Blog Tutorial- Learn blogging and make more money blogging

Video Blogging Start-Up Tips

2010-03-16T13:03:00.000+05:30

Blogging is one of the hottest Internet marketing innovations ever created. The ways that people are streaming video using this new communication medium are astonishing. But for the most part, everybody is basically sticking to basic text blogging. However, just like the multimedia wave that has begun to reshape website content and design with web 2.0 and social media sites such as squidoo, myspace and youtube. Video blogging is the next generation medium for posting ideas and products over the Internet. And thanks to the popularity of sites like YouTube and GoogleVideo, this field of using streaming video for blogging is poised for a massive take-off.

While video blogging will require additional kinds of resources, it is definitely worth the effort as part of your internet marketing endeavors to have video on a webpage with the use of streaming video. Here are some things you need to consider. First of all video blogging requires larger website disk space. Next, you will also need to use a faster server. Lastly, this technology is supported by a completely different collection of programs.

Video blogging is an ideal communication platform for both personal and commercial expression which promotes that one add video to a website. From a business prospective, it offers a number of benefits. Consider this as a highly effective means to display the complete line of your products or services to prospective customers. In many ways it's similar to running a commercial for free.

It's a proven fact that people want to see what they are going to buy. And all of us have experienced the persuasiveness of a thirty second commercial. Video blogging offers a similar experience. You use streaming video to display content about your product and visitors watch it. If they like what they've been shown then they'll buy it. And if your presentation is powerful enough, they'll buy the product sometimes if they don't need it.

If your internet marketing business is in its early stages, you can create and use video blogging right in your own home. All you need is your web camera, a microphone, video software, and good lighting. Once you learn how to use your web camera, then you're well on your way toward creating a videoblog as you add video to a website.

You should make the effort to invest in a good web camera. A key consideration is its resolution. The higher the resolution, the better the output. Plan out your video presentation so that you can create the best one possible. Be creative; it could be a short story, or an overview of your products and services. Regardless of how you choose to present what you're selling, be sure to capture the best profile for each item.

You should also try not to skimp on the lighting. This is a very important aspect of video production and having video on a webpage. Be sure to illuminate the entire setting that will be included in your videoblog. The brighter the area, the crisper the images become. Another suggestion is to include lighting effects for added appeal to the presentation.

A good microphone will also be necessary for your video blogging efforts. If you would like to include sound in your videoblog. When incorporating audio, it's a good idea to record a voice over for the item(s) you wish to promote. The quality of the audio is just as important as the video on a videoblog. You might also want to include sound effects or a music bed in your audio production.

You shouldn't forget to pay good attention to the use of good video editing software. This is necessary to finalize your work. For instance, you can add sounds, remove bad angles, or insert some still photos. Some video software programs are extremely user-friendly and can be used even if you know nothing about video editing. Others may require a working knowledge of the subject. Select the software that will help you accomplish what you want to achieve.

Like any other technology, Video blogging does have a few drawbacks. For one, it may slow down the computer, so it's possible that some people will avoid it. Another concern for users is that the download time may be quite lengthy, especially in the case for the few that are not using broadband. And of course, there is the cost associated with greater bandwidth.

Although these are valid concerns, they shouldn't keep you from doing Video blogging. Consider it as an alternative method for your internet marketing. If you choose to use it, remember it is best to incorporate both text and pictures in your streaming video presentation in order to accommodate anyone who visits your site.

Author Resource: Stephen C Campbell (MBA, MSc, MCIM) is a business consultant who has conducted business throughout Europe, Far East & U.S. He specialises in helping businesses use the new technologies as a part of their business strategies.http://www.affordablewebsitevideo.com

How To Build Good Blogging Relationships?

2010-03-14T12:56:00.002+05:30

Everyone has a group of friends, relatives, and neighbors in real life that they connect with on a regular basis. Having personal relationships helps make a person successful. The same is true with a blogging network.

In the business of blogging, having a support group of other bloggers is essential to make money on the internet. Building these relationships will take time more than anything, but there are ways to build these relationships up to help your blog roll along smoothly.

Connecting with other bloggers is a great way to promote each other's blog and bring in more traffic to both your blog and your online blogging friend's web page. So, how do you establish relationships online?

Start your relationships with bloggers that have similar blog themes or ideas. They should have the same level of blog that you produce. You can push and push to get an A-lister to make a link to your blog but it most likely won't happen if they are a bigger web site than you are.

The first step is to take your time. You shouldn't jump the gun and ask to trade links, but take it a little slower. Leave a few comments on their page so that they become familiar with your name or title.

Another important key is to make yourself stand out among the other bloggers. You can use admiration and generosity when commenting, and you can even ask for a little advice on a particular topic. Asking a question is a great way to get them to respond to you and to help them get to know you better.

As you approach the blogger about swapping links you may need to point out that your blog themes are similar and that it would benefit both of you. Don't act like you just think it would be fun or exciting, let them know you are in it to help each other make a little more cash.

Another tip is to connect with your new blogging friend on other levels besides your similar blogs. Ask if they have any other networking sites they use, use as an instant messenger, twitter, or facebook. This way you can connect on a more personal level and have actual conversations instead of leaving comments back and forth.

Don't expect a friendship to develop overnight. There will be some online relationships that take off and work wonders and there will be others that have to be nourished time and time again in order to seal the deal.

Remember that you must choose your blogging friend relationships as seriously as you choose your real friends. Posting too many links on your page will only show them that you will accept anyone and anywhere just to get your name out there.

Always be honest and professional when working with other online friends and they will learn to trust you. The same works both ways. You don't have to feel obligated to trade links with a blog much smaller than yours or an online blogger that doesn't treat you with respect.

Author Resource: Court is an expert on how to make money on the internet and also provides internet marketing tips.

A Simple Guide To Blogging For Bucks

2010-03-13T13:17:00.000+05:30

If you're looking to make money online, but have little in the way of a marketing budget, then a free an easy way promote your website is to create a good blog.

Easy to set up, simple to use, a well managed blog should essentially be filled with quality, frequently updated, content that allows readers to learn more about your product or business. More than that it should be engaging enough to make readers want to come back and read it again.

"Pinging" your blog nearly every time your blog is updated is crucial. "Pinging" is basically a way of informing search engines and blog directories of new content on your blog. And this is great because search engines love new content and you can expect better locations in search results if you do update your site on a regular basis. JZNT5F58TGFW

That said, don't over do it. Blog directories and resources look unfavourably on over-pinging, especially if you ping small or trivial updates or changes to your blog.

Content on your blog can include podcasts, video casts and photography, but essentially it is the quality of your text that counts. In traffic terms this may be translated into the "authority factor".

This term implies that you are aiming to establish a readership and subsequently a series of backlinks to your quality posts. You do so by providing unique content that distinguishes your blog from others. In other words you are seeking to establish yourself, or brand yourself, as the person to turn to for advice on the product you're selling.

Not only can this be achieved by presenting, in own voice, accurate information on your subject of choice, it can be done by making your posts rich in keywords particular to your subject of choice.

If, for instance, someone is doing a search on an affiliate program, and your blog is specific to that, then you need to be aware of what keywords and keyword phrases people are going to be typing in their searches, and use these throughout your blog postings.

This way you optimize your blog for higher ranking in the search engines.

That said, it's important to remember that "content is king". The more content you have the better off you are going to be. Keywords are important but they need to be interspersed judisciously through relevant, thought-provoking content.

So, the key things to remember:

Be active; update your site on a regular basis.

Make it yours; stand out from the crowd. Show that you are a real person and not just a parrot. Engage your readership with your own voice, opinions and experiences. Readers value honesty and can see through strong arm selling techniques.

Relevancy; remember to use keywords wisely. Note that as search engine spiders become increasingly sophisticated, you are less and less likely to pull in traffic through keywords alone - remember at all times that "content is king!"

Build upon the main theme(s) of your blog; don't try to cover every aspect of what you are selling in your blog postings. Seperate the various aspects or subjects of your theme into managable chunks that naturally link; this in turn will aid the likelyhood of revisits to your site.

Ping your blog; improve your blogs visibility and increase traffic by alerting search engine spiders that your blog is alive. Frequently updated blogs, frequently pinged, increase your chance of making a profit online(provided you have quality content, remember!).

Conclusion. Achieving blogging success is an ongoing process, but simple enough so long as you work at it on a consistent basis. In time your aim should be to develop a name for yourself and an image that will stick in peoples minds, thus increasing your earning potential and reputation. Dilgency and honesty are key.

With practice your skill and creativity will develop and consequently the content of your blog will generate more targeted traffic,leading to sales.

Once there, well, the power of blogging is plain to the eye. Happy blogging.

Author Resource: Robbie Pringle is a member of the Tim Rohrer's TC Marketing Group, for more information on how to utilize the enormous potential of the internet

Affiliate Marketing Tips: How to choose right products from clickbank?

2010-03-13T10:18:00.002+05:30

I joined clickbank about a couple of years ago. To start with my performance was dismal. First few months went without even a single sell and as a result money. But as time went on I started earning some money. I read some blogs and ebooks to learn some affiliate marketing tips.As I started gaining some experience the things got easier for me.

First thing in affiliate marketing is choosing a right product that you can sell through your blogs and personal pages. First and foremost , the product should be one which is of your reader's interest. For example, if you write about "skin care" then your product should be related to this. Apart from this, there are other tips and techniques to choose right products.This is what I am going to tell you in this post.

Before you start, you should know the meaning of certain terminologies used in clickbank marketplace.This is important because this helps in choosing products. You will not be able to use the stats provided by clickbank unless you know the meaning of terminologies and how to analyze them.Here is a brief definition of some important terminologies.

$Sales - $sales is the amount that an affiliate will get for each sale. For example, if you sell a product with $sales $20 then $ sales will be 20.

%Sales -This is somewhat related to $ sales. % sales means the share that an affiliate will get once a product is sold through him. For example, a product with price $100 and % sales 40% mean that affiliates will be paid $40 for each sale made through them.

%Refd - This is the percentage of sales of the product coming from affiliate sales.

Grav - This stands for "gravity" of the product, or a measure of how many affiliate are promoting it.

Having understood these basic terminologies of clickbank, let us now jump off to find some great products to sell.here are some of the points to take note of.

The main criterion in choosing a right clickbank affiliate marketing products is the conversion rate. Conversion rate means how many visitor out of 100 buy the product. For example, if 2 out of every 200 visitors to a sales page buy the product being sold there, then you have a 2% conversion rate.You should choose a product with high conversion rates to earn some income from it.

But a good question that arises here is,how do you find out what the conversion rate is?Take a look at following paragraphs where I have solved this problem for you.

1) Look at the product "Gravity". -
Every clickbank affiliate marketing product listed in the market place is marked by a "gravity" number, which is displayed at the far right, under the product title. This number represents how well the clickbank product is converting for affiliate, as it is a measure of how many sales have been referred by other clickbank affiliates. The higher the gravity number, the better the product is converting.

Shoot for gravity roughly between 50 to 100. This is one of the important clickbank affiliate marketing tips, anything lower than 50 or so probably isn't popular enough to sell well and anything that is higher than 100 is probably so popular that the market is already saturated.

2) Look at the %referred. -
If in a case you see that 84% of sales for this clickbank affiliate marketing product have been referred by affiliates then It means that major of sales for this product has been referred by affiliates but not the owner themselves.This is a good sign.

3) Look for additional factors that favor sales-
How good is the merchants sales copy? This is important for clickbank affiliate marketing the product as the sales pages are meant to SELL. You need to make sure it will attract attention of a buyer.Pick a good clickbank affiliate marketing product from the marketplace which is highly likely to sell well for you, assuming its a great fit for your target market niche.

4) Look at the $sales-
In general more $ sales means more money per sale. You should choose a product that gives you more money per sale. This is particularly true if you are advertising your sales pages to get more buyers of the product.

These are some of the tips to choose right products for you to sell.
But sells are not made entirely because of right product choice. Choosing a right product is of course important but more important is the way you promote and sell that product. I will come up with some additional tips to make your affiliate marketing campaign successful in some of the next posts. You can subscribe or return to my blog to catch those points.
Best of luck and see you again !!!!

10 steps to gigantic blog traffic

2010-03-12T10:08:00.000+05:30

Do you need more traffic to your blog? This article will give you practical steps that you can take today in order to increase your blog's readership.

Post quality, original content to your blog.

Creating original well-researched content will set your blog apart from the pack. If people look at your blog and see poor quality content, they will leave your blog and probably never come back. People are drawn to great content and unique personalities. They like blogs that are written conversationally. Write like you are writing to a friend you really want to help. Include personal life stories and testimonies. This will help people feel connected to you and add uniqueness to your blog.

Help your readers solve their problems.

Many people come to the Internet to solve their problems. If you answer their questions with simple step by step instructions, they will appreciate your help and re-visit your site for more useful information in the future. You can also use this strategy to promote affiliate programs. Show them how they can use the particular service or product that you are promoting with simple steps and solve their problems.

Write for your visitors and not for the search engines.

When people write just for the search engines they tend to include search terms that don't flow with the stream of thought of the post. If what you write doesn't make sense to your visitors they will leave. You still want to optimize your posts for the search engines, just don't overdo it.

Post regularly and on a schedule.

This will cause the search engine spiders to visit your site regularly. It will also cause your readers to visit you regularly, because they know that at certain times they will be able to get fresh content from your blog. They will come to depend on it. It might be a good idea to include your posting schedule on your blog. People like consistency. If you have long lapses in posting, this will cause people to stop visiting your site. You want people to know that they can count on you for high quality, fresh, original content.

Write for a niche within a niche.

For example, Internet marketing is the main niche and ezine creation is the niche within a niche. People are looking for high quality content on a certain niche. If you can provide great information about a niche, your visitors will know where to come for the next great post. Give your readers a great reason to come back.

Optimize your blog for the search engines.

Make sure your blog posts are search engine friendly. Configure your blog to display the title of the post in the URL. You can do this in the control panel of your blog software. Another strategy is to put your main keyword in the domain name of your site. It is also a good idea to put your keywords and keyword phrases into the titles of your posts. Do keyword research before each post, so you know what are good terms to include in your post title. Then, take the time to write incredible posts. This will cause other blogs and websites to link to your blog. When you get links from related sites to your blog, your blog post will receive priority in the search engines and cause your post to appear at the top of the search engine listings.

Re-write your posts and submit them to article directories.

Use your posts to write articles that are 300 - 1000 words long and submit these to the top article directories on the Internet. Each article contains an author box. In the author box you will be able to promote your blog. Make sure to include a link back to your website. You can also use article submission services to blast out your articles to tons of publishers that will reprint your articles. Once again it is important that you write high quality articles or they won't take the time to publish them. There are a variety of companies that will do this. Take the time to research and find out which ones will best meet your needs. You could also contact websites that are within your niche and ask them if they would like fresh content for their sites in exchange for a link back to yours. If the article is well-written and useful then they will probably say yes. You could also write exclusive articles for these sites in exchange for a link back to your site.

Post on forums within your niche.

Do a search for "forums" + "your niche keyword" in order to find forums that relate to your niche. Take the time to review the forum rules and get to know the main contributors to the forum. Remember, a forum is a community of people and you are going to engage in this community. Get to know who is who. A lot of forums allow you to have a signature line attached to each post that you make. In the signature you will be able to put a link to your blog. You also might want to include a link to your RSS feed. Sign up for an account and start posting. Make sure that each post is informative and contributes to the forum. People will pick up on this right away. They will know that you are an authentic contributor. Just posting your ads to forums will tarnish your reputation, unless the forum allows it. When someone reads your post and clicks on your link, you will get traffic to your blog.

Design a useable, eye appealing blog.

It is a worthwhile investment to host your own blog rather than using free blog hosting. It would also be a good investment to take the time to create a visually appealing blog. There are many designers who can design a custom blog for you. You also want to make sure that it is easy to navigate your blog. Don't over clutter your blog with widgets and advertising. Do some research on blog usability and apply what you are learning to your blog. The time and money that you invest in a useable and eye appealing blog will result in traffic.

Get one way links to your site.

Submit your blog to all the blog and RSS directories. If you don't have time to submit to all these sites, there are services you can pay to submit your site. You can also get one way links by doing a search for "Add link" "(your target market key word)" and submitting your link to those directories. One of the best ways to get one way links is to write amazing content. This will cause other blogs and websites to link to your blog. High quality posts are known as "link bait." Once you create a great post be sure and social bookmark it to all the main directories. It takes a lot of time to write quality content, but a good "link bait" piece can cause your traffic to explode.

Author Resource:-Join Jeff Newman's Ezine and receive "Create A Website Traffic Explosion in 10 Days" and a collection of other special reports, by sending an email to mailto:ib411@aweber.com. Visit http://www.internetbusiness411.com For a membership to all of Jeff's content

5 Ways To Drive Targeted Traffic To Your Blog

2010-03-09T18:11:00.001+05:30

So you want to build traffic to your blog? Okay, well there are a million posts on the web that will tell you the standard ways of driving traffic to your blog. I want to give you a few new traffic building ideas, ones that you probably haven't thought of yet. The following five techniques are good techniques to generate "targeted" traffic to your blog. This is traffic that comes to your blog already interested in your blog's niche ahead of time. This form of traffic converts at a MUCH higher rate than all-purpose traffic.

1. Groups

There are numerous assorted websites out there where folks meet in one location in order to share knowledge on a specific topic. Just to specify a few for you: Google Groups, Facebook Groups, Flickr Groups, and MySpace Groups. Locate one related to your topic, then sign up and use the visability to build traffic to your blog.

Question and Answer Sites

Sites like Yahoo Answers, Answers, Wiki Answers, and Expert Exchange provide an opportunity for laser targeted traffic. When you go to the site, you can find pages that answer a question directly related to your blog topic. If you had a blog related to adoption, then you could answer questions from people like, "What are the requirements for adoption?" Once you answer the question, you could place a link to your blog. What could be more targeted than that?

File Sharing Websites and Torrent Sites

Torrent sites are full with surfers that are exchanging files with each other all over the world. One awesome thought is to write an eBook on your blog's topic, and then upload it to the torrent sites. Make certain you give it a memorable title like, "10 Ways To Resolve Problem X" Once you get people to read your eBook, you have their attention. It is only natural for them to go to your website if they like your eBook. This method can build some major viral traffic to your blog if you use it creatively.

Video Sharing Sites

With the advent of the internet, large amounts of visitors sign-on to web sites such as YouTube every single day to view videos about all kinds of things. This is a traffic pond that you simply cannot walk away from. Make a video on your blog's subject, and then upload it. You can utilize Windows Movie Maker if you do not wish to spend any cash. At the end of the video, ask your viewers to go to your blog for more info. If you are great on film, and have a lot of character, you can actually go viral and get thousands of viewers. Whether you use comedy or unique abilities, if you can get visitors to watch you then you can draw people to your blog from there. Start a video tutorial series and place the first one on the video sites, then inform the viewer the others can be found at your blog. Simple tactics like this can really raise your traffic numbers.

Topical Newsgroups

Various people have forgotten about newsgroups. Make sure you do not. Newsgroups are another way to produce laser targeted traffic to your blog. It doesn't matter what the topic is, there is bound to be a newsgroup on the web that is dedicated to it. If you own Windows, then your Outlook Express program, which comes free of charge with Windows ordinarily, has a newsgroup poster that you can use to post to and read from newsgroups. You just have to input your ISP's newsgroup server info, and you're all set to go. Do not spam the newsgroups, they are extremely intolerant of it, but as long as you post useful posts, then you will see some traffic in return.

So there you go, five new ideas that should get your creative juices flowing. When it comes to blog traffic, there always seems to be some new idea floating around that you can examine. Join some blogging forums to keep yourself up to date on the latest blog inventions. Remember, the most profitable bloggers are the most active ones. Blogging is not a "one-day a week" business. Stop posting for a week or two, and you will discover this real quick.

About the Author:
The best way to drive traffic to your blog, and ultimately generate blog income, is to have a system, or blueprint in place that you can follow. I found the best blog money making system ever about 2 years ago, and nearly tripled my monthly income using it. If you are interested in doing the same, click here and I will tell you how.

7 Tips To Run Affiliate Program In Personal Blog

2010-03-08T10:06:00.000+05:30

How exactly do you run the affiliate program? There are many ways.

But the simple, at least there are two ways to run the affiliate program.

The first, with arbitration techniques. For example, suppose you want to promote the product of Nintendo Wii from Amazon.com affiliate program. With arbitration technique, what you do is take advantage of pay per click ads campaign (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing / YSM, or Microsoft adCenter / MSN) on the Nintendo Wii with Amazon.com using your affiliate link.

Every time your campaign ads are clicked, the search of information about the Nintendo Wii will be brought to the landing page of the Nintendo Wii Amazon.com product details. Every time a purchase transaction through your Adwords ads put it, you get a commission from Amazon.com.

The advantages of this way, you do not need to maintain or write new articles every day. The downside (if I may say so), you must have an initial capital to start doing PPC campaign and have enough knowledge about the affiliate arbitrage strategies.

The second way, by using blogs or personal sites that you already have or make an online shopping mall. In other words, you use the media blog (either in the form of posts, sidebar spot or banner) to promote the affiliate products you are taking. Every time a purchase transaction with an affiliate product links on your blog, you get a commission from Amazon.com.

The advantages of this way, you do not need an initial capital to invest in PPC programs. Itâ€™s just with your own personal blog. The downside, you must have and write in your blog regularly.

Because of my limitations, this article will not discuss the first way that is quite advanced and sophisticated level. This article will only discuss tips to run affiliate programs by the media using blogs or personal sites that you currently have.

7 Tips Affiliate Programs Starting With Personal Blog

1.    Focus On Your Blog Visitor Needs.
What to look for your blog visitors? What information can you give to your blog visitors? Often we are so tempted to promote products that labeled as Best Seller or Hot Deals from our affiliate program follow regardless of whether your blog visitors need these products or not. As a result, not the buyer, your blog visitors even bored with the sales pitch pages you create. Try to meet the needs of the visitors first. If your personal blog contains more about the flower arranging tips, do not push yourself to promote the Nintendo Wii to your blog visitors.

2.    Select a Product and the Best Affiliate Program.
After determining what products are in accordance with the needs of visitors to your blog, the next step is to select the products and the best affiliate programs you can promote. There are thousands of products you can promote through affiliate programs that you can follow. I personally followed some affiliate programs (Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, ClickBank and Linkshare), but I feel more comfortable promoting Amazon products rather than other products of the other three programs. Perhaps because the Amazon branding is established relatively easy to make it acceptable. Or maybe because I still have a lot to learn about the three other affiliate programs. Choose the product and the best affiliate programs you think that you feel comfortable to promote it.

3.    Your Personal Experience Is The Best Recommendations.
One of the advantages of the personal blog is a personal nature. Owner relations with personal blog visitors are often like the relationship between friends. By utilizing the nature of this personal relationship, itâ€™s easier for you to promote affiliate products to visitors of your blog. Especially if you have purchased or use affiliate products that you want to promote on your blog. Ken Evoy, founder of CTPM Pilar, calls it pre-selling advantages. When you have a close relationship and a warm, honest, serve and demonstrate proficiency in the areas that you control your blog visitors, it will be much easier for you to do the selling without having to impress as sell something.

4.    Text Link is Much Better Than Banner Link.
Install affiliate banner link is much easier, but its effectiveness is much smaller than using a text link in your blog post section. Concretely, try to enter text link affiliate products that you follow in the article. Of course the topic must be according to the article that you want the product to promote. I personally tend to use text links to promote Amazon Associates product that I follow. And the result is different than just installing Amazon Associates banner links.

5.    Be Honest To Your Blog Visitor.
Promoting affiliate products on your personal blog is not something unlawful. However, there is no harm in also to be honest with your visitors by telling that you want to paste the link in your article that are posting an affiliate link. Put a (Ref) or (Aff) if you use a link that will bring visitors to your blog affiliate program to the landing page that you are taking. Why should you be honest? First, your integrity. Because of the nature of a personal blog, your blog visitors will be more appreciative if you are honest with them. Second, appreciate the time of your visitors. If they want to know more, they click on the affiliate products link on your blog even if you had marked (Ref) or (Aff).

