When I started my sales career over 25 years ago, I worked for a small company selling telephone answering equipment. Hard to believe it but in those days I had to explain to prospects what equipment was for and why they might want to use it.

The company I worked for got business in several different ways. First each of 4 sales people handled incoming calls and also made calls to people he/she thought could use equipment. The company advertised so sometimes people called in to inquire about products we offered. Finally manufacturers of equipment sent company names of people (leads) who called manufacturer because they were interested in equipment.

No one particularly liked making cold calls so if we could get an incoming call we took it hoping it was a potential customer. Cold calling was part of job however so I learned to do it in a way that made it a game. One of other sales people really hated making calls so he very rarely made any.

Instead of calling this fellow would complain to whoever was available that company didn’t provide good leads, that company should advertise more so people would know what equipment was, and that company should move its location to a high traffic mall so we would get walk in traffic. (We were located in a building that housed mattress factory of parents of owner!)

Needless to say he didn’t make many sales but it always struck me that he truly believed problem was with company not with himself.

Jack Canfield in his book The Success Principles says, “If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes level of your achievements, results you produce, quality of your relationships, state of your health and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings—everything!”

The fellow may have been right about company and its support (or lack of support) of sales but he couldn’t change that. It didn’t help any of us that he continually complained about leads, location, and lack of advertising. He needed to take responsibility for his own sales process and begin to think about possibilities not problems.

I conducted my 1st customer appreciation webcast on April 12th 2005 to answer my subscribers' most pressing question on Blogs and Rss.

Here's one of questions I have:

How can you use blogs to incease traffic?

Blogs can increase traffic through following:

1. If your blog has valuable content, this will attract readers to your blog who will visit again

Most people who perform searches using search engines are actually looking for information, for solutions. The more helpful and relevant content you have, easier it is for you to attract visitors and also to turn them into loyal readers and subscribers.

2. With a Blog, you can submit to many Blog directories that exist online.

By submitting to many blog directories in proper category, you can expand your reach to targeted subscribers or readers who wants to read your posting on your area of specialisation.

3. Blogs promote relationship building and trust with your readers, as it allows you to interact with them. Your readers can refer a friend and imagine traffic power that can be generated if each one of your reader make a referral.

For example, if you have 500 readers and each one makes a referral, that will be an additional 500 new subscribers, giving you a total of 1,000 subscribers/readers.

4. By attracting search engine 'bot's to visit site more often