Customize The Site’s Sidebar

The sidebar is one of the most important aspects of your WordPress site. When you first sign up for WordPress or install it on your hosting plan, you will get default sidebar options installed on the site. These default options usually include the “Categories,” “Blogroll” and the “Archives” listings. When you haven’t changed out the sidebar options your blog is going to look like every other blog on the Internet. Change it up with different widgets for a customized feel. Implement social bookmarking widgets or differentiate the standard “Blogroll” and “Archives” options with “Articles” or “Reviews. This will help you establish your online authority.

Ghostwriting Made Simple

One of the best ways to get your WordPress blog some more traffic is to offer your readers a chance to submit their original content to your blog. There are a plugins that will give you a form to implement on your blog so users can submit their content directly or you can set up an email account to accept blog posts. Either way, you will get users who submit their content and then tell their friends about it. Not only will you be offering people a way to backlink to their website, you will be creating a traffic tree where friends tell their friends about the post who then tell other friends about it. This is a great way to build traffic, subscribers and original content.

Browser Compatibility

There are a lot of different browsers on the market. If you’re not sure if your WordPress blog is going to work with different browsers, you can check through on an online website called Browsershots.org. This will test your WordPress blog for compatibility over different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. If your blog isn’t compatible with different browsers, you’re going to see a decline in traffic and sales. The Internet is moving into the mobile phase and you need to make sure that your WordPress blog is also compatible with mobile browsers. Check your blog to make sure that your readers have the ability to access it while mobile or while working with Linux, Windows and Mac systems.

Use RSS

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to get your readers to subscribe to your blog and keep coming back. The best thing about RSS is the fact that it actually is really simple. You can use this by installing a subscribe button to your “Plugins” directory. Log into your WordPress blog and go to the “Plugins” option. Click on the “Install” button and then install the plugin so your readers can subscribe to your posts. Once you have built enough authority to your site, you should see regular traffic coming in as you post new content. You can also submit your RSS feeds to different RSS directories so they know when you have uploaded new content to your blog.

Organize Categories

The categories on your WordPress blog are going to be the first line of communication with your readers. He comes to your blog or website they’re looking for information based on your niche. When you fully implement categories into the sidebar of your blog or website your readers will have an easy way of navigating through different blog posts and articles. The categories that you choose for your blog or website are going to depend on your niche. Try to make the categories as narrow as possible. You might want to divide the categories into reviews, articles and product information or something similar depending on what your website is dealing with. Make the categories personable for added effect to the readers.

WordPress can be a powerful blogging platform when implemented properly. You want to establish yourself as a credible blogger so using the same methods as every other blogger on the Internet isn’t going to cut it. Differentiate yourself and create a blog that is pleasing to the eye while still giving your readers the information they are looking for. Follow these tips and you should see an increase in traffic in no time at all.

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1. Great Content

I swear we keep saying this, great content rules. Make stuff that people want to read, which is the same stuff that people actually want to link to and people will read it and link to it. I mean it’s really what it gets back to other blogger’s will naturally link to it. They don’t just say, “ I wrote this link it to me. Alright really great stuff.” People will be like, “oh look someones writing really great stuff lets link to them.” I mean it really does work that way. Keep it fresh and publish consistently though.

2. Consistency

Consistency. That’s a big thing, ok? You gotta, you can’t just post once every three months, ok? Build relationships, ok? That just never goes away in business. Network, network, network. Ok. Reach out to other bloggers, other web site owners, even PR and news. OK, use contact, emails, forums, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and if you have to…get on the phone, ok? There are still people that like to get on the phone these days. You know, comment on other peoples stuff. Be useful, ok? Don’t just blah, blah, spam everybody but provide useful feedback, useful comments, engaging…

Dan: I’m engaged

Jennifer:You want to be someone that people want to be partnered with.

3. Write Guest Posts

Absolutely! And another one and this is a good one, write guest posts, blogs always need more content; online magazines always need more fresh content. So what do you do, you solve their problem. Offer to write fresh content for them and they’ll publish it and you should get the link back, you should get the link back, plus you’ll get exposure to their audience. Great one way.

4. Directory Links

Directory links are a great way to help spread the word about your website or blog in a good way. The more directories that your site can be found on, the more that search engines will trust your site.

While it may sound easy to go ahead and submit your site to a directory, bear in mind that there are literally tens of thousands of different web directories out there – and not all web directories are equal. Some of them are poor in quality and not SEO friendly – which means that they won’t help your site in search rankings in the least. You want to make sure that the directories you are submitting your site to will actually be able to pass your web link down the line.

The best way to submit your site to a directory is to try and use a niche directory submission. Niche directories are those which are created with one specific topic in mind. Niche directories will only accept sites that they say are related to that particular niche, which is why Google places a lot more importance on backlinks that come from any sort of relevant site or sites anyways, so this will help you a lot when it comes to search engine rankings.

Submitting your site to a directory one by one is incredibly boring and time consuming, so you may want to look into hiring on a directory submission service provider. These providers already have a whole list of directories that they know will help improve your site’s rankings in search engines, and they also understand the nature of each and every directory they are submitting your site to. They know how to get your site approved so you don’t have to spend countless hours fiddling with this or that, and they typically quite affordable.

5 Social Media

Social media are all the rage these days and they are continue to grow. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, even MySpace… the list goes on and on. You can build some really important links just by having a placement on each of these social media sites (yes, even MySpace is still a bit relevant, so don’t count it out entirely).

Social media is great since they offer a lot of different ways to have people promote your content FOR you. People can retweet, “like”, “share”, “+1” and just plain old copy and paste a link to your website right on their social media accounts if they find the link that you have put on your very own social media site at all valuable or useful. If you have a blog (which you should, and we’ll discuss that in a second), then you should try to have it on the very same domain as your company’s website. Social media is all about keeping it real and keeping it human, so having a blog, which is far more human than just a website advertising products, is a must-have.

Conclusion

Link building plays an incredibly important role for any website or blog that wants to actually have a presence on any search engine. Unfortunately, link building has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately, mostly because people have used and abused it for a while now. One of the worst types of link building that everyone should avoid is the Blackhat SEO (aka completely unethical) link building techniques. This type of technique attempts to manipulate any search engine’s rankings through things such as hidden text, paid links, cloaking, and link farms.

There are a number of reasons why you want to build links to your site. For one, it will help improve your site’s authority in a number of search engines, like Google and Bing. Having a strong network of links backing you up tells search engines that you are trustworthy and aren’t a site full of useless garbage. Link building will also help draw attention to your site’s important keywords, which in turn will help improve your ranking in search engines. Lastly, having a strong network of links will make your site all the better known on other larger websites. This will, of course, help increase the referral traffic to your site, and it won’t even cost you a dime!

Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be a guessing game; fortunately, there are a number of different tools and services out there that will help you optimize your blog so that you are getting the best search results possible.

Why should I Care about SEO?

If you don’t know why you should care about search engine optimization, it’s definitely time to start learning about it.

When you want to search for something online, where do you go? To a search engine. Search engines are exactly what will bring people to your blog – if you use proper and effective search engine optimization tactics to make it locatable. You need to learn just how your website will be indexed and ranked in order to understand how to optimize your blog.

In this article, we’ll talk about both offsite techniques for making your blog all the more searchable, as well as the onsite techniques.

Offsite Techniques for SEO

These methods will discuss factors that are outside of your actual site which will have an impact on your blog’s ranking in search engines.

Inbound links are definitely one of the best ways to start generating fresh traffic to your blog. Links that will point to a website will help you climb up on search engine result pages, meaning you will be more visible.

Putting it simply, every single link that is not on your site and which leads to your site is somewhat like a vote of confidence towards your site. It increases its validity, which in turn increases its value, which in turn increases its position on search engines.

The best inbound links that you can have will have three qualities:

a) The sites on which the links are posted are higher ranked
b) The sites are relevant to the topics that you blog about
c) The sites will link to you using keywords that are relevant to your page

So here’s the next important and pressing question: how do you generate inbound links? There are actually quite a few different ways:

Notify Other Relevant Bloggers about your Site

Spamming isn’t highly recommended here, but if you start seeking out other bloggers who have similar interest to yours and you gradually introduce yourself to them, then you may very well have an inbound link. The best way to build up a rapport with another blogger is to offer to link to their blog, and they to yours. If you also write a good post on a topic that you know is if interest to them, you can throw in a link as a sample of your work.

You Need Quality Content

Adding further to the topic of content of your blog, you need to have content that’s worth reading. If your content is stuffed with hyperlinks and is clearly keyword spammed, then no one is going to want to read it. Write information that is correct, that is helpful, and that is interesting.

Submit to Directories

Another good way to try and generate those inbound links is to submit your blog to a directory. There are paid and free directory services, all of which will help make your site more visible on the web. Compare what each directory can do for you before you decide to shovel over any cash to a directory company.

Recommended: Technorati

Do a Link Swap

Why not swap links? As mentioned earlier, if you create a rapport with another blogger, you can then swap links and support one another’s sites. This link swap may very well come about organically and with you both enjoying one another’s content and wanting to share it. Or, you can very well send an email – or receive an email – asking to link swap.

Link swaps tend to be rather effective, but there are some rumors about search engines being able to track the link swapping strategy, which would then devalue the links. Do your research before counting on this method of search engine optimization.

Onsite Techniques for SEO

There are a lot of techniques for onsite SEO that can work for you. We will start with the most obvious and work our way from there:

Keyword Rich Content

What makes your blog searchable on the web? Keywords. These keywords help define what your blog is and will allow you to optimize it accordingly.

Coming up with appropriate keywords isn’t as easy as a lot of people think. The most used keywords have been bought up by the large corporations, so you will have to get a bit creative and try to figure out keywords sentences or phrases that may be relevant to your blog. Some great tools for these are Google Analytics and the Google Keyword Tool. They’re both free, so they are both definitely worth trying out.

Recommended: Google Analytics and Google Keyword Tool

NOTE: One important thing to point out is that stuffing articles with keywords, while it may improve your search results, just isn’t worth it for your website. You need that quality content to keep people coming back. Otherwise, no matter how high your site may appear on Yahoo! or Google, no one will swing by your site.

Themed Blogs

A lot of people truly believe that having a lot of pages that relate to the same theme will help increase your rankings on search engines. Your blog should already generally be about the same sort of theme anyway, but a theme will help a search engine more easily decide where your blog belongs.

Site Design

Site design does play a role in how searchable your website is. Sites that are nicely laid out, that are well coded and easy to navigate tend to fair better on search engines. Flash animation and Java Script don’t tend to help you for search engine searchability at this time, but some people suggest that imbedding video that they have created or that is off of YouTube will help improve search results.

Recommended: www.reelseo.com for video services

Facebook is the number one social media site on the Internet. It has a population that is larger than hundreds of countries on this planet, with members coming from every corner of the earth. Just being a member means that you are potentially exposing yourself or your business to millions upon millions of people – and all with little to no effort. Though a lot of bloggers don’t realize this, Facebook offers a number of tools to promote your blog. Let’s start with the most basic of them all:

Change your Profile

What’s the purpose behind your Facebook profile? Is it to connect with friends and family? Is it to showcase pictures of your wild night out last Saturday? Or do you want it to be associated with you, a professional blogger who is an expert in your niche? You have to really consider how seriously you want to be taken, starting with how your profile is set up. People will be looking at everything about you, from what you “like” to what you are a “fan” of to the different pictures you have taken of yourself. Say, for instance, you have a blog about putting a stop to animal cruelty. A picture of you eating a steak probably isn’t the best thing to have on Facebook.

If you do want to have your profile about your personal life, then strongly consider having two separate accounts – one for “you”, and one for the professional blogger.

Seek out Friends

Don’t wait for people to find you; you’ve got to go out there and find them! The search tool  is pretty thorough, allowing you to search for people not only by name, but also by company, school, networks, email address, and more.

And don’t think that you need to know a person before you send out a friend request. You can send a friend request to absolutely anybody on Facebook. What’s the worst that can happen? They can decline your request or ignore it. But what happens more often than not is that they do accept your friend request (many people have a strong urge to have a high “friend” tally) and you then have a brand new addition to your Facebook blog network.

You can also try to seek out people who may be interested in your niche by checking out people on your friends’ friend’s lists or through group and fan page lists.

Create your own Group or Fan Page

One of the best tools for it is the Facebook Page. We’re not talking about just creating an account and friend everyone. People won’t follow you just for that. Instead they want to get updates from your blog. In fact, the first fans of your Facebook page might just be your own friends. Have them click on the “like” button. That way when you post something, they’ll be able to see it on their feed.
When you do create a Facebook page for your blog, make sure that you also upload your blog’s content onto it. When people comment or reply, make sure that you also reply and keep the conversation going. It  is an online community, so in order for that community to survive, everyone has to keep on talking and participating. If you post and never reply, you’ll find that people will quickly lose interest in your Facebook page and your blog.

One big difference between a fan page and a personal page is that the former can have an unlimited number of follows, while your personal page is limited to 5000. Obviously, you hope that your business will bigger than that at some point.
So how to you get people to like you page. Well put the “like” button on your post. It’s a matter of engaging the Facebook audience on your site, and have them eventually subscribing to your Facebook page as well.

Comment

You know how a lot of blogs have comments by default. Well the problem with that is you get a lot of spams. Facebook solves that problem by offering a plugin that requires actually Facebook accounts. So it means only authenticated users can post on your blog. Additionally when someone post comments about your article, it shows up on their wall and feeds that’s visible by their friends. So it creates a viral environment that promotes your blog.