6.    Giving More Options To The Visitors of Your Blog.
That cliche but true: Do not put all your eggs in one basket.Try to diversify your revenue streams from online business. Do not be fixated on one program alone. If possible, combine it with other affiliate programs or even with other programs in online businesses. However, it remains important to note that your personal blog is not too much crammed by various programs. Imagine if in every post youâ€™ve pasted the article 10 of the affiliate links for 10 different programs. Your blog visitors will be disgusted and run away from your blog.

7.    Promote.
The key is: do not be too quick to stop promoting affiliate products that you follow even if the value of earnings that you get was little or even none at all. Try to keep writing and paste the link (of course once again relevant to the topic of your writing) affiliate programs on your blog. Over time, it is not impossible if your affiliate products links are sought after one month, two months or even a year after you write it on your blog. If you have post pages indexed search engines, it is not impossible people will find your blog, click on your affiliate link and make a purchase. So, just wait. Do not despair.

Perhaps the seven simple tips above could be the beginning to start running affiliate programs on your personal blog. How do you think? Do you have any personal tips that proved to give positive results for affiliate programs that you run? Or it does not work?

Anthony M. Robbin is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of Bandung, Indonesia. To learn more about increasing blog popularity of your site and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques simply visit:http://indonesia-malaysia.com/

Your Guide For Blog Marketing, How To Use Blogs To Make Money Online

2010-03-07T09:46:00.004+05:30

Blogs also known as web logs are the latest thing on the internet. With there being so many blogs out there in cyber world, how do you make yours known and get people to read it. How do you have the most often read blog on the market that you are promoting? Because there are so many people that are trying to all accomplish the same thing, how are you going to stand out?

There are several things that you can do to make your blog marketing a success, and we are going to cover some of them right here.

The first thing that you should know is that you should have your blog URL pointing to your market. For example, if you are trying to promote and sell sunglasses from your blog, you want your URL to say sunglasses.YourBlogWebsite.com. Doing so will give you an extra advantage.

The next step would be to customize your blog. Rather than having the same old blog interface like everyone else has, make your unique and interesting to look at. This will also help anyone from getting your blog confused with others that look just like it. There are so many types of blog software on the market that having your own look should not be that difficult to accomplish.

Keyword research is another very important part of blog marketing. If you are not using the keywords that people search on, then chances are no one is going to find your blog. Have a variety of keywords in your blog as well. Not just the same one over and over. Not everyone just uses the term 'sunglasses' when they are searching for shades to keep the sun out of their eyes. Keyword research is an important factor to remember.

Using SEO on your blog, which stands for search engine optimization is a great idea as well. SEO will help get your blog out there and read, and will also help you get a better ranking with Google. Being as high as you can be in the Google search engine results is something that you want.

Find other sites and blogs that are in the same market as yours, but not in direct competition with you to exchange links with. This will help you out a lot as well, especially if you can get some good exchanges with high authority sites. The higher the page rank of your link exchange, the better for your blog.

Many people do not realize this, but having a different title tag in the HTML code on each page makes a big difference. If you have given the first page on your blog the title of 'sunglasses', you need to be sure that none of your other pages are named this. Doing so will make Google think that you are spamming that keyword, and that will result in them punishing your blog URL.

Once you have done your keyword research, you will want to write content based on the research you have done. Using one or two keywords, make entries into your blog using the keywords will make it easy for your blog to be indexed under those terms. That will also result in people searching on those particular terms able to find your blog.

Pinging your blog frequently is another good way to get your blog seen. Every time that you update it, use the ping tools to ping it. This will let all of the blog directories know that you have added something new to your blog. This also brings you in some more traffic.

Blog marketing is pretty much the same as website marketing. However, if you have never had a website, and are not familiar with marketing these great tips will help you get started. Be sure that you put new entries into your blog on a regular basis as well. This will help keep you up to date and current and also will keep your readers coming back for more.

Dassana Jayalath is the editor of InternetBizIQ newsletter. Visit http://www.internetbiziq.com/turbo-membership.html to get more information on Turbo Membership internet business opportunity.

How to Make Affiliate Money- Basic Principles You Need To Know

2010-03-07T09:28:00.000+05:30

Having problems trying to make affiliate marketing work for you? Has the promised affiliate money not shown up in your bank account? Many new online businesses promoting affiliate products fail miserable. They fail because they do not lay the proper foundation needed to make money with affiliate marketing.

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, simply getting a website and then placing affiliate products onto your website is not going to make you an affiliate money millionaire.

Regardless of how you plan to promote your affiliate marketing business you need to lay a good foundation for your business. There are certain principles that make up a successful affiliate marketing business. You must learn what is important to your business and website in order to make money with your affiliate products.

I have listed some of the most basic principles that have been used by the elite affiliates for a long time. Employing these principles can help propel your affiliate program to the top.

Basic Principles to Make Affiliate Money:

1. Content is Number One - Your site content must be your number one priority. Without good, original content no one will be interested in your site or the affiliate products you promote. Give your visitors great, keyword related content and they will reward you. Keep you content up to date and use categories like, "most recent", "most popular", "most read" or other similar categories to highlight your content.

2. Know Your Visitors - Your visitors have come to your site as a result of keywords or phrases. You must meet those needs with your content and your affiliate products. Elite affiliates get to know their visitors. Make very sure your affiliate products provide a solution to your visitor's needs.

3. Promote Quality - Promote only quality products. Do not let the allure of affiliate money cloud you judgment. Buy the product, use the product and then promote the product only if it solves your visitor's needs. If you promote products that do not solve the problem you may make some quick affiliate money but you will not be trusted in the future by your visitors.

4. Be Open - Disclose your affiliation with your product. You can build you reader base if you are honest and fully disclose your relationship. Let you visitors know that you found and used a product that you believe can help them. If they know you purchased the product they will feel more comfortable about buying the product through your link.

5. Build Trust - Being trustworthy in the eyes of your visitors can result in more sales and more affiliate money for your business. List the benefits of your product, but also list any short comings of the product. If you lose their trust then you lose their value to your website and your ability to make affiliate money for your business.

6. Free Information - People love free stuff. Offer your visitors free information. Your success as an affiliate marketer can be enhanced by these free items. Offer free reports or free products when they purchase through your link. Do not necessarily tie the purchase of your product to receiving a free report. You can offer a free report or product if they opt-in to your mailing list.

7. Targeted Keywords - Always use highly targeted keywords and phrases for your affiliate products. The same is true for your ads. Don't pay for clicks on a keyword that does not directly relate to you products.

8. Linking Cloaking - Always cloak your affiliate link. There are some unethical affiliates who will change your linking code to their own in order to get credit for your sale.

9. Have a Plan - Develop a marketing plan. Set specific and measurable goals for you affiliate marketing business. How much do you want to earn? What is your timetable? How much do you have to invest? It you don't have a plan it will be like driving to a location in a car and not having any idea how to get there.

10. Determination - Rome was not built in a day and neither will you become an elite affiliate in a day. Stick with you goals, work at them each day and be patient about your success.

11. Testing - Test different affiliate programs. Test different affiliate products. If one product is not producing the results you want then try another quality product. Test different ads, different keywords and or make minor changes to you product page.

12. Improve Your Skills - Never stop improving your affiliate marketing skills. Work on better keyword research, ad writing, pre-sell pages and page layout. Develop better writing skills for your content or product review pages. Work to become a better affiliate marketer and set your goals to make affiliate marketing money a reality in your life.

By: Les Ross
Marketing an affiliate product is more than just picking a product and having a website. AffiliateResourcesCenter.com provides the resources you will need to build your online business and effectively market your affiliate products. Get started today at www.affiliateresourcescenter.com.

5 ways to blog better and earn more money online

2010-03-06T09:25:00.000+05:30

As you may already know, blogging can be quite effective in improving your ranking on search engines, driving traffic to your website or blog and increasing your revenue. Sadly, many people do not fully realize the benefits, which they can get gain from blogging.
This article will show you tips that you can utilize to make your blogging more effective, drive that traffic to your website and increase your sales.

1. Blog on a regular basis!

This is very important and can determine how successful you will be in driving traffic to your website through blogging. You must blog at least once per day. Serious internet marketers who earn six figure incomes online blog several times per day. You must consistently add new, useful and informative content on your blog so that you can keep readers coming back for more.
This can potentially make your internet business blog rank high on search engines, which will increase traffic to your website. The more you blog, the more you improve your visibility and ranking. You can write your blog posts, save them, and then just make sure that you publish them on your blog everyday.

2. Invite people with websites and blogs that are related to exchange links with you.

Links to websites with high PR on your blog will help you when Google index and rank your page. The more high PR sites that are linked to you through your blog, the more chances of you getting high PR for your website and blog.

3. Monetize your blog and increase the chances of you earning money from your blog.

You can make money from your internet home business blog through affiliate programs. What you need to do is to simply place affiliate products' names in your blog posts and hyperlink them to direct readers to the product. Every time someone clicks on the link and purchases a product, you make money! You can use your blog to advertise your own products and as well as affiliate products.

4. You must know all your keywords and use them in your blog posts.

The secret to successful blogging is making sure that all your blog posts are rich with your keywords. Don't just write blog posts without including your keywords. Keyword-rich blog posts will increase your site's ranking for your online business niche or topic keywords.

5. Seriously consider video blogging!

It is the new wave in the blogging world and can increase your exposure much more than only a text based blog can do.
Use the 5 ways outlined above to increase your online profits. Start blogging for more profits today!
To you success and happiness.

Nick J
P.S. To learn why you should really consider video blogging visit http://vidblogging.blogspot.com/

How to Set Up a Blog for Launch?

2010-03-05T09:44:00.000+05:30

If you know how to set up a blog for launch correctly you can generate a lot of momentum in the early stages of your site. It is common for many when creating a blog to inadvertently overlook a few 'minor' steps that could slow their progress. The blog building process normally takes a bit of time before progress can be seen. By preparing your site and yourself properly BEFORE launch however you can expect to see progress sooner rather than later.

If you are blogging to make money it is a sure bet that you will be motivated to see progress as soon as possible since money tends to strengthen our motivation. With that said here is a simple 9 step process to use when creating a blog you want to establish as quickly as possible.

Establish Your Niche

The first order of business is to select a market or niche that your blog will focus on. Now you want to be sure that the niche you select has some sort of following. Now if you are blogging to make money you need to also be sure that these people spend money or else you will be wasting time and effort.

Establish Your Hosting and Domain Name

In the earliest stages of creating a blog you will need to select both a hosting service and a domain name. The name you choose should have one of your main keywords in it which will make it more relevant in terms of search engine rank.

Choose Your Theme

Select a theme for your blog that is appropriate for your niche and your intentions. Generally if you are blogging to make money you will want a more professional looking theme however your target audience also needs to be considered. Selecting a 'playful' theme or one with a lot of color may be a better fit for your purposes.

Prepare 20 Posts

To get a quick start and build momentum early on you will want to prepare about 20 HIGH QUALITY posts BEFORE you launch your blog. By doing so you will have plenty of content that you can post to the site to stir up an interest while also giving you time to produce more posts. Continual posting is a large part of the blog building process.

Determine How to Capture Names

If you are blogging to make money you will want to set up some way to capture names of the visitors to your site. You can position an opt-in box on the blog itself or you can channel traffic to a location off your site. This is your choice but if you place a box on the blog make it easy to find but NOT dominating in size.

Establish Twitter Account

If you have a Twitter account great and if not go sign up for one since this is a great way to increase the exposure of your blog. Twitter has an app called twitterfeed that allows you to 'tweet' every new entry you post to your blog. With the large membership base Twitter has and the automation of this app you can not beat its effectiveness and ease of use.

Get Comfortable Writing

Oh yeah, while you are busy during the launch of your blog you MUST continue to create content to post to your site. The more content you post the more traffic you will receive therefore if you want to attract lots of readers you will need to give them plenty to read. The blog building process takes time but if you stick with it you will be rewarded especially if you are blogging to make money.

Use Social Networking

Get involved with other social networking sites to helps increase the exposure of your blog. Blogging takes a lot of time if it is done right so choose a few social network sites you are comfortable and start making some friends and spreading the word.

Build Backlinks

Go out into your niche and visit other blogs that are relevant to yours. Check out the posts and comments and participate in any discussions. When making any 'meaningful' contributions to these discussions you will find people notice and 'follow' you back to your site. If your comments are beneficial to others the blog owner will also notice and visit your blog to see what it is all about. If they like what they see they will link to your site creating a backlink that helps boost your search engine ranking.

Knowing how to set up a blog correctly can save you a lot of time after launch in establishing yourself in your chosen niche. The blog building process will take some time no matter what you do but a strong launch can capture you a lot of momentum. This momentum is especially important if you are blogging to make money since who does not want to profit as soon as possible. The 9 steps reviewed here today will help you generate and capture momentum immediately upon launch to establish your blog as quickly as possible. Of course the final destination of your blog will ultimately be influenced by the level of your commitment and efforts after launch and throughout the life of your blog.

TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.
To learn more about how to set up a blog and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques simply visit:http://blogbrawn.com/

How to choose Hosting Company for your blog?

2010-03-04T13:20:00.001+05:30

One cool thing you can do before your blog concept pages go live on the World Wide Web is taking first your time shopping on the internet the type of hosting company you want to host your online business with. Don't rush my dear reader because the web hosting company will determine your online success.
There are many web hosting companies each with differentiated qualities. I agree that doing comparison regarding their quality is not an easy task, but please do take your time to choose the best one that best suits your blog requirements.

What is Hosting Company?

Your hosting company is a company that stores your blog pages and makes it visible to anyone browsing it on the internet. Usually it has got computers that stores pages and information. The computers must stay connected to the internet throughout otherwise the surfers won't access websites.

A fee is paid to these companies for renting their computer space and also for using their bandwidth which they have to pay also. The bandwidth allows the transfer of data from one computer to another over the World Wide Web. Large bandwidth allows large amount of data to be transferred unlike smaller bandwidths.
Before choosing your web hosting company, you should inquire the pricing of different types of packages they are offering so that you don't end up paying more than you ought to.

Factors to consider when choosing your quality web hosting Company:

1. Disk space-

Project your online blog space requirement for the current period and for the future one. Remember that as your online blog grows, it will require more disc space in your web hosting computer. So, be clear about the space required and inquire if your web hosting is able to support your present and future requirements too.

2. Bandwidth-

The type of bandwidth will be a major factor to consider when selecting a web hosting company. Select the company that will be able to handle many requests of your website data by surfers on the World Wide Web. This will ensure the success of your online business as it is able to handle many requests from surfers. Don't trust any web hosting company advertising that it is offering unlimited bandwidth. It is also paying for this bandwidth too so, there is no way it can offer it for free.

3. Web hosting technical support-

Select a company that will offer you technical support at any time when a need arises. Inquire how long they take to respond to calls when their clients require help.

4. Security of your online data and resources availability-

Does this company offers security through SSL [Secure Socket Layer]? If not, then it means that your client's credit card information will not be secure from hackers. If you are planning to have an online store or any other online business, then MySQL is a necessity. MySQL is a database that you will use in your many programs which will be running in your online business.

5. Reputation of company and how it treats its clients-

Also Inquire for how long this company has been in the business. Read the reviews about this company and know how they treat their clients

Remember that what you pay for is what you get regarding the disk space and the bandwidth. The greater the disk space and bandwidth you require, the greater the price you will be compelled to pay.

There is much to learn about affiliates, J. Nyamache lets you know how to go about affiliate.

What is blogging voice and how to find one?

2009-02-07T23:59:00.006+05:30

Do an exercise before reading this post.Go to your favorite blog and read out some of the posts there. Carefully take note of the words the blogger has written. Every written word in the post makes some sound in your mind. You will feel the angry words when the blogger is angry due to some event.You can feel the heated discussion when blogger is involving himself in one and you will feel the gratitude when blogger is thanking someone. The words by itself has no tone but it still reflects the feelings by making some sound in your mind. This is the voice of the blogger whose post you are reading.

So,What is blogging voice?

It is false belief that the written materials can't express the subjective traits like mood, tone and feelings which is well expressed while speaking and talking.Written material can well express all these traits only that you have to find your voice and use words in such a way that it expresses your mood, tone and way of speaking.

Take an example, whenever you write a letter thanking your friend or family, your letter and words in it well expresses your gratitude.The reader can feel how you are feeling.Similarly, when you write a condolence letter to someone you don't sound like you are happy.Your words itself express that you are sad on someone's demise.

This is the voice and we inject it unknowingly in our writing in day to day life.Good bloggers also inject this voice in their posts. Blogging voice is just expression of blogger's feelings and opinions in his own special way through his blog and posts.It is a method by which you take your personality into your posts just by being original you.

Why I need my own blogging voice?

Most of the bloggers are not able to take their voice onto their blogs. Every blogger wants to write nice posts and for this he starts copying voice and style of someone else usually another blogger who is established in his niche.

Bloggging is all about projecting a person's views, thoughts and feelings in his own special way. If you start copying someone the originality is lost and whole purpose of starting a blog is defeated. That is why you should have your own blogging voice.

Furthermore , even with the best efforts you can't copy a person perfectly. Your own voice will keep on popping up in between. So, what you produce will be a mixture of two voices- one yours and the other of the person you are copying. Your readers can sense this disparity in voices the moment they start reading your post. So, instead of copying someone you should allow your own voice to come out.Let you readers find your personality by reading your posts. Let them feel your feelings and subjective traits like tone and way of speaking.

With this much said, I would now like to give you some advices to help you find you blogging voice and inject it into your posts.

How can you find your own blogging voice?

Finding your blogging voice is easy said than done. Take a note of following points and keep these points in mind next time you sit to write your post. Keep in mind though, your voice will not start coming out in a matter of day or two. It will take some time. But with time you will find your voice. With this said, let us jump off to the points that you should follow to find your own blogging voice.

1) Write and write more-

Good writing skills require a great deal of practice. Furthermore, writing with a voice requires even more practice. More you write ,more you inch towards your blogging voice.
Indulge yourself in daily writing sessions. Write about any subject and don't care about the grammatical mistakes or anything else while writing practice sessions. Furthermore, you don't have to spend hours writing. A few minutes of writing session on daily basis would suffice.

2) Read more-

To be a good writer you have to be a good reader first. Consume as many articles as you can. Just like daily writing sessions, make habit of daily reading sessions.Read out the opinions of others ,tear things apart and then reach to your own conclusion.

3) Know who you are?-

Different people have different senses in day to day life. Many of you might have a comical sense while others might be philosophical and still others might be analytical.A person with comical sense will throw a joke or two while explaining things.Similarly, persons with philosophical or analytical senses have their own way of presenting things. Try to know what kinda guy you are? Whether you are comical or philosophical or analytical or critic or anything else.
It is easier to take your voice onto your blog once you know what kinda guy you are.

4)Know your audience-

You talk differently with different people.For example, you talk in a different way with a boy and differently with girls or in a different way with an old man and differently with a child.Just see how your way of talking varies with different sets of people.
Same principle can be applied to blogging as well. Just know ,whom you are writing for? Whether you are writing for boys or for girls, for old people or for young men and women. Try to write with your target audience in mind. Write in a way you would have talked to your target audience.

5) Don't write to impress anyone-

Although making impression is not bad thing to do but doing it on cost of your blogging voice is bad.
Blogging is not about impressing anyone, it is about presenting your own opinion and perspective in your own special way.
It is not uncommon to lose your voice while trying to impress others with you piece of writing.So, let the words and sentences come out naturally. Don't stress upon your writing in order to make impression.

6) Express your opinion-

Blogging makes no sense when you don't have a opinion or, when you have a opinion but you don't express it on your blog. Internet is a democratic world and your opinion here matters.People come to your blog to know what you think and not what other people think.
Once you start expressing others ,you lose your voice and lose it fast.

Is there anything to add?

I know everyone has there own way to find his/her voice. I would love to know yours through comment section of this post.

How to beat blogger's block?

2009-01-29T21:41:00.010+05:30

Image by: re birf
Imagine a situation. You are about to write your next post on your blog. You prepare yourself and place yourself in front of your computer.And suddenly you experience a total mind block. You have no idea what and how to write. You try hard to write something only to make situation worse. You start banging your head on the wall but this doesn't help as well. You have no clue what has gone wrong with you and how to combat it. And then after sometime (usually after 2-3 days) everything becomes fine.

Have you experienced such thing while blogging? Well, I am sure you have. This is called blogger's block and is a normal thing and happens to every blogger including the top tier bloggers.

I was going through the same shit for last few days. I spent hours in front of screen and produced nothing. I am writing this post to help anyone who experiences or has experienced blogger's block while blogging.Although a lot has been said on the subject on many blogs but I want to add fresh perspectives to it.

What causes blogger's block?

Blogger's block can be compared to a similar situation occurring in writers called writer's block.The causes of these two similar phenomena are also same.
According to wikipedia the most common cause of writer's block is stress, anxiety or fear. Here are the lines I have quoted from wikipedia-

Writer's block can be closely related to depression and anxiety, two mood disorders that reflect environmentally caused or spontaneous changes in the brain's frontal lobe.
Source

Apart from stress , partial or no research on the topic , monotonous life styles and loss of motivation may also lead to blogger's block. Other less important cause is blogging in a niche that is not of your interest.( I say it less important because most of the bloggers blog in their area of interest)

I am telling you all these things because it is necessary to identify the cause in order to beat the blogger's block phenomenon. With this said, let us now head over to the steps to follow to beat this.

How to beat blogger's block?

The things you do while going through this phenomenon can either make things better or worsen it. For example, getting panicked in this situation can worsen it.So ,it is necessary to face it in tactical way to get rid of it at soonest possible. Here are some of the tips that you can follow to beat the blogger's block phenomenon.

Don't panic just relax-

As I have said earlier,stress and fear are the triggering events of blogger's block. More fear and stress will make the situation last longer. Relax yourself. Do the things you love to do. Play your favorite game or watch TV and movies or go out for a walk or eat your favorite dishes in your favorite restaurant. Just do what you love to do. This will dispel your fear and relieve the stressed situation to some extent.

Change environment-

I live in a flat located in the heart of my hospital campus. So, there is much din and bustle going on near me everytime. Although I am accustomed to it but sometimes I am not able to concentrate in this surrounding. This is the time when I go out in a peaceful environment with my laptop.
Your surroundings has direct impingement on your brain's activity.Changing your environment has a positive impact on your mind. This freshens your mind and you can concentrate better in the new surroundings.

Change your writing schedule-

Mind works at different pace at different times in a day .Normally, brain slows down after long day's work and it works most efficiently when you have just woke up in the morning. You should select a time that tunes up well with your brain's activity. For example, I work most efficiently during night when everything around me has calmed down and my mind works well in this environment. Most others feel energized in morning when they are fresh like morning petals.

Just think when your mind is fresh and you feel like you are energized from within. This is the time when you should start writing your posts.

Prepare yourself beforehand-

Blogger's block is like Tsunami, you never know when it appears before you. It is nice to plan your future posts beforehand. So that, you have ample ideas to work on with even when you are going through blogger's block kinda thing.

Always take a pen and a notebook with you ,so that, you are able to note down every idea that comes to your mind. It is easy to lose future post ideas just because you were not able to note it when it came.I have lost many ideas by not doing this.

Now just start looking into your notebook when you experience blogger's block. The ideas noted down in your notebook can help you break loose of mind block. This can help you craft a post even when you are going through blogger's block.

Engage youself in free writing-

Free writing is a writing technique in which a person impulsively write whatever comes to his mind for set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar or topic.A brief period of free writing helps fight blogger's block and helps the brain to tone up. Free writing can be regarded as an exercise of mind.

