Archive | Blogs

We all know that .com domains are the ideal option, but it is also difficult to find good ones that have not been registered yet. The substitute is to register a .net or .org domain.

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There are many popular blogs that are not hosted on .com domains, so if that is your case do not get discouraged. One thing that you should do, however, is to add your domain extension into the name and logo of your site.

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The logic is quite simple. Suppose your domain is “coolwebsite.net”, but the name and the logo of the site both display only “CoolWebsite”. A visitor coming from another blog or from a search engine will pay attention to the name and logo, while neglecting the URL. Should that visitor want to visit your site the day after, it is likely that he will just open his browser and type “coolwebsite.com”, and if your site is not there he will just go somewhere else.

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If your logo displays “CoolWebsite.net”, on the other hand, there is a higher chance that the user will recall the domain extension. If you do not own a .com domain, therefore, you should attach your extension to your name and incorporate it into your brand.

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Want some practical examples? Check the three headers below, they come from popular blogs using this technique:

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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What do Thom Yorke, Tim Ferriss and successful new media publishers have in common?

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It’s not just that they comprehend that smart marketing is about relationships more than swift one-time sales.

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And it’s not just that they know it’s not just any relationship they want, but loyal, raving fans.

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It’s that they know it’s about having a direct relationship with your fans.

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Radiohead Blows Off Record Companies in Favor of Fans

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So you’ve likely heard plenty about Radiohead’s decision to allow fans to download its new album for a donation the fan thinks is fair. And you’ve heard even more about Nine Inch Nails and Oasis planning to deal directly with fans as well, following the lead set by Prince long ago.

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Some people want to believe this is about turning music free, but it’s not about free. It’s about smart business. It’s not about anti-marketing… it’s brilliant marketing.

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The not-very-well-kept secret about the music business is that recording artists don’t make a lot of money selling music when labels are involved. The corporate accountants do a great job of ensuring that.

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But that’s okay, since bands make money on the backend (as is so common is more business models than you might think). Concerts and merchandise make bands wealthy, and the music is actually an attraction strategy.

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If the average donation for the new Radiohead album works out to more than 30% of a regular-priced CD attached to a label, the band likely makes more profit than they would have otherwise. The fact that Radiohead will grant a label to distribute a CD in 2008 doesn’t detract from the importance of this move, since the band took the low-hanging fruit known as die-hard Radiohead fans away from the intermediaries.

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And this is not just about massive artists. The undiscovered have to sell records out of the trunk or use the Internet to make people clap their hands and state yeah before a label will even notice. How long till they figure out the label is expendable?

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The most important thing anyone can take away from the revolution in music distribution is summed up well by Trent Reznor in his announcement that Nine Inch Nails was free from the tyranny of the record contract.

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It gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.

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Think about that the next time you find yourself writing for Google.

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Tim Ferriss and Fan-Fueled Lifestyle Redesign

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I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Tim Ferriss, New York Times Bestselling author of The 4-Hour Work Week and an all around fascinating guy. I shared some strategies for his blog, and he indulged me in some of his plans for the future.

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While many feel the gist of Tim’s book is about outsourcing as much of your business and life as possible, I see it a bit differently. The book is about freedom, and the fact that money is not really what we want.

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We want the benefits of money.

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Tim teaches people that time is not money, it’s more important than money. And although he took the traditional publishing route, it’s clear from the book that Tim understood upfront the importance of having a direct relationship with his audience that had nothing to do with his publisher.

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When I read Tim’s book, I saw several obvious opportunities for him to profit on the backend, thanks to the fact that he made an effort to engage readers directly with his website at each turn. When I asked him about it, he confided that several direct marketing “gurus” had chastised him for dropping the ball and not properly “monetizing” his new audience.

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I told him not to worry about it, but Tim was way ahead of me.

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He then told me a story about how he needed to be in another part of the world on short notice recently. One of the people he recently met thanks to his book let him use a private jet to get there, at no charge. He enjoyed the benefits of money, thanks to his relationship with a fan.

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The gist of what I took away from my conversation with Tim is that he’s not about to do anything in the name of short-term profit that damages his long-term relationship with his fans. Smart guy, since he’ll end up with more money (and more of the benefits of money) going that route.

