Posts Tagged ‘Blogging Tips’

How Much You Can Make From Your Blog?

May 2nd, 2008

Have you ever thought of this question? How much can you make from your blog? How much do you think your blog is worth? Many people, in fact, almost every bloggers out there wish to earn money from their blog. Maybe not much, maybe a few dollars here and a few dollars there. How much do you really want to earn from your blog?

This Is What Happens To Most Bloggers…

You started a blog a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks ago, a couple of years ago and it isn’t doing anything for you. You thought blogging would be a fun way to write about something you’re passionate about as well as make some money along the way. You find yourself falling behind with your blog and losing touch with the topics you track and start wondering if it is even worth it to keep this running commentary online.

Then reality hits. You have tons of draft posts saved but never publish them because you don’t have the energy to finish them. You have lots of comment spam to weed through and suddenly doing the dishes seems like a lot more fun. Your blog becomes a waste of money. Your blog becomes a waste of time. Your blog becomes dead weight.

Does this sounds familiar to you? Is this what is happening to your blog? Understand this, there are thousands of people get online and start their blog every single day, but the fact is this, MOST OF THE BLOGS WON’T GO ANYWHERE. This is exactly following the 9 to 1 concept. Out of 10 bloggers who want to earn money from their blog, 9 will earn nothing, while only 1 who really earns ton of money from his or her blog. (Read this post before you start your blog, 5 Questions To Ask Before You Start Blogging)

What I wanted to say is this, if you keep on doing everything the same just like everybody else is doing, you are going to achieve the very same result just like everybody else. Well, maybe you will earn a few dollars, but ask yourself this, is this really what you want? Don’t you want to earn $10,000 from your blog every month? Yes, your blog has the potential of earning $10,000 per month! Everything is possible, if you have this, this is the thing that you need to make your blog a real money maker…

Your Blog Profits Blueprint

Yes, you need a blueprint to get you there. Most people start their blog without any planning, they don’t know what they want to achieve, they don’t have a clear plan, they don’t have a vision, they don’t know how. All they do know is that they have to keep on posting and try to find a way to increase traffic to their blog. That’s all they know, nothing more nothing less.

Your Blog Profits Blueprint

While for other successful bloggers like Yaro Starak or Darren Rowse, they knew exactly what they want from their blog. They know how much their blog can bring them, they know what they should do every day with their blog. Put all of these in just one word, they have a blueprint, they have a key plan of what they should do every day. This is what you need to in order to rake $10,000 from your blog monthly.

So, first thing first, set up a clear goal for your blog. What you expect to achieve from your blog. Know this, every successful online business has its own blueprint, and you will need one as well. For example, in the first two months, you will want to create quality content for your blog, so you will just focus in building great content when you first start out. In the following months, you can then reduce the number of posts and you can start to concentrate in marketing your blog, in other words, drive traffic to your blog.

You should also have long-term goals for your blog, like what your blog is going to be after 1 year, or maybe even 3 years. I strongly recommend you to download Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint, and read it.

I hope that this is going to help you in your journey to blogging success. I know that many people wanted to earn money from their blog, and I can tell you, it is possible for you! Here is one post that is going to help you in your venture, 6 Steps to Build a Profitable Blog From Scratch.

5 Super Tips to Build a Successful Blog

April 26th, 2008

Well, if your purpose of blogging is because you want to earn a living, then you can’t miss these 5 super tips to build a successful blog. You should know that if you want to earn a living with your blog, then you will have to be serious with it. Nothing can beat the level commitment. Want to see how the level of commitment determines your success? Read this post, The Commitment of Sylvester Stallone.

I know that every bloggers out there wanted to have a successful blog, but most of them won’t achieve it. Simply because they are not committed to their goal. If you are reading this right now, I want you to be clear and understand this, for most people, their goal is not a must, they can live without their goal. That is why they take no action and live in their comfort zone. Let me tell you this fact, actually, most people want to be rich, they want to be a millionaire, they want financial freedom, they want to be successful.

