Tag Archives | blogosphere

Blogosphere News – WordPress Plugins – What Plugins Are All About and How They Can Make You Money

Blogosphere News – WordPress Plugins – What Plugins Are All About and How They Can Make You Money

Blogging is the latest trend to hit the internet. Everyone I know has a blog. Some people make new entries everyday, some people made one entry and forgot all about it, other bloggers blog to update friend and family on their lives. Most people blog to build a brand and make money.

There are three main blogging platforms. They are:

1. Blogger2. Typepad3. WordPress

WordPress is by far the MOST popular blogging platform out there. Look at the blogs that you currently read. Most of them will be on WordPress.

It used to be all about WordPress Themes. Now it is all about WordPress Plugins. If your blog is not loaded with the best plugins then it is nothing. It is on the bottom layer of all of the blogs in the blogosphere.

Here are some of the most WordPress Plugins that you can get:

1. SEO Package Plugin: Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines.

2. WordPress Super Cache Plugin: A very fast caching engine for WordPress blogs that produces static html files.

3. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

4. NextGEN Gallery Plugin: NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

You can also get WordPress Plugins that are guaranteed to help you generate money via blogging.The Most Popular and Sought After Plugin for WordPress themes at the moment is the “”Membership Plugin””. This WordPress plugin allows you to have different Membership Types.

Membership-Plugin has 3 default user group types:

1. Free2. Trial 3. Paying

You can easily create as many free, trial and paid subscriptions as you need. Each subscription can be assigned to a separate membership level allowing you to offer your users multiple subscription options.

Interesting!!

There are countless other plugins. Too many to mention actually.

You will have hours of fun experimenting with different plugins on your blog!

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Blogging With WordPress

Blogging With WordPress

WordPress is a popular open source blog publishing application. First available to the blogging public in 2003, the current release of WordPress is 2.7.1 as of February 2009. Open source means that it is available free of charge for the people to use. It is therefore very common for people to do blogging with WordPress.

WordPress has evolved around the years with introduction of themes, plugins and widgets into the blogosphere. Those additions really made WordPress very popular with bloggers due to the flexibility and ease to modify and customize the blogs. They could produce very professional-looking blogs in a short time frame with WordPress compared to when they had to do it using the HTML codes.

Theme is a way to “”skin”” a blog. It provides control of the look and presentation of the blogs. Without changing the core software, bloggers have the flexibility to change the display of posts and the blogs. By simply modifying some template files included in a particular theme, we can customize the blog’s look on-the-fly without having to worry about compatibility with the application and other components used by WordPress.

Since it is an open-source application, there are many people willingly working on and sharing the WordPress theme with everyone. Most of the blog themes are available free of charge. You can just use search engines to find WordPress theme with whatever additional attributes you want to have. You will be presented with hundreds if not thousands of websites that have more information on themes. You can also visit WordPress Theme Directory for a complete listing of officially recognized blogging themes.

Plugins are used extensively to extend the capability of WordPress blogs. There are just too many things to list down what you can do with WordPress plugins. I guess you can find just about anything you want to do available. If you can’t find it, it is relatively quite easy to make one if you have some basic programming skills. Just like the themes, there are many plugins available. Most of them are also available freely on the web. Beside using search engines, WordPress plugins are also available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Another benefit of using readily available themes is that many people have designed adsense-ready themes. Adsense is a way to monetize your blog. Adsense is simply an opportunity for bloggers to display google ads on their blogs. They will earn money when people click on the displayed adsense. With adsense-ready theme, it means bloggers can configure adsense easily just by entering their adsense pub-id into some parts of the theme files.

A good resource to learn about blogging with WordPress is available on the web. Using normal search engines to search for WordPress tutorial, there are many resources available. You can choose to do the blogging directly on http://www.WordPress.com Otherwise, you can choose to host the WordPress on your own web hosting.

Installing WordPress can pose a challenge. However, nowadays WordPress is included in Fantastico that you can use to install with just one press. If you don’t have Fantastico in your web hosting, you should be able to do an install following the instructions provided when you download WordPress.

Although WordPress is very easy to use, for first time users who are not technically savvy, it is advisable to start with some basic tutorials to understand the structure of how blogging can be done with WordPress. Once you get the basic, using WordPress will be just like using a normal word processor.

Happy Blogging!

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What Is Link Bait

What Is Link Bait?

Link bait is basically how you’d think it would be, simply put link bait is something that will make other bloggers want to post about what you’ve written about. This can be done in a number of different ways including writing a great article, creating a WordPress theme or widget and also through any other software you could make. If you make a theme, widget or other piece of software then you’ll stand a great chance at receiving lots of backlinks from other bloggers and depending on the functionality of your creation you may even get some great backlinks from authority blogs.

Authority bloggers are also looking in the blogosphere for new and interesting topics to write about and if you offer a great new creation then chances is it will be found by other bloggers. All you need is one good review from an authority blog and your traffic could jump an insane amount instantly. Some blogs receive thousands of people each day and if you ever get a link on one of them then your blog will enter a new phase, and it’s something you should be proud of.

Another way to get link bait without creating anything is through writing an interesting and well written article. The topic must be something that isn’t widely talked about and you must teach something that hasn’t been taught before or at least taught well before. If you find a good topic that you think you could teach better then anyone else has then you should create a long and detailed blog post. After which you should begin getting the word out about the blog post, you can do this by submitting to social bookmarking sites and also by contacting other bloggers in your niche.

Link bait is how all the big name bloggers get so many backlinks pointing to their blog and if you want to enter a new league of blogging you’ll need to get lots of link bait rolling. The good thing about link bait material is it never completely dries up, meaning you’ll always get new links from great link bait material even after its aged which is great for bloggers. Link bait is an important part of blogging and once you reach the point where you’re getting lots of links from something you’ve created then you’ll begin to realize more how vital it is. One creation could bring in a steady stream of both traffic and revenue so get into the lab and think up some new wonderful yet creative ideas.

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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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Creating Unique Valuable Content Is the Only Way to Blog

Creating Unique Valuable Content Is the Only Way to Blog

There are now so many blogs in the blogosphere and more created each day that if you think you can take any shortcuts to creating a successful blog you’re crazy. Blogging is now mainstream and everyone who is anyone has at least one blog if not many blogs. Some people and businesses even have teams of writers who write for a network of blogs. These blogs are typically the authority blogs in the niche and they make all there money through private ad sales to businesses. Now the key to the success of these blog networks though is that they have teams of writers who write real content that is useful to the readers. This ensures that the people reading the blogs come back and then before you know it they have a huge source of traffic. It’s really hard to do this unless you have a team organizing it all and lots of investment money for the initial start-up of the network. You can however take a piece of a smaller niche and write content for it that is useful and educational. People like reading things that offer some value to them and not something that they’ve heard thousands of times before.

A lot of webmasters I see lately are trying to use anything automated that they can to make their work easier, but what they find is there work is ruined. If search engines detect any type of automated promotion of a website then they’ll remove it from their index without warning and it can be difficult to get back into the index. There are programs being advertised for everything from automated article distributors to automated social bookmarking tools but they all could cost you your site.

There has also recently been an influx in programs that supposedly create unique content from an article, these are known as rewriter programs and they spit out nothing but garbage. Anyone who uses these to create content for their blog is never going to have a blog that is worth any money and you definitely won’t have any return visitors. Then there are the RSS feed autoblogs that are being created every second of every day right now and they are simply useless. They don’t offer anything to the readers as its just copied text from an authority blog. You may get some indexed pages in Google which you can use for backlinks on your other sites at your own risk, but I don’t recommend it because if you do this often search engines will punish your main site for getting links from an autoblogs network.

Having unique content is important to the success of your blog and if you plan on making money from a blog you need good solid unique content that is educational. You don’t ever start making money from blogging until you have return visitors coming to your blog, and once you have this then you can start trying to monetize the traffic. In the first few months though you will make hardly anything and you need to strictly focus on building natural strong backlinks and unique educational content.

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Blogging for Money

Blogging for Money

Blogging for money is one of the loosest terms in the blogosphere lately and almost everyone who’s anyone has there own blog now. Celebrities, sports stars, rock stars and even kids have blogs nowadays and with them being so easy to function it’s no wonder they’ve become so popular. Blogs are now used to earn an income from and after the likes of ShoeMoney who is a blogger who became rich from it everyone wants their piece of the action. Now there are many methods of monetizing your blog and your efforts won’t be unnoticed. The more work you put into your blog the more return you will see in the long-run and it’ll be completely worth it.