Schedule a time for free writing session on a daily basis. You don't have to do it for hours, a 15-20 minutes session of free writing is enough. Apart from beating blogger's block it also helps in preventing it and sharpening your writing skills.

Read your favorite blogs and visit different forums of your niche-

If writer's block comes from a lack of new ideas, attempts to spark creativity by visiting your favorite blogs and different forums of your niche can be useful.The posts on blogs and forums can trigger new idea formation. This has happened to me time and again.Many of the ideas on this blog has emanated while reading other blogs or feeds in google reader or forums.

Ideas need a triggering event to come through. Of course ,sometimes they may come spontaneously but most of the times they are result of some event like, going through a post on a blog or a thread in a forum.

Throw negative thoughts out of your mind-

Blogger's block also occur due to too many negative thoughts hovering in your mind.If this is the case with you ,you have to get rid of them as soon as possible.I know getting rid of negative thoughts is easy said than done. But some of the things that you can do to throw out negative thoughts are-

Focus on the good things that has occured to you. Has a reader appreciated your work or did you get many votes on some of your posts in social media sites?Just remember those moments and soon you will start thinking in positive way.

Read the top posts you have written. What are the posts that got maximum coments or managed to get extra votes on social media sites? Read out your own posts loudly and soon you may start feeling flow of positive energy in yourself.

Research if you already have an idea-

Sometimes blogger's block doesn't occur because of lack of ideas but because of failure to expand upon the existing ideas to make up a post. This usually points lack of research.In this case you have to do a thorough research to beat the blogger's block. Google the topic ,read relevant articles and visit different forums and sites to make an in depth research.

Organise the points once you are finished researching.Many a times you are not able to write just because you are not able plot your post. Organising your points can help you to beat the blogger's block in this case.

Chat with other bloggers in your niche-

A nice and productive chat with other bloggers can trigger your idea engine to get some ideas. Recently I had a nice chat with one of my friends (who is also a blogger but doesn't blogs in my niche). We were discussing the cases where bloggers were sued.It sparked of an idea and I finished writing the post- "How to blog without getting sued?"

So, getting involved in a chat does help in beating the blogger's block. Apart from triggering your idea engine it also helps in relaxing your mind.

Is there anything to add?

Everyone has different tactics to get rid of blogger' block. Things I discussed above are the ones that I practice. I know many of you can add some more tactics to beat blogger's block. You are most welcome to discuss it if you have one. It is highly appreciated.

How to blog without getting sued?

2009-01-21T23:28:00.006+05:30

Internet used to be the playground of a few handful of people a few years ago. But now everyone has their say, thanks to blogs and social media sites. Social media sites in general and blogs in particular has transformed internet into a democratic media. The 'freedom of speech' that everybody talks about can now be seen on virtual world of internet as well.

Although this advancement has been quite exceptional but the so called 'freedom of speech' has also created situations where bloggers got sued because of it (mostly due to misuse of it). The fine line between being critical and being defamatory is obscure and has added to the plight of bloggers. As a result, the cases of bloggers getting sued has been on rise since last couple of years.

For past few weeks I have been studying some of the cases where bloggers were sued and came to a conclusion that in most of the cases a blogger can avoid the trauma of getting into the courtroom by following some simple steps. This is what I am going to talk off in today's post.

Take care of following points while blogging to avoid getting sued-

1) Don't write defamatory posts-
While as a human being every blogger has right to criticise a person or a company ,criticism based on false facts is something you should refrain from doing. Furthermore, if you are criticising someone and some company time and again on your blog, you are inviting a problem.

In 2007, a blogger named Joe Albero was sued because he made fun of Salisbury police chief time and again in his blog ,Salisbury news blog. Police chief, Allen Webster sued him because he repeatedly made fun of him sometimes calling him "Chief Jack and coke". (Source)

Take another example, in July 2008, one of the blogger from Malaysia, Raja Petra was sued by two army officials when he declared the officials to be involved in murder of Mongolian Altantuya Shaariibuu.The blogger made this statement without backing his statement with citations and proofs from reliable sources and did it repeatedly on his blog. He was charged RM 1 million in damages. (source)

In both these cases bloggers were sued because they criticised someone and the statements were based on either false facts or without citations and proofs from reliable sources.Furthermore, they did it repeatedly on their blog.

So, to not get litigated for defamation you need to-

Criticise someone only when you have solid backings in the form of solid citations, quotes or proofs from authority sources.

Refrain from criticising someone repeatedly on your blog.

Refrain from making false statements on your blog.

Don't infringe copyright policies-
While researching the topic last week, I found copyright infringement to be second most common cause of getting sued.

The hottest example of this would be perezhilton.com. The author was sued by a Los Angeles based photo agency company, X17 Inc. for illegally using some of the photographs on the blog. The company charged the blog author, Mario Lavandeira with accusations of using 51 images without permission , payment or credit. (Source)

Another example, Britney spears' label record sued a Los Angeles based popular gossip blogger for illegally posting tracks from her album even before it was released. The company demanded unspecified damages plus legal cost for this copyright infringement. (Source)

The lessons to take from these two cases are-

Read the copyright policies before using any rich media on your blog.

Don't indulge yourself in plagiarism.

Take permission of copyright holder before using something in your blog.

Don't disclose other people's secret-
While it is OK to break news of your niche, it is not good to disclose secrets of either an individual's personal life or a company's policies or product secrets.

There was a case when the computer giant company, Apple charged an owner of blog to divulge secrets of the products even before the products were officially launched. Although the company and blogger agreed upon a settlement after 2 years but the mental trauma that the blogger would have suffered during these two years can be imagined. ( Source)

Although divulging someone's secret can give you overnight popularity but it would be nice to not indulge in such things to avoid future problems.

Take a close look at the comments appearing on your blog-
Once the famous blogger, Aaron Wall of SeoBook.com was sued for the comments that appeared in his blog. One of the Las Vegas based company, trafficpower.com charged Aaron Wall because some of the comments submitted by readers were defamatory for the company.

Some visitors to Mr. Wall's blog had posted comments complaining about what they said were unprofessional business practices by Traffic-Power.com, while others said they didn't think the tools sold by Traffic-Power.com were effective in boosting search-engine rankings.
Source

As a blog owner you are responsible for the things that appear on your blog (including comments). So, to avoid getting sued for comments appearing on your blog you should-

Moderate all the comments that are inappropriate or possibly defamatory and harsh.

Disallow anonymous comments on your blog.

Make a comment policy for your blog stating the types of comment that are allowed or not allowed on your blog.

Don't write anti-government posts if your government forbids it-
There has been cases where bloggers were sued and tried for writing anti-government posts. While it is allowed to criticise government policies in most of the countries, it can't be said for all countries of the world. If writing against government policies is not allowed in your country , you should not write about it to avoid getting into a problem.Please make a note that the freedom of speech I talked about earlier is not followed in all countries of the world.

Although there has been situations when bloggers has been sued for quite absurd and obscure reasons but by following the points I discussed above you can avoid running into a problem in most circumstances.

Basic SEO tips for blogging beginners

2009-01-16T09:21:00.002+05:30

SEO is quite a favorite topic between internet marketers and bloggers alike and many websites are in place focusing only on SEO. So, it won't be possible to discuss it all in one post. In this post, I will deal about very basic of SEO. I will not dive into advanced things and craft this post with a newbie in mind.

With this said, let us now jump off to know some basic SEO.

What is SEO and how a blogger can benefit from it?
Although this might not be a difficult question to answer for many of you but let me answer this for someone who has just joined the internet world and has no idea about it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In its simplest form it is the things you do on your site and off it to get high search engine rankings. Search engines rank websites by taking certain factors into account. SEO is just knowing those factors and applying that knowledge to attain a high search engine rankings.

Now let us take the other part of the question. How SEO can benefit a blogger?
Well, the success of a blog depends upon the traffic it gets.You are a successful blogger if you are getting more hits on your blog.Furthermore, search engines are one of the best sources of traffic. So, by attaining a high search engine ranking you can assure you find readers to your blog.

So How can I optimize my blog for search engines?

As I have said earlier, search engine optimization is a vast topic to deal with in one post. But in most of the cases a basic knowledge of SEO is just enough to get high rankings.Here are some of the points that you should know to make your blog more search engine friendly.

Do a solid keyword research- Keywords are the words or phrases that are used by people to make searches. A keyword used time and again to make searches and with less website using it in their pages is better. Now, to find such a keyword you have to do a keyword research.Here is the link of the post where I have discussed keyword research in some detail. Choose three keywords for your post ,one primary and other two secondary.

Use your keyword in title ,sub-title and uniformly in the content- Titles are the part that get most attention by the search engines. So, it would always be good idea to use your primary keyword in title.Furthermore, use your secondary keywords in subtitles and all of them through out the content.

Make use of html tags- Search engines take a close look at the things written in bold, italic or in heading. So, make use of bold and italic Html tags to emphasize your important points. Just make sure your important lines contain your keywords.

Add fresh content regularly- Search engines in general and Google in particular love fresh added content. A site/blog with regularly updated posts get some preference by search engines.So, write more content and add pages to your blog regularly.

Make navigation easy- Search engines (and also humans) love easily navigable sites. Make sure you have interlinked your related posts with each other. Navigation makes crawling easy and also that your pages are crawled properly. Other things you can do is, list your top and popular posts from your sidebar.Details in the post-"Organic search engine optimization part-3- internal linking".

Don't use java and flash overly- Unllike humans search engines are blind to javascripts and flash. So, keep use of javascripts and flash to bare minimum.Furthermore, java and flash cause delay in page loading this will cause improper crawling of your blog and is also irritating for most visitors.

Build links for your website- A link from other website is seen as a vote to your page by search engines. More votes to your blog mean you have worth content and deserve a high high search engine ranking.Furthermore, a vote (link) from an authority site has more weightage than a link from 'C' grade site.Links increase Pagerank of your blog which is one of the metric used by Google to rank websites. For details read the post- "Pagerank Explained." Read the post " 10 powerful ways to build links" for details of link building.

Use keywords in the anchor text- Anchor texts are the words used to link a page from another one.Having your keyword in your anchor text is seen as search engines as the page being relevant for that keyword. So, instead of using 'click here' or 'here' use your keywords as anchor text.

I think this much is the basics of the search engine optimization every blogger should know. I would like to say here that often there is temptation to write with your keywords and search engines in centre of your mind. My word of advice here would be to write content for humans and use your keywords in a way that it does't interferes with the user experience.

How to get traffic to your blog through Stumble Upon [Video post]

2009-01-15T09:53:00.002+05:30

One of the challenges , most of the bloggers face is, getting traffic to a new blog (sometimes even old blog if you are not doing things right). You try hard and hard writing useful content , do some SEO and comment in forums and other blogs.

Still you wonder why the traffic is not coming .Here is the solution.One of the easiest way to get traffic to blog is through Stumble Upon. The traffic from StumbleUpon is quick and unlike other social media sites you don't require a lot of votes to get visitors.

You just submit your blog or blog posts and manage to get some votes and see visitors coming to your blog. Another good thing with stumbleUpon is traffic is sustained.This means you will get traffic as long as people keep on giving thumbs up to your posts.

The video below shows how you can generate traffic to your blog through stumbleUpon. This is somewhat long video (9:54 minutes) but is worth watching.Hope you would enjoy watching this one.

The video was prepared by MakeMoneyOnline and was taken from Youtube.The video was originally prepared for Web2Marketer.com.

Getting started with Stumble Upon [Video post]

2009-01-11T09:13:00.001+05:30

I am posting two videos here in this post for someone who is a beginner and joined the internet world just a few days ago. These first videos shows how you sign up and submit a page to stumble upon and the other one shows how you use the Stumble Upon toolbar.

But before you watch these videos let me give you some basic ideas about Stumble Upon.

Stumble Upon is a social bookmarking site and a way to randomly discover and surf col websites on the net.The site has a virtual community behind it who discover ,vote and review the pages and based upon votings and reviews the websites are presented to an user.

So how as a blogger you will be benefitted from stumble upon. You can benefit by three ways-

Discover cool websites- For being a blogger you have to be a learner first. You will get immense learning opportunity here by discovering some websites or pages having ocean of knowledge on almost all topics.
Network with others- Success as a blogger depends upon your networking capabilities with both your readers and other bloggers in your niche.Stumble Upon provides you with excellent opportunity to network with like minded people.
Traffic building opportunity- Stumble Upon can be used to get instant traffic to your blog.One of the best features of this social media site is it gives quick and good results in terms of traffic.You can get hundreds of visitors even if you manage to get only 2-3 votes from your friends or other members of the community.(this is a clue)

Now just watch these videos to get started with stumble upon.

Video by Mauibob33 and taken via YouTube.This video was originally prepared for RecognizedExpert.com

The video below shows how to use the Stumble Upon toolbar.This is 2.43 minutes video and worth watching if you are a beginner. The video was prepared by casttv and was taken from YouTube.

How your Tweets and Twitter followers are correlated? [Case Study]

2009-01-07T03:32:00.002+05:30

It has been a week since I became active on Twitter and I have devoted this time in learning the etiquette of this social media site. This also allowed me some time to observe some correlation between the tweets and followers you get subsequent to those tweets.

First let me give you some stats of my Twitter usage during the week. At the time of writing this post , I had made 170 updates (tweets) ,I have 57 people following me and I am following 32 people. I got 12 @ replies and sent 17 . I got 4 DMs (direct messages) and sent out 4 to others.These numbers are not great but since I have been there only for a week and mostly as bystander, so, these numbers are all expected.

During these one week I noticed some specific type of tweets getting me more followers than others. Furthermore, this has been a repetitive phenomenon ,meaning this phenomenon has been reproducible time and again. This led me to think that there certainly is some correlation between tweets and follower number.

With that said, I would now move on to the things I have observed.
The first surge in the followers number came in when I tweeted a famous humorous quote by Albert Einstein.Here is the screenshot of the tweet I am talking about.

I got 10 followers within an hour of posting the quote. I wondered ,if that was due to the quote I just posted. I was not sure of it. So, I posted another humorous quote to check if it was the earlier quote that caused the surge.Here is the screenshot of that another tweet.

This one got me 8 followers about half an hour after it was posted.

So,I was wondering what caused these two tweets to get some followers? Well, I am not sure. But my obvious guess is , these tweets were humorous in nature and humorous things are quite popular in social media. I guess, the followers picked this up from public timeline and followed me because they found those tweets entertaining.

Now take a look at the screenshots of these two tweets that were posted hours after the earlier ones.

These two tweets were made at an interval of an hour between them.The "blogging news" tweet was earlier to go.With this one I got 7 followers within half an hour. Another thing that I noted with this one was most of the followers were bloggers and most said they were passionate about blogging in their profiles.

Now I think you are correlating it well. By using the word "blogging news" , I got followers who were bloggers. My explanation for this one is- these followers made twitter search using the term "blogging" or "blogging news" and saw my tweet there, got interested and followed me afterwards( I am not sure of my explanation though).

Now take the case of "twitter news" tweet (screenshot above). This one caused the steepest spike in followers count. It got me 17 followers just after it was posted.(May be because it involved three celebrities- "Obama" ,"Britney Spears" and "Twitter". Furthermore, it was about a news that was red hot when it was posted.

I posted another newsy material to test this hypothesis further. This time I tweeted this news-

Although in terms of numbers it didn't bring me more followers ( I got 4 subscribers after this one) but I noted an interesting thing here. This time 3 out of those 4 followers were interested in Search engines and SEO (the news I tweeted was about google). I think you are getting the correlation right.

Conclusion-
The number of Tweeter followers increases when you tweet about something that is popular in social media. In my case it was humour and breaking news. Furthermore , you get targeted followers if you just tweet about the topic you are interested in. In my case I got bloggers as followers when I tweeted about blogging news and Search engine marketers when I tweeted about Google.

P.S.- These datas are based on my usage for past one week only. This certainly is not reliable and it has to be supported by further datas. I will keep you updated on how it goes. In the meantime, I would like to get some feedback from you about your experiences with twitter and some correlation between your tweets and followers if you have seen it happen.

8 reasons why a blogger should be on Twitter?

2009-01-04T21:45:00.007+05:30

Image by: Mykl Roventin
I came to know about Twitter last year in March through some of the posts on Problogger. But for some strange reasons those 140 characters appeared less to me and I decided not to tweet. I can tell you, I was such a dumb ass to make such a decision and deserved to be kicked on my backside.
Anyways ,it is better to be late than never.

Twitter has shown tremendous growth last year and tweeting phenomena has taken over every other social media site. I have become a part of Twitter community only recently and I have discovered some areas where Twitter can be beneficial from a blogger's perspective. This is what I am going to deal in here today.( I have also posted a video at the end of the post on the topic and hope you would enoy watching this.)

OK, then, let's discover the 8 reasons why a blogger should be on Twitter?

Networking opportunity-

In some ways blogging is like running a business. Just like businesses make relations with their customers and prospects ,a blogger has to interact with his readers. Twitter can be used as a platform to communicate with your readers and also with other fellow bloggers in your niche.

You can have a nice chit chat with others or answer reader's questions or even ask questions to others. Tremendous !! I mean ,you can do miracles with those 140 characters in terms of building relationship.

Updating your readers-

You can make use of Twitter to update your readers. You can share your latest posts with them by twitting the link. Or you can share a link of a nice article you just found while surfing or you can share the breaking news with your fellow tweeterers.
Just see, how easily you can update your readers about the latest happenings in your niche.Isn't this fantastic?

Learning opportunities-

I have found some great articles when someone else tweeted about it and I feel ,I couldn't have found those articles Googling.
So, you can also get some learning opportunities through Twitter.Afterall a blogger has to learn before he delivers.

Posting ideas for future-

A nice chit chat can transform into an idea for your future post. Although this hasn't happened to me yet but I have heard some bloggers talking about getting ideas from a tweet or communication they had on the Twitter.

Making new friends-

Just like any other social media site, you can make friends on twitter from areas which are out of your reach. You can track other people's conversations and befriend someone who is involved in useful and interesting conversation.

Finding new reader-

Although I am using twitter for last few days only, but Twitter has provided me with some visitors.The numbers are understandably not great right now but I expect some more visitors to my blog once I become more involved.

Traffic from twitter is usually achieved by tweeting about one of your posts. You can also request your friends to tweet about your posts (not every one only those which are interesting).You never know when some of your post goes viral this way.So, twitter can also be beneficial in increaseing hits on your blog.

Tracking conversations about your blog-

You can track the conversations involving your blog.You can know what people are saying about your blog and this can be a nice feedback to improve your blog.
This is done by making use of the twitter search.Type in your blog's url or title and see what people are saying about your blog. Easiest way to get feedback from a community, isnt it?

Networking on the move-

Imagine ,you are in a restaurant eating delicious recipes and something interesting happens around you.Now, if you are on any social media other than twitter you have to rush to your computer or nearest cafe to share the event. But with twitter you can share the incident instantly using your mobile phone.
From a bloggers perspective, you don't lose contact with your readers even when you are on a holiday or in a train or plane.

Here is one of the videos that effectively answers the question - 'why you should use Twitter?'. I find this video extremely beneficial and interesting. The video has been prepared by jeffBT and was taken from youtube. Jeff is a young entrepreneur and runs the site besttechie.net. Hope you would enjoy and learn from this video.

How to drive traffic to a very new blog?

2009-01-02T12:48:00.010+05:30

image by- Juhansonin
I started my first blog back in 2006 about two and half years ago from now.The blog was about 'Tourist places in India".This was followed by two other blogs, one on 'Medical studies' and another one on 'Hill-stations in India". Although I have abandoned these blogs now but I learnt a lot from them.Particularly the first one.One thing that was common to all these three blogs was there were no visitors until a few months of starting these blogs.

While running those blogs I learnt a lot about driving traffic to new blog and this is what I am going to discuss in this post.I have learnt these tips from my earlier experiences as well as by taking a look at activities of other bloggers in the blogosphere.

Indeed, it is quite a difficult task to drive traffic to a new blog.You don't get anything from search engines as a new blog is never ranked higher or may be not even indexed. You might not get direct traffic and links from other blogs as word about a new blog is never out until a few weeks (or even months) has elapsed since starting it.

Timing of promotion of a new blog is important-

Timing of starting blog promotion is very important. In my opinion you should not jump off to a promotion campaign until you have published 20-25 pillar posts .By being early in promotion you might disappoint the visitors if they find just 1 or 2 meaningful posts on your blog.
So, my advice here would be to accumulate some quality content and then get your hands into the promotion.

Having said this, I would now set off quickly to actual tips.

Tip #-1- Announce your new blog from an existing blog-

According to one of the surveys conducted by Technorati, vast majority of bloggers write on more than one blogs. So, I will presume that most of you already have a blog.You can just capitalise on your existing blog to drive traffic to the newer one.

Take an example, Just about a few weeks ago Darren (the man behind Problogger) launched his new blog- TwiTip.com.And guess what, he announced his new blog from Problogger.net. Now, see the results.At the time of writing this post, Twitip.com has 3529 subscribers.This,I think, is enormous figure for a blog just about a few weeks old. You can yourself watch this tip in action.

Of course, majority of you don't have that much reader base as Darren but even 50- 100 visitors coming to your new blog matters.
Alternatively, you may also place a banner-link of your new blog on your older blog.

Tip #2- Be a guest blogger in an already established blog-

Recently I came across a very nice but relatively new blog- howtomakemyblog.com.This blog is written by a very nice guy Marko. The blog came to my knowledge because Marko featured as as a guest blogger at probloggr.net.

Here is that guest post I am talking about. According to Marko ,he got 287 visitors from that guest post and also 60 subscribers just after his post was published (source). Now, these figures might not sound like great but it is really great figure for a blog which is relatively new. At the time of writing this post Marko has more than 200 subscribers to his blog.

My conclusion on this is, a new blog requires an initial offshoot to take off in the blogosphere and I reckon guest posts to be the fastest and relatively easier way to provide that off shoot.

Tip #3- Start commenting on related and well established blogs-

Commenting is the easiest method to drive traffic to a blog. Although you won't get flood of visitors to your blog by commenting but by being a consistent comment maker you can gradually build traffic to your blog. Just take care of following points while commenting-

Comment on blogs with high readership

Be first to comment on a post.

Make your comments useful and unique

Make your comments eye catching by making use of bold and italic tags.

More details on comment making in this post- "How to master the art of comment making on other blogs?"

Tip #4- Make full use of social media-

Web 2.0 has already taken its full effect and it would be insane not to use social media sites in the era of web 2.0. One of the biggest reason why I am a fan of the social media sites is because they give instant results. You submit your pages to these sites and manage to get some votes and booom, you start seeing a lot of visitors coming to your pages.

Again I will take the example of Twitip.com. One of the reasons why twitip.com took off too quickly is because Darren made use of his strong profiles on social media sites to drive traffic to this blog. I have often seen Darren voting his posts on Stumble Upon. Furthermore, he always announces his new posts on Twitter. Here is the screenshot of one of the updates Darren made on Twitter-

Now, Darren has more than 25,000 followers on Twitter and announcing his new post updates to those thousands of followers means thousands of visitors to his blog.

Apart from Stumble upon and twitter many other social sites are there on internet and making use of these sites is an excellent way to generate some traffic to your blog. Also a blog needs to have an unique content to get viral in these sites but I have seen many average and some below average posts also getting some traffic from social media sites.

Tip #5- Advertise through Adwords-

Personally I don't prefer this method but many bloggers advertise their blogs during early days and once they accumulate some readers they pull off those ads. This can be an excellent way to drive traffic to anew blog but it is not free and might not be suited for many of us.

These are a few ways a new blog generates some traffic. Driving traffic to a new blog is pretty difficult undertaking but it can be achieved by keeping yourself motivated and trying hard. The initial times are hardest in a bloggers life and if you win this situation ,I am sure you can cruise along nicely later.

My blogging plans for 2009 (It can be your plan as well)

2008-12-29T22:39:00.006+05:30

Slowly and slowly we are heading towards the end of the year to welcome the new one.And while lazing in the sun and doing some preparation for new year ,today I thought seriously about the plans for the next year.