However, 95 percent of them will not achieve what they want. Why is this so? This is because even if they did not achieve what they want in their life, it will be fine for them! They are not going to die if they don’t achieve it, nobody is pointing a gun on their head, so it will be fine if they did not achieve it.

So the first rule, if you want to build a successful blog today, be committed in it. Give everything, give all out, do what you have to do. If you have to write 2 posts, then sit down and write them, don’t procrastinate, don’t watch movie or go out with your friends.

Once you are committed with blogging, here comes the 5 super tips that can help you build your successful blog:

1. Get The Important Task Done First

This is it, first thing first, do what is important. You have to do your important tasks first every time you start. For example, if you just have one hour, but you have to do two things, posting and replying comments, what you need to do is to choose which is more important and get it done first.

I cannot give you the right answer for which task should be done first, because every blog has its own important tasks. What I can suggest here is that you know what you are doing, go for the one that you think is important. Take posting and marketing your blog for example, posting can be done daily, but it is not necessary. In the meantime, marketing your blog can be a crucial task, because it is going to help you boost the traffic to your blog, expose your blog to the world.

So, first thing first. Do what you suppose to do. Divide your blogging schedule nicely, and stick with it. Here are 2 posts which can help you, Schedule Blogging and How Often Should You Post In Your Blog.

2. 60% Marketing and 40% Building

Here is what most people did not know about. Most bloggers thought that they should keep on updating their blog, keep on coming up with quality post and traffic will come by itself. No, not this way. If you are just starting out, keep on posting for your blog content is a right thing, however, once you have the content, what you should focus more on is marketing your blog, and not building content anymore.

I don’t mean that building content is not important anymore, content is still king. However, it is not something that is so important. After your blog is filled with quality content, you have to market it. If you did not market your blog, nobody will know about it. Don’t expect that people will come to your blog and help you promote your blog. This is your blog, not theirs! Nobody will do this for you except yourself.

Spend 60% of your blogging time into marketing your blog, and the rest goes into building your blog like updating, posting, etc. Marketing strategies like article marketing, forum marketing, comment marketing, social networking are very important tasks, they can expose your blog and create the visibility of your blog.

Don’t get it wrong by thinking that all you have to do to build a successful blog is keep on posting.

3. On-page SEO and Off-page SEO

This may seem like a fancy term, but don’t worry, search engine optimization is not as difficult as you can think of. If you don’t know what is SEO and how it relates to your blog, just read this post of mine, 6 Premium Search Engine Optimization Strategies For Your Blog. It is a great post which you must read if you want to get your blog to rank number one in search engine.

SEO is something you must do every single day when you update your blog. For example, you do do some on-page optimization in every of your post, like, bold the keywords that you are targeting, insert text links in your blog post, etc. As for off-page SEO, article marketing is one very effective strategies. Simply because people will use your articles as their content, and whenever they do this, they will include a link back to your blog. That is how you can build tons of back links for your blog.

Another great strategy for off-page SEO is by using forum and comment marketing. Try to leave your link after every reply in forum or comment. This will also help yo build the number of links pointing to your blog. Remember, don’t simply spam links, people hate it.

4. It Is About Quality, Not Quantity

Blog frequently, but not too often. Most bloggers will agree that two or three posts a week is a pretty good frequency. The key is to make your posts count. Don’t post about anything and everything in your field just because you have to. Posts that are original, meaty and full of opinion are more likely to get read and linked to than posts that are just a few words with a link to the news source.

So why do I still post every single day? This is because I’m building the content for my blog right now. I’m in the phase of building quality posts. I’m going to switch into the next phase, which is marketing my blog soon. Right now, all I do is trying to come up with quality post, that is why I keep on posting everyday. Not because that I have nothing to do, but this is just my blogging principle. I want to create a blog full of great content before actually marketing it. If you are running out of ides of what to post, read this, No More Topics To Blog? 5 Tips For You.

