Showing posts with label Blogging Tutorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogging Tutorial. Show all posts

Earn piles of Tip from Making Quality Blogs


Looking for information about blogging? You have clicked the right article. This article will give you tips on how you can earn tip on blogging.

Blogging is the easiest way to gain money over the World Wide Web. It originated from writing hobbies and sometimes used to make it as their career. In many ways, people used blogging to earn much money online.

There are obviously many ways to earn extra money through blogging. You can earn tips from blogging, but how are you going to get tips from it?

The answer is simple. You should give the people reasons to give you tips. This is done by giving the good information, reliable sources and highly entertaining that can make them feel that you deserve to be appreciated. In this way, you will be telling them to give you tips. To make your writings invite readers, you should put everything on it.

Polish your writings by providing them with updates, keep your articles fresh, gives real information and writes interesting topics. It is very necessary for you to do well in your writings to be able to make money in this venture. In these ways, your audience will give you tips without you asking it from them.

Once that you have written a perfect article, you are now ready to promote it. You will need to expose your blogs to sell. Market it by targeting the search engines online. With you quality blogs, make sure you are going to get something from it.

Register in the different blog websites submit your blogs to the different search engines and post it to other people’s blogs. In this way, you are going to invite many audiences through your high quality, informative and entertaining contents of your blogs.

The next step after marketing your blogs, you will be ready for some tips. However, there should be a vehicle to which your audience can tip you. There are heaps of ways to gain money or to receive money payments online. There should be at least one way in which the reader can pay you anytime they want. Make sure that the way they are going to pay you will not give them more time. Very critical way of paying will make your readers think of not paying you anymore.

If you want to earn more tips, you can ask them to pay you in some ways. You can add post after a blog telling that tips are appreciated to fund the blogging services. In either way, you also have to state that the clients’ generosity is also appreciated without sounding like you are in a bad need of money.

Blogging can be so much fun, aside from making it a good business. You are sure to gain a lot of money if you are going to work hard for it. One way of making money is to gain tips from your readers. This will be a good replacement for the work that you have done and for giving them entertainment. By making sure that the content of your blog is of high quality, realistic and informative, you are sure to not only gain money but also positive reputation that can make you famous over the web world.

Get A Free Blog And Increase Online Traffic

If you're merely just browsing the Internet or have a website online, guess what? You will need traffic! Let me give you the definition of Web traffic. The Internet is like a freeway with many lanes and these lanes represent networks people use while online.

The lanes on this traffic Highway are Comcast, AOL, Qwest or MSN. The vehicles on this traffic Highway are millions of people looking for the best exit to meet their needs. These exits are weblogs or affiliate websites. And our goal today is to make our exits more visible than all other exits.

Now when I say I'm going to teach you how to increase online traffic FREE. What I'm actually saying is I'm going to show you how to point more cars to your exit. Now this alone can cost you mega dollars if you have no understanding of a simple technique called "keyword optimization!"

I'm not claiming to know everything or to be the only one with the Holy Grail on how to increase online traffic. But I will show you a simple nontechnological technique to draw FREE targeted prospects to your website. I will keep this short and simple due to time limitations I leave my contact information for more detailed questions.

I want you to know I'm gearing all my information to affiliate products because this is what I prefer to sale. Because with affiliate products there is usually no startup costs. You also receive a free affiliate link from the owner of the product. I usually sale affiliate products from clickBank.com in your spare time check them out it's worth it!

If you have a large advertising budget, it's okay to purchase paid advertising. But this is normally not the case for the beginner affiliate marketer. You see saving time and money is the main objective of the affiliate marketer. Our goal is to advertise effectively for free.

If you are familiar with Pay-Per click advertising which is effective but costly. Visit: Enhanced.com or AdWords.google.com for more pay-per click information. But our main purpose is to get free visitors to your website.

