Archive | blogging

Monetizing your Blog

Monetizing your Blog

After you have set-up your wordpress blog and begun getting some traffic to your blog from your link building and from the search engines you can begin monetizing your blog. You shouldn’t start monetizing your blog too early because it will turn some people off from your blog. Also make sure that you don’t make each post a big advertisement for some product or advertisement because your readers won’t enjoy that too much. You need to figure out the perfect combination of ads to make money off of your blog while keeping your readers happy.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

Google Adsense is the biggest ad network for bloggers and you’ll be best off using them for your pay per click ads. You simply make some pay per click ads to the size you need them in the Adsense admin section and implement them into your blog. The size of the ads will make a big difference so make sure you don’t try adding too big of ads into your blog. You should try to implement the ads into your blog so that they fit right into the content as it will draw in more clicks.

Affiliate Leads

Many of the affiliate networks offer leads that you can add to your blog and what this means is simply that you send your readers to a lead page where they sign-up for something free. Leads don’t pay that much when there free, but some of the leads which cost money will pay a lot of money. You’ll also find that you have better luck trying to get people to join leads then buy products.

Affiliate Products

All affiliate networks have products that you can promote and you can either add links or banners to your blog to promote these products. It’s best to generally write a review as a blog post to promote the product this way it won’t interfere with your blog. You will be paid on a commission basis for the products you sell ranging anywhere from 5-75%.

Link & Banner Sales

There are lots of webmasters and businesses that will buy links and banners from blogs with traffic and you can make lots of money with ads. You can choose to find the people privately on webmaster forums or you could advertise your blog in some of the networks out there that allow you to advertise your blog in hopes of selling links and banners. Many of the networks work great and will find you advertisers quickly, it’s best if your blog is niched based though when looking for private ad sales.

There are lots of ways you can monetize your blog as you can see, and I haven’t touched all of the methods either. I’ve gone through the most popular methods, but there are some other things that can make you money depending on your website niche. I’d recommend starting out with these monetization methods first so that you can make some money before moving onto other areas. Also remember that you should stay with the same networks until you reach minimum payouts so that you don’t have money sitting in a bunch of networks that you can’t withdraw. It’s a rookie mistake that many webmasters make and I don’t want to see you waiting months for your first check.

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Twitter Try it

Twitter: Try it

Twitter, a new way that you can talk to millions plus people. A sleek looking alternative to the other social networking sites out there. You may not have as many theme choices as some other sites, but you can change up the background colors that will fit your wishes better.

As a Twitterer you can do just about anything. Have fun looking up different subjects from Wicca to Shoes. Meet people from all over the world. Write a blog to vent those daily issues you can’t stand. Others will follow you, which means they are interested in what you do, and want to be a friend. You of course can choose who you follow, and believe it or not, there are a lot of famous people here too. Shaq is on Twitter and to a big basketball fan they can click and follow what he posts and talks about. It’s just a really neat thing for people to be able to learn things about others.

Maybe you have a project that you need to write about another country. Go and see if you can find some Twitter people who live there. What a way to make that report even better than normal. You will wow your teacher or professor and have information that others will not find in books. Why not take advantage of something that will only help you score a higher grade.

You are able to add widgets or design your own. Some people can come up with some really excellent ideas for widgets; it’s always nice to check out the new ones that have been made. Add them to your page and have something that will make your page a bit different.

Perhaps you have a product or a website that you would like to promote put that up on Twitter and your followers will see it and check it out. Plus those people who are doing a search and hit on a keyword you may have. Well you can see the possibility of having a bunch of people come and check out what you have on your site.

There are many reasons to use Twitter, a fun way to connect with others in the world. Your own unique look on your profile by changes the colors if you want too. Plus just meeting some nice people, or a mate, you never know where you might meet your Mr. or Mrs. Right! Twitter could be the place that it may happen at.

Be sure to check out the Twitter page and see what all the hype is about. Don’t worry if you don’t post a lot, looking at what others has posted is fun too. There are so many advantages to meeting people online. Heck it’s a great way for a person who hates going out to have friends too. You may even meet one day or just talk through years and become really close with someone. All this can happen by just going to Twitter and getting signed up. Check it out now and make some new social connections.

