Archive for December, 2008
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
For those who are hoping to make money blogging and are busy developing the web content to be featured on the blog, one of the most important things to keep in mind is simplicity in website development. Today, more and more internet visitors want to find good quality and dynamic web content that provides the information they are looking for, while keeping them engaged.
Dynamic content has proven to be one of the most important elements in not only getting targeted traffic to a website or blog, but also in encouraging them back to the site again and again. Webmasters across the board agree that it is much better to offer the things that web visitors want so that they come back rather than constantly trying to find new traffic. It is much easier to make money blogging when your blog attracts repeat visitors as most experts agree a site visitor often needs to see read your sales pitch around seven times before making a purchase.
At the same time that dynamic web content is very important to the visitors to a site, it is also fundamental to attracting the search engines and gaining a favorable placement in the search engine ranking pages, often called SERPs. These days, all of the search engines give a lot of weight to fresh content that is kept updated and to user-generated content, in addition to relevant information about the keyword used for the search.
Because of the above facts, having dynamic content throughout a site can weigh heavily in favor of a site that is diligently trying to make the most of search engine marketing. Good SEO (search engine optimization), combined with great web content that is regularly updated, is a powerful combination that can improve your potential to make money blogging dramatically.
Ranking high in the search engines for specific keywords that are directly related to the topic and purpose of a website is an essential internet marketing strategy and one of the simplest ways to assure a regular stream of visitors, without having to go to the cost of advertising your website. At the same time, once visitors arrive at a site that is filled with dynamic content that provides the kind of info they are after, they are more likely to bookmark the site, subscribe to your rss feed, or subscribe to your email auto responders that gives visitors access to additional free web content on the topic they are interested in.
One of the easiest methods of generating dynamic content that visitors enjoy and benefit from and that the search engines are attracted to is to provide a way for visitors to interact and add to the content. Allowing visitors to submit comments on your posts will encourage open debate between your visitors. This encourages them to return to check other comments plus the search engines love the fact that your pages are forever changing and growing with fresh dynamic web content.
WordPress is a popular blogging platform and it is a website development tool that can also be used as a dynamic web content type of management system. WordPress is free and easy to use, and it is widely used so there is a great deal of support, training and enhancements for the platform. With a WordPress blog even a person who has never built a website can quickly become a webmaster and start to make money blogging.
Technorati Tags: dynamic web content, make money blogging
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Sunday, December 28th, 2008
These days, it is fairly easy to set up a simple blog for personal use or even for a small business. There are an ever increasing number of tools and software programs available nowadays to help bloggers design their blogs and get them online in record time. In fact, most of these programs don’t even require a budding blogger to learn coding or programming in order to create a simple, yet attractive new blog.
The fact of the matter is that there isn’t even very much technical knowledge, skill or experience required these days to become a blogger and have your own successful money making blog once you have an internet marketing strategy in place. Most people with average skills can put together a simple 5 page blog in just a few hours of tinkering with a brand new piece of blog development software.
In the internet culture of today, putting up a new blog and getting it rolling is not much of a mystery anymore to most people. However, the thing that does trip up many bloggers and is most challenging to them is figuring out how to tell the world that their new site is actually “there.” Without visitors, no amount of work to make a site attractive will make any difference at all.
For people who are building a personal blog and who will send out an email to all their friends and family to view their new blog, this is probably not even a problem and they perhaps might even prefer that strangers don’t find it. But, the lack of blog traffic can be terribly vexing for bloggers who have worked hard, even if it was only a few hours, to put up a new site with some good web content in order to help promote their business or to try to start selling something online.
All too often, someone with plans to make money blogging will complete their new blog and then sit back and check their stats hourly, only to see that the only one visiting the site is the blogger himself, or the search engine spiders. However, if there is some activity from those spiders from the search engines, then at least there is hope of some traffic real soon.
One thing every blogger must learn to do is to utilize proper search engine optimization, or SEO techniques. This is the part that can be much more complex and time consuming to learn than the technical aspects of building a webpage and taking care of the blog hosting. SEO entails a number of things, in order to attract the attention of those search engine spiders and get them to index the site with a high ranking.
There are several blogs offering keyword tools and sound advice about blogging for money. Many of these resources go into great detail about how to do proper search engine optimization. With a little time, even a newbie can take the information they can find about SEO and apply it to their blog and eventually they will start to see their site climb in the rankings for certain keywords and phrases.
Identifying the primary keywords for a blog is one of the first steps in search engine optimization and bloggers must figure out what search terms, or keywords, people might use to find their site. At that point they can begin to make changes to the content and on-page elements. Then they will start to see traffic coming to their site and their blog statistics will improve.
Technorati Tags: bloggers, blogging, blogs, making money blogging, money making blog
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Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
In the prior article in this series, I reviewed what blog carnivals are and why all up and coming bloggers should be participating in them. In the event that you missed that post, let me review briefly the advantages of participating in blog carnivals:
- They improve your credibility
- You immediately get regular, profitable readers of your partner blogs
- You get a quick boost of traffic to blog articles
- You get a longer term increase in search result rankings
What I’d like to review in this article is how you can get the most benefit out of your carnival participation. Let’s face it, carnivals require effort and time, so you should get as much benefit and good will from them as possible. Here’s how you can accomplish that:
1) Add your posts early. There will be a submission deadline, but in all likelihood the host already has some idea on how the post will be structured before the deadline, so you want your post available during this early stage.
2) Make the host’s job simple: Learn how to create blog post titles that are catchy, and brainstorm two or three powerful, compelling headlines that can be used for the anchor text in links. Good headings are hard to create, so create them on your own. You’ll save the host the trouble and get more visitors from a better heading.
3) Follow the entry guidelines.
4) Get organized: Organize the information you enter. Include your e-mail address, name, blog name, article title, post summary, several sample headings, permalink, and trackback URL. Place this information in an e-mail above the full article itself, unless otherwise directed.
5) Advertise: Once submitted, be sure to promote the carnival. What goes around comes around, and your collaborative efforts to generate traffic will payoff for everyone in the long run. That’s the point of these carnivals: all participants are sharing subscribers, giving each the opportunity to attract the others’ regular subscribers.
6) Make sure you can handle your traffic: Prepare your blog for any traffic spikes that might occur, and optimize the page that the carnival readers will be viewing. You’ll want to target the ads or offers to your audience, provide a very visible subscription link, and follow-up with at least one week’s worth of powerful posts to capitalize on any lingering traffic you might have.
Blog carnivals are an excellent way to bring profitable, relevant, qualified, long-term readers. Use them properly and you’ll reap the rewards. But you must be prepared to put your best foot forward. Pick up a good blogs how to if you have any doubts on how you can optimize your blog for this kind of traffic.
Good luck!
Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs how to, how to blog, how to create blog, promote blog, traffic to blog
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