So think for yourself, if you feel your blog is filled with great content, then you can start to market it. For me, to build a successful blog, it can break into 4 phase. The first phase is where you just get started, learn everything and get use to blogging. The second phase is where you build quality content, because without content, nobody will come to your blog. The third phase will be marketing it, and the final phase is monetization.

5. Keep On Learning and Updating Yourself

The final super tips is this, keep on learning and keep on updating yourself. Learning is a very important process, however, learning itself will not bring you any results. You have to apply what you learn. Be balanced between learning and taking action. Say, maybe 30% learning and 70% taking action. If you have one hour, don’t spend that one hour reading an e-book teaching you how to blog.

Instead use part of the one hour to build your blog, and the rest go for learning. I found that many people keeps on learning, but they never actually take any action. If this is happening to you, then you have to change your routine. Take more action from now on. It is action that produces result.

Often, you can also subscribe to other bloggers which are in the same niche as yours. This way, you can learn from them and see how they progress. Learning from your competitors is one of the best ways to understand your weakness.

I hope that all these 5 super tips here can help you build a successful blog. Always remember this, building a successful blog requires time, it is not something that can be done in just 1 hour. Building your blog is the same as building your asset, its value will increase over time.

No More Topics To Blog? 5 Tips For You

April 25th, 2008

I know every single blogger face this, running out of content to write. No matter how great a writer you are, you will somehow run out of content and don’t know what to write. I believe that this is also one of the killer reasons that make most bloggers out there fail. For me, writing a post is easy as long as if I have the idea of what to write. Before this, I have also written an interesting article how I find most of my content, you can read it here, Where I Find Most of My Content.

Ideas to Blog

You should know that you will have to update your blog constantly in order to build a successful blog. Don’t know why you should update your blog? Read this post, Why You Need A Constantly Updated Blog. If you are running out of content and don’t know what to write, don’t worry. Today, I’m going to tell you 5 tips, how you can overcome this problem. In fact, if you are running out of content and don’t know what to write, you have come to the right place. Read these tips, and I believe that you will never ever running out of content anymore.

Tips #1 – Post What You Have Posted

This is what you can do if you are running out of content. You can search for your older post which have higher views and comments, then re-type it, give it a spin before you post. This way, you will have another new article to post. For example, if you are a search engine journalist, and last week your position was that most mainstream sites need Google traffic to survive, try proving and re-type your point from the “con” perspective, instead of the “pro” position.

There are tons of ways you can write a same article, the main idea remains the same, just the way you present it to your readers changed. Just write from another angle. By putting your point another way, you might give your readers a totally new perspective, it can even the the point where they found their ‘ah-ha’ moment.

Tips #2 – Write What Others Are Writing

If you truly don’t have any ideas what to write, this may be a good alternative. You can always visit those popular blogs in your niche, then just see what they are talking about, get the idea, and post it in your blog with your own words. Another strategy is this, you can also talk about what others are talking about. What I mean here is that you can write something, like a review of what others are posting. Of course, you will have to choose those from your niche market, or else it will be out of topic.

Friendly debate can often spark the soap-opera like drama that will have both your audiences visiting both blogs to see what “the other fella” had to say. However, make sure that you are saying is real and don’t put ‘fire’ on other bloggers. You should know that words can spread like wildfire in blogsphere, so mind what you are saying.

Tips #3 – Guest Blogging

Another tips here is that you can invite somebody else to write for you. Just like submitting articles to article directories, the same concept applies here. You invite someone to write an article, and post it in your blog. But, you will have to insert at least one link to the desired website of the writer. You can choose only to accept those articles of your choice, for example, choose those that are related to your niche.

Guest blogging is a great way of posting, you just have to make sure that all the posts are not out of topic and properly written. There is no need for you to worry that your readers will follow the links in your post and never come back again. If you truly provide what they are looking for, they will come back for sure.