I have learnt a lot in 2008 and my next move in 2009 would be to capitalize on this knowledge to make my blog more worthy than before.I jotted down some of my mistakes ,experiences and some experiments that I havn't done yet or didn't get time to work out.

I spent about 4 hrs. thinking over the issue and came up with a big fat list of 56 things which I need to do in the coming year (the list will grow as the year passes on).Next, I spent about one extra hour to arrange the list according to priority.

Today in this post I would talk about my top 5 plans for 2009. I am not sure how many of you would be benefitted from my plannings but I think some of you might get some ideas from this post.

Here comes my top priority-

1) Regular and frequent posting-
This is in top of my agenda. My posting frequency and more importantly regularity has been dismal all the year round in 2008. I have always adviced everyone to be regular in posting but I myself has not acted on my own advice. I can tell you, this is real bad feeling.(I have no excuses to make though)

In 2009, I will be getting some relieving from work load off my shoulders and I am quite serious to act on my own advice. Still ,I will not be able to maintain the daily post frequency but yes, it will be around 3-4 posts a week.

2) More laser targeted but short posts-
In 2008, I have written pretty long posts. Most of my posts are of 1000 words or longer. This has also been a reason why my post frequency has been so poor in 2008. I never cared about the post length in 2008 but I am planning to get more serious over it.

While I will still write long pithy posts atleast once a week ,my focus in 2009 would be laser targeted short posts discussing one issue at a time. Don't worry though, the short posts still will be of great value.I will not compromise with the quality.

3) No monetization in 2009-
I will not monetize my blog in the coming year at least until August. I want to focus my attention in growing the blog next year.I don't want to dissipate my energy in monetization ,rather I am willing to apply my full energy in growing my blog.

I have some plans to grow my blog and those will take some time to work on. I will pore whole of my energy working on those plan. Money is still, no no for me !!

4) More twittering-
Twitter has been the biggest sensation in 2008. According to one of the stats most of the Twitter users (about 70%) registered in 2008 and about 5000-10,000 new users join it per day.

I am seeing Twitter as one of the places where I can find new readers for my blog as well as network with those who already are readers. I have registered an account in Twitter a few months back but I have never been active there.

Next year, I am planning to do some Twittering.I am checking out some tools and plugins to make Twittering more fun and productive.By the way, you can follow me on Twitter if you desire to get connected with me there.

5) A better blog design-
In offline world the first impression is created by your face or the way you dress yourself or the way you walk. But on the internet, you don't have a face to show . The design of your blog is what that creates the initial impression about you and your blog.

I have decided to revamp my blog design to make it more professional while retaining the simplicity. I hve already changed the template of my blog and I am working to give a tinge of professionalism in it.

These are my top priorities in the coming year. The list may grow in coming few days but for now this is it !!

70 top tips to generate blog traffic

2008-12-21T22:13:00.005+05:30

Image via WikipediaTraffic is the key to success of any blog and blogger. It is the measure of success of a blog. One of the greatest advices that I usually give to other bloggers is- "Be involved in building traffic first. Everything else come along with traffic."

No matter what your objectives as a blogger are, you have to think in terms of traffic and visitors. In today's post I will tell you 75 traffic generation techniques that I learned while blogging.Here is the list-

Do a solid keyword research before writing your posts.

Use your primary keyword in title

Use your secondary keywords in subtitles.

Use all your keywords throughout your content.

Build links for each of your posts with your keywords in anchor text.

Build some more links.

Write articles in other people's Ezines.

Write and submit articles in top article directories.

Build a very useful lens at Squidoo.com

Build a useful hub at hubpages.com

Submit your blog in top web directories like Dmoz and Yahoo directory.

Write useful and unique content.

Write some more.

Write list type posts.

Write about Obama.

Tag your posts.

Be first to mention an update or an interesting news.

Even better. Be first and best to write about an update or an interesting news.

Write controversial but well backed posts.

Run contests on your blog.

Request other bloggers to announce your contest.

Be active on StumbleUpon

Submit your own top posts to StumbleUpon

Exchange stumbles with other fellow stumblers

Submit your pages in Digg and Reddit

Start Twittering at Twitter.com

Twitter more.

Answer questions in Yahoo answers with a link back to your related posts.

Answer questions in Help.com with a link back to your related posts.

Answer questions in Wiki.answers.com with a link back to your related posts.

Repeat tip #28, 29 and 30 daily.

Leave some useful and unique comments on other blogs of your niche.

Make your comments attention grabbing stuff.

Make use of trackbacks.

Be a guest-poster in a bigger blog of your niche.

Do some more guest posting.

Network with other fellow bloggers.

Announce your new blogs from your existing related blog.

Exchange posts with like minded fellow bloggers.

Be active in well trafficked forums in your niche.

Leave your link in signature in forums.

Be helpful and ask questions in forum.

Write unique articles in forums.

Give a viral ebook for free with free give away rights.

Place a "tell a friend" script at the bottom of your posts.

Give away free ebooks to some one who uses "tell a friend" script.

Be active in google groups. Ask questions and answer questions.

Be active in Yahoo groups

Be active in MSN groups.

Make some useful microblogs and funnel traffic to your main blog from micro blogs.

Make friends at BlogCatalog.

Join some groups at BlogCatalog and be active there.

Make friends at Mybloglog.

Tell other bloggers about a top post or great post you have written.

Research and make free reports .

Distribute those reports for free and mail it to fellow bloggers.

Upload some interesting photographs in flickr with link back to your blog in description.

Make some interesting videos and upload them on Youtube.

Upload those videos to Google videos and Metacafe as well.

Ask your readers to bookmark your posts (No ask no gain.)

Make wordpress templates.

Make use of press releases to announce your blog or contests or anything else worth aqnnouncing.

Build lists using Aweber.

Giveaway free ebooks to those who subscribes to your newsletter.

Interview fellow top bloggers in your niche.

Create viral softwares and tool.

Take part in webinars.

Write post about what you learned in a webinar.

Make use of craiglist.

Network through Myspace.

Steps to write better posts on your blog?

2008-12-18T21:19:00.001+05:30

Image by: Dabawenya
Content is the soul of any blog. Without real unique and useful content a blog is a dead blog. This is why most of the successful bloggers stress upon an useful content which is of value to the readers. In this post I will talk about the things you should do to make your posts more admirable and worthy.

Writing content is not an easy task specially when you are burdened with loads of expectations from your readers. But this can be made easy by following the basic steps every expert writers talk off. The process of writing can be divided into three steps-

Pre-writing- Things you do before writing
Writing- Things you do during writing
Post-writing- Things you do after writing

These basic steps apply to all kinds of writing like, fiction writing, journal writing and even blog writing. Following these steps can make your posts better, well laid out and interesting for your readers. But don't expect things to happen in seconds or overnight because although these steps are essential ,practice also plays its part to make your writing better.So, if you just write more and more with these basic steps in mind you can make a good writer in yourself.

I hope you are getting what I mean to say. In very short, These basic steps plus a lot of practice makes your writing rise above the level of mediocrity. Furthermore, while I can tell a bit about these three steps I have listed above, practicing is something that is completely under your control. So, just take a look at these steps as I describe them below and start practicing. Let us start with the first step- Pre-writing.

Pre-writing-

Pre-writing is the thing you do before you start writing the post. This consists a variety of things like, choosing a topic, researching, outlining and researching the keywords. Pre-writing can be considered as the foundation of your post. Without this you may fail in your endeavour. Let us take look at the things you do before writing a post-

Find a topic or an idea to write about-

Every posts or any writing starts with an idea or topic. An unique idea or a well sought for topic is admired and others are just overlooked. So, try to choose a topic that people are looking for or if you have an unique idea in your mind just go on with it.

One of the finest way to do this is by taking a look into the forums and blogs in your niche. Just try to figure out what are the things people are asking for and choose it as your topic.

Research the topic-

Half cooked food is always bad to eat, isn't it? In a similar way , a post having incomplete facts and no solid backing is way too boring to read. As a blogger you should try to present quality content to your readers with solid facts and back it with solid citations and links. This is where, researching becomes so essential.

Read articles ,books and other blogs to have a clearer idea on the topic. Note down the points that you would like to mention in your article. Talk with experts and other bloggers to get an idea about their opinion on the topic. These are some of the ways you can research the topic. Researching is an ultra essential part of pre-writing and in any case it should not be omitted.

Outline your post-

Have you seen a painter painting or an artists making his art piece. Well ,I am sure most of you would have. Just take a close look next time a painter paints. A painting or an artwork starts with an outline. Even the masterpiece of Da Vinci, the Monalisa would have started with an outline.

The purpose of telling you all this is, a good article or a blogspot starts with an outline just like a good painting. The points or facts that you have collected while researching is obscure unless it is arranged in a meaningful way. This makes your article well laid out and easy to understand. But the question is, how an article is outlined?

Well, Just think of the sub-headings ,you would like to mention in your post. Once you have your sub-headings, list the points you would mention in each of these sub-headings. This is the staple element of outlining an article. Other advanced outlining methods include,picking out images and videos to be embedded in the post, the sentences to be cited or links to be given under each of these sub-headings.

Writing-

Writing means giving ideas the shape of words. For many of us it might be an easy thing to do but for most of us including me it is pretty tedious job. But if you just try and practice more you can become a better writer.

Now, for purpose of simplicity ,I would classify a post into two parts-

Title or headline of post

General body of the post

Both these parts has some importance. Title helps grab the attention of visitors while the rest of the post is for holding that attention.
I have already written detailed post on both of these parts and would suggest you to go through these posts if you are interested. Here are the links-
How to write articles on blog- Part-5 (Writing Title)
How to write articles on blog- Part-6 (Writing Content)

Post-writing -

Post-writing is largely concerned with proof reading and editing. No film is complete without editing- cutting some scenes and adding others. Similarly, apost has to be edited before being published. Read your post time and again before publishing. Look out for any grammatical and spelling mistakes you have committed and correct them.

Apart from mistakes also look for words and sentences that are useless or otherwise not in good shape. If you are not satisfied with your own writing, chances are there that your readers won't be either. So, cut the useless sentences and add some colorful ones to make your post more appealing. I have details about proof reading a post in the post- "How to write article on blogs?- Part-7 (proof reaing)"

Once again I would like to mention, these steps are just to help you learn blog-writing and are not an alternative to practice. Remember the the phrase that you have heard so many times during your lifetime- "Practice makes a man perfect."

How to choose domain name of your blog?

2008-12-03T21:17:00.001+05:30

Image by: cogdogblog
So you have decided to start a blog and would like to have your own domain name but you are not sure how to do this? Your conventional wisdom says to keep your domain name short and memorable but you are unable to find one as all short ones are already in use and not available. Then things like SEO and keywords, personal branding come into play and you get totally confused. You are left in a total mesh and experiencing a total mind block. If this is what you are feeling now or has felt in the past then this post has been specially written for you.

Actually I have experienced the same sort of things when I decided to have my own domain name for this blog. The disarrayed situation led me to make many mistakes and ignorance also played its part to make the situation worse. I am writing this post to share the things that I experienced an year ago in a hope that you will learn from the mistakes I made. But before I go on , I would like to start the things from very basic.

What is a domain name?

Just like your letters need an address to reach your home or office ,your domain name is the address that tells where your blog /site would be found. For example, if you type in dr-sandy.net into address bar of your browser you will reach on my blog. So, dr-sandy.net is the domain name for my blog.

Why should you have your own domain name?

Most of the free and semi-free blogging platforms like blogger, wordpress.com ,livejournal and many others provide you with a name. But that is with their own extension and you don't own it. The domain name will look like this-
Myblog.blogprovider.com and in some cases
blogprovider.com/myblog

For example, a blog on blogger will have a blogspot extension, like, myblog.blogspot.com

Now this name can be used if you are blogging for fun and you are not willing to pay for domain name but if you are looking for a long haul with some other objectives other than fun then you should consider having your own domain name.

Your own domain name gives a sense of professionalism and also helps to build a buzz around you. Furthermore, you won't lose your readers and back links when you plan to move your blog from one platform to other.

This is why every serious blogger with long term objectives should get serious about having his own domain name.

How to choose a domain name of your blog?

Many factors has to be considered while choosing a domain name. Some of them are absolutely needed while most others are based on your personal preferences. Here I am providing you with a list of things to be considered while deciding a domain name for your blog.

A domain name should be short and easy to remember- You should think off a memorable domain name so that anyone can reach your blog by typing in your blog's domain name in the address bar. For example, if I would have registered a domain name like DoctorSandeepKumar.com then probably I would have lost many direct visitors.

A domain name should communicate straight way-This is where I made a mistake while choosing the domain name.A domain name should tell what a blog is about. For example, if somebody says DailyBlogTips.com then you straight way know the blog is about blog tips.

A Domain name should have your keywords incorporated- For past few years the internet has become pretty competitive as more and more bloggers have joined the blogging bandwagon. The scenario will become more and more worse in the near future. So, it would be a nice thing to have an edge over rest. Domain names with keywords in it do well in search engines. So, having them would always give you a competitive edge over others blogging in the same niche.

A domain should be brandable-More and more bloggers are getting serious over branding their blog and guess what, domain name helps a lot in branding a blog. Think about problogger or TechCrunch, they have built a brand around their blog names.
The other school of thought is to make a brand around blog authors name. A nice example would be Chrisg.com of Chris Garrett. Even this blog can be regarded as an example of this thought.

A domain name with numbers or hyphens-Personally ,I don't like numbers and hyphens in the domain name. But many a times you have to choose a domain name with hyphen or numbers because of non-availability of non-hyphenated and non-numbered versions of domain names. I bought a hyphenated domain name (dr-sandy.net) because of this reason.

A domain name should have preferably .com ,.net or .org extension-Personally I prefer a domain name with .com ,.net or .org extensions. There has been reports about these extensions working well in search engines although there haven't been any reports from experts on the issue. But it would be nice to play it safe by buying a domain name with above mentioned extensions.

You may think of getting a country specific extension if you are willing to target a certain geographical area. For example, if you think your audience will be from USA then you might think of a .us extension or for india it would be .in extension. It depends on your personal preference. Their are no hard and fast rules for this.

In my opinion you should spend some time to give a thought over the selection of domain name. A carefully selected domain name will always benefit you in some way. Furthermore, apart from some essential factors much of the decision of domain name selection depends on your personal preferences. I would love to know about your personal preferences as well as your own thoughts regarding choice of domain names through comment section.

Is Bounce Rate a ranking factor in Google?

2008-11-25T12:32:00.008+05:30

Image via WikipediaJust about a couple of days back SEOBlackhat has triggered a new debate. QuadsZilla the writer has noted some correlation between bounce rate and search engine ranking. He has presented some interesting images of his analytics stats that points bounce rate to be correlative with Google ranking. The debate has also been taken over to one of the articles in WebProNews here.

I wanted to take this topic on this blog as I think the discussion is still red and hot and I should post my own thoughts on the issue.

Although QuadsZilla has supported his views with some solid snapshots of his stats but still I feel bounce rate can't be a ranking factor. Furthermore, I don't see it as a strong and influential factor which can make a large difference to search engine rankings even if it happened to be a part of Google algo .I have many facts to support my point of view but before I go on with those facts it would be better to get some basic ideas about Bounce Rate.

What actually is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of vists in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.For example, if 3 persons out of 10 visited just single page (the landing page) of your site then your Bounce rate would be 30%.

A high bounce rate means most of the visits generated a single pageview. A lower bounce rate would mean most of the visitors are visiting more than one pages on your site.

Can Bounce Rate be a ranking factor?

At first instance it may seem like bounce rate can be a factor for search engine ranking. A high bounce rate mean that you don't have a stuff users were looking for. That is why they left your blog without visiting other pages of your blog.

Take a look at the way Google has defined Bounce rate in their help page of Analytics-

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.
Source

So, from above sentences it is clear that google relates bounce rate with the relevancy and quality of the webpage and relevancy as such is a ranking factor in google.They may have included bounce rate based on this hypothesis. But still there are reasons why bounce rate can't ba an effective metric to rank websites.

Not all webmasters use google analytics. Although there are many other ways to collect data about visitors activity (like GToolbar, Firefox and Chrome) this information covers no more than 50% of the sites.

Many of the top blogs get much of their traffic from social media sites. Furthermore, social media site users are very notorious groups because they are not interested in your blog as a whole but just one post which has been bookmarked or shared.They would visit the shared item and then move on to other website.So, most of the blogs getting traffic from social sites will have a high bounce rates and lower ranking if i believe this hypothesis).

On a blog many people find the site with a search for specific information. Typically they read the article they found, then move on to the next search result. Usually people are looking specifically for the info they land on. They don't usually start reading all sorts of other posts on the site. Penalizing for this sort of traffic does not make sense.

Blogs usually have high bounce rate which is easily explained, by the fact that loyal users come to the blog (usually coming from RSS reader), read the newest article and leave.

Based on above mentioned reasoning ,I don't see Bounce Rate as a metric to rank websites.Remember, Google itself has to compete with other search engines like Yahoo and MSN and if they start including these absurd metrics in their algorithm, they know they will be on a loser side.

What is your opinion on the topic? I would love to hear your opinion on the topic.Do you think Bounce Rate can be a measure of site's quality and relevancy and can act as a factor for ranking?Or, are you of belief that this can't be included as ranking factor?
Over to you !!

Adsense Optimisation Tips from Adsense team

2008-11-22T19:44:00.001+05:30

For past few weeks people in the adsense team has been releasing some nice videos showing how a publisher can improve earnings by following some simple and basic Adsense optimisation tips. They released a series of three videos in three weeks. The first video showed how placing bigger ad units help increase the earnings. The second video was about blending the ads and how blending the ads increase your Adsense income. The third video and last video in the series showed some positioning techniques.

All those videos were nice to watch with some basic valuable message in them. Here is the first video that was released about 2 weeks ago.

I would also like to mention some of the sentences that they mentioned while releasing this first video.

Publishers often ask us what the best ad sizes are to include in their site's design, and we always point them to these three:
300x250 medium rectangle
728x90 leaderboard
160x600 skyscraper
These ad units have proven in the past to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you've receiving all ad types, you'll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they're interested in.
Source

The second video was released a week ago. Here is that second video.

Here is what Adsense team mentioned while releasing this video-

When you design your AdSense ads, keep these tips in mind:
Use colours that either blend with or complement your site's colours. Make the ads a part of your site.
Use lighter colours for borders, or no border at all.
Try rotating colours or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.
Save sets of frequently-used colours as a palette.
Source

The last video of this series was released about three days back and it contained some valuable information regarding positioning of the adsense ads. Here is the third video that Adsense team released.

I would like to mention some of the sentences that the adsense team had said on Official Adsense Blog while releasing this third video.

Great positions include:
Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)
At the end of an article
Aligned with content
But don't just take our word for it - every website is different. Make sure you use your judgment of how visitors interact with your pages to determine good ad placements.
Source

These videos have some great tips shown in them and are worth watching.
HAPPY EARNING !!

How to promote your blog through other blogs in your niche?

2008-11-19T21:21:00.008+05:30

Other blogs in the niche are excellent source to promote your own blog.This is usually done by commenting on other blogs discussing same topics as yours. I think you already have commented on a number of blogs in a hope to get some traffic to your own blog. But my question here is- Did you get the traffic you were eying at? Many of you might have answered it in an affirmative way. OK, you did got some visitors but did you get A LOT of visitors to your blog?

Not exactly, most of you would have got some 10 or 20 odd visitors to your blog a day (through other blogs ofcourse). And I think 10 -20 visitors a day is nowhere near to "a lot of visitors" I am talking about.What I would discuss here in this post is getting a lot of visitors to your blog from other blogs and not just 10-20 odd visitors.

First of all let me ask a question. Why does other blogs send such a less amount of traffic even when you do a lot of commenting on them?

The reason, as I see it, is one (or more) of the following three-

You didn't pick up right blogs to comment on

Your comments were not unique and useful

You didn't made your comment noticeable

Now I think you are getting some clearer idea on what you have to do to promote your blog through other blogs. What you have to do is-

Comment on blogs having high readership

Make your comments unique and useful

Make use of bold and italic tags to make your comments noticeable

Why should you focus upon blogs with high readership only?

I don't have enough time and always run out of time when it comes to posting on my blog and promoting it. This is not just my story but it is a story of majority of us. So, you should focus upon a blog that saves your time and energy. It is better to post one insightful comment in a top blog rather than commenting on hundreds of low quality blogs.

Of course, low quality blogs can send in some traffic but it is not worth your time and energy. If you are like me you should aspire more for little work and that can be done by commenting on a blog with high readership.

Just make a list of 20 - 30 blogs in your niche and be a regular commenter on those.

Why should you care about unique and useful comments?

Nobody cares about "great post" type of comments. When you have to attract some visitors to your blog, you have to be useful. Why should people care about you and your blog if you don't have anything exciting to offer? Useful and unique comments are the only way through which you can tell others that you have something great to offer.

An useful comment makes people inquisitive and if they become curious enough they might click your link to reach your blog.

Why should you make your comment noticeable?

Earlier in this post I have said , you should comment on a top blog to get better results. Now, a blog with high readership also gets more number of comments. Most of the bigger blogs get more than 100 comments on an average. Your comment should stand out of other 100 comments to get noticed. How can you get a visitor when they are not able to see your comment a t first place?

Furthermore, people tend to skip comments very often when there is higher number of those. If you are making your comments noticeable they might have a good look at it even when they were scrolling down carelessly. So, making your comments noticeable helps grab visitors attention.

A good question that might arise here is-

How can I make my comments noticeable?

Well most of blogs allow some basic html tags in the comment section , such as, bold and italic. Just make your important points bold or make the font-size bigger. This is one excellent way to make your comments an attention grabbing stuff.

One other way to do this is making a longer comments.This is based on my own behaviour on the net. I tend to read longer comments and skip one and two liner comments. On an average most of the comments are about 4-5 sentences long. If you can just post a comment having 10 or more sentences it might grab attention of people (like me).

I think these are the ways you can make your comment more productive and draw in more visitors to your blog. These are my own opinion and you may differ from me on the issue. If that is the case , I will be more than happy to take a note of your angle of perception on the topic.

How to choose niche of your blog ?

2008-11-19T21:14:00.019+05:30

Selection of a niche is the first step once you decide to start your own blog. Niche should be regarded as the foundation on which your blog would stand and grow. A stronger foundation in the form of well researched niche selection will make sure that your blog grows (or at least has potential to grow). on the contrary, a weaker selection of niche would mean that your blog would crumble due to one reason or other.

This is why an intensive research and at least a few session of brainstorming is essential when you start choosing the niche of your blog. A wrong selection of niche will mean no or little growth of your blog in the long run. Proper selection becomes more important when you have long term plans with your blog.

Before I go on with the points it would be nice to explain the meaning of 'niche' to someone who is new to the blogging thing or new to internet world.

What is niche?

Niche is a term that emanated from ecology.In ecology, a niche refers to the place or position occupied by an organism or a population within an ecological community called the ecosystem.

In internet world, niche refers to the specific areas or topics that the blog/site covers. Let us suppose you write (or plan to write) about Basketball in your blog then it becomes your niche.

Depending on the size the niche can be larger and less specific or smaller and more specific. Let us again take the example of Basketball. Your niche would be larger and less specific if you discuss everything about Basketball in your blog. On the other hand, it would be smaller and more specific if you just cover one smaller topic about Basketball like, 'Great players of Basketball'.

How to choose niche of your blog?

First let me ask a question to you.

What a good niche should be like?

Personally I define a good niche as one which -

interests you

has lesser competition

has more number of audience

is profitable and,

big enough so that you can write indefinitely and small enough so that you have lesser competition to face.

Of course some other points are also there which influence niche selection but the points listed above are most basic and should always be kept in mind once you start brainstorming for your niche selection. Right through this post I would be expanding upon these basic points to help you make proper selection of niche.

