Blog Posting Softwares How to Blog & What Softwares to Use

If making money is your goal, here are 5 vital blogging tips to insure your blog has a solid foundation from which it can grow.

1) Have knowledge or a Passion to Learn

If you don’t have some knowledge of or at least a passion to learn more about the material you’re blogging about it will be difficult to add content to your blog. Your knowledge or passion will be the motivation needed to continually post content that is both interesting and useful to your readers. It will also make your posting routine more enjoyable and less like work.

2) Establish a domain name

It is recommended that you purchase your ‘own’ domain name. The cost is minimal and and it will look more legitimate to your visitors. Also your domain will be more highly regarded by the online advertising networks, many of which will not accept sites without their own domain names.

You’ll also want to have your site hosted as opposed to a free site since this gives you total control of the site. A site hosted by for instance Google or wordpress can be shut down at any time due to any activity they view as a violation of their policies.

3) Keep Your Content Current

The more frequent you post to your blog the better. Your posts should remain fresh to encourage visitors to return while attracting new readers as well. Think of it as breathing air into the life lungs of the blog.

4) Identify with Your Readers

Be sure to cater to the interests of your readers by responding to and acting upon their comments. With the ability to interact with your visitors thru the comments they leave comes the opportunity for you to know them better. What is it they want to read about? What problems may they have that you can assist them with? Don’t ignore your readers; speak TO them not AT them. Their appreciation of this will be reflected by them continually returning to your blog.

5) Setting up a Money Making Blog

If you’re interested in making money by blogging, there are ways to optimize your blog to accomplish this. The use of banner ads that reflect products you may want to sell is a very popular and passive way to earn an income. Please note that by representing or promoting multiple products or services will diversify your income opportunities. Expecting to make a living with just one product is unrealistic. Google adsense, affiliate products, and other online advertisers looking for viable ad space are some of the more popular ways to monetize a blog, but by no means do the opportunities stop there.

I hope these basic yet vital blogging tips have given you a definitive direction in which to take your blog. Also remember to blog about something your interested in. The point is to make this experience enjoyable not only for your readers, but also for you!

By: T. J. Philpott

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina. For additional success tips and a free guide that demonstrates how to find both profitable markets and products visit:blogbrawn.com/

For a more comprehensive guide on how to make money blogging, take a look at Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 3.0.

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I monitor a lot of blogs, forums and news sites with my trusty RSS reader. One of my favorite sites is SitePoint, which is a terrific discussion forum for webmasters, programmers and domain name investors.

I’ve had some great conversations on the forums and via IM that have been very enlightening.

In a recent post, one of the SitePoint forum guys was lamenting the fact that he was having trouble getting to 100 unique visitors per day.

There was some good, solid advice that I would like to share and build upon:

1. Make sure your posts are optimized with popular keywords. I would be careful with this one because you don’t want to lose your blogging voice or make your pages read awkwardly by jamming in as many keywords as you can. Do check for the most popular keywords in your universe, though, using a tool like WordTracker. As a poster on SitePoint said, using the competition values in WordTracker allows you to pick keywords that haven’t soaked the web yet.

2. Use a service like PinGoat to ping blogger indexing sites every time you change your site. Pinging is basically extending an invitation to indexing services like Technorati, IceRocket and Feedster to come to your site and index it. The more indexing you get, the more exposure you get. PinGoat is a terrific service that pings them all at the same time.

3. Update your Google Sitemap every few posts and resubmit it. A Google Sitemap is an interesting and amazing phenomenon. Here is how Google explains it:

The Google Sitemaps program is two-way communication between webmasters and Google. You can give us information about your site so we can index it more effectively, and we can show you how we see your site and tell you about any trouble we’ve had crawling it.

Basically you create a special xml file and tell Google to go look at it. It uses the file to better index the site. And it definitely works. There’s even a Plugin for WordPress that will build the perfect sitemap for Google. You can read more about sitemaps by visiting the Google Sitemapspage.

4. Post relevant comments on blogs related to your content area. Look around, find people blogging about the same stuff as you. Monitor their blog sites and participate in the discussion. Be sure to include a link to your site in all of your comments. It’s a great way to correspond with like-minded people and get your name and site name out there.

5. Search for link partners and link exchanges at least once a week. If you find a site you like, include it on your link page and drop the site owner an email. He or she will most likely list your site as well. Join a couple of free or cheap link exchange sites and stick to your subject area when exchanging links. Always visit the prospective link exchange site and ask yourself if you would be doing your readers a service by sending them to that site. If not, don’t link to the site.

6. Write great content, and don’t plug stuff unless you are familiar with it and approve of it. If you write interesting content about subjects that interest people they will always find you. Don’t hustle your readers if you are going to plug something for money, make sure the product or service is something you would use and recommend. If people sense a hustle they will not convert and they will not come back.

7. Watch your keywords and make sure they are performing. DigitalPoint has a terrific tool that will help you track your keyword placement over time so you can see how your efforts are doing.

8. Perform some basic Search Engine Optimization. Learn how to not only optimize your posts, but optimize your entire site. You can get some great tips and tools at SeoChat.com

9. Shake loose a couple of bucks and buy some ad space. Once you’re certain your blog looks and operates perfectly, spend $100 on Adsense ads and see how that helps.

10. Be patient. It isn’t going to happen overnight. It will take weeks or months to get things rolling.

By: Matt DeAngelis -

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.

For a more comprehensive guide on how to make money blogging, take a look at Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 3.0.

More resources:

Increasing blog traffic, How?

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Twitter isn’t for marketing your blog, but for networking and building a community. This community over time will lead to traffic to your blog. Feel free to post you new blog posts on Twitter as well. …   Read more…

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Wordpress And General Blogging Tips

So I’ll discuss a little about the wordpress platform, themes, recommended plugins and some tips.

If you have just started blogging, there are a few steps you should take.

1. Activate the akismet plugin. This plugin comes preinstalled with wordpress but you have to activate it and get a wordpress key (which takes 2 minutes). Akismet blocks spam comments on your blog, so if you choose to enable comments on your posts (which you should) then this plugin is a must, and best of all it’s a set and forget.

2. Choose a theme. You could use the default theme, but it’s way overused. The ideal is to choose a theme that is very user friendly, with good link visibility, nice color contrast, and a nice and attractive layout. If you know how to design a theme or can change a free theme to your liking, then you should do so, unique content and layout designs are always a better choice than free themes that are probably used by hundreds or more. A good place to get themes is the Wordpress Theme Directory. Another one is searching google for "free wordpress themes"

3. Decide on a permalink structure, permalinks are the actual links to your blog posts, and wordpress gives you a lot of flexibility here. For maximum SEO performance, you should simply choose "yourdomain.com/blog-post-title" but this really comes down to personal preference as I personally don’t think it makes that much of a difference, so you might prefer "yourdomain.com/year/month/blog-post-title" that is also search engine (and user) friendly. Whatever you choose, do activate the permalink feature because otherwise you’ll have those ugly query strings all over your urls.

4. Download and install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin. This plugin takes care of updating and submitting your sitemap to Google and other search engines. This allows search engine to know more about the structure of your website.

5. Dowload and install the All In One SEO Pack Plugin. This plugin optimizes your blogs output for search engine optimization. Optimizes keywords, page titles and more.

6. Install the ShareThis plugin or a similar social bookmarking plugin. This should go right after your posts along with a reminder letting visitors know they can subscribe to your feed. This way visitors have some options when they finish reading your posts. If they like your post, they will be able to quickly submit it to whatever social bookmarking sites they use or e-mail to a friend.

7. Create an About page. You should use this page to introduce yourself to the visitors, your background, your work, what you do and like and what people should expect from your blog. This gives your blog a personal touch that helps visitors to identify you as an actual human behind the blog. Also consider placing one or several pictures of yourself on the about page (or on a photos page if you prefer) as this also greatly increases the human awareness of the visitor.

8. Create a Contact page. You can simply put up a page with e-mail instructions or use a contact me plugin like Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form. This gives confidence to the visitor that he can reach you if he so chooses and, like the about page, gives the human touch.

9. Create an account on FeedBurner for your blog and give your visitors a visible option to subscribe to your blog by RSS and by e-mail (FeedBurner takes good care of all this). This allows users to use an rss reader or just get your posts by e-mail. Most visitors never return so you should make it easy and worthwhile for them to subscribe to your blog and receive future updates.

Well, those are 9 of the things that I think are most common and needed, but I could go on, you should familiarize yourself as much as possible with wordpress (or your other blogging platform of choice), try out new plugins and optimize your theme. It’s a work in progress, but you shouldn’t let that get in the way of your posting.

You could consider setting up a password protected subdomain and creating a clone blog for testing (or install it on your own computer) because once you start getting traffic you shouldn’t go trying new things on your live site where things could break giving your visitors a bad surfing experience. A clone blog is obviously just a blog installation that matches your actual site with the same theme, same plugins and a few dummy posts so you can do your testing.

Once you get your blog ready to go, all that’s left to do is start posting! You should make a nice first post, introducing yourself briefly and letting the reader know that you have an About page with more details. You should give some idea of what visitors can expect from your blog posts.

Now for some quick blogging tips:

1. Make constant posts. You should try your best to do about 3 posts per week minimum. This all depends on your ability to express yourself with words. If you’re good at it, then post as much as you can, daily or even bidaily. If you’re not, well, then try to make at least 3 posts per week.

2. Use post titles wisely. Your post title is very important as it’s the part that will be most visible to the web. Create informative titles, the words you choose here will eventually make your site rank on google for some or all of those same keywords.

3. Make medium to long posts. Not saying that you can’t do small blog posts, you can and should, but you should try your best to create full length and keyword rich posts. Write your best and biggest posts as if the were articles with a small intro, content and conclusion.

4. Post about other blogs. Read blogs about the same topic than yours and link to them and do your own spin on the post, agree, disagree, whatever. Basically try to engage in friendly debates with other bloggers.

5. Leave them wanting for more. End your posts with a small text about what you’ll be posting about next time. Be creative and suspenseful.

6. Proof read and spell check your post before publishing. Occasional typos are ok, but proof reading and using a spell checker should keep them to a minimum.

7. Have fun! You should be having fun blogging. If you’re just starting you can probably feel a little intimidated or sometimes don’t knowing what to post. But you shouldn’t stress to much about it, just take a break and post some other time. Blogging should be relaxing not stressful. Find inspiration around you.

Well and that’s it, there you have just some blogging tips to get you started. These are of course mostly geared to blogging beginners. You can do much more with blogs and use the blogging platform to create other type of niche sites and adsense sites but that is topic for a whole different article.

By: Roberto Gomes

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Roberto Gomes writes for TheMillionDollarDomain.com, a blog aimed at beginners in the make money online business, internet marketing and all subtopics that revolve around it like traffic generation, search engine optimization, contextual advertising, affiliate marketing and much more.

More Resources:

 
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For a more comprehensive guide on how to make money blogging, take a look at Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 3.0.

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