Tips #4 – Jotting Down Whatever Comes Into Your Mind

This is what I will always do. Whenever there are any ideas come across my mind, I will jot them down. This may seem like a kiddy stuff, but I can assure you, try this and you will see the results. This thing really helps a lot. Every time when there is an idea comes into my mind, I will write it down with my hand phone. As easy as that, and this is a very effective strategy. Try it.

Tips #5 – Post What Is On Demand

So how to do this? Very simple, just head up to any forums, or social networking site, or even Amazon, eBay, or Google News. Then search for the hot topics that everyone is looking for and talking about. Get the idea and post it in your blog. Don’t forget that you will have to choose those topic which is in your niche.

Remember, internet is flooded with information. Let me tell you a little secret about internet. Do you know that you can actually obtain ANY information from the internet without having to spend any money? Just perform your searches well, and you will find a lot of information, more than you can ever think of. So if you are out of topic, just perform the search with search engine.

Blogging Your Experience

These are the 5 tips that I have for you whenever you run out of content to write. And there is one thing I want to tell you before I end up this post. Blogging is about experiences actually. What you blog is your experience. It can be what you have gone through in your life, it can be what you have learned over the internet, in your life. You are actually blogging your experience. Meaning to say, if you want to constantly come up with quality post, you will have to learn from your experience everyday.

That will be all for today. If you are still running out of ideas and are looking for more blogging secrets, read my posts, Blogging Tips.

6 Premium Search Engine Optimization Strategies For Your Blog

April 21st, 2008

Well, before you start to optimize your blog for search engine, you must first understand the term “search engine optimization” or simply SEO. So what does SEO mean? To put it simple, if you do SEO for your blog, you are doing something to make your blog rank higher in search engine whenever somebody searches for some of the keywords. So why SEO for your blog? One simple reason, to get free traffic from straight away from search engine.

I believe that you want your blog to show up at the top of search engine when someone searches for something related to your blog right? Then you will have to do SEO for your blog. A lot of bloggers worry that if their blog is search engine friendly. Don’t worry about it, blog is one kind of software and website that search engine likes, it is content-base and it is updated frequently.

Premium SEO Strategies For Your Blog

Here are some search engine optimization strategies that you can follow to put your blog rank higher in search engine. Just follow all these rules and you will never run out of track.

1. Use Your Primary Keyword In Your Domain Name

No matter what type of domain and hosting you are using, just make sure that you have the keyword that you want to target in your domain name. This is the first and the most simple strategy. For instance, if you are targeting the golfing world, you can use www.improvegolfskill.com instead of www.shawnlim.com. It helps in SEO and the search engine spider can recognize your blog more easily.

Besides this, having the keyword in your blog’s domain name also help to build your visibility and credibility. It is common sense that people will go to the website which is more related to what they are searching for. Let me ask you this, if you are looking for ways to earn easy money online, which domain you prefer? Is it www.makemoneyonline.com or www.trainyourdog.com? So can you see it now? It is plain common sense here.

However, if you want to go for branding, like www.yahoo.com, or maybe www.google.com, these 2 domains don’t mean anything, but they are hot and everyone knows them. This is the branding type of domain name. If you are new in internet marketing, it is not advisable to for for this kind of domain names, just stick with the basic, choose a domain name which is related to your market, and make sure that your primary keyword in there. Do you know why you need your own domain name? Read this, You Need A Domain Name! and you will know why I strongly recommend you to have your own.

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 are using Blogger, and the title of your post is “How To Earn Easy Money Online”, then Blogger will automatically create a page with your post title as the file name, “How-To-Earn-Easy-Money-Online.html”. 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.

If you are using WordPress and you don’t know how to do this, simply head to WP support and tell them your problem, they will lead you there. It is not as difficult as you can think of. If you are doing this the first time, yes, you may be confused, but keep on staying with it, and everything will become easy.