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Follow people on Twitter

Follow people on Twitter

Twitter one of the newer social networking websites out there; it’s a fun place to spend some time just looking around. A quick and free sign up will have you hopping around looking at other people on Twitter. You can also add your friends by using the email invite button, or the email match to see if some of your contacts are already on Twitter.

One of the coolest things about Twitter is the fact that you can look for others by name, or you can look at the tab that says “suggested matches”. These are the people Twitter thinks you should find interesting. Plus there seems to be several celebrities that are on this site too. A fun thing to do is to look up a celebrity and see who they are following, and who’s following them. It’s a quick way to add up people you want to follow at times. Someone you may not have thought of that is famous, and they are following all you do is go to the next pages and follow that other person too.

People will add you to who they are following too. It’s really neat to see that people you don’t even know would like to follow what’s going on with you. Maybe you write a blog that they find interesting, or some other reason. But really who cares as long as they don’t turn out to be a stalker, to get a message saying someone is following you is just a good feeling.

You can also pull up different topics, say you love “botany”, pull up the word and see if there might be others who are into botany. Follow them and perhaps you will learn more about the topic. Or you can find a friend who you can talk to about a subject that interests you both.

As with anything on the internet there may be some things that are inappropriate for younger kids. So you may want to just check if you son or daughter are on Twitter what they are following. Make sure that you tell them not too discuss any personal information with others either, but that’s on all kinds of websites you just need to be careful.

Following people on Twitter is so easy to do, once you find a person who you’d like to keep track of, just click on the follow button placed right below their picture or icon. Find some lifelong friends that you may never have met had it not been for Twitter. Or perhaps you’re a person who is shy in social settings. This is a way that you won’t need to go out of your house to meet someone. No more feeling awkward as your not sure what to say. Online it’s a lot easier to talk, your not face to face with someone, your not wondering if there is food in your teeth, or how you look. Try out Twitter to see if you can meet some great friends.

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Making Your Job Easier with Software

Making Your Job Easier with Software

Webmasters have the benefit of having a wide range of different software tools that can be used to make your job easier. A lot of being webmaster means doing repetitive work and it can take a heck of a lot of time to complete these tedious repetitive tasks. You could choose to hire people to complete these tasks, but in the long-run you’ll be much better off purchasing software to make your life easier. There are tools for all sorts of different webmaster tasks like article submissions, social bookmarking, blog automaters and much more. If you want to increase your revenue then you need to work smarter, and by buying the software to automate the processes of tasks you’ll be working smart.

Article Submissions

There are plenty of software programs out there that you can buy which will make your article submissions automated. You’ll be able to submit to hundreds or thousands of article directories within roughly an hour rather then weeks. You can find one of these software programs for around $100 and that will usually mean free lifetime updates as well. This type of tool is invaluable as you’ll gain tons of backlinks and traffic from these article submissions.

Social Bookmarking

We all know how much of a pain it can be to go from website to website submitting your webpages, but if you want the traffic you got to do the work. Social bookmarking websites bring lots of traffic and some of them even give you a do-follow backlink which will increase your SERP’s. You won’t even need your own accounts with these software programs because they have the power of making and approving the accounts for you. Social bookmarking demon would be your best tool to get and it submits to a lot of different popular bookmarking websites in the matter of minutes.

Directory Submissions

Directory submissions take a long time to complete we all know this, but with an automated directory submission software program you can spend minutes on your submissions. These tools will generally be able to submit to thousands of directories for you and most of the time it’s automated. Some you’ll need to type in codes to activate the submission, but it will still save you hours upon hours of submitting time.

Are time is precious and as a webmaster it always seems like we never have enough time in the day to complete our work. If you want to start working smarter instead of harder then you needs to invest some money in the software that will assist you. There are new programs coming out everyday that can assist your adventure to making money, and like the old saying goes you need to spend money to make money. I believe this holds true online. Of course you can make money without spending money, but if you want to make any serious amounts of money online you need to invest in yourself.

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Is Buying Links for your Website Safe

Is Buying Links for your Website Safe

Many webmasters frequently get into discussions with one another about whether or not it’s safe to buy links from other webmasters. Now although the search engines frown upon this type of stuff it’s completely safe for you to buy links for your website. As long as you don’t make the links look unnatural then you’ll be completely fine in the search engines, but if you do have unnatural links then you could be looking at getting de-indexed from the search engines.

