Search Engine Optimization For Blogs

Blogging software is really a simple Content Management System (CMS) that easily adds new pages and integrates them into your site's navigational structure and linkage.

Blogs and blog posts are naturally search engine friendly because they are text-rich, link-rich, frequently-updated webpages that use stylesheets or CSS, and have very little extraneous HTML. Optimizing a blog is very similar to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post similar to optimizing a web page. But depending on the blogging service or software you use, the results may look somewhat different. If you follow some simple rules for search engine optimization, your blog can rank much higher than static website pages in the search engine results pages. Here are the most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice. 1. Use your primary keyword in your blog domain Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. For example, if you want your blog to get found for the keyword "rss" get a domain with the keyword "rss", or use the keyword in a subdomain as in http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/rssnews/ Getting a domain name with your own name might make for good branding, especially if yours is a personal blog. But if you're doing it for business and want the targeted traffic to flow your way, keywords in the domain or subdomain are a move in the right direction. 2. Use your primary key phrase in your blog header tags and the title of your posts If your primary key phrase is "business blogging" make sure that the word business, or blogging, or both, appear in your blog headers (the H1 or H2 tags) as well as the title of each of your posts. Most blogging software will take the keywords in your post title and put them into the file name of the permalink posts it creates. For example, if you have a blog on Blogger and title your post "Search Engine Optimization For Blogs", Blogger will automatically create a page with your post and name the file "search-engine-optimization-for-blogs.html" or something similar. With other server-side software like Wordpress and Movable Type, you may require the mod_rewrite command to save the title of your entries as a permalink. 3. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post and pepper your blog titles or links with them appropriately. Don't overdo this or your posts will end up sounding unnatural and spammy to readers. 4. Use your keywords in the anchor text of links Keyword in links have more importance than simple text. Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages on your main site. Link keywords where they naturally appear in the body text, but again, don't overdo it, or you'll end up with spammy looking pages. 5. Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily Set up your blog so that the side navigation bar is present on all pages. Make sure your archives and previous posts are accessible from all pages of your blog so they get spidered easily. 6. Get backlinks from other blogs or websites Links pointing to your blog or posts are essential to build pagerank and make your blog rank higher in the search engine listings. I've seen many people recommend Blogrolling as one method of building links to your blog. BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal. http://www.blogrolling.com But all this service actually does is give you a bit of javascript code that "calls" the links. As far as search engine rankings go, this method of linking is of little use, because spiders can't read external javascript code. Instead I recommend that you focus your linking efforts on the methods here. * Submitting to Blog Search Engines and Directories: Submitting your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories is essential for getting high-quality links back to your blog. Here is the best list I've found of places to submit your feed or blog. Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ * Link Exchanges: Many similarly-themed blogs are often willing to exchange links with other blogs and form richly interlinked networks or communities. Link exchanges with other blogs are easy to implement with most blogging software. * Trackbacks: You can also get links back to your blog using trackbacks. One of the disadvantages of using Blogger is that it does not automatically create trackback urls that others can use to link back to your posts. Haloscan is a free service that will automatically add comments and trackbacks to your Blogger blog. http://www.haloscan.com But if trackbacks are an important component of your linking strategy, I would advise using another software or system that adds this feature automatically. * Comments: You can also get back links to your blog by posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs. 7. Update frequently There's no better food for search engine spiders than fresh content. Post and update your blog frequently using all the rules outlined above and there's no reason why your blog will not get you top rankings in a short period of time. 8. Stay put Once you create your blog, try to stick to the same domain and blog host or system for as long as you continue to publish. You could end up losing a lot of your traffic, your readers and all your search engine listings if you decide to move. For more ways of building traffic to your blog, read the article "How To Build Traffic To Your Blog." http://www.blog-maniac.com/build-blog-traffic.htm

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Making Money With Your Blog

I’ve sure you’ve heard before that it’s a possibility to make money with your blog and you may be wondering how this is possible. And were they really meant for making money or just for journaling your personal thoughts? I’m not sure what they were intended for but they are great ways to make money.

