Blogging is Popular All Over the World

Knowing "how" to think is much more important than knowing "what" to think. Those among us that understand how to gather knowledge, then how to use and apply what their small inner voice suggests are truly wise. The realization that our "inner voice" is our higher self (inject your own term, i.e., God, Angel, Spiritual Guide, etc.) asking to manifest itself can be a life changing event!

Okay, so what is a blog anyway? A blog is basically an online journal in which you can digitally pen down your thoughts, ideas, and opinions and practically anything that you want people to read. For more details go to: http://www.bloggers-guide-to-profit.com Blogs come in different styles, formats, and settings, depending on the preference of the user. Many blogging sites, offer built in features such as hyperlink, straight texts, pictures etc. Instead of writing texts, some bloggers choose to make their blogs more audio friendly, by using spoken word entries. This is called audio blogging.

Some blogging sites, even allow you to put video and mp3's on your blogs. Blogging is popular all over the world.
Blog is short for the term web log. There are very few rules when it comes to blogging which means that bloggers have the freedom to express themselves in most any way they want. Perhaps the best thing about blogging is that most blogging sites are free. Anyone who wants to start a blog can do so by becoming a member of a blogging website of their choice. Once they've become members, they automatically become a part of that particular blogging community. They can browse through other blogs, and link them back to their own blogs. They can also make comments on other members' blogs.

Bloggers usually communicate within themselves. This is one of the appeals of blogging. It creates a community of people sharing their ideas, thoughts, and comments with each other. Blogging is not just limited to personal usage. There are a lot of blogs that follow a theme such as: sports, politics, philosophy, social commentary, etc. These blogs build on their specific themes. In this way blogging becomes a medium in which people can share their knowledge and opinions about a variety of themes and topics.

Many groups exist within blogging communities. Of course, the members of the group have a common interest and the blogs provide a place for the group members to share their interest. Chats and forums are also contained within blogging communities.

A lot of entrepreneurs benefit from blogging by promoting their businesses on their blogs. With the rapid growth of blogging communities, entrepreneurs have found that this is a very cost-effective way to promote their products/services.

Some bloggers use their blogs as a means to advertise things such as Ebooks, while other bloggers, and use their blogs to shed light on current issues, events, news and catastrophes. It seems the uses of this communication medium are limitless!

Blogs are also being used by many teachers and professors. Lessons that they have discussed and taught can be posted on a blog which allows students access to this information 24/7. This provides a way for students to keep up with assignments and projects.

One of the advantages of blogging is that it is made up of only a few templates. In comparison to websites that are made up of numerous individual pages this is a much simpler format. For help visit: http://www.feed-reader-links.com this make it easier for blog users to create new pages, because it already has a fix setting that include: slots for title, body of the post, category, etc. This is especially useful for first time users, since they can start blogging right away. They can choose from a number of templates that blogging websites provide.

But by far, the most popular blog type is the one that takes the form of a personal journal. This is the kind that is usually used by first time bloggers. Individuals who want to document the daily struggle of their everyday lives, share poems, rant about their issues or perhaps world issues, or simply post their opinions will find that blogging offers a place to do just that.

Blogs varying in topics, themes, and set-ups, can be found in blog directories. Browsing through these directories is beneficial for first time users. They can check out a number of blogs before deciding on any. This provides an opportunity to get acquainted with what these blogging communities are like. An educated decision can then be made about which blogging community better meets the needs and appeals to the interest of the newcomer...allowing a first-timer to get exactly what he/she is after. Blogging is fun, simple, and easy.

Should You Blog?

There are many people online that create and manage blogs. You might be wondering if you should join in on this fun and rewarding writing adventure. There are a few things that you are going to have to think about before and while you are running a blog.

Before you blog

If you are thinking about blogging, there are a few things that you are going to have to think about. The first is what you are going to blog about. A hobby is a good place to start. If you have a love for trains, you can tell your readers everything there is to know about creating train layouts and what trains are good for your budget. It's really a personal choice as to what will work best for you and what you want to tell people about the most. If you don't like what you are doing as far as your blog, you will probably not keep up with it after you start it. This is something that happens a lot. You will also want to decide if you are going to create a personal blog or a more professional blog. If you want to look like a professional, you will need to treat your blog differently than someone that is just blogging for the fun of it.

While you are blogging

If you decide that you are going to blog, you have to do a few things in order to keep your blog looking nice and fresh. Figuring out when you want to write is also a must for a blog. You will need to write a few times a week or at least once a week. Have a plan as to what part of your subject you are going to write about. This will help you keep good ideas coming in and a plan for the blog itself. This will also help you to keep your readers coming back for more. The more valuable information that you can give your readers, the more of them that will keep coming back to you.

There are a ton of blogs out there, but not all of them are going to be good. There are to many people that start one and let it sit. The best thing to do is really plan what you are doing and your blog will be the best that it can be. If you are doing this, then you will be happy with your blog as well as the amount of people that stop by and see it.

7 Elements Of A Perfect Website Copy That Converts

A perfect website copy is the one that converts visitors into clients. In order that this happens, there are 7 key elements that a writer must incorporate in the article before it can work this way. Let us consider the elements and see how they are relevant in the conversion.

1. Has a compelling offer

Maybe we should define the meaning of the term compelling so that you understand how this element works. When an offer is compelling, it is probably irresistible. You would feel the temptation to take the offer any time. So, a writer would need to make sure that they give a reader such an offer.

The best way a writer can do this is to explain to the reader in clear and concise terms how the products and the services being marketed would be of value to them. It is the value that readers look for, not the cost, not the name either.

2. Targets the right audience

Yes, a writer must first of all identify the audience before they can start writing a copy. This is very crucial because in the writing, the writer needs to connect with the readers and certainly you will all agree that you cannot connect with someone you do not know.

Understanding your audience is about understanding their needs, fears and above all what they would want most. Try to figure out what you target market would appreciate most before you start communicating.

3. Must have reasons

The reader is very smart. They must not see that you are into marketing strategy. You need to convince they why they are the right people for the message, products, site and why they are not lost being in the site. These answers must flow and they should be convincing.

Never try to bring so many points together at once. At least, you need to be sure that the reader will not have any 'why' questions unanswered while reading the copy.

4. Must call for action

Even though you are not forcing the readers to take action, it should be clear from the copy that there is an action they are supposed to take. So, you need to state clearly what you want your visitors to do in the copy.

5. Does not give room for next time

It should be clear at the copy that the time for action is now. This can be done when you answer all the visitor's questions and they have nothing else that they would want to think about. As in, they feel the information is adequate and what they need is just to make their orders.

You must be focused in the call for action. Do not expect so much from the readers. You must have one intended outcome and let it be.

6. Must have sense of credibility

Readers are very wise. You have to give them enough proof that your claims are true. They need to see some testimonials and even case studies at least so that they are sure.

7. Finally, a perfect copy must use the right words

While trying to craft a professional website copy, perfect choice of words is the number one thing you need to ensure. This would invoke emotions hence the readers would take the desired actions without coercion.

No doubt, this is one of the most crucial services that a copywriting agency would offer. It has the power to build or break a business.

