How To Set Up A Blog: Part 7- More Traffic

This article is part 7 in series of how to set up a blog series. In part 1 of the series,we learned how to set up a blog,in part 2 of the series,we looked at how to write to attract readers,in part 3 of the series,we looked at where and how to get ideas for what to write on your blog,part 4 of the series we looked at how to optimize on page SEO to attract traffic to your blog. In Part 5 of the series, we looked at how to optimized off page (outside your blog SEO for increasing traffic to your blog). In part 6 of the series, we looked at how to set up an off page SEO and Google Page rank. Now this this part 7 of the series, we will see on how to get more traffic to your blog website.

See previous post in the how to set up blog series: How to Set Up Blog:Part 6- Off Page SEO 2 and Pagerank

Part 7 – More Traffic Sources

Getting off page SEO or backlinks from other sites such as they linking to your site of blog post or writing a guest post for them can get you some much needed backlinks and boost your traffic and page rank of your blog. However what if that is not possible for a new blogger right away? Do not fear, there are more ways to get traffic to your site. Getting links from other websites is not the only way to attract visitors to visit your blog. This time, we are going to explore alternative methods to attract high quality traffic with both free and paid methods.

How To Get More Traffic To Your Blog:

The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to recycle all the content you have written on your blog. What I really mean is to turn your blog posts into little “manuals” or articles that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to article directories. These article directories are like aggregators that collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day.

When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On most article directories, you are also permitted to include a “resource box” where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. This is where you can truly leverage the traffic of the said article directories.

Some good article directories to get you started:

www.eZineArticles.com

www.ultimatearticledirectory.com

www.submityourarticle.com

www.goarticles.com

www.articlebase.com

www.buzzle.com

www.suite101.com

www.infobarrel.com

www.amazines.com

www.isnare.com

Of course, there are lot more article directories out there, some are free and some are paid. I like the one that mentioned above, as they have high page rank from Google, that means you site will get better quality backlinks and these are free article directories so you do not have to pay anything to get backlinks from them, except to write a original article for them.

Are there more ways to get traffic to your blog?

Sure, there are more ways you can get backlinks to your site. Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that is based on your niche. To find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter “<your niche> +forum”, without the quotes. You would want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members, and preferably always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum.

When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to append a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affiliate since they are already convinced you’re an “expert” in the field.

More Traffic Ideas:

The strategy we’ll discuss is word of mouth. Let’s say you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift and posted it on your blog, saying that if a certain visitor can refer three of his/her friends to visit your blog the gift will be his/hers for free? If your small report or gift is lucrative enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will surely refer their friends to this blog that they frequent!

You can also utilize the “blog and ping” technique that everyone’s talking about. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as www.technorati.com know by pinging them. You can ping a lot of portals at once by using the free www.pingomatic.com.

Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space. A thing to keep in mind when buying paid traffic is to always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads. If your profits do no offset the expense, you will end up losing money, so choose wisely. In general, when you are starting out, I would stay away from paid advertisement until your blog is making some money and some profit.

Stay Tuned for next part in the series of How To Set Up a Blog: How to Set Up Blog:Part 8- How To Monetize Your Blog

You Might also be Interested in;

Also,You can learn more about favorite blogging resources and tools reviews for further details.

There are also reasonably priced web design,template and blog transfer services, if you are interested, you can use them as they have done great job with out web design.

See Complete How To Set Up Blog Series

How To Set Up A Blog: Part 6 – SEO

This article is part 6 in series of how to set up a blog series. In part 1 of the series,we learned how to set up a blog,in part 2 of the series,we looked at how to write to attract readers,in part 3 of the series,we looked at where and how to get ideas for what to write on your blog,part 4 of the series we looked at how to optimize on page SEO to attract traffic to your blog. In Part 5 of the series, we looked at how to optimized off page (outside your blog SEO for increasing traffic to your blog). In part 6 of the series, we will continue to look at how to set up an off page SEO and Google Page rank, as search engine optimization is one of the most important tips to gain traffic to your beautifully written blog posts.

See previous post in the how to set up a blog series: How to Set Up Blog:Part 5- Off Page SEO Part 1

Part 6 – Off page Search Engine Optimization II

In the last article, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we’re going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain “high quality” links. We’re also going to talk briefly about Google’s PageRank.

First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are

1) The address which it links to

2) The text of the link

3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let’s analyze this information one by one. First, you’d naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

How Google sees your backlinks:

Remember in our series, we are looking at “technical gadgets” as our blog niche topic for example, so let’s continue with it. The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says “Barbie dolls” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms “technological” or “gadget”, it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it’s essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google’s PageRank. It’s basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targeted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine results. In simple terms, if your blog or blog posts linked from high page rank site, it will give your blog or website a boost. So getting link from page rank 5 is much better than getting it from page rank 1 site. One important thing is learn is, while quality of page rank matters, you should not avoid lower page rank sites for commenting or guest posting as sometimes every backlinks counts, including from lower page rank.

Stay tune for next part in how to set up a blog Part 7: How to Set Up Blog:Part 7- Get Traffic to Your Blog

You Might also be Interested in;

Also,You can learn more about favorite blogging resources and tools reviews for further details.

There are also reasonably priced web design,template and blog transfer services, if you are interested, you can use them as they have done great job with out web design.

See Complete How To Set Up Blog Series

How To Set Up a Blog: Part 5 – Off Line SEO

This article is part 5 in series of how to set up a blog series. In part 1 of the series, we learned how to set up a blog, in part 2 of the series, we looked at how to write to attract readers, in part 3 of the series, we looked at where and how to get ideas for what to write on your blog, part 4 of the series we looked at how to optimize on page SEO to attract traffic to your blog. This part 5 we will look at how to optimized off page (outside your blog SEO for increasing traffic to your blog)

See Previous article in how to set up blog series: How to Set Up Blog:Part 4:On Page SEO

Part 5 – Off Page Search Engine Optimization

We’ve already optimized our blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we’re targeting, but here comes the sad news – it affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, don’t skip this step as every little bit helps when you’re competing for search engine rankings!

Now, we’re moving on to off page search engine optimization. That is, factors that are not on your blog but affect your search engine rankings very greatly. There are a lot of off page factors, but we shall study them one by one. The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog.

Off Page SEO Tips:

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like the Feds storming a crack den…

Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply guest post for it, if they offer it. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information to the site’s readers, chances are the webmaster(s) will link to your blog or even write about you! It may not happen right away, when you have 5 blog posts up, but it may happen as you write more and established your self as a blogger in your niche subject area.

Let’s talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to offer to write a guest post for them as they may or may not naturally link to your blog when you are still new blogger. We’re discussing this based on the presumption that your blog is really content rich and offer high quality information to anyone in your niche or topic of discussion. The most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster or see if they have set up rules about how to submit a guest post to them. Some bloggers may like first your comment on their blog, so they know of you. Second if they have submit blog rules, follow it. Some may like it you submit post with request, some may want index of content of guest post. Make sure your guest post is original and not posted anywhere to be accepted.

Tips On Finding Right Blogs for Your niche:

We started with “technology gadgets” as our niche in this series for easy to understand how to set up h1 tags and on page SEO, so let’s continue with that subject here as well. First, let’s look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that you’re targetting. In this case, let’s search for “technological gadgets”. The first few results, www.t3.co.uk and www.acarplace.com/brands/gm/gadgets.html are commercial sites, so don’t bother asking. We’re looking for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Seems like www.gizmodo.com would be a good option!

So, compose an email to the webmaster of www.gizmodo.com (whose email address you shall find on the site). They even have their AIM contact there, so it’s also a good choice if you use AOL Instant Messenger. Start by stating how you came across their site (i.e. “looking for gadget information”, NOT “looking for link partners!”) and how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really good about their site honestly. Leave comment on their latest posts for sometimes, so they are aware of you and your blog.

You may ask for guest post suggestion and submit the request in timely manner. I personally do not use this technique as I feel odd about it, but one the blogger I know uses often with some success rate, so I want to mention it here. She writes to a web master or admin of the blog and suggest that so-and-so content on her own blog will be a nice complement to their site’s content and vice versa. Put a link on her blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to weld a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and your blog. She says she has about 20% chance of it working.

Along the way, you might find people who won’t even respond to your email, so forget about them and move on and ask others to link to you or write a guest post for them. In blog business, keep writing good content will generally work with time. Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up, and before long you should have quite a few good sites all linking to you. In the next article, we shall explore further the more advanced off page factors, and ways to improve them!

I would also mention that you can link to blogs that you like and are related to your blog. But, link selling is no no according to Google term of services so stay away while you are still establishing your blog. Only a few lucky people like John Chow can get away with it.

Stay Tune for Part 6 of the series: How to Set Up Blog:Part 6- Off Page SEO 2 and Pagerank

You Might also be Interested in;

Also,You can learn more about favorite blogging resources and tools reviews for further details.

There are also reasonably priced web design,template and blog transfer services, if you are interested, you can use them as they have done great job with out web design.

See Complete How To Set Up Blog Series

What Happened To Scroogle and Scroogle Alternatives

If you were a scroogle user, then you already know how useful tool it was,for those of you who do not know, scroogle allowed you to search without your own bias and preference, meaning you got more better view of your ranking. If you search your own site in google, Google gives it more preferential treatment for your own site, having search and worked on it. For example, if I were to search for “Home Business Ideas” in google my site would come up much higher ranking on my computer, compare to say someone else truly searching for home business ideas search. It would be inflated ego boost to see my site ranking higher but it would not be right ranking. So if you want a unbiased ranking, scroogle was a great and free alternative to other paid services that many Internet marketer used.

I have been relying on scroogle to find out my site ranking for free. Yes, you can find your website ranking with market samurai or other paid tool, but scroogle did that perfectly with ease and simpleness to use for anyone.

I knew once in a while scroogle goes offline so after days when I was unable to get any searches done in scroogle, I had to find out what happened to scroogle and why it was not working for more than a few weeks.

What Happened to Scroogle?

Whenever scroogle was down, people used to see “google is mad at us” type of message. This time there was no message but it said scroogle is not found. I had to find out that what happened and I found out that it was not Google who shut down the site, it was shut down by its own owner after much frustration, read here : Daniel Brandt at Betabit Article. Nice, free alternative site was attacked by hackers to create denial of service issues. God knows why any hackers want to ruin a good, free service like scroogle is beyond me. But scroogle is gone this time and unlike 2010, it seems scroogle is gone for good.

Find Scroogle Alternatives:

So, if you used scroogle or interested in scroogle alternative, that let you do annyomous search and find your website ranking, what a person to do? I did little research and found a few alternatives which may work as scroogle alternative for now.

What Page I am On:

This is a neat little free search engine tool. You enter your keyword and website URL, it will tell you what page your keyword is sitting on. It does not tell you ranking by number, but you will know page it is sitting on. Currently, what page I am on site is able to do first 10 page searches and be able to tell you if you are there or not.

What I like about What Page I am on:

Free
Enter keyword and URL to know your ranking
Easy to search

Things to consider:

Only first 10 pages search
Does not tell ranking # such as #35 or #1, just tells the page URL shows up

Page Wash dot com:

Page wash is free search engine tool where you can do specific search, for example, google.com or google.co.uk for UK based search and so on. You also will have an option for remove all cookies, scripts, remove ads and so on.

Things I like about Page Wash:

Anonymous search
Free
Country, place based search result if you want
Can clear cookies, scripts
remove ads and hide referrer information

Things to consider:

It does not tell you ranking, you have to find it

Duckduck go:

Duckduck go claims to have more privacy than Google and it surely has less ads and spam ads above compare to Google. Seems pretty neat for searching online.

Things I like about duck duck go:

Pretty neat name for a search engine: seems like we are playing a game 🙂
Free
Less ads and spam
Private searches

Things to consider:

For ranking you will have to dig and search through your site info
Search engine results are bit different than google ranking

Start Page:

I am beginning to like start page a lot. You can do private search through ixquick proxy, it does not record and keep your IP information and search are based on unbiased google search. What is not to like;

Free
Anonymous search
No IP recording: protecting your privacy
Unbiased search results
Quick

Things to consider:

Ranking have to be manually searched in

Additional Choice:

There is Encrypted Google for those who may trust google to give unbiased search result. I have used it and it tends to give US based search which is fine for me, as I am US. However for those outside US may not get clear search result for their countries.

How To Set Up A Blog: Part 4 – On Page SEO

This article is part 4 of the How to set up a blog series. In part 1 we looked at how to set up a blog, part 2 of the series, we looked at how to write attractively for readers, in part 3 of the series, we looked at what to write by finding your likes and passion.

Now, hopefully you should have a blog full with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless fact sheet or boring stat blog.

See Previous article in the series here: How to Set Up Blog:Part 3:Where to Find Writing Ideas

How to Get Traffic To Your blog:

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information. Simple enough.
However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com, to name a few more popular ones. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, (I have learned a few tricks for years of blogging but still there is lot of knowledge to gain) but that doesn’t stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”, but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

On Page SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, meaning when someone is searching for certain terms let’s sat how to start blogging, I want this series to come up from this blog. We can do that by on page SEO. Let’s break it down for simple illustration that makes sense. For now, let’s determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for.

For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competitive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so.
Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That’s more manageable, but you’d like to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadget” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the WordPress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML! That helps for sure.

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the <h1> and </h1> tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the <h1> </h1> tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant. So in html you can write your keywords in <h1> Technical Gadgets </h1> to make search engine take notice. It would look like this below; Technical gadgets on your blog (without the tags)

Technical Gadgets

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic. Obviously this is an example, as I am not writing here about gadgets but how to set up a blog so I would focus on h1 and h2 tags with those without making it hard to read for readers.

Write for People:

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and drop your ranking further down into oblivion… So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!

You can do SEO without being overly writing your keywords, tagging your sentence and most of all never write tips on ALL caps. It does not make easy reading. Focus on SEO without being paranoid about it. With time and consistent writing traffic and readership will increase as well.

Stay tuned for next in series; Part 5: How to Set Up Blog:Part 5- Off Page SEO Part 1

You Might also be Interested in;

Also,You can learn more about favorite blogging resources and tools reviews for further details.

There are also reasonably priced web design,template and blog transfer services, if you are interested, you can use them as they have done great job with out web design.

See Complete How To Set Up Blog Series

How To Set Up A Blog: Part 3 – What To Write

This post is part 3 of how to set up a blog series. In part 1, we looked at how to set up a blog for free, in Part 2 of the series, we looked at how to start thinking about blog content. In this part 3, we will look at how to brain storm on what to write on your blog. Check out: Start Blogging: Step by Step Guide

See previous post of the series: How to start Blogging Part 2: Content

Part 3 – What To Write

Face the fact – your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Hence, you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we’re going to discuss how to do just that in this article. I know this from an experience that when I regularly update my blog, my readership increases, when I get busy and stop writing my visitors slows down too, as everyone wants to read new materials right?

We have discussed how to write attractively or at least that people may have interest in Part 2 of the series, so now we are going to discuss what we are going to write on. The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate and interested in. You’ve chosen to make blogging your career because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about something that you’re not interested in is as torturous as as your mundane job! I tried to write once about “getting your ex back”, as it seems to be very lucrative niche subject, but I clearly did not believe in nor I had a passion for as I really believe that real love does not require tricks and ebooks to sell. I rather stick to things I know a little about and have passion for. Blogging and sustaining my financial life working from home is something I believe in, and share my learning here in blog.

Choose you niche or subject:

The other reason I ask you to write about something you’re passionate about is because your feelings and emotion shows through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it’s only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally reach your full speed. Then, it’ll take a lot of effort to stop you instead!

However, no matter how well you know your topic, your brain is bound to get exhausted over some time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

What To Write On Your Blog:

1) The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

2) Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you’ll have quite an inexhaustible “conversation” ongoing, so you’ll not need to actively search for content to write about. However, if you’re still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.

3) You can also have conversations with people with the same interest as you in the particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don’t join every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

How Often To Write:

Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day (or more if you have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. Now, Ideally, that does not work for someone who works full time or has kids like me, so I try to write 2-3 times a week or as often as I can on the blog. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you extra traffic.

Don’t worry about the paragraph above about generating traffic and search engines, because we’re going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like that of a locomotive!

Stay Tuned for next part 4 of How to start a blog series. How to Set Up Blog:Part 4:On Page SEO

You Might also be Interested in;

Also,You can learn more about favorite blogging resources and tools reviews for further details.

There are also reasonably priced web design,template and blog transfer services, if you are interested, you can use them as they have done great job with out web design.

See Complete How To Set Up Blog Series

How To Set Up A Blog : Part 2 – Blog Content

This article is in series of how to set up a blog, start writing setting up SEO, getting content and what to write to get started on making money from blogging which can turn out to be a good home business idea for anyone who want to achieve a financial freedom and make more money.

If you have not read previous post you can read it here: How To Set Up a Blog: Part 1 (Free Blog)

Start blogging (Step by step guide to start a blog and make money)

Blog Content

Today, we’re going to discuss the type of content that is suitable for your blog in order to make it profitable. First off, I want you to understand that there is no fixed scope that your blog should have, which means you can write about whatever you’re interested in. However, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable blog is the way the blog is written. Just imagine, would you prefer to read your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by your favorite author?

You may prefer to read the novel because it appeals more to your interest, or because it is not as mind-numbing as the lecture notes by your professor. However, the most important point is people like to read “light” stuff most of the time. You see, when people log on to your blog, they are not only looking for information – they are also looking for information they can obtain easily, and better still in a relaxed manner.

How to Write For Readers: Be Human and Be helpful

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current visitors coming back for more, it is very important to add a human touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining you’re talking about a certain topic with your personal friend. An extra bonus for your readers would be a great sense of humor, so try to add funny comments in your articles where they are suitable. If you are like me, when you specially try to be funny, it does not work, leave it to writing down facts. (Note: If you are truly gifted at making people laugh, that is special talent which can be used in writing as well. One of my friend has a humor blog, as he is funny in real life too, and he has more popular blog compared to me. I envy that. I am also okay with my humorless but informative and hopefully helpful blog of mine too. )

Another important key point is to avoid addressing your reader as a plural unit. What I really mean is you should not write as if you’re preparing a speech. Instead, you should write as if you’re having a conversation to a single person because this will make your visitor think of you more as a personal friend rather than a person of higher authority.

Besides that, it is also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. Human beings are very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

How To Think Like a Popular Blogger

Having a distinctive personality in your blog would make a world’s difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need to find out information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fast food or Nike for sportswear.

So, the lesson for today is to simply write as an equal friend to your visitors, write to them as if you’re talking to a single person and establish your own personality on your blog. I have found that when I write as a friend or person my blog readers connect much better. So, I always try to think of writing this post to my friend in email, instead of make money blog and it flows smoothly and comes out much honest. I think in long run, being helpful and yourself works if you are in long haul for blogging as a home business ideas.

Stay tuned for next part 3 in how to set up a blog series: How to Set Up Blog:Part 3:Where to Find Writing Ideas

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Also, you can learn more about favorite blogging resources and tools reviews for further details.

There are also reasonably priced web design,template and blog transfer services, if you are interested, you can use them as they have done great job with out web design.

See Complete How To Set Up Blog Series

After SOPA Now New Internet Surveillance Bill HR1981:

A friend of mine today sent me this video about a new internet surveillance bill called HR1981. Unlike SOPA, this bill is relatively unknown (so far) from media and seems to be right now focused on Canadian ISP, but I am told, US and other countries are next in line. So, what is this and why should we care.

Internet Surveillance Bill, WORSE Than SOPA: Explained

This bill HR1981, seems to be about “protecting children from pornographers”, as a parent of a child, this matters to me a lot as I am sure many other parent will feel the same. However, from what looks like, this bills treats “everyone”, including you me and you as guilty and monitors every move and keeps data for at least a one year for everyone using internet.

Why this is a concern;

1. Everyone is affected, bloggers, internet marketer, people who use online bill payment, people who use email and anything online.

2. Your IP address is tracked, even when one is using proxies. According to David Seaman, people who uses proxies services are going to be scrutinized more. Many blogger and internet marketer tend to use proxies services,

3. This is relatively unknown and under reported by media so far, so not many people seem to know about it.

I think everything in news has good and bad stuff, this bill may have good intent, but it can be misused if everyone is going to be under scrutiny, even innocent people who use internet to read news, or send an email. Here are news and video explaining what it is, so you can make your own mind and be aware and see how it may affect us.

Here is little news information so far about it that I found;

Where is HR1981 outrage by David Seaman

Toews surprised by content of online surveillance bill

Just know your laws and how it affects us. Happy blogging.

How To Set Up a Blog: Part 1

I often get asked by friends or co-workers on how to set up a blog, when I tell them I blog in my spare time. The process is simple enough but when you are new, it can be overwhelming and not knowing where to start, so I want to set up a series of articles on how to start a blog and how SEO works, whatever I know. Of course, I am not an blogger or SEO expert yet, but doing this for over 3 years has given a few skills. So here it is;

Part 1: Setting Up Your Blog

Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.

In this article, we are going to look into the profitability of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on! I want to show you how to get started on your free blog with free hosting as many new bloggers may not have money to get started yet. If you have about $5-$8 a month to spend, I recommend getting a domain and self hosting as I have learned over the years, see get started blogging post for more details.

First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options – host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or at www.wordpress.com. If you are a techie, you must have heard of WordPress, a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. WordPress.com, however, is a one platform loved and made for blogging, with many free and paid plugins making blogging so much easier. WordPress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently.

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com/signup.g) or WordPress (http://wordpress.com/signup/). Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Here are a few common “blog-related” words to help you out:

1) Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

2) Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.

3) Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later

For now, I shall leave you testing out your new blog and the features that come included with it. In the next articles, we shall discuss the many ways we can gain profit from a blog, as well as tips on how to write posts that keep visitors glued and keep coming back for more.

Stay tuned for Part of 2 of the how to set up blog series: How to Set Up Blog:Part 2- How to Write Content

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Also, you can learn more about favorite blogging resources and tools reviews for further details.

There are also reasonably priced web design,template and blog transfer services, if you are interested, you can use them as they have done great job with out web design.

See Complete How To Set Up Blog Series

Why You Should Not Use GoDaddy For Your Internet Business

Avoid Godaddy

As an internet marketer and working from online business, one the way I make some money is via affiliate marketing. For example, if I recommend a product and if my reader buys it, I make a small commission. Affiliate marketing is one of the great way to make money, selling other people’s product without much effort to create a product myself.

As a person who has lost some money on stupid or over hyped products, I know it is not fun to lose money on crappy products. I like to do ethical internet marketing and show you which products to NOT buy and save your money. I have written a few reviews to show you products that I have used and/or like. Here is a popular domain and webhosting Godaddy and why you should avoid using it.

GoDaddy Hosting and Domains

I have been GoDaddy Customer and still in process of removing my domains with other Registrar such as Namecheap or Bluehost. I have been a customer and an affiliate for GoDaddy but I am no longer recommending Godaddy for following reasons;

1. GoDaddy upsells pricy add-ons.

Many people use GoDaddy’s dirt cheap coupon codes to get $1.99 domain and cheap hosting. However, when you try to buy it, godaddy tries to add so many upsell and some additional item so your final price is much higher. One time, I had to call back to remove extra add-ons that came with upsell.

2. GoDaddy is confusing for Newbies

A few of my clients was trying to set up first blog, and Goddady site was confusing and hard to use for novices. As seen in #1, Godaddy upsells and adds some services that it becomes expensive, confusing and frustrating for some. Unless you know and have used it before, I would suggest buy from elsewhere or if you must buy it, make sure to have an expert next to you.

3. GoDaddy Supports SOPA and Backs Off

As I have written in my post SOPA issue, which is thankfully postponed for now, Godaddy was initially supporting SOPA and PIPA. In easy terms, that means, if you had a domain or hosting from Godaddy, they can shut down your site if you used any copyright material or even linked to it by chance. So think of this way, great site like wikipedia would not exist, as there will be no free knowledge sharing, no downloads, no linking .

After many internet marketer took their business away, GoDaddy relented and stop supporting SOPA sort of. When you are running a business, you want to protect your business and content and work with companies that are stable and stable in decision making.

4. GoDaddy Hosting is slow

Godaddy apprantely puts so many domains on one server, slowing the websites for everyone involved. As these sites competes for space and bandwidth, it slows down your site, means if you lose your readers and customers for sites that sell merchandise.

Not only that, if your site loads up slow, Google penalizes your site and ranks it much lower. Why would anyone want to rank low, knowingly?

Another problem with slow hosting and slow server is, you will not know if anything is broken or needs maintenance on your site for half an hour or longer.

5. GoDaddy does not give you cPanel Control

For those of you, who are already blogging knows the power that cPanel can give in controlling and managing your domain and content. I have bluehost for hosting this website, while they are about $6 a month compared to $4 a month for GoDaddy, bluehost gives me cPanel to manage my domains. As an administrator of your site, I rather have a control of my own site and content via cPanel. You get none from Godaddy.

6. GoDaddy have lousy relationship with publishers.

For Godaddy, if you are a small publisher making little money for them, they do not care much. I have 4 people told me, they bought Godaddy from my links, yet it never clicked or registered with GoDaddy. I sent them proof of purchase from clients and their email and there was no response. I finally got to talk with one person, who seemed nice enough but did not do anything for me in the end.

Not only that, clients who bought Godaddy domain or hosting, had a such as terrible time with Godaddy customer service that I felt as I recommended them, it was my responsibility to only recommend good product with good customer services. Now, I know all Godaddy’s Rep are not bad, some are good, I have had a good customer service with them. However, generally speaking for many people, customer services from Godaddy left much to desire.

Conclusion:

I have been a Godaddy customer and have both good and bad experience. I still have a few domains with them, which I am in process of moving to Namecheap. As namecheap is cheap and provides free whois guard, unlike Godaddy or bluehost.

The biggest lure of Godaddy is abdunce of coupon codes available, making you feel you are getting a great domain and/or hosting a cheap price, but by the time you buy it it may not be cheap at all and you end up spending same of more for the same thing. See example, here is a rough price breakdown for domain according to domain comparison site.

Price Breakdown:

GoDaddy $10.69 per year
Namecheap.com $9.69 per year
Name.com $8.99 pear year

See Related Posts from other bloggers about Godaddy:

iThemes GoDaddy Post

Avoid Godaddy

6 reasons to avoid Godaddy