Now let us come back to the question. How to choose niche of your blog?

What I am going to tell here is about a series of steps that you should go through to make proper selection of niche.Those steps can be summarized as

Make list of things you are passionate about

Research the search volume

Research the competition

Research the market for profitability

Select the niche

All these steps are important and skipping any one of them may result in improper niche selection. Now I would deal with each of these steps in detail in the following paragraphs.

Step-1 Make list of things you are passionate about-

In any case I would advice you to choose a niche you are interested in (and not people are interested in). This point of view has certainly got some solid facts in its backing. By choosing a topic of your interest you make sure that-

You enjoy your blogging even for years

You are kept motivated as the niche is of your interest

You already have some basic knowledge about your niche

You might evolve as an expert just because it is of your interest

Just make a list of things you love to do. Ask following questions to yourself and note down the answers of these questions in a piece of paper or in a text file-

What is your full time job?

What is your favorite pastime?

What are your hobbies?

What are the games that you love to play?

Do you have some qualities that make you different from others? Like, are you a better painter or an artist or a musician?

In which subject did you graduated?

Do you like to travel and travel many times in a year?

What are the things you love to do?

Once you have compiled the list of your answers ,you have got some idea about the the probable niche that your blog should cover. For example, you may like to write about CSS and codings if you happen to be a web designer by profession or you may like to write about Basketball in your blog if you love to play this game or you may like to write about tourist places if you are a frequent traveller.

Just see how the things you do in your day to day life affect the niche selection. I would once again would like to repeat, choose a niche you are interested in. This will make blogging more easier and more enjoyable.

Step-2 Research the search volume

Search volume gives an idea about the number of audience you have. The most tragic thing about blogging would be not getting any audience or getting little of them. So, you should choose a niche where you have wider audience to present your content to. Without audiences you would be blogging for yourself which doesn't make sense.

Researching the search volume helps you by giving a broader idea about the size of visitors that you might get on your blog. But the big question here is, How to research the search volume of a particular niche?

Well this can be done by making use of one of the free tools available on the net- Google Adwords Keyword tool.

So, How do you make use of this tool?

I would suppose that you have already made a list of things you are passionate about as stated in the previous step. Let us suppose you are interested in- "pet care" , "computer languages" and " Skin care"

Now just go to the Adwords keyword tool and type in these terms in the box provided as shown in the figure below.(marked by a red arrow)

Now if I type in "pet care" in the box, this tool presents me with the search volume of this word and other related terms, like, "dog pet care", "pet care tips" etc. The list looks as shown in the image below-

Now choose the words or phrases that have highest search volumes in the list. Choose at least 10 such phrases. Repeat the procedure for other topics also. Now you will have a comprehensive lists of topics with the search volumes of each of them. This completes this step.

Step-3 Research the competition

No matter on what topic you start your blog upon, there will always be other blogs and websites to compete with you. Getting your feet into a highly competitive niche will dwindle the chances of your blog being noticed. So, you should always target a niche having lesser competition. This will brighten the chances ofyour being noticed.

Now, the question here is how the competition is researched?

The best place to research competition is the search engines. Just type in the words or phrase you have compied in previous steps and notice the following things-

The number of website competing for the phrase.

The pageranks of the top websites for each phrase.

The number of website competing for a phrase can be seen on the top right corner of the search results page. The pagerank of top websites can be seen by opening each page in separate window and looking at the pagerank bar in the google toolbar. Both of these has been depicted in the picture below.(click the images to see the enlarged view)

Just note down these stats in an excel sheet for each of the phrases you have discovered in previous step.
Now analyze the data and choose the phrases with lesser competition (as reflected by by lesser number of websites and lesser pagerank of the competing website).This completes this step.Now I would move on to the next step- researching the profitability of niche.

Step-4 Research the profitability of niche

Most of the bloggers blog for money. You may not think of money while starting your blog but down the road money factor come into play. That is the time when many bloggers start remorsing of not having a blog in profitable niche. So, here my advice would be to think of a profitable niche even if you are not interested in money making while starting your blog. This ,of course , is my personal view and many of you might differ from me in this context.

I will suppose here that you are blogging for money and for that you need a profitable niche.But the question here is how one can know whether a niche is profitable or not. I make use of two websites fior this. One is Adwords keyword tool and other is Clickbank. Here is what you have to do.

Open Adwords keyword tool by following the link and type in the phrases you have compiled in the above steps. Choose "show all" from the drop down menu once the list of keywords start showing in your browser. See the picture below.

After clicking "show all" tab the tool shows the bidding amount (Avg. CPC) in one of the column as shown in the picture below. In general keywords with high bidding amount are more profitable.

The otherway to check the profitability of a niche is through clickbank.com. This is a portal for affiliate marketers and this can be used to check profitability. In the marketplace of this website type in the phrases you have chosen in the keyword field. The niche can be regarded as profitable if it shows a lot of related products.

Step- 5 Select the Niche

Now after following these above four steps you have a lot of data on the individual niches you have selected. Just compare the data you have collected uptill now and choose the one which suits you best. Make sure your niche your niche is not too large nor too small.

Proper niche selection is the basic step to succed as a blogger. Failing to choose a proper niche can make blogging disgusting and more like a burden rather than a fun.Remember one thing niche is the base of your blog. A weaker base will never help your blog grow.So, just spend some time to research a better niche for you.

Tips to increase CTR of Adsense ads by 500%

2008-10-15T22:18:00.026+05:30

Image via WikipediaOne of the factors that can increase your adsense income is the CTR. Although it is not the sole factor and other factors like Traffic, relevant ads and CPC also play their part in increasing the adsense income but CTR is clearly one of the most important of them. The reason why I identify CTR as one of the most important factors is because it can only be manipulated in part. Other factors like traffic , relevant ads and CPC can be achieved if you have a basic knowledge of blogging and adsense and how it works. But CTR is something that requires a fair bit of research and some understanding of your visitors and where they are focussed on your blog. It varies on different blogs and different pages of same blog and also during different months in a year.

I have already explained these factors in detail in some of my posts .Just start with this post- "How to increase Adsense income?". I have also discussed about CTR and and how to increase CTR earlier on this blog. If you haven't read this post ,I would advice you to go through that post before switching to this one.

Now let us come to the point. How to increase Adsense CTR by 500%. There are couple of things that I have tried during last couple of months and the results I got was quite gratifying. Here is the screenshot of my CTR during the months of August, September and October.

Picture showing my CTR in August

Picture showing my CTR in September

Picture showing my CTR in October

As you can see in the picture the CTR in the months of August, September and October was 0.5 %, 1.66% and 2.84%. So, the increase in CTR from the months of August to October has been roughly around 550% ,i.e., five times increase in CTR. In this post I would tell you about the steps I have followed in order to achieve this substantial increase in CTR. I hope you are ready to go and discover the secret, right? Right, OK ,lets proceed now.

First let me tell you about some of the factors that tend to influence the CTR of the adsense ads. These factors are-

Ad Type ,i.e., image ads or text ads

Ad format ,i.e., the size of ad blocks

The colour and background of the ads

Ad positioning

Seasonal variation

Now I will expand upon these points and will explain what and how I did things that resulted in increased CTR (by more than 500%). So let us take each point one by one.

Ad Type-

The type of ads that you place on your pages has a direct impact on your CTR. Presently adsense for content has three ad types - Text Ads, Image Ads and Video Ads. I haven't tried Video ad units as they are still new and I will get to them soon. I have compared the performances of image ads and text ads.

I have found that text ads perform better than the their image counterpart. The reason I guess for that is, I have a blog that is mainly rich in text with very little images. So, the image ads stand out of rest of the things and say it loud and clear that "I am an ad ,don't click me". While the text ads can be blended well with a content rich pages and will result in higher CTR.

Image ads tend to perform well on a page that has a number of images. For example, just take a look at the snapshot of a greeting site with a lot of images.

I have marked the ad with an arrow. The page contains a lot of images and the image ads has really blended well with this page. At first glance the ads doesn't really look like an ad but gives an impression of being a greeting card.

I have consistently found that the text ads do better on a page rich in text and image ads on a page rich in images. So, if you have a page with a lot of texts you should try text ads and if you have a page rich in images you should try image ads. The idea is to blend the ads with the things that exist on your pages.

Ad format-

Just like ad type, ad format has got some direct impact on the CTR. I have tried four formats during last couple of months- 336x280 Large Rectangle, 160x600 Wide Skyscraper, 468 x 60 banner and 125x125 button. Out of these 336 x 280 large rectangle were the one that performed best followed by 468 x 60 banner.

The reasoning for these ads performing better has been quite well described by the Adsense help centre.

As a rule of thumb, wider ad formats tend to outperform their taller counterparts, due to their reader-friendly format. Readers absorb information in thought units (that is, several words at a time). The wider format lets them comfortably read more text at a glance without having to skip a line and return to the left margin every few words as they would be forced to do with a narrower ad. The wider ad format also lessens the likelihood of readers leaving the ad unit altogether.
Source

Indeed the people at google has come up with a good explanation but I am not sure why the 468x60 banners performed well on my page. I think it is due to the placement of the ads that caused it and not the ad size.( these ads were placed on the top of the page just above the title of the posts).

The colour and the background of the ads-

I find colour of the ads together with the positioning as the most important determinants of the CTR. This is because they require a great deal of research and also are the most important factors that make the ads blend with the page's content. The google people has come up with three colour strategies- Blending , complementing and contrasting the ads.

Blending the ads mean to make the background and the borders of the ads the same as the background of the page of your blog.See the picture below.

Complementing the ads mean to use the colour that already exist on your pages and not essentially matching the background.Look at the picture below to see this type of ads in action.

Contrasting the ads mean making the ads stand out of the background by choosing a background colour of the ads different from the one of your page.

I tried two of these colour schemes Blending and complementing. Blending gave me slightly better results than the complementing. I only once tried the contrasting feature (for a few minutes) on my page but it ruined the look of my pages and so I removed it. The contrasting of ads works well when the page has a dark background.

The colour of the title-

It is not just the colour of background and border that affects the CTR but the colour of the title also has some role to play in increasing the CTR. Now most of the bloggers are of the opinion of making the color of the ads the same as the color of your links. But I differ from them. Actually a small story is attached with this and I would like to tell this story to you before explaining my point.

When I was a kid one of my teachers used to play a game with me. He used to write some words on a paper (all in different colours) and then asked me to see that paper for just a second and remember what word came before my eyes first. I like a good student used to obey him. Then my teacher used to tell me the word that first came before my eyes (without me telling him the word). At that time I was surprised and also regarded my teacher as magician but then one day he revealed the secret to me. He told me that in a page containing many colours the one that draws our attention first is the red.

I made use of this knowledge in adsense. I made the title colour red. You can see this in action on this blog at the bottom of the page. The colour scheme of the adsense ads should help draw the attention of the visitors and making the title red helps in drawing the attention of the blog visitors. You may give it a try. It may work well for you.

Ad positioning-

Ad positioning is one of the most important factor to increase the CTR and requires a great deal of research to find out the better positioning of your adsense ads. Now research for ad positioning can be done in two ways.

One is by trial and error method which is advised by most of the bloggers. You just position the ads at different places and see the results.If one position fails you try another until you are able to find a position that suits well for your site. While this method may work for you as it has worked well for many but it takes too long to get the results and it often becomes cumbersome to compile and compare the data of different ad positions.

The other method (the easier one) is guiding your research through some of your stats of google analytics. The most important stats shown in analytics (which help in positioning of ads) are

Average time spent on the page

Visitor type

Average time spent on the page-
The analytics account shows the time spent by the visitors on your pages. This can be found on your dashboard (dashboard shows the average value) and details of it can be found by clicking the 'Visitor'> 'Time on site' link located in the sidebar on the left side.

Snapshot showing the dashboard of analytics with average time spent (on the right side)

Snapshot showing details of time spent on the blog

Just observe the average time spent by the visitors for one week. Now, if the average time spent is greater than 2 minutes that means people visiting your blog are scrolling down upto the bottom of your page. You might think that 2 minutes is somewhat lesser time to read a post but remember majoity of people on net scan through the pages and not necessarily read your post word by word. 2 minutes time is enough to scan through a page.

I am of opinion that you should place your ads on the bottom of your posts if average time spent on your site is greater than 2 minutes or place it on the top if it is lesser tha 2 minutes. As for me average time spent by a visitor on my blog is greater than 3 minutes so, I have placed the ads at the bottom of pages.

Visitor type-
The visitor type stat shows the number of new and repeat visitors on your blog. You need to shuffle your ads and colour of your ads if you are getting too many repeat visitors on your blog to counteract the phenomenon called as 'Ad Blindness'. My analytics account shows that I have a high percentage of new visitors so I don't shuffle my ads too many times.

Some more points regarding Ad positioning-

People tend to be focussed in and around the content area so placing ads near the content will help draw there attention towards the ads and they might click an ad if they find it appealing.

Placing an ad on the top tend to do better than the one placed on the footer and ads placed towards left tend to perform better than the one in right. But this is a generalisation rather than universal and you have to research and find what works best for you.

The ads placed just below the title of your post and towards the left tend to do give better results than those placed away from it. I have placed adsense ads at this place on one of my blogs and it is getting more clicks than any other blog even when the traffic to that blog is lesser than others. Here is th screenshot of that blog.

You have to take care of all the points that I have discussed here in order to see a drastic increase in your CTR and thus your adsense earnings. Before closing this post I would like to mention one last tip. Think like visitor of your blog. Just think where people will be focussed on your blog and place your ads there.

How to get traffic to your blog through social network marketing ??

2008-09-05T19:43:00.007+05:30

In the previous few posts I have been talking about Social network marketing and what you should do to take advantage of social media sites and to drive more traffic to your blog. Earlier have talked about how you should choose a social network site that suits your blog's need. I have discussed this in three posts-
How to choose most popular social network for your blog-#1
How to choose most popular social network for your blog-#2
How to choose most popular social network for your blog-#3

In this post I will talk about some of the steps that you should follow to get maximum from social media sites once you are complete choosing a social media site. To get maximum advantage from the social media sites you need to follow three steps-

Create the hook
Communicate in such a way as to make your interaction productive
Redirect the social site users to your blog

Create the hook-
No matter what topic you cover in your blog, there are thousands of blogs and websites to compete with. So, the chances of reaping benefits from social sites are meagre unless you create the hook.Creating the hook simply means telling others how you and your blog is different from whole lot of other blogs and sites on the topic.Social sites are of little benefit unless your blog stands out of the crowd.

There are certain ways that you can make a good impression on the social media site users. Firstly create quality ,original and useful content.Remember that age old phrase- 'Content is King'.

Secondly research in your niche and find out what are the areas that has been little covered by your competitors.Just focus on those areas and congratulations you have created the hook.

Although I know creating hook for social networking sites is not that easy as it sounds but to get success in these sites you have to sound different from whole bunch of other blogs.

Communicate to make your interaction productive in social networking sites-

A productive interaction is one that makes interaction beneficial for you. For example ,if you are blogging to sell your products then a productive interaction would be one that makes other social site users to buy from you.If you are on social networking sites for traffic then a productive interaction is one that makes others to visit your site.

In one of the earlier posts in the series I have told , Social networking should be done to build trust and not essentially to build links and traffic.Just keep this thing in mind while interacting with social site users.The easiest way to do so is by giving useful advices and helping others without expecting or demanding anything in return. Social sites should essentially be used to make relations without promoting your blog or products directly.

Follow the following points while interacting with other social networking sites users-

Say no to affiliate links in social sites. While giving affiliate links in social sites may make a few dollars for you but this way you will loose your credibility very fast.Don't use affiliate links in social sites.

Be helpful to others and always be keen to help others in whatever manner you can. Give impartial opinions and genuine advices to users if they are seeking one from you.

Be courteous and polite. Your words are the only weapon when you are interacting on social networking sites.People can't see your faces and can't hear your voice.So, your words are the only weapon you have. Use good ,polite and be courteous.Your words should reflect that you are courteous and friendly towards other social site users.

Don't demand something in your first meeting (rather avoid demanding anything anytime during your interaction) .I remember an interaction with a blogger on blogcatalog when she requested a link exchange in the very first chat she had. Although I am not against link exchanges but requesting it even before we know each other well is something I can't digest.

Don't spam social networking sites.Social sites are a potent way to build loyal readers but if you start spamming it , you would loose most of the loyal readers.Social networking sites are meant to be used not abused.

These are some well known points but very useful points that can make your interaction positive and productive.Keep these points in your back of the mind while interacting in social sites.

Redirect users to your blog-

Once you have interacted in a positive way with keeping the above points in mind, you now need to make the social sites users to visit your blog.In most of the cases you can skip this step as the social site users will visit your blog once you have interacted in right way. But in general keep these following points in your mind-

If there is a discussion going on about a topic on which you have written a post then it would be good thing to provide the link of the post with a short description of what you have discussed in that post.

The easiest way to get some visitors from social sites is by leaving a signature link or a link of your blog in your profile.People who are inquisitive about you would certainly visit your site.

If you have written a post that you think would help others then it would be nice to let others know about it.

This way you can make full use of the social networking sites.Remember, social sites have big potential to drive traffic to your blog but it should be done in right way.Don't abuse the service just to make some short term benefits instead go for a long haul by interacting in a nice courteous way.Build trust through the social sites and keep everything else in back of your mind.

What are the methods that you use to get benefits from social sites.I would be happy to know your tactics and methodology of using social sites.Just comment to let me know about your methods.

How to choose most popular social network for your blog # 3

2008-07-18T23:30:00.007+05:30

Earlier I have talked and helped you in answering two questions that help you in choosing right social network for your blog.In this post I would talk off third and the last question- What niche do you cover in your blog?

Niche is important for deciding the right social site for your blog.Different social media users have different tastes. For example, Digg users like tech and news related topics.So, it is of prime importance to know the tastes of the social sites user. If you have a blog on history and you are using a social site with majority of users inclined towards geography then you will hardly get any purchase from that site.

So, just do a research on different media sites and try to find out what topics are liked by the users of a particular social site.But the question that arises here is ,How can I know the tastes of the users of a social site?

Well that is not a difficult task but it requires a lot of work to research it.There are different methods I employ to research this but none of them is perfect.So, what I do is combine different methods to research.I use a combination of three methods to find the tastes of the users.By doing this I reduce the errors in research and thus try to reach a near correct result.I would talk about these methods in following paragraph.

Take a look at the frontpage of social sites you are researching-

This I think is simplest method and and gives best and nearest results among the three.Just take a look at the front page of the social sites and see what sites are appearing there.Note down the site title and niche.Do this for minimum of one week.After you are done doing this, just see what niche or category has most featured on front pages of a particular site. This is most suited for social bookmarking sites like digg.

Take a look at the tag cloud of the social site-

Tag cloud give you a broader idea about the likings of a social site user.You may wonder how tag cloud can help you in choosing the right social site for your blog?? OK, let me explain the things in some detail. Take a look on this image of one of the pages of stumble upon.

Click to enlarge

On the right side of this image you can see the tag cloud. Just see the words that are written in bigger font in this cloud.Then see whether your your blog is about this.For example, one of the words in tag cloud is business (written in bigger font). So, if your blog is about business the social site can be of your choice.

Take a look at the categories-

Categories can be quite helpful in deciding the social site.Just ask a question to yourself. Is there any category which describes your blog or in which your blog can be fitted? If you don't find any category for your blog then probably your blog is not suited for that social site.

Based on these three factors and others I have discussed in earlier posts you can reach to social media site of your choice.In any case go for 2-3 best suited social sites to get maximum from social networking.Social networking is all about communicating with your target audience and the first step is choosing a social site where you can find plenty of target audience.Once you are not taking this first step with caution ,you may fail in social network marketing.

How to choose most popular social network for your blog- #2

2008-07-11T01:25:00.005+05:30

Image via WikipediaEarlier in the series of this post ,I have helped you to answer one of the questions to choose most popular social network for your blog. Now I will move on to the next question- What do you want social sites to do for your blog?

As I have said earlier , social sites can be used in a variety of ways. They can be used to drive traffic to your blog, they can be used to build relationships and increase sales or they can even be used to build links for your blog. So, answer of this question is quite important for choosing right social media site. Let us expand this in foollowing paragraphs.

Social sites of choice if you are there to drive traffic-

This is probably most important reason why bloggers participate actively in social sites. The most efficient social sites in this regard are stumble upon and digg. Of course, there are some other second tier choices like reddit and newsvine. So, if you are there for traffic you should focus on these sites.You don't have to actively participate in conversations here, only thing you have to do is bookmark your posts and encourage your readers to do the same.

Social media sites of choice to build relationships-

One of the reasons why you need to build relationships with others is because you want to win trust or you want to highlight yourself as an expert of some field.For this you need to be personal with your target audience.You have to converse with them. And that is why, you have to choose a social media site that has a messaging interface to make connections with others.Facebook ,orkut and different forums in your niche are excellent examples where you can communicate with others.

Social media site of choice to build links-

Yeah !!! social media sites can be used effectively to build links and increase your pagerank.For this you need to research and find out which bookmarking sites don't use "no follow". Some of the examples of social media sites that don't use "nofollow" are furl and blinklist.There are still some more and I am working on it.I will produce a list of dofollow social sites soon.

So, you can see ,how the answer to the above mentioned question dictates the choice of the social media site. Most of the times you have many reasons to use social sites.For example ,you wish to increase hits on your blog as well as build links from social sites.In this case the choice can be different.Just find out what do you want from social site and choose the one that fulfills your need.In every case, focus your attention only on 2-3 social sites as it is not possible to focus on every site that comes your way.

How to choose the most popular social network for your blog?- #1

2008-06-26T23:23:00.008+05:30

One of the main reasons why many bloggers fail in social networking is, they don't choose a social site which suits their blog's need.For example ,it is unlikely to get purchase from digg if you have a blog on history because Digg users love tech stuff and newzy material.That is why choosing a right social media site is of paramount importance if you wish to market you blog socially.In this post and two other posts of this series you would learn to choose a right platform to network.

In the earlier post of this series I have given an outline of social network marketing.I have talked about three questions you should ask to yourself to be able to to choose a right social platform.In this post I will talk of first question and how the answer of this question helps you in choosing the most popular social site for your blog.

The first question was-

What do you want your blog to do?

Whether you want your blog to make money for you through adsense or through affiliate marketing or you just want your blog to make you famous through your opinions or is it just a fun for you.

The answer to this question is vital in choosing right network for your blog.Why ?? well, I will show you the reason in the paragraphs that follow.

Social media of choice if you want your blog to make money through adsense-

If you are planning to make money through adsense then you should care about traffic.More traffic means more clicks and more clicks mean more money, isn't it? So, if this is the case you would go for a social media site that brings in a lot of traffic to your blog like, stumble upon and digg.

Social media site of choice if you want to be an affiliate marketer-

As an affiliate marketer you need to build trust because people seldom buy from someone whom they don't trust. So, in this case your social media site of choice would be one that allows you to communicate with others through a messaging interface, like facebook, orkut etc. You can't build trust unless you talk to your target audience.Social bookmarking sites like,digg won't help an affiliate marketer in building trust.

Social media site of choice if you want to be famous-

Many people blog to build a profile or to become famous.If this is the case with you ,you need to communicate with other people in your niche.This can be done through comments in blogs and forums of those people.Once people in your niche come to recognise you as an expert you would become famous in your field.

So, you can see how answer to this question help you in choosing the most suited social platform for your blog.I will suppose that you would have answered this question for yourself.Many a times you blog for more than one reasons.For example, you may wish to make money through adsense as well as an affiliate.In that case you can choose a combination of two social sites or even one if it is there.

In any case you have to choose a social site that suits your need.