Cleva Smith is an expert author who writes SEO articles and strategies tips. She also works for copywriting company, Content Axis, one of the best copywriting agencies that offers premium copywriting services, article submission services, press release writing and eBook sales packages. To know more about the services, please visit Content Axis Inc

Ascend To The Top Of Your Niche Rankings With Contextual Link Building

Every web master dreams of landing on the top spot with his website on the search engine
results. Contextual link building is one of the many tactics of SEO that webmasters can make use of in order to get on top. It is however important to know the latest search engine algorithm trends in order to draw maximum benefit from link building and other SEO moves.

The blog network

SEO companies that will be offering you contextual link building services are teamed up with many bloggers to form an entire network. Only the finest blogs that are well maintained and heavily promoted are part of the network.

It is important to understand the nature of the blogs where the reviews are posted. These blogs are not mere link selling spaces. Rather they are popular blogs that have a great fan following and a multitude of back links.

The fact that these blogs have their own traffic enables them to drive relevant direct traffic to the website that is reviewed on the blogs. This is why such blogs will be able to deliver maximum link building value to your website. Your website will begin to make its way upwards on the search engine rankings in a steady, completely ethical and purely natural manner.

Since contextual link building is very similar to what is known as word of mouth advertising off the net, PR matters. In the process of contextual link building web users are given useful information and a recommendation of your website. The selected blogs on the network can take advantage of the PR that they have developed and transfer it on to your website along with the traffic generated off of links.

Creating unique content and linking anchor text

The nature of the blog posts is as important as is the selecting of blogs where they will be posted. You would want to ensure your blog posts give out interesting and useful information to the readers. Furthermore the entire content should be free of plagiarism. But giving your readers something good to read is not all there is to contextual link building. Rather the main motive is to add relevant in bound links to your website.

The blog posts will contain a link back to your website through an anchor text which is chosen by the webmaster in consultation with an SEO company.

Link building time line

With the first three aspects of finding unique blogs, writing informative reviews and adding links to anchor texts covered you need to ensure that the process moves forward in such a way that it seems natural to the search engines. This is because unnatural rapid link building will be detected as spamming which might result in your website getting penalized.

Ideally the reviews should be posted up on unique blogs slowly and steadily over a time period of a couple of weeks to a month. In this way you will be able to ensure that search engines find the link building to be natural.

Despite the effectiveness of contextual link building most SEO companies will advise you to compliment these efforts with other link building services such as article marketing to help you get on top of your niche.

Cleva Smith is an expert author who helps in article marketing for SEO Peace, an established and professional SEO company that offers affordable SEO services including social bookmarking, manual directory submissions, contextual link building service, article marketing service and more. To know more about the services, please visit SEO-Peace.com

I Need More Hits for my Website

In today’s web 2.0 world you might look at your website and think it needs a complete overhaul because you are not receiving a lot of hits. You are probably thinking to yourself, “is my website technologically advanced enough to draw people to it?” In a nutshell I can answer simply, it does not matter.



It doesn’t matter because it is the content of the website that will get visitors to go there, tell their friends about it, and keep them coming back. Take the social network website MySpace. I would hardly call it a Mecca of technology. In fact compared to other social networks it doesn’t compare on many levels, however it ease of use and what it offers is what makes it the #1 social network on the Internet.



I won’t say that the advice I am about to give you will make you the next MySpace or even close to it, but if your website has something that people like they will go to it, tell their friends and keep going back.



Your website is about something. You could be selling a product, telling about a service that you offer or you could just be posting information about your favorite NFL football team. Whatever it is that makes you an expert on the subject. If you weren’t an expert you wouldn’t have a website for it.



You need to translate your expertise into written format and pass that knowledge along to others. For example, let’s say you are a professional interior painter. You have a website that tells about your services, costs and so on. You want more people to learn about your business and what you have to offer. Since you are a professional painter that means you are an expert. Therefore in order to draw people to your website you need to pass on some knowledge so they will take you seriously and visit.



People are always looking for tips on how to do something and as a professional painter you can give tips on what it takes to keep the walls cleaned how to repair small holes and so on. So our first step in getting people to your website is to write informational and education articles about your expertise. Your articles should be 400 to 700 words in length and should be written in such a way that the reader will take away from it ideas and solutions (exactly like what this article is doing for you).



Now that you have your article written, at the end of the article you need to add what is called a resource box. A resource box informs the reader as to who wrote the article and how you can get in touch with them should they have any further questions or interests. Your resource box would something like this, “Jane Doe has been a professional interior painter for 15 years. You can learn more about Jane at here website {insert your web address here}.” Do you see how this resource box informs the reader of who you are and how to get to your website?



The final step is to submit this article to what are called article directories. These article directories allow you to submit your article free of charge complete with your resource box. These directories receive tens of thousands of hits daily of people looking for good quality content and here you are giving it to them free of charge, aren’t you a nice person.



All you have to do from this point forward is repeat these steps on a daily basis, writing and submitting one article each day and you will be receiving thousands of daily hits to your website. Make sure you have on your home page an area where you can let visitors enter their email address to receive your newsletter even if you don’t have one yet. It would be a waste to get all of these visitors to your website and have nothing to show for it.

Google Adsense guide for blogs

Sounds easy and yes, it is very easy. The only thing you will need is a blog (you should have it by now) and an Adsense account. Once your Adsense account got verified make sure to check out the interface and get used to some options. The Ad program is relatively easy to use, however, to become an Adsense Guru you will need to know a little more. I dedicated some time to work on a complete guide for Adsensel. I splitted it into several parts, each of them about a different topic.

1. My first post is about the position of adsense units on you blog.
2. The next guide will assist you on choosing the best ad colors.
3. Next thing you will need are Adsense channels.
4. You need to know whether you should use CPC or CPA Ads.
5. And finally what the best ad programs for blogs are (other than Adsense).

So, go ahead, you got something to read. I have been working with Advertisements since 2007 now and still continue reading every day. Always remember, there is never the perfect solution, but there is a most suitable solution for your blog or website. You will need to test all advertisement programs to see which perform best for you. Depending on your website CPM advertisements might also be interesting for you. It is a very complex topic.

I was starting with Adsense only and then combined it with other advertisement programs. On one of my websites I experienced that CPM Advertisements seem to perform best for me (not a blog, a forum). Since then I am working together with Adsdaq, Tribalfusion, Adsense and CPXinteractive. The combination of all of them is what gets me most :-). Nonetheless, before you start thinking about all those other ad programs, make sure to read my Google Adsense guide first!

Generating Traffic to Your Blog

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Glen Allsopp, who is a loyal Daily Blog Tips reader, emailed me a while ago to let me know about a post he written titled 4,439 Words on Driving Traffic to Your Blog. I went there to read it, and found a really comprehensive piece. The 5 main areas where the touches upon are:

• Choosing your Niche
• Spreading your Brand
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Writing Quality Content
• Niche Engagement

And here is one quote from the post:

For example, if you are interested in ’scandanavian fly fishing’ and are hoping to become a full-time blogger then you might struggle to find an audience large enough to make a decent income. What I recommend in this case is that you simply step back in terms of topic. So if you are interested in scandanavian fly fishing then you write about fishing, if you are interested in snow boarding then consider creating an extreme sports website.

