Guide to be a blogger

If you’re just started blogging, first you must aware that blogging is not easy as you think. As everything has it ups and downs blogging also has its own ups and downs, also when it comes to blogging the difficulties you’ll face are much higher than others because blogging is an activity which has no formal steps to follow. So blogging needs a good self confidence and a desire to do the best.

Here’s a list of things you must need and follow to be among the best in the business.

Self confidence
Without the feeling self confidence not only in blogging but in anything, it is very difficult to go with a good rhythm. Surely self confidence may go up and down but it is important to be focused on your future goals and improve your self confidence. As long as you maintain it the more higher and quicker you get in to the top.

Learning
One doesn’t necessarily have to start blogging in a paid domain or hosted space. You can start your blog in a free service in the internet like blogger.com or wordpress.com and after being stabilized transferring it to a paid domain and a hosted space. It is good to start your blog in a free service because you can create many websites and do experiments without any cost. It is a good learning process. So start few blog sites with different contents and keep experimenting them. Also if you find it worthy to keep that free domain keep it.

Set of tools
Using good set of tools for your blogging is also important. Use analytical software like Google Analytics to keep track of your visits and everything. Use social book marking sites like Digg, Stumble upon, and Delicious etc. to show your site to the public. Use social networks like Facebook, use mini blogging tools like twitter.com. A good set of tools will lead you to amazing results.

So if you’re just in to blogging. First get in to that attitude. First learn what you’re doing and how to do it. Read as much as you can. Everything will guide you to a good income in blogging.

Writing in Internet | Considerations

I love writing
Originally uploaded by Fabio Catapano

Writing an article or a blog post to an online website is different from writing to a paper based one. As the reader reads the article on a screen you must make a good conversation with the reader so that he is more interacted with the content and read it to the end. So depending on the topic, size of it and many other, you must write the article very carefully. This is also important to get a good rank in Social Bookmarking sites. Let’s take a look at few things you can do to the article to keep the reader attracted.

Readers read web articles on some sort of screen, their eyes and mind are tired most of the time. Because of this it’s the heading of the article that catches the reader most of time. If you haven’t put a catchy heading you will be missing good number of readers for the article. Use something that is short and sweet. Like ‘25 Places to Find Photos for Your Every Need’, ‘Increase Traffic: 3C's of Blogging’ like that.

Next comes the paragraphs. You must think of how to interact and attract the customer from the first to the last paragraph. Some kind of a small story or a life experience of you will do best for you. Readers like to read something really happened or some story that they never heard of. So consider writing the content of the article in one of the two approaches mentioned. Also follow the basics accurately. Like spellings, grammar, correct and matching quotes etc.

Also try to do something different in your writing. Asking a question on top of the article and giving the answer or a hint in middle or last would engage the reader in the article. This kind of things gets reader involved in the article. Most of the time in this kind of question based articles reader tends to post comments so that they can actively participate in the conversation. Trying something like this is good but overusing this method will bring you nightmare. People won’t be like an article which just asking many questions but no use.

My last point is an important one, the length of the article. The length depends on the topic you write. For topics like gadget review, writing long articles won’t bring you anything. People tend to see gadget videos instead of reading. So gadgets reviews must be kept short and simple and also technical. But writing about some scientific matter will have a lengthy article and sometimes it could spread over few articles. In these people are looking for is more content.

Follow these steps and be a good writer. Good writing skills will bring you great opportunities if you’re in to internet marketing. Share your thoughts and ideas in comments.

Get traffic from social bookmarking sites | part 2

Writing a blog post? Written one? Or have you not found the amazing results you can get from social bookmarking? If not this article is for you to achieve them. This article is a 2^nd part of ‘Get traffic from social bookmarking sites’. If you want read the 1^st part click here. Or else let’s continue.

• Submitting old news won’t bring you any traffic. People are not interested in old news and they won’t bother reading them because its history. But if you’re really want to write on do so but don’t expect much traffic to generate from the bookmarking site.

• Check your facts once a week after submitting; checking daily will give you bad feelings if you’re not getting what you want. Also reply to comments posted about your article so you can create genuine readers.

• Some sites don’t allow editing your posts after submitting them. So double check the URL, keywords, title before you submits them.

• Even you put them in a right category not all topics will do well. There’s some topic which find no interest in users. For example Apple sells well in Digg and the war in Iraq on Netscape. Sometimes negative stories too well rank on top like George W. Bush, corruption, crime etc. doing some research would be better.