Social network marketing: Taking your blog to next level

2008-06-24T00:43:00.006+05:30

Image by glenn.batuyong via FlickrOne of the reasons most successful bloggers are successful is because they market their blog through social networking.The reverse is also true, most bloggers fail because they don't market their blog socially.Social network marketing ,also called as social media marketing, is one of the arsenals that web 2.0 has given us to promote our blog.But most of you are not able to take full advantage of it because you simply don't have an idea how to use it.

I am writing a series of post where you can learn about social network marketing and thus, you will be able to promote your blog socially. This is the first post of the series and in this post I will just outline the things that you would discover in the rest of the posts of this series.But before I would do this, it would be nice thing to define social network marketing.

What is Social network marketing?

"Social network marketing is a process of building relationships with target audience, to market principles and ideas for the purpose of societal benefit by winning trust."

If you take a close look onto the definition ,you will find three key factors of social network marketing-

Building relationships with target audience.

Marketing for purpose of societal benefit.

Winning trust.

These three points are key to social marketing and through out this series I will expand upon these three key factors only.

Now the next question that would be hovering in your mind is- What should I do to market my blog through social networks or social media sites? Well, social media sites are complex to deal with as you have to deal with a variety of people having different behaviours and opinions.But this can be made easy if you can follow a couple of steps.These couple of steps are part of social media optimisation.

Social media Optimisation-

Social media optimisation is simply the things you do to market your blog or products socially.You have to follow just a couple of steps (with a few sub-steps) to successfully market your blog socially. These steps are-

Choose most popular social network that suits your blog's need.

Apply some social media marketing tactics.

Choosing the most popular social network-

One of the mistakes most of you do while using social media sites is, you don't research to find out which network site is suited for your need. I have seen many bloggers using all the social networking sites that come their way.So, they will stumble, digg , and reddit and will twitter also without researching what they really need to use.

Choosing the most suited social sites is not hard either. Just you have to answer some questions-

What do you want your blog to do? Whether you want to make money through adsense or through affiliate or you just want to get noticed or is it just a fun for you.

What niche do you cover in your blog? Whether you write about computers or making money or news orany other thing in this world.

What do you want the social sites to do for your blog? Whether you want to build links or get subscribers or generate some traffic through social sites.

The answer to these three questions are vital to select suitable social sites for you and your blog.I have separate posts on these questions where I shown you how answers to these questions affect the choice of social networking sites.

Applying social media marketing tactics

Once you are done choosing a social site for you, the next step is applying some tactics to make your social network marketing campaign more effective. I have categorised these tactics into three steps-

Creating the hook- This is basically a tactics to tell others , how you are different from your competitors.

Communicating like a skilled person-The way you should communicate online to make an impression and win trusts of others.

Redirecting the users to your blog- It is quite easy to redirect users to your blog once you have won the trust. But you need to be careful while doing this as you may loose the trust by doing it wrong way.

I will discuss these three points in separate posts.

This post was just an outline about what you will learn about social network marketing in this series of posts. Social network marketing is crucial for success as a blogger.Without networking it is impossible to be successful so, you must learn the art of networking on popular media ssites.

I hope you would enjoy this series and be benefited from it.If you fear loosing a part or whole of the series , you may subscribe via email to get the posts delivered in your inbox.

Drive traffic to blogs through search engines: Tips SEOs forgot to tell you

2008-06-20T22:34:00.009+05:30

Image by ocean.flynn via FlickrAfter reading out the title you may have guessed , I would talk about search engine optimization.But in this post I would not say a word about it. I would not talk of keyword research or anchor text optimization or anything else about SEO. Instead I will talk of how you can apply SEO techniques to get more hits (not high search engine rankings).There is some difference between getting more hits and getting high search engine rankings.You will unfold the difference between the two somewhere in the following paragraphs.

Optimizing just your home page is biggest mistake-

I have seen many bloggers who have optimized their homepage quite well but if you take a look at inner pages they are poorly optimized.Even the best of your keywords can't drive loads of traffic if you have just optimized your main page.To drive more traffic from search engines you need to optimize many of your pages. Just create many entry points to enter your blog.

Let us take an example. Suppose you have one page beautifully optimized and it gets 50 visitors per day from search engines.50 visitors from one page is impressive ,isn't it?But since you have just one optimized page , you will not be able to go beyond that number. Will you? Now what happens if you have 10 such optimized pages.Do the simple maths and calculate.You will get 500 visitors and what if you have 50 optimized pages.My god!!! you have thousands of visitor just from search engines.....

So, the first lesson is optimize SOME OF YOUR inner pages apart from your home-page.

Optimizing all your pages is not easy (possible) either-

To succeed as a blogger you have to update your blog frequently, means, you have to write daily ,right? Right!! So, you are already in a pressure of writing daily and once you start optimizing each of your pages ,you will feel additional pressure. The pressure of doing keyword researches and building links for all your posts.

But all SEO experts told you to optimize your all pages, isn't it? Ok ,they are right. But they write for all the pages on internet and they most importantly write for websites which are not updated as frequently as blogs. So, a website owner can afford to optimize all of his/her pages but same can't be said about blogs.

So, What the hell should I do to drive traffic through search engines-

From above paragraphs it is clear that you can't drive traffic by optimizing just your home page and optimizing all your pages is not possible. So, the big question is - What you should do to drive traffic to your blog from search engines?

Here comes the secret-

Classify your blog pages into three tiers or strata. Your home page comprise the first strata ,some of your long, tutorial type posts (pillar posts) will come in the second strata and short posts and newsy posts in the third strata. I have shown this in the figure below.

Once you have classified your posts ,focus your attention on tier-1 and tier-2, that is, your homepage and your pillar posts.Optimize these two tiers with best keywords and get some links for them. Make sure all your pillar posts are accessible from your homepage and all relevant pillar posts exchange links between themselves.

So, what is the use of tier-3? Well, tier-3 (the short articles and newsy items) are just meant to provide internal links for your home page and your pillar posts. They feed your important posts with links without getting link from them.Thus, your pillar posts get one-way internal links from these posts. Isn't this cool.

If you write a pillar post each week, you will have 24 posts in six months and if you can manage to write two, you will have 48 pillar posts.If you can optimize all these posts you will create 48 entry points for your blog. Another good news , you will have a lot of newsy items or short posts to get your pillar posts linked.

Does creating entry points drives more traffic to blogs-

In the first paragraph i have said, "there is difference between getting more hits and getting high search engine rankings."I know you are getting confused here because you have been told that higher ranks mean more hits.OK let me clarify the things.

Let us suppose you are in the top ten (1st page) for a term in google results page.Well, you have 10 other sites to compete with even if you are in top ten for your targeted keyword. Furthermore, these competitors are often the toughest one.I know you can still get some traffic competing with them but my point is to leverage your high rankings to get maximum you can get from search engines.

How can I do this?

You have to simply focus your attention on search snippet. A search snippet looks something like this-

You can see here, a search snippet has two parts-

The title which is written in blue colour.

Description which is written in black.

Both these parts are quite important as it reflects the stuff in your blog.Many people decide whether they should click the link or not on the basis of this snippet.Thus, if you can assure people that you have the stuff they were looking for ,you can make them to visit your blog.

Make sure you have written an intriguing and 'killing' title. Also , make use of meta tags to describe each of your page.This way you can get more traffic from search engines.

These are all little things but are most often not given the attention they deserve.If you have some fantastic ideas to share or otherwise my points were not clear to you then you are most welcome to start a discussion here in the comment section.I look in to every comment i get and personally answer those.

5 unique traffic generation posts from 5 unique bloggers

2008-06-17T09:14:00.007+05:30

Image via WikipediaEvery blogger wants traffic, only some of them constantly and seriously try to generate it and still fewer get it.This is the real picture of blogosphere in terms of traffic generation.If you are quite serious to generate some quality traffic for your blog ,then check out the links to the posts of some successful blogger and learn some unique and innovative ideas to build traffic.

Traffic building through offline blog promotion- By Darren Rowse

Most of the bloggers and webmasters are centered on online blog promotions.OK, online blog promotion can bring in some traffic to you but to really get piles of visitors on your blog you have to complement it with some offline blog promotion strategies.Darren has pointed out some good reasons to consider offline blog promotion and also has listed some great tips to do so.You can find the post here.

Traffic generation through google image search- By Maki

You read it right!!!!! Traffic from google image search is something that I have never thought of getting.Although I get some traffic from google inage search but I can't expect heaps of traffic from this.But, Maki , the man behind doshdosh has some ground-breaking tips to build a great deal of traffic from google image search.He has discussed a series of steps optimize your blog for google's search engine for images. You can find the article here.

Traffic generation through stumble upon- By Mani Karthik

This may sound like a repetitive and regurgitated list of tips but believe me Mani has got some useful techniques to get traffic from stumble upon.The post has been written on bloggingtips and can be found here.

5 traffic generation tips from Skellie Wag-

Skellie has got 5 great and unique tips to build traffic for your blog. All the five tips are singular and has great thoughts behind them.Read this post here.

30 Traffic building tips on daily blog tips-

This post is a bit different from others listed above.It contains views and ideas of thirty people on traffic generation techniques.Many of them are quite innovative and easy to follow.Check out this post here.

These are the unparalleled posts on the topic of traffic generation.Read them, follow them and enjoy getting more hits on your blog.If you have got some unique ideas on traffic building ,you can share it here through comment section.

Blogs I read

2008-06-17T02:15:00.007+05:30

Blogs on blogging-

Blogs on Making money-

Others-

Surefire ways to promote your blog?

2008-06-13T22:58:00.011+05:30

Image via WikipediaPromoting a blog is one of the most tedious tasks as a blogger.This becomes even more unmanageable when you are a part time blogger like me.Promoting a blog is an ongoing process and you have to promote your blog as long as you write on your blog.

If you are looking for some shortcuts then I fear I might disappoint you.I have no secrets to disclose on the topic .But if you are quite serious to promote your blog and ready to schedule the task on a daily basis then you will find this post useful.

Leverage your current visitors to promote your blog-

People are quite focussed on the things that they don't have.Same applies to blogging also.You might have been thinking of your low traffic or subscribership.But real key to blog promotion is to concentrate upon what you have.A bunch of visitors can bring in huge traffic to you if they spread just one of your post virally. This is the true value of the visitors you have.

How can I promote my blog through current visitors?
Now this is the question which needs to be answered.The ways to promote your blog this way are-

Produce quality content-How can a visitor promote your blog if you don't have a content worth promoting.Content is the soul of your blog and a blog without quality content is a dead blog.

Use "Tell a Friend" script in the post-footer -"Tell a friend" script is a piece of javascript or php code that enables your visitors to email your posts to their friends.So, only thing you have to do is to encourage your visitors to use this script to email your posts.This can be more effective if you give away free gifts to your visitors to tell their friend about your posts.Although right now I am not using this method to promote my blog but I am planning to use it pretty soon.

Encourage your visitors to submit your site in social bookmarking sites-Social bookmarking sites like stumble upon(SU) are the best place to promote your blog.Just encourage your visitors to add your posts to social sites if they liked it.

Make many entry points to get into your blog-

Entry points for your blog are the highly optimized pages which rank high in search engines for their keywords.Thus, if you have many entry points you have more prospects of getting visitors to your blog through search engines.In my opinion 10-15% of your posts should be optimized for search engines.If you write 10 posts a week then 1-2 posts should be written with search engines in mind.

What should I do to make entry points to my blog-

Give some time to research your keywords.

Place your keywords tactfully.

Maintain a keyword density of 3-6%

Build links for your optimized pages.

Promote your feeds to promote your blog-

Your blog and feed are the two faces of the same coin.So, promoting your feeds can actually help your blog to grow.Infact, my feeds get more hits than my blog and many of the visitors who discover my feed actually come to see my blog.

What can I do to promote my feeds-

Submit your feed to feed directories.You can find a list of feed directories here.

Make sure autodiscovery feature is working.Most of the blogs have an innate autodiscovery feature but sometimes it may not be working.

Leave your feed's link in your signature whenever you comment in forums and other blogs.

Distribute your articles in article directories and forums-

Submitting your articles in article directories has two benefits-

It build links for your blog.

It refers some of the visitors to your blog.

Forums, I think, are not being used properly by bloggers to promote their blog.Writing some very good comments on forums can bring in some traffic for your blog but it will be only a few even if you are commenting in high trafficked forum.To really get some purchase from forums write an article which is value packed,,addicting, attractive (you can add some more adjectives here !!!) I had once written an article on about 10 forums to promote my blog on "Tourist Places in India" and next day the traffic came rolling in.

Identify some forums having good traffic and post a new thread with a beautiful article in it and see the magic.Seriously,this has worked quite well for my blog and it can work well for you too.

Build a community to promote your blog-

The simplest way to build a community is to join communities at mybloglog and blogcatalog. Other ways of building community are-

Email other bloggers when you have produced a quality post and let them know about your post.You can even email entire post to them.Don't email all your post but only those which you think are promising.

Comment on other blogs.This is the simplest way of building relationship with fellow bloggers although it may take some time.

Giveaway links to other blogs and don't expect anything in return.

Write a guest post on an established blog of your niche.

Be active in social media sites.

Answer your emails and comments on your blog.

Although there are many more methods to promote your blog but those I have discussed are not frequently used by most of the bloggers.If you have some unique idea to promote blog you may discuss it here in comments.

What makes a successful blogger successful?

2008-06-12T14:05:00.005+05:30

Have you ever thought how successful bloggers build readership or make money or get tons of hits on their blog?Have you ever thought what makes a successful blogger successful?According to one of the surveys 99% of bloggers fail.So, have you ever thought what makes a blogger to get in the 1% list.

I had a hawk eye look at some of the bloggers over past few weeks and sorted out some of the points that make them distinguished.I have been following many successful blogs like,problogger, daily blog tips and doshdosh to name some.In this post I will share some of the tips that I have learned after looking at those blogs closely.

1) Successful bloggers consistently produce quality content- All the successful bloggers write quality content and they do this on a consistent basis. Most of the blogs have one or two quality posts but what makes a blogger successful is his quality to produce nice content consistently.

2) Successful bloggers has a optimum posting frequency- I have seen, most of the established bloggers post at least once a day. Sometimes, they post like 2-3 posts a day.To be a success blogger you have to maintain an optimum posting frequency.

3) Successful bloggers make many doorway pages- Most of the established blogs has multiple doorway pages.Doorway pages are highly optimized pages that rank high in search engines and thus act as entry points for a webpage. Having many entry points increases the traffic on the blog.

4) Successful bloggers are excellent networkers- Networking is quite essential for a blog to be highly trafficed. Networking helps a blogger in finding new readers as well as to market their blog virally.

5) Successful bloggers outsource some of their blogging tasks- This is something that only successful bloggers do. They outsource some of their tasks like, comment moderation,content writing or email replies to others. Most of the established bloggers has plenty of guest posties and also they had given the task of content writing to freelance writers sometime during their blogging career.

So, how many of these points do you follow? Tell me about your opinion on this topic and apply some of these tips yourself.

Competing in 640-863 and 642-436 is not a problem for a 1Y0-259 applicant as long as he is well prepared in 70-536 and/or 70-642

Posting daily Vs posting 3-4 times a week

2008-06-07T22:13:00.007+05:30

Image by comicbase via FlickrAfter seeing the title of this post you may have said-"Ah!!! the age old discussion on posting frequency once again." But I thought I should write about it as the discussion is still hot and almost all discussions on this topic has been inconclusive.I have seen many posts on posting frequency and found most of the bloggers leave you in a mesh between posting daily and 3-4 times a week.

There are a couple of school of thoughts on the posting frequency-

Post 3-4 times a week.
Post daily

Before I give my thoughts on the two ,I would like to discuss the pros and cons of the two-

Pros and cons of posting 3-4 times a week-

I have been posting on this blog more or less with this frequency and I am better acquainted with the pluses and minuses of posting with this frequency.Let us take the pros first.

Well the plus with this is you are able to give more attention to your post.As a blogger the quality of content you write depends upon the time you give to your post and not on your writing skills.The biggest advantage thus, is ,you are able to produce quality content.

Secondly, your blog is free from the filler posts that people often post to cope up with the pressure of posting daily.

Thirdly,it doesn't takes away the charm and fun of blogging.You can't blog if you are living with constant insistence of posting daily.It will take away the fun and fascination of blogging.Your unwillingness will be mirrored in your posts and you will loose credibility.

Now let us talk about the cons of posting 3-4 times daily.One of my observations for past few months has been-
1)I get some subscribers when I post and I loose a few of them when i didn't post for next 2-3 days.
2)My blog ranks better in search engine rankings when I post and I loose the ranking when I am postless for next few days.

A visitor on your blog subscribes because he is crazy about the information or topic that you deliver through your posts.Since he is crazy about the topic he likes to be fed daily.Once you disappoint him he unsubscribes.Thus, the blog subscribership suffers.In my opinion , you can still build a subscribership with this rate but the growth rate would be low and thus, it will take long time to build huge readership.

Search engines like regularly updated contents on blogs and one of the determinants in ranking a blog is the update frequency.So, with this posting frequency you loose ranks in SERPs specially if you have a competitor who blogs daily.

Pros and Cons of posting daily-

Let us kick off to the pros first.Most of the bloggers advice to write daily.The reasons they give in support of this are-

Posting daily ensures you feed your subscribers daily and thus, satisfy them and also increase their numbers.

Daily posting schedule wins the love of search engines as search engines in general and google in particular love frequently updated blogs.

By writing daily you are able to increase the numbers of posts with good pace and more number of posts affect your pagerank in positive way.

You improve your writing skills as the most important tip to become a great blog writer is to post daily.

The cons of writing daily are-

The quality of content is affected.

You are not able to give more time on your posts.

Your blog may become a clutter of filler posts.

Most importantly the zest of blogging is lost as you have a constant pressure of blogging daily.

So, after telling so much about the posting frequency, I feel, you are baffled and going to ask me one simple question-

What should be the posting frequency on my blog?

Well, I am not the one who can answer this question for you as the answer differs for different blogs and different blogger.But certainly I can help you in answering this question.Your decision on blogging frequency should be driven by asking certain question to yourself-

What your blog is about?- A blog which delivers news on it will certainly have a high posting frequency and a blog that covers very small niche will have a smaller frequency.

Have you got an idea or you are posting just to meet the demand of posting?-I have seen bloggers posting short posts just because they have to post.The result is they produce a low quality content having no value and make their blog a directory of filler posts.

Have you worked sufficiently on the post or you are posting it when it is still raw?- One of the things I have noticed on many blogs is ,they produce uncrafted content.The imperfection comes out because they haven't worked on the post and they believe they should post daily.

My final opinion on posting frequency-

In my opinion posting frequency doesn't matter if it is not too low or too high.
What actually matters is the quality of content.If you can produce quality content everyday it is good but if you can't it is fine to have a lesser frequency of 3-4 posts a week.Give the time your post deserves and never post fillers on your blog.

The best way of driving traffic to blogs

2008-06-06T01:33:00.010+05:30

Image by ocean.flynn via FlickrToday one of my reader emailed me asking the best way to drive traffic for blog.His exact email was like this-

"Blogs like any other website get traffic from either search engines or referring sites (Other blogs + Forums) or social bookmarking sites like Stumble upon. What do you think is the best way to drive traffic to blogs? On which means a blogger should particularly focus upon?"

After reading this mail i was a bit befuddled as all three methods has its own importance and to choose one of them as best is certainly going to be a tough ask. Earlier I thought to reply him saying all these method are important and you should focus on all the three.But then I thought to answer him through one of the post with comprehensive details of each of these three methods of driving traffic to blog.

Driving traffic through search engines-

Driving traffic through search engines is free if you optimize your blog yourself.All you need is basic concept of organic search engine optimization.Even if you don't know ABCD of optimization you can learn it on the net. I am a health care professional and learnt a fair bit of optimization on the net.My point is if I can learn it probably anybody on this earth can learn it.

Secondly, traffic from search engines is laser targeted if you have researched your keywords and used it smartly.Through google analytics I have found that people coming to my blog through search engines spend a fair bit of time on my blog.

The only con I see in search engines is it takes some time to rank high in SERPs.You have to optimize each and every page and build links which certainly is not a one day process.Most of the times it takes several months to rank high in search engines if you are not applying some black hat SEO.(which I think you would not be applying)

Driving traffic through referring sites-

Number of visitors coming from other blogs and forums constitutes the second best source of traffic after search engines for this blog. This traffic is also targeted and most of the times they do return and comment.But to get traffic from this means you have to endlessly comment on other blogs and forums which is certainly not suited for a part time blogger like me.But if you have got some time this can be the single best source of traffic for you.Ten comments a day will be suffice.

Driving traffic through social bookmarking and media sites-

Today this mode of traffic generation is being talked highly.But frankly speaking I am quite disappointed with the quantity and quality of traffic I am getting from these sites.Stumble upon gives some visitors to my blog.But most of the times they spent only a few seconds on my blog.The average time a visitor from stumble upon has spent is 11 secs. which is certainly not assuring.

In my opinion traffic from social sites are absolute garbage.They are like swarm of bees that come to you and never visit again without watching what you have to offer.The only use of such traffic ,as I see, is in beautifying your traffic stats.

Although I am not only one who will tell against social media but still there are some folks who get some quality traffic from this media but they are very few.

Some additional points-

The biggest challenge that you get while driving traffic is when you have just started your blog, as a new blog has neither a high search engine rankings nor it gets purchase from social media.In this case comments on other blogs are the only source of traffic.I know that will not be the huge amount of traffic but every traffic you get will keep you motivated.Just add some useful comments on every blog that comes your way when you are new.

Once you start getting some traffic from search engines you can relax a bit and keep your comment rate down.

All these three methods work in conjunction but to choose the best one from these is certainly difficult.The best practice would be to monitor your analytics and see what works best for you.For me and most others search engines work best if you optimize the pages cleverly.

After 642-812, the next wanted credit is 70-431, followed by 350-030, but students who cannot clear their 220-602 or 70-640 are not qualified for it.

Unique way of building links- I can bet you don't know about it

2008-06-04T00:21:00.008+05:30

Most of the bloggers will tell you to comment on other blogs and forums and submit your blog to directories to build links.There are many other ways they usually talk about.I know these are very effective ways of building links for your blog. But problems with building links this way are-

Often you get a 'no follow' links specially if you are commenting on other blogs to build links.(Most of the blogs now use 'no follow' in comments) Many of the directories also befool you by using either 'no follow' or robot.txt.
You can build links for your homepage and other 2-3 pages only.Most of the directories don't allow inner pages and in forums you can only leave 1-4 links in your signature.

Now what you are going to learn here in this post is an unique way of building links. By using this technique you will be able to build links for any no. of pages (even all of your posts) and most importantly it will be 'do follow'. So, stick yourself with your seat as you are going to discover a very unique way of building links.

I discovered this technique only a week ago and felt I should share it with my readers.Actually this technique makes use of google docs and spreadsheets.Confused !! I can guess you are..... OK let me explain the things in a bit more detail.

First of all log into google docs using google account.If you don't have a google account you can open an account here for free.Once you log in to google docs the page looks something like this-

(click to enlarge the image)

Using the 'new' button on the top left corner (as indicated by a red arrow in image) you can make a new document, spreadsheet or a presentation.You can write anything relevant in your document. You can make a list of your posts, you can make a list of your top posts , you can describe your blog or even write a short post there.While preparing your document embed your blog's link or your post's link in the document. Once you finish preparing the document you can publish it as a webpage.Look at the picture below-

(Click to enlarge the image)

In the image above, you can see my spreadsheet which contains a list of RSS directories.In the right side you can see the 'publish as webpage' button under 'Share' (encircled in red and indicated by a red arrow).Once you publish your document it is published at a unique url.My document can be seen here.This document now behaves in exactly the same way as other webpage.

So, just make a document with some of the links from your blog.Publish it and congrats you have built some links for your blog.Make more documents daily and see the links building for your blog.Isn't this cool.

The best part is the links will be 'do follow' (I have checked this and found no 'no follow' tags)

There are many other websites similar to google docs.Just google it and you will get a number of these sites.You can use any of them or all of them.
Happy linking!!!

Tips to incease blog subscribership

2008-05-28T04:47:00.008+05:30

The number of subscribers your blog gets is the measure of your success as a blogger.If you have good no. of subscribers you are successful.This is why every blogger is quite serious of increasing the blog readership.Infact , you are reading this article because you also are quite serious to increase your blog subscribership.OK , I promise I will not let you down.In this post I will talk about some very good tips to increase blog readership/subscribership.I will not present you with a list of tips that other blogging guides do.Instead I will first tell you about the basics about how and why people subscribe and only then I will come up with my tips.

How and why people subscribe to a blog?

Most of the people surf the net because they are in hunt of some information.If your blog provides the information, they subscribe.But from hunting for information to becoming a subscriber, visitors pass through certain steps which you should understand to increase your subscribership.I have depicted these steps in the following picture-
The three steps that people pass before subscribing are-

Finding your blog or feed- How can a person subscribe to your feed if he is not able to find your blog or your feed at first place.

Reading your content- A visitor subscribes only if he/she reads your content and likes it.

Finding the subscription button- Once a visitor likes your content he will try to find out the subscription button to subscribe to your blog's feed.

The tips I am going to tell you in the following paragraphs revolve around these three points.

Tips to increase blog subscribership-

1) Make your blog and feed more visible-

While there are too many blogs including this one which tells you about making your blog more visible but there are very few which will tell you to make your feed more visible.A blog can be made more visible by search engine optimization, commenting on other blogs and forums, and networking with other bloggers.

To make your feed more visible-

Submit your blog's feed to feed directories- You can find a list of feed directories here. Just submit your feed url to all of these directories.This will make your feed more visible to others on the net.

Make sure autodiscovery feature is working- Autodiscovery makes it easy for feed aggregators and websurfers to automatically find your feed and subscribe to it.You only need to put a html code to enable this feature.The details for enabling feed autodiscovery can be found here.

Leave the link of your feeds url in forums and comments-I have seen many bloggers leaving their feed's url in their signature.I am not sure how much does it works because I don't do this but many bloggers tell to leave feed's url in the signature.

2) Produce original and quality content-

I am sick of telling this in almost every post I write.The reason I always talk about content is because it is the soul of your blog.Without content your blog is dead.Furthermore, Visitors will subscribe only when you provide a solid reason to subscribe.And the solid reason is the quality content.

3) Make the subscription button more visible to visitors-

Visitors can become subscribers only when they are able to find the subscription button on your blog.If you have placed the button in some corner of your blog which is barely seen then probably you are losing many many visitors per day.To make your subscription button more visible-

Use a large sized orange button for subscription. People are accustomed of watching an orange button for rss feeds.So, always use a large orange button and not of other colours. A different coloured button may go unnoticed.

Place button on the top of the sidebar and below each of your post- Again people are habituated of seeing orange button on the top of sidebar and below posts.If they wish to subscribe they will go on to see these places first.So, place it there.

4) Facilitate subscribing-

Apart from the tips I have discussed above you have to take care of other factors like, encouraging your visitors to subscribe. Explain RSS feeds to your visitors who don't have an idea what it means.And give some incentives to the visitors who subscribe.I have seen many bloggers giving away ebooks to the subscribers.Some bloggers profess to cut off the steps to subscribe to minimum.All these strategies work quite well.

Increasing blog subscribership is not an overnight process.It is an ongoing process. Focus on producing a quality content and make subscription easy.Encourage your visitors to subscribe and do talk to them every now and then and you will see subscribers rolling in to your blog.
All the best !!!!

After 70-646 and EX0-101, attempting 642-552 can become complicated in the absence of credits like 70-294 and 70-647

Grab your visitors attention or lose them forever

2008-05-26T08:12:00.008+05:30

Image via WikipediaI will start this post with a small question. What is the use of huge traffic when it can't be transformed into readers or subscribers?For most of bloggers such traffic has little or no use.For transforming visitors into readers you need to grab their attention first.That is why getting hold of visitors attention is more important than getting visitors alone.In this post I will talk of ways to grab attention of your blog visitors.

I have been interacting with regular internet users for quite sometime and based on the conversation with them I came to know about following points-

Most of the visitors are focussed on information and benefits while surfing.Everytime they reach a page they will ask a question- What is there for me on this page?,or How I will be benefitted by reading this page?

Most of the internet users seek advice from professionals or experts of their field?

My point of telling all this is, if you are able to convince your visitors that you have useful information and you are an expert in your field, you will catch hold of their attention.Now, million dollar question is, How can I tell visitors that I have great information and I am expert? I find three ways to grab attention of visitors-

By writing a 'killing' title/headline-

If there is one thing on your blog that is always read by each of your visitors then it is your title.So,write title in such a way that it clearly answers the questions-

What information is there on your blog?

How visitors will be benefitted from this information?

If your title contains the answer of these two questions you will surely be able to gain attention of your visitors.

By using interesting images on the top of your post-

Sometimes images speak louder than the words. The role of an interesting image in grabbing attention is invaluable.

Just take an example-

I found this image on one of the blogs while surfing.Actually I stopped and read whole of the post after watching this because this picture looked so interesting to me.So, you can just see the value of images in grabbing attention.But to really get some purchase from images you have to place an engrossing and relevant image.

By blog design-

A beautiful , unique design can make your blog stand out of the crowd of millions.After talking to hundreds internet users I came to know that people on the net access the expertise of a blogger by the design of the blog.This is especially true if they have to make a decision in few seconds.

Although I feel it is insane to judge expertise of a person by blog design but since most of your visitors have this kind of attitude ,so, you have to live with it as a blogger.

Attracting your visitors attention is important as it will convert a lot of your visitors into readers and even subscribers.A great content has got no meaning if it is not being read and grabbing attention of your visitors ensures that your content is read.

10 super tips to write better content on blogs

2008-05-22T22:36:00.006+05:30

As a blogger much of your success depends upon quality of your content. You will be appreciated if you are writing original and quality content otherwise you will fail miserably.This is the reason why content is called king.In this post I will talk about ten powerful tips to generate awesome content on your blog.

I will not preach about making things scannable or making your significant point bold or other stuff that is widely discoursed in every blogging guide.Instead I will talk of some slap-up points to make your content better.

1) Recognize your audience-

Just ask yourself, Who your audience will be? Or, for whom you are writing? Whether you are writing for newbies or intermediates or savvys .Plan your content once you answer this question.

2) Use colourful verbs in place of tired overused verbs-

Verbs are like condiments. Just like condiments add flavour to food, verbs flavour the content.And once you flavour your content blog visitors will relish it.Let us take an example- Take a look at following sentences-

"The whole SEO is such complex that sometimes I get confused."

"I am perplexed due to intricate nature of SEO."

Both these sentences mean the same thing but in later case the verb 'confused' (no doubt an overused verb) has been replaced by more attractive verb 'perplexed'. Also, see the word 'complex' has been replaced by more appealing word 'intricate'.

Where can I get colourful verbs from?

Now this is a question which needs to be answered. Well just download a thesaurus from internet.They are available for free , just google it and get it. Thesauruses contain list of synonyms.What you have to do is to identify overused verbs and replace them with vibrant synonymous verbs.

3) Use active voice rather than passive voice-

The benefits of using active voice is that subject comes first and some worthless words are chopped off.Take an example-

"John killed Michael" (active voice)

"Michael was killed by john" (passive voice)

In this example, the subject 'John' comes first and and useless words 'was' and 'by' were cut-off by using active voice.

4) Write 'you' centred content and not 'I' centred-

Although it is not possible to use 'you' focussed content everytime but use it most of the times in your content.You focussed content makes your discussion personal with your blog readers.

Example of 'I' focused sentence- "I will provide you with latest information about blogging on this blog."

Example of 'you' focused sentence- "You will get latest information about blogging on this blog."
Now just judge which statement looks better to you.

5) Don't write useless sentences and words-

I have seen some bloggers talking about their pets, or girlfriend or running nose on their blog.Don't do this.These things doesn't matters to your visitors.Visitors come to any blog in search of information and not to know about your running nose.

Your every sentence should either be an information or an elaboration of an information.

6) Don't preach, demonstrate-

Preaching is like muttering a confounding theory without proofs of whether it will work or not.While demonstration is backed by some solid facts ,citations or images. Evidencing your facts makes you much trustworthy.So, make your points backed by some solid facts, citations and images from trustworthy sources.

7) Be personal while interacting through your content-

Write as if you are talking to your readers.Think how would you have talked with your friend on a particular topic? Use the same sentences as you have used while conversation with your friend.(often with some refinement)

8) Break longer sentences into two-

Longer sentences look clumsy and are often hard to understand. So, break longer sentences into two easily digestible sentences.

9) Be simple and clear-

If you close your eyes, can you visualize the idea behind every sentence? Is every sentence as tangible and concrete as possible? If you can’t wrap your arms around your message, neither can your readers. Rework sentences to ensure they’re clear and concrete.

If you’re struggling to explain a technical or abstract concept, grab a pencil and sketch it. This exercise forces you to simplify and distill your idea and may spark helpful ways to present the concept to your readers.

10) Be a ruthless editor-

Writers often fall in love with their own words.But be ruthless with your words.Cut words, sentences and even an entire paragraph if they are not needed or otherwise not in good shape.Sometimes you may have to delete your entire post and start afresh. But if you are not satisfied with your own writing your readers will not be either.So, just cut cut and cut untill you are satisfied.

Check for grammatical and spelling mistakes. Nothing hurts you more than a bunch of grammatical and spelling mistakes.So, be in the hunt of mistakes while editing your content.

Writing better content for blogs is a time consuming process and needs a lot of motivation. But once you are able to keep spirits up you can be a better writer of blogs. Earlier it takes much time to write a content but as you go on writing the process will become a bit easier and less time taking.

How to Master the art of of Comment making on blogs?

2008-05-16T23:26:00.007+05:30

Is your blog not getting the traffic you have expected? Are you getting occasional or no comments on your blog? Are you blogging without being noticed? If your answer to these questions is 'yes' then probably you have not mastered the art of commenting or haven't commented on blogs at all.

I myself have been a kind of blogger who doesn't care of commenting on other blogs because of time constraints. I started commenting only recently and I can see the results coming as a spike in my blog traffic. Also I have been able to come closer to some of the bloggers of my niche.

I have noticed that not all comments translate into traffic or relationship. But there are some specific types which bring in more traffic and buzz than others.Based on my own experience and after talking to some of the bloggers I have come up with a list of some tips to master the art of commenting which I will discuss in paragraphs that follows.

Be an eager participant rather than just a comment maker-

An eager participant adds value to the post and injects some useful thoughts into the post through his comments. And one who is just a comment maker will write one-liners like, "Great post" or "hey! visit my site example.com" or something similar having no value.These sort of comment do more harm than benefit in long run.It is better not to comment if you have no ideas or thoughts. Commenting just to make comments doesn't help in anyway.

Treat Your comments like very short posts-

Yeah !! Comments are not just thoughts they are actual content and may contain some valuable information like actual blogposts. Just think, if you have to write 5-10 lines on a topic on your own blog what those lines would be? Those 5-10 lines you think off is your comment.Of course, the information you deliver through those lines should be unique.

Remember the words that has come before your eyes million times- 'Content is King'. Producing quality content will boost your blog's reputation no matter whether you are pouring it in your blog or somewhere else through comments.

Don't cross the fine line between being critical and being harsh-

Different people have different views or opinions on a topic. As a blogger I would love to get some critical comments simply because they add a different angle of perception on topic. Most of the bloggers I know don't mind critical comments either.

But criticism should be constructive and should be done in a humble way. Don't bash the blog author with aggressive words.Be polite while presenting your angle.While criticising a point or post as a whole make sure you support your views with some solid facts and citations. A poorly supported critic may bounce back on you and hurt your reputation as a blogger.

Try to build relationship with blog author and readers-

Much of the bloggers success depends on his/her potential to build relationships.Although there are many techniques to build relationship but the best I reckon is to get a bit personal in your conversation.The more personal you become the more chances are there that you will get closer.Be helping and expect or demand nothing in return.

Make your comments stand out of others-

OK you have poured in a great piece of advice or information in your comment but what if it doesn't get noticed.The whole effort will go in vain. Most blog readers read a few comments and then skip others.This is particularly true if a post contains a large number of comments.Let us suppose there are 100 comments on a particular post.Now the readers will not be able to notice all of them if you are not making your comments stand out.

Most of the blogs allow certain html tags ,like, bold, italic etc. Just make your important points bold. Things written in bold can draw the attention of readers as they are easily visible stand out of the things written in normal text.

I think comments are the most potent way of building relationships and network, the most vital thing to become successful blogger. Unlike social bookmarking sites comments help you drive targeted traffic and that is why I think every blogger should learn the art of commenting.

If you have anything to add or otherwise anything to share on the topic you can let me know through comments.I will be more than happy to hear from you.

How To Make Money Using RSS Feeds ?

2008-05-15T14:23:00.003+05:30

RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) has become so popular today and is being referred to by internet users as "Pull" Technology rather than "Push" Technology.

It's difficult to imagine that anyone who logs on to the Internet has not heard of "Spam." Most, If not all Internet users are inundated with these
advertisements, that we did not ask for or request.

For those of you that may not be familiar with the term, rest assured we're not talking about canned meat here. LOL! Rather, it is unwanted advertising from people that we neither asked for or requested to recieve. Spam is "Push" technology. "Pushed" in your face and inbox, wanted or not.

Many believe this brand of "Push" technology is or will be, the death of email. Yet, as long as there are individuals and companies that continue to use the illegal spam process, email will be around for
a long long time. The irony being, companies are raking in millions, selling spam solutions, to people and big corporations, that are Not Working!

RSS, is the Total Opposite of the above "Push" technology. When subscribing to an RSS Feed, subscribers "Pull" information into their RSS Readers and can only be done so if someone voluntarily subscribes to a particular RSS Feed. If they find it's not the information they want, they can simply unsubscribe and never have to recieve another message from the owner of that particular feed. Hence the term "Pull" Technology.

Utilizing RSS "Pull" technology has become a popular source of income for webmasters that use RSS Feeds on their websites. Here's How:

Let's say, you set up a one page mini-site or you could even set up a Blog. A Blog would be a quick and easy
alternative.

You can then host ads from either Google Adsense or the New Yahoo look alike Google Ads. When someone visits
your page and clicks one of your ads, You Get Paid.

If you've followed along and done the steps above, you've created a good starting place. You're going to need to
make sure your pages are optimized properly. This will ensure you get your page ranked high in the search engines.
Like any site or page, the more targeted traffic you get, greater are the chances that someone will click your ads.
Which increases your Income.

Now, by using the power of RSS you increase your pages earning potential. When you add an RSS Feed
to your page, you convert it into an ever changing, dynamic web page. Bringing you an abundance of visitors who, in all probability will return to read it.

Especially if you add 10 or 15 RSS Feeds to your page. You will create a dynamic, ever changing, self updating page. Providing valuable content that readers will want to read, over and over again.

Any web page can be turned into a dynamic web page. Just use the free RSS creator software called "Carp" This is one of the most popular free versions and can be downloaded here: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

After you set the program up on your website and added the proper code to your website, then you will
need to collect RSS feeds that relate to the topic of your web page.

You've got your web page, It's topic is about writing articles. Go to Google News, Get their RSS Feed Code, Insert it into the designated Carp Coding, then make the necessary changes found below: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=writing+articles&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

Same with Topix.net, adjust the code like this: http://rss.topix.net/search/?q=writing+articles&xml=1

Once you've got your web page uploaded, It will automatically pull in fresh content from Google and Topix about writing articles.

Do these things for any web page and watch your search engine ranking soar and also your Income!

How to become a rockstar content writer on blogs?

2008-05-14T17:40:00.006+05:30

One thing that can make you a distinguished blogger is your content. Look out in the blogosphere and you will find that every successful blogger generates high quality content consistently. Because it is content which builds enormous links , it is content that brings lots of traffic to your blog and, it is content and only content which skyrockets your blog readership .In short content is vital for your success as blogger.This is the reason why content is regarded as king.

Creating high quality content is a skill not every one knows. If you are a kind of blogger who is quite serious to generate rockstar content for your blog then this post was specially written for you. Before I start I would like to tell you that creating content requires a lot of motivation and work on your part. But if you are a serious blogger this doesn’t pose any problem for you.

To generate a blogpost of high value a blogger need to follow five points. These five points are-

1) Find topics people are interested in.

2) Research on topics people are interested.

3) Organize the points you have found during researching.

4) Write a very attractive title or headline.

5) Take care during writing content body..

Now I will take each of these points one by one and tell the things in great detail.Let us take the first point here.

Find topics people are interested in-

It is vital to choose a topic in which people are interested. Much of your success as a blogger depends on the people who read you. If they like you and your content, you are successful if they don't you are a failure.This is why a blogger has to respect the interests of the communities. But the question is how one could know what people are interested in? Here I will tell you some ways to get an idea about likes and dislikes of the readers.

1) Through polls- Polls are a very good media to get an idea about the likes and dislikes of people. Just run a poll on your blog and see what people seek from you. If you don’t have good amount of traffic on your blog then results of polls can sometimes be misleading. In such case take a look on the other blogs (with high readership) of same niche and see the poll stats of those blogs.

2)Through forums- Forum is site where people discuss their issues ,problems ,and questions and other members answer the questions.Forums are great place to see what people are interested in.Just look what questions are most frequently asked and the answers of those questions can be one of your posts.

As a blogger you must respect the likes of your audience or you run the risk of being neglected.

Research on the topic people are interested

Once you know the the topic/s of interest your next job is to research the topic. Just try to increase your knowledge base as much as you can. Note down any point which you would like to mention in your post. Forums are again great site to get some content for your blog. You can get some exciting ideas and points from forums. Read some other blogs , websites , journals and books to make your research perfect.

Organize the points you have found during researching

You get a very big list of points while researching the topic. Now the next job is to organize the points. Just rate the points according to importance or sequence (in which points should come) or any other criteria you think will fit best. Organizing the points is often missed by most of the bloggers. Although organizing your point is not that important if you have a short list of points but It would be nice to organize as it makes the task of writing a bit easier.

Write a very attractive title or headline

Although the title contains only a few words but it is the most important part of your content and so, a blogger must pay attention and spend some time on the headline of the content. The title or headline is often written in bigger font and in catching colour , so, it is first part that is noticed by the blog visitors. The title should be regarded as the advertising hoarding of your content.

But the question here is- What a title should be like? Well your title should -

1) Tell what your post is about

2) Contain your primary keyword ( For visibility in search engine)

3) Generate curiosity in reader’s or blog visitor’s mind (Most important)

Just ask yourself how you would describe your post if you have to do it in a sentence or a few words. The sentence you make can be your title often after some refinement. Similarly, incorporating your primary keyword in the title is quite easy to do.But what actually is tough ask is , generating curiosity in reader’s mind. I have some tips to do this although I am not sure if these will work every time.

Well there are variety of bloggers doing variety of things to make the title more intriguing. Many bloggers including me use words like ‘How to’ , ‘Tips’ and ‘Tutorial’ to make title more attractive. Others use the technique of shock, confusion and sometimes big claims. But sometimes these techniques bounce back on you when you don’t live upto the expectations.

Many times I use the actual question asked in some forum or a blog as my title. I have researched on some of the posts and found that the posts with such titles do better than others. You can see it yourself on your blog.

Take care during writing content body

While writing content take care of following points –

Be to the point yet descriptive.

Write paragraphs of 3-4 sentences. Long paragraphs can strain readers eyes and so readers on the net don’t like long paragraphs.

Write your most important points upfront. Readers spend very little time on one site instead they flick between websites like people flick between channels while watching TV. So, you have just a few seconds to convince the visitors. Keeping important points on top can make use of those few seconds.

Don’t copy sentences of other bloggers .If at all you want copy something then copy ideas and relate it in your own unique way. Don’t forget to give credit to the original blogger.

Try to write your stuff in a different way. Remember successful person don’t do different things they do the same thing differently. So, try to be different from others. Even if you are presenting the same stuff, present it in some different way as others.

Write simple sentences and avoid using jargons. Write for everyone rather than for some handful who can understand hefty language and jargons.

Try to throw a joke or two every now and then. This lightens the mood and make reading more enjoyable.

Make use of images and graphs wherever needed. Images and graphs help readers understand the topic you are writing on.

Be personal and original you while writing the post. Write as if you are talking to your readers. Just imagine how you would talk with your friend while discussing the topic and write the same sentences.

One last tip- don’t write when you are angry or frustrated or drunk.

Writing content is an art and only some people are gifted to generate good quality content but of course, if you follow these points you can sharpen the skill of writing on the blog.

If you have something or some point which you would like to discuss ,you are most welcome to discuss it through comments. I will be more than happy to hear from you.

Things to do before writing a blog post

2008-05-13T23:08:00.003+05:30

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeOne of the most important factor which can make you a successful blogger is your content.If you are able to produce quality content and you can do it consistently then there is no reason why you can't become a successful blogger.Furthermore, the quality of your content depends on what you do before writing your post.You select topic , you research and there are much more things you do before writing your post.Here in this post I am going talk about the things you should do before writing your post.

I would suppose that you have already selected a topic to write a post on.If you have not selected your topic ,I would suggest you to take a look at my post on selection of topic.Once you have selected your topic you would prepare yourself to write post.A good preparation involves following steps-

Visit forums and see what questions people are asking on topic.

Research and get answers of those questions.

Organize your findings on the basis of importance.

Research for keywords

Visit forums and see what questions people are asking on the topic you have selected-

This is important as if you are able to answer the questions which is hovering in other people's mind then there is all likelihood that they will appreciate your work just because you are actually answering their queries through your posts.Secondly, you get an idea about what should be discussed in detail and what should be left.

There is a very easy method of finding forums on your selected post through google search.Just type in "your topic"+ "forum" and you will get a list of forums in which people discuss their issues relating to that topic.

Make a list of questions people have frequently asked in the forums.This will give you a fair idea about what people are interested in.

Research to get answers of questions people have asked in forums-

Once you have a list of most frequently asked questions ,you should start your hunt for getting answers of those questions. Research the topic and get as many material as you can on the topic.Scan through some quality websites or blogs, read books and scholarly articles on the topic and make all efforts to get the answers of the questions you have listed.

Write down any point you would like to mention on a piece of paper or MS word document or a text file.Make a list of points that you would mention in your post.

Organize the points you have found while researching-

Most of the people using net don't read the full post but scan through the post. Furthermore, Things on the top of the post are more often read than on the bottom of the post.So, to make an impression and to bind your visitors with your post you need to keep your most important points on the top of the post.

Organize your points according to importance.But to organize your points you have to identify your important points first.In general, answers to the question most frequently asked are more important.Another good criteria is- little known things are more important than more known and widely discussed points.

Research your keywords-

Researching your keywords is necessary because keywords help people to reach to your posts or blog.There is no meaning of a great content when nobody is able to find it.So,researching your keywords before writing a post will be nice and fruitful thing to do.

Think of keywords or phrases which people might use to find you.Make a list of 10 such keywords or phrases and analyse them for search volume and competition.Then pick 3-5 keywords with high search volume and least competition.This is the basics of keyword research.

Writing a post in a blog is like appearing in examination.If you don't prepare well you are likely to fail.So, you must pay attention on the points I have mentioned above in order to keep your preparation tight.Once you prepare well you are able to create quality content.

What is the best time to publish your post?

2008-05-13T22:36:00.004+05:30

Today I was going through one of the posts on bloggerbuster when one of the posts there drew my attention.The blogpost was about the time of publishing the post.Although I knew that blog posting time does affects traffic to some extent but I have never researched on the topic.

According to the facts and research results written there the best time to publish on a blog is 10 am to 2 pm PST (Pacific standard time). This time correlates with the time when online users are most active in US.

If your visitors come from some other part of the world you can calculate the the best time to publish accordingly.These results are based on a research carried out by Jake Luciani and was done by analyzing about 10,000 entries from social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious ,Reddit and Mixx.