If you begin buying links in blog networks and other spammy areas of the internet then you’re going to be placing a risk on your website of being punished. I personally wouldn’t recommend buying blog network links that are all associated with each other because they’ll be deemed a link farm and your site will be punished for having a link on them. You should only spend money on links that will help your website increase in the search engines and also page rank. You should be looking for links with high page rank that will move you up for the keyword used as anchor text and also will help increase your sites page rank. You could also buy links with high traffic, but these are harder to find and most of the time the cost outweighs any potential profit you could make which is the point.

There are many forums where you’ll find people selling links on their blogs and websites. Both offer great links and you should try getting both blog and website links. Try to avoid sitewide links when you’re buying links because you don’t want it too appear like a bought link. Ask the owner of the website to place your link on the homepage only. You may also be able to find some webmasters selling links on inner pages of their blogs and websites, which are also great for buying as long as they have page rank. You should be able to pick these inner content links up for cheaper then homepage links as well, and they will send the same amount of link juice so it’s a great way too save some money and purchase more links with. If the page where your link is going doesn’t have page rank then it isn’t even worth looking at too buy because there won’t be any benefits from it.

You’ll also need to make sure that you’re checking out each individual website before you buy a link on it. You’re spending your hard earned money on links so you first want to make sure the person you’re buying the links from is trustworthy. Many people sell links on monthly and yearly terms, but then a week later the link will be taken down by them. Try to avoid these webmasters as there only a huge waste of time and never result in anything good. Things you should look for before buying a link on a website is things such as how many backlinks it has, the page rank of where your link will be, cost, is the domain dropped and what niche it is. Only ever buy links that are relevant with your website because the search engines give far more value to relevant links then links that are opposites of each other.

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Information about Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Information about Pay-Per-Click Advertising

If you run a website or blog that sells products then you might want too consider using pay-per-click advertising too increase your revenue. Whether you sell your own products or products for affiliates doesn’t matter, although you would obviously make more if it’s your own products. Many affiliates make thousands of dollars each month though using pay-per-click advertising and it’s possible for you too as well if you know what you’re doing.

Nowadays there are lots of different pay-per-click advertising mediums available to you, but the most popular is still Google Adwords by a long shot. Of course if you want too use Adwords though then you better be prepared too pay more for your keywords then you would on other pay-per-click mediums. Some other options available too you are MSN Adcenter and Yahoo.

Basically pay-per-click advertising is where you pay for your search engine rankings. As you probably already know many keywords in the search engines have millions of results and many have been around for years. This means that getting a first page ranking on Google would take years of link building which for a company isn’t something you want too hear. Now if you use Google Adwords then you’ll be able too buy rankings for your site which appear on the first page of Google. The rankings on the left side of Google search results are all the ones who are ranking for the keyword from their SEO, and the listings on the right on the search results are the pay-per-click advertisements.

Pay-per-click search engines aren’t for new webmasters and you shouldn’t attempt using these services unless you know what you’re getting into. They can cost you a lot of money and if you’re not getting conversions then you could be in big trouble. Many keywords nowadays also cost a lot of money per click so you could be spending upwards of $100 daily depending on what you’re promoting.

The goal you should focus on when using Adwords is too find long-tail keywords that get good search traffic that you can buy for cheap. Long-tail keywords are always cheaper too purchase and you may only need to spend $10 daily for top rankings. Make sure when you buy keywords you look for keywords that are generally people looking too buy something. You don’t want keywords of people looking for free things coming too your site because they’ll leave when they see it’s not free. There are millions of keywords and it can take hours to set-up a good Adwords campaign and even then you’ll need to do a lot of tweaking.

There is definitely money too be made in pay-per-click advertising, but for newer webmasters without the huge budgets you need to focus on smaller keywords and niched products. You’ll do a lot of testing, but once you find the right combination of keywords and products then you’ll be well on your way too cashing in on the pay-per-click craze that is going on right now.

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The Dawn of a New WordPress

The Dawn of a New WordPress – V2.5.x

Not long ago, the ever popular blog hosting site which goes by the name of WordPress gave their system a remake, thus giving birth to a newer and better WordPress 2.5. It is a major improvement over WordPress 2.3 and these are the areas where the new features are prominent.