• Traffic from social bookmarking sites are some kind of come and gone. They come from the bookmark site, read the article and then go away. To keep them focused in your own site to make them more interested consider putting related articles or popular articles list end the end. They tend to click and go to these links.

• If you have promoted RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions people coming from the bookmarking sites can be a member of your readers club. So you can make them genuine subscribers.

• Using automated submitters are big help for social bookmarking because in few steps you can put your bookmarks in many sites. But do not use automated submitters because automated submitters usually have malware in them.

• As I stated above, responding to comment on your stories is important. The commenter’s may feel like they are participating in a conversion much closer. Do so will result in more subscribers and more backlinks.

• Front page story in a social bookmarking site will result in unexpected increase in traffic. Because it is un expected it is better if you prepare your server for the un expected traffic.

Following these steps or even few of them will result you in increase of traffic. Don’t forget to comment about your results.

Get traffic from social bookmarking sites

Writing a new blog? New to blogging? Or else written a blog post and wondering what steps to take next? The first step I would consider myself is to promote it on a social bookmarking site for more traffic.

Of course social bookmarking sites can bring you a lot of traffic. If you do the basics right getting to the front page of these sites is not hard to achieve. Here are 20 points I’ll present you to guide you through this process. You can also use it as a checklist.

• Headline is an important consideration for social bookmarking sites. If your headline is not catchy enough it won’t move on to the top. Also headline is the sort of only thing readers see about your article in the social bookmarking site. So it is important to put a catchy and informative headline to your blog post.

• Headline is the 1^st step. To give a little bit more information about the blog post, you must add a short description about the content of your article. 100-150 character description won’t do the job for you because no one’s going to bother read that much. So you must be very careful writing this part.

• Writing a good first paragraph also important as the above two points. If the reader does not find this interesting he won’t bother to read it down. Adding a life experience of you would be better here.

• I have heard this hundred times. ‘Content is king’. Writing the first part of your post won’t enough. All your content must be written well because search engine spiders are going through the content most of the times.

• To your readers to bookmark your site, add a bookmark button in your every article. Sure some readers will bookmark your article if they find it valuable.

• This is something to consider if you’re really up to this. The time of submitting your post to a bookmarking site is also something to think of. Because if you submit the article in a time that people in west coast or east coast are sleeping, and when they wake up your article would be 10’s of pages away from the front page and no one’s going to find you. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US central time, so give a try.

• Category is also important; there would be no result if you published a SEO article in sports category or reverse. You should get an idea that what category the article should go when you’re writing it.

• If you’re a senior member of a social bookmarking site with bookmarked a big number of blog articles chance is that your new submissions get a little bit higher rank on the bookmarking site. Also the advantage over this is you have more and more links inter connected.

• Also even you’re not a senior member and if you have many blog posts published you definitely will have many inter connections of different blog posts from different social book markers. It is also a plus point you should be aware of.

• Most of the readers in the world are English. And of course many programs and internet is based on English language. Even your mother tongue is not English; consider writing the articles in English. But it would be ok if you have audience of your own language.

So even from these 10 points I think you have got a good idea of how to optimize your blog post to get higher ranks in social bookmarking sites. If you want to know more about here’s my 2^nd part of this article ‘Get traffic from social bookmarking sites’.

Universal Writing Ethics

Some times there are things that can be called as universal because they are globally recognized. Even in web writing (Especially in Blog Writing) there are things, that are globally accepted.

Here even though the writer says these are Rules, I'm not going to say they are Rules because they are actually not rules. 

Here I'll list down the 5 Universal Writing Rules from a Guest Writer at problogger

Increase Traffic: 3C's of Blogging

Increasing traffic to your blog is a must for every Blogger. A vital factor of achieving this goal is to develop contacts with your audience by following the 3C's of Blogging. They are comments, conversation and community 

1. Comments

It’s not wrong to say comments are the lifeline of a blog. Ask your readers to leave comments. Make them feel like they all are worthful members of your blog. And spend some time to interact with them.

2. Conversation

As the comments flowing in to your posts it automatically starts to build a conversation within you and the other commentors. Listen to them. And if you have time post your own thoughts in comments. If not write a second post in connect to the comments. 

3. Community

As you follow above two steps, as the conversation moves on you have started a small community under that topic. Your goal as the bloggers is to keep the community run.

 So at the end with a lot of interactions you have increased your blog traffic. See it's even fun to interact with other bloggers in same niche.

Search engine optimization is very important if you want to get traffic from search engines. Other fact is that 70% of web searches only look in the first page of the search list. So if you're not in the first page. You definitely going to miss many numbers of visitors to your website/blog

Here I will give you the top 10 seo mistakes that people made. Read this post not once but twice and don’t try but don’t do these mistakes again.

1. When targeting keywords use keywords that people may search. Do some researches before selecting keywords. Keywords can break or make your website.

2. Nowadays leaving . It not only works as keywords. But it's what the people see when your site appears in the search results page.

3. Flash might be attractive but flash website without html alternative you're no more. :( provide an html version of it. A search engine spider can't read flash so it can't index it.

4. We know that JavaScript Menus for navigation is good for the design but you must understand that spiders don't index them. So if you're having JavaScript menus consider build a sitemap

5. seo maintenance is important. Don’t think that once you optimize your site, it is optimized forever. If you want to be successful you must look at the SEO in a regular basis.

6. Most people think that SEO is all about Meta keywords and Meta description. It’s correct! Somehow Meta tags are becoming a thing of the past. But don't depend on this.

7. Using images for headlines is an attractive thing but when it comes to SEO you are ruining your web/blog in a long run.  So try modifying them in a style sheet or this.

8. Ignoring keywords in URL's is something that many people do. But just think, if you have keywords in the URLs this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are very important MSN and YAHOO. Google, their relative weight is high. So there are no worries having keywords in URLs.

9. We all know that having more backlinks are always better in SEO. So because of this web masters go to things like link farms, forum spamming etc. but the hard truth is you could end up getting your site banned. So what you need is quality backlinks.

10.when you've written an article do some look back and check whether you're lacking your keywords for your content or not.

I Also recommend you to read Top 5 Mistakes in SEO which is similar to this.

Using Facebook for Generate Traffic

Nowadays many online marketers use facebook to market and drive traffic to their websites. This trend is very understandable because presently over 150 million people are a part of facebook. It's a big way to drive traffic to your website.

 

Talking about driving traffic, if you're in to some internet marketing about youth addictions like sports cars, games, sports you're going to get a huge traffic to your site via. Facebook because many people using facebook are young people.

 

So, How to promote your blog via Facebook? Enough talking lets get down to the business,

 

1. Creating a Group:

One of the greatest functions in the facebook is creating a group. It’s a very simple way and the good news is all the group members don't have to be your friends. You can invite any of them and anyone can join your group. It's a very effective way to promote your business.

 

2. Status Update:

This is a good way to update the latest news about your blog. (Maybe about a blogpost or something) the bad news is this only appears to your friends and only they can see them.

So if you're already using Facebook Sign In or If you're new to Facebook Sign Up

What is Search Engine Spider?

Well don't get confused or scared thinking that I’m going to write about that creature. But what I’m going to write about is the search engine spider that comes to your site as a virtual bot. It comes and crawls all over your site/blog content making its way through the links in your site. So basically it works as an inspector that inspects your blog and updates its content to the search engines.

What can the spider see?

Search engine spiders can only see your page source. They are blind for many extras like Flash, JavaScript, and Frames. It is worth to know what spiders like and what don't.

Feed the spider with what it need!

Flash, JavaScript and images are not visible to spiders. Frames are a real catastrophe in SEO rankings. They maybe great in web designing. A big mistake one could do is making a flash intro page. Try this Search Engine Spider Simulator to a page filled with flash and images and you will see that, to search engines the pages appears very much blank. So you can really know that they are not search engine favorites. But if you include an ALT tag in a picture. That will notify the search engine about the image. (But don't get caught to keyword stuffing with too much of this). Careful with optimization and over-optimization. Also you can use

Meta title is what reader sees in your browser's title bar when the page loads. As the spider see it. You must put a relevant Meta title.

Meta description is virtually invisible for the visitor. But it's very visible for the spider. Basically you must have a good targeted Meta description. It specify about your niche to the search engine.

Content: but at last but not least content is important than any of these. Even if you got the traffic thanks to the above things. New comer will never come back if your site's content is not relevant or not interesting. So above all consider most about your content.

Extra: Try this Keyword Playground tool to get analysis of your site regrading Keywords

 

Reasons why people dont leave Comments

I will ask you this directly, Do you leave comments on other people's blogs? Either your Answer is Yes or No or even maybe you must read this article by Liz at Successful-Blog. She has expressed 10 Reasons why Readers doesn't leave comments. Well I'm not hasitant to say some of these applies for my self even... :)

So go on & Read "10 Reasons Reader Don't Leave Comments"

Join ONLINE PROFITS today!!!

If you're following the right sites you may already heard about www.onlineprofits.com. Want to know what it is? It's the most complete Internet Marketing and Online Business Training Program that can make 2009, Your Best Year Ever.

The program mentors are the best in field. What more can you expect?

The program module is,

Module 1: Introduction and Business Principles

Module 2: Domain Names

Module 3: Setting Up Your Website

Module 4: WordPress

Module 5: Web Design for Entrepreneurs

Module 6: Business Models

Module 7: Selecting Your Niche

Module 8: Blogs

Module 9: Other Types of Websites

Module 10: Web Content and Copywriting

Module 11: Basic SEO

Module 12: Advanced SEO

Module 13: Generating Traffic

Module 14: Social Media

Module 15: Web Metrics

Module 16: Selling Advertising

Module 17: Email Marketing

Module 18: Affiliate Marketing

Module 19: PPC (Pay-per-Click)

Module 20: Landing Pages

Module 21: Selling Your Products

Think Outside The Box

The definition wikipedia gives for think outside the box is;

Is to think differently, unconventionally, from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel, creative and smart thinking.

 If you’re onto blogging or anything, thinking outside the box is very important to get on to big heights. It will help you to stand out from the others and shine as gold

• Thinking outside the box required few things.
  
• Ability to take new perspectives to everyday work
  
• Willingness to do different things and to do things differently
  
• Listening to others
  
• Supporting others and respecting other's ideas when they come up with good one's
  

For further reading, I recommend this site which is full of video tutorials 

Top 5 Mistakes in SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the method of making your site search-friendly. But when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, there are few common mistakes that people incline to make when starting to submit their sites for Search Engines.

 

1. Lack of targeted keywords

Keywords play the most important role in Search Engine optimization. When a searcher went to a Search Engine and type in a keyword that you like to be found and if your site doesn’t have these keywords, then the searcher will not find you.

2. Poor content

Good content is the key to higher rankings in Search Engines. Content is what the search engine spiders are looking for. But if your site or blog is badly written or never updating or not on the right track, it won't be search engine friendly. You must have great content for Google spiders to crawl on.

3. Black Hat SEO

Black Hat Search Engine Optimizations are the techniques that are prohibited by search engine spiders. They include Meta keyword stuffing, doorway or gateway pages, hidden content, and Meta keywords, link Farming and many more. But search engine spiders have become much aware of these techniques and these spiders can recognize these very easily and the sorry thing is they will be banning your site. So don’t go for the shortcut which is unclear and go for the long path. You can check your website and get a analysis of it for free here!

4. Using Meta Tags unconventionally

These Meta tags include title tags, keyword tags and description tags. Put all of them in every page of your site. And link them from other pages.

5. Bad Design

This includes lack of clear navigation, unclear design frames and also sites that get much more time to load. Spiders can block these sites that have bad design. 

 

So try to avoid these for a long run…

Simple Ways to Gain RSS Subscribers

Bloggers like to have more and more RSS readers. Just imagine when you wake up one day and see that your RSS subscriber count jumped by 300 or 400. Amazing right?

So what are the ways we can pull in more RSS subscribers to the site? Here I have written few ideas for you. Try these and see the results.

1. Have a big RSS button

What everyone are looking for is big one's remind that in mind. So if you use a little RSS icon, visitors may not find it. So make sure the icon is large but not overlarge.

2. Display it above the fold

Make sure that you display it above the fold. Many bloggers don’t scroll down to find the RSS feed. Remind that in mind.

3. Display the RSS in every page

Most of the people are not just subscribe to your blog. Some might read few articles, and if satisfied then looking for a RSS feed. So you must display the feed in every page.

4. Explain RSS

Not every reader is familiar with what the RSS feed is. So write a small but catchy little sentence explaining what the RSS is.

5. Offer email subscriptions

As I said before not every reader knows what the RSS feed is! Believe it or not it's about only 10%. So one thing you can do is using an email newsletter. Make it weekly or twice a month depending on your rate. But don’t overwhelm you reader by filling out his inbox. AWEBER gives you the opportunity for this service.

6. at the bottom of every post

As explain in 3rd point, some people want to subscribe after reading the post. So put some link to subscribe just after the end of the post.

7. Don’t jumble your RSS feed with ads.

People will unsubscribe it for sure

8. Animated RSS feed icon

People like things that are attractive. So if you use an attractive RSS icon, an animated one your RSS subscriptions will jump up over night.

 

If you have more ideas for this topic don't forget to put a comment and go...

Why You Must Join a Blog Network

There are many positives about joining a blog network as a Blogger. If I get to the points straight.

 

1. Relationships

if you ask bloggers who are in blog networks why are they in it, majority of them will say that they enjoyed being a part of something larger than there own Blogs and they got to know many bloggers in there same niche. Many blog networks have there own communicating systems like forums, emails, chat etc. so it's very easy to communicate with others and easy to share pros & cons.

2. Traffic

When I first started blogging it was very hard to find traffic at that time. In present even we have many ways to find traffic, joining a blog network is also a good way to drive in traffic. But you have to write good content. Many networks have ways of promoting Blogs via spotlighting top posts of that week etc.

3. Expertise

Not many bloggers have the experience in running successful blog. But if you join a blog network. These can handle many of the technical aspects like web design, SEO optimization, finding advertisers like that. This allows bloggers to simply just write. But remember you can't expect everything from the network.

4. SEO

One of the biggest plus point of being in a blog network is you can be linked to each other blog in the network. As you have many links to other web site from your site, the chance of ranking higher on the Search Engines gets higher.

5. Prestige

As the experience grows, if you can get writing for one of the biggest networks on the blog, you can put that to your advantage by building your own image.

6. Learning

If you are new to blogging, joining a blog network is a good learning material to get started. Because you can practice your own theory as you like.

 

These are only pros I have talked about in this post. But remember anything has its pros and cons.

How Google Ranks Blogs

Different from most blog search engines, Google blog search ranks its results by relevance. You can customize it by clicking on "sort by date", but the default is useful if you want to find the most substantial blog posts.

But how does Google rank blog posts???

Positive signs	Negative signs
Links from quality sites Page rank The number of feed readers Clicks in search results Links from mail, chats etc.	Posts added at a certain time The size of repeat content Using words that appear frequently in spam Blogs Linking to a one web page A large number of ads

 

We cleared that Google uses all kinds of factors to decide the popularity and the quality of a blog. But this doesn't mean less popular Blogs are dropped out if they have relevant content. But you should try to avoid the cons that may signal that the blog is spam.  

Boost your blog traffic! MUST READ!!!

The easiest way to give your blog a traffic boost is by submitting your web site URL's to search engines. You'll say the search engines will some how find my site even without submitting. But why not making it easy for search engines to get to know about your site, rather than waiting until they do?

Below links can submit your websites to the most popular search engines in the world.

 

GOOGLE

YAHOO

TECHNORATI

THE OPEN DIRECTORY

MSN LIVE SEARCH

P.S - Submitting your site to a Search Engine will not boost your web traffic by

overnight. It depends on your quality content.

Twitter What is it really?

Twitter has really grown up its popularity since its start in March 2006 as a side project in offices in the SoMA in CA. now all around the world; people follow twitter to follow the blogs on their same niche.

            To get the best from the twitter you can build a link on your blog and encourage your readers to follow you via twitter. On the other side you can shout about your latest post on twitter. So people who are following you can see you have posted a new one without even accessing your site. You can also update your facebook status from twitter. One thing you must avoid is overloading twitter with linking to every post that you write. It will frustrate your followers and sure they will turn away. I suggest you better pickup 1 post a day and post the link to the twitter. Another thing is posting variety of things. This will not bored your followers and you can come across more and more followers.

            If you are beginner to twitter, take your time and look what are things people are linking via twitter. Try to get a good look before kick starting. This will give you a good feeling and experience how twitter can be used. Search for few articles on Google about using twitter.

I recommend you to read "How to Use Twitter - Tips for Bloggers" by problogger.

7 Ways to improve your traffic

1. Content

Your readers are like customers. They always look for new things. Having quality content that is updating frequently will keep your customers coming back and back.

2. Newsletters

These are like reminders. People always logging into their email so maintaining a newsletter will keep your readers updated. But don’t overload your subscriber’s inbox. Send it about once a week or so. 

3. Running contests

These get people involved in your site very much. Make it interesting and giveaway attractive prizes. Also don’t forget to include rules page.

4. Giveaway free items

Giving away free e-books has really worked for me in one of my websites. Not only e-books, there are so many things you can give away online with less budget. You can download free e-books here

5. Analytics

Use analytics software’s to track your traffic. Do some researches and find out what sources sends you more traffic and what people read the most on your site. I recommend Google Analytics.

6. Create links

Create links to other web sites on your niche. As they see your website link in there analytic software. They will do the same and will create links on there sites linking you.

7. Give your best

Focus on your niche and give the best ideas you have. Don’t stock it on your head. Express your self to the world.