How To Join The Blogging Revolution

The Legalities

The Publisher has strived to be as accurate and complete as possible in the creation of this report, notwithstanding the fact that he does not warrant or represent at any time that the contents within are accurate due to the rapidly changing nature of the Internet.

While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, the Publisher assumes no responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. Any perceived slights of specific persons, peoples, or organizations are unintentional.

Like anything else in life, no guarantee of income is made. You are advised to use your own wise judgment and due diligence in applying the information within this manual to your circumstances and condition.

This book is not intended to be a source of professional, legal, financial and/or accounting advice. Where these subjects are concerned, you are advised to seek competent advice from professionals.

This manual is written in Verdana for easy reading. You are encouraged to print this manual for reading convenience.

Content

The Legalities 2

Contents 3

Modern Blogging 5
1.1 Blogging Defined 5
1.2 The Popularity of Blogs Today 6
1.3 Why Start Your Own Blog? 6
1.5 The Pros 8
1.6 The Cons 9

Blogging for Profit 11
2.1 Making a Decent Income from Google Adsense 11
2.2 Pre-selling Your Own Collection of Products 12
2.3 Promoting Affiliate Programs 12
2.4 Selling Advertising Space 13
2.5 Other Methods You Can Make Money From 14

Step by Step Set Up 16
3.1 Planning Your Blogging Profit Plan 16
3.2 Choosing a Popular and Profitable Theme 17
3.3 What You Need to Get Started 17
3.4 Creating Your Own Blog Account 18
3.5 Building Content Rich Pages 19
3.6 How to Drive Targeted Traffic into Your Blog 20
3.7 Increasing Your Blog’s Page Ranking & Search Engine Results 21
3.8 Making Money from Your Blog 22
3.9 Powerful Blogging Tips & Strategies 22

Creating Content 24
4.1 The Importance of Updating Your Blog Often 24
4.2 Writing Your Own Content 25
4.3 Using Ghostwriters to Write Content For You 25
4.4 Using Private Label Articles to Build your Pages 26
4.5 Leveraging on Articles with Reprint Rights 27
4.6 Why Keyword Focus & Density Matters 28
4.7 Content & Writing Tips 29

RSS (Really Simple 30
5.1 What is RSS? 30
5.2 How Can RSS Benefit Your Blogging Activities? 31
5.3 Adding RSS Feeds to Your Blog 31

Getting Traffic 33
6.1 Link Exchanges 33
6.2 Submitting Your Blog to RSS & Blog Directories 34
6.3 Leverage on Article Marketing 34
6.4 Using Ad Swaps 35
6.5 Search Engine Optimization 36
6.6 Getting Viral with Free Reports 37
6.7 Other Notable Traffic Generation Strategies 37

And Finally 39
7.1 Is Blogging For You or Everyone? 39
7.2 Recommended Blogging Tools & Resources 40
7.3 Last Minute Blogging Tips & Tricks 40
7.4 Recommended Resources 42

1.1 Blogging Defined

With the recent rise in advanced social networking sites and the subsequent attention they have received from media outlets, people commonly perceive weblogs–which are the staple of social networking–as a new invention; however, this isn’t entirely true. Adding information to web-logs or “blogs”–blogging defined today–has been around for over ten years–and has gradually gained strength on the Internet as means of communication.

While people blogging in the early 1990s generally limited their blogs to personal information, such as chronicles and diaries, bloggers defined today includes blogging on a wide variety of different topics–from politics to cheese-tasting; however, blogging defined today is very much the same: a simple means to better facilitate communication.

Blogging defined is one of the most effective means of Internet-based communication because it is relatively easy and requires little time investment. Using a blogging interface like WordPress or Google’s Blogger, a blog owner can add new entries to his blog while he sits in a meeting at work or watches events unfold on TV. Rather than fooling around with messy code, he can simply enter his message textually in his blog; and then update it in a matter of seconds.

Another crucial aspect of blogging that makes it such an effective medium for communication is that it allows for rapid-response comments. A political debate could literally unfold over the course of the afternoon in the form of comments on a blog.

Conversely, blogging defined by the media is often “controversial,” but it doesn’t have to be that way. Many blogs are used to simply say “hello” to friends who are blog owners. This is quite common with social networking sites, such as Myspace and Livejournal–both of which use a form of blog to facilitate communication.

Whether blogging defined is a form spurring debate between political opponents or blogging defined is a means of increasing bonds between friends, they have the ability to rapidly increase the speed of communication by acting as a sort of intermediary between a full-featured website and a forum.

1.2 The Popularity of Blogs Today

In recent studies by the American Life Project and The Guardian (UK), researchers asked whether or not the popularity of blogs today was growing in the two countries; and if so, why? The results on the popularity of blogs today were not exactly what most members of the blogosphere might expect.

Researchers working on the American Life Project found that the popularity of blogs today in terms of readerships in the United States was absolutely exploding; however, they also found that the amount of blogs available was increasing slowly in comparison. In the last six months, for instance, blog readers grew from a mere 17% of the population to a robust 37%–a significant increase. However, blog writers only increased from 5% and 7%; and largely maintained their homogeneous composition, which is predominantly male, young, and wealthy. The ALP attributed this explosion in readerships to the Presidential race, where both candidates employed blogging in some form to attract campaign donors.

The Guardian, which performed their study more recently, also found similar results in the United Kingdom on the popularity of blogs today. While they also found that readerships had increased dramatically, they did not find the same issue of slow blog growth; however, they did find out that a fairly astonishing 30% of frequent Internet users had never even heard of a blog.

So in which direction is the popularity of blogs today moving?–To greater profusion or to obscurity?

Given that blogs are the best intermediary between websites and forums, it is hard to imagine that they will decrease in the popularity of blogs today; conversely, however, it isn’t hard to imagine that they will improve significantly in continuation with how they have changed since their inception in the mid-1990s.