Like Box/Facepile

It’s a box that you can embed into your website to show the number of people who likes it. Someone can click on the Like button, and become a follower as well. There’s also Facepile which shows the pictures of users that like your blog.

Hook Up with your Other Social Media

Every social media site can work with the other social media sites in some way. If you create a Facebook page, for example, you can include this link in a number of your Twitter entries. Link your blog’s RSS feed right up to Facebook to create up-to-the-minute status updates. While you’re at it, link up your Twitter feed and if you have a SlideShare account, add that to Facebook too. Keep on connecting different social media to other social media that you have to create a web, or network, of sites that are all promoting your blog and what it’s about.

Remember to Be Human

Whether your blog is written solely about daily observations, or whether it is more business-minded, you still have to be human. Facebook is less professional and more casual in nature (unlike some other business-related social media sites, such as LinkedIn). People aren’t on Facebook to be bombarded with promotions and business-only material. If that’s all you’re giving people, then they will be de-friending you soon enough. Make sure you do a fair mix of both personal stuff and promotional material. As long as the personal material isn’t too personal, your customers will appreciate it. Funny observations, pictures, quotes, and videos are all great to share. Talking about what your dog, cat, child, or friend did – as long as it’s appropriate and, preferably, universally funny – will give your Facebook page a fun, personal edge.

So these are some of our favorite tips & tools tools. Tell us about which ones that you like the most.

These tags can also be helpful if you are using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla. Knowing about them is essential to using them. On these content management systems the tags are implemented in a slightly different way, so make sure you reference your user’s guide to find out how to take advantage of them.

H1, H2, H3

Most search engines will look to your header tags to see what your content is about. They pick this information up in a number of different spots, but the heading tags get a lot of the attention. If you put your key phrases in these tags, then the sites will know that your content has a lot to do with these key phrases.

For instance, if you are writing a blog about blueberry pies, but your entire site is about baking in general, you may want to mix and match your header tags in that article to get the best effect. The following examples are great for your headers.

H1 Should read:

Baking Blueberry Pies the Easy Way.

H2 Should Read:

Can Blueberry Pies be this easy?

And H3 should read:

Baking Blueberry Pies Will Make Everyone Happy.

This will ensure that the search engine knows that this page is about blue berry pies while also giving you the opportunity to tell it that it’s about baking. Since the search engines find every site to be about baking, they will be more likely to learn what the whole site is about.

Img Tags

These tags are very important. It’s required for you to put a picture into your posts. Having images in your posts are a secret way to get extra SEO points.

Make sure that with each IMG tag you also use the ALT attribute. This tells the search engine, in plain text, what the picture represents. Having lots of pictures about your topic can help to put you higher in the search engine ranks.

Anchor Tags

The anchor tag is probably the most important on this list. It will enable you to link to other content on your site as well as others. Make sure that you regularly link to your own content in order to tell the search engines what your site is about.

Make sure that you don’t ever have more than 100 links on a given page. Search engines don’t like this and your site may get flagged. But if you include at least one link on every page, that will help a lot.

Integrating the anchor tags into your posts on a regular basis is easy. You should always stay on topic, though, because the search engines will learn what your site is about based on what you link to just as much as what links to you. A good place to find high quality content that won’t compete with your site is through Wikipedia.

Meta Tags

Using meta tags is a great way to make sure that the search engines know what your site is about. There are two tags that you should know about: Meta Description and Meta Keywords. Each of these are used independently to tell the search engines what your site is about.

The description is what will show up to a user who finds your content on the Internet. This will help them make a decision as to whether or not to click to your site or to a competitors, so bring out your best writers game. The search engines also learn what your site is about.

The keywords tag will help the search engines know when to return your site versus another. This alone won’t do much, but when combined with the other search engine optimization tips, it will help. But remember, it’s not a magic bullet!

P, DIV, SPAN

The final three tags rounding out our tutorial are absolutely important if you are going to properly organize the content on your site. Remember that the search engines don’t care what your site looks like as long as nothing is hidden from view. By structuring your content with these tags, you will be able to make sure that the search engine gets the right idea about your site.

The P tag will indicate that you have started a new paragraph. This is far better than working without it, as then all of the content jumbles together. The search engine can still figure out what your site is about, but you will not be able to intelligently style your pages without it.

The DIV tag helps to identify “dividers” on your page. Putting all of the sidebar links in such a tag will enable you to style them using style sheets without filling your page with useless styling content. It’s one of the most important tags for anyone looking to make their site look good without annoying the search engines.

The SPAN tag is like a combination of the P tag and the DIV tag, and allows you to style a span of text. Doing this is useful if you want to bring attention to a string of characters in your content, but you don’t want to confuse the search engines. You may also want to be able to provide different types of designs for different users.

Regardless of your skills using HTML, all of these tags will come in handy. If you understand what each one is used for and how to best employ it, then it can easily be useful for you. Now that you know, you can prepare better content for the search engines.

But before you read on, you really need to think about whether or not monetizing your blog is the right thing to do. Some topics don’t lend themselves well to monetization. If you are not sure, then you could always ask your readers, especially if you have a mailing list.

If Your Blog Isn’t Right for Monetization

Some people will find that their blog isn’t right for monetization. In these instances there is still a way that you can make some cash from your hard efforts. Putting a donation button on the blog will help you in this way.

Not all of the buttons are directly related to donations. Some of them have cute little names like “buy me a coffee” or “buy me a beer” and they allow readers to donate set amounts of money through Pay Pal or other similar sites. These buttons can work on blogs that are suited for monetization, too, though.

Affiliate Products

This process lends itself best to sites that have an active mailing list community. Making sure that you keep in touch with your community on a regular basis will make it easier for you to sell them the affiliate products that seem most suited for them. This is a great way to make a lot of money without a lot of work.

One of the hottest sites for affiliate products is ClickBank.com. This site will provide you a lot of details and statistics on the product you are getting ready to sell. Make sure that you find the ones with the best reputation and the highest payout.

Some products pay as much as 80% commission. That means if you sell it for a hundred bucks, you get eighty in your pocket. Make sure you consider this when choosing products to sell, but don’t over look quality.

Adsense (or other contextual advertising)

The big contextual advertising product is Google AdSense. This is a means through which you can designate sections of your blog for ads. Making sure that you get the most from this involves making sure your blog is geared towards keywords that have a high online commercial intent.

OCI is a term that came and went in the world of Internet marketing, but it is still relevant. You can do some research on it and see how to apply it manually. Most of the automated methods are long gone.

There are a few alternatives including AdBrite, if you don’t like the Google Adsense terms of service.

Amazon Reviews

This is a popular one. Many people include reviews to amazon.com products scattered throughout their blog. The good thing about Amazon.com is that a person doesn’t have to buy your product for you to get credit.

Let’s say that on your flower blog link to a vase on Amazon.com. A reader clicks through but decides not to buy. She comes back a few hours later and buys a dress that she had forgotten to order.

Guess who gets credit for that sale? That’s right, you! The thing is, if she buys anything within 24 hours of clicking your link, then you get a commission (so long as you were the last person whose affiliate link she clicked).

So what are some of the best ways to monetize your blog with this method? Well make sure that you are constantly publishing links through your referral account. Don’t be shy with them and include two or three in every blog post.

One of the best ways to do this is by including a footer at the bottom of every single one of your posts. You can include two or three links right there. For instance, if you publish a blog in which there is any discussion about your personal life you can include links to what you are currently reading.

If people find you interesting, then you can easily incorporate other things from your daily life into your blog that link to your Amazon.com affiliate account. There are a lot of ways if you get creative.

Sell Your Own Products

Don’t forget about selling your own products through your website. If you have a lot of viewers that love your content, you might be able to create a special report or a product that will help them in some way. It doesn’t take much more than some common sense to figure out if your blog lends itself to this.

The trick is, most blogs can be turned into some sort of product. For instance, if you regularly write a blog about fish, you might want to write a small guide on how to care for fish. This will give you something to sell that gives you all of the profit.

The best thing is that you don’t have to share the profit with anyone. Well, you may have to share it with eBay, but that’s because they take a cut out of any money you receive no matter what.  Figuring out how to write a special report or e-book can take a lot of time and effort.

The thing is, you have already created thousands of dollars worth of content on your blog, so just look through there for the best ideas on how to make your e-book. If you have a lot of comments, then you are definitely at an advantage, as this will provide you with the most ideas possible.

You can also check websites like Yahoo! answers to find good suggestions for special reports and e-books.

You just need to put a little time and effort into it. A Pay Pal button on your site will enable you to sell the product without setting up a major storefront on your site.

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Get a Celebrity Endorsement

Now one of those is getting a celebrity to mention you on Twitter, whether a real life movie star or just someone really popular on the network. For example, Ashton Kutcher has 7.6 million followers. If he mentions your site, it’s like hitting the lottery. Everyone is going to know who you are and what you like. It can be exceptionally difficult, and may take a lot of luck, but it could be worth it to reach out to them. It’s something to try.

Just don’t let it be a sand trap, where it’s “end all, be all.” Some people’s sole mission in life might be to be on Oprah (when she was still on the air), but guess what, it might be a possibility, but don’t put all of your eggs in it. Instead focus on your overall goal, but be flexible on how to get there.

Build Relationships with Other Bloggers

A better way is to reach out to other experts in your niche. Follow them on Twitter. Retweet their posts and content. Eventually you’ll begin to develop relationships with these people, especially if your tweets add value and increase their visibility. They’re going to start to notice you. It may take a little while, but it will happen.

Every niche only has a few really successful people, like five. You want to be among them. Be one of the few that is there to stay.

Make Sure You are Retweeted, Too

It’s great for you to follow people on Twitter and retweet their postings, but you undoubtedly want to the favor returned as well. Though most bloggers support each other and will retweet your tweets if you retweet theirs, there may be some who don’t seem to follow that courteous practice. You will also have people other than bloggers on your Twitter following you, and it’s incredibly valuable if they will retweet your messages.

Though there’s nothing saying that you can’t ask for people to retweet your messages, for a lot of users that comes off as a bit too desperate for most. You really have to get creative, stand out, and offer something of value for other people to bother retweeting what you have written.

Let’s assume that you have your niche picked out as being men and women who are trying to conceive, or may be having difficulty conceiving. Products that your business may sell are pregnancy tests. Here’s an example of a fairly bad tweet that has very little guarantee of being retweeted:

“Wide variety of pregnancy tests available. Click here to check out our selection.”

No offense, but who cares? Someone can go to their local pharmacy or grocery store and find a wide variety of pregnancy tests. But if you have something unique to offer, or something of significance, then you’ll get attention and get retweeted. A good example would be:

High sensitivity pregnancy tests. 99.9% accurate! 10 for $3 with free shipping while quantities last!!! Click here to place your order.

So which Twitter message would you be more likely to click on and retweet for your friends to benefit from? Chances are it’s the second one and definitely not the first. Provide a link to your blog, and you have yourself not only a new customer, but you’re giving people what they need, making the transaction mutually beneficial.

Keep the Conversation Going

If all you’re doing with your Twitter account is posting message after message promoting either your company or your service/product, then you’re going to ultimately fail. Twitter is a social media community. A community requires all people that are part of the community to participate in some way. Having a self promoting one-sided conversation with other Twitter followers will get you unfollowed as fast as you were followed, so when people leave comments or even ask questions, make sure you follow up.

Everything that you post on your account doesn’t have to be purely business related either. Funny (yet tasteful) videos and pictures are great, so are less or non-topical news articles that you find interesting.

Seek Out Followers

Don’t be a lazy tweeter and wait for people to come to you; go to them! You can easily use Twitter’s search tool to find other tweeters and other bloggers who have the same interest as you, or who is a professional in a niche that is the same as yours, or related to yours. As in the example above, if your business is about selling pregnancy tests, why not follow people who offer products for newborn babies? Not only are you expanding your network, but you may get some awesome ideas for blog entries that you can write in the future (or you can ask for the blogger to be a guest blogger!).

Other Tweeting Tips

Tweet consistently. If you only do it a few times, or sporadically, guess what, you’re not going to build the momentum to attract followers to a sizable audience. Do it at least 3 to 5 times a day every day. Be interesting. You can tweet about your blog posts, but also mix it up with other content around the web.

Offer cool, sexy, awesome info. Be the guy where people say “hey I want to hear what he has to say.” Include a link in your blog in your Twitter profile so that people can visit it. In your tweets, include something that’s more relevant on your site. The links will also help with your site’s SEO efforts.

Also remember to ask specific questions to get a dialog going. So to follow our own advice, leave a comment and let us know, how do you use Twitter to promote your blog?

WordPress has amazing features that hadn’t existed on any platform prior to their introduction through the WordPress system. While it can be quite technical to get it installed, this has also become easier than imagined, because many hosting companies now install it with the single click of a button.

Simple Installation

As stated above, you can usually install WordPress with little more than the click of a button. You generally log into your hosting control panel and find the fantastico or simple scripts link. From there you can choose WordPress, enter a couple of settings (like user name and password) and be done with it.

If it were any simple than that, you wouldn’t even need to do anything. Where’s the fun in that? We have got to keep some sort of barrier to entry.

Easily Change the Appearance

So many people want a blog, and they want it to look just how they want. With WordPress, there are tens of thousands of freely available themes for you to choose from. You can get the blog to look exactly how you want it if you are willing to spend a few hours scouring through all of the themes available to you.

And if you don’t like what you are seeing in the free section, you can always look for “premium” WordPress themes. These are themes professionally designed with the professional blogger in mind. You can often find designs that are as good or better than anything that you have seen on other websites.

And if none of those suit you, the WordPress community is huge, and there are thousands of designers ready to build a custom design for your site.