Good (keywords) is where we want to begin. Example: say the product that you are promoting is (apples). This should be your main or primary keyword. But for the beginner seeking free traffic (apples) is to competitive of a keyword. The major guru's have been selling Apple's for years. So you want keywords much easier to compete with. You want to start from the bottom and CLIMB your way to the top.

Climbing from the bottom to the top should be your goal when competing for keywords in your particular market. By targeting keywords with 3 or more words describing (apples) is far more effective. Example: (red shiny little Apple) is more effective than the word (apples).

There are free tools available online that will give you the exact keywords people are using when looking for your product. Freekeywords.wordtracker.com has a free keyword tool that can help increase online traffic to your website. With this tool you can see exactly what people are typing in the Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Alexa search engines.

Or simply type the words "free keyword tools" in any available search engine. Using these tools type in the name of the product you're selling to see what keywords people are using to locate your product. Then analyze these keywords starting from the BOTTOM.

These phrases consisting of 3 or more words are called (Long tail keywords). Remember to increase online traffic your success involves the effective use of "long tail keywords". For a in-depth understanding of effective keyword use visit: goodkeywords.com they have a great free keyword tool available to you.

Finding the right keywords will be fairly easy using these above websites. Now let's change our ugly affiliate website link to a website link that matches our primary keyword. In our above example (apples) was our primary keyword. And "shiny little red Apple" is our long tail keyword.

We just want your affiliate link, in this case ClickBank.com links look like this: http://candyc77.apples.hop.clickbank.net The candyc77 is my affiliate tracking identification code how I get paid!

To make this link more pleasing to the viewers of your website you need to change this link to something more pleasant. By visiting the website http://www.shorturl.com you can get a shorter more pleasant looking affiliate link like this: Apples.2fortune.com for around $1.88 a year.

Now with your effective list of longtail keywords and your new pleasant looking affiliate link. Let's increased online traffic with a Web log, better known as a blog. Go to www.blogger.com or WordPress.com and get your FREE weblog.

I don't have time to explain the awesome advantages of using a Web blog instead of a website promote your affiliate products. The RSS feed advantages are tremendous and you can learn more at whatever Web blog site you choose to join above.

The RSS feed is already installed so you don't have to worry about that, just enjoy promoting your product. And no this one thing,(search engines love RSS feed) Now when promoting your affiliate website with your new Web blog use your primary and secondary and long tail keywords to promote your affiliate website.

Remember to increase online traffic you must start from the bottom if you are sort of new to advertising with weblogs. For example, your primary keyword (apples) is too competitive for the beginner. Your secondary keyword example: (candy apples) is still too competitive for the beginner.

As I stated earlier (Long tail keywords) are phrases with 3 or more words in the phrase. You have a smaller audience using Long tail keywords; but this is where you start for free search engine traffic.

Now with the pleasing URL: Apples.2fortune.com you received from the website: http://www.shorturl.com which disguises your ugly affiliate website link: http://candyc77.apples.hop.clickbank.net which is now plugged into your new weblog. In your blog, describe your affiliate product using your longtail keywords. You will have the competitive edge to increase online traffic using a Web blog, a .com website URL, and long tail keywords.

Now don't forget, you have a little homework by visiting the websites I presented above. The knowledge you can obtain from these websites will help you achieve even greater traffic results. Remember, you have a entire blogging community to present your product to. And if you really want to target your market and increase online traffic visit: http://www.technorati.com click on "Blogs" and search the blog directory.

Find your market and see what others are talking about! There you have it, this is a general guideline, due to time constraints. But if you follow these simple procedures you will see a increase in online traffic. Again using good Long tail keywords and a Web blog will give you an advantage.

By Elizabeth Clark

Article Submitting For Newbies

Article submission is a great resource for increasing traffic to your website and also getting one way links back to your site. There are a lot of article directories on the web that accept articles for a variety of categories.

If you are a good writer with something great to say, then my advice to you is to keep it up because you are very good for this world, I thank you on behalf of all who may never have bothered to tell you personally. But at the same time I warn you to try to keep your articles a little shorter to benefit you and the reader.