While going through the research results I came across an astonishing fact.According to Luciani the worst time to publish your posts is on weekends between 3pm and 5 pm. Earlier most of the bloggers including me were of the opinion of publishing during weekends as less blogs are updated during this time.So, the facts coming out from Luciani's research came as a surprise for me.

But Luciani has supported his point with nice graphs and charts which you can find here.Further details can be found here.

Why your blog need "Top Posts" block in sidebar and how to do it ?

2008-05-12T23:53:00.006+05:30

Many of you would have seen a "top posts" block in sidebar in many of blogs which you have seen.This top post block lists the link of some of the posts which are either most viewed or are most appreciated by the readers. In this post I will discuss about the benefits of having a top post block on a blog and how to make a top post block in your sidebar.

Benefits of listing your top posts in the sidebar-

Listing your top posts has got importance both for your SEO campaign and for readers who reach your blog.

The readers of your blog has the convenience of getting to your most rated or top posts from any of your pages on the blog. As a blogger you must take care of the convenience of your readers. And by making a list of top posts you actuallyfacilitate browsing between your blog posts.
Most of the surfers of the internet are lazy or are in haste. So, they will never make an effort to find good posts on you blog themselves unless you tell them what is worth reading on your blog.The best way of telling about your best posts is to list them in your sidebar as top posts.
Making a list of top posts has a great utility from SEO point of view. Once you place links of your top posts in the sidebar, your top posts get a sitewide link from your blog. This helps your best posts to climb up in the search engine rankings.

I think now you get the point that why it is necessary to list your top posts in your sidebar.But the question here is , How should you do that? Well in the following paragraphs I am going to answer the questions like, What method you should adopt to choose your top posts? What factors you should take into account to choose your top posts? How to decide that which posts should come first and which later in the lists of top posts?

How to choose your top posts?

Although there are many factors which you can take into account while choosing your top posts but original decision rests on you. What you think is more important in this regard. But some of the factors which you must take into account while choosing top posts are-

Number of views.
Average time spent on the post..
No. of comments on the post.
Your personal choice.

Number of views and avg. time spent on the post can be found through google analytics. If you don't have an analytics account I would recommend you to get one. Its completely free.Pageviews and avg. time spent on a post can be valuable parameter in selecting your top post. A post with high pageviews and more time spent can be your top post.

No. of comments on a post is another factor which you should cosider while selecting your top post.A post with more number of comments mean it is being read and appreciated and thus can be one of your top posts.

Most of the bloggers only consider stats such as views and avg. time etc. in deciding their top posts and easily forget their own choices. But I will recommend to include a post which you like in your top posts even if its stats are not encouraging.

You can use any of the above mentioned factors either solely or in conjunction to choose or select you top posts. I use all these factors to select my top posts and will recommend this method.

Should I use a plugin to make a list of top posts if I am a wordpress user-

There is a plugin for wordpress blogs which can make a list of top posts for you. Well this sounds good as you don't have to raise even your fingers to list your posts and the task is done with few clicks with the help of small piece of software.

The main drawback is that this plugin only considers pageviews in deciding your top posts which I think is not good.It doesn't cosiders avg. time spent on the page/ post or comments which I think are valuable parameters. Secondly, the plugin makes use of javascripts to lists your posts which means you will not get the SEO benefits as search engines are blind to javascripts.

My advice would be to refrain yourself from using this plugin and make the list manually with the use of html. This will give you a dual benefit.

So, now I think you will be eager to place a top posts block in your sidebar. Do consider adding top posts on your blog's sidebar if you haven't done so yet.I have just added a top posts block on this blog which you can see on right side of this page.

What you need to be a successful Blogger ?

2008-05-12T06:22:00.003+05:30

Why do you blog? Do you blog to promote your business? Do you blog to support a product or a service? Does your blog have a narrow or broad focus?

Some people blog for personal reasons: they blog to promote a cause like the importance of cancer research. Some people blog to promote affiliate programs or to share their knowledge about a topic. Others blog to promote their home business, to differentiate themselves from the competition or to let people know more about the products and services that their company has to offer.

Regardless of why you blog, regardless of whether your blog is focused on one element of one service or around a network of products and services, you'll find that your blog needs one thing in order to be successful: content.

Without regularly updated content, your readers will not have a reason to keep coming back to your blog. Without regularly updated content, your readers won't be learning anything new from your blog. At that point, no matter why you are blogging, you'll start to realize that you are not accomplishing the goals that you set for your blog.

There are plenty of companies that will tell you what to do to find blog content. They will tell you that, in order to have a successful blog, all you need to do is visit article directories and repost content that's relevant to your blog. The problem is that, when you do this, you're still not offering your readers anything new.

The next group will tell you that, rather than visiting article directories you should look into purchasing private label rights for content. Private label rights content can be eBooks or articles that can be broken down, sold, relabeled with your name or title or that can be rewritten: when you buy the rights, you can use the information.

In theory, private label rights content is only a good investment if you purchase it as a framework, an inspiration for creating something new. Many people however, use the private label rights content as it is. They too, however, do not offer readers of their blogs anything new.

Even if everyone rewrote the content in the PLR articles they purchased, it would still not be original content. Think about it. 100 people buy the same article and each rewrites it a little. Do you think that each of the 100 articles will be significantly different from the others?

Plus, when your readers find only the same information they find elsewhere, you'll quickly find that they don't keep coming back to your blog. The only way to hang onto your readers is to offer them fresh relevant content. In order to provide the fresh relevant content that your readers are looking for, you have two options: write the content yourself or hire someone who will be able to write it for you.

While blogging enables everyone to be a writer, there will be times when you find yourself at a loss for words or too busy to contribute to your own blog. These are the times when you will benefit the most from having a content writer. Your content writer can create articles of the length you specify, using your topics and keywords and provide you with content that is yours and yours alone.

If you're looking for fresh content on a regular basis, there is an additional option. Rather than hiring a content writer to provide an article or series of articles, you could hire a blog content provider who will manage your blog, optimize it for search engines and readers and create fresh content daily.

The right blog content provider can work with you to create a blog that meets or exceeds all of your goals whether you're writing to promote a cause or a business. With fresh, relevant content each and every day, your blog's readers will have a reason to come back again and again.

What is a RSS and how a blogger should use them?

2008-05-11T06:17:00.002+05:30

RSS has been around for more than 10 years but has only recently become popular. RSS provides headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (although versions before RSS 2.0 have been known by other names).

RSS feeds are written in a computer language called XML, a special mark up language much like HTML This means that they have mechanisms included that identify structures in a document. The structures define the content and how that content will be displayed within that document. RSS is what makes big news websites possible: RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to a channel viewer application, commonly called a news reader.

In simple terms, an RSS feed is a system that allows web content to be put into a standard format for viewing through an RSS feed reader. It allows the user to save time and effort by viewing recent content from many different websites, without having to visit the sites in question.

RSS Feeds or news feeds are growing quickly and have become a major part of the Internet but many users don't understand what they are. They allow people to see when their favourite websites have added new content without actually having to go to that web site, this can be done through simple, often free pieces of software named RSS readers.

Using RSS feeds is a great way to keep up to date with the latest posts from your favourite blogs and websites. You can use RSS feeds to get the latest news, weather,or movies, and be able to read them all in one place. RSS gives you the ability to have other websites have up to date, accurate information from you online in seconds. Headline news, technical articles, website updates, security alerts, or your favorite food recipes are just a few of the things that you can syndicate!

Many people set up RSS feeds to update in their My Yahoo, or Google page. You can also use them to keep informed with any groups that you belong to.

Rss feeds also can be used for online marketing very effectively.

If you want to promote your website, using RSS can get your URL listed with all search engines fast and easy. No more waiting weeks for your URL to get listed with search engines, RSS marketing allows this to happen almost immediately. This is certainly a good choice for new web pages that are looking to increase web traffic. Another awesome aspect of RSS marketing is that it can get your web page returned as the number one result for your web pages' most popular keywords.

For example, take a look at these results reported on MarketingStudies.net:
W. Atlee Burpee &nbspCo. (the garden seed people) saw their RSS strategy help them increase November sales by four times from just one trial feed featuring a 'seed of the day'.
USAToday.com reports that their RSS traffic is 'rising month after month by orders of magnitude', even though they are barely promoting their RSS feeds.

The need to provide fresh content is a challenge for most webmasters. Rss feeds are an easy solution to this problem. RSS feeds create a ever changing source of content syndication and need very little maintenance once set up. There are several advantages to using RSS feeds as a source of fresh content to your site.

Fresh content keeps your site visitors coming back and continually adds value to your website. It helps to establish you as an authority in your industry and makes people more comfortable buying from your site. RSS feeds greatly aids your site in obtaining higher ranking in the search engines.

The secret of getting repeat visitors on your blog

2008-05-10T06:06:00.002+05:30

Your blog can be used effectively to get repeat visitors to your blog. As an internet home business owner, getting a person to visit your blog for the first time may already seem hard work, but what do you need to do to entice the same reader to visit your blog continuously. How do you get repeat visitors to your blog? It certainly is not hard work, but it does require a conscious effort from you to learn a few easy yet effective techniques to make this happen. If there is something that I can share with you, it is that if you can succeed in making your new blog visitors feel really at home, well half the work is already done.

First impressions Last

It is a common knowledge that the first impression of an event, a person, or an activity last forever. In internet marketing, this is still valid when your reader visits your blog for the first time. It is important therefore that your blog’s font size is large enough with a good and nice design. If you have a unique design, this is even better and it may lead to a certain branding that people can identity as yours. Remember always that your blog is being read by many readers, not just yourself, so how you personally like your blog to look like may not be that important after all.

Don’t Over Focus On Your Keywords

Many people tend to place too much emphasis on SEO in their blogs as they wish to get top search engine ranking for their internet home business site. It has been an acceptable practice that when you write to repeat your keyword or keyword phrases and sprinkling them throughout the article post. Although this is a good practice to follow and eventually your search engine ranking does improve due to this blogging technique, there is unfortunately a downside to it.

Your readers may eventually get a little bored with your posts and stop visiting your blog. You should therefore try to focus on a narrower topic but mix it with other content to attract your blog visitors, new and old. You should also consider content swap in which you exchange blog posts with other bloggers.

This offers your readers fresh content as well as present a different style of writing too. It is a first step towards getting your repeat visitors to your blog and ultimately to your online business opportunity.

Squidoo Lens, Blog and RSS Feed

There is a relation among your squidoo lens, your internet home business website and your blog. With squidoo, you can create a lens or a free page. This lens consists of various modules that you can choose from. Every module contains a different category such as text, eBay opportunities, Reader Feedback, RSS Feed, Your Tube videos etc. However, many marketers seem to neglect the RSS module.

Simply putting your blog RSS Feed address into this module allows your latest blog posts to appear in your squidoo lens. To create a good lens, it is important to choose a topic that is related to what your blog offers to your readers. It is easy to create a squidoo lens but it is important to make a good one so as to generate free targeted traffic and repeat visitors to your blog.

Blog Frequency

You really need to blog frequently if you want to see repeat visitors to your blog.. The more often you blog the better it is, but I would say you should blog at least weekly. You can also consider blog posts from other bloggers, which provide your readers some variety and a different perspective to your usual work at home business ideas.

You must remember that your visitors subscribe to your blog because they like what you have written, the service you provide and the internet home business ideas your blog offers. So if you don’t blog frequently they may be tempted to just unsubscribe. Remember that your subscribers contribute to your free targeted traffic to your blog, so not only do you need to bring in new visitors, but it is important also to keep those in your subscription list satisfied as well.

Value Readers’ Comments

Your readers’ comments on your blog posts are important and you should review and reply them as soon as they are received. A comment posted by your reader may arise as a result of his agreeing, disagreeing with you or seeking clarification on what’ your have written.

There are some very good techniques that you can use to encourage your internet home business readers to give their valuable comments on your blog. A good blogging technique that I have learned is to engage my readers’ feedback and responses. You can do this by asking a question in your post, usually towards the end of your post. Do remember that writing a blog post is a lot different than writing for a newspaper article, in which you present all possible scenarios of the topic to a very passive audience.

In a blog, you should try to encourage and engage the reader to provide comment and feedback and share his experience on the topic. Inviting participation like this is good for getting your traffic and your visitors. The reader may be interested to find out more about the topic and like to read up on the new responses that are received. Getting high traffic and repeat visitors to your blog in this way is common, if the topic is thought provoking, interesting ant the right blogging technique is used.

5 working tips to write great posts on your blog

2008-05-09T05:58:00.005+05:30

Today, the internet is overflowing with content and there is a growing demand for articles on just about any topic ranging from cosmetics to construction material. However, not everyone can write a good flowing article and people often hire out freelance writers to write articles for them. This is probably why Article Writing in itself has become a fast growing profession that more and more people are taking to for earning a real income.

Here are 5 tips on how to write a great blog post:

1. Attention Grabbing Headline/ Title

It does not matter how well written your article is unless you have an eye-catching headline. Most of the time, when people are looking for information on the Internet, they tend to click on the catchy or inviting headlines instead of the boring and the mundane topic names.

2. Simplify Your Words

It is also important to remember that people who surf the internet come from various backgrounds and are usually looking for some information or the other. So in order to reach out to a wider base of readers, you must try to use simple words that are easy for everyone to read and understand rather than use big words that would confuse readers. Also, when catering to a wider audience, it is important to stay away from technical terms. For example PLR Articles maybe a common term for an Internet Marketer, but it is something that an accountant will know nothing about.

3. Use Short Sentences and Paragraphs

When surfing the web, the attention span of most people is reduced to 9 seconds, equivalent to that of a goldfish. In other words, people tend to be a lot more impatient when reading from a screen as compared to reading from a book. This is why it is important to keep your sentences and paragraph short, simple and to the point. Another way to keep your readers attention would be to use a lot of bulleted points.

4. Make Your Article Conversational

The best way to make your article likable is to break the ice with your readers by using conversational language. To put it simply, try to use the sort of language you are likely to use on an everyday basis. This should make your article feel more personable and your readers will take personal interest in your article because they feel you are talking directly to them.

5. Infuse Your Personality Into The Article

When writing an article, try to inject some of your personality into it as well. For instance, you could mention if you had any personal experience related to the article or if you particularly like something related to your content. You may even slip in a light joke or two to entertain the reader as long as it is funny and goes in sync with your article. Whatever you do, the basic idea is to let the reader know that there is an actual human person who has written the article. Doing so will eventually lead to forge a relationship with your prospects.

To conclude, there are always different approaches to different cases and though you may be able to use all the above mentioned tips in some cases, you can only use one or two of the techniques in most cases. And I am sure you will learn more about how to write a good article as you go along.

How to get more hits on your blog through stumble upon ? (The unethical way)

2008-05-09T01:23:00.006+05:30

Social bookmarking sites like stumble upon are proven way of getting more hits on your blog. But to really get much purchase from social bookmarking sites you have to constantly indulge your self in these sites and be active as long as you blog. But there is a shortcut with stumble upon which I will talk about in this post.

Before I start ,I must tell you that this is the unethical way of getting more hits on your blog but as such, you will not break any rules or violate any terms of services. The trick I am going to tell you makes use of a pitfall in stumble upon which you can utilize to get more hits on your blog.

Now get ready to discover the secrets as I am going to tell you the secret of getting more hits on blog in a stepwise manner.

Step- 1 –

Register yourself for stumble upon with five different usernames. Five is the minimum but if you have enough time you can make as many as 10 or even more accounts. But 5 will also do.

Step- 2 –

Add friends with all your accounts. So, if you add 50 friends with each of your five accounts you will have 250 friends and if you make 100 friends you will have 500 friends through your 5 accounts.

The friends you add should be interested in the niche in which you are blogging.This is important as it will give you the maximum results.It is easy to find interested members if you make the use of tag feature of stumble upon.

Step- 3 –

Just start stumbling your own posts once you have completed making friends. Add your posts to stumble upon through all your five accounts. The unique feature of stumble upon is that even 2-3 stumbles can bring thousand of hits on your blog.This is what this trick makes use of.

The posts you have stumbled will appear on the "pages liked by friends on your friends" page. And that will act as hits on your blog. Furthermore , if any of your friends like your post and stumble it then it will feature in their friends page and so on.

I think the working is quite simple and very effective to get more hits on the blog. Once again I would like to remind that this is unethical way as users are not liking your pages but it is you yourself who is adding your pages to stumble upon. But it doesn’t violates any TOS and rules of stumble upon or any other site. In fact stumble upon allows you to add your own posts and blogs unlike digg and other social bookmarking site.

Blogging Guides is now in club 3

2008-05-09T01:20:00.001+05:30

I am quite excited to announce that the my blog “Blogging guides : Blogging Advice to make money blogging” has got page rank of 3 in the latest update of google pagerank by google. Although pagerank 3 doesn’t sounds good pagerank for a serious blogger but knowing that I am part time blogger and till now I was not really serious for building links , I think this is a great achievement.

Well in this post I have decided to let you know , what I have done uptill now to get links for my blog.

1) I have submitted my blog to about 100 directories in a gradual phased manner.

2) Only occasionly I have commented on some blogs.

3) I have taken part in google groups and left my link beneath every comment I have made.

4) I have linked my blog to my other blogs which I use for researching purposes only.

5) I have internally linked my post wherever I get chance to link.

I think I have not made use many link building techniques like, link exchange , buying links and article marketing. I also need to be more active in commenting on other blogs and in forums which can boost my pagerank and search engine ranking.

Well now I have plans for building links for next three months which I think can implement. Now I have a per day schedule for my link building strategies. In one sentence I am really getting serious for building links which I was not earlier.

Things to do when you run out of ideas to blog

2008-05-06T23:00:00.007+05:30

As a blogger you might have faced the problem of not getting ideas to blog on every now and then. This is specially true if you are around for more than an year or your blog covers a small niche.Although the definitive solution to this problem would be to plan your blogging beforehand and to choose a bigger niche on which you can blog indefinitely but if you get this problem even after planning and good niche choice then this blog entry is written for you.

First of all I must say that don't panic when you have nothing to write or talk about on your blog.This is quite normal phenomenon and occurs with every single blogger sometime during their blogging career.

OK now I will talk about the tips any blogger should follow if he/ she runout of ideas to write a blogpost.

Read your own blogposts you have written months before -

There are very few bloggers who look back to their own posts. Think yourself , how many times you have read your own posts published months back ? Although this will take sometime but this can be fruitful to extract ideas to blog. Once you read out your own post , you get some points you have missed or some updates about the post.

The missed points or updates you notice can be the theme of one of your blog articles.Apart from getting ideas to blog , reading your own post gives you some opportunity to internally link your newer posts with the older ones.

Take a look into the forums and see what questions people are asking -

Forums are very very useful for bloggers as you are able to know what questions are irking people and if you are able to answer them through your blog your work will be appreciated.Just make a list of questions people have asked in forums.

After making a list of questions , see what questions has been answered through one of the blogposts and what questions has not been answered. The questions which has not been answered becomes one of the potential blogpost of your blog.

Read out other blogs of your niche

Many a times I have found ideas for blogging through one fo the posts of other bloggers of same niche as mine. The moment you get something interesting you may write the point on your blog with your own opinion the subject. Here I must say that you must copy the ideas not the word and opinion of other blogger. Be yourself while expressing thoughts on a particular subject.

Have a look at quality article directories

Sometimes I do take a look at some article directories and while browsing through the articles actually I discover some udeas to blog on.This works quite fine for me and I think it will also work for you. The plus point of article directories is that you get multiple articles on multiple subjects which are written by many authors all with their own style.

I would like to emphasize here that don't copy articles from article directories instead write yourself it is good not only for search engine optimization but also for long term success as a blogger.

In short , ideas are there scattered all over place no matter from where you tke it from but always think of ideas or subjects in which people are interested and be original yourself.I would once again repeat one of the things i have said earlier that planning and niche choice will help you not getting burnt out but once you do runout of topics you must take a look around yourself, I am sure something will click in to your mind.

Ten Powerful ways to build links for your blog

2008-05-01T08:32:00.009+05:30

As I have already said in my previous post on link building by post exchange through smorty that link building is getting tougher and tougher for bloggers.In this post I will talk about ten powerful ways to build links. The ways or tips I will talk about here are working pretty fine and most importantly they are free (absolutely free rather!!)

So, without wasting your much of the time I am going to discuss all the points one by one. Here comes the first one-

1) Write quality content which stands out of the crowd-

This is the most powerful way of building links. If you are generating some good quality content and you are doing it consistently other bloggers will give away links to you without you asking for it.

Here I would like to make it clear that not all types of content will give you links. There are some specific type of content which will give you more links than others. In general an updated unique content or a controversial post will bring you more links than other types of post. But while writing a controversial post you must have some solid facts to support your controversial points or it may bounce back on you and your reputation will go down.

2) Tag your internal links with rel=”tag” attribute-

This is very little known technique of building links. The beauty of this tip is that you get oneway link by just adding a code in your internal links.To link to some page you use the code which looks something like this-

To build links you need to use the code like this-

Note that ,I have just added a small piece of code “rel=tag” (in red) to the existing one.

You might be wondering how does it works. Well working of this method is simple. Some of the services like, Technorati ,icerocket etc. allow you to tag your posts.The spiders used by them recognizes rel=tag attribute and indexes them on their pages and this indexed page of yours act as a live link for your blog which is one way and does follow.

3) Make some videos and upload them on sites like youtube-

Youtube can be used to build links for your blog as well as drive some trffic if your video is liked by the users. But here I will talk about link building only. Well once you start uploading your videos on youtube , you have to fill up some form before uploading. In the description of the video you may give a live link back to your blog.

The disadvantage of this method is that you are not able use an anchor text for your link.

4) Guest posts on other blog-

You can write guest posts on other blogs.This is a win win situation as the other blog gets content and you get links for your blog. So, try to persuade other bloggers to write a guest post on their blog.Also, the links you get will be contextual which according to google are more valued than other links.

5) Press releases-

I have not seen many bloggers doing this but believe me this is one of the most advantageous way of building links. If you have anything worth mentioning or announcing to the world then you must consider a press release.It also brings some popularity and some traffic to your blog.

6) Submit your blog to web directories-

Submit your blog to as many directories as you can. This is proven way of building traffic to your blog. There are many softwares available on the net which can submit your blog to many directories at once. But make the process gradual.It is better to submit your blog to a dozen directories at a time than to submit to 1000 directories all at once.

7) Article marketing-

Article marketing is writing some content which others can use on their site or blog with a link back to your blog through the authors bio. This is done through the article directories. All you need to do is write some good articles and submit it to as many article directories as you can. There are several article submitter softwares available on the internet. Just download anyone of those and submit your articles to several article directories all at once.

8) Comment on other related blogs-

Commenting on other blogs is a very time consuming way of link building as to get really profitable number of links you need to comment on hundreds of blogs and thousands of pages. But if it is done regularly on day by day basis it can really build some links for your blog in some months. If you are commenting to get links then you must make sure that links in comments are followed.

9) Be active in forums-

Forum is a place where people share there problems and get answers from other forum user. In most of the forums you are allowed to leave your signature with your blog’s address. So, the more active in forums you are the more links you will get for your blog. But this requires constant motivation for part time bloggers like me.

10) Participate in Groups like google and yahoo groups-

Google groups or yahoo groups is a place where people share their stuff or ask questions to other group members. It is just like forums and thus works pretty much in similar way as forums.So, just participate actively in groups and leave your signature with your blog’s address at the bottom and build links for free.

These are all free way of building links for your blog. But each of these require some active and constant motivation and patience to build some appreciable amount of backlinks. Although these ideas work slowly but they work quite perfectly. If you are about to use these ideas then don’t just expect things to occur overnight but I can guarantee that these tips will work once you are following them constantly.

After 70-291 and 646-204, all those students who have done their 70-649 and 70-620 are automatically exempted from 642-901.