Simple Content Creation

It’s easy to create new content with WordPress. Whether you are looking to create a single post or an entire page, it’s easy. You just click a button and start writing.

With the WYSIWYG editor, you can edit your content as simply as if you were writing a document in a word processor. You can easily bold or italicize your content. You can add links with a couple of quick clicks.

You can easily tag and categorize your post and pages all from the same layout. This will help to keep your content organized for you and your readers. And you can always update all of this later on if you decide that you want to make some changes.

Simple Site Wide Changes

In the past, when you were creating your web pages by hand in HTML, if you created a change to the layout of your site, you would have to migrate all of the content from the old version to the new version. It didn’t even have to be a complex change.

If you changed a punctuation mark in the footer, you would have to do that all over again. And as your site grew, that became more and more of a chore. Of course, there were advanced ways to do it using nerdy programming techniques, but if you could do all of that, you wouldn’t be worried about wordpress, would you?

So when wordpress came on the scene and introduced its simple site-wide changes through themes and designated sections of the layout, it was a real blessing to anyone responsible for managing a website. That same flexibility is now available to you.

If you want to change some links or items in the side bar, you can do that with a couple of quick clicks. It really won’t take you that long to get it all sorted out and get the new things installed. And once you do it, it’s done.

An Amazing Community

There are literally millions of members in the WordPress community. Whether you use their hosted solution or install it on your own hosting, you are going to find that there are plenty of people available to help you with your site if you have questions.

And since there are so many people participating in the project, you are going to find that there are tons of add-ons for you to improve the functionality of your site. You can also be sure that the code has been scrutinized by thousands of pairs of eyes for security, since it’s open source.

Great SEO benefits

If you aren’t aware of some of the basics of SEO, then you wouldn’t realize how amazing some of the basic features built into WordPress are. The search engines love to see keywords in the URL of content. And with WordPress, you can make this happen easily.

You don’t have to worry about building proper link webs throughout your site, either. With the tags and categories, your site is going to create a huge web of internal links for the search engine to crawl through. If you have named all of your pages appropriately, then the search engine will quickly figure out what your site is all about.

Comments Encourage Repeat Visitors

WordPress automatically includes the ability for visitors to comment on your posts. This is great if you already have a batch of visitors coming to visit you on a regular basis. You want to make sure that you are able to allow them to participate in the conversation.

When people are able to comment on your site it does two very good things for you. The first is that it gives the readers a sense of community. They are more likely to come back if they are participating in the creation of the site and have a voice that is being heard. The second is that it helps to create truly unique content, pushing your SEO through the roof.

If you have never considered WordPress before, then it’s about time you start to take it seriously. Many people have found that installing WordPress changes their entire approach to working on their blog.

Whether you’re learning how to start a blog or you’re a seasoned blogging veteran, having all the possible information about your blog, its traffic, visitors, and search engine results, is very important. Google Webmaster Tools for bloggers is the perfect complement to decide whether you have a design and content that is attracting the kind of attention you want, not only from the search engines, but also from your visitors. These free tools offer a wealth of information that any blogger can use.

The Power Of Search Engine Optimization

More than 90% of websites are found through the use of search engines. At the moment, Google accounts for more than 65% of all web searches, with Yahoo and Bing following at a distant second and third, respectively. Other less traditional search engines are cropping up every day, such as Facebook and even YouTube, which means more people will likely use the power of these search engines to indirectly find your blog.

When you are competing with other blogs for traffic, it’s important to be able to get on the first or second page of these search engine listings. If you don’t know how Google views your website or how often it is crawled (viewed by Google), then you could be missing out on valuable insight and the potential to move up in the search results. If you’re not sure about how important getting a first or second page ranking is, then just think about the last time you went beyond the second page to find what you were looking for.

Most people will tend to give up after two pages and move onto a different search if they don’t find what they want. With Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll be able to get the most out of your potential visitors’ searches by understanding what search terms people are using to find your website and the search terms that Google thinks are relevant for your site.

Performance Counts

Google will not send traffic to blogs that are slow, unresponsive, or that have broken links. But how can you possibly know if you’re site is slow or if certain posts are not displaying correctly? Again, this is where Google Webmaster Tools can help. You can see how fast Google thinks your blog is as well as get a detailed listing of any broken pages or links.

Understanding Flash And Videos

Google ‘spiders’ constantly ‘crawl’ websites, reading all the content, logging information about the content, and analyzing the data. Google then uses this data to determine the importance of your website. Here’s the thing… These spiders only look for text. They can’t see images, Flash (all that fancy animated stuff), or videos.

If you plan on using images, Flash, or videos on your home page, then you may earn a lower search ranking if you don’t compensate and enter a specific description of the content of those videos, images, or Flash compositions. These are topics that many bloggers don’t fully understand and their beautifully designed websites end up ranking much lower in the search engines than those totally ugly all-text websites.

Google Webmaster Tools can help you identify where you’re design falls short so that you can avoid this pitfall.

Set Up Your Google Webmaster Account

In order to use Google Webmaster Tools , you need to have a Google account. It’s free and so is the tool. Once you have an account, you’re ready to find out what your site is lacking and how you can improve it.

Verify Your Site

The first thing that you’ll be asked to do is enter your website’s URL. You will want to be sure that you also add the ‘www’ to the address. To verify your site, simply follow the instructions on the page and you will be able to have access to all the aspects of this powerful tool.

Information

Once you’re in, you will be able to see a host of information about your website, including whether it is included in Google’s indexing pages and when the last time a spider crawled it. It’s important to know when the last crawl took place because if you update your content every day or every few days and the spider last visited two months ago, that generally means that at the time there weren’t any significant changes to the content and the search engine deemed to site a low priority. If you’re not getting crawled, it will mean that all of those new blog posts you’ve added, along with those important keywords, are not being indexed when you need it to be.

Next, you’ll find a diagnostics page that will entail all the problems that Google’s spider encountered while accessing your page. If there are certain pages on your site that are not available to the public, then they will show up in this report. The goal of any website is to not have anything show up in this report, but most often it does.

Using The Statistics

The statistics part of this webmaster tool is great because you can see what searches return your website the most, what words are being used when linking back to your site, and how many subscribers you have. For bloggers, this information is like gold. The statistics are not crucial, but they are always a benefit to have and use.

Links

Links are important to boosting search engine ranking, but there’s a difference between quality links and just a large number of links. The goal should always be high quality links pointing to your website, as well as those links that your website points to. This information provided by the webmaster tool will give you important aspects to focus on.

When you get these results, go through the pages that are linking to yours and see which ones have any real value. While you certainly don’t need to have them removed, you can focus on more important sites that might be willing to link back to your blog. The more quality links that lead back to your site, the higher you will rank on the search engines.

Professionalism To The Core

The Google Webmaster tools for blogging is about creating a professional presence on the web. When you have access to important information about your website and how search engine spiders ‘view’ it, then you will gain insight into how to improve not only your search engine ranking, but also your visitors’ experience. By using this free tool, you will increase your chances for success on the World Wide Web.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is essentially when you as a blogger sell other people’s products on your blog and receive a commission for each sale made. The commission rates vary depending on the product and are based on wherever the product owner chooses to set them.

Finding Affiliate Offers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different sites out there that allow product owners to set up their information products and promote them to affiliates who can, in turn, pick which ones they want. These types of sites are a good place to start when looking for products.

A few of the largest sites out there that offer these types of affiliate products include ClickBank, Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, and Amazon Associates.

ClickBank

ClickBank is made up mostly of information products – ebooks, online courses, video series, and the like. It has been around for a long time and has several great metrics and resources that you can use to decide what is the best selling product and what is the most likely to do well on your site. You can also track how many times your link has been posted and how many sales were made.

Of course, as mentioned above, ClickBank does have its limitations. There are no physical products sold there, so you can only promote online products. If you want to join ClickBank, just head over to their site and follow their approval process. It usually takes a few days to get in.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is a huge marketplace that many of the larger retailers use to get affiliates for their products. Most of what is on Commission Junction is physical products, so you have a bit more choice in what you can make a commission on.

Signing up to Commission Junction requires a website plus a fairly rigorous application process, but once you are in, you have all kinds of retailers to choose from. The only downside is that you must get approval from each retailer to be able to promote their products for a percentage. However, many of the retailers in the system auto-approve everyone who applies, so it is not that hard to find something that you would like on your blog.

Google Affiliate Network

The Google Affiliate Network is very similar to Commission Junction. In fact, the entire setup and process is almost exactly the same as above.

Amazon Associates

This is one of oldest on the Internet. The Amazon Associates program allows you use basically anything that is sold on Amazon plus items sold on the other sites that they manage.

Think about all the products out there on Amazon.com! There is bound to be something related to your niche that you could blog about and sell! Amazon, also has a fairly rigorous approval process, so you will want a site with some good content on it, and maybe even some decent traffic, before you apply.

Once you are in, this program does not need you to get approval for every company or product that you want, so you can get right to it!

What Items You Should Choose

When you are trying to decide what type of affiliate marketing products you should promote on your blog, you need to consider very carefully your readers. Do not ever choose anything that is not a high-value, high-trust product. You do not necessarily need to own the product yourself, but you should certainly do your homework and make sure that the product is legitimate.

Also, think about what will really be pertinent to your readers. If your site is about bunk beds, find some bunk beds or something related to bunk beds. Do not choose to use say, an ebook about making money online. You probably will not get any sales on a product that is not relevant to your blog.

How You Can Do It

Once you have found a few products, now you obviously need to promote them! The first thing you will need to do is make sure you get the correct links so that any sales that are made are registered to your account. Each affiliate network has a different way of doing this, but in general, they will give you a link with some data in the URL, so that when someone clicks on the product from your blog, that visitor is registered as someone you sent, giving you the credit if that click turns into a sale. Most of these systems also register the click, and even if the person leaves and comes back, if they buy within a certain time period, you can still get the sale.

Most of these product owners and retailers also have marketing materials that you can use, especially ad banners that you can put on your site. These can make the process of selling a product much easier on you.

Once you have your unique links, there are several ways to promote the products. You could just put a link or a banner in your advertising space or in the sidebar of your site. This might get you a few clicks and sales, but you are going to want to do more than that to get even better sales numbers.

One of the best ways to promote these products is to write a review of them on your site. Write an honest review in a blog post specifically for a product that you are promoting and put it on your site. This way, people feel more comfortable about buying product having gotten their information from a third-party source.

If you will follow the steps outlined above and get signed up to one or all of the networks mentioned, you are bound to find something that you can promote!

This article assumes that you already know the basics of setting up your Facebook ad campaign and moves into some of the advanced methods for generating traffic.

Choose Your Demographic Appropriately

One of the mistakes a lot of people make when setting up a Facebook ad campaign is to choose the wrong demographic. You need to know who your target reader is. So how do you find out what these people are interested in?

By using Facebook! If you start with one thing that you know a reader of your blog is going to be interested in, you can start clicking around Facebook, finding people that like those things and going to see more of their likes. This won’t be easy and will take some time and effort.

Not everyone has everything available for public review. So you will need to find the lists that are public. Take this information and put it into a spreadsheet.

Collect as much of it as you can, and then cross reference each list. Make a new list of all of the things they have in common. That will help you ensure that you are focusing on the right demographics for advertising on Facebook.

Write A Great Title

It’s important to pick a title that is going to draw people into your ad. You don’t want to simply tell them what you are offering. They won’t pay attention. Write the headline of your ad in a way that leads the reader to believe that there is something important that they need to find, which they will.

But avoid the clichés, such as “One secret to…” as people already know this is a trick. You want to come up with more interesting headlines that are specifically tied to the type of content that you are going to be offering the reader.

Go back to the list of interests you collected and see what sort of inspiration you find there. Drawing people into your blog using a good teaser is easy.

Use Pictures To Get Their Attention

Did you ever see those pictures that don’t seem to be related to the Facebook ad in any way? Those are pictures that are there simply to attract people’s attention. You can use any number of different types of pictures, but you should aim for one of a few different kinds: sexy, shocking, funny.

Those three will get the most attention and also keep the reader focused long enough to read your text. If you have a good title, the whole ad will start to come together, and you will be pulling readers into your blog before you know it.

You can find pictures at a number of different places. There are many stock image sites on the Internet and the Wikimedia commons has plenty that are totally free for you to use.

Just always check the terms of use before you commit to using any specific image for your Facebook ads.

Writing The Body Of The Ad

This is an important step. You need to bring out some sense of urgency here. You can do this if you are offering something as a prize or gift.

But for many blogs this just might not work. So what are you going to do to instill a sense of urgency in your potential reader? Think about offering something that they might be interested in reading or watching.

Offer that to them in the body copy and then tell them that it is free for a limited time.

For instance, if you are writing a blog about video games and you know that most of your potential readers are interested in a specific game, then you could put together an ad that uses the following body copy: “Get a free guide to dominate GAME X. It’s free for now, but retails at $35. Limited offer!”

If this doesn’t get you a lot of clicks to your site, then you did your research incorrectly and should go back to that step. You are probably targeting the wrong group.

Putting It All Together And Split Testing

The most important element of this entire process is the initial demographic research. If you get that wrong, the Facebook ads won’t get the right attention and draw traffic into your site. But assuming that you got the right stuff in the research step, how are you going to make sure that you get the best possible click-through rate?

Well, that’s easy! Use split testing. But how do you do it?

You have three elements in your ad that you can mix and match. The first is the picture, the second is the headline, and the third is the body copy. You can’t possibly know how any one of those is impacting the success of the ad, but you can verify the power of a specific combination.

Come up with at least three different pictures, three different headlines and three different body copies. They don’t need to all make sense when you mix and match them. You just need to be able to come up with nine distinct Facebook ads.