Some online businesses are making use of ghostwriters to do the writing for them if they are not capable of coming up with the contents themselves. And these owners are also enlisting the help of other people to do the submissions for them. It can be noted that article submission cannot really be considered a piece of cake.

In addition to submitting your articles to the best article submission sites, you should also submit them to a number of directories that are related to your niche. Normally, these sites will attract people that are actively looking for information on a particular subject. If you are promoting a product or your website, this is a very good place to submit articles to generate interested prospects.

If you would like to make article marketing truly profitable, you need to write numerous articles. Remember, the number of your articles equates to the number of links you obtain for your site.

Many experiences reveal that the best approach to ensure that your articles will be listed is that you do not insert the affiliate links in the body of article. Most major and well-known article submission directories do not allow inserting the affiliate links in the article. They allow you to include your affiliate website, not direct affiliate links.

Every web site needs traffic or number of visitors to be visiting their pages day in and day out, every single day. This is more so, if the web site is for business purposes and the owner expects to attract customers and generate revenue from the exercise. Article publishing is a cost effective method to increase the traffic to your web site.

There are thousands of companies and their sites are used to promote them. Some are lucky enough to make their position to the top rank of the search engines and some get lost in the Cybercafe Ocean with abysmally low ranking positions where customers don't even view them.

You will need to know whether your articles are being read or not, if they are, are they being read by the right people, who might turn out to be potential customers? Keeping track of your postings will help you configure a good article and also know what to post and how to post. At times the process is everything.

Writing an article depends on your research and writing skills. However, article submission to numerous article directories is a manual and tedious task. Rather than be bogged down, there are now good automated article submission software that can do the job. Find out more about article marketing and the most value for money article submission software at my blog.

Get a reliable automatic article submission software. If you don't want to spend so much time manually posting your articles to hundreds of article submission sites and directories, you can invest on a submission software that can distribute your articles in just minutes.

Don't be too conservative in using hyperlinks on your resource box as most publishing sites will allow you to use a maximum of three. Take advantage of this as this can potentially help you increase your conversion rate and drive more people to your website.

Your article submission will reap visitors, so make sure you keep your website content easy to read as well as relevant and useful to your viewers. When search engines decide who to give the highest ranks to, they look at and weigh a few different factors.

Play by the rules. The submission criteria of each article directory is unique, so be familiar with the guidelines of the publishing sites and follow them. Your articles are of no use if they are not even accepted by the publishing sites.

So why submit articles to the article directories? We all know that the submission of well-written articles is an excellent means to build the reputation of oneself and one's site as the authority in a particular online niche. Article Marketing is also one of the best methods for generating qualified leads to your website.

By Green Buggy

A Massive Boost to Your Web Site Traffic Today

Yes you can boost your website traffic this very day. And I don't mean necessarily by using pay per click methods which can be expensive. There are other things you can do.

Blogging - do you own your own blog? If not you can set one up today for no money at all by using www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com and start getting links to your site. Some of those links will generate their own traffic, so the trick is to get the word out about your post. What do you do is write a post with keywords related to your topic or niche, and then use the ping services to get the word out. Try using www.pingomatic.com and www.pingoat.com that will send your link out to lots of blog directories and sites. Traffic will grow the more you do it.

Forum posting - there is a forum out there for most subjects and you can usually join for free. To find them just search on Google for your keyword plus the word forum. You can't blatantly promote in your forum post but if you write sensible posts, offer help and advice you are likely to get people check out your site and this can happen for free on the same day.

Writing articles - some of the article directories review your article before they post it to ensure quality and some don't, and that means you can get an article with a link to your web site showing within a few hours. Other people pick up on them and use them for content on their own sites and all the time your link is in the author bio box pointing to your site.