I have a personal blog which is just my own private little place to go online and jot down my thoughts, but I also have my business blogs. Back In The Beginning Now to be honest with you in the beginning of my blogging experience I really wasn't sure what I should do with my blog. I knew I wanted to make money with it, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what I could do to not only be a value to others so they would come back to my blog, but that I would still enjoy writing it. So it was really important to me that I find a topic in which I would be excited about, and have enough to offer so that I could blog every week or so. After starting a blog that was meant to just be an add on to my business at MommysPlace.net and struggling with the direction of that blog, I came across one of Alice Seba’s blogs. Which she used to write about her experience through a traffic product. Every couple of weeks or so she would update her progress through this course. She would tell us all about her successes with this product and how great it was for her business. And it made me think of how I could do something similar. Product/Service Focused Blog This is when the light bulb moment went off in my head. This is when I realized what I should have been doing all along. I have been a member of a exclusive coaching program for mothers in business. Since joining this program my business has seen great success. My income has increased more then five times what it was before I joined and my traffic has increased even more then that. I enjoy and believe in this coaching program and it happens to have an affiliate program. I often got email from other work at home mothers who wanted to know my thoughts on this program. Taking a cue from Alice’s blog I decided to start my own such blog. And named it http://MomMastermindsJourney.blogspot.com - okay, not a catchy title, but I'm no good with picking names I used this blog for the purpose of documenting my successes with my business. My projects, new content added to my website, keyword phrases I was ranking for…etc. Basically anything that had to do with my business, that was directly or indirectly because of my joining Mom Masterminds, I jotted down. Not only was this the best move I could have made for my promoting this affiliate link it also served as a great way to really see for myself the successes my business was achieving and also to keep me on track. This is one way you could make money with a blog. There are other ways you could make money with a blog if you don’t want to devote a blog to one service or product you’re promoting. Side Kick Blog For instance, my blog at http://www.mommyworkingvirtually.com is a side kick to MommysPlace.net and my forums. This is a blog in which I update my members on additions to the website, newsletter and forums. Updating any important telecommuting or business news and can promote my adsense and any other affiliate programs. So this blog serves more then one purpose. My main goal with this blog is to get traffic to certain sections of my website. I have a large website and it’s not always easy for people to find my information. So this is a great way for me to keep certain new pages or sections of my website in the public eye and get traffic to those pages. It also serves as a way to make money with adsense and affiliate programs. And lastly it gives exposure to my forum and my newsletter. There can be many ways and many topics in which you can make money and gain exposure to other businesses you may have or can help in creating you as an expert in a certain field. Just take the time to really think about what you could be writing about and then how you can make money with that as well. You can take a look at others blogs to get an idea and see what other people are looking for. Making Money With Your Blog - Resources: Blogs to Riches- is an ebook that details ways you can make your blog profitable. And the really cool thing with this is if you list the publishers link on your blog for 45 days he will give you this ebook for free! If you don't want to wait that long you can also purchase it for a low price. Read more about Blogs to Riches - www.blogstoriches.com Increasing Adsense - is an ebook about how to increase your adsense revenue. This ebook isn't specifically geared towards blogs, but the information you will learn you can use with your blogs. (As well as websites and forums...anywhere you have adsense.) www.adsense-secrets.com * Don't know what adsense is? Go to www.google.com/adsense to learn more. Ready To Blog? Are you ready to take the leap into a blog? If so, it’s really very easy to set up a blog. The one resource I have used for all my blogs has been blogger.com. This is free, easy, and fun. There are many templates to chose from and you can customize yours if you would like. I have used the general template for my mom masterminds blog and I have customized my http://www.mommysworkingvirtually.com blog with different colors and fonts then what it came with. I also have that hosted on my own domain, but you certainly don’t have to do that. Submit Your Blog After you create your blog you will want to submit it to blog directories to help get your blog out in front of the public. Some of the directories you can try are: BlogWise - http://www.blogwise.com Blog Search Engine - http://www.blogsearchengine.com Blog Hub - http://www.bloghub.com Blog Daisey - http://www.blogdaisey.com Get Blogs - http://www.getblogs.com Is Blogs - http://www.lsblogs.com Feeds Next, you need to add feeds to your blog. What is a feed? Good question. I don’t know the exact way to describe a feed nor do I have a lot of valuable information on this subject. This is still very new to me, but I can tell you briefly what a feed does. You add a little graphic to your blog. It can be for someone's yahoo page, msn page and other ways. When they click on that they can add your blog to their personal yahoo page. Then every time you add a new post they are alerted on their yahoo page that you have posted AND it even shows the topic of the post and how long ago it was posted. This is one of the best resources I’ve found in keeping people coming back to your blog. They can subscribe to it so easily and they will be automatically updated whenever you have posted. It’s pretty easy to add an RSS feed to your blog. The resource I personally use is at www.feedburner.com Watch Out Blogging World - Here I Come! Now, see how simple this really can be? You can make money with a blog, gain exposure for another business or websites, can create yourself as an expert on a certain topic, can create a blog for free, get it listed for free and start an RSS feed for free! Now get out there and start blogging.