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The Tiny Known Blessing of Attracting Fans Directly

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In my opinion, the ideal thing about being an online entrepreneur is the direct relationship we have with readers and prospects by default. It used to sound so cool to hear about someone landing a recording contract or a book deal, but when you realize the struggle many of those people face just to have a direct line to their own fans and maintain creative control, it doesn’t sound all that great.

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It’s no secret at this point that I believe the best way for online publishers to create fans is to teach. For whatever reason, I naturally gravitated to an educational approach to selling and to paid content right from the start, and I’ve never looked back.

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Whatever your approach, keep this in mind: modern marketing is less about market share, and more about share of customer. It’s much easier to keep an existing customer then it is to attract a new one, so do everything you can to retain the relationships you’ve got. Even though the allure of the World wide web leads us to believe we can conceivably reach every possible person who might be interested in what we offer, you’ll make more money by focusing on attracting the right people and keeping them as happy as possible.

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Forget Everything You Know About Making Money On the web… And Begin Making Some

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So, I’ve been promising that I’d release a free report this week, and I actually got it done. There’s even an audio version, should you be so inclined.

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Anyway, I’ll let the download page give you the details, but if you’ve ever wondered what NASA, Russian cosmonauts, the film industry in the 1940s, Marshall McLuhan and the Sex Pistols have to do with on the web business….

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Well, you’re going to want to read this.

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Forget Everything You Know About Making Money On the internet… And Start Making Some

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This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day, joining thousands of other bloggers to write about one topic for a single day. This year’s topic is the environment.

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The acre of land my family and I live on rests on a heavily-wooded elevation, which provides a panoramic view of a sparkling lake to the south. It’s quite a departure from the suburban tract home I grew up in, and I’m hoping my children end up with fond childhood memories of frolicking in a beautiful natural setting.

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One remarkable thing about the property is the amount of butterflies it attracts, no doubt due to the variety of plant species that are permitted to grow undisturbed. My 5-year-old daughter and her little brother spend huge chunks of time hopelessly chasing after scores of Monarchs and other brightly-colored, flitting butterflies.

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And all I can think about is the havoc these little critters are having on the weather in China. Not the kids… the butterflies.

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The Butterfly Effect

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The Butterfly Effect is a term that has leaked into popular culture thanks to time-travel stories, but its actual meaning is steeped in no-nonsense science. From a technical standpoint, it refers to the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory.

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In plain language, little changes within a complex system lead to results that are impossible to predict. For example, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could create little changes in the atmosphere that lead to violent weather conditions elsewhere on the planet.

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Although the concept has been around since 1890, the Butterfly Effect gained popular acceptance in 1961 due to weather prediction modeling performed by meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He found that changes that should have been statistically insignificant led to totally different weather scenarios. The butterfly analogy began in 1972, when Lorenz delivered a speech entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?

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What’s that got to do with the environment?

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Well, given the changes we humans have introduced into the complex ecosystem known as Planet Earth, it’s fair to say that we’ve done the work of billions of butterflies. What we’re trying to figure out now is what’s going to happen, but it’s most likely going to be pretty significant.

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What if Butterflies Disappeared?

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While there’s little agreement as to what’s going to happen ecologically due to human activity, there’s no doubt that we’ve made drastic changes to just about every natural habitat on the planet. Our oceans and natural water sources are polluted, the composition of our soil has been chemically altered, the atmosphere has been heavily influenced by emissions, our forests have been dramatically reduced, and on and on.

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One area of particular importance is biodiversity. Beyond the fact that biodiversity itself protects humans from the effects of agricultural catastrophes like the Irish Potato Famine, the loss of a species results in significant changes in natural habitats that can hurt us badly down the road.

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Maybe you don’t personally care about the Mexican long-nosed bat, but if they disappear absolutely, there will most assuredly be consequences that ripple well beyond Texas and New Mexico over time. We just can’t predict what they’ll be.

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If butterflies disappeared, the world would most certainly be worse off for kids of all ages. But it’s much worse than that. Many flowering plants are so closely linked to butterflies (and vice versa) that one can\’t survive without the other. When you think about the natural interdependence network that could collapse due to the extinction of one important species, it starts to get a tiny scary.

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In the last 439 million years, there have been five cataclysmic extinction events, each one wiping out between 50 to 95 percent of existing life, including the dominant lifeforms of the time. Many scientists believe that:

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• we’re in the midst of the sixth extinction event

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• we’re the cause, and

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• we’re in danger of being wiped out ourselves

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Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson predicts that if things don’t change, half of all plant and animal species will be extinct by the year 2100. Worse, a poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that 7 in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a much more dire threat to human existence than global warming does.

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That’s not good news, but let’s step away from the negative. Instead, let’s look at how we can put the Butterfly Effect to work for us in a good way.

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The Positive Side of the Butterfly Effect

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Let’s face it—things will likely change for the worse regarding the environment no matter what. Some of those changes will be pretty bad, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

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That doesn’t mean we should give up. The more positive change we introduce into the system starting right now, the more bad things we avoid. Plus, we purchase time for technology to help protect us from adverse conditions, and even reverse some of the damage.

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The corollary of the Butterfly Effect is that little changes you make do in fact make a difference. And when those little changes are aggregated among millions of people, we can truly make a real difference in how much nature we save for our kids, grandchildren, and beyond.

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We might even be saving them.

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It doesn’t need to be a sacrifice. Why not make changes that simply save you money?

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Check out these planet-saving actions that keep more coin in your pocket:

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• Cut out bottled water: Producing plastic water bottles consumes big amounts of fossil fuels only to crowd landfills. American demand alone requires 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel approximately 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. And if you think gas prices are bad, you’re paying $10 a gallon for water when you purchase individual bottles. Get a simple home filtration solution, and a reusable stainless steel bottle.

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• Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs: CFL bulbs are more high-priced, but they last 5 times longer than conventional bulbs. Save $30 in energy costs per bulb and help save the planet.

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• Purchase a new monitor: You know you want a new LCD monitor, so go ahead and do it. They use 1/3 the energy, and they look cool. Just hold on to your personal as long as you can stand it, or learn to recycle it when you trade up.

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• Quit your job. Telecommuting twice a week can save 40 percent of your gas costs according to the Telework Coalition, or $624 per year. To further maximize your happiness and the future health of the Earth, start that home-based business you keep speaking about.

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Here are 52 other ways to save money while you save the planet.

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What Have You Got to Lose?

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It’s mid-October now, and the butterflies are just about gone for the year. My daughter provided the inspiration for this article when she asked me in a concerned voice:

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“Daddy, where have all the butterflies gone?”

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“It’s okay sweetie… they’ll be back in the spring.”

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I hope no parent has to answer that question differently.

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Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online… And Start Making Some

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Google is quite busy these days implementing new features on the Webmasters Tool section. The most recent addition, under the “Statistics” tab, is a feature that lets you access the top search queries on your website.

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For each search query you can see its position on the SERP (search engine results page) and the percentage that it represents from the total queries where your pages appeared. Additionally, as the Google Operating System blog reported, you can also see the top clicked search queries. This information is quite useful to determine the headlines that work and the ones that do not.

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Finally, you can also filter the search queries for specific periods (e.g., one week ago, two weeks ago, one month ago and so on) and for specific regions (e.g., Google India, Google Canada and so on). For a more complete review check out “The Blogger’s Guide to Google Webmaster Tools.”\n

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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English is not my native language, but I do rely on it to work, therefore I am always trying to improve my grammar, spelling and overall writing skills.

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That is why I decided to create Daily Writing Tips, just over four months ago. I was already researching and gathering writing tips for myself, so why not share that information with other people?

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Surely I had a feeling that the topic could be popular, but with blogs and the World wide web you never really know if a website will take off or not. Luckily it did take off, and this day we are already over 3,000 RSS subscribers.

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The merit probably goes to the outstanding team of writers that I have over there. I share some tips coming from my personal experience once in a while, but when it comes to hardcore English grammar they take care of it.

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If you are not a subscriber yet, here is the RSS Feed of the blog. I am pretty sure you will learn a thing or two!\n

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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For the last few years bloggers have been endlessly hearing the refrain: “Content is king”. While content is incredibly important, another old saying holds true.

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Not all content is born equal.

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Have you ever seen one post talked about across a number of blogs you subscribe to? Has social media ever led you again and again to the same place?

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If so, chances are you were witnessing viral content in action.

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In this post, I want to introduce the concept of viral content and outline five reasons it’s worth your attention.

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What is ‘viral’ content?

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Seth Godin coined the term ‘viral’ as it applies to ideas. His definition can easily be adapted to blog content. Viral content is:

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• Easy to comprehend

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• Worth sharing and speaking about

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• Simple to spread and share

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• Rewarding to share

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Viral content is remarkable: it might be a big list of resources, a compilation of inspirational quotes, a new way of thinking about things, an eloquent argument for a point of view, and so on.

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Regardless of the form it takes, it causes the following internal reaction in the reader: “I’ve got to tell someone about this!”

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The good news for bloggers is that viral content does not require a strike of brilliance to create. One you begin to appreciate the common characteristics of viral content, you can start to emulate it — with a bit of work.

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Why viral content is the new King

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1. Social media loves viral content. Viral posts are made to be shared, and what superior way to share than through social media? As your post is passed along social media networks you can anticipate it to be championed by various users, creating a snowball effect for the content in question. This kind of social media success has the potential to bring hundreds of new visitors and subscribers to your blog.

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2. Viral content generates inbound links. As viral content is both shared and talked about this will commonly occur through links into your blog. This will boost your Technorati ranking, bring new, targeted visitors, and possibly contribute to an SEO boost if the anchor text is good.

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3. It can bring streams of traffic over long periods. The ideal forms of viral content are timeless, and the snowball effect of such posts can roll on for long periods of time. The strongest viral post I’ve written is 50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog: it never reached the front page of Digg or achieved booming social media success, but has still managed to receive 37 trackbacks and 91 comments, and continues to generate new comments and trackbacks to this day.

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Content spread via word of mouth can contribute to your blog’s growth over a long period of time, whereas social media success alone tends to explode, then fizzle away to nothing.

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4. It creates buzz around your blog. Viral content is great for spreading your brand throughout your niche. Your name and viral articles will seem to be turning up everywhere: in link round-ups, in social media, and so on. That kind of visibility will ensure your chosen niche begins to recognize your name.

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5. It encourages comments. Viral content is meant to be talked about and much of that talk will occur in comments. In my experience, posts I’ve written that have become viral have also resulted in a high comment count. This is great for the social proof of your blog.

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Where to next?
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Give some thought to the idea of viral content. Have you seen any content lately that qualifies as viral? What is everyone talking about in your niche at the moment?

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If you can, write down some of the reasons why you think that post was so widely shared and talked about. Chances are each one of those characteristics can be applied to your own content in order to create your own viral post.

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The next time I write about viral content here — which will be soon — I want to advocate a number of strategies you can use to create your own viral content, and in doing so, launch your blog’s growth into the stratosphere. Stay tuned!\n

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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Welcome to the third edition of the Blogging Questions & Answers. You can ask your questions either through the comments on this post or via the Contact Form.

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Karthik asks:

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Do you ever write on blogs with the intent to resell it later?

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No I don’t. That does not mean that such strategy would not work though. I know several people who create blogs with the intent of reselling right from the beginning, and if the plan is executed well you can make good profits.

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My case is different because I write about things that I love. I am 23 years old and I don’t have many bills to pay, so money is not a priority right now. If money was the most important factor I would start websites on different niches like celebrity gossip or entertainment.

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Ian Fernando asks:

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How am I able to get more readers to comment and participate within a blog?

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There is one thing that you can not change in the equation: the fact that the majority of visitors will only read your content and not interact or leave comments. Different niches will have a different level of participation, but overall the number of comments is strictly tied to traffic levels.

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So the first advice would be to focus on the content and traffic, and the comments should come naturally.

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That stated there are several things that you can do in order to maximize the comments on your blog given your traffic levels, including:

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• Participate in the conversation yourself by answering to all the comments

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• Ask your readers explicitly what is their view on the matter

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• Make sure that it is easy to comment (I don’t like CAPTCHAS or strict moderation)

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• Reward people that leave comments often

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• Write about controversial topics

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• Offer subscription to comments

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Online Money asks:

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What inspire you to write articles? Is it for money? Is it for passion? Any other reason?

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I would state that passion is the main factor. I am fascinated at the way technology and the World wide web are changing the way we communicate, work and live. In my opinion the revolution that the personal and the World wide web are creating can be compared to what happened on the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, the so called Industrial Revolution. I am not sure where this is heading, but I want to be there in the front line.

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The second factor would be life style. I worked for one year inside a big multinational company, and it was enough for me to realize that the corporate environment is not what I am looking for. Right now all I need to work is my laptop and an Internet connection. That freedom is priceless.

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Tejvan asks:

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To make money on the web, do you think it is more important to bring traffic through google and search engines or develop an RSS readership?
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First of all these strategies are not mutually exclusive. Most popular blogs, in fact, have both a big RSS readership and large organic traffic. It is a natural cycle: in order to get RSS readers you need quality content, quality content will attract backlinks, backlinks will attract search engine traffic.

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That being said there are some blogs that have a modest RSS readership and a big organic traffic. Honestly I would be fine with that, mainly because organic traffic is gold when it comes to monetization via PPC methods (read Google AdSense).

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If you need to focus on only one of these factors, however, I would aim for building a big RSS readership. First and foremost because organic traffic is volatile. One day you are on Google’s first page for a popular term, the other you are gone. Secondly because you can also leverage a large and loyal readership for other projects down the road.

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Sumesh asks:

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I see you are using h1 for post titles on index also. However, is it safe to do so? Google guidelines indicate that there should be only one h1 tag per page. I am confused too, and is this a slip-up on your part, or purposeful?

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This is a slip-up on my part. In fact I’ve had this problem noted on the “to-do” list for a long time. Ideally, as you mentioned, you want to have only one H1 tag on each page.

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I am already working on the fix with a friend, and once I do it I will write about it. On most WordPress themes you can solve this issue with some PHP coding. It is not straight forward, but definitely doable.

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Roseate asks:

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Do you think it is important for bloggers to use PPC to advertise their blogs, as I feel like most of them do?! And do you use PPC?
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I think that PPC advertising methods like Google AdWords can definitely be part of a marketing strategy for a blog. The ideal way in my thought to use it is when you are launching a blog.

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By spending $200 you could send 5,000 or more visitors to your blog. If your content is outstanding it is very likely that a good percentage of these visitors will bookmark your site and subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Paying for traffic will not make an average blog popular. But if the blog is good in the first place that influx of traffic will accelerate things.

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60 in 3 asks:

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What exactly are supplemental results? Am I missing something I should be paying attention to?

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Google has a supplemental index where it puts pages of “lower quality.” These pages are not assigned PageRank, and they only appear in search results for very narrow terms. There are many factors that can make your pages go into the supplemental index, including duplicate content or the lack of backlinks.

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Keep in mind this is a minor problem unless the majority of your content is in the supplemental index. Even in that case it should get fixed naturally as your blog becomes more popular. If you want more information on the matter check out the post “Calculate Your Google Supplemental Index Ratio.”

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Karthik Kastury asks:

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How long did it take for you to make a decent income with your blog? State more than $100.

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If I remember correctly after two months I was already making $100 monthly. That is not what I would call decent money though . Daily Blog Tips is approaching its one year anniversary, and only now I am starting to see good money ($2000).

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Keith asks:

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What is the ideal method to have your content added to the popular link tracking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Technorati, etc…?

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The content itself will influence your chances of being featured on these large social bookmarking sites. Not only must the content be outstanding and original, but it should also be written in a certain fashion.

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People that use social bookmarking sites are very technology-savvy, so tech related related topics have a good chance of getting picked. Secondly these folks are also multi-taskers, so make sure that your content is scannable and
that is goes straight to the point. Lists, bullet points and clear messages are your friends here.

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Finally, it never hurts get friends to help. If you think your latest article is really good, ask them a couple of votes to get the ball rolling. Do not try to game the system though, else you will do more harm than good.

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For more information on this topic check the article “10 Tips for Writing Bookmarkable Content.”\n

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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