Digg it - Digg is a great site with high page rank and high traffic. Boost your own traffic today by placing links to all of your website pages. If you don't have a web site then set up a free blog and point traffic there.

Email your list - you should have your own list as they know you, trust you and hopefully will listen to you and look at what you have to say. I know some people that have lists of over 60,000. When you have built this up it is easy to get traffic to your offer whenever you want - just don't email them too often.

Joint Venture - not always possible in a day but sometimes it is. If you receive a newsletter from another website in your niche then why not see if you can offer something of interest to them and their customers. Preferably this would be something you would do to offer some value - a free report, a product to sell and you would share the profits with the list owner. Some people have 1000's on their lists and this is a good way to increase the traffic to your web site.

By Paul Turner Marketing.com

Part Three Of A Blogging Masterclass

By Rob Pike

More Traffic Sources

Getting links from other websites is not the only way to attract visitors to visit your blog. This time, we are going to explore alternative methods to attract high quality traffic with both free and paid methods.

The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to recycle all the content you have written on your blog. What I really mean is to turn your blog posts into little "manuals" or articles that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to article directories. These article directories are like aggregators that collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day.

When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On most article directories, you are also permitted to include a "resource box" where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. This is where you can truly leverage the traffic of the said article directories.

Some good article directories to get you started are www.eZineArticles.com, www.ultimatearticledirectory.com and www.submityourarticle.com.

Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that is based on your niche. To find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter " +forum", without the quotes. You would want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members, and preferably always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum.

When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to append a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others' as an affilliate since they are already convinced you're an "expert" in the field.

The strategy we'll discuss is word of mouth. Let's say you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift and posted it on your blog, saying that if a certain visitor can refer three of his/her friends to visit your blog the gift will be his/hers for free? If your small report or gift is lucrative enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will surely refer their friends to this blog that they frequent!

You can also utilize the "blog and ping" technique that everyone's talking about. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as www.technorati.com know by pinging them. You can ping a lot of portals at once by using the free www.pingomatic.com.

Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space. A thing to keep in mind when buying paid traffic is to always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads. If your profits do no offset the expense, you will end up losing money, so choose wisely.

Monetizing Your Blog

You have been working hard to produce good-quality, original content on your blog and you have attracted a decent amount of traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.

There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google's Adsense programme allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You'll find out more about their advertising programme there, but here are some extra bits I'd like to tell you.

First, Google's Adsense programme is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do on your blog. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. Ka-ching! You've just cashed in on your first virtual cents!

But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don't "do it right". This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the "heat map" of your blog. The "hotter" a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.

Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog's text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It's that simple.

Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don't have to create your own products or services.

Anyway, let's refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let's say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant's website, and they offer an affilliate programme. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.

If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.

Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog's theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for +"affiliate programmes". Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche. The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We'll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!

More Monetizing Options

We've discussed about using Google Adsense programme and other merchants' affiliate programmes to generate profits from your blog. However, we have a lot of other options ot monetize your blog, so we're going to look into that today.

The first option we'll be looking at is Chitika (www.chitika.com). Chitika is a very innovative contextual advertising programme because it can serve very detailed advertisements. For example, on your technological gadget blog, Chitika will show advertisements for tech gadgets such as iPods. The way they show it is in different tabs: one for "Best deals", another for "details", another for "reviews" and so on. This way, it is more of an informational section for your visitor rather than an advertisement, and naturally the click-through will be higher. You can apply here: https://chitika.com/application.php?type=mm

You can also be an affiliate for Amazon.com. Amazon offers a wide range of products but its predominant domain is in books. Whatever your niche is about, you can probably find a book about it on Amazon.com. Join their Associate programme here: https://associates.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html/

Once you join them, you can refer visitors to them and earn up to 10% commission. It's not a lot but if you can manage to refer big volumes of visitors, Amazon is for you. This programme really shines when it comes to the ways you can refer visitors: you can use their predefined templates to pull up recent items that match a certain criteria you set, you can target your ad to show a specific item on sale or you can just simply weave your referral links into your blog posts.

Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs like http://xiaxue.blogspot.com. That blog receives over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog's owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog popularity. To gauge how much pageviews and visitors you get everyday, just use the free tool available at www.statcounter.com. They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won't go into it.

If your blog has not acquired large amount of visitors yet, you can still sell ad space on your blog on a per click or per impression basis. Just visit sites like www.adbrite.com. For a complete list of these sites, visit http://performancing.com/node/60.

Hopefully, that will help you maximize earnings and profits from your blog!

Interactions Between Blogs

As your blog's content increases, people in your niche will definitely mention you for intelligent or interesting discussions. This is, in a sense, an initiation of an interaction. When people speak of you, you should thank them for the mention and build up the interaction! When you use a traffic tracking script such as the free www.statcounter.com, you can see where traffic comes from. If a large number of visitors come from a certain blog, you can be sure they have mentioned you in their latest post or linked to you from their sidebar or links page.

What you should do is pay them a visit, leave constructive comments on their posts and build up a conversation! As you continue doing this, you will start to gather a lot of friends in your niche. This is helpful later on when you decide to do collaborations such as interviews. In fact, when you're out of ideas for writing on your blog, you can interview other blog owners in your niche! Human beings are curious creatures, so naturally they would like to know more about a person whose writings they read so often.

If you're using Wordpress, Textpattern, MovableType or any other advanced blog engines, you can also post trackback links on your posts. This means you can post an article about what other people have posted! Your particular post will then appear as a link on that post you have written about. This is definitely a great way to get traffic if you post brilliant insights about a post on a very famous blog.

Since the famous blog already has a pre-existing pool of readers, this is like a shortcut to hog their visitors! The only thing you would want to observe is to keep your posts sensible and insightful, or you'll be viewed as a spammer.

On the other hand, if you're using Blogger, you would not be able to use trackback links. However, you can post insightful comments on other people's blogs and subtly include a link back to your blog. You can make it seem like you're pointing to your blog as an extra reference to the subject of discussion. Of course, this technique is not only limited to Blogger users and users of other blog engines can employ this strategy as an additional traffic source.

Finally..

Is blogging for you or even for everyone? I guess it all depends on how we define blogging. For instance, if we include social network blogging, blogging is indeed for you and for everyone, as a good percentage of Internet users operate some form of social networking blog. Currently, over 60 million people in the United States alone do that with Myspace.

So is blogging for you or everyone? If we consider commercial endeavours, it certainly is not for everyone. Only about 7% of Internet users operate blogs for commercial purposes.

The question of "is blogging for you or everyone?" also applies to entrepreneurs. Blogging can be an excellent tool for an entrepreneur - especially those who are sole proprietors looking for a good and inexpensive venue for promotion, but that doesn't mean that everyone should necessarily do it. In some instances, a private forum will be a better means of recorded, Internet-based communication between a group of people. In other instances, a website will require less maintenance and will be a better stand-alone traffic puller, especially if the would-be blogger does not have the time to constantly update and promote a blog.

However, there definitely are a number of good reasons to blog. One of the best reasons is that it's really easy. Building a good website can take hundreds of hours. This is not so with a blog. With a blog, you can simply open up an account with Blogger and begin posting. No coding or HTML-editing is required. You don't even need to learn how to use WYSIWYG program - or how to upload your uploads to your website.

So is blogging for you or everyone? It isn't for everyone, especially if we're considering commercial blogging; some people don't own businesses, have nothing to promote, and have no interest in starting. But there's a good chance blogging is for you if you want to a low cost means of promoting your business. It's cheap, comparatively easy and quick to start.

Part Two Of A Blogging Masterclass

By Rob Pike

On Page Search Engine Optimization

Now, you should have a blog full with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless factsheet.

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can't generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information. Simple enough.

However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com, to name a few more popular ones. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, but that doesn't stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as "fat loss", but I'll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let's determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you'd want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don't think so.

