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.

There is no question that Twitter and RSS have some things in common. However, they are not the same, and Twitter will not kill the feed reader. This is a concept I have seen come up a number of times, and frankly, I just don’t see it happening, at least not without some dramatic changes in how Twitter is presented to its users.

Note: There are many different feed readers that offer different options. I am not familiar with all of them. There are also many Twitter applications out there that allow for different kinds of integrations, and again I am not familiar with all of them.

There are similarities and differences between the concepts that are RSS and Twitter. Let’s look at a few of them.

How They Are the Same

- One thing they have in common is that there are a lot of people that don’t understand the purpose of either one.

- Both can bring you a wealth of information that you are interested in receiving into one convenient place.

- Both can keep you up to date with news.

- Both can provide a means of discovering new and interesting content.

- From the content provider’s perspective, both can provide a convenient delivery method.

How they Are Different

- Of course, Twitter is a two-way communication tool whereas a feed reader only brings information in. Although some have social features that allow for interaction…Google for example has gotten more social with sharing and commenting features.

- With RSS there is a better chance that content won’t go overlooked. Feed readers put a number on the unread posts. Twitter is a never-ending stream. Granted, you can go to each person’s stream separately, but you won’t see any specific number of unread posts.

- RSS Readers can be organized, broken down into categories…how do you organize Twitter messages (without RSS feeds)?

- With Twitter, you can only subscribe to or “follow” those you find on Twitter. With RSS, you pretty much have the entire web as long as the site offers feeds, which most providing regular content do by now. Most blogging platforms create feeds automatically.

- With feeds, you get a lot more visible content. With Twitter, you get 140 characters. Some feeds allow for full text. With tweets you will always have to follow links to get full content.

- Tweets are real-time. RSS tends to drag behind a bit (at least in my experience).

Jeff Chandler puts it well (if not bluntly):

“To limit yourself to Twitter instead of RSS is a dumb move because your feedreader provides you the opportunity to see the bigger picture. You get to see many viewpoints instead of just one. You get to see trends outside of what people are talking about. Instead of updates or cool posts from here or their on the web, your feedreader serves the purpose of bringing all sorts of great information from across the web to you in one location.”

You can subscribe to Twitter streams as RSS feeds, for better organization, which is another endorsement for RSS. Use a feed reader to organize your Twitter friends’ posts. You can also set up your blog to post to Twitter via RSS.

Will Twitter replace feed readers?

I don’t think so. But it certainly could become more mainstream (if it hasn’t already). You could probably find more people on the street that have heard of Twitter than have RSS at this point. But for those who have already been enjoying RSS, you’re going to have a hard time convincing them that Twitter will replace it in their lives.

While similar in some aspects, they are clearly two very different animals. Like blogs and Twitter, there is no reason why they can’t co-exist, and even feed off of each other.

The best links on Twitter often come from people who acquire those links themselves via feed readers. Likewise, a lot of bloggers are gathering information from Twitter to compose their content.

I do think that RSS and Twitter can be used to explain each other to those who don’t grasp the concept of one or the other. If you describe Twitter as “sort of a feed reader” type service, you may drive (at least part of) the point home. If someone doesn’t understand RSS, you might be able to explain it using Twitter as an example. Just a thought.