this happens besides wait it out and hope for the best? Submit to other search engines (www.submitexpress.com is one), keep adding rich content, get some help with your meta tags, use other promotional means such as writing articles, and get more quality links. Or put up another website, only call it a BLOG! I’ve sold services and products from my blogs, and yes, that’s plural. Why stop with one? They’re fun to do, and can be extremely informative for other people. Be sure they include links back to yur website(s) and to each other, and ads for your products and services. Make them dynamic, with entries daily, to keep people interested returning. Be sure and enter its URL on the search engines too. You can build a blog free at www.blogger.com . It's about as simple to do as a thing can be on the Internet. Research some of the blogs out there (google it), and get going. You want to give people every chance to find you and purchase your great products and services, don’t you? This article is free for republishing

Susan Dunn, MA, The EQ Coach, is the author of “Midlife Dating Survival Manual for Women,” available on her website, and offers coaching, Internet courses and ebooks around emotional intelligence for your personal and professional development. Retirement, midlife, and transitional coaching. Get certified as an EQ coach, the perfect retirement career. Contact her at http://www.susandunn.cc for information on the EQ Alive! program and free ezines