In the beginning you shouldn’t be looking for methods to monetize your blog but instead you should be aiming to try and target traffic. The most important part to running a successful blog is the traffic and without the traffic you won’t be able to get very far in the industry. Millions of blogs are on the internet and with so many being on the internet it’s difficult to make yours stand out from the others. This is why you should avoid adding ads in the beginning until you’ve established a good amount of steady traffic to your blog and once you do that then implement your ads.

When it comes times to begin implementing your ads to your blog you will need to take a look at the many different options you have. First and probably the most popular is your cost per click ads like Google Adsense, where you place a block of ads on your site and every time someone clicks it you receive a certain amount of money. This can add up over time and the more traffic you have viewing the ads the higher your earnings will be, which is why I stress leaving ads off your blog until it would be worth having them on it. Many people get turned off by ads, especially badly places ads. Try refraining from having Google Adsense in the content of your blog and try keeping it off to the side in one of the themes sidebars.

Another form of monetizing your blog can be from CPA offers which is a cost per action usually either an email submit or a sale of a product. There are many networks hosting many different CPA offers and some can pay very nice amounts of money depending on the niche that you’re involved in. Some great networks to join are Commission Junction and MaxBounty, one is for product sale commissions and the other offers many trail and free cost per action offers.

There is a lot of money that can be made in the blogosphere and depending on your skills you could have a head start to making money, but no matter your experience you’ll have a chance of making money. It’s rather simple to maintain and set-up a blog so you should have many problems with that and the networks for ads all have great support and guides for you to follow. Make sure you take the time to read the guidelines and also the rules so that you don’t break them, and then start implementing the ads throughout your established blogs.

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Become an Active Member in the Blogosphere

Become an Active Member in the Blogosphere

You’d actually probably be surprised but if you’re an active member in the blogosphere then it will bring you countless amounts of free traffic, and can make your blog more mainstream. There are tons of blogs created and many more created on a daily basis and you need to make sure that if you plan on blogging that you make yourself stand out from the crowd. There are tons of social networking sites for bloggers that can help create a name for yourself and your blog, and the more time you spend on working on networking the better results you’ll see.

Don’t expect to get thousands of visitors overnight from a couple conversations, but over time if you consistently use the social networking sites for bloggers then you can gain a following of people, especially if your blog is half-decent. Twitter is probably the most popular network for bloggers right now and it allows bloggers to follow the daily internet lives of other bloggers. Anyone can use the site though and you don’t need to be a blogger which means that many blog readers also use the site to follow the popular bloggers. If you make yourself noticeable on Twitter then chances are more and more people will begin to follow you which simply means they can see whenever you post something new to Twitter.

This means you can post a new blog post and then notify everyone on your Twitter about it within seconds which will help gain you a readership. If your knowledge is useful and not just regurgitated nonsense then you will stand a much better shot at retaining the readers that come from the social networking sites.

Another way to become active in the blogosphere to benefit your blog is by commenting regularly on different blogs. I always make sure I comment on certain blogs, as then you begin to gain a friendship with the other blogger which can be great for your blog. This can lead into link exchanges, blog post exchanges and even traffic exchanges through numerous methods. The possibilities are endless and the fact is most bloggers like networking with other bloggers to help each other out. All you need to do is make yourself noticeable by commenting on blogs, and obviously you might not be noticed on a blog with hundreds of comments a day but if you comment on semi popular blogs you can become noticed quickly.

You can also link to other blogs in your blog posts and they will then notice that they’ve been linked to from your blog. This could end up getting you a link in return and depending on which blog links you back it could bring in huge amounts of traffic.

Your best friends are other bloggers when you’re a blogger yourself so make sure you remember that and always be network with other bloggers. Also if you’re asked for help from a fellow blogger you should help them out because you never know what it could lead too. You may end up getting a link from them or even a review from them and it could lead to more traffic. If it’s a service you offer on your blog then you may even get more business from it. Sometimes doing free work leads to higher paying jobs which mean you should always consider doing freebies for some people. If it gets you advertising out of the deal then it’s not working for free anyways, so you need to think of it like this.

There is nothing more important I find then becoming friends with other bloggers in your niche, because although there sort of your competition you can still benefit from helping them out. Blog commenting also builds your backlinks so this is the most important thing to do, because even if it leads nowhere you’ll at least be getting some backlinks. The do-follow backlinks help your search engine placements as well, but most bloggers don’t use do-follow. If you find a do-follow blog then you should bookmark it and comment there at least once a day because then you’re guaranteed to be increasing your backlinks everyday which is something that Google and the other search engines love to see.

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