Run each one of these Facebook ads with an identical budget and then use the Facebook system to track their effectiveness. You will quickly learn which one works the best.

With this combination of Facebook ads, you can also cross reference and determine which picture is drawing the best attention. You can do the same for each headline and body copy. Just make sure that you are keeping good track of conversion rates.

When you finish with the first set ads, you can do another round, focusing on the elements that work the best. With these tips you can draw tons of traffic to your blog using the Facebook advertising platform.

Proper SEO

A solid SEO, or search engine optimization, strategy can significantly increase the traffic to your site. Search engine optimization is essentially the process of setting up your site in such a way that the search engines can understand exactly what your site is about and display your site in the rankings accordingly.

There are many simple things you can do when blogging to make sure you have your site properly search engine optimized. First, do a little research to see what keywords people search that are related to your niche. You can do this by using several free keyword tools out there on the Internet. Just do a quick search and you will find them. The keyword tool designed by Google AdWords is a great one to use.

After you find a few terms that are relevant, then you can make some changes to your site to incorporate those terms. Try to add it to the title of your site, and then include it in the text a few times as well. Do not overdo it, though, as too many mentions of a keyword can lead to the search engines to penalize you for that particular term.

Also, make sure that you have a sitemap built into your site that the search engines can find and take a look to ensure you do not have the search engines blocked from coming to your site.

You can also write articles, guest posts on other sites, and build other links that point back to your site to help grow its presence in the search engines. As a general rule, the more links you have back to your site, the more important your site seems to the search engines and the more likely you are to rank for the terms that they see as relevant to your site.

Clean Up The Design

Is your site pleasing to the eye? If not, users are less likely to stick around as a customer long term. You may want to have a web designer take a look at your site to see what could be cleaned up and updated for proper website performance. Ask a few folks to give their opinion of your site, as you may have spent too much time looking at it to see it through the eyes of a customer.

Often, it does not take much to take a site from hard to look at to pleasing to the eye. For the most part, users want a simple navigation on your site so they can get where they want to go, and they want a clean, simple design that flows for them and has clear divisions between sections. When blogging, your site should also look updated. If your site looks like it has not been redone since 1995, you may have a problem! In addition, try to avoid music or videos that load on their own without the user clicking a play button. People would rather have the option to play these types of media.

Write Solid Copy For Your Site

The best blogging tips include writing solid copy for your blog. Poor copy can seriously kill your website performance. You can bet that people probably will move on without making a purchase or contacting your business. First, make sure it is free from grammatical, spelling, and capitalization errors. Second, make sure that the information is easy to read and that the message is clear.

Give enough information for users to make a decision, but do not overdo it, either. If users come to your page and see an article of 5000 words, you can bet they will not read it. Keep it under 1000 words max on any particular page or article. Do not go to short, though. Anything above 250 words is probably good as a general rule.

In addition, good copywriting should explain the benefits to the potential customer. What does your site or business offer that others do not? This is known as a unique selling proposition, and including it can seriously improve your website performance.

You should also include a solid call to action for the user. What is it that you want them to do? Should they buy something right on your site? Should they call you or e-mail you? Make that as clear and concise as possible.

Use Media Properly

Blogging with video, pictures and audio content can really enhance the user’s experience on your site and keep them on your site longer. In fact, these days, having good media on your site can be absolutely crucial to your website performance. Proper use of pictures and video can keep your reader’s interest much longer than simple text alone.

If you can have a video created about your site or business, this can be a great selling point for users. Pictures can break up the monotony of text and can further illustrate the point you are trying to get across to your readers. As mentioned above, however, make sure that you do not have any videos or audio set to play automatically for users, as many users want to start these when they are ready.

Stay Connected With Visitors

Make sure that you have a way to stay connected with visitors and invite them to come back. There are several ways to make this connection and keep your site or business in front of them.

First, you can include a link back to your Twitter or Facebook page, so that users can “follow” or “like” you. This way, you can have your message in front of them and get them more likely to come back. You can also include an email opt-in form so that users and potential customers could get updates from you or an email newsletter.

If you follow these simple blogging tips, you will likely see a boost in your website performance, no matter what your site is about!

When you operate a blog, there are often many factors about your marketing efforts that you should know in order to be effective. Some of these factors can be measured through some basic tools offered by web hosting companies, but Google Analytics offers the best free options.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When you have access to the right information, then you can fine tune your internet marketing, as well as your blog design, to gain the highest number of visitors to your site.

When you create a blog, whether it is for your own personal business or you are maintaining one for a major corporation, having access to the details about the layout, design, and search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to success. There are literally millions of blogs already floating around in cyberspace. In fact, there are billions of web pages that are competing for attention from the major search engines. You need to know how your blog, as well as the individual web pages, are performing if you want to maximize the return on your investment.

And your blog is an investment. Make no mistake about this simple fact. If you have taken the time, made the investment in resources to build a solid blog, then you want to make sure that people can: A) Find it, and B) Be compelled to stay with your blog.

The World of Blogging

Blogging used to be about sharing your random thoughts with anyone who might feel the same way as you did. Today, blogging is about business. Many of the world’s most popular blog sites, such as Blogger and WordPress are often used to build businesses.

Blogging is no longer about simply sharing your opinions about a sports team or movie that was released. Today it is about offering potential customers information that they can use. When they find information, they develop a bond of trust with the business or blog that offered it to them.

When you are experienced at it or still need to know how to start a blog, it is imperative that you incorporate Google Analytics for blogging into your site. This way you can track a host of data, such as how your visitors found your site, their geographic location, and how they enter your site (what pages) and which pages are the most popular.

How Keywords can Be Effective

Keywords are one of the most important fundamental aspects of blogs and design. When you target very specific keywords, you will have more success converting the average visitor into regular customers. Using this tool will help you determine how people found your blog and what keywords were driving traffic.

When you know which keywords are working and which ones aren’t, you can fine tune your marketing approach. For example, if you sell car parts for Ford automobiles, for example, and you discover that the keyword phrase ‘Ford muffler parts’ was driving considerably more traffic to your site than, say, ‘Ford parts,’ then you know how to market more effectively. This sample would tell you that the more precise you are with your keywords, the more effective your internet marketing plan will be.

Using Google Analytics

What makes this tool impressive is that it is free to use. You simply need to set up an account with Google. Once you’ve completed that step, build a profile for your blog.

If you have built your blog from the ground up, you will likely have to enter the code that you are given to each page that you want information about. If you are using one of the blogging platforms, such as Blogger or WordPress, for example, you will only need to add this code to your theme. Simply copy the JavaScript code that is created based on your blog profile and paste is above the </head> tag in your page, or the template that you’re using.

Please note that this code does not operate visible. In other words, it will not affect the layout or design of your blog in any way, shape, or form. Some analytical tools do, in fact, alter the appearance of your blog and this is what makes this tool more efficient.

Once you have added this code to your site, you can begin learning a great deal about your visitors as well as your blog’s effectiveness in grabbing visitors. Simply click on ‘View Report’ on the initial screen that you see. This will show you a main dashboard with a host of analytical options.

From there you can view information about your Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, Goals, and if you sell items on your site, E-commerce. The Content section can give you some good insight about the content that you’ve placed on your site. Search engines love high quality content and so do readers.

Competition On The Internet

When it comes to the Internet, there is an enormous amount of competition. Every year there are tens of thousands of new blogs being launched. As the World Wide Web becomes more crowded, search engines become more particular about how they rank these sites.

When you create compelling content, then your blog will attract more attention. Also, with so many different internet marketing venues to choose from, it is practically impossible for the single businessman or businesswoman to tackle them all by himself or herself. This tool created by Google allows you to determine which methods generate the best success.

Design Matters

While it can be easy to focus strictly on the content and internet marketing strategies that you use when building and promoting your blog, the layout and design is equally important. People will give your blog 5 seconds of their time before they decide to either move on or stay. 5 seconds is not a lot of time.

Using Google Analytics, you can find out just what aspects of your blog design and layout attract users. Is your call to action in the right place? What about the images and navigation bar?

When you give every detail the attention it deserves, you will maximize your users’ experience which will bring them back again and again.

In our modern economy, finding more ways to make money is important. In fact, being able to increase your earnings on your own is one of the most important aspects to surviving such treacherous economic times. Knowing how to generate Google AdSense revenue is one way that you can boost your bottom line every month.

While Google AdSense was initially designed with website and blog publishers in mind, anyone who creates and maintains their own blog or website can take advantage of the incredible opportunity. Whether you have a full-time job and are building a web presence for yourself in your free time or run a web design business, for example, you can generate a great deal of revenue using this tool, if you know how to use it to your advantage.

By allowing advertisements on your blogs, you create a static revenue stream. It’s basically that simple, yet there are important considerations to be made.

The Advertising Effect

Traffic coming to your blog, regardless of how they found it, is going to judge you and your business based on many factors. The design, layout, and navigation of the blog is one factor. Another factor has to deal with any advertisements that you post on the site.

If you visit some of the larger media outlets in the world, such as CNN, you have probably seen plenty of advertisements throughout their sites. When an ad is front and center, though, it takes away from the purpose of the blog itself and can drive visitors away.

You’re not CNN, so any new visitor to your site will be important. Some blog owners don’t understand the basic concept that consumers can and often are turned off by too many ads on a site or ads that overtake the blog itself. Ads need to be secondary to the content of the blog.

It serves no purpose to you or your business to have ads that grab more attention than your blog design or content. You haven’t worked hard on internet marketing and done all the legwork to bring visitors to your site only to have them click on an ad and leave your site, never to return again. You want them to focus first and foremost on your site, and then take a look at the ads you post.

Building A Quality Blog

You may not consider the design factor of your blog to be all that important, at least not when it pertains to ads, but it is crucial to success. The design of your blog should always be directed toward keeping visitors on your site. There are three main areas to which you should focus your design efforts.

The first is where a visitor looks as soon as the page loads on their web browser. Most people look to the upper left corner of the screen. This is where your business name and/or logo should be. Placing an ad here is tantamount to saying, ‘Thanks for stopping by, but why don’t you check this other business’s website out instead.’

Next, the eyes will travel toward the upper center of the screen. You’ll find that most websites tend to place their mission statement or slogan here. This is where you tell your visitor why this website is exactly what they’re looking for.

This is also where navigation tends to originate, and for good reason. You want your visitors to be able to find their way around relatively easily; you don’t want them to struggle to find the other pages of your site. Having an ad within this zone may work, but if it gets in the way of your message, or the navigation, then it’s being counterproductive.

Then a visitor’s eyes tend to drift down the page. Many visitors won’t scroll down unless they really like the content. Placing ads below the bottom of the viewable area will often mean that your visitors never even see it.

The best placement for ads will be to the right and bottom of the screen. That way your website and your message still remain the focus of attention. Then, if an ad captures attention, then when someone clicks on the link, you earn money.

Keywords And Google AdSense

When it comes to Google AdSense, you will be building your campaign around your website. While you don’t want to have ads for your direct competition on your site, you want to keep within the same genre. In other words, if you sell auto parts, advertising for used car dealers would be a good fit.

If you choose the represent keywords or keyword phrases that have nothing to do with your website, then visitors to your site are not likely to follow those ad links and you’ll be wasting valuable space. It’s a balancing act to choose the right keywords to represent. But when you get it right, you will be earning revenue every single month.

The More Traffic You Get, The More Money You Will Earn

Google AdSense revenue will not happen by simply being static with your website. Just because you build a website, have a web hosting company maintain it, or take care of some of the other aspects of launching it does not mean that anyone will come to your website. If they don’t come to your website, then they will not see the ads that you have posted on it and therefore you won’t be earning any extra money.

It’s important to keep in mind that you can have up to 3 ads on your site at any given time. Some people would want more in order to maximize the potential earnings, but more than 3 and visitors will begin to navigate away from your site before they even have a chance to see what you offer. You don’t need to post 3, either; you can post 1 or 2 ads if that’s your preference.

You still need to employ all of the same marketing strategies for your website that you would normally do. Google AdSense revenue is all about earning money from visitors who might be interested in other topics than what they searched for. If you bring in visitors who realize they should have entered something else into your search, they can certainly go back to the search engine or they can follow an ad from your site to something more in line with their needs.

Evaluate Your Strategy Monthly

When you are looking to generate Google AdSense revenue, there will be a balance between targeting the right keywords to supplement your website and avoiding giving your business away to your competitors. Determine whether you’re targeting the right keywords every month and make changes accordingly. It’s much better to make changes quickly rather than wait and lose out on all that potential revenue.

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There’s a lot to cover here and we don’t want to overwhelm you, so we’ll keep it simple. Here are five SEO tips to get more visitors to your site.

SEO / Keywords

Make sure that your website and its content are optimized for the keyword phrases you are targeting. SEO means Search Engine Optimization; it’s a huge topic that people spent enormous amount of time mastering. Since it’s not the focus of this article, we’re not going into it in too much detail.

The point is that you need to learn about it and understand keywords & how to use them in your content. Always start with the end in mind. In otherwise be clear which keywords you want to rank on top of the search engines and then build your website and articles around those keywords.

Many amateur bloggers write aimlessly on various different topics without focus. Their efforts get watered down in many different directions. You want to make money. Concentrate and be clear!

Backlinks

A backlink is a link from somewhere else to your site. Usually this is from another website with a similar niche as yours. That audience, which may not know about your site will see the link, click on it and check out your blog.

You can do this yourself by leaving well thought out, insightful comments on other websites, blogs, and social media sites (and then linking back to your site in the comment). Note the key here is “well thought out, insightful.” If you just start writing something like “Love your blog! Now check out mine which also has a lot of fresh and interesting content!” That is not cool!