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The Future Of Next Generation Weblogs

In the earlier days having a blog was an instant hit. People who embraced writing web logs from the beginning, did get a lot of extra exposure. Now the mass is jumping on a train which already left the station some time ago.

The success of the first blogs explained

The first blogs on the web were non commercial and that was the first ingredient for their success. Second, web logs are quality content and can be made really easy. As we all know search engines like Google really love good content. The first blogs could be on top of search results in mayor search engines like Google in a matter of days, where other (big) websites struggled to get the same result in years. This could happen because web logs contain loads of text which is related to quality content. Other traditional websites tweaked their sites with tricks that did not compete with the awesome power of blogs: honest quality content.

These days loads of people have their own blog and I must say 90% is not even worth reading. Because the amount of people having a blog is exploding, search engines which finally were able to find some good content related websites, now have to struggle with the millions of blogs with absolutely no good content at all. Many blogs are not updated on a regular basis, they are often made to sell products or used for marketing the thousands “get rich quick schemes” around on the internet. They really lack the power a good blog can have.

Next generation blogs

But there are really good blogs around and web logs will definitely stay around for a while. Beside that there is a new generation blogs on their way. Blog techniques are changing fast, many people start to put photos and pictures on their blogs. This caused a very interesting phenomenon. The first pictures of the London bombings where spread by blogs so fast, that they did beat the big television networks and news agencies. People actually submitted their pictures made from the scene with their mobile phones on their blogs. Other blogs picked up the news with the photo material in minutes and spread them around with lighting speed. I think this is the evidence that blog are really powerful things and earned their place on the internet. With the implementation of video on blogs their importance and popularity is even growing. This makes us consumers of news and multimedia much more independent from big commercial TV and news agencies. Those guys have other interests to consider then provide us with objective news, quality TV and radio programs.These advertisers and investors want everything to be a commercial success, rather then not so commercial quality content.

If you want to start your blog then here are some tips.

These days you can’t make any money from having a blog. You are way too late to do that at this stage. Use web logs for their own purpose e.g. provide quality content. This is the only way to attract people to you web log.

Pick a quality blog hosting provider on the internet where to host your blog. There are free providers like blogger.com and Bloxster.net, both of them are free and provide features for your blog you really need. There is no reason why you should go for a paid service. The bigger the blog community not always means this is the best choice, because the servers of these providers often can’t handle the hughe amount of traffic and need to be shut down for maintenance very often. So bloxster.net would be a good pick

Post pictures with your articles to enhance your blog. If you have a startup band or you want to be the new rising pop star on the block, place a link to your demo (make one in mp3 format), and place it on your blog. This is called pod casting. While traveling submit travel stories and photo’s to inform people at home or fellow travelers about your adventures. You can even stream video on you blog!

Most important write and provide quality content and update your weblog on a regular basis. Also take the time to promote your blog and rss feed to web blog directories because the competition of other blogs is fierce!

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How to Use A Blog for Free Traffic

One of the Number 1 traffic building secrets is adding content to your website. Have you ever considered that a blog could be the tool that makes this very possible, fast and extremely easy to do.

Blogs are written in RSS or Atom, both very effective content managment systems. Getting a blog for free is easy at www.blogger.com. After you set up your blog you need to change your settings to archive daily so you have a new page of content every time you make a post to your blog. Blogging daily is best if you want to add new content every day. If you archive daily, then post each day the blog software will generate a new page of content for you. It's definately the fastest and easiest way to add content. The best way to integrate a blog into your website is to make your website into a blog. If you have fresh relevant content on your blog then top search engines like Google will return more often to gobble up that fresh content. That means your site will be spidered more often, and if you just built another page you want spidered, just leave a link within your blog posts to that page and the spider will follow it. This is a great way to get your pages spidered fast. But it's important to have the pge you are linking to be somewhat related to the topic of your post. Google is getting more picky about the content of the pages where your incoming links are coming from. Also, it is important to optimize your blog just as you would for a website if you want to get theat free targeted traffic. Optimizing is easy, include your keywords within the title and description of your blog, as well as in the title posts occasionally. And don't forget to include the same keywords within the link text of your incoming links to your blog. Most bloggers don't see the traffic potential their blog holds if it was oiptimized just like any other webpage. One more factor to consider: Google loves blogs Not simply because it's a blog, but because of the nature of blogs; They usually have fresh relevant content on a specific topic. That's what Google loves. Give it what it wants and it will visit you more often.