3. Use Your Secondary Keywords In Your Post

After you have done the first 2, the next thing you can do for better SEO for your blog is this, you can use your secondary keywords in your blog post. For instance, if your target keywords are like “blogging”, “earn money online”, then you can often use these keywords in your post. Meaning that you are writing something related to your targeted keywords.

However, remember this, you don’t want to repeat all these keywords and make your posts sound odd to read. You still have to consider for your readers. I know that you want to get high rank in search engine, but without good readership, your blog will not grow. Think about this, you are wiring for your readers or you want to write for search engine spiders?

My suggestion is this, write for your readers. After all, it is people who read your blog, not computer. Of course you can include your keywords in your blog post, just make sure they are not overloaded and make your post odd to read. For most people, 3% – 5% of keyword density will be fine. Meaning that if there are 100 words in your post, 3 to 5 times of your keywords appear in your post will be just fine. Learn more about on-page optimization here.

4. Use Your Keywords As Hyperlink or Anchor Text

Another strategy is this, you can make your keywords into hyperlink or anchor text. Where should you link to? You can link back to your older blog post if you don’t have any link destination. This way, you will direct readers to read more in your blog. Having your keyword in hyperlink or anchor text is more important than just having them in plain text.

The same concept applies here, do it, but don’t over do it. In fact, I encourage you to use this strategy more. Simply because if you are doing this, it somehow makes your blog seems more lively. It is not just a ‘dead end’ blog where everything stops in just one post. When there are people reading about your blog post, and if you have hyperlink in your blog post which link back to your older post, the reader may follow the link and find more information about it.

This is going to encourage readership, and in the same time, your older posts will not just buried deep in your blog. I’m sure that you want people to read all of your what you have written right? Then insert more links in your blog posts, direct readers to the information they are looking for, you will earn an extra point doing so.

5. Get More Back Links For Your Blog

This is what you need if you are serious in getting your blog to rank number one in search engine. Back links is the most important factor in SEO. The more back links you have, the higher higher percentage your blog is going to show up in search result. Meaning to say, if your blog has a lot of back links, search engine will rank it higher because it thinks that your blog is relevant to what people are searching for.

There are a lot of ways you can look for back links for your blog. For example, forum marketing, article marketing, comment marketing, link exchange, reviews, buying links, etc, etc. There are many ways you can generate back links for your blog. The main challenges here is how long can you stay with it? Some people decide to go for article marketing to build back links for their blog, but most of them won’t stand it because it is a long-term process which requires a lot of your commitment and persistence.

Once you have decided which strategy to use, make sure that you stay with it, the longer you can stay with it, the higher chance you are going to achieve what you want. It is persistency that counts here. Remember, master one of the strategy first before you go on to the next one. Here is a tips for you to attract more back links, How To Get Your Blog Rank #1 In Google.

6. Learn It, Live It, Love It!

This is the last strategy that you will need. Learn it, live it, and love it! Always take the initiative to learn more about internet marketing. The more you learn, the more you can improve. Once you have learned it, then live it. Means that you have to take action, learning without applying is just a waste of time. What for if you keep on learning about how to earn easy money online without actually applying all the strategies? It is going to be a waste, because you are ‘storing’ all of your knowledge.

The final step is, love it. Love what you do, and money will follow. Just like what those very successful yet wealthy people always do. Look at Bill Gates, look at Warren Buffet, and look at Donald Trump, do you think that they work for money? No, they work because they love it. Money is just the by-product of their hard work, money is the measurement of their achievements. Want to find out more about these people? Read, The Real Millionaire Lifestyle.

I believe that you will be clear how you can improve your search engine ranking for your blog by now. Just stick with all the strategies here, and you will find your blog’s ranking climbing up to the top.

5 SureFire Ways to Build Your Blog’s Readership

April 18th, 2008

You should know that there are millions of blogs out there, and if you have a blog today, one of the biggest thing you may lack is this, readership. You can have a blog set up in 5 minutes, however, if your blog doesn’t have any readers to read, then all of your effort will be wasted. Just imagine this, you spend 1 hour to come up with a good post which you think it is what people are looking for, and you have searched for all the nice pictures to include in your post. In the end, you found that there are actually no people there to read it.

If this sounds like what is happening to your blog right now, this is the right article you should read. In fact, it is fine if your blog doesn’t have any readers, only if the purpose of your blog is just for personal matters like you just write it for your girlfriend or for your family members. That will be fine. However, if your purpose to blog is not personal, you want to earn money from your blog, then you should come to know that readership is very important in your blog.

Think Like a Marketer

This is the world of internet, and marketing has a common concept with marketing, that is communication. Can you communicate well with your readers? I bet that you can, to communicate from blogs are as easy as talking with your friends. So often operate from the mindset of a marketer. You have to learn how to market your blog, as long as your goal is to grow your blog, then you will need to learn how to market it.

Before this, I have also written an article about how you can raise your blog’s readership, you can read it here, How to Increase Your Blog’s Readership. And today, I’m going to tell you exactly how you can build your blog’s readership, all in a different way, from a different angle. I truly hope that you will benefit from this article. Here we go:

1. Stay On Course

Unless you are a very famous people, you should always write something about your market. If you are Bill Gates or Tom Cruise, it will be find to write what you have eaten for your breakfast. However, if you are nobody, then I don’t think that people are interested in what you ate for your breakfast. Here is an example, if you are in the entertainment industry, let’s say movies, then make sure that you write something related to movies in every of your post. That’s the way to stay on course and that’s the way to do it.

2. Write As You Are Talking With Your Friend

This is another good blogging tips. I guess, nobody will want to read something like a ‘lecture’s talk’ after they came back tired from their work or school. You have to understand this, this is a blog, and it is just like your personal diary. Therefore, you have to write in the way just like you are talking to your friends. If you are afraid of grammars, then use this tool to help you, SpellCheckPlus. I use this tool to check for my spelling and grammar before I publish any post in my blog.

3. Add In Your Opinion

Always add in your own opinion in your blog posts. Like I said, this is a blog, you can always add in your own opinion about some issues. In fact, this is what other people want to read about. Your blog is not a company’s brochure or a sales page, people want to read about what you think, and that is the reason people subscribe to your blog posts! Make sense? Your readers like what you write, and that is the reason they subscribed to your blog post. Do you know why people visit your blog? Follow this link, The 3 Reasons That People Visit Your Blog.

4. Update Frequently, and Don’t Give Up

Another thing is this, you have to update your blog frequently, don’t get frustrated and give up because you don’t get any traffic in the first month. Everything needs time to develop, it is the same for your blog. It is impossible for you to become a millionaire overnight, you will have to spend a lot of time into making it comes true.

Remember, your blog is just like a real-estate, its value will increase with time. Meaning to say, the longer you stay with your blog, the more valuable your blog will be. Most of the bloggers out there can’t stand this, they just give up updating their blogs. And if you can cope with this, you are considered a great blogger. If you don’t have any idea how often should you post, read this, How Often Should You Post In Your Blog?

5. Serve Your Readers

This is what I have learned from my blog, it is a very valuable lesson. You have to serve your blog readers. Think about it, what is the different between a successful blog with an ordinary blog? The only different is that the successful blogger post something that really valuable for their readers. Successful bloggers post with the mindset that they want to serve the readers, how they can do more to help their readers, what are their readers’ problems, how can they design their blog so that their readers can read withe ease? These are the differences between a successful blogger and someone who are not.

I believe that with all these 5 keys here, you can greatly improve your blog’s readership. Of course, there are more tips and guides to increase your readership. These are only what I think are important to you. So just stick with them and you will see the results real soon. Once you have build up a huge readership, you should then learn How To Maintain Your Readership.