In the short term, it is fairly safe to imagine that larger blogs will experiment with video technology while older blogs stick with easy, faster-loading models. It is also fairly safe to image that blog indexing methods will continue to improve and may even break away from the traditional algorithm method.

1.3 Why Start Your Own Blog?

Why start your own blog when you can simply use a website? That is a question many marketers ask. The truth is that blogs are started for decidedly different reasons–some social, some productive, and some a combination of both. If you plan to start a blog for entirely social reasons, you may want to select a medium with high networking value, such as one of the networks that have large amounts of members and allow for high degrees of interactivity.

If your goal is to create a blog that is completely productive, the question of “why start your own blog?” may become even more crucial, as you probably see starting a blog as a potential time trap. If this is the case, you may want to bypass social networking altogether and instead create something with an easy-to-manage and easy-to-update template, such as Blogger. If you do this, you will find yourself asking the question “why start your own blog when you’ve already got a website?” less and less.

You may want to block comments altogether to prevent extended conversations between blog viewers. Even though comments can improve how fresh a blog appears to search engines–and can also add new content–they can be seriously abused if you do not have the time to monitor them closely. They can be the source of perpetual fights on your blog–or a means for blog spammers to post their irrelevant and unrelated comments on your blog. Additionally, if you’ve ever been involved in a heated forum debate, you can understand why allowing viewers to interact could seriously detract from time you could spend marketing.

Your third option is to create a blog that combines both productive goals with social interaction. This might seem impossible, as social interaction can only decrease the amount of time you can potentially spend working, but it actually isn’t.

If your goal is to position yourself as an industry leader for your topical blog, then you will want to have some means of interacting with other industry leaders; and you will also want to prove your worth through responses to questions. Additionally, you can also use social controversy to market your product. For instance, if you own a dieting blog and you have a defensible, controversial stance on something like low carb diets, you could benefit significantly by stirring up controversy on low carb blogs — and then sending them your way. You can then use your blog to reel them in to your salespage.

So, to answer the question of “why start your own blog when you have a website?” : blogs can be created for completely social reasons, for completely productive reasons, or for something in between that involves both. In many cases, this simply isn’t substitutable for a website.

1.4 Types of Blogs You Can Build

The types of blogs you can build are limited only by your imagination and by your willingness to conduct research. For instance, while some bloggers focus on general topics, such as cars, other bloggers narrow the scope of their blogs even further to sub-topics, such as luxury cars or antique cars. From an optimization standpoint, a blog with a narrower scope would likely outperform a blog with a broader scope in terms of conversions or clicks-per-visitor. So, if your goal is to make money, the types of blogs you can build are somewhat limited.

In terms of actual topics for the types of blogs you can build, there are about 9 major areas that are popular for current blogs: business, culture, community, politics, religion, science, travel, online diaries, and gossip. Most blog directories use similar topical categories to order blogs.

In addition to the topic for the types of blogs you can build, you will also want to consider the program used to generate it. This is another way that directories categorize blogs. For instance, blogs can fall under the category of the tool or software that was used to create them. Some blogs are created using Google’s Blogger. These blogs are often lumped together in directories as the same “type” of blog. They actually have an auto-surfing system that allows you to jump randomly from one Blogger blog to another.

Other types of blogs you can build include social networking blogs, which allow members of the same network to interact with each other using various blog functions. Two examples are Livejournal–which was one of the original social networking blog systems–and Myspace, which is currently the largest, boasting a base of around 80,000,000 users. In recent months, marketers and business persons have begun using Myspace to introduce their product to potential customers.

Another type of blog you can build is a video blog or “vlog.” These usually contain videos and allow other posts to attach media in comments.

The last types of blogs you can build are geographical blogs. With such a robust blogging atmosphere–with users weighing in from all over the globe–directories, such as Blog Wise will allow users to search for blogs by geographic location. If you believe you have some information you can contribute about your specific region, you may want to start a regional geographic blog.

1.5 The Pros

Internet marketers, business professionals, and high school cheerleaders have all debated the virtues of a blog. Even though blogs are relatively easy to update, many question whether or not they provide real value–or just a means to create more meaningless information. So what are the pros to building a blog and what are the cons?

The high school cheerleader in the above example may see some serious social value in a blog (the pros), but isn’t sure if journaling her every move is really worth the time (the cons). The business professional might see the value in keeping in touch with clients and
colleagues, but might not want to be tied to yet another responsibility. And the Internet marketer might the pros of having a blog as its ability to drive traffic to a new product, but isn’t sure whether he will actually have enough vested interest to continue updating it.

In fact, blogging can be a positive time investment for any of our characters in question; and the pros do outweigh the cons.

Take the cheerleader for instance. She could open a Livejournal or Myspace account and spend a half hour each day updating her blog. Now all of her friends can find out exactly what she is up to without talking to her on the phone for hours about the same exact topics. The pros are significant. She can also simply post comments on their blogs and respond to comments on her blog. This frees up a lot of time, which she can now spend working on her cheerleading routines.

Next, consider the business professional. Rather than repeating plans to several different colleagues, he can simply create a private blog; and use it to articulate and update all of his plans and ideas. He can then provide all of the colleagues in question with access to this blog. In this case, the pros are also significant.

Last, consider the Internet marketer. He knows the blog will be a useful mechanism for driving traffic to his salespage, but he doesn’t think he will have the interest to continue updating it. Rather than updating it himself, he can hire an expert on the subject to do it for him — or he can purchase material and use that to update it. Since most blogs can be updated without downloading software, almost anyone can do this update for him. This means that he now has a stable source of traffic generation and some extra time to promote his product.