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Starting Your Own Blog

I was sitting in my local Internet Cafe yesterday, I like to get away from my 'home office' from time to time and it's a great place to go for a cup of Espresso and to meet interesting people. The rather attractive lady sitting next to me was typing away furiously and, when she had finished, I asked her what she was writing - I'm interested in learning how other people use the Internet... some people call that being nosey!

It turns out she was a 'Blogger' and she was updating her web site through a web browser. She was really interested in vegetarian cookery and she was adding a new restaurant review to her blog.

If you spend any time at all online these days you simply can't avoid reading something about blogs, they are becoming increasingly more popular; and they are a great way of building an online presence without the need for any technical knowledge. A blog is an abbreviation of the term 'web log' which is a relatively simple content management system.

Quite a few years ago, web surfers began collecting information and interesting links that they encountered during their online travels. As time passed they started to create logs of the information that they collected and they soon started to develop their own web logs. These web logs enabled them to update the information and links as often as they wished.

Blogs are more permanent than posts to an online forum or to a discussion list, they are much more dynamic than the traditional style home pages. They are also more personal than standard journaling, and definitely more public than diaries. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary site. So, there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

There are a few common characteristics of a blog, but there may be slight variations within the classification. Some blogs provide succinct descriptions of links within the chosen theme of the blog. Some others contain commentary and links to the news of the day. A few are endless stream of blurts about the writer’s day. Others are - political blogs, intellectual blogs, some are hilarious and some topic driven. They are all - Weblogs.

As mentioned earlier, blogs are posts that are short, informal and sometimes deeply personal no matter what the topic of discussion is. They can be characterized by their conversational tone.

If a person has a web presence but is disappointed with static homepage - if an elegant treatment of posts on a global platform is what they want, then ‘blogging’ provides an ideal platform. They may also consider blogging if they are seeking feedback from their chosen audience.

Weblogs are definitely the mavericks of the online world. Two of their greatest strengths are their ability to filter and disseminate information to a widely dispersed audience, and their position outside the mainstream of mass media.

There are many different options available to the new and seasoned blogger alike. Some blog scripts are available for you to install on your own domain and these require at least a basic understanding of FTP and HTML. There are many hosted blog services available some free and some paid. If you are serious about blogging then I would strongly recommend that you use the best system that you can afford and that meets your needs.

I personally have used the 'Moveable Type' stand-alone script and although quite complex to install, I found it very easy to use. My recommended choice of hosted blogging service would have to be the Blog4Cash.com system that includes a wide variety of high quality features and has a built in two tier affiliate scheme that enables you to generate a recurring income from all your referrals!

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Blogging for Dollars

Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it's the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.

Whether a blogger's focus is to communicate with customers or just to have fun, they have begun looking at ways to earn revenue from their blogs. The most popular ways for bloggers to earn some added cash for their pet projects are:

1. ) Google Adsense in Blogs

Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content-relevant advertisements in blogs. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the blog, the website owner is credited for the referral. Webmasters need only to insert a Google-generated java script into the blog or blog template. Google's spider parses the AdServing blog and serves ads that relate to the blog's content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served.

2. ) Affiliate Programs (Product Endorsements)

Affiliate Programs work when an affiliate web site receives income for generating sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website. Generally, bloggers will mention or endorse specific products and if site visitors purchase the product, bloggers will receive a portion of the sale.

3. ) Product Promotion

Businesses use blogs to detail how specific features or product add-ons can increase functionality and save time. Content-rich product promotion will help with search engine placement.

4.) Banner Ads

While less popular than in the past, websites with high traffic levels can still earn decent revenue by selling banner space.

As the Internet evolves bloggers will continue to seek out ways to monetize their opinions and thoughts. Daily journals and online blogs have become more than just a communication means to many.