It’s actually called comment spam. There are already a lot of shady online marketers who do that. Don’t be that way! Not only is it bad manner, current blog plugins catch many of these spams automatically. And even if you do get through the filter, links in comments are usually tagged with a piece of code called rel=”nofollow” which negates any SEO benefit you might get with that link.

It’s very important that you network with people in your niche. They’re not simply competition to be ignored. Instead they’re “comp-friends.” You can work together with them, because the pie is big enough for everybody.

What you really want is to build relationships with the owners of other blogs, and hope eventually that they will link back to you site. The downside of this strategy is that it might take a while.

So if you’re not patient, you can also contact other people in your niche and outright ask them to link to your site from their blogroll. But you need to answer the question “why they should do that?” What benefits are you offering? If they agree, you will get a lot of traffic & maybe a jump in SEO! The likelihood though is somewhat low. So it’s basically a numbers game.

Even better is to offer to do a guest article or blog post for them. (make sure it’s good so that people will want more from you). Again remember to include the link to your website in the articles. This will have the added benefit of potentially increasing you page rank in the search engines.

Register With Online Directories

There are directories for various blogs and websites. For example you want to make sure you get listed in major directories like DMOZ, BlogCatalog and Yahoo Directory, so people know who you are and how to find you. There are some hoops to jump through to be accepted by them, but it’s definitely worth the effort both for the search engine optimization and traffic.

Use Social Networking

Get a Facebook page for your website, and tell your friends about it, and get them to refer other people. Get on Twitter, and be consistent about your tweeting. Get a YouTube channel and posts videos there. All these require you to interact with others on a regular basis!!! It’s not enough to just BE there.

You have to be a member of the community by having ongoing conversations. Become a recognized expert, not a spammer.

Create High Quality, Targeted Content

Make sure you have a site that people who are into your niche would actually want to visit. Many publishers have content mainly for the search engines and not really for reading by actual human beings. Don’t do it!

Companies like Google have spent billions of dollars to weed out that type of crap. You don’t want to have your effort wasted and your website penalized. We have a saying, “You can do all the marketing you want, but you can’t polish a turd.” Make sure your site is a great one or all your hard work is for nothing.

Avoid article generating software like the plague! You get what you paid for. In the long run, it’s just not worth it! It’s not going to be in your voice or your style.

We also learned the hard way that if you’re going to hire someone to write for you, make sure that they speak your native language. Otherwise, the euphemisms and the phrases just don’t quite click.

Your audience basically wants to read the writing the same way they speak. Put out good solid content that you’d be proud to stand behind. Don’t try to trick the search engines. Put your heart and effort into your work.

Build your brand! Have good quality content and links will result in more traffic and establish you as a recognized expert. That should be your long term strategy for making money on your blog.

Audio and video have become popular among a number of Internet marketers because they are easy and inexpensive to make. Yet article marketing is still the force that drives search engines. That’s because articles contain content that the search engines can actively find, log, and rank.

Whatever kind of products or services you are marketing, using articles is one of the most effective ways to generate interest and build one of the most important foundations of any relationship: trust. When a consumer trusts a business, they are much more inclined to purchase from them. A well-written article, full of valuable content, will build trust, and it will generate leads.

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Step 1: Writing The Article

Writing an article requires a specific purpose. For those that will be published on the web, there are two kinds. The first is keyword-stuffed and the second is content driven articles.

Keyword-stuffed articles were once the driving force of all content on the web. These articles, more commonly referred to as ‘fluff,’ were created with the sole purpose of a achieving the highest ranking within search engines. Content wasn’t very important; it was all about ranking and driving traffic to a specific website or page.

Content rich articles are the driving force of Internet marketing today because search engines have changed the way they rank web pages. Also, as more people are using the Internet to find products and services, they are demanding more information. Content driven articles are, for the most part, well-written, have useful and action-able information within them, and answer a specific question.

When you set out to write an article to promote a product or service, focus on one or two main ideas that relate to the product or service. It could be about the uses for the item or how it can help people. Stay on topic and don’t inject too many opinions.

Step 2: Watch Your Article Length!

The length of the article is important. In fact, gauging how long an article should be is a balancing act. On one end of the spectrum, short articles or overly long ones will be penalized or ignored by the search engines, and you have to contend with the attention span of your readers.

If the article takes too long to get to the point, then the reader is likely to stop move on. Getting your article into the hands (or in front of) readers is a challenge and you don’t want to waste those opportunities because of length. The best articles have a word count between 400 and 1,000 words.

Step 3: Creating Links And Backlinks

Every effective article for marketing purposes will have back links that lead the reader to the main page or sales page. Inserting these links is a delicate balancing act if you use article submission sites such as Squidoo.com or EzineArticles.com, for instance. These submission sites do not permit direct selling and only allow links to informative pages, not to sales pages.

In most of these article submission sites, you will have a resource box that is used for giving information about you, the author. It is here where you can give a brief overview of you and your blog. If you’ve written a quality article, your readers will want to know more about you.

Step 4: Make Sure You Offer Useful, Actionable Advice

The best articles use strong opening lines. In the first sentence of any article, a question that the reader has must be addressed. This narrows the focus of the article and lets the reader know that they have found the right content to read.

Once you have set the tone of the article, the main body is where you offer instruction, advice, opinions, or other pertinent information. If the writing moves off on a tangent or becomes cluttered, then there is an opportunity for the reader to stop reading. Common sense information may be useful only if it is designed to set the stage for something greater, or as an example.

Many writers fail with their blog posts because they use them as a long sales pitch, making promises that are never delivered. The writer must conduct enough research in order to compose a targeted and specific article rich with useful, actionable information and advice. Anything short of that and it becomes nothing more than fluff.

Step 5: Publishing On The Web

Articles that are never found by the search engines are about as useful as one sitting on your home computer. Marketing is about getting content in front of the public. Article submission sites, such as those mentioned, are one of the most powerful tools that businesses can use.

Most of these article submission sites offer free services, but you have to wait longer for approval. Paid services offer faster turnaround times as well as some other benefits, such as increased exposure to the search engines, advanced keyword strategies, and assistance creating better content. If you are serious about marketing and prefer top quality results, paying for memberships to article submission sites will offer a greater return on your investment of time and other resources.

You can also publish on blogs and if you know how to start a blog, then you are already in great shape. The main focus here is to get as much exposure as you can to the search engines. That will, in turn, give you the most exposure to potential clients.

Step 6: Using The Right Keywords

Not only does the author need to concentrate on content, but he also needs to incorporate keywords or keyword phrases appropriately so that the major search engines can rank it appropriately. Keywords are the driving force of search engines and the way they rank websites. Keyword phrases refine any search and when you have content rich articles and a keyword density between 2-3%, then your article marketing campaign will be a powerful tool for your business.

When you’re ready to break into the world of article marketing, knowing the ins and outs is the first step. The entire process takes time to master, from web hosting to blogging, writing the articles, and fine-tuning them to target your ideal consumer. The more you market with articles, the more exposure you will receive.

• How do you find advertisers?
• Should you go with individuals or ad networks?
• What’s the best way to get started?

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Traffic Matters

If you want to make money online by getting someone to advertise on your site, the first thing they’re going to want to see are your traffic numbers. If you get only 10 visitors per day, you’re probably not going to get many advertisers. They want to see that you have a considerable amount of traffic (visitors) to make it worth their while. If you have that, you can start soliciting advertisers. If not, focus on building traffic first. We like at least 10,000 page views per month, but if you want to get into ad network, you will need even more (20,000 for basic ads and at least 100,000 for traditional advertisers).

It also helps if your blog is focused on a particular niche. This makes it easier for advertisers to reach their desired audience.

In many ways it’s like a popularity game. People will respect you more, or in this case willing to advertise on your site if they see that you have a huge following. Politicians and corporations do it all day long when they seek to influence others through opinion leaders. Learn from them and be the central hub, then leverage your expertise into money.

Make It Easy For Advertisers To Contact You

Going back to answering the original question of how to find advertiser, one of the simplest things to do is make “advertise with us” a tab on your website. Advertisers will actually compose a percentage of your website’s visitors. Why not make it easy for them to contact you?

You can also publish a blog post letting your readers know that you are looking for advertisers and the spots and location available. If you have an email list (which you should), you can email your subscribers and mention you are looking for advertisers.

Go to the popular blogs in your niche (there are usually 4 to 5 major players in any industry), find out what companies advertise with them as well as which ad networks they use and contact them. Come up with a proposal of what they’re going to get and why. Basically you want to find and sell to receptive potential customers.

Also based on our experience the more you grow your audience the more likely advertisers will come to you, which is a lot easier and more awesome!

Join An Ad Network

Google AdWords is by far the biggest and most popular ad network for advertisers. On the flip side, the Google AdSense program is designed for publishers like you. It’s fairly easy to sign up. You’ll need a legitimate telephone and mailing address. Google will confirm on both.

Once approved for AdSense, you will then determine the size of your ad units which comes in different shapes. You can even add tags that will allow advertisers to target a particular ad – for example, a Leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels) in top center of your home page.

You’d most likely get paid by each click (CPC) instead of impressions (CPM) or the result of a sale (CPA). This is fine at the beginning. But eventually you want to reach the point where you will get paid simply by showing your ad to your customers. The advertisers would determine that based on the perceived desirability of your blog.

How You’re Going To Get Paid

Let’s review really quickly the three payment models in online advertising. Cost Per Click or CPC is payment by each click. The price can range from a few pennies to tens of dollars. With proper planning and research by logging on and using the AdWords Keyword tool, you could start a blog whose niche overlap with a high paying keyword. The downside is that high paying keywords often have low traffic, so again proper research to balance two is highly recommended.

CPM is the cost per 1000 ad units. In other words it’s how much the advertiser would pay you every 1000 times the ad is displayed on your website. For example anywhere between $0.50 CPM and $8 CPM. If you have a high traffic website, this is an excellent earning model for you as the publisher because it doesn’t require action from your visitor for you to earn money!

CPA also known as Cost Per Action pays a lot more for each instance than CPC & CPM, but is also harder for you to get paid because it requires your visitors to take a particular action such as buying a particular product.

There are plenty of other networks out there, but nobody beats Google AdSense for simplicity and ease of use. Plus there’s no minimum traffic requirement – many ad networks require that 100,000 page view minimum. It’s probably the best way to get started especially if you don’t have much of an audience yet.

Should You Go With An Individual Advertiser?

Ad networks are easy – individuals affiliate programs are a LOT more profitable. This is a middle person fee, and you will only get a percentage what the advertiser is willing to pay – especially if you combine advertising with an affiliate arrangement. This is something that we do a lot on AskDanAndJennifer.com.

You can have both passive advertising and active promotions so that you get the best of both worlds. It’s a win-win for both you and the advertisers. You’re building a true long term partnership that will grow and become ever more lucrative. Essentially you move from an unknown affiliate to their preferred superstar. They might even design custom commissions for you that pay much more than their standard.

In conclusion remember to focus on growing your site and providing great content. Don’t focus on monetizing from day one because you’ll be disappointed with the results. Once you’ve demonstrated authenticity, and build a sizable following, advertisers will find you! They’re PART OF your audience already – be awesome and they’ll want their brand behind you.

This is not to say that you can’t make money in a popular, broad niche, but it does take more time and work to grow that kind of blog to the level where it makes good money.

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How to Pick a Niche – Passion vs. Moneymakers

So where do you start when you want to pick the right niche and learn how to start a blog? There are two schools of thought on picking a niche. Some people say that you should just choose something you are passionate about because you will want to wake up every morning and write quality content.

While that is a great thought, if your biggest hobby is underwater basket weaving, you are unlikely to make a great income blogging about it.

One often overlooked component in blogging is that you need to be able to find related products to promote to your customer base in order to make money. Of course, you could create a blog with simple AdSense or other banner ads, but it might take longer to see a profit over time.

On the other hand, some people say you should only pick topics that are known moneymakers whether you are interested in them or not. While that might work for some people, others need to have at least a passing interest in their topic in order to be successful.

In short, when you learn how to start a blog, you want to be certain that thousands (if not millions) of other people share your enthusiasm and interest in the topic and will pay money for products and/or services that you have to offer in the niche from time to time. No matter what, the key to the whole niche selection process is choosing the right keywords and getting your research together before building a blog site.

Keyword Tools

There are many free online keyword research tools to find keywords. One popular tool is the free Google Keyword tool.  After you have entered the keywords, you can check the amount of advertisers in that niche by gauging the bar in the “Competition” column.  You can even assess how lucrative the keywords are by click on the “Columns” button, and then enable the “Suggested Bid” checkbox.

This site is handy for many different tasks including your search for a blog topic. Let’s say you know that dating is a popular niche, so you want to do something in that niche. The problem is that going after such a broad niche can be the kiss of death for most new bloggers. So it’s important to find a sub-niche on dating in this case.

One way of doing that is putting in a “seed keyword”. You could start with “finding a date” and whittle the keyword options down further and further. Perhaps, in the end, you find that you would be interested in blogging about “finding a date for young professionals in their 20s & 30s.” There are many sub-topics to choose once you have a general idea of your topic.

The idea behind blogging is to develop a loyal following. To that end, it is important that you target your niche with laser-like focus so that you are one of the only people providing such specific content to a group of people. Additionally, you want to be sure that enough people are interested in your niche so that you get enough traffic.

If only 10 people per month are searching for your keyword, you need to either move on to another topic or see if there are other related keywords to create a bigger blog.

