Blogging Questions & Answers 2

It is time for more Blogging Questions & Answers. You can ask your questions either through the comments on this post or via the Contact Form.

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Remember that all questions will be answered, so if your question is not here it will probably be featured next Wednesday.

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Blogstheme.com asks:

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How can I get more links to a blog about making money on the web? This seems to be the hardest part when you are starting off a new blog.

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Getting links to a new blog is hard regardless of your niche. It was simple some years ago when some niches were unexplored, but today you have blogs covering virtually any possible topic on earth.

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If your blog is in the “make money online” niche it might be even harder, because this is one of the most crowded niches. Darren has an interesting video post on this subject titled “Make Money Onlike Blogs – Should You Start One and How to Choose a Profitable Niche.”

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Now if you are looking for some practical advice I would need to list the basics: write some pillar articles, use blog carnivals, leave comments on blogs that “dofollow,” use social bookmarking sites, email bloggers on your niche letting them know about your blog and so on. These are what most people use on the beginning, and it works pretty well if the content is there.

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Lincoln asks:

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Are tags really worth the time needed to invest in them? Now that WP has native support for them I’m beginning to wonder now if this isn’t really an overhyped feature that has tiny to no SEO benefit.

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Tags can be used to complement your categories and to offer another navigation option for readers. In that respect I believe they can be useful, depending on your layout and theme.

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Using tags for the SEO benefits, however, is not that straight forward. Some people argue that they can be used to increase keyword density since you are able to hand pick the tags and place them hyperlinked at the bottom of every article. Personally I think that the SEO benefits from such practice are minimal.

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Very few authority and popular SEO blogs use tags. I also tested it on my blogs, including and removing the tags for a period of time and tracking the rankings and organic traffic for related keywords. The overall impact of tags on such factors was not noticeable. SEO is not an exact science though, so the best thing would be to test it on your blog and track the results.

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TechZilo asks:

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I’d like to know how you get high-profile sponsors….coz of your content, or bargaining? Also, do you think guest blogging is a good idea to drive traffic to my blog? In relevant, 80k PView blogs? Which give a link at the end?

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In order to get high profile sponsors you need to have several things in place: good traffic and exposure on your niche (which is related to the content), a professional looking theme, a focused audience and so on. I wrote an extensive article on the topic titled “How to Find Advertisers for Your Website.” There you will find pretty much all the tips I gathered on this subject.

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Regarding your second question, yes I think guest blogging is a very good way to drive traffic and gain more readers. Relevant blogs with around 100,000 monthly page views sound like an excellent place to begin. Try different blogs, different articles and different strategies and see what works ideal on your case.

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Vijay asks:

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I am writing educational blog on Software Testing. But last week I saw one web site under my niche that is posting many of my full posts as it is. What I can do in this case. The web site owner is giving link back to each of my post but I am concerned about the SEO. What should be the action plan in such cases?

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I had similar problems in the past (in fact I have a related post coming soon). The ideal way to approach this situation is to contact the person who is ripping your content privately, and ask him politely to remove your content.

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If there is no contact information on the site, perform a whois on the domain name and try to contact the registrant. If that does not work either you will need to contact the hosting company directly (you can discover that by taking a look at the name servers that appear on the whois information).

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Honestly, you will notice that as your blog grows it will be difficult to track and remove all the scrapped material. I am still trying to figure it myself. You can also read an article we published sometime ago titled “Blog Plagiarism Questions & Answers.”

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Adnan asks:

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Have you ever thought about selling out? Do you think that it’s likely that DailyBlogTips will be changing hands in the next year or 2? If you were selling your blog, how much would you value it at currently?

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While I am not looking to sell the blog, I had a couple of people coming to me with offers. The offers were pretty low though, so it was not even a negotiation. Personally I do not think that DBT will change hands in the near future.

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If I was to sell the blog today I would set the minimum bid at $50,000. Some time ago NetBusinessBlog.com was sold for $13,000 if I am not wrong. The blog had 1,500 RSS subscribers and traffic was not close to mine as well, so I figure four times that price could be reasonable. DBT is also making around $2500 monthly with a very subtle monetization strategy, meaning that the buyer should be able to recover the investment within one year or so.

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Anyway this is just speculation. The blog is not for sale since I have a really good time writing here and interacting with the community we managed to build.

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Jorge Camoes asks:

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So, the question is, do you think that bloggers from Portuguese or Spanish speaking countries should have at least a secondary blog written in their native language?

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Interesting question, especially because I asked that to myself already. I am fluent in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English, and I always wonder if I am limiting my potential by writing in English exclusively.

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I think we must consider the two sides of the coin here. Blogging in English enables you to reach a larger audience, and it also gives you the opportunity to reach top social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit. The English-speaking Internet is the most advanced one, though, so you will have a lot more competition as well.

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Blogging in your native language might limit the traffic potential, but it will also be easier to affirm yourself as a leader in your niche and to attract attention from local companies and press.

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So yeah, it is a dilemma. Personally I think that if you have fluency in English that is the language you should go with. The monetization part plays a huge role as well. It is much easier to find advertisers if you have a blog in English, and I like to have my AdSense clicks in US dollars….

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Cindy asks:

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Is it

better to keep the same tagline for a long time, or to change it occasionally (e.g., each few months)?
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If you have a very good tagline I would keep it for a long time. After all you want that tagline to stick in people’s mind. When I think Slashdot I think “News for Nerds.” I doubt I would if they had frequently changed the tagline, though.

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Matt asks:

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Does commenting on other blogs really increase traffic to your blog?

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Yes, and apart from getting some new visitors it is also a good way to interact with bloggers on your niche. Obviously do not expect hundreds of visitors coming from your comments (I remember one time I got 400 visitors from a first comment on TechCrunch, but that was a single event and I never managed to repeat this success).

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If your blog is new I would set a goal to comment on at least 5 new blogs every day. Make sure to add value with your comments also and not just post one-liner stuff promoting your blog.

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Kim asks:

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With all of the different ways to monetize your sight nowadays, what are your top 3 recommendations or services (ie. is Google Adsense really the way to go for starters?) for a website to use to make money?

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For a new blog I would recommend as few ads as you can have. There are opposite views on this issue, but I believe that you should build credibility and a loyal readership before monetizing it.

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That being said I would begin with AdSense and see how it performs on your niche (i.e., track CTR and cost per click). Over the time (after six months or so) I would consider moving towards direct advertising deals.

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Depending on your niche and topic you could also explore product related ad networks like Chitika and affiliate programs.

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Karthik asks:

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What were the 5 most important steps you took to popularize this blog?

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1. Original and useful content
\n2. Networking with other bloggers
\n3. Proactive promotion strategy (i.e. I tried pretty much everything available, tracked results and adapted accordingly)
\n4. Consistency
\n5. Patience\n

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