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13 Steps to Successful Blogging

Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start? You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn't become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your "move". Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has "moved" and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to...but only when you need to! 2) Niche A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family...you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog. 3) Update Daily (nothing less) This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don't come to work for days or weeks...you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here...if you don't update your blog for days or weeks you'll lose visitors. 4) Traffic It's no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the "About the Author" passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the "About the Author" passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your site in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators. 5) Track Your Blog How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn't mean your blog isn't growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what "you" have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors. Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose. 6) Listen to Your Audience When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting. 7) Multiple blogs Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, tBlogs.com, etc. The more blog accounts the better. You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords. 8) Short & Concise Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic. 9) Digital Art Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended. 10) Keep it Personal A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors. 11) Interact With Your Visitors You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: "Monday Money Tip" or "Picture of the Week" which entices your readers to look forward to each week. Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you "will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated". Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about "Paris Hilton Getting Married" then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog. 12) Make Money Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising. 13) You're a Professional You're a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a "move" announcement. The title should be "Moved" and the blog entry should state something like "Old Blog has been moved to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com". This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain. At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying "two heads is better than one", more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors. Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.

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What Blog Can Make Money ?

How to blog to make money from it?

Truly the whole picture of making money blogging is simple:you blog (B), traffic comes to your blog (T), you PREsell to them (P) and finally monetize (M). You may ask me "I have blog and peoples are coming. I need to know how to monetize, though not sure about what the PREsell means. So, tell me how to monetize, NOW." Understandable request. But before you rush into monetization, there is something you must take care of, otherwise you'll rush in vain. I read some articles talking about "how to monetize or in what way can you make money from your blog." They were OK and nothing was wrong. But most of them were missing one thing, very important one. If you have a lot of traffic, say 10,000 visitors a day, you may need to focus only for how to monetize. And the way of monetization is simple, something like placing banner, affiliate text link, Google Adsense, (listed a few) on your blog page. What you have to realize is that "B--T--P--M" is really STEP-by-STEP. Monetizing will work only when you make a good success in previous three STEPS (B--T--P) What blog can make money? The answer is Any Kind! So, the right question should be "what blog can make more money?" The answer is Well Prepared Blog! :-) What to prepare? Why not just posting? If you want to just blog and you don't care things to prepare, maybe you're not serious about making money from your blog. Otherwise, please read on. First, I want to say this, "DON'T BLOG unless you know what you're going to blog!" By this, I don't mean only conclusion of you blog. Before you blog, sit back from your keyboard and take a time to answer following 3 questions: 1. About what topic am I going to write? Are many people want to know about that topic? 2. With that topic, what product or link am I gonna introduce? 3. And how am I gonna do that? What do I have in mind about those questions? 1. About topic, I'll do a little bit of research before I write. Have you heard about "keyword research"? There are free tools fit for keyword research. Not only for blog but for any kind of writings, if Internet is involved, I do keyword research first. For example, for this article, I took a little bit of time to find what kind of keyword people are using when they want to look for information about how to make money from blog. And I found people are using "make money blogging." This keyword research has two fold benefit. One is that it helps you fine what kind of topic people want to read. The other is that by using these keyword you'll have better chance to be positioned high in search engine result page. 2. About question 2, I'm thinking about what monetization method I'm going to use. Am I going to introduce an affiliate program, a book or place Adsense? 3. The purpose of asking question 3 was to emphasize the word "PREsell". In blogging, though you want to sell something or want your visitor to click links, don't rush it. What do you do if you see a blogger is doing nothing but a sales pitch. You leave him once and for all, don't you? So PREsell is the key of how to write.It is something like creating a worm mind to your suggestion. If you want to make money from your blog, start writing it only after you know what keyword is related your topic and what kind of monetization you can apply. This can make a huge difference. If you want to know about how to do a keyword research, you may want to read this blog, Traffic to Blog: Keyword Research. To sum up, a blog that can make more money is; 1. a blog talking about the topic people want to read and this can be found by keyword research 2. a blog that uses the the keyword in the post so that search engine can easily pick up 3. a blog that PREsells product by creating warm mood.

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How To Boost Traffic To Your Blog

Let search engine index your blog and let people come to your fresh blog. Though you're in World Wide Web, nobody knows you're there. You need to pull kindly those who are potentially waiting for you but don't know where your are. This objective is related to generally known as search engine optimization (SEO). It's too broad to address all. But the most important things will I talk about. Though they're not all but more than enough will be covered. They are about...

• How to use keywords as a SEO technique
• What to consider when you choose blog templates
• How to construct your blog search engine friendly
• Ping your blog

How to use keywords as a SEO technique?

As long as SEO is concerned, the keyword comes at front line. You have to find the target keyword/keywords or niche keywords.

What to do with the keyword/keywords? Please read on.....

Enter keywords in your blog name: If you named your blog for example, "Ryen's blog", it's not a good idea in the view of SEO. Instead name your blog something like "keyword blog". You need to substitute "keyword" with your "target keyword", for example "mountain bike blog", if your blog is about mountain bike.

Enter keywords of your post in title tag: Actually most of bloggers don't need to concern about "title tag" because most of blog hosting applications such as blogger, typepad, wordpress, movable type, drupal, etc... care this for you. But you have to use the keyword in your title and then they will include it in the title tag for you.

Enter keywords in meta description tag, if possible: This may be difficult for most of bloggers because most of blog hosting system don't support this. If this is your case, don't bother with this. To make it possible is almost impossible for the people like me who are not techie at all. But don't worry there is other solution: care your first sentence of the first paragraph.

Enter keywords in the first sentence: Nowadays many SEO experts say that most of search engines don't look meta description tag. Instead they look for the few words in the first sentence. So care your first sentence to include the keywords, make it fit to describe your whole post and attractive.

Repeat your keywords in your post: With this an English grammar teacher may not be happy. But as long as SEO is concerned, it's necessary: frankly to say, you have to. General rule says the keyword density should be about 2-3% of whole words in your post.

You may complain "heck, how do I know keyword density." Well, you don't need to count it manually. There is a free tool to check the keyword density. And actually I don't even check it all the time. I just keep in mind 2-3% and check only for some posts that I think worth checking. Having this in mind, the free tool is here. Type the URL of your post, keyword and click "analyze" button. It'll return you the keyword density of your post. If the keyword density is too low, consider repeat the keyword more but don't repeat too much (more than 3%)

Use your keyword in your blog domain: This improves the ranking of your blog and hence more traffic come to you. If your blog is about "anniversary gift", for example, include it in your domain name so that your blog domain looks like "anniversary-gift.yourhost.com"

Use your keyword in the link title: Many blogger don't know about this!

Which one do you think better, "anniversary gift" or "anniversary-gift.your host.com" as your link title? The former is better. The reason? Because search engines value more. So keep in mind that whenever you get link try to enter your keywords in the link title.

Enter keywords in your file name: When you save your blog, use your keyword.

Which one is better, "mypost98.html" or "anniversary-gift-how-to-choose.html"? This time the latter is better because it includes keywords and hence get better chance to be listed in high rank in search engine.

Enter keyword in alt tag: If you use images in your post, don't forget to put your keyword in alt tag. A 2 cent-tip related to this is that if your Google Adsense doesn't seem to show matching ads with your content, check your alt tag. Maybe it's because you put unrelated words in alt tag.

What to consider when you choose blog templates?

Certainly there is a search engine friendly blog templates. To know whether your blog template is search engine friendly designed, go to Crawler simulation (It's free.) Enter your blog URL and then it'll show you how it looks like when a search engine spider visits your blog site. If you see a lot of html code or java scripts before you see main content, it means your blog is not well designed in the point of search engine optimization. There is a way to hide unnecessary code from spiders, using CSS or div class "hide". Try to make your title tag immediately after head tag and to show up your body content as near to head tag as possible.

How to construct your blog search engine friendly?

Make your blog site structure as simple as possible. This may not be a big issue for bloggers because unless a blogger can design her/his blog system, they have to use a default system. What I mean by this is that most of blog system make permalink be for example, "www.blogcom.com/user/archive/year/month/date/apost.html". See how far the final "apost.html" is from root. It's 5 step further. This is not so good in terms of search engine optimization. You can reduce those steps but you only can do so one or two step because database recognition is concerned behind this story. So the bottom line is that try to make your blog simple but if it's not possible, focus on writing good content. I observed many top bloggers have a bit complicated permalink system yet have lots of traffic. But if you can make your blog structure simpler without problem, please do so because it is much better for the reader and search engine as well.

Ping your blog

Do you ping? Many pongs will come,then. :-) This may not be an issue if you're using Movable Type, WordPress, Typepad, or Drupal 4.6.0. But consider pinging to Ping-o-Matic!, if your system is not configured to do so. Because it pings to most of important blog search engines and directories in one spot. If your blog application doesn't support to ping automatically to "Ping-o-Matic!", you can do so manually by visiting Ping-o-Matic! Once you type your blog name, blog URL, check where to ping and click "submit ping" button, and don't forget to bookmark. It gives you a convenience because you don't need to type blog name, URL and check where to ping again.

By pinging you make search engine spider crawl you more frequently and make your reader notified faster.

So far you have the most important SEO techniques for your blog. Say, how to use your keywords and where to enter, search engine friendly blog template design, structure and finally ping to "Ping-o-Matic!"

But one thing is missing!

Get inbound links!

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