Now, let's try to narrow down our scope. Let's look for "technological gadgets" instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That's more manageable, but you'd like to search for more focused keywords. However, let's optimize your blog for "technological gadget" just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you're optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like "Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!" would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when you're creating it. If you're proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML!

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you're optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the
and
tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, "technological gadgets"). Since we're posting a blog, the
and
tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words "technological gadgets" in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic.

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you're writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you're spamming and drop your ranking further down into oblivion So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!

Offpage Search Engine Optimization

We've already optimized our blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we're targetting, but here comes the sad news - it affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, don't skip this step as every little bit helps when you're competing for search engine rankings!

Now, we're moving on to offpage search engine optimization. That is, factors that are not on your blog but affect your search engine rankings very greatly. There are a lot of offpage factors, but we shall study them one by one. The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog.

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like the Feds storming a crack den

Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for it. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information to the site's readers, chances are the webmaster(s) will link to your blog or even write about you!

Let's talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to link to your blog. We're discussing this based on the presumption that your blog is really content rich and offer high quality information to anyone in your niche or topic of discussion. The most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster.

First, let's look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that you're targetting. In this case, let's search for "technological gadgets". The first few results, www.t3.co.uk and www.acarplace.com/brands/gm/gadgets.html are commercial sites, so don't bother asking. We're looking for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Seems like www.gizmodo.com would be a good option!

So, compose an email to the webmaster of www.gizmodo.com (whose email address you shall find on the site). They even have their AIM contact there, so it's also a good choice if you use AOL Instant Messenger. Start by stating how you came across their site (i.e. "looking for gadget information", NOT "looking for link partners!") and how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really good about their site honestly.

Then, suggest that so-and-so content on your own blog will be a nice complement to their site's content and vice versa. Put a link on your blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to weld a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and your blog.

Along the way, you might find people who won't even respond to your email, so forget about them and move on. Remove the links from your blog to their site if they have not responded to your email within two weeks, which is a pretty long wait.

Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up, and before long you should have quite a few good sites all linking to you. In the next article, we shall explore further the more advanced offpage factors, and ways to improve them!

Offpage Search Engine Optimization II

In the last part, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we're going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain "high quality" links. We're also going to talk briefly about Google's PageRank.

First, let's examine a regular link. It's a piece of text (or image, but we're going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are1) The address which it links to2) The text of the link3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let's analyze this information one by one. First, you'd naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog's home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let's say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says "Barbie dolls" and links to your blog. Doesn't make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms "technological" or "gadget", it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it's essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google's PageRank. It's basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google's robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google's search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google's robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog's PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targetted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine results.

Part One Of A Blogging Masterclass

By Rob Pike

Setting Up Your Blog

Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.

In this article, we are going to look into the profitability of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on!

First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options - host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let's talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com. If you are a techie, you must have heard of Wordpress, a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google's radar faster and you will be indexed faster. Wordpress.com, however, is a relatively new option so I have no comparison on the speed of getting indexed by search engines. However, Wordpress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Here are a few common "blog-related" words to help you out:

1) Permalink - Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

2) Trackback - When you post about someone else's blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their "trackback" section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.

3) Pinging - Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

Blog content

Now we're going to discuss the type of content that is suitable for your blog in order to make it profitable. First off, I want you to understand that there is no fixed scope that your blog should have, which means you can write about whatever you're interested in.

However, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable blog is the way the blog is written. Just imagine, would you prefer to read your university professor's lecture notes or the latest novel by your favourite author?

You may prefer to read the novel because it appeals more to your interest, or because it is not as mind-numbing as the lecture notes by your professor. However, the most important point is people like to read "light" stuff most of the time. You see, when people log on to your blog, they are not only looking for information - they are also looking for information they can obtain easily, and better still in a relaxed manner.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current visitors coming back for more, it is very important to add a human touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining you're talking about a certain topic with your personal friend. An extra bonus for your readers would be a great sense of humour, so try to add funny comments in your articles where they are suitable.

Another important key point is to avoid addressing your reader as a plural unit. What I really mean is you should not write as if you're preparing a speech. Instead, you should write as if you're having a conversation to a single person because this will make your visitor think of you more as a personal friend rather than a person of higher authority.

Besides that, it is also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. Human beings are very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you're offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog would make a world's difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately remember your blog's name when they need to find out information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald's for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

So, the lesson for now is to simply write as an equal friend to your visitors, write to them as if you're talking to a single person and establish your own personality on your blog.

Blog Content Brainstorming

Face the fact - your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Hence, you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we're going to discuss how to do just that in this article.

We have discussed how to write attractively, so now we are going to discuss what we are going to write on. The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate and interested in. You've chosen to make blogging your career because you want to escape a mundane job - forcing yourself to write about something that you're not interested in is as torturous as as your mundane job!

The other reason I ask you to write about something you're passionate about is because your feelings and emotion shows through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it's only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally reach your full speed. Then, it'll take a lot of effort to stop you instead!

However, no matter how well you know your topic, your brain is bound to get exhausted over some time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

1) The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

2) Once you've established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you'll have quite an unexhaustible "conversation" ongoing, so you'll not need to actively search for content to write about. However, if you're still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.

3) You can also have conversations with people with the same interest as you in the particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don't join every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day (or more if you have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you extra traffic.

Don't worry about generating traffic and search engines, because we're going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like that of a locomotive!

To Join a Blogging Site or Not to Join

by: S Chan


Joining an established blogging site like live journal or blogger has plenty of advantages, especially for the blog novice. Sites that host a lot of different blogs often have very useful tutorials about building and updating your blog, and you are likely to encounter a very user-friendly software interface at an established blogging site. In addition, these sites provide a kind of instant community of fellow bloggers who can provide advice, insight, and feedback. These established sites often keep directories of their members, which can be great news for your traffic logs because it means that other bloggers on the site will find out about your pages.

However, there are also some downsides to linking up with a large blogging site. By posting within the established templates of a site like blogger, you run the risk of having your blog look and feel like everybody else's. The blogging movement is very much about the creation of distinctive sites and the development of individual voices, so it makes plenty of sense that many
bloggers would shy away from the cookie-cutter look and feel that these blogging sites often promote. Many bloggers feel that the content of a blog is what makes it distinctive, not the look of the blog, but many members of the blogging community feel that the visual impact of a blog should match the originality of the writing.

Visit http://mmodiary.com a social network and blog website for people who enjoy mmo games. Free blog space with the ability to change how you want it look and more.

Blogging How to do it..

by: Seo Writter


We usually create blogs for fun, to earn money and sometimes to promote other sites. But, do you really know how to blog? How to do it right for your blog to rank good on the Search Engines?

On this article, I will state some tips and tricks on how to create a blog that will surely rank in SE's in a longer period of time. Those tips that I usually read from SEO forums that most web masters said.

I know blogging is a very exciting thing to do on the net. To think that you earn from blogging and get to know different people from different part of the world.

The first thing that we bloggers need to know on how to do right in blogging is what's your blog all about? What are you going to post on your blogs that can make readers be interested to read more. After spending several hours on thinking on the right niche for your blog you must think of the best title for your blog. You can make some list of titles you want and sometimes bloggers uses some tools for them to have different lists of titles for their site. Then, you also need to choose the right platform that you think you can easily manage. Blogger and Wordpress are some of the most popular platforms with lots of free templates available on the web.

Next, after choosing the right title for your blog you will start writing articles to be posted on your blog. Reading other blogs with same niche as yours can makes you more inspired and for more ideas. But, make sure not to copy other peoples articles. Your articles should be interesting and informative for the readers to continue reading it.

Many bloggers want there site to be visible on most of the search engines. If you also want to do that create an article that is keyword rich. You can include keywords on your title and also on your post but make sure the title will not be longer than 10-12 words.

Posting more often can makes your readers become more interested to your site because they learn different things everyday. Make sure to allow comments on your blog for you to be able to know the feedback of your readers.

You can also do some link exchange to make your site more popular. There are directories that offer free submission and also some social bookmarking. If you have a little budget for your site and submit your site to a paid directories make sure not to lose that directory all a sudden because that may cause your site to drop its ranking.

Other than that, if your site started to climb up and more and more visitors are visiting your site. You should avoid changing your website specially re-designing it. Because it has a big effect on the rankings of your blog. Nowadays, google has a filter for those site that changes more often. If you change your site, your site will be temporarily filtered by google.

You should also avoid spamming, the use of cloaking, hidden text and doorway pages are some of the spam techniques that can makes your site be penalized. And also make sure your server is up and running smoothly.

Those are some tips and tricks that you should do in Blogging. There are so many things that you need to learn if you really want to have a website that rank good in different Search Engines such as MSN, Yahoo and most specially Google.

Now that you know how to blog and how to do it right you can now start blogging.

6 Things to post on your blog when you're running out of idea

by: Dulce Azogue

There is no doubt that blogs are the “it” thing today in the online world. Wherever you surf, blogs are sprouting everywhere like mushrooms, whether they’re used for personal or business purposes. But for starters, what is a blog anyway? It is a diary where you can post your thoughts or feelings or whatnots, except that it is online and the public can read it. But enough of that. Gone were the days when they were used solely for personal reasons. On the business side, they can be a very useful tool to boost your business, and to keep your customers updated on the products and infos you have. But if you’re still struggling to catch up on the latest thing these days and you think you’re not much of a great writer either, let me give you some useful subjects you can write about to give your customers a lot of reasons to keep coming back to your site.

1. News. Okay, so maybe that’s basic. After all, your company or business is the reason you put up a blog, right? Write about the products you sell. Give them a bit of the benefits your potential customers might get for buying them, with a link back to your main site to read the entire sales letter. You can also write about updates to your product. Post news about the industry you’re in. If you’re selling products that help people get better search engine rankings, write about search engine news. Or, if you or your service has been featured on TV, papers, or notable websites, write about it. Don’t forget to post seminars or gatherings where you’ve been invited.

2. History of your business. Maybe this one has already been in your main website, but who cares? People forget it. They come and go and chances are, when they visit your site, they don’t read it. Write about how you began, the reputation and achievements you’ve earned, and the accolades or awards you received, with a link back your site. That way you’ll let them know why they should buy from you, and that you’re a real person who’s building a reputable business. Add some employee’s profile if you have someone working for you, too. If you have nice traffic or site stats, that’s also worth mentioning.

3. Customer’s feedback. When a raving customer emails you about how your product has helped him, share it in your blog. You’re giving your visitors a compelling reason to buy from you.

4. Site of the week / month. Mention a site that doesn’t compete with you but complements to your won. Explain to them why you like it, and why it deserves your accolade.

5. Contests, surveys, trivia, questionnaires. If you’re running a contest, post it in your blog to encourage visitors to join. Get their attention by including the prizes, a bit of the rules, with a link back to your site for more information regarding it. Or put a survey. That could give you information regarding the product you’re selling, as to how you could develop it further.

6. Tip of the day. Write about a new tactic you developed or something you learned and perfected.

So there. Whatever your business is, no doubt there’s always something you’ll definitely want to write about. Give it a try. And it will reward you soon.

About the Author

Dulce Azogue is a work-at-home with two kids. Visit her website where you will learn how to unleash the power of a blog and use it to its full potential to boost your business and make you money. Get your FREE information now at http://www.getintogoogle.info/bloginabox/index.html
and download your FREE gift. You can also email her at shem@getintogoogle.info