Dashboard
The dashboard is now designed to look very much like your blog’s hub and is designed in a sleeker and more focused manner which provides you an interesting choice of colour schemes. The new layout is now more organized with quick links at your disposal and easy to use. Also, feeds are now customisable for your viewing convenience and are not only limited to WordPress Development Blog or WordPress Planet feeds. To add to that, the displays of incoming links such as the ones from Google Blog Search are can now be personalized.

Navigation Menu
One feature which went through a major revamp is the navigation menu which has shrunk in menu items, a number of which have been renamed. Renamed items include Presentation (changed to Design) and Options (changed to Settings) and these are now included under Manage.

Post & Page
This area had a major overhaul which leaves bloggers who use the ‘tag’ and ‘trackback’ features needing to scroll more when using the new WordPress. There is also no more drag and drop option for items. However, WordPress 2.5 will provide the option to add pictures and videos directly from the likes of YouTube and Flickr.

Post/Page Management
Navigation and management is now a lot easier as users can now skim through and edit their posts according to tags or authors. Also, there is now the ability to mass delete unwanted entries. An interesting change is the date format, which will give displays such as “3 hours ago” for any edits or posts within short periods of time.

Edit Post Page
Basically, the most prominent change would be the renaming of ‘View This Post’ to ‘Preview’. However, it is now more convenient and faster when it comes to post editing and there is a quick link for quick post deletion. Overall, it is a whole lot more convenient.

Miscellaneous Management
There is now a ‘Tags’ option for easy tag addition, editing or deletion. As for media, there is now a Media Library which supports more file types than what WordPress 2.3 could where all your uploaded files can be managed. Also, it is easier to manage widgets now than before. They are easy to add onto the sidebar and once there, can simply be dragged as you wish for your desired arrangement.

Other Changes
There is now an improvement on the user filters which makes it more user-friendly. Also, you can now see the exact number of comments in the navigation menu pending your review. One last notable addition is the ability to support avatars directly from the box. Overall, WordPress 2.5 is quite an improvement but the changes make it a love or hate affair. Either way, it is certainly the talk of the blogosphere.

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Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

There are millions of blogs out there on the internet and thousands of them are promoted on a daily basis and updated regularly. This means that in most cases there will be other bloggers in the niche that you choose to blog about, and although there your competition they can also help you out. You don’t always want to look at your competition as your enemy when it comes to blogging because there are ways you can benefit from other bloggers in your niche. The importance of becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche is becoming more important as each day passes and you should make sure you start commenting now. If you’re unsure as to why you should spend time becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche that’s fine as we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons now.

Reason #1

The first reason you want to become active on blogs in your niche is for the backlinks. The backlinks only count in the search engines if there do-follow, but nowadays there are lots of bloggers who use the do-follow feature on their comments. You should find all of the blogs that offer do-follow comments in your niche and you should make a note of commenting on these blogs regularly. The search engines love relevant links so by commenting on blogs similar to yours you’ll be getting about as relevant as links as you possibly can manage to get.

Reason #2

Commenting on blogs helps to also gain traffic for your blog over the long-term, and is one of the main benefits of commenting on blogs in your niche. As visitors see your comments on the blogs they’ll be able to click your link and visit your blog. You won’t get to much traffic from doing this, but it adds up over time and you should use any advantages you can over your competitors. The traffic you get from the comments will also be targeted and could result in a long-term reader of your blog or even a customer.

Reason #3

If you comment regularly enough on the authority blogs then the owner will begin to take notice of you and it could benefit you and your blog. As you grow a relationship with the other bloggers in your niche you open up your chances of exchanging links with them. To get an authority backlink in your niche usually means spending a lot of money, but if you can grow a friendly relationship through blog commenting then you may be surprised what the bloggers may do for you. If your blog has good content then they’ll have no problem linking to you in one of there posts, and this is when you get the real traffic.

There are even more reasons as to why you should become active in the blogosphere, but these three are the main reasons that I do it. You don’t need to go to blogs in your niche and spam all the posts on them as this will just upset the blog owner. You should comment on a regular basis as the blogger adds new content, as then they’ll know that you continually check their blog out and will make them more likely to check out your blog.

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