You can use tools other than the Google Keyword tool also. For instance, two other free tools are the SEObook keyword tool and Google Insights for Search. There are also other paid tools that are a lot fancier. We recommend you get a proven keyword research tool to find your keywords quickly and accurately.

The Google Insights tool gives additional information that can be very important during the niche research phase. It shows you how popular search terms are and what kind of history they have. For example, Christmas phrases would be highly searched from October through December, but most blogs would be quiet throughout the rest of the year. That can have a direct impact on your income.

Check the trends for your keywords and make sure that enough interest is there throughout the year to give you a reason to put your time and effort into the topic. This tool can also help you maximize your chances of making bursts of income at different times of the year as well.

So how do you know the proper way to research a keyword? The answer is that there is no “right” way. Everyone has their own opinion as to the number of searches that a keyword tern should have to make it worthwhile.

You can find yourself spending so much time researching that you never get around to creating quality content for your blog. Don’t over-analyze things. Often, you will find yourself with a list of keywords that, when added up, will give you plenty of potential search volume for the month.

The key is finding a way to get to the #1 slot on Google so that you can get the bulk of the daily searches for your keywords.

Once you have picked your keyword, you can also search what affiliate programs are available and check their commission.  Choosing a niche for your blog does not need to be a long, drawn out process. Use a mixture of your interests and knowledge to make your selection.

Here’s a quick tip: if you do a search on Google for a topic and people are paying money to run AdWords ads on the right side, they are making money. If you see TV commercials or magazine ads about your topic, they are making money. It’s a good bet that you will make money too!  So get started today and pick that lucrative niche that you will dominate!

Be sure to check our How to Start a Blog page to give you an overview of the process.  In our next step, we’ll be talking about our recommended web host, which comes with 1-click installation of WordPress, our favorite easy to use blog publishing platform: the one we use for all our sites.

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First, what’s the difference between Keywords and Tags?

There really isn’t a difference. Simply put, the keywords that you enter at the bottom of your article or blog post in WordPress are called tags. So for the purpose of this article we’re going to use them interchangeably.

What are the “Best Keywords and Tags?”

The tags for an article are the few words that best describe what your article (or blog post) is about. Ideally there are 5-10 keywords that specifically tie into your post.

A word of warning: these keywords have to be topics that actually relate to your article. You can’t just throw in random keywords that you think will get you noticed on search engines, as that will backfire on you. That’s called keyword spamming and it’s a one way ticket to nowheresville, population: you and your blog that no one will go to.

What are the some examples of the Best Keywords and tags?

Let’s say you had a post on your blog entitled “How to get a hot date online!” Some keywords you might use include as tags are: dating, online dating, online dating profile, get a date, get noticed online. See how those actually relate to the article we’re talking about? That’s the idea. Your job of course is to find the ones that best reflect your article AND get the most search traffic, but more on that coming up.

Also there’s no need to post 50-100 keyword tags. In fact, that’s not going to help you at all. Less is usually more, and the keyword realm is no different.  Be honest about what your article is about and you’ll be much more likely to get noticed in search engines.

WordPress “tag pages” are great for SEO

A lot of people don’t know this, but one of the (many) great things about WordPress is that for each tag you add to an article, WordPress creates a tag page. And that tag page will link to all articles tagged with that keyword. So all articles tagged with the keyword “dating” will be linked from the “dating” tag page on your blog.

For example, here are the tag pages for “web hosting” and “WordPress“ here on Blog Success Journal. And to give you a little different flavor, here are the tag pages for “pick up lines” and “sex positions” on Ask Dan & Jennifer.

Tag pages are important from an SEO perspective, because they can rank really well in search engines. Tagging your posts well will help you climb the keyword mountain faster and you’ll get noticed in the search engines and gradually move your way up in search rankings for those keywords.

Again, this is assuming you are tagging your posts accurately: if you add bogus keywords as tags, then your “tag pages” will be full of spam, i.e. non-related junk, and they will NOT help you get better search engine rankings.

Categories are not keyword tags – don’t use them interchangeably

Tags are just the natural evolution of the old category concept. Whereas years ago you had to choose 1 or 2 pre-defined categories when writing an article, these days it’s easy to just add the 5 to 10 tags, which are the topics the article is really about.

“But what about categories”, you ask? Well, for the moment you will still need them as well. We strongly recommend that you choose a single category that your article best fits into – in addition to the tags. For example, on Ask Dan & Jennifer, our 3 top-level categories are “sex“, “love“, and “dating“. Each new article is filed in one of these top-level categories, and then we add the appropriate tags to it.

We use major keywords as categories for better search engine rankings, because just like with tags, WordPress creates a category page which links to all the articles in that category. But you still need to tag your articles appropriately.

Use the same form of keywords and tags from one post to the next

As far as Google is concerned, the following keyword tags are completely different: “website” and “web site” and “websites”.

You need to be aware that those are completely different keywords and be consistent in the way you tag your articles. There’s nothing wrong with either keyword, but choosing one form and using it that way consistently increases your chances of getting ranked for that form of the keyword. So pick one and stick with it. Either you always use “website” as your tag or you use “web site”. Don’t use both interchangeably or you’ll be missing the chance for better rankings and more traffic.

Do your Keyword Research to determine with keywords get the most search engine traffic

“Website” and “web site” are perfectly valid keywords (tags), but we’ve also mentioned that search engines regard them as two completely different keyword tags.

But did you also know that each one generates an entirely different amount of search engine traffic?  Well, you do now. Fact is that not all keywords are created equal. Obviously if you are building your audience for your website, you want to only have the most effective keywords possible.

How do you that? Keyword research. That means doing your homework and looking up the number of searches each version of a keyword gets.

Doing your keyword research is crucial to have the most effective keyword tags on your blog, and it’s literally the ONLY way you will learn which keywords and tags are the most effective for you and your blog. It’s a bit time-consuming and tedious, but if you’re starting a blog you really need to start thinking of it as a business and more importantly as YOUR business. Treat it as if it is your full-time job, because well, it is and who else is going to research keywords and tags for you? That’s right. Nobody.

And here’s great news about keyword research: these results are fairly consistent from day-to-day. So you just need to do it once and save your findings in a spreadsheet – that’s what we do. Sure you’ll find yourself updating this keyword research spreadsheet now and then, but you won’t have to duplicate your work every time.

Keyword research tools – how to find the right keywords to use.

Here is a great keyword tool for you to check it. It can take a little getting used to, at first. But once you play with them a little bit they get easier to use, and it really helps to know as much about your niche as possible. That way you can hone in on the words that your audience are mostly likely to use to try and find the kind of content you have to offer online.

• SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – free keyword research option.

Tip: A very helpful strategy we use is to do your keyword research for your niche up front, find your most valuable keywords (in the right form: plural, singular, etc.) and keep track of all of them in a spreadsheet (complete with number of views per day). That way you can always refer to this again. And you will refer to it later – and you will update it later… but it’s important to have a strong starting point to build on.

Do your keyword research now and it will set you up for long-term success

Fact of the matter is that most people do the research too late after they’ve already made up their own keywords and find out they don’t work as well as others would have. But why do that? Why waste all that time (and potentially money) when you can simply do the keyword research NOW and get started on the right foot? It’s much easier to start off on the right foot than it is to get off to a slow start and get stuck in bad habits and then try to correct them. Do the keyword research now and start yourself off with the best tag habits possible and you won’t need to correct them later.

This is a very technical article, with a lot of information. It’s unrealistic to expect to assimilate all of it at once. We highly recommend that you read it several times to make the most of all the keyword and tag information above. Then, after you’ve done that, go out there and make the magic happen!

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What the heck are keywords?

What are they and why do I need to know about them? Are they really that important to me and my blog? Can’t I get by without them? I mean, it’s all about the content right? So if I just write a really cool article, people will find it, right?

Well, not so much really. As with most anything in the world, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but don’t worry. That’s what we are here for. So sit back and enjoy. We’re going to give you keyword 101. If you’re an SEO expert, you won’t get much out of this video (you should be teaching it, really), but if you think SEO refers to a 70’s rock band, you’re in the right place.

Here’s the deal. You’ve set up your blog, picked a niche, installed the necessary tools to make your blog succeed, now what? Now you have to make sure that people who are searching for it on Google and other search engines can find it. But how? With keywords.

Wait, what exactly is keyword, you ask? And what’s a “keyword phrase”

Every go to Google and type in something like “How do I make money off my blog?”  or “Good pizza” or “Dry cleaners in my neighborhood” Guess what? Those are keywords.  Or, they are a “key phrase search” to be specific. Technically a single word (i.e. “dating”) is a keyword, but a phrase (i.e. “dating tips”) is a keyword phrase. Simple, right?

They can be short, or they can be long. Most “keywords “ are actually three to five word phrases. Keywords, in a nutshell, are what you are searching for. Whatever you type in Google (or Bing, Yahoo, or whatever) is a keyword or a string of keywords.

The textbook definition of keyword is a “term that encapsulates the essence of your text.” For this article, on this article “What are keywords and why do they matter?” Our keywords could include the following: keywords, keyword research, keyword analysis, keyword service, most searched keywords, SEO, blogging

Think of it this way: the content of each article can be boiled down to a few key topics. Those would be your keywords for that article.

Choose your keywords carefully.

Why? Because some keywords will get a few clicks a day while some words get a few THOUSANDS of clicks a day. The crazy part? Both keywords can cover the same topic and mean the same thing, but the more “common” term people use more often will obviously get more searches.  So every keyword gets incredibly different results and offer a completely different bang for your buck.

For example, keyword (singular), keywords (plural) and “keyword phrases” get 859, 723, 45 searches per day respectively.

How will you know the difference between the two? The way you learn everything: by doing your homework, which in this case is called keyword research. But where do you start? With a basic keyword research tool.

Keyword research tools – how to find the right keywords to use.

Here is a great keyword tool for you to check it. It can take a little getting used to, at first. But once you play with them a little bit they get easier to use, and it really helps to know as much about your niche as possible. That way you can hone in on the words that your audience are mostly likely to use to try and find the kind of content you have to offer online.

• SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – free keyword research option

Tip: A very helpful strategy we use is to do your keyword research for your niche up front, find your most valuable keywords (in the right form: plural, singular, etc.) and keep track of all of them in a spreadsheet (complete with number of views per day). That way you can always refer to this again. And you will refer to it later – and you will update it later… but it’s important to have a strong starting point to build on.

Don’t keyword spam!

Figure out which are the most searched words in your niche, then include them in your blog as much as possible, but don’t do it arbitrarily. That’s called “keyword spamming” and you don’t want to go down that road. No one will like you, particularly the search engines who you’re technically “spamming” by doing it. And that’s not something you really need to be doing anyway. Just do your homework, write your blog with those words in mind, and you’ll be all set for success.

Next steps to choosing great keywords for your blog posts.

This article is just an introduction, the very, very tippy top of the iceberg, but it is at least enough to get you started. Now you’ve got yourself a good starting point from which to conquer the internet via your master of SEO and keywords! Okay, maybe not so much, but you’re on your way. That counts, right?

Just remember: you start with the topic, the niche that you’re going to cover,  then you really need to focus on how people who are looking for your content are going to find it. Those tags you add to your blog are crucial! Those three to five words can make or break you!

And back to the cardinal rule… write great content that people actually want to read, and work with the search engines to help them find your great content. Then promote that great content.

Be sure to also check out part 2 of our Keywords 101 series: Keyword Research 101: How to Choose The Best Tags & Keywords For Your Blog Posts – And Why This Matters (Video).

Top 10 Tools Every Blogger Needs (Part 1 of 2)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Top 10 Tools Every Blogger Needs (Part 2 of 2)

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. WordPress

Once you get set up with a great web host (here’s our #1 recommended web host), you need a blog publishing engine, or rather a Content Management System (CMS) that your site will run on. You have a lot of options, some paid and some free. Google’s Blogger is free, but there’s no support. What happens if you blog goes down (or disappears) in the middle of the night? Who will you call? With Blogger, you get what you pay for: not much. We’ve actually seen this happen. Joomla is well, something that we won’t get into here (lets just say we are SO not fans of Joomla). Then there’s TypePad, a paid option. Let’s just say we started on TypePad, and left as soon as we could.

WordPress is really your only viable choice, plus it’s free. It’s very powerful and customizable, and very easy to optimize for a busy site, which is crucial. It’s the best CMS tool out there, and it comes in 2 flavors, both free: installed on your website or hosted on their servers. Sure, you can get a WordPress blog right on the WordPress.com site, but we strongly recommend against that. That’s a handicapped WordPress that doesn’t give you the power to grow that makes WordPress so valuable to begin with. And their terms of use don’t allow affiliate / revenue generating links.

If your blog is your business, you need to treat it like a business. Get a good, cheap web hosting service and install your own WordPress on it. There’s no reason not to. Our recommended web host even offers 1-click WordPress install.

2. Google Analytics

Knowledge is power. You need to know about the traffic on your site. Where is it coming from? Where are they going on your site? How long are they staying there? Is your traffic up? Or down?  This is information you need. Big time.

Google Analytics has all this. Yes, there are other products out there that cover the same territory, but this is the best one. And it’s free. Have we mentioned that free is good? Because it is. Get it, use it, learn it, love it. You totally met your new best friend. Fun fact: some years ago, Google Analytics was a commercial product called Urchin, which cost upwards of $5,000. Then Google bought it, made it way better, and offered it free to everyone. Best. Analytics. Ever.

3. Chartbeat

Chartbeat very similar to Google Analytics. In fact someone once called Chartbeat “Google Analytics on crack”. It offers you much of the same data, but it does so in REAL TIME. You can see traffic stats unfold right before your very eyes, feeding your Type A personality or offering you a cure for insomnia. It shows you who’s on your site right now, what they’re looking at, where they came from, etc.