The idea here is that you don’t limit yourself to what you can cover. There’s nothing wrong with writing about celebrities or blogging or self improvement. Although they are niche topics they do have a very large potential audience if you can build your brand and gain some marketshare. However, if you want to write about blog design (which a friend of mine does) then you are limiting your potential post ideas. On the other hand, with this topic you are branching out from a huge niche so there is still potential to reach a few thousand subscribers and make a great go of things.

It is always interesting to read the experiences and perspectives of other people on Internet marketing and blogging, so check it out. If you want more on this topic, read also the group writing project we had a while ago titled 30 Blog Traffic Generation Tips.

15 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic

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The blogosphere is a big and busy world with over 100 million blogs and growing. How do you attract visitors to your blog? Follow these simple tips to drive traffic to your blog.

1. Write Well and Write Often

Frequently updating your blog with useful content is the first step to building your blog's audience. The content you write is what will keep readers coming back for more. Make sure you have something meaningful to say to them and say it often to maintain their interest and keep them loyal.

Furthermore, post frequently to increase the number of chances you have for your blog's content to be noticed by search engines such as Google or Technorati.

2. Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

Get on the radar screen for the popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! by submitting your blog's URL to them. Most search engines provide a 'Submit' link (or something similar) to notify the search engine of your new blog, so those search engines will crawl it and include your pages in their results.

It's important to understand that simply submitting your blog to search engines doesn't mean your pages will appear at the top of a Google search results screen, but at least your blog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up by a search engine.

3. Use and Update Your Blogroll

By adding links to sites you like in your blogroll, the owners of those blogs will find your blog and will be likely to add a reciprocal link in their blogrolls. It's an easy way to get the link to your blog in front of many readers on other blogs. The hope is that some of those readers will click on the link to your blog on the other blogs' blogrolls and find your content interesting and enjoyable turning them into loyal readers.

4. Harness the Power of Comments

Commenting is a simple and essential tool to increase your blog's traffic. First, respond to comments left on your blog to show your readers that you value their opinions and draw them into a two-way conversation. This will increase reader loyalty.

Second, leave comments on other blogs to drive new traffic. Make sure you leave your blog's URL in your comment, so you create a link back to your own blog. Many people will read the comments left on a blog post. If they read a particularly interesting comment, they are highly likely to click on the link to visit the commentor's website. It's important to make sure you leave meaningful comments that are likely to invite people to click on your link to read more.

5. Syndicate Your Blog's Content with an RSS Feed

Setting up an RSS feed button on your blog makes it easy for your loyal readers to not just read your blog but also know when you publish new content.

6. Use Links and Trackbacks

Links are one of the most powerful parts of your blog. Not only are links noticed by search engines, but they also act as a tap on the shoulder to other bloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps to get you noticed by other bloggers who are likely to investigate the sites that are linking to them. This may lead them to become new readers of your blog or to add links to your blog from theirs.

You can take links to other blogs a step further by leaving a trackback on the other blog to let them know you've linked to them. Blogs that allow trackbacks will include a link back to your blog in the comments section of the post that you originally linked to. People do click on trackback links!

7. Tag Your Posts

It takes a few extra seconds to add tags to each of your blog posts, but it's worth the time in terms of the additional traffic tags can drive to your blog. Tags (like links) are easily noticed by search engines. They're also key to helping readers find your blog when they perform searches on popular blog search engines such as Technorati.

8. Submit Your Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites

Taking the time to submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more can be a simple way to quickly boost traffic to your blog.

9. Remember Search Engine Optimization

When you write your blog posts and pages, remember to optimize your pages for search engines to find them. Include relevant keywords and links but don't overload your posts with too many relevant keywords or completely irrelevant keywords. Doing so can be considered spamming and could have negative results such as your blog being removed from Google's search entirely.

10. Don't Forget Images

Images don't just make your blog look pretty, they also help people find you in search engine listings. People often use the image search options offered by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, and naming your images with search engine optimization in mind can easily boost your traffic.

4,439 Words on Driving Traffic to Your Blog

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When I posted my one month and two month traffic stats for PluginID for the world to see, a lot of people were impressed with the growth the site received so quickly. In fact, I had a lot of comments and emails from people asking me how I did it.

There are no real ’secrets’ you need to learn in order to increase your blog traffic, so today I’m going to share what I know and how I effectively build traffic. This can be used on sites you are just starting up or on blogs that are already established, there should be something here for everyone to benefit from.

Photo Credit

Brief History

Before you wonder whether or not you should trust my advice, I just want to say that I’ve been in Internet Marketing for over 3 years. I work with newspapers and some Fortune 500 companies so have quite a bit of experience in the field with both large brands and sites I’ve started from scratch.

However, you shouldn’t take anything I say as the blogging traffic bible or word for word what you should do to get visitors to your content. This is simply my advice on building a high-trafficked blog that doesn’t require multiple digg homepages or PR8 backlinks in order to see a traffic spike.

So, without further anticipation, here are the sections we are going to cover today:

• Choosing your Niche
• Spreading your Brand
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Writing Quality Content
• Niche Engagement

To me, these are the main factors to building a blog to respectable traffic levels. You may know about SEO but you may not know about niche engagement so if you don’t have time to read all this or don’t think you will benefit from certain parts then just read the sections necessary for you.

Choosing Your Niche

Deciding a niche to blog about can be very difficult for most bloggers, once you’ve set the tone of your blog it can be challenging to veer off into other areas. The first thing I want to say is that you should not just start another ‘make money online’ website. These are absolutely everywhere, I actually feel bad for some of the authors who are preaching about how people can make money online when they have 18 subscribers and every other post is a product review.

Choosing your niche should not be a difficult job, you simply have to write about something you love; cover a topic you are passionate about. While knowing what you are passionate about shouldn’t be too difficult, you should also make sure that there is an audience for your content.

For example, if you are interested in ’scandanavian fly fishing’ and are hoping to become a full-time blogger then you might struggle to find an audience large enough to make a decent income. What I recommend in this case is that you simply step back in terms of topic. So if you are interested in scandanavian fly fishing then you write about fishing, if you are interested in snow boarding then consider creating an extreme sports website.

The idea here is that you don’t limit yourself to what you can cover. There’s nothing wrong with writing about celebrities or blogging or self improvement. Although they are niche topics they do have a very large potential audience if you can build your brand and gain some marketshare. However, if you want to write about blog design (which a friend of mine does) then you are limiting your potential post ideas. On the other hand, with this topic you are branching out from a huge niche so there is still potential to reach a few thousand subscribers and make a great go of things.

Before you pick your final niche, make sure:

• You love the topic you are going to be writing about
• There’s a big enough audience for you to reach
• If you blog on a very specific topic then there’s a chance to become the niche leader
• There are other blogs in the space that you can interact with

The bottom point is not absolutely necessary, but when you are blogging in a specific niche rather than a broader industry it can feel lonely when you are on your own. One of the main benefits of blogging is that you can become part of a community and find like-minded people with the same interests. Don’t limit yourself too much but also don’t go to broad and write about everything. After a while you’ll work out what is best for you and what is best for your audience.

Spreading Your Brand

You found this blog post somehow. Somewhere out there in the World Wide Web you came across this post. Whether it was from StumbleUpon, a comment I left on another site, a recommendation from a friend or you were already subscribed to our feed, you found it. I’ve worked very hard at spreading the PluginID brand and I’m going to go through exactly how you can do the same thing.

Get an Avatar - I strongly recommend that you pick an avatar (a small image) that is going to be used to represent your site on the various platforms I mention below. Your avatar should be something that stands out, is catchy and most importantly…memorable. If you sign-up on social sites and don’t fill in your details or upload an image then you are going to look like every other lazy member of that community.

It can be something that represents your niche but it certainly doesn’t have to. Here are some popular examples from around the web:

The second one is mine

In order to get your avatar in comments like you see on a lot of blogs, including this one, simply join Gravatar and upload the image you want to use. It works based on your email address so whatever email you insert in your comments, the corresponding image will show (if any).

Join MyBlogLog - Although I don’t use any of the services provided in MyBlogLog, there’s one cool benefit to being a member. Whenever you view a blog that has their ‘recent visitors’ widget installed, which many of them do, your avatar will show on the side of the website.

Just through browsing the web I already had 4 friend requests on my profile and my page had been viewed over 160 times. When you factor in that your profile clearly displays your website URL then there’s the potential to get quite a few visitors for no extra work on your part. You can check out MyBlogLog here.

Register on Social Voting Websites - whether you are a fan of these or not, there’s a lot of traffic potential in all of them. I recommend only signing up on the ones that interest you and you will use but some of the biggest ones are:

• Digg
• Mixx
• StumbleUpon (Toolbar)
• Reddit

You should also check if there are any niche social voting sites in your industry, Squareoak has a huge list which might help in your search.

For all of the sites you join, upload your avatar from earlier and fill out your profile details. Whether or not you use a site name as your username is up to you. Some people prefer to remain anonymous so that they can become ‘power users’ and drive more traffic to their sites. For me, I make it clear who I am on StumbleUpon and Mixx but use a more anonymous profile on Digg where it is frowned upon to vote or submit your own content.

Join Twitter - Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ service which allows you to share 140 character updates with the world. My favourite aspect of Twitter is definitely the community aspect and seeing what other people are up to. Once again I recommend you use the same avatar as on other sites, or at least show a picture of yourself.

I’ve been using Twitter for PluginID for over 2 months now and it is consistently in the top 5 referring sites in terms of traffic to this blog. What I love is that you can ‘follow’ people (add them as a friend) and keep up to date with like-minded people that have similar interests. When you fill out your profile you get to put your URL in the site field so definitely do this, and then start following people in your niche.

Following is not something that you can just do on its own and expect to get traffic from the site, instead you want more people to follow you. Some quick tips to get more followers include:

• Link to your twitter profile from your website
• Establish relationships with friends who are already connections on the likes of StumbleUpon & Mixx
• Ask interesting questions that people will reply to, then their followers will find your profile
• Offer great tips and advice in your industry so that people would be missing out if they didn’t follow you

Finally, you can also use TwitterFeed to automatically update your followers of all new posts to your blog. I tend to click on the blog updates of others so this definitely sends traffic.

Make Content Easy to Share - I’m amazed at how difficult some blogs make it just in order to digg one of their stories or give it a save on delicious. If you want to grow and want people to share your content then you have to make it easy for them. If you look at the bottom of every post here then you will see there are quick links to:

• Email posts
• Stumble Posts
• Save to Delicious
• Digg

If you are using feedburner then you can set this up very easily, I also have the links showing in my RSS feed for people who prefer to read content that way. People aren’t going to share your content if you make it easy for them, why would they go through the hassle?

Search Engine Optimisation

When I first started out in SEO I was constantly learning and testing as much as I could. I was reading forums on a daily basis, writing my own SEO blog and trying out new techniques. Based on all this work, I’ve managed to successfully pick up the knowledge to rank very highly for competitive keywords in search engines and I’ve actually been providing SEO as a service for a few years.

In this post I’m just going to keep to the basics as…to be honest…that is all you really need.

Unique Title Tags - This is the tip that most people in the SEO industry give first because in terms of on-site optimisation this is one of the most important things you can have. The title tag is one of the best ways to tell search engines what your website is actually about. In terms of optimising this for blogs I tend to show an optimised homepage title which either features the site name and slogan or keywords relating to my niche.

In terms of single posts, I prefer simply having the title of the post as the full title of the page. Of course, if you want to add branding to that then I recommend you do so but only at the end of the title. It is believed (and proven in my own testing) that keywords at the beginning of a URL are given more weight.

Non-WWW to www Redirect - For those of you thinking ‘What??’, let me explain. Basically, it’s a good idea to make sure that either the non-www version of your site (http://pluginid.com) is redirecting to the www version of your site (http://www.pluginid.com) or vica versa. The reason for this is that whenever somebody links to your site you want all that link juice to go to the same place.

The best way to do this is by using a 301 redirect, which tells the search engines that the link is permanent. You can learn how to do this over here. As an extra measure, you can also sign your site up for Google Webmaster Tools and there’s a section to tell them which version of your site to show in the search results.

Interlink - Interlinking is when you relevantly link to other sections of your website in your blog posts. I do that quite a lot over here at PluginID and there are 2 benefits. The first benefit is that you increase the inbound links to these pages and thus increase their importance in the eyes of the search engines. This can help you get more pages indexed.

The second benefit is that you can keep your website visitors on your site for longer. Instead of just having them read an article and leave, you’ll find a lot of them clicking through to other sections and checking out your other content.

Have a Sitemap - We have a sitemap over here but for now it is only covering pages I’ve created that aren’t actually blog posts. The best things to normally include in your sitemap are:

• Post Categories
• Latest Posts
• Any other pages you’ve created

I will be implementing the latest posts on the PluginID sitemap shortly but for now the site is being indexed fine. I link to product reviews that I wouldn’t have on the main blog, this helps website visitors find content and also help search engines navigate around the website. When we add more pages in the future (which we will) this will become even more useful.

If you want to set-up your own simply create a new page in your blogging software and link to it from all pages of your website (I recommend the navigation bar or footer). Then include the main pages that you want the search engines and site visitors to see, that you may not have been able to link to elsewhere. You can also use this opportunity to guide new visitors around your site and direct them to your favourite posts.

Shorten your URL’s

Even on the big blogs out there today, I see this mistake over and over again. You look at the address bar for a post URL and it appears something like this:

http://www.domain.com/2009/10/03/keywords-that-I-used-in-the-title-of-my-blog-post-rediculous/

I’m not kidding, I see this on sites with over 50,000 subscribers. If you are using Wordpress then go into the Settings >> Permalinks page and cut it down to simply the post-name. Now, whenever you are writing a post you can also cut this down as well, so for example the URL for this blog post will probably end up being something like:

http://www.pluginid.com/increase-blog-traffic

Doesn’t that look much better? Very long URL’s get cut off my search engines and they look quite spammy in my opinion. Personally, I prefer URL’s to remain short but just long enough so that the user knows what the page is about.

SEO No No’s

I’ve spent 3 years blogging in the SEO industry so I’ve never encountered as many people who sell links as I have in the personal development niche. I saw bloggers posting and wondering why their PR went down when they had 20 spammy links in their sidebar. If you want to stay on the safe side of the fence then I wouldn’t sell links in your blog. I do this on a few sites but only on sites where I don’t care about Google or other search related traffic.

I also recommend that you don’t write solely for search engines, your blog should be all about the readers. If you are creative you’ll find someway to include the keywords you are targeting into a post title without it looking spammy. If you simply want to include your keywords all over the place and make your text unreadable then you probably aren’t in blogging to build up a readerbase, or you shouldn’t expect to build one.

Writing Quality Content

Content is the main factor that you need to work on with your blog. Even if you don’t spend time tweaking your site for search benefits and don’t care that much about branding specifically on each social site, excellent content will still give your site a chance to succeed.

Of course, the definition of ‘quality’ really depends on which niche you are writing in. If you are writing on a golf blog then quality might be a new swing technique that nobody has thought of. If you are writing on a humour blog it may be about finding a funny image or a new joke that people just have to pass around. For our case in terms of the personal development niche, quality content tends to be content which is personal, original and fills a need.

The type of content that tends to do well are:

• List Content - ‘11 Ways to’, ‘21 Reasons why’, ‘101 things that’ - you find these a lot on blogs
• Unique content i.e. research into something that hasn’t been done or a personal challenge people are thinking of trying which you report on
• Viral Content - something that is easy for people to share and something that they are likely to share. Humorous content tends to do well
• Resource posts - links to products, services or items in one place that can help peoples lives (example)

Although you might have success with a post on the ‘11 Biggest Fashion Mistakes of 2008′, it’s not really going to go down well with your general audience on your soccer (football) blog. Remember that although social media sites have the potential to drive you a large amount of visitors, many of them will simply disappear so don’t push away your regular genuine readers with unrelated content.

If your content is just the same as what everybody in your niche is used to then you aren’t going to stand out. If most people write short newsy posts then try writing longer posts that are informative. If people tend to write list posts that offer little substance, can you do something different and still interest the audience?

Following is a look at some of my top articles with their titles and how many views they received:

Title: Dream Lifestyle? Think Again!
Views: 21,383
Reason: The reason that this post did so well is that I took a popular myth and showed people the behind the scenes look. If you can change people’s assumptions then you are onto a winner.

Title: Personal Development Blogs
Views: 15,126
Reason: The reason this page did so well is because I ranked the top sites in the personal development niche based on a number of public metrics. Everyone who is involved did their best to share the list with their fellow stumblers, tweeters or website visitors. If you can create a page that people benefit from sharing then definitely do it.

Title: Are you Living a Scripted Life?
Views: 13,980
Reason: I find post titles with questions tend to get a lot better response than those without, that’s not saying you should overdo it though. I think the main reason this post did so well is because many people could relate to the content and wondered if they where simply living a life that was already designed for them, rather than doing something unique. Once again, this is making people question themselves rather than feeding them all the answers.

Title: How to Get Someone or Something, Off Your Mind
Views: 8,836
Reason: This post did very well on Care2 and StumbleUpon and was posted quite recently. This is a resolution to a common problem that people have, but I’m also putting my own spin on it. I didn’t answer it in a way that you would normally expect and actually shared something I think would work better. I’ve noticed that a lot of search engine referrals are also coming in from this post so it’s view count will constantly increase whether I get social media traffic or not.

Niche Engagement

Niche engagement, as the name suggests, means immersing yourself in all aspects of your niche in order to get targeted traffic back to your blog. I’m going to run through some ideas of what I mean by this now:

Blog Comments - I regularly comment on blogs in this niche for a number of reasons. The first is that the author is likely to come back to your site to see who is commenting. The second is that there’s potential for visitors of the site you are commenting on to click your name (link) and arrive at your website. I found one blog comment to drive me over 100 visitors recently and when it is in the niche you blog in, you can’t complain at the effort it takes to comment when you can get that many visitors.

Thirdly, blog comments are a good way to become ‘closer’ to the author of a blog, in which they might link back to one of your blog posts or simply add you as a friend in other social websites. I tend to find that the authors of small to medium size blogs will comment back on your site as well when they get the time, making yours look a bit more lively.

Guest Posting - I’ve only done about 4 guest-posts since starting this blog, actually that’s quite a few for 3 months, but they’ve all been worth it. Guest posts are a great way to get both backlinks and traffic to your website which can help with direct visitors and search engine referrals. It’s best to do a guest post on a blog in your niche because that way the people that come across your site are much more likely to subscribe to your feed.

I’ve done a few guest posts for blogs that aren’t very related but are still large. My main reason for this is that I find it very easy to write on a range of subjects, and prefer relevant posts to this niche to be written solely for this blog. However, you should try things out and see what works best for you. If you do give guest posting a try then don’t value quantity over quality. You want to showcase your best work for others so that they:

• Are likely to post the content on their site
• Have a chance of receiving some good traffic to the article
• Bring in visitors from that site who want to see more of your work
• Are likely to invite you back to guest post again

Forum Activity - If you didn’t pick too small of a niche when you started your blog, it’s likely there will be a few large forums in your niche. In the personal development industry the biggest forum is definitely the one ran by Steve Pavlina. In the past I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the site, mostly because I enjoy the content and discussions there. If you don’t enjoy the content of the biggest forums in your niche then you should question whether you really love your industry.

The reason I state that is because forum posting is something that can be tedious for little results, however the result is targeted traffic. On most forums, you can place a signature link so that whenever you make a post there is a link back to your website at the bottom. I’ve found that this works well not only for website visitors but also in terms of making relationships with other bloggers on that website.

Be Active on StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon is one of my favourite websites because time and time again it is able to show me amazing content from my niche at the click of a button. Not only that, but StumbleUpon is known to have the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website.

When you first sign-up to the site you will be given some options to share your interests, make sure you are actually interested in the topics that you select. Now, whenever you hit the ‘Stumble’ button in the toolbar, you will be directed to a new and interesting article in your niche, providing that some spam hasn’t gotten through their filters. I tend to Stumble a lot of related content, especially that of my friends on Twitter (Add me) and the blogs that I comment on. If you are nice to others and vote for their content, then you’ll find that they are likely to stumble yours back.

Of course, don’t only stumble the content of certain people as SU might pick up on this and it will look as if you are gaming the system. Vote for whatever you find interesting and if it is something of someone you’ve ‘connected’ with in the past then even better. In terms of traffic potential I can say that StumbleUpon has sent me over 30,000 visitors in one day before and for another site sent over 150,000 in one month. So in terms of potential, there’s absolutely loads.

Be Real - The ideas I mentioned above are not ‘tricks’ so that you can start receiving traffic from other blogs, they are all utilising the power of networking, helping others and being real. By being real I mean let people know who you are. There are multiple ways you can do this:

• Leave your full name in blog comments
• Have a picture of yourself on your about page
• Leave your full name in your blog posts
• Write from the heart, connect with people on a personal level

I do all of those things here and I don’t think this site would have had such a quick growth if I was robotic and anonymous. Consider whether there are ways that you could come across in a more humane manner.

In Summary

By far this is the longest blog post I’ve ever wrote, but that’s OK. It may have taken me 4-5 hours but it’s a blog post that I can keep referring people to, and hopefully one that other bloggers keep referring their visitors to. You see, when you care about your website you don’t mind writing a 4,000+ word post because you are enjoying what you are doing, you are looking forward to the reactions of your readers and other bloggers.

I’m not saying posts of this length or necessary, but now and again they might be what separates you from the thousands of other bloggers in your niche. And when there are hundreds of blogs in your niche, there’s no harm in doing things that stand out in a positive light, in fact I strongly encourage it. You found this post somehow, now get out there and make sure people are finding your content ’somehow’. I hope I’ve helped you all in getting more traffic to your websites and look forward to reading what you guys have to say in the comments (genuinely)!

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 7 - Well Placed and Designed Ads

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Revenue = high readership + high paying ads + relevant ads + well placed and designed ads

The forth element of our Adsense Equation is that of having well designed and optimally placed Adsense Ads. I’ve found that ad positioning is incredibly important. I remember shifting the ads on one of my blogs a while back and being over the moon to discover the next morning that the move had doubled the click through rates that I’d had over night! Its worth doing some tweaking.

Adsense Ad placement and design is an issue that is often hotly debated in Adsense discussion forums. It seems that each Adsense user has their own strategy - some like ads that blend in, others like ads that stand out from the rest of the page. Some like ads in banner positions, others in skyscrapers, others like to put them right in the middle of content. In my experience, different strategies work on different blogs at different times. The key tip I’ll give you is to experiment. Try new positions and design and track your results. One of the best ways you can do this is by using Adsense Tracker which is an amazing tracking package for adsense which gives you much more control over what and how you track your adsense performance. It does cost to purchase the tracker but in my experience you’ll make your money back pretty quickly by using it to adapt your Adsense strategies.

Let me also share a few other tips that you might like to experiment with.

Blend - Most successful Adsense users seem to be taking the approach of blending their ads into the overall theme of their page. This often means making the ad’s background (and often border) the same (or similar) colour to the background of the page and making the title and URL the same as links of the rest of the page. In this way the ad does not stand out as being ‘ad-like’. Having said this I know of a few bloggers who take the opposite approach and make their ads as bright and ugly as possible in the hope of attracting the attention of their readers. I don’t subscribe to this because I think it cheapens the overall feel and look of a page.

In Content - More and more bloggers (and webmasters) are putting their ads inside the main body of their posts. In this way the ads are prominent and more likely to be seen by readers as they read your content. If your text wraps around the ads this can be quite effective. On the flipside of this argument is that you may run the risk of frustrating your readers with dominant ads. People reading content online are a fickle bunch and get easily turned off by blatant advertising.

Above the Fold - it is generally accepted that your Adsense ads should be placed towards the top of your page and be visable without your reader having to scroll down. Studies show that blog visitors stay on average for only 60 or so seconds, many without scrolling down. If you ads are hidden towards the bottom of your page you decrease the likelihood of them ever being seen let alone clicked.

Left is Best - Google has put together a ‘heat map’ which is probably the best thing that you can look at when thinking about the positioning of your ads. You’ll see from it that they have found that ads on the left hand side of the page do much better than those on the right hand side.

Too Dominent? - The position and design of your Adsense ads needs to be balanced with the overall purposes and design of your blog. What is the priority of your blog - is it to make money or is it something else. I have a number of blogs - and place ads differently on each depending upon their purposes. For example this blog is not a commercial blog - I’m more interested in building relationships, sharing and hearing others ideas and updating those interested in what I’m doing with my life. As a result my Adsense Ads are in a less prominent banner position and are designed to fit with the overall theme of the blog. However on my Digital Photography Blog there is obviously a more commercial intent (as well as it being something of a passion and hobby). As a result I experiment with more prominent Adsense ads (usually skyscraper and within content).

I cannot stress enough how useful it is to experiment. What works on one blog doesn’t always work on another. I’ve also noticed that if you have a blog with regular and loyal readers that it is good to keep things changing as your readers tend to get used to the way your blog is and become blind to things like Adsense Ads. I notice that when I move my ads around that it often creates higher click throughs for a few days - until the blindness kicks in again. Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense is an excellent E-book written with lots of good tips on positioning your adsense ads if you’re wanting to get another person’s opinion on this topic.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 6 - Relevant Ads

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Revenue = high readership + high paying ads + relevant ads + well placed and designed ads

The third element of our Adsense equation is that of relevant Adsense ads. It is all very well to rank high in search engines to generate high levels of traffic, but without relevant ads that relate to the content of your blog you are not likely to generate much in the way of click throughs.

Let me give you an example. Recently I was asked to help a fellow blogger who has struggling with his Adsense ads because whilst his content largely focused upon the topic of ‘health care’ - most of the ads being served to his blog were focused upon ‘blogging’. He was getting quite reasonable traffic levels and had a reasonably high paying topic (there are some good health care ads out there) but as you’d expect, people coming to a blog about health care did not click on ads for blogging software and services at a very high rate. The challenge was to get his ads reflecting the content of his blog.

Another fellow blogger had the problem of not getting ANY ads being served to his site. Instead of paying ads all he was getting was the public service ads that Adsense serves when they couldn’t find any relevant paying ads (these pay nothing).

How do you get relevant ads? Here are a few things to try.

Make sure there are ads available - My friend who didn’t get any paying ads served was focusing on a key word for which there was no or very few ads. A simple way of checking this is to do a search on Google for the key word you are targeting. If they don’t serve ads on their own search results page its an indication that such ads are scarce - if not non existent. They way we got ads on my friends blog was to experiment with other related keywords. He didn’t have to change the focus of his blog - just the way he described his topics. For example if there are no ads for ‘bed linen’ try ‘blankets’, ’sheets’, ‘quilts’ etc. Experiment with different combinations until you find something that works.

Increase your Keyword density - The more you use your keywords the more likely you are to get ads on those topics. Its not common knowledge exactly how the Adsense bot decides what ads suit your content best (if someone knows feel free to post it in comments below) but it’s a pretty safe bet that if you put you keyword in your title, at least once in your first paragraph and then scatter it throughout the rest of your page that you’ll convince the Adsense bot of what your topic is. It MAY also be helpful to include your keywords in the URL of your page (Moveable type can let you do this - ie look at the URL of this page - it incorporates my title and therefore some keywords). It MAY also be worth putting your keywords in outward links, bold, italics etc. All of these strategies also help optimise yor blog for search engines which won’t hurt either.

Examine your Sidebars, menus, header and footer - It is not just your main content that the Adsense bot searches to find the topic of your page, but also your other areas. When I looked at the healthcare blog that was getting ‘blogging’ ads I noticed that he had the word ‘blog’ in his title, three times on his sidebar and once in his footer. It was also in his URL and he also used the word quite often in his content. My recommendation was to remove the word from as many of those places as possible and to increase his health care keywords. The ads improved their relevancy almost immediately.

Stick to one topic per page - Obviously this may not be feasible on your front page - but attempt to keep each individual blog entry/post as highly targeted as possible. I’ve noticed that some people often include two or three topics in one entry - this will confuse Adsense’s bot so split them up into two entries.

Block irrelevant Ads - Sometimes despite your best intentions Google just gets it wrong and serves your ads that have nothing to do with what you write. If you’re getting some repeating irrelevant ads block them. Adsense lets you do this to quite a few sites and its easy to do. I have a number of ads blocked, some because they are philosophically not consistent with what I write about, but mainly because they just are not relevant to the topic of my blogs.

Ask Adsense - If all else fails notify Google Adsense of your issue. Of course they are busy people - but Google prides itself on being responsive to its users. I’ve emailed with queries a number of times, once on an issue of irrelevant ads, and every time I’ve had positive results from my query. You’ve got nothing to loose - shoot them an email!

If you do all of the above you SHOULD find Adsense serves you with relevant ads. In conjunction with the other elements in our equation this will contribute to increased click throughs and hopefully higher Adsense revenue. Next in this series on maximizing Adsense revenue is a post on Well Placed and Designed Adsense Ads.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 5 - High Paying Ads

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Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

The next element of this Adsense equation to be examined is how to get high paying Adsense Ads running on your site. Obviously in any business one way to get higher profits is to charge more for your product - whilst you have no direct say in how much is charged for ads run on your site - there are ways of targeting types of ads that might bring in a higher return than others.

As we mentioned in our initial explanation of the equation, the PVR Blog is one example of a blog that targets a well paying ad type - ads for PVR technology. Whilst I do not know specifics of earnings I would suspect blogs like Gizmodo who run Adsense ads would also be generating a higher paying ad, due to their focus on technology.

The lesson we can learn from blogs such as these is that they attract specific ads (that presumably are well paying) by keeping their content targeted on the same topics. To over simplify what we’re saying - if you want ads about Camera Phones blog about Camera Phones.

Finding High Paying Ads is not as easy as it sounds (is anything?). Do a search for Google on High Paying Adsense Ads and you won’t find too many sites listing the best keywords for Adsense. The top Adsense users in Adsense discussion forums tend to be pretty secretive about not only what keywords they focus on, but also what sites they run. I don’t blame them either - its good business sense really.

Having said this there are a number of strategies and tools that you might like to employ to help find high paying keywords.

• Buy them - Finding high paying keywords for your blog is possible by yourself for free - but as with everything a few entrepreneurial types are willing to do the leg work for you to save you some time and give you a comprehensive result. One service that you might like to try to find good keywords is Top Paying Keywords.
• Trial and Error - I know this will frustrate some of you who want a nice and easy quick fix but overall it is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Try writing on a topic - track the results - if it pays off do it again….lots. Adsense allows you to track specific pages or sections of your blog using its ‘channels’ feature - if you’re smart you’ll watch which sections of your blog are generating the highest ads by dividing your overall earnings by the number of clicks and comparing it to other channels. Keep trying new topics until you strike gold and then dig in like crazy!
• Are there Any Ads? - This is a good first question. Despite the many thousands of advertisers using Adsense there are some topics where the answer to this question is no. A simple way to check is to head to Google and do a search for the key words you’re wanting to blog about. The results page will bring up not only a list of other sites writing about that key word (they are you competitors) but on the right hand side there will be a list of ads - these are the same sorts of ads you’ll get on your site if you write on the topic. If there are ads there, it is a good sign. If there are not - maybe its worth finding another topic to write on if you’re hoping to attract ads.
• 7 Search has a list of the 100 of the top paying keywords (in their advertising program - not Adsense) at the moment. Its a bit depressing actually to see a list like this because you’d have to sell your soul somewhat in order to go with many of them. Its an interesting site to check out though.
• Also from 7 Search (and more useful) is their Keyword Suggestion Tool which gives you an idea of what people are paying per click on different tools (again this is not specifically for Adsense but it will give you an idea of what the going rates are). Find What also has a similar service.
• Google Adsense’s biggest competitor are Overture (they run the ads on Yahoo) - they offer a service where you can enter your keywords and they will not only tell you how much advertisers are paying for the words but also how many people are searching for the term. This is a very useful tool.
• Sign up for Adwords - One way of getting a feel for how much people are willing to pay per click is to sign up with Google as an advertiser yourself. It doesn’t cost much to start a mini campaign and do some research this way. You’ll get a feel for what people are bidding on different words very quickly this way.
• Word Tracker is the best tool I’ve seen to help in finding keywords that people are searching for in the major search engines. The excellent thing about Word Tracker is that they also tell you how many other sites out there are targeting the same words! This is very handy as it will stop you targeting ‘Britney Spears’ as a Keyword phrase even though its one of the most searched for keywords on the web because literally hundreds of thousands of other sites have beaten you to the punch. Word Tracker has a free version to trial it and their paying version is even better - well worth the investment.

Targeting High Paying Adsense Ads is an important aspect of generating an income from Adsense. It is not enough in and of itself however. You can have $10 per click ads (I’ve not found any of these yet) but without generating any traffic your research into the right ads will be useless. Likewise it is one thing to identify which ads you want to target - but it is another thing to actually get these relevant ads showing on your site. It is to this topic which our next post in this series will head - Finding Relevant Adsense Ads.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 4 - Increasing Traffic

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Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

I now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.

Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’

Increasing the readership of your blog is not as simple as it sounds, it takes time, patience and hard work (and sometimes a bit of luck) Having said that there are many things you can do to get your blog in front of a wider audience and there exposing the adsense messages on your site to more potential ‘clickers’. Here are a few tips…

• Quality, Interesting, Useful and Original Content - What are the blogs that you read the most? If you’re anything like me they are blogs that have quality content that ’scratches me where I itch’. This is essential to increasing your readership unless you have a pretty amazing ‘gimmick’ to bring readers in.
• Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out. Also worth a read is Good Weblog Design and Layout.
• Link to others - be generous with your links to other bloggers big and small. You’ll be surprised how many links come back your way. This not only brings traffic from their sites but doesn’t hurt your ranking in Google.
• Comment on others blogs - Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog because I genuinely interacted with them on their blogs through comments. Hear me now, I say genuinely because its easy to spam in comments, but this will have the opposite effect of generating readers to your blog.
• Update Frequently - There is nothing that turns me off a blog faster than seeing that it hasn’t been updated for a month or more. Keep it rolling over with interesting content.
• Interact with Readers - Having an interactive blog that invites the involvement of readers is one way of generating repeat visitors. I’ve written a tip on Interactive Blogging including a number of interactive tools that you can use on your blog. Also check out this tip on using comments effectively to increase interactivity on your blog.
• Optimise for Search Engines - I can’t stress enough how important Search Engines are to increasing traffic, especially traffic that will click on your ads. I find that 95% of my traffic comes from Google and have found that anecdotal evidence suggests this traffic clicks through on Adsense ads at a higher rate than traffic from links on other blogs and sites. So work hard at getting listed and highly ranked on Search Engines.
• Add a signature to your outgoing email - Learn a lesson from Hotmail who have used signatures on the bottom of their users emails for years to promote their home page and generate interest in their product. Be careful though if you don’t want your worlds to collide!
• Web Rings - There are literally thousands of webrings that you can sign up for. I’m not sure how effective they are these days, but some people still swear by them.
• Add an RSS feed to your blog - more and more people are reading blogs without ever visiting them through News Aggregators that pick up information using RSS. Whilst this does not guarantee those reading through aggregators will visit your blog (and therefore see your Adsense Ads) it certainly increases the chances of them dropping by, especially if you invite comments and have internal links on your posts.
• List your site on Portals - There are a growing number of sites which exclusively list blogs. If you want people to find you its worth submitting your blog to be listed on them. Some focus on specific topics while others list blogs on a wide variety of topics (like Eaton Web and Globe of Blogs). Other portals like BlogShares and Blog Street also list a lot of blogs in different ways which might increase your blogs profile.
• Blog Search Engines and Indexes - Get yourself registered on sites like Blogdex, Technorati, Popdex and Daypop (they require RSS I think). These sites have features that allow people to search for blog entries via topic and keywords. They also list the most popular recent topics and each have other interesting features which can enhance your blogging experience.
• Start a Newsletter - Offer your readers a newsletter service to keep them up to date with your latest posts. I’ve found since adding a free weekly newsletter to my digicam blog that hundreds of readers have signed up for regular updates of my latest posts. Think about this - hundreds of people have given me permission to invite them to come back to my blog - every week!
• Get Involved in Blog Projects and Memes - From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Get involved, support their project and you might find it pays off. On the flip side start your own blogging project or meme. Do something that is of service to other bloggers. I tried something like this with Underblogs and Blogger Idol.
• Get involved in other web forums - Genuinely participate in web forums and discussion pages on topics related to your blog. Many of these allow you to add a signature to your posts which raise your blogs profile.
• Promote your Posts - If you think you’ve written something worthwhile spend a few minutes letting others know about it. I regularly shoot other bloggers to notify them of what I’ve written if I think it will interest them. Think about it before you send the email and don’t bombard the same people constantly with every topic you write on - be selective, concise, polite and helpful with your emails but don’t be afraid to promote yourself.
• Add a ‘Email a Friend’ Option to your posts - make it easy for your readers to tell others about what you’ve written. I know this function gets used regularly on my blog and brings in new readers that I would never otherwise have been able to reach.

These are just some of the ideas that I’ve used and seen others use to increase the readership of a blog and thereby increase the exposure of Adsense ads to a wider audience.Many of the above tips were taken from my Blog Tips Series including the ‘Finding Readers’ Series.

What methods have your found to be effective at increasing the readership of your blog? What works for your and what doesn’t? What tips would you add to this collection?

Of course increasing traffic alone won’t greatly increase your Adsense revenue, but it can help! In our next Adsense Tip for Bloggers we will explore ways to generate High Paying Ads - the second component in our Adsense Revenue Equation.

Earning a Six Figure Income from Blogging?

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There has been quite a bit of flow on interest from the Interview that I did a few days back with Susannah Gardner. Interestingly, despite the fact that I wrote thousands of words of wisdom (I like to think so) it was a line buried way down at the bottom of the first part of the interview that seems to have gotten everyone talking and emailing me. In response to the question of ‘how much do you earn’ I wrote:

‘This is the big question, isn’t it? Some of the systems I use don’t allow disclosure of actual figures so I won’t break it down or give specifics. It is actually difficult to put a figure on it because each month is different and overall my earnings are still on the rise from month to month. However based on how things are currently going I expect that this year my blogging (across all blogs and income streams) will generate a six figure income ($US).‘

To be honest I grappled with whether to include that detail in this interview. As I’ve said here before, I was brought up not to discuss money and to do so to me feels a little awkward - but i did it for a couple of reasons:

1. It is the question i get asked more than any other question. People are fascinated with a blogger earning money from their blogging. I thought I’d answer it once and for all so we could get past it and start talking about more important things.

2. I partly did it because people constantly write off the idea of Pro Blogging to me.They see what I and a growing list of other Pro Bloggers as a hobby and write it off as just a stage we’re going through. I want to legitimate what we do and show it is a significant earner and something worth putting some serious time into. Pro Blogging is here to stay.

3. I wanted to encourage my fellow Professional Bloggers(and those aspiring to be them) with a figure that would give them a bit of hope. If I can earn that kind of money then I know others can (and already are). Yes I’m working very hard on this (and have done so for a couple of years) but I’m just an ordinary guy following some hunches and dreams.

A couple of people have told me I shouldn’t have revealed how much I earn because it breaks confidentiality clauses with the ad programs that I use. Thanks for your concern but please don’t worry. In saying I earn a six figure income (in excess of $100,000 $US) I have not said how much over and I have made it clear that the figure is calculated on a number of income sources including private advertising deals, affiliate programs, impression based ad programs, Adsense, BlogAds, text ads and blog consulting revenues etc.

Lastly I’ve had a number of people write to me in the last 24 hours via email and I’m quite amazed by the diversity of responses that I’ve had. They range from utter rage and anger that I earn money from blogging through to people asking for lessons and consulting.

To those that are angry - I am sorry that you are offended by me earning money from blogging. A guy has to support his family somehow and I figure it might as well be by helping people on the net by providing them with the information that they are searching for.

To those that want help to do what I do- sure thing - I’d love to help. I’d suggest the first port of call is to take a few hours to wander through the archives of this site. Virtually everything I’ve learnt is here for free. Yes I am open to doing some consulting work to help people but I’d recommend you start with the free stuff that I offer here on this blog. If after you’ve had a read you would still like to engage me for some coaching or consultation I’d be more than happy to do that. I do charge for this service.

update: Since writing this post I’ve had many requests for help from people wanting to know more about how to blog for money. The requests are so many that I’m unable to respond to all individually or to give everyone the attention that they want. As a result I suggest two things for those wanting to know how to make money blogging.

Firstly I encourage you to read the archives of this blog. Everything I know about blogging professionally is on this blog. There are thousands of posts on the topic and I encourage you to put some time aside one day to have a read.

Secondly if you don’t have the time or patience to wade through my archives (there are a lot) I’ve developed a course in conjunction with Andy Wibbels to introduce people to the ways to make money from blogging. The course was inspired by this post and is called Six Figure Blogging. The course is made up of six one hour recordings of Andy and myself looking at different aspects of making money from blogs and includes over 200 pages of transcripts from the recordings. The course is not free but we believe it contains information that has the potential to earn bloggers money from blogging through hard work, putting in time and following some of the ideas we include in the course.

I hope that between the course and my archives you find the information you’re looking for on making money from blogging.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

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How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments - lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs

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My Personal Income Streams

As an update to this post I’ve more recently written one on How I make Money Blogging which highlights the most profitable ways that I use blogs to generate income. I’ve also written extensively on how bloggers make money in ProBlogger the Book.
How do bloggers make money from blogs?

How-Bloggers-Make-MoneyI’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

Update: Looking for more information on how to make money blogging? Here’s a post I wrote talking about my own experience - particularly looking at the top ways that I make money from blogs.