1.6 The Cons

You’ve heard all of the hype about blogging on the news. You’ve even heard about people who use monetized blogs to rake in piles of cash. Maybe you’ve even read “Blogging to the Bank”–or even have a number of monetized blogs yourself. You might wonder if everything about blogging really is true–if it really is that good—or if you’ve only heard the pros, not the cons.

Let’s first tackle this from a non-marketing perspective. If you’re not selling any good or service, what are the cons to owning a blog?

Owning a blog can be a serious drain on your time, even if it is a completely casual blog, which you update irregularly. It is yet another thing that you must check; and if you don’t bother checking it and updating, it is essentially a non-functional, casual time drain. These are some of the cons you will want to consider.

And from a marketing perspective, there are also the cons associated with a blog, especially when compared to the alternatives, such as a fully functional website. While a blog might provide you with an easy means to make updates and an easy means to pull in traffic, you can effectively do all of this better with a fully functional site.

For instance, if you want to constantly update content, you can add RSS feeds to different pages on your site. This will look like fresh content to spiders, very much like comments on your blog would appear.

And if you’re looking for a means to communicate with potential customers or to talk about problems with current customers, you are probably better off either using a support ticket system or creating a forum, which, if done properly, will yield more fresh content than a blog, but will require significantly less effort on your part.

Additionally, as a marketer, a blog that significantly detract from your time. It can also put you in a bind to add fresh content to a site that might be better off with a static, optimized sales page.

Overall, a blog can be an effective stand-alone device for pulling traffic, but if you’re looking for a more long term solution, you may be better off using a suite of different tools and a fully-functional site, especially when you consider the cons associated with a blog.

2.1 Making a Decent Income from Google Adsense

Making a decent income from Google Adsense – is it even possible? Anyone who has received a single, $100 check or deposit from Google after an entire year’s work will probably say no, it isn’t possible; and anyone who tells you that making a decent income from Google Adsense is possible is lying to you. On the other hand, anyone selling a product that promotes the use of Google Adsense will probably tell you that it’s easy to make thousands of dollars each month.

What is the truth about making a decent income from Google Adsense? It’s somewhere in the middle. The good news (or maybe bad news) is that there aren’t any real tricks to the process. The key to making a decent income from Google Adsense lies in repeating a bunch of tedious research and development actions hundreds of times.

The first step to making a decent income from Google Adsense involves actually finding the right keywords. Now, the “right keywords” will depend on what you plan to use as your source of traffic. If your source of traffic is design and linking – i.e. natural search engine optimization – then you will want to look at two things: which keywords have high pay-per-click values (you can research this with an Adwords account) and high bidder densities, but very few competing sites for non-sponsored results?

If you can find keywords that have few competitors and high bids, you have a winning niche. All you have to do now is develop a site with Adsense ads, build in search engine optimization, and wait to get traffic.

Another means of making a decent income from Google Adsense is called “arbitrage.” This technique essentially consists of buying pay-per-click traffic from Google through Adwords and then directing it to a site that contains Adsense ads. Your goal in this situation should be to find keywords with high PPC values for your site and keywords with low PPC costs for your advertisements.

If done properly, either of these techniques can yield a consistent income, but it more than likely will take months before this occurs.

2.2 Pre-selling Your Own Collection of Products

What does the process of pre-selling your own collection of products entail? Of course, the first step is actually generating the products. But once you have found a good niche and once you have developed software, info, or physical products that do actually have a buying market, you will want to figure out how to go about pre-selling your own collection of products on your blog.

Pre-selling your own collection of products is a concept that was pioneered by Ken Evoy of SiteSell fame. Pre-selling your own collection of products is a slight variation on selling your own products. Rather than directly bombarding site visitors with pop-up ads, timers, and all sorts of other high-pressure sales techniques, you do the exact opposite: you do your absolute best to make your site visitor consider you a friend—someone he or she can trust.

This sounds like a tough endeavour, but it isn’t. There are a number of elements that professional marketers generally employ; you can use these elements when pre-selling your own collection of products.

One “lite” element of pre-sales is a no-pressure salespage. This salespage must include a picture of you, which will immediately build confidence with the visitor. This salespage should also include testiomonials from clients who were satisfied with your product, as well as their pictures and even an audio recording if possible.

However, if you prefer to use longer-term forms of pre-sales, you will want to avoid the salespage altogether and build a blog that naturally recycles visitors for years, as they continue to make purchases. In order to do this, you will want to fill your blog with useful, no-pressure information that induces them to bookmark your blog and continue to return. Other methods you can use for pre-selling your own collection of products include free software and report give-aways, as well as free autoresponder courses.

2.3 Promoting Affiliate Programs

Promoting affiliate programs is a means to make money without making products. An affiliate program is essentially some system which allows vendors who did not create a product to become affiliated with it by selling it for a commission. Depending on how these vendors are promoting affiliate programs and which programs they promote, they could earn a 75% commission on each sale.

If you’re interested in promoting affiliate programs on your blog, you will want to consider the major third party players. This list includes Link Share, ClickBank, and Commission Junction.

ClickBank and Commission Junction provide affiliate programs for most major information product sellers and membership sites. If you want to earn higher commissions, you will want to use CB and CJ, as their programs usually offer commissions between 25% and 75%.

If you promoting affiliate programs through LinkShare, you will have access to a virtually limitless amount of programs to promote. Just to name a few — Netflix, Wal Mart, Target, 1 – 800 – Flowers, Pet Smart, and Apple all have affiliate programs administered t hrough LinkShare. Commissions on these physical products tend to be lower – usually in the range of 5 to 15%.

If you begin promoting affiliate programs through ClickBank, it is important that you check what your check threshold is set to. In many cases, it will be set to an amount like $100; if you would prefer them to send you a check every two weeks, regardless of how little you earn, you will need to change this manually.

If you’re promoting affiliate programs through LinkShare, payment methods will vary, but most programs only pay on a monthly basis, as they are large and administered by corporations.

If you don’t want to promote CJ, CB, or LS products, you can always promote large Internet-based corportions, such as Google and Ebay. Although many don’t know it, Google has an affiliate program for Adwords and Adsense; and Ebay has an affiliate program for auction accounts. Both have rewarding commission systems.

2.4 Selling Advertising Space

Selling advertising space is one of the oldest methods of revenue generation. In the past, it has been used on billboards, on radio shows, in newspapers, and in magazines. Since the advent of the Internet, selling advertising space has become even more popular, as it allows advertisers to better target customers by demographic breakdowns.

While selling advertising space on the Internet has traditionally been done through banner advertisements, image ads, and textlinks past, that is no longer the case. Now, selling advertising space is usually done through some sort of third party program.

The most popular type of third party program for selling advertising space is Google’s Adwords/Adsense combination. Through Adwords, advertisement publishers create ads and distribute them throughout Google’s network, which includes both search engine partners and sites and blogs with content, such as yours. By simply tuning variables and submitting an ad to Google, the publisher can completely avoid having to find sites to advertise on; and can, at the same time, avoid paying for “page views,” rather than performance or action.

Through Adsense, you can begin selling advertising space for your blog by generating code that matches the your layout. You can then insert it into three different places per page. You can also insert a search function, which will also yield ads that will match the visitor’s search keywords.

While this has become considerably more popular in recent years, it is important to note that older forms of selling advertising space still do exist. You can still sell advertising by seeking out larger firms and asking them if they are interested in purchasing a periodic image or text advertisement on your website. You can also work through a third party “link broker” and have them do the same thing for you.

Additionally, you can still engage in banner selling or banner exchanges. While they have fallen out of favor somewhat as of late, they can still be a reliable means of generating blog revenue.

2.5 Other Methods You Can Make Money From

Other than direct sales and adsense, are there any other methods you can make money from using your blog? Yes, there are several, but three are usually used more often than others: 1) lead generation; 2) affiliate marketing; and 3) newsletter subscriptions.

Of all the other methods you can make money from with your blog, lead generation may be the most promising. This is an especially true if the market your blog is in is related to anything financial. Mortage and refinance leads are especially good, as they bring in tiered commissions. Your first commission will come when you generate the initial lead – which will simple entail getting someone to fill out a completely free form; this lead will earn you anywhere from $3 to $12. If this lead then goes on to refinance her home with the company in question, you could earn a windfall of several hundreds or several thousands of dollars.

The other methods you can make money from with your blog include affiliate marketing and newsletter subscriptions. Affiliate marketing generally consists of either directly signing up as an affiliate through someone’s website – or signing up as an affiliate through a third party. You will then use your blog to market this person’s products for a share of the total price. If you sell information products from Click Bank or Commission Junction, you can earn as much as 75% per sale; however, if you sell physical products, such as chairs and tables from Link Share retailers, such as Wal Mart, you will earn a 7-15% commission at best.

If these other methods you can make money from don’t sound appealing, you can always consider newsletter subscriptions. You can create an opt-in page or a “squeeze page” on your blog and offer a trial subscription to your newsletter. If you provide quality content and promote your blog, you could end up with hundreds of subscribers over time.

Other methods you can make money from on your blog include selling advertising space directly and selling site memberships that allow visitors to access certain server-side tools.

3.1 Planning Your Blogging Profit Plan

Planning your blogging profit plan is crucial part of the construction of any monetized blog. But what does it usually involve? Generally, planning your blogging profit plan consists of two things: working on a traffic generation plan and improving conversion rates.

When planning your blogging profit plan, you may want to work on the conversion side first. If you begin sending traffic to your blog before it is monetized properly, your conversion rates could be too low to earn a significant return on your investment; this is especially true if you are paying for traffic from pay-per-click sources, such as Adwords.

One important thing you must consider when planning your blogging profit plan is how you can improve the quality of your copywriting. If you do not feel that you have the expertise or writing skills to convince someone to buy your product, you may want to hire someone to write your salespage for you.

With the recent boom in freelancing markets, you should be able to find a talented copywriter on elance.com or guru.com for a relatively low price per word or page. If your copy is bad, your conversion rate will also be bad, which means you are wasting traffic.

Additionally, you should consider including pre-selling tactics while planning your blog profit plan. You may want to include such pre-selling methods as giveaways, cash prizes, or some other form of interaction for visitors.

The other important part to consider while planning your blog profit plan is your traffic generation methods. No matter what the topic of your blog, you generally have five basic traffic generation methods: pay-per-click programs, which allow you to pay for targeted traffic; natural search engine traffic, which you can build by optimizing onpage and offpage factors; link-based traffic, which you can build by purchasing links from link brokers; list marketing traffic, which you can build by purchasing solo ads from list-owners; and repeat traffic, which you can build by giving visitors a reason to return and by persuading them to bookmark your site.

All things being equal, you must concentrate on traffic generation and conversion rates while planning your blogging profit plan.

3.2 Choosing a Popular and Profitable Theme

Choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog will determine whether or not you are able to stay in business for an extended period of time. While narrowing down the theme from a list of themes can be a fairly scientific process, choosing the themes on that list to begin with is considerably more experential.

If you’re planning to market your own products, you may want to start by finding a need, rather than looking at data. For instance, do you know of a pressing need that many people have? Could you provide some sort of substantive solution to that need? If so, would a blog be the appropriate means though which to provide that solution? Something might come to mind immediately, but if it doesn’t, you can proceed with data-analysis as a means of choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog.

You can start by using a program like WordTracker to begin choosing a popular and profitable theme. WordTracker will allow you to view a list of the 100 or 1000 most searched topics on the Internet.

You can then break this list down into smaller pieces. For instance, if number 10 on the list is “cars” and you have some sort of an interest in cars, you can then take the keyphrase “cars” and search for it on Wordtracker using overture pay-per-click results and demand/supply analysis called “KEI.”

This will tell you two things: it will tell you approximately how hard it is to penetrate your niche; and it will tell you roughly how much money people are making in your niche. For instance, if pay-per-click amounts are high and have a lot of bid competition, that means that people are making a lot of money in your niche, which is why they are purchasing advertising for large sums of money per click. It also means that you can potentially make a lot of money for serving ads for these advertisers via Adsense and YPN.

And there you have it: through data-analysis and need-analysis, you can begin the process of choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog. If the topic you select is popular, has a good KEI rating, and has a high PPC rating, you know you have a winner.

3.3 What You Need to Get Started

Many people ask what you need to get started in order to make a profitable blog. The answer is nothing, provided that your only goal is to spend no money at all. Now, if you
want higher returns and if you have the money to spend, the answer to “what you need to get started” might several hundred dollars to invest in tools that could make your climb to the top faster and smoother.

One of the most important things you will need to get started is some form of keyword research tool or database. Currently, there are dozens of these products on the market, which range in price from free to around $500. The most popular tool on the market is probably WordTracker, which offers a limited trial version for free—or a fully-functional version for $7.50/day or $45/mo. This will allow you to find out which keywords are most profitable and have a reasonable demand (aggregate search)/supply (aggregate site) rating.

Other than a keyphrase tool, the answers to the “what you need to get started” question will usually depend on the project. For instance, if you’re hosting a blog and you want to monetize it with Adsense, you may want to add a thumnail generator to your “what you need to get started” list. A thumnail generator will create code that, when inserted in your blog, will generate scraped-thumnail pictures from related searches on Google images—and will place them next to your contextual ads, increasing the click-thru rate.

In contrast, if you’re planning to sell your own products, you may want to add an autoresponder to your “what you need to get started” list. An autoresponder will allow you to greatly improve your conversion rate by allow you to put all follow-up emails on autopilot, rather than doing them personally or strictly using your salespage.

So what exactly do you need to to get started? Nothing. You can create a profitable blog without paying a cent, but if you want to take advantage of automating tools to further improve your profitability and efficiency, you will have to purchase at least a few tools.

3.4 Creating Your Own Blog Account

Creating your own blog account is relatively easy, especially when compared to building a website. Even if you’re using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor to build a simple website, you will still have to design every page, purchase a domain and hosting, and figure out how to upload your work to your site. This is not so with a blog. If you create your own blog account with with a large blog network, you will actually be able to do it for free and without worry that you wont be able to figure out how to upload new pages.

So how do you go about creating your own blog account? You should start by selecting the type of blog you wish to create. For instance, are you using blogs to promote your business or for to chronicle your daily life? This will affect how you go about creating your own blog account.

If you’re using a blog to chronicle your daily life, you may want to create an account with a network such as Myspace. Myspace will give you a simple means to design your blog, to

update it, and to communicate with other network users. Creating your own blog account with Myspace is actually completely free; and you wont actually have to host the blog yourself. Instead, Myspace will host it on their own network and will also provide you with all the tools you need to update it.

If you’re creating your own blog account simply to promote your business, you may want to open an account with Google Blogger—especially if you do not own a website. Upon creating your own blog account, Blogger will allow you to customize the template and the subdomain you use to display your blog. If you’re trying to target a specific keyphrase with your blog, you may want to use that exact keyphrase as the subdomain.

Once you have completed this process, you will want to spend some time searching through Blogger’s various options. For instance, to optimize your blog completely, you will want to consider how many posts you display on each page and whether or not you will allow comments.

3.5 Building Content Rich Pages

Building content rich pages is an absolute must if you wish to optimize your blog for search engine traffic. But what are the best ways in which to go about building content rich pages?

There are essentially three factors you have to consider when building content rich pages: is this content unique? Is this content self-updating? And is this content actually useful to human beings?

The first question is possibly the most important, but also the most debatable. If your site does not contain unique content—content which has not already been spidered by search engines—it more than likely will not be ranked highly. Additionally, if your unique content is in video format or in any other language other than HTML, search engine spiders might not be able to recognize it as content at all—and, in all likliness, will not be able to factor it into ranking algorithms. So when you look think about adding content, consider looking for good sources of unique textual content, such as articles written by ghostwriting agencies from guru.com or elance.com.

Additionally, you will want to consider whether you are building content rich pages with self-updating content or static content. RSS feeds, Google Adsense, YPN, and Amazon Ads are all forms of self-updating content. When search engines spider your website, they will pick up all these different forms of content and view them as “new” content, which improves your site in the eyes of the search engine spider.

The last question you will want to answer when you are building content rich pages is whether your content is actually useful to human beings. For instance, is your RSS feed picking up topics that are only marginally-related to your topic? Are your articles jumbled

garbage that only exist to host ads? If this is the case, your site will likely get canned by major search engines at some point in the future. Even if they don’t, you are throwing away a significant amount of revenue by not encouraging repeat visits.

Once you have answered these three questions, you will be well on your way to building content rich pages that will keep the spiders and the visitors coming back.

3.6 How to Drive Targeted Traffic into Your Blog

Driving targeted traffic into your blog obviously isn’t an easy, uninvolved process. If it were, blog owners would not need to purchase and review courses on targeted traffic generation methods. And while it isn’t an “easy and uninvolved process,” the answer to the question of how to drive targeted traffic into your blog isn’t tricky, either; it’s just not something people want to hear because it is it’s simple and tedious. There are essentially four basic traffic generation techniques you can use to answer the question of how to drive targeted traffic into your blog. If you adhere to these techniques and use conventional methods, you will generate a consistent stream traffic in the long run.

The first technique experts say answers the question of how to drive targeted traffic into your blog is to purchase one-time, periodic-rate advertisments. This can include radio advertisements, billboard advertisements, classified advertisments, ezine solo ads, or banner advertisements. All of these advertisments will send a one-time surge of traffic to your site. From there, it is your job to “recycle” those visitors into members or repeat buyers.

The second technique experts say answers the question of how to drive targeted traffic into your blog is with contextual advertising through Google Adwords. Google Adwords will allow you to specifically target your audience by selecting keyphrases and keywords, which, when searched for, will yield your ad as a “sponsored advertisement.” You can do this either exclusively on Google’s search network (i.e. Google, AOL, Ask.com, Earthlink, etc.) or you can also do it on their content network, which is essentially any site that contains Google Adsense ads—possibly including your own.

The third way to drive targeted traffic to your blog is through natural search engine traffic. You can do this by optimizing both onpage and offpage factors. Onpage factors include keyword density and place, titles, headers, and uniqueness and freshness of content. Offpage optimization includes exchanging links with other related sites. In order to maximize offpage optimization, you should seek out sites that have high PR and Alexa ratings and offer to exchange front page links. Also, make sure your targeted keyword is in the anchor text of the links they put on their sites.

The fourth and last way of generating traffic is through “recycling.” This simply means creating a website that has build-in systems that retain visitors and encourage them to come back. This can be a number of different things—from autoresponder courses to raffles to free software downloads.

3.7 Increasing Your Blog’s Page Ranking & Search Engine Results

Increasing your blog’s page ranking & search engine results doesn’t actually mean the same thing—although the process is somewhat similar. “Page rank” is a system Google uses to determine the degree to which a site (or blog in this case) is an authority. Page rank is assigned to each site Google spiders and is updated quarterly; however, this does not necessarily translate into better search engine results—even on Google. This is why increasing your blog’s page ranking & search engine results do not always mean the same thing.

Increasing your blog’s page ranking & search engine results can be complementary, however. When sites look for other sites to link to, they usually use two methods of deriving whether or not the site is worthy: page rank and alexa ratings.

The page rank system works on a 1 to 10 scale—and is allocated primarily based on inbound links. Additionally, both increasing your blog’s page ranking & search engine results are also both heavily dependant on inbound links. If you are able to get links from several sites with high page rank scores, you may be able to increase your blog’s page ranking and search engine results significantly. Several links from PR 5s and 6s might raise your blog to a PR 4—and may boost your natural search engine traffic.

Increasing your blog’s page ranking & search engine results is complementary because you need links to do either; however, they do not necessarily translate into each other. This is because Page Rank is determined purely by Google and search engine rankings are determined by Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask.com, and a number of other, smaller search engines. Even if your site has no page rank rating yet from Google, you could still receive a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo and MSN.

Additionally, if you optimize onpage factors, such as headers, titles, and keyphrase density for targeted keyphrase niches, you can actually pull more traffic on GOOGLE with a PR 1 site than a PR 5 site that is optimized for highly competitive keyphrases.

3.8 Making Money from Your Blog

Is making money from your blog a fantasy that Internet marketers promote to induce spending—or is actually a reality for the average person? Those who haven’t yet had success with a blog might be inclined to say the former, but the truth is probably

somewhere in between: making money from your blog isn’t quite as easy as most marketers would like you to believe, but if you have realistic expections and maintain steady time inputs, you will reap some sort of consistent profit.

What are some of the more popular ways for making money from your blog?

One of the most popular ways of making money from your blog is to sell an information product. You can hire someone else to create an information product for you; and then you can compile it, and then sell it on your blog through Paypal or Clickbank. For instance, you could use a campus professor directory to contact a psychologist or biologist—and then pay them to ghostwrite a product for you. You can then setup a payment button through Paypal that will redirect them to the product download page after they pay.

Another popular way of making money from your blog is through affiliate programs. If, for instance, you own a blog about real estate, you can go to Clickbank.com and find a number of different information products for real estate—most of which will pay 50-75% commissions on each sale. If your earnings are above a certain threshold, Clickbank will send you a check bi-weekly for your commissions.

The last and easiest way of making money from your blog is with contextual advertising. You can do this by opening a Google Adsense account and generating code for a block that will match your blog’s layout. You can then insert that code into your blog in a “hot spot”–which visitors are likely to click. As visitors click on your ads, you will accumulate earnings, which are paid out on a monthly basis.

3.9 Powerful Blogging Tips & Strategies

In order to position your blog as an industry leader, you will need to follow some powerful blogging tips & strategies—in addition to simply following all of the convention means of building traffic and converting visitors to subscribers or customers. So what are some of the powerful blogging tips & strategies that experts use frequently?

Some of the more powerful blogging tips & strategies involve adding your blog to your RSS feeds on all of your accounts at Yahoo, MSN, and Google. This will greatly decrease the amount of time it takes your blog to get indexed by all of these search engines; however, if is crucial that you spend the time to develop your blog and to get backlinks before you use these powerful blogging tips & strategies. If you don’t, you will get ranked poorly and will remain so until the search engines decide to send a spider your way again.

Another genre of powerful blogging tips & strategies usually involve posting on other big blogs and including a signature. It is crucial that you do not litter the Internet with spam comments, as it is unethical and will likely get you banned or shunned in the long run. However, if you have useful comments to make, you may want to search for similar blogs

and post on them. Include a signature with a link to your blog. Not only will this get your site spidered faster (and with a backlink from an authority site), but it might also get you some visitors from other people reading the blog. This is especially true if you post a controversial opinion.

My last suggestion for powerful blogging tips & strategies is to ping everytime you update your site. For blogging veterans this might seem fairly obvious, but if you’re new, you might not ping at all. Pinging basically alerts all of the major blog directories that you have updated your blog. In many cases, you could end up on the front page of a blog directory for several hours; additionally, your blog will get listed in dozens of high-PR directories. You can ping your site for free at places like kping.com and pingoat.com.

4.1 The Importance of Updating Your Blog Often

What is the importance of updating your blog often? Some might see no value in it; and might instead create multiple blogs, each of which they attend to for only minutes each week. Other blog owners see the importance of updating your blog often—and will spend 3-4 hours each day updating their blogs with news and ideas.

From both a technical marketing viewpoint and a social marketing viewpoint, updating your blog often is one of the best ways to maintain a constant stream of traffic.

From a technical viewpoint, new and unique content makes your blog look better to search engine spiders; this, in turn, gets your blog ranked higher. Additionally, from a technical viewpoint, updating your blog more frequently will allow you to get pings accepted more frequently, which means your blog will spend more time on the front page of blog directories.

The importance of updating your blog often also comes into play if you wish to integrate extensive social marketing into your overall blog marketing plan. Most people don’t realize this, but marketing is often all about the human connections.

You don’t need to be a technical wizard if you forget about profits for a few minutes and instead concentrate on making human connections with other blog owners who share similar interests. One of the best ways to achieve this is by keeping an updated blog, which will give other bloggers the incentive to drop by each day, post new comments on your blog, and refer their own blog readers to your blog. The importance of updating your blog often is crucial.

And there you have it: the importance of updating your blog often is paramount to success. Whether your goal is to use your blog for social marketing or technical marketing, you will have to update it often with unique and interesting content if you want to build an atmosphere that encourages return visits.

4.2 Writing Your Own Content

Writing your own content is often the hardest part about owning a blog. Writing your own content can be broken down into two phases: actually finding related things to write about—and then writing about them in a way that is both clear to human beings and clear to search engines.

You should begin writing your own content by finding numerous sources of information with which you can work. For instance, let’s say your blog is about baseball. Before you begin writing anything, you will want to aggregate all of the best sources of information on baseball. You will want to find RSS newsfeeds about baseball. You will want to bookmark forums about baseball. And you will want to bookmark all authority sites and blogs that either talk about baseball or promote baseball products; this is one of the most important parts of writing your own content – finding sources.

Now that you have aggregated all of the information sources you will ever need, you will want to determine the average profile of one of your blog readers before you begin writing your own content. For instance, is a blog reader going to be someone who wants to purchase baseball equipment? Is the person a baseball fan? Or is the person someone who both plays and watches baseball? You will then use the answers to these questions to develop a format for your blog.

One example of a format for our blog in question is this: you will blog three times each week. On Sunday, you will use the forum as your source of information. Perhaps you will look for news-worthy discussions about the game or about equipment. On Tuesday, you will post again, but this time, you will use your feeds as a source. You will post about the latest information to hit the news about baseball. And on Friday, you will post yet again, but this time you might review baseball equipment; and relate it to a news item.

This being said, it is still important, when writing your own content, that you try to integrate important keyphrases into your posts. For instance, if your post is about baseball equipments, you may want to perform some keyword research and figure out what keywords would be best to insert in your update.

4.3 Using Ghostwriters to Write Content For You

If you operate a large blog with a considerable readership, you may want to consider using ghostwriters to write content for you. The major advantage to hiring a ghostwriter is that it frees you up to do the things you do best, such as marketing, product-creation, or administrative work.

Using ghostwriters to write content for you can also be quite beneficial if you can find some who are experts on whichever subject you are blogging about. For instance, if you are blogging about sauces, you may actually be able to find someone who has attended a culinary school and can write excellent articles and homeade recipes for sauce on your blog.

In most cases, using ghostwriters to write content for you will entail some sort of contractual obligation. For instance, if you hire someone from guru.com or elance.com, you will have to post a project and then specifically select one of the project applications to complete the project for you. They (the writers) may require you to pay a deposit upfront – and Guru or Elance will require you to pay some sort of fee for using them as a labor market intermediary.

The largest challenge to using ghostwriters to write content for you is that they are often somewhat unpredictable – at least until you have developed a long-lasting relationship. For instance, you may hire a ghostwriter and then find out that he or she never responds to you after receiving the deposit. You may also find that the ghostwriter will plagiarize portions of the work and will take off if you question him about it. All of these are important potential problems to consider when using ghostwriters to write content for you.

In summary, it using ghostwriters to write content for you can be quite beneficial for your blog – regardless of the subject – but if you don’t have a reasonable means to protect yourself against plagiarism and to pay the writer without putting yourself at risk, it may be somewhat of a hassle until you find the right writer.

4.4 Using Private Label Articles to Build your Pages

With the rise in popularity of freelance labor sites like Guru, Elance, and Rentacoder, it is not surprising that many webmasters now choose to outsource their writing projects, rather than performing the writing themselves. From an economic perspective, using private label articles to build your pages for a blog makes sense.

While it may seem like writing site content yourself has no cost, it actually does—and that is the cost of employing yourself as a writer when your expertise is as a webmaster or a marketer. If you can earn more per hour as a marketer than writer, then you should spend your time marketing; and then use the profit derived from said marketing to pay for private label articles. From a pure cost-benefit analysis, using private label articles to build your pages makes sense, provided that they are of equal quality.

Now, with that being said, you can purchase private label articles from a number of different sources. One source is Elance and other similar freelancing sites, where you can allow writers and agencies to bid on contracts.

Another common source for private label articles are sites that sell pre-packaged sets of articles. You can purchase them as private label articles at a very low cost when compared

to the price of a similar size article contract from Elance. However, it is important to note that these sites distribute these articles to multiple sites, which means the articles will be counted as duplicate, rather than unique, content. However, since these articles are “private label,” you have the right to rewrite them – which means that using private label articles to build your pages makes even more sense, as it can be done even more economically.

If you are considering using private label articles to build your pages, you will want to consider purchasing lower cost, multiple distribution articles—and then rewriting them yourself. As long as none of the information is lost in the process, you will end up with dozens of well-composed, high-quality articles for a fraction of what you might have paid someone at Elance.

4.5 Leveraging on Articles with Reprint Rights

For as long as search engines have been content-driven (rather than tag-driven), webmasters have been in search of content they can use to bolster their search rankings and increase the amount of unique visitors they recycle into repeat visitors.

This trend has never been more popular than it is today, especially now that dozens of niche content providers have arrived on the scene. The ones we will look at specifically in this article are the content providers who own article directories – and a strategy called “leveraging on articles with reprint rights.”

Content directories allow for you to employ this strategy of “leveraging on articles with reprint rights” by adding them to your blog or website without paying a dime (although you may have to solicit permission from the author). While articles themselves are usually considered to be “duplicate content” by search engines, you can use this strategy of leveraging on articles with reprint rights by making them at least partially unique. Now, this does not mean you should alter the text of the article; that would be illegal and unethical; however, writing an introduction paragraph for the article, explaining what readers will learn is an excellent example of leveraging on articles with reprint rights. You can also increase the uniqueness of the article by putting it on a page that contains other content.

However, the majority of leverage you receive from articles with reprint rights will be from their ability to draw repeat visitors. If your visitors find that your site is chock full of good information from a number of different sources, you will gain significant leverage on articles with reprint rights, as these visitors will visit again and again

In order to maximize what you gain through the leveraging on reprint articles strategy, you will want to create some sort of visitor recycling system. This could include several different parts. One thing you will definitely want to integrate into your system is a link to bookmark your site. Another element you will want to integrate into your recycling system is an
autoresponder follow-up system like Aweber. These two parts will keep customers coming back.

4.6 Why Keyword Focus & Density Matters

The topic of this article is especially important, as it is hotly debated: why focus & density matters. While some would state why keyword focus & density matters – because it is one of the best ways to optimize your page for traffic – other would challenge that premise altogether. There are essentially two things which will be used to rank your blog – your onpage factors and your offpage factors. The bulk of your onpage score will quite simply be determined by your keyword focus and density. This is why keyword focus & density matters.

Of course, your offpage factors should also be optimized for keyword focus, too. For instance, if you’re planning to optimize your blog for the keyword “Sunflower Seeds,” you will want to use the keyphrase “Sunflower Seeds” in the anchor text of all of your links. This means that the title of your link in any directories you submit to will say “Sunflower Seeds.” This is arguably a far more important form of optimization; however, it is still an argument for why keyword focus & density matters, but simply from an offpage perspective about focus, rather than density.

For onpage factors, you will want to consider your title, your headers, and your keyword focus and density for the body of your site. Before you even create your blog, you will want to figure out what keyword you should optimize for. An easy way to do this is to determine how many people search for your keyword. You can use overture’s inventory tool to do this. You can then compare that number against the amount of competing pages by Googling that keyword in quotations. You may also want to check out competing pay-per-click bids through your Google Adwords account if you plan to publish Adsense ads.

Once you have selected a good keyword or set of keywords for your blog, you will then want to optimize your blog for these keywords. You can do this by inserting these keywords into your blog entries at a density of approximately 1.5% — or six uses per 300 words.

Working on your blog’s keyword focus and density – including both onpage and offpage factors — is crucial because it will ultimately determine how much traffic you receive. Additionally, optimizing onpage factors for keywords that are searched for less than 1000 times may allow you to capture an entire search group without actually competing.

4.7 Content & Writing Tips

How important is it to find content & writing tips for your blog? Content generation and writing are two important parts of any blog. If you can’t generate content for your blog, no one is going to read it. And if you cannot clearly communicate your ideas on your blog through writing, no one will understand the purpose of your blog, possibly including search engine spiders. This is precisely why you need good content & writing tips to keep your thoughts on track.

A good place to find content & writing tips is either a forum or another blog. If you scan writing forums, you will find good tips for writing clearly; likewise, if you scan marketing forums, you will find good content & writing tips—especially about communicating concepts clearly. If you scan popular blogs, you will see how the experts do it; and you can use that to determine how you should do it.

If content generation is your problem, you may want to consider the resources of content available; there are three: reusable content, alterable content, and public domain content. Alterable content, such as ghostwritten and private label articles have the highest content value for blogs, as they can be turned into content that is unique for both visitors and for search engines. Public domain content also has a high value. Massive government documents that are in the public domain can be used and quoted from on your blog. This is especially good if this information is in PDF format or is on a page that contains thousands of words. In either instance, the information will not be identified by search engine spiders as being duplicate. The last type of content you can use is reusable content; and this includes articles with reprint writes and syndicated content. This has a low technical value in terms of content, but it can sometimes provide the best content for visitors.

If writing is your problem, you may want to consider hiring a freelancing blog updater. This could be a fairly inexpensive arrangement, especially if said person is only updating your blog 2-3 times per week.

In sum, all content & writing tips boil down to the following: write clearly and with purpose on your blog and use content that both humans and search engines find useful.

5.1 What is RSS?

What is RSS? RSS stands for more than one thing. Usually, RSS stands for “really simply syndication,” but it can also mean “rich site summary,” or “RDF site summary” — RDF standing for “resource description framework.” That answers the question of what is RSS, but what can it do?

What is RSS in the context of really simple syndication? It is a tool that allows sites to give a quick summary of important links and descriptions in XML format. This essentially allows them to syndicate their content by allowing other blog owners and webmasters to use this summary as part of a list of summaries on a specific topic.

Blogmasters and webmasters collect these various summaries with something called a feed aggregator or a feed reader. Rather than asking “what is RSS?” this tool will ask “where is RSS” — and then find it. An aggregator finds RSS feeds to aggregate from selected large sites – such as Yahoo and MSN – and selected smaller sites, