…Continued from

Blogging And Businesses Today Part 1

Blogging And Businesses Today Part 2

First, let’s look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that you’re targeting. 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 or www.x-about.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. Then, suggest that so-and-so content on your own blog will be a nice complement to their site’s content and vice versa. Put a link on your 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.

Along the way, you might find people who won’t even respond to your email, so forget aboutthem and move on. Remove the links from your blog to their site if they have not responded to your email within two weeks, which is a pretty long wait. 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 offpage factors, and ways to improve them!

Part 6 – Offpage Search Engine Optimization II

(contiued from Blogging And Businesses Today Part 2)

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 timesensitive. 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.

Most people buy and beg for backlinks and that is not a very good way to go about getting backlinks. Some sites that sell backlinks have a very bad rep with google and google will penalize you for having backlinks for some sites! You will also get penalized if all of a sudden you show up on the search engine with a 1000 backlinks when the other day you had none. Remember one thing Google ain’t dumb. The programmers at Google did not just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

You will need good solid backlinks and the best way to build your backlinks up is slow and steady. There is a report that will show you how and will give you the places to go to get backlinks, without paying or begging for them. It will show you where to get high PR backlinks, .edu backlinks, .gov backlinks, and even a few PR-8, PR-9 and PR-10 backlinks all free for nothing. Just a little work on your part. Less than 15 minutes.

More Traffic Sources

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. 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

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.

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. There are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space. I do not like to buy links when I can get very good text anchor, backlinks for free.

Does anyone even go to the Twitter homepage anymore? It seems like more and more users are changing the origin of their tweets as Twitter desktop clients are becoming more mainstream.

There are literally dozens of desktop clients available for download… but which are the best?

To assist you in your Twittering efforts I’ve put together a list of 5 great desktop Twitter clients to help you Tweet from your desktop. If you know of a better one or don’t agree with one of my selections, leave a comment with a description and a link.

Are you currently using a Twitter desktop client? If so which app do you use? Tell us.

TweetDeck, my personal favorite, is like having a dedicated browser window just for social use. It makes going to Twitter.com almost obsolete.

TweetDeck allows you easily customize what you see in each column. Easily see Twitter updates, @ Replies, Direct Messages, Facebook status updates, Stocktwits, Twitscoop and more. A really neat feature is the ability to build groups of people you follow based on your certain parameters you set.

One of my biggest gripes with TweetDeck is how you have to go about re-arranging the columns. It should be a simple drag and drop but instead you have to use this nav at the bottom of each column. Sure it’s minor… but it is quite annoying at times.

Seesmic Desktop has been out for a few months. It was supposed to be the “answer” for TweetDeck, which took users away from Twhirl (another Seesmic desktop app).

At first glance Seesmic Desktop is a very clean looking app, a bit too “Mac” for my personal taste… but I’m sure most users love it.

Much like TweetDeck you can set columns with various information of your choosing. Probably the slickest feature Seesmic desktop features is a “drag and drop” image feature which uploads images to Twitpic for you.

For a full breakdown of all the features and a demonstration, check out the video below…

Twitterrific comes in two formats, a free (ad-supported) version or a premium version for $14.95. The two versions are essentially identical; the only differnece being that the free one has a small ad that is visible once an hour.

Some of the key features of Twitterrific include…

• Small desktop footprint
• Multiple Twiiter account support
• Number of unread tweets shown in the Dock
• Easily switch between friend and public tweets
• Keyboard shortcuts

One of the only “downfalls” is that Twitterrific is only available for the Mac. (If you consider this a downfall)

twhirl, the other desktop client by Seesmic, has been around for sometime and has a loyal fanbase.

Some of the key features for twhirl are…

• Connect to multiple Twitter and Friendfeed accounts
• Cross-post your updates to numerous social clients
• Easily find tweets mentioning our @username.

twhirl also offers extensive configuration options, some might even say too many options.

One of the drawbacks, and their reasoning for developing the multiple column client Seesmic desktop, is twhirl only features a single column layout.

DestroyTwitter is hoping to do what their name suggests, by keeping you far away from the Twitter homepage. The very compact Twitter app features several “canvases” (tabs) which update constantly.

One of the best things about DestroyTwitter is its minimal use of memory, compared to other AIR-based Twitter apps.

One of the better, if not the best, feature of DestroyTwitter is the “Rules” feature. With rules you can “exclude” certain users as well as certain keywords. Below is a snippet from DestroyTwitter about this feature…

“The Rules preferences are used for filtering the Home canvas. They allow the user to restrict the canvas to only showing particular users’ tweets. What makes it different though is ability to exclude users as well. Excluding users shows tweets from all users except the ones listed under “Exclude these users.” There is also an option to show only tweets that contain links. Users are added to each list by either clicking the plus sign or pressing the hotkey Command + Shift + I/E (Mac) or Control + shift + I/E (PC) to prompt Quick Friend Lookup where I is include and E is exclude. Users can also be added in other canvases by pressing either I or E while a tweet is selected. This adds the user who posted the selected tweet. To remove a user from a list, hold Option (Mac) or Alt (PC) and click the username. Clicking the username without holding the modifier navigates to that user’s profile. Rules are applied the next time the Home canvas refreshes. Clicking “Apply rules” applies them immediately.”

When you first look at DestroyTwitter it’s quite apparent that TweetDeck was the design inspiration, and why not mimic the best desktop client out there.

First read my post about Blogging And Businesses Today Part 1

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.

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.

Blog Content Brainstorming 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.It is important to know how to write attractively.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 your mundane job! 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.

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. 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. 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! On Page Search Engine Optimization Now, 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 factsheet.

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, 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. 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!

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. 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.

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!

Somewhere along the line you are going to have to spend a little money on a guide to show you all of the real ins and outs of blogging. One of the best reports I know of is Blogging And Businesses Today How To Become A Blogging PRO Save Hundreds Of Lost Hours and thousands of dollars in lost time and potential earnings by setting up your blogs right the first time!

Most plug-ins are free and can be gotten at wordpress.org, however there are a few that are well worth paying for. Here are a few plug-ins you can’t live without. The first six are MUST have. If you do not have those first six plug-ins………forgetaboutit. Most of the plug-ins are at wordpress.org, if you can not find one or two of the plugins there then just “google” it.

all-in-one-seo-pack

google-sitemap-generator

google-analytics-for-wordpress

maxblogpress-ping-optimizer

wordpress-automatic-upgrade

FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin

add-to-any

advanced-permalinks

all-in-one-adsense-and-ypn

answerlinks

are-paypal

autoresponder-gwa

auto-translator

business-directory

cnn-news

diggz-et

full-text-feed

max-banner-ads

maxblogpress-favicon

maxblogpress-unblockable-popup

jeromes-keywords

Lucia_s_LinkyLove

onlywireautosubmit

Offpage 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 offpage 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 offpage factors, but we shall study them one by one. The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog. 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 to ask for 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!

Let’s talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to link to your blog. 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.

Will continue in the part 3..

Google says AdWords’ real-time targeting and reporting are ideal for finding an efficient way to reach customers in the economic downturn. The company has detailed six tactics for maximizing your AdWords investment.Aka Make more money online.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.

“Consumers care about prices more than ever, especially on day-to-day purchases,” says Google. “When someone searches on a particular product, you know they’re interested; by using your ad to tell them that you’ve got the highest quality and the best price, you’re more likely to earn their click.”

2. Use value-related keywords.

People are constantly looking for bargains. Google suggests using keywords that cater to this mentality. The company recommends using the AdWords Search-based keyword tool and Search Query Performance report to find higher-performing keywords that people are actually searching.

3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.

“Ads perform best when their ad text reflects the ad group’s keywords; this makes ads more relevant to their intended audience,” says Google. “Make sure that both the text and the keywords in each ad group focus on a specific topic or product.”

4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.

Google suggests using negative keywords to filter out traffic from people looking for things that you don’t offer. They use an example that if you sell peanut butter, you might want to use “allergy” as a negative keyword.

5. Make it easy for customers to buy.

This tactic is all bout the landing page. Put some thought into your landing page, because people don’t want to hunt around trying to find where they need to go to buy the item they clicked on the ad to buy in the first place. Why make it hard? It should be as easy a process as possible.

6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

Google has a free conversion tracking tool that will let you see what keywords and ads are performing best. It is wise to focus your time and resources on the ones you are getting the most value out of.

That’s the six tactics Google provides for maximizing you AdWords investment. Performance is more important than ever when there is not as much money to play around with. If you’re using PPC as an advertising method, focus on eliminating the waste of money by getting the most you can out of your campaigns. Google provides more resources for each of these tactics here.