Chartbeat has many valuable features, but chief among them is the ability to tell you how long it takes real users around the world to download pages on your site. Is your fancy new flash widget downloading slowly? Is your front page taking forever to load? Chartbeat will tell you, and you desperately need to know. Why? Because the internet makes people impatient. They may have no problem waiting nine months for their child to be born, but they won’t wait five seconds for your site to come up. Google knows that and won’t send visitors to a slow-loading website. Chartbeat lets you know if there’s a problem and gives you real time insight into what’s happening on your website.

4. Pingdom

Is your website up? Or is it down? You hope it’s up, you thinks its up, but is it really? Is it up all the time? Does it go down at the four in the morning on the third Tuesday of the month? Is your web host flaky, meaning having lots of tiny outages that you wouldn’t normally notice?

The truth is that without a great site uptime monitor like Pingdom, you simply don’t know. It offers you uptime reports, error analysis response time reports and will notify you by email, text or twitter if something happens. Pingdom does cost money, but it is an extremely valuable and necessary item for anyone who is in the business of blogging and/or making money online. You simply can’t live without it. Think about it: if you walk by a store and the sign says “closed” are you really going in? You can’t. It’s closed. Your website is the same way. Pingdom makes sure your doors are open all the time. And yes we’ve tried many other uptime monitors over the years, most sucking more or less than the one before.

More than any other uptime service we’ve tried, Pingdom catches any minor server flakiness so you know about it before your visitors or Google abandon you for it. Think of this as your outside agent keeping your web host honest.

5. Google Ad Manager (now DoubleClick For Publishers)

Google Ad Manager is the best ad management tool on the market, bar none. And it’s free.  It is simple, robust and relatively easy to use, once you get the hang of it. Yes, you’ll need to play with it a bit because it’s very powerful, but it’s time well spent.

So what’s an ad manager? It’s a way for you to post ads on your site and make money. It allows you to create “ad units” on your website and then to display (and test) all kinds of different ads through those ad units. And then it allows you to figure out which ads get clicked best, convert best, etc. It’s something you must have if you’re going to make money online.

And it is free, and will remain so despite rumours that this could change with their recent acquisition of DoubleClick. As a result of that acquisition, Google Ad Manager has morphed into DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP). The DFP web page has replaced the Google Ad Manager web page, but the functionality is the same. In fact the functionality and the user interface have both improved considerably since the DoubleClick merger.

6. Aweber (Email List Server)

If you have a website and no email list, you’re really missing out on a huge opportunity. But that’s a topic for another day.

And let’s face it. If you do have an email list, you need your emails to get there and get read. Period. You need a way to get them from your keyboard to John Doe’s inbox. Period.

How do you make that happened? With Aweber.  It’s that simple, and with their $1 for 1 month trial offer, it’s that cheap. At least, to start. It’s true. Aweber is not the cheapest email marketing service out there, it’s just the best, and frankly, it’s only one worth using. We left. We came back. There’s a reason for that. In the past it wasn’t exactly known as the easiest to use or most intuitive  site out there but they have made incredible strides in this department as of late and it is way more accessible for you and we can’t recommend it highly enough. Do yourself a favor and don’t price-shop email list providers; try Aweber, you’ll be glad you did.

7. Tubemogul

If you’ve started a video show (or video podcast) you know that it can’t just be on your website, it has to be everywhere. That means YouTube, DailyMotion, 5Min, Blip.tv, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, Sevenload, etc. You also know that each video file is HUGE (especially with HD), and uploading them is a HUGE PAIN. And that’s just uploading it once. With multiple sites, you have to upload each video multiple times, right?

Wrong. Tubemogul takes care of this for you. With Tubemogul, you simply upload it to their site once and then boom! They use their proprietary magic to distribute your video content to all the major online video platforms.  That saves you time, and sanity. And if that wasn’t enough, they have analytics built in! See how many times your video has been viewed, for example.

8. VodPod

Oh, VodPod, how do we love thee? Well, we’ll spare you the details, but we love them a lot. You are seeing them right here, at the top of our page! You see that sexy row of our videos? That’s them.  They are really amazing at giving you ways to do something with your videos in a stylish, organized manner. Lets say you upload your video to Youtube. Great. What do you do with it now? Embed the heck out of it? That’s fine, to a degree, but if you have multiple videos like we do (we have over 550 segments and counting on Ask Dan & Jennifer alone) that just doesn’t cut it. Vodpod gives you a way to integrate and display your videos on your website in a way that is as accessible as it is aesthetically pleasing.

9. Sendible

The simple fact of social media is that it is always there. If you want to be a force in the social media world, you must always be there. You need to be regularly posting to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. You can’t be robotic, but you must be consistent. The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” certainly applies to the digital age and social media.

Fortunately, with Sendible, that’s never a problem. Sendible is a tool that allows you to schedule you tweets and other social media posts on all platforms hours, days, weeks and even months in advance. Going on vacation? No problem, set up your tweets in advance and your followers will never even know you were gone. Another way to look at this is that your followers who expect your great tweets regularly will keep getting them regularly. Just don’t go totally automated or everyone will stop following you… they expect personality and engagement too!

10. TweetDeck

TweekDeck is a free desktop tool that functions as your personal real-time social media browser. It allows you to keep up with and post to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and seemingly every other place you can think of – all from one application. Think of it as a sexy, digital command center from which you can control your burgeoning media empire. Okay, maybe not, but it is really simple and fun to use. You simply enter in your account information for each network and that’s it. You are officially off and running.

11. PollDaddy

Yes, we know this is #11, but you will thank us for it. Face it. People have opinions and they LOVE to share them. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that user interaction is a key component of a successful site. People love to take polls and they love to see what other people think.
PollDaddy is the way to go, and there’s no point in you looking around at other polling options. We did. They look bad; really bad. Recently it was acquired by Automattic, the good people who bring you WordPress, which is definitely a good thing. Here’s a poll we ran on Ask Dan & Jennifer…

That’s all for our top 10 (and by 10 we mean  11) tools that all bloggers need! We’ve done all the work, research and experimentation so you don’t have to. All you have to do is run out and get these tools and put them to work on your site. And remember, if  your website is your business, you need to treat it like one. Now get out there and get to making money and changing people’s lives!

We know we went kind of fast through this list due to time constraints, but stay with us. In the coming weeks we’re going to get into all the details you ever wanted to know for choosing all of these tools and using them like a pro.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Congratulations! You’ve made it this far. You’ve got your niche, figured out what you want to talk about, who the other players in the niche are, decided what you like about them, what you don’t like about them, and you’ve started interacting with their readers on their blog and you have begun to build up your presence. Now what?

Now you write your first blog post.

Oh, how this strikes fear in the hearts of many a blogger… “What will I write about?” They ask “How will I come up with a topic.” Writer’s block sets in at this point and for many, but really, it’s not a problem if you’re writing about something that you are passionate about.

Not satisfied? Fine. We’ll give you a sure-fire way to come up with your first subject.

Lock yourself in a room. Literally. No cell phone, no significant other, no T.V., nothing. Sit down in front of a pen and paper and write down every idea that you can think of. Don’t stop until you have a least 50-100. Then pick one. How do you pick you? You pick the one that speaks to you. How will you know which one speaks to you? It just does. Try not to over think this. Your first blog post is important, but the fate of the world doesn’t depend on it. Just your world. Kidding! Just relax, and pick one. You’ve got like a 100 to choose from, right? See, it wasn’t that hard. You’ve done it! You’ve chosen a topic. And now you have your first blog topic ready to write about to your heart’s content.

Here’s something to get your juices going: What keeps your audience up at night?

What are their hopes, dreams, problems, etc? Now pick one of these and write about it. Now we come to blog length. How long should it be? As long as a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the goods, but short to keep it interesting. Spell check it, and be sure to test any links in it you might have to say, your twitter account or a product page.

On a side note, always have a notebook handy.

You will often find yourself getting ideas at the most random times, when you least expect it. Write them down whenever they come to you. You may never actually use any of these ideas that you come up with on the go, but you will have them and it will help relieve any fear or pressure you feel about coming up with topics. You’ll never be stuck.

Once you have that first blog post written, when do you post it?

This is a bigger question than you think. The name of the game with posting is consistency. Do you post every hour or every day or every week? You have to set a schedule and stick to it. If you’re going to make money at this, you need to have people consistently coming to your site to check out your content. It has to be new, constantly updating content. They aren’t going to be checking out your greatest hits, either. They want new, fresh content. It’s not going to help if you post ten times a day for a week and then don’t post again for another month. If you do that, you’ll come off as flakey to your readers and that’s just death to bloggers. You won’t get those readers back, and you won’t be generating any traffic or making any money, either.

But it’s not just readers that hate inconsistency and flakiness. Search engines hate it too. You want to be on their good side, and you’ll need to be posting regularly. We’re talking at least once a week, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to manage that. The more posts the better, but don’t commit yourself to something you can’t deliver and end up flaking out. There’s plenty of scheduling software’s out there that can help you make sure you never miss a posting. WordPress even allows you to schedule a post to go live at a certain date and time. So there’s no excuse to not be posting regularly!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Should you start an online video show? That’s like asking yourself if you want to lose weight or marry the person of your dreams! The answer, if you haven’t caught on yet is yes. We’ve been doing it for years, and it’s been huge for us! But recently we were talking to someone who said “Oh, there’s no point in me starting an online video show. You guys have been doing it for so long.”

That’s just bunk. It’s true, we have been doing it for years, but it’s not like we just woke up one day and said “let’s start an online video show!” and then presto! We became a huge success. It didn’t work that way. We started our first online video show (Ask Dan & Jennifer) a few years ago, and it grew and it grew and it grew and now it’s grown like 1000% in that time, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took time. Allow yourself the time to grow and just go off and do it. And whatever you do, don’t think it’s too late. It’s never too late.

And this is ESPECIALLY true if you have already started a blog – because a video show will get you a lot of extra visitors and much more credibility.

There are many reasons you should start your own online video show. Such as…

It creates trust

If you make posts to a blog, yes, it’s great and wonderful and all that, but it still doesn’t pack the same punch as an online video. People can look at your online video and say “Wow. He/She is a real person.” People will be able to relate better to you if they can see and hear you. It will allow you to better showcase your own particular brand of speech, humor, satire and the like. It also creates a deeper personal connection. Having a face and voice to associate with your content helps your audience feel like they know you and then they will be more invested in you and your success.

It helps you reach different people

Face it: in today’s world, we have way too much to do and way too little time to do it in. Reading a blog takes more time than listening to one. People want options with their content. They want to be able to put it on the iPod/iPhone/iPad and take it with them to the beach or the gym or to be able to listen to it in the car. Having a video blog gives people options. And people like their options.

It allows you to differentiate yourself in the market

We started askdanandjennifer.com a few years ago and it’s a love and relationship site, and that is a VERY crowded market place. It’s very difficult to stand out, and if you don’t stand out, you die. It’s just that simple. So we had to sit down and ask ourselves, “What can we do to stand out? What do we have that no one else does?” Simple! We have Dan and Jennifer. By posting our online video show we were able to showcase our most unique asset-ourselves. People could see us and connect with us and become part of our audience and then tell their friends about us. That helped increase our audience exponentially.

It opens up an entirely new audience

There are a mulitiude of video sites out there (youtube, hulu, funnyordie, etc) and they have their own audiences, and many of these people are not really that into reading blogs. Posting an online video show allows you to access and engage these people and potentially bring them back to your site or simply create a new online show only audience. There are millions of people on these video sharing sites and it’s also true that there are people on these sites that are going to be interested in whatever it is you have to say. They’re not going to go to you, you will have to go to them. The first rule of growing your fan base is simple: go where the people are. Not going to these sites is about as effective as opening up a surfboard shop in Utah. No one’s going to buy a surfboard there. Why? Because there’s nowhere to surf in Utah. Setting up your surf shop in say Southern California is going to be more effective. Even more effective would be setting it up right on the beach. You have to go where the people are.

You can be everywhere

Having an online video show gives your and your blog a life of its own outside your actual blog. You can be on multiple sites that each have a wide reach. The bigger your net, the bigger your catch.

Never, ever, try to do anything

We never try to do anything. We just haul off and do it. You’ll never hear us say “we’re going to try this and see what happens” we say “we’re going to do this.” Big difference.

“Do or do not, there is no try.” – Yoda, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

That crusty little muppet was right. If you “try” to do something, you’re just going to fail and but if you “do” something it’s different. You’ve “decided” to do it. The word “decide” has comes from the latin root which means “to cut off all other options.” If you want to be successful, say you’re going to do something, and then burn the bridge behind you so you have no other choice.

Never ever give up.

Of all the blogs that started around the same time as ours, we can name two still in existence. Most quit after about six months. The general rule of thumb is people quit right before they’re about to become successful. Don’t that make that mistake. Never give up. Just do whatever it is you want to be doing. Live that passion, live it daily and be consistent about it. You can’t help but succeed then.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Question 1: Why are you starting a blog?

It’s the most profound question you will ever ask yourself, but also the most important. Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to make money? Do you want to help people? Do you want to make people laugh? Do you want to vent about something (society, politics, your love life)? There are no wrong answers here, but you do need to have one. You need to know why you are doing it, but more than anything you need to be passionate about doing it, whatever it is. If you love Spam and you want to sing the praises of Spam on your blog, then you will be successful. But if you’re a Vegan and you hate spam and someone offers you a ton of cash to blog about Spam, it’s just not going to work. It’s a job at that point, and you’ll hate doing it, and more importantly, you’ll hate yourself for doing it.

Question 2: What’s your niche?

Everyone needs an angle. Whether you’re a writer blogging about being a stripper, or a stripper blogging being a writer, you need a hook, pure and simple. You can’t be all things to all people and you shouldn’t try. You will fail. You can only succeed if you can identify a portion of the market that is being underserved (ideally, they won’t be getting served at all) and then speaking and marketing to them. This isn’t as hard a question to answer as it might seem. Once you answer the first question, the second question will largely answer itself.

Question 3: How will you set yourself (and your new blog) apart?

Here’s the really tricky question. You know why you’re blogging, you know what your niche is, now what? How do you stand out in a sea of endless bloggers? What’s your angle on your angle? Maybe you’re giving relationship and dating advice from the Born Again Christian perspective, for example. Or maybe you’re a divorced dad offer dating and parenting tips. The point is, whatever your niche, there is probably someone already there serving it as there are very few new ideas under the sun. What makes you worth listening to? Tricky question, to be sure, but an important one.

Once you have the answers to these three questions, you’re good to go. Just be aware that the answers, may change over time, and probably should. Your answers to these three questions represent a snapshot of where you are at the time you answer them. If you have a vision and a goal of say, getting ten people a day to visit your blog, and then that happens, then what? What happens is your answer to these three questions will probably change. You’ll need to re-answer them, and that will affect why you are doing this and how you go about doing it.

Don’t worry about this. Don’t wait to have the perfect answers. You won’t. You’ll not only never get it “right,” but you never even get started either. It’s all about progress, not perfection. You must repeat “Progress over perfection” in your head one million times. Okay, actually only three. But you get the point, hopefully. Perfection is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It robs people. Of their hopes, of their dreams and of the chance of actually making those hopes and dreams a reality. If you don’t get in the game you’ll never get a chance to win it, but there are some that endlessly practice and attempt to perfect whatever it is they working on before they show it to the world. But it’s never perfect. Ever. I don’t even know if anyone knows what that means.

It’s vitally important that you have a plan, vision and something to shoot for. But don’t let the prep work consume you to the point where things are unhealthy. That’s as much a life lesson as it is a lesson about blogging, but it certainly applies here.

Great! Starting a blog can be a solid way to make long-term income – just for doing some writing on stuff you actually like and care about. But there’s a little more to it than that AND it may not be for everyone. This is not a get rich quick or plug and play business. If that’s what you’re looking for, this is not the place for you.

Yes, you can make a lot of money online but, like other traditional businesses, it’s not guaranteed. Anyone who tells you otherwise, is not being truthful.

Our goal is to help people who are really serious about building a real online business – because you can make a little, or a lot of money. That all depends on you…

Here’s the big difference between making money online and going to a job every day. If you do it right, the work you do today, this week, and this year – will continue making money for years to come. It’s an investment rather than trading your time for money.

So how does this work? Search engines find and cache the articles that you write, and over time each post is “worth more” to the search engines. That means you’ll get more web site traffic with every passing month as your site gains credibility. This does not happen overnight. It takes persistence and even some hard work – but you can do it if you’re serious and committed…

We did it (Dan and I both walked away from our corporate jobs and now do this full time), and so can you. The good news is that you get to take advantage of what we’ve learned over the last several years and avoid the sand traps that we had to dig our way out of.

So let’s get started – RIGHT NOW!

Here are 10 EASY steps we’ll take together to help you start a blog and make money online.

Decide to start today

TODAY. No, not tomorrow, not next week, and not next month. Tomorrow always feels “safe” because you’re not having to make a decision. The power of today is that you make that commitment to yourself. And that is the first step to success.

This step is the most critical one, and it’s where most people get stuck. Don’t dream about doing something. Just get up and do it.

“The best way to live the life of your dreams is to start living the life of your dreams Today, in every little way that you possibly can.”  – Mike Dooley, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

Step #1 – Choose the right niche – What your blog is about…

Choosing the right niche for your blog is perhaps the most important choice you can make BEFORE you actually start writing. Choose the wrong niche, and it’s very unlikely you’ll ever succeed.

Some questions to help you choose the right niche

• The most important question you have to ask yourself is this: What are you passionate about?
  It’ll be very hard for you to write regularly and authoritatively and be a go-to industry expert on a topic you don’t really care about. Passion tends to make the difference between amazing success and quiet failure.
• Do you intend to make money with this blog? Would you like it to be your primary income source?
  This makes a big difference. If so, you’ll have to choose a nice that is not overly crowded. Regardless of the crowding, you’ll need to research your niche thoroughly and develop your own value proposition.

Research your niche and learn the landscape

Find the popular websites in your niche, study them closely, and visit them regularly.

Get to know the authors and regular contributors. Comment on their posts regularly so they can get to know you too.

Find the right keywords to target with your blog

Once you choose your niche, it’s crucial to find the right keywords to target. This is a delicate balance between finding keywords that get enough search traffic and keywords that don’t have too much competition.

Don’t wait until your site starts getting popular to figure out which keywords to target, or you’ll waste a lot of time and effort and end up starting from scratch.

While you can do a lot of research the manual, old-fashioned, and time-consuming way, we recommend you use a keyword research tool to find your keywords quickly and accurately.

For more details on choosing your niche, check out “How to Start a Blog – Step 1: Pick Your Niche”.

Step #2 – Get a web hosting account

Your host should be reliable, responsive if you have questions, and inexpensive. $7 per month is reasonable for a reliable host; less than that and the service tends to go down a lot.

Many people try to save those few dollars and start a blog with a free platform like Blogger.com. But we strongly advise against it. It’s virtually impossible to get free search engine traffic to those free blogs, and support is completely nonexistent. Oh, and if your blog disappears overnight (as we had happen once on Blogger.com), there’s nobody to call and ask for help. Your work is all lost. You’ll also have a hard time moving away when your blog takes off. And you’ll lose all the search engine value that you’ve built up.

Take this seriously and go with a proper web host that actually has competent support people available to help you. Spending $7/month for a proper web host will also help you realize that you’re serious about your goal.

We highly recommend HostGator when your just getting started.

HostGator is great because it JUST WORKS, they offer a lot of great features, and (unlike most other quality web hosts) you can sign up for an inexpensive monthly plan, and pay month by month. Most of the other guys advertise a really cheap rate, but you only get that if you pay 1-3 years up front.

The fact Hostgator’s email support team replies to my issues in literally minutes is awesome, but that’s not the only reason we recommend HostGator. Check out all of the reasons we love them in our web hosting review of HostGator, and then go set up your own account with them today.

Are there other good web hosts? Sure, but HostGator is the only web host that we recommend to our own friends and family when they ask…

If you’re just starting out – or you’re looking to keep your costs as low as possible while working with a solid, reliable web host, do yourself a favor and get started with HostGator.

Don’t forget to check out our web hosting review of HostGator, and give it a try yourself; we’re glad we did.

Tip: Don’t forget to use Coupon Code BLOGSUCCESS when you sign up with HostGator – and your 1st month is just $0.01! That means you can start a blog today for just $0.01. Now you’ve really got no excuse to delay, so take a few minutes and do it before you get busy and forget!

For more information on web hosting, read “How to Start a Blog – Step 2: Get a Web Hosting Account for your Blog”.

Step #3 – Install WordPress

After you choose a reliable web host, you’re ready to install your blogging software. The most flexible choice available today is WordPress. It’s also free, and easy to set up and maintain.

Yes, this is a little more involved than setting up a free account somewhere, but it’ll be well worth the effort when you get more web site traffic in a month then you would have gotten in a year on a Blogger.com.

For more information and step by step details on how to install WordPress, check out “How to Start a Blog – Step 3: Install WordPress to Run your Blog”.

Step #4 – Make a great first impression with a great theme

First impressions always matter. On the web, that’s even more important. A web visitor’s first impression about your site determines if he clicks away in the first 5 seconds, if he stays on to read what you have to say, and if he will ever come back again.

So it’s very important to put your best foot forward. Make your site interesting, distinctive, and engaging to your readers by using a great “theme”. WordPress themes are basically website designs that you can just download and enable for your WordPress account.

Start with a free theme and when you have the resources, consider having a custom theme made to enhance your brand even further.

For more information and how to find great free themes for your blog, make sure to read “How to Start a Blog – Step 4: Make a Great First Impression with a Great Theme for your Blog”

Step #5 – Configure WordPress and its plugins to get the most search engine traffic

What good is a blog if nobody is visiting? One of the great advantages of WordPress is the vast array of options to make your blog very yummy to the search engines. This is all about understanding what Google wants and giving it to them in the way they want it. Simple.

The most powerful SEO trick of all: “work with Google to give them what they want instead of trying to trick them”.

For our list of must have plugins and brain-dead simple SEO tips, check out “How to Start a Blog – Step 5: Install These WordPress Plugins to Get the Most Search Engine Traffic”

Step #6 – Make your blog welcoming and engaging to every reader

To make your visitors stick around and come back for more – day after day – use the power of WordPress and make your blog fun, engaging, and interactive.

Use polls to get readers involved and ask their opinion. Feature the latest posts and comments. Show off your most popular articles. Get readers truly involved by getting them to comment on your posts.

To discover a few simple ways to get your readers coming back, again and again, check out “How to Start a Blog – Step 6: Engage Your Readers”

Step #7 – Write your first post

OK, at this point you’ve chosen THE best niche for you, you’ve become very familiar with that niche and it’s most popular sites, and you’re basically what could be considered an “authority” on your topic.

So now is the time for that all important first post

Off the top of your head, make a quick list of all the issues in your niche that people care about. What problems do they have, what questions do they have? What keeps them up at night?

Now pick ANY one of these and write a quick article on it. This “article” can be just a simple Top 10 list, with a supporting sentence of two for each bullet. That’s it!

Get feedback

Get this first article out there and see what people think. Email it to your family and friends, and ask them to help you make it better.

All the planning in the world is no substitute for Action. It’s time to go forth and do those good and powerful things.

For detailed steps on how to get started writing great content, read “How to Start a Blog – Step 7: Write your First Post”.

Step #8 – Set up your RSS feed

Not long ago, RSS was the domain of the super-geeky. But today, millions of mainstream internet users are subscribing to RSS vibes every day.

Get set up with full-blown RSS support by setting up a free account with FeedBurner. They’ll pull a feed from your blog, make it pretty so everyone can actually read it, and they’ll even give you accurate stats on your readers. Yes, it is nice to know if anyone is actually subscribed to your feed.

WordPress also has a simple plugin that you can enable to support your shiny new FeedBurner RSS feed service.

For more information on RSS, check out “How to Start a Blog – Step 8: Set up Your RSS Feed“.

Step #9 – Register your new blog with the top directories

Once you have a few posts out there, it’s time to start getting the word out. Search engines want to see links coming back to your site. Those links show that people other than just you consider your site to be important.

Well, at first you have no links. So you have to start somewhere. One of the best places to start is the endless list of web site directories and now blog directories which are just begging to give you a free link.

Here are a few to get you started: BlogCatalog, DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory. DMOZ and Yahoo Directory are very important, but your submission to them is considered just a “suggestion”, and you may never hear back or get included.

Blog Catalog has turned into a social community of bloggers, which makes it significantly more valuable than a regular blog directory, largely because of the relationships you can forge there.

For more information on blog directories, read “How to Start a Blog – Step 9: Register your Blog with Every Top Website and Blog Directory”.

Step #10 – Promote! Social Media, Internet Press Releases, Article Marketing, and more

If you don’t tell people about your new site, they’ll never know about it! Stop hoping someone will accidentally stumble upon your site. Take matters into your own hands and get the word out there!

It’s never been this easy to promote a brand new site, and to explosively grow your traffic and readership.

Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, and more

Did you just publish a great article on your site? Let people know! Social media is a great way to share your stories with others who WANT to know about it.

Share your great article on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. But tread with caution. Don’t “spam” these sites with everything you write.

To be truly successful, it’s VERY important to follow the rules and participate in these communities.

There are even some great tools like to automate the process and submit your stories to tens of social media sites! This means you save countless hours AND actually get your story out to dozens of sites instead of just one. But again, you can’t just spam these communities, it’s crucial to build a presence and participate as a real person.

Article Marketing – Establish yourself as an expert by publishing your articles

Time to get more visibility for your hard work. Article directories take your articles and provide them to the countless webmasters and eZine publishers that need what you have: good, useful, and informative content.

You’ve already spent the time and written excellent articles… Now it’s time to publish those articles on the top 10 article directories and get lots more readers coming to your website.

For more information on the best ways to promote your blog, check out “How to Start a Blog – Step 10: Promote! Social Media, Internet Press Releases, Article Marketing”.

“Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.” – Tim Ferriss, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

Next Steps: What to do RIGHT NOW – Today…
(It’s Easy, Stay With Us Here)

OK, so we’ve been through the basics, it’s time for action. If you’re going to do something, there is only “now”. Later and someday never come. So let’s do it together! Yes, today.

1.) Choose your niche.

• Ask yourself these 3 questions.
• Here’s a short video to help you choose a niche.

2.) Get a cheap, reliable web host. Regardless of your niche (topic), this is one thing you’ll need before you start.

And that little $5 commitment may actually help you get going! This is the ONLY web host we recommend if you’re just getting started – the one we recommend to our own friends and family.

Our recommended web host even comes with 1-click installation of WordPress, our favorite easy to use publishing platform: the one we use for all our sites. So you can now check this item off your list, and move up to step 2.

3.) Write your first post.

Don’t agonize over it, just do it! Start small, and keep going. Here’s some step by step help for you -
How To Write Your First Blog Post (Video)