I monitor a lot of blogs, forums and news sites with my trusty RSS reader. One of my favorite sites is SitePoint, which is a terrific discussion forum for webmasters, programmers and domain name investors.
I’ve had some great conversations on the forums and via IM that have been very enlightening.
In a recent post, one of the SitePoint forum guys was lamenting the fact that he was having trouble getting to 100 unique visitors per day.
There was some good, solid advice that I would like to share and build upon:
1. Make sure your posts are optimized with popular keywords. I would be careful with this one because you don’t want to lose your blogging voice or make your pages read awkwardly by jamming in as many keywords as you can. Do check for the most popular keywords in your universe, though, using a tool like WordTracker. As a poster on SitePoint said, using the competition values in WordTracker allows you to pick keywords that haven’t soaked the web yet.
2. Use a service like PinGoat to ping blogger indexing sites every time you change your site. Pinging is basically extending an invitation to indexing services like Technorati, IceRocket and Feedster to come to your site and index it. The more indexing you get, the more exposure you get. PinGoat is a terrific service that pings them all at the same time.
3. Update your Google Sitemap every few posts and resubmit it. A Google Sitemap is an interesting and amazing phenomenon. Here is how Google explains it:
The Google Sitemaps program is two-way communication between webmasters and Google. You can give us information about your site so we can index it more effectively, and we can show you how we see your site and tell you about any trouble we’ve had crawling it.
Basically you create a special xml file and tell Google to go look at it. It uses the file to better index the site. And it definitely works. There’s even a Plugin for WordPress that will build the perfect sitemap for Google. You can read more about sitemaps by visiting the Google Sitemapspage.
4. Post relevant comments on blogs related to your content area. Look around, find people blogging about the same stuff as you. Monitor their blog sites and participate in the discussion. Be sure to include a link to your site in all of your comments. It’s a great way to correspond with like-minded people and get your name and site name out there.
5. Search for link partners and link exchanges at least once a week. If you find a site you like, include it on your link page and drop the site owner an email. He or she will most likely list your site as well. Join a couple of free or cheap link exchange sites and stick to your subject area when exchanging links. Always visit the prospective link exchange site and ask yourself if you would be doing your readers a service by sending them to that site. If not, don’t link to the site.
6. Write great content, and don’t plug stuff unless you are familiar with it and approve of it. If you write interesting content about subjects that interest people they will always find you. Don’t hustle your readers &ndash if you are going to plug something for money, make sure the product or service is something you would use and recommend. If people sense a hustle they will not convert and they will not come back.
7. Watch your keywords and make sure they are performing. DigitalPoint has a terrific tool that will help you track your keyword placement over time so you can see how your efforts are doing.
8. Perform some basic Search Engine Optimization. Learn how to not only optimize your posts, but optimize your entire site. You can get some great tips and tools at SeoChat.com
9. Shake loose a couple of bucks and buy some ad space. Once you’re certain your blog looks and operates perfectly, spend $100 on Adsense ads and see how that helps.
10. Be patient. It isn’t going to happen overnight. It will take weeks or months to get things rolling.
After you create a blog that is interesting, now it is time to start making money. The second step of getting visitors is the most important, if you plan on making money. The third step is choosing how you will make money from your blog. You should try to keep your blog on the same topic on all your post, being that you can have an unlimited number of blogs, you can have a blog for any and every topic you choose. Make sure to start a new blog if you are totally off the main subject of the blog that you are posting to.
Blogger and several other free blog companies make it very simple to have a brand new blog up and running in a matter of a few minutes. Try not to post an article about dogs on a blog about golf. Once you have an interesting blog on one particular topic, the best place to start making money is Google AdSense. Blogger has made it very simple to add AdSense ads to your blog.
The ads that show up on your blog will be targeted towards the topic of your blog, which means if you have a blog about dogs, the ads that show up on your blog will deal with pets. It’s like Google is paying you to advertise on your blog.
Another way to make money with your blog is with affiliate programs. Companies will pay you good money to advertise their products, and all you have to do is put a link or banner on your blog leading to that companies web site. Once a sale is made the company gives you a commission. That is the reason you should pick one topic for your blog. If you want to have a blog about your life, by all means do it, but have other blogs about specific topics if you want to make money.
Once you find a topic that interest you, look for affiliate programs for that particular topic. With the dog blog example, there are several dog training products that you can have links and banners to on a dog blog that will make good money. ClickBank is the top company when it comes to affiliate products, they have over 10,000 products to choose from. Browse their products to see which ones you would like to promote. Obviously you want to pick something that fits the topic of your blog, but don’t limit yourself to just one, you can change a product you are promoting with a few clicks.
The internet is the essence of marketing, by that I mean, every word in an ad matters, every color, where the ad is located on your blog, whether is is blinking or not, and the color of the text. It might not seem like all of those things matter, but the fact is, everything that you decide matters. The good thing is you can experiment with how your blog looks as much as you want. There are several e-books written on how you should place and where you should place them, in the beginning, just go with the basic blog set-up until you get the hang of things.
Did you ever ask yourself, why do you blog, or why do you have to? Nowadays on Internet there are more than 70 millions blogs, and it is interesting what purposes do they pursue?
Until recently, to make money online was not easy for usual people like we. 4-5 years ago it was difficult to earn something on the Net until WEB 2.0 era had came. The only way which could help us in that time was website creating, it’s promotion, and selling of advertising places.
Today everything changed. Blog fever amplifies day by day, and everyone, who heard something about blogs, wants to have it. So, why? Lets try to make some supervisions.
1. Glory. The vanity was, is and will be always. Whether is necessary to be surprised that people wish to be famous? Look at how many amazing people did you know since you have enjoyed blogging. Seth Godin, Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse… Did you ever know them if not blogs?
2. Self-expression. Many people are blogging because it gives them some charge of energy. I created this blog because I just want to share of my thoughts… Why not? And there are guys, who are the professionals in different spheres, but they don’t have another opportunities of expression. Internet is the best instrument for people like we.
Internet is not developed even on a half and I do not exclude such opportunity, that people will become famous all over again online and only after, in real life. Blogging is what such people need.
3. Job. For many, blogging is a real time job. Companies are hire people to write about their new products and its announcement. Like I wrote in my post Occupation Bloggger, the middle salary of such blogger in US is equal $2,5-3 thousands per month.
4. Sale of own products. Through Internet, we can start selling our products worldwide from the minutes after beginning. Especially if we have an electronic product like eBook or useful software, Internet is the best that we can use. And people use it. Blog helps to realize these purposes.
5. Sale of affiliate products. Recently, are appeared the new techniques, which help anyone to sell affiliate products with help of blog. Check this out.
6. To Help Another. Yes, yes, yes… And why not? I found many blogs of family doctors, radio engineering and even workers of the zoo which are writing about what should we do in different situations.
7. Money Making Online. And eventually people are blogging for the sake of money. Look at Jonh Chow, if to be honest, I’m not against that my blog brings me $18,000. But while I have no such purposes. And John is not alone. For many people blog is a big business. I read somethere, that Engadget make more than $100,000 per month. Youare probably agree with me, that these people don’t have any financial problems. 
Everyone of us have different views, but the are all the same, because blogging join us. Let’s create blogs, promote them and enjoy this process, because it gives us a big opportunities in our lifes.
From Artem Belinskiy. .earnexperience.com
Many clients ask me how to drive more traffic to their blogs. By now you have probably heard that blogs are an excellent resource to get leads as well as clients for your business. The best way to do that is by creating search engine friendly blog posts that get indexed in search engines. When people search for information on topics you discuss in your blog it appears on the search engine result pages. Potential customers then are able to read what you have to say and get on your mailing list.
So now it all boils down to techniques that help you effectively optimize your blog for search engines. Here are tips and ideas to do just that:
- Create A Keyword Rich Header For Your Blog. The header repeats on all pages on the blog. By making sure that your header contains targeted keywords, you are able to get more of your blog pages indexed in search engines.
- Treat Each Blog Post As A Separate, Optimizable Page. Use the process of search engine optimization on each blog post. This means that you need to create an optimized title for each post, find targeted keywords for each post and weave the keywords into your post’s text.
- Make Sure That Each Blog Post’s File Name Are Descriptive. Different blogging software behaves differently, but some will call your blog posts 2.html, 3.html, 4.html, etc. As you can see, that is not very descriptive and not particularly helpful to either people or search engines. When you create a post called “How Coaching Helps Business Owners”, calling it “how-coaching-helps-business-owners.html” is a much better title than “5.html”
Make sure that your blogging software creates descriptive file names for your blog posts; it is better both for human readers and search engine spiders.
- Get Links Pointing To Your Blog. Quality links to your blog means more blog visitors and higher search engine rankings. Current search engine algorithms value links to your blog, which means that having links pointing to your blog will improve your blog’s search engine rankings.
- Get Your Blog Listed in Blog Directories. Blog directories are a great source of getting unidirectional links to your blog. Since blog directory links many times are unidirectional (they link to you, but you don’t link back to them), they are great for boosting your search engine rankings. Having many unidirectional links pointing to your web site will improve your search engine rankings.
A blog is an excellent marketing tool, but your blog will not attract more leads and clients for your business if you don’t use search engine optimization techniques to optimize your blog and attract targeted search engine traffic to it.
Now, I build content-sites, and in my free time, I still build more and more. To my definition, a content-site is more or less like what James Martell does. I would research for keywords, define my topics, list the content that I want to have in my site, and then start writing (or get somebody else to write for me).
Done with that, then it’s about building the site, putting web pages together and getting a domain name and web hosting.
After that, you go around looking for link partners.
I suppose most people understand what a blog is. But just in case for some newbie readers, I’ll try to explain what it is. A blog is a site that contains articles after articles written one after the other. The content is not being written all in one go upfront. But it is rather being updated along the way.
A blog lists the articles in a chronology manner, being the latest, the first. MoneyClicking.net is a blog. A blog is normally supported by a system or a script. You can use Blogger.com (remote hosted), Wordpress (PHP script), Movable Type (Perl script), etc.
Anyway, back to the topic. I was on the phone with my friend, we concluded it’s better to have a blog because it’s easier to get traffic with it.
Why? Well, there are some mechanics of a blog and also the culture of blogging that makes it much easier.
For one thing &ndash it’s easier to get incoming links. Let me tell you how.
Reason #1: Blog Ping
First of all, there’s this thing called - PING. With a blog ping, when ever you write a new article in your blog, you can set addresses to a few ping sites to tell them that you just updated your blog. When you do that, you’ll get a link back to your site. Ping sites are like Technorati.com and BlogRolling.com. News sites like MSN News, Yahoo News and MoreOver, also have ping addresses.
Now, maybe you won’t be listed very long on that page, because many other blogs are also pinging to those sites. But more or less, it’ll help. I’ve gone through my web statistics and traffic do come from the sites that I pinged.
Reason #2: Trackback
Secondly, there’s also TRACKBACK. Now, I was with a friend explaining how trackbacks work last week. Now I’ll tell you. With blogs, for every article that you write, there will be a unique URL for it. And for each article, there’s also a unique trackback URL. Whenever you are at another person’s blog, look for trackback URL, and you may want to copy it.
Now here’s how you use a trackback URL. Let say you are at somebody else’s blog. And he just wrote about something about cat grooming. And somehow, you feel that you have something to say about what he wrote &ndash and you know, what you want to say will be very long which may not be suitable for a comment. So you write your own message at your blog, and lower down the interface, you enter the other guy’s trackback URL, and then you hit the Submit button.
Now, that new article will appear on your blog. And because you put in a trackback URL, a part of your article will also appear in the other guy’s article as a comment. And that comment links directly back to your article. So that’s how trackbacks work.
Reason #3: Blog Comments
Now, my third point on why blog is better than content-site &ndash Blog Comments. This is where you able to go around at other blog sites and write some comments on articles. And you even leave a link back to your site. But here’s the thing, just make sure that your comments are genuine, because now days, there are too many people spamming blog comments just to get a link back.
Reason #4: Bloggers’ Linking Habit
OK, here’s some more. This is more a blogging culture thing &ndash bloggers like to link to each other. If your blog is interesting, it’s easy to get other bloggers to link back to you. Whether you ask for it on your website, or sometimes they just simply give you a link back. I’ve got this many times, and most of the times, they link back write to a specific message. And sometimes, they just list blog sites that they like on their website.
Reason #5: Faster SE Indexing
This is getting quite long already. But I am not done. When it comes to getting traffic, you may not realize this, but it’s easier to get indexed in the search engines with a blog. I don’t know why &ndash perhaps it’s because incoming links are more natural and you don’t really go around asking for them. And when the incoming links are more natural, I think search engine will prefer it a lot more.
I myself have experienced where new content on my blog was indexed in under seven days.
Reason #6: Repeat Visitors
Now, after you get traffic from search engines, ping sites, and other blogs, later you’ll start to realize that 80-90% of your visitors are repeat visitors. It’s common with a blog. So the point is with this one &ndash it’s easier to retain visitors with a blog.
You get huge traffic from multiple sources &ndash and the ones you already have you get to keep. This is different from content-sites, where you really so much on search engine traffic.
Blogging Seems Much More Fun …
In my experience, starting from scratch, in six month, a content-site may or may not reach to mark of 1000 visitors per day. And it takes serious hours writing content and building incoming links. I have multiple sites consistently doing 100-200 visitors per day, after six month. But with a blog, it’s not unusual if a blog reaches 3000 visitors per day, provided you give good content.
But I suppose, it all boils down to which you are comfortable with.
Realizing this, I may be planning differently in the future &ndash but I am not certain on that yet. From the looks of it, blogging seems much more fun. You write about what you like, and you network with other bloggers. And the writing part becomes much, much easier with scripts like WordPress and Movable Type. Not much designing, no uploading files, less link building, etc …
With building content-sites, you still have to build the website again, upload them up to your web hosting, build incoming links, etc …
This is my opinion. And you may not think the same way I do, based on your personal experience and knowledge. I respect that.
There are all kinds of blogs like personal blogs, topical blogs, culture blogs, political blogs, science blogs, educational blogs, news blogs and much more. One of the things these blogs have in common is that they are generally good sources of information. Not only are they good sources of information but are good sources of up-to-date information at that.
People looking for an alternative source of information will find that blogs can sometimes offer a more in depth view or a refreshing take on current events. One of the major benefits of information from blogs, specially from personal, cultural and political bogs, is that it gives readers insight on the locals’ viewpoint. For example, although news sites can offer accurate information and report facts and statistics about important events such as the 9/11 attack or the latest Tsunami tragedy that hit Asia, personal blogs of people who were actually there or knew someone involved in the tragedies offer a deeper and more compelling insight on the events. Reading political blogs would also give you a chance to know what ordinary citizens of a country really think.
The downside with information from blogs is accuracy. Since most blogs are subjective, information garnered from the blogs can be lopsided and even exaggerated. Most blogs do write about facts but give commentaries as well. When reading opinions and commentaries be discriminating and do not believe everything written without thinking or checking out the facts by reading other blogs and sources.
One problem with extracting useful information from blogs is knowing where to start. With more than 10 million blogs online it is impossible to search for specific information without the help of a good blog search engine. A good blog search engine, however, will weed out most of the noise and point you to the blogs that contain the information you need.
To help you search for information found in blogs, here’s a short list of the best blog searching tools on the net right now.
• Google blog search &ndash google blog search is the fastest blog search engine at the moment and returns incredibly relevant search results.
• Technorati.com &ndash Technorati.com is the most established blog search engine. It gives back the most number of results and has the most features among blog engines. However, it can be slow and returns quite a number of irrelevant links.
• Yahoo! Blog Search &ndash Yahoo’s blog search is a new feature added to its news search. The search result page is divided into two columns with the left column containing news results and the right column containing blog results. Yahoo! blog search is best for people who need current information but are not very particular that it be from blogs.
• Feedster is one of the oldest blog engines. One of its useful features is that it caches blog pages. Feedster would be useful for people looking for blog posts that have been deleted or edited.
• BlogPulse is a search engine most useful due to its extra tools that allow users to do things other blog engines don’t like create graphs and plot log buzz for search terms. It also has a Conversation Tracker that’s gathers related blog posts converts them to threaded conversations. This cool feature allows readers to follow topics they are interested in more easily.
• And to apply for a Blog Review and possibly win an award, go to Bloggy Award!
Did you ever consider to start your own blog to make more money on the internet? If not, you really should, because by tapping into the blogging scene you can easily increase the profitability
of your website.
Just right now is a great deal of hype and talk about blogs, but when one strips them down and looks at them clearly, they discover that a blog is nothing more than a web site. In essence, a blog is a website featuring an easy to use content management system that allows for quick updating in chronological order. The roots of blogging trace back to online journaling and community-building efforts, but approached from a business perspective, blogs are uniquely positioned to make you money. Their structure, treatment from search engines, and ease of use make them a wonderful moneymaking tool.
The structure of blogs is perfect for revenue-producing efforts. This is because the sites are, invariably, heavy on content and are naturally organized in an intuitive fashion. Regardless of what platform one uses for blogging, they will be able to produce a content-based site featuring a series of potentially well-targeted pages.
Search engines love content. Textual content keeps search engine spiders well-fed and persuades them to visit again and again. Google, Yahoo and MSN reward informative sites chock-full of information with better positioning in search results and index these sites quickly. Because blogs are content-driven, they serve as a model for how to build a “cooperative relationship” with a search engine. In the end, effective blog use produces high search engine rankings and, thus, great traffic levels. Traffic, of course, is a key to profitability. It is hard for a site to profit if no one sees it! The traffic advantages vis-
There is certainly nothing new about the concept of blogging, and yet many business owners and Internet entrepreneurs don’t seem to grasp the power of this simple strategy. This is evidenced by the fact that many business websites do not include a blog.
If you run a business site, but do not currently have a blog, there is a great chance that you are leaving money on the table. Regardless of what kind of business you are in, a dynamic and interactive web log will improve customer response and add profits to your bottom line.
Consider this:
When you use a web log as the platform for your newsletter or ezine, you can post each of your promotions to the web, and then invite your subscribers to your blog to view your most recent update. When readers follow the link from your email to your latest blog post, they will not only have the opportunity to respond to the current promotion, they will be able to browse your blog and take action on offers you made last week, last month, even last year.
Quite often when I mail my list about my latest blog post, I end up making new sales on a promotion I did some time ago. And since my blog is linked to all of my other web sites, it’s easy for me to generate traffic for multiple products and services with just one mailing.
And blogging is a great way to generate new web traffic for your domain. By setting your blog software to ‘ping’ search and directory portals each time you make a post, you can alert a large number of people about your new content with the single click of a button.
Also, search engines are more likely to spider your site on a regular basis if you update your content frequently. With blog software, making changes to the text on your web pages is as simple as sending an email; you just fill in a subject line and post body, and then click ‘submit’.
You can even configure your blog so readers are able to leave comments and questions about your articles. They don’t have to take the time to send you an email, they can just click on the comments link and post their feedback right there on the spot. This is one of the easiest ways possible to encourage productive interaction among your prospects and customers.
Blogging requires no special technical knowledge. Sure there is an advanced side to this marketing strategy, but just adding a web log to your domain and making posts on a regular basis can improve your traffic flow and customer response tremendously.
So, you have been out on the Internet and hear people talking about blogs. Weblogs (Blogs for short) are web-based publications consisting of information of all sorts. Some people have personal blogs. Others are using blogs to market a product or service. I use one of my blog as a complimentary informational site to my home based business. It allows me to easily and quickly publish information about my home-based business. It is also a portal for my team to keep abreast of business related information.
The first thing you need to decide what type of blog you want. Having decided, go to .blogger.com (there are other, but for the purpose of this article, I will discuss .blogger.com.) to setup an account.
Once your account is setup, you will want to login into the dashboard. At this point, I would send some time reading the tutorials and looking at some of the other blogs. By looking at other”s blogs, you can get an idea of how you want your to look and function. Blogger provides a help group (forum) where you can communicate with other members.
First, you will want to create your blog. You do this by using the “Create A Blog” button. This will bring you to page asking you a few questions. At this point, you have two options: simple setup or advanced setup. If you are new and have no knowledge of setting up a website and ftping, stay with the simple setup. But if you are familiar with setting up website and ftping, I suggest the advance setup. The advance setup would allow you more flexibility, but requires more of a learning curve. For our discussion, we will stick with the simple setup.
For the simple setup, chose a title and address (URL) for your blog. Select a title that reflection your intention for the site. Selecting a good title is an important consideration, especially if you are using it to market a product or providing information to your audience. Put in the word verification number and hit “Continue”.
Secondly, you will want to select a template from the ones provided on this page. Make your selection based on how it will coordinate with product or service. Also, the template should have an aesthetic affect on your targeted traffic. In other words, if you are using this to promote a home-based business, use a color scheme that is not loud and boisterous.
Lastly, hit the “Continue” button. Your blog has been setup. You will now want to start publishing to your blog. You are back at the dashboard, so select your blog link.
Under the “Publish” tab, select the “Create” tab. You will have a blank editor box to enter your new information to be published. If you are familiar with HTML tags, you can add it into your text. (i.e.: This is my new text will produce This is my new text.). There are some edit buttons within the editor that you can use also. Once finished entering your new information, hit the “Publish Post” button.
As a side note, once you have published to your site, you will want to draw traffic to your new blog. You can use two sites that will send out your post so others can see them. They are .pingoat.com and .pingomatic.com. Every time you make a new post, use these two sites.
Whether you are just wanting expound your personal views, market a product or service, or provide a portal for additional information about your home based business, blogs are great. They can be setup easily and quickly be published. You do not have to worry about web hosting and programming if you are a newbie. Just start typing in your thoughts on a daily basis to keep your content fresh.
Blogging is one of the most efficient ways to increase your website rankings on search sites like Google and Yahoo. Blogging refers to posting your website links to blog sites in order to increase your website rankings. Blogging work best for the SEO as it is the one of the most effective tools to make your website popular amongst the people. If your website is more famous it will generate more revenues as more and more people will visit your site.
You can follow these simple rules for SEO and your blog will definitely rank much higher in search engines. You should use your primary keyword most often in your blogs. The URL that you post on the blogs should contain a primary keyword to optimize your website. You can also use the main keyword in sub domains to get better results. In case your website is about automotive parts then you can use the keywords “Automotive Parts” in your website. Also it is necessary to use your main keyword in the title of your posts and the titles of your web pages. Also use the main keywords and key phrases in your H1 and H2 headers to make them more searchable.
Next you can use your secondary keywords in the body of your post in the blog. The more times the keywords are found in the webpage or post, the better are the chances of the search engines will be able to pick up the keywords. However it should not look like spam. You should refrain from posting the same keywords again and again in the same post as then Google will ban your site for some time and your rankings will fall drastically.
You should also use your primary and secondary as much as possible in the anchor texts for linking the text to other blog sites or other blog posts. Also make every effort to make your site easier for search engine to track. Also it is very much necessary to make your navigation bar of the whole website on every page of the website. All your previous posts should be linked to all pages so that they can be easily searchable by search engines.
You should also create back links to your website on as many blogs as possible. This is because it will help a lot in getting the rank of your website higher in the search engine pages. The more links you have created the higher will be the rank of your website on search engines. You can get back links to your website is to submit your blog and RSS feeds to as many blog search engines and blog directories as possible. Exchange your links with other blogs and network with as many people as possible on the blogs. If you find any interesting information on a blog then don’t forget to link it. The track back will become a link to your blog after some time. In the end to optimize search engine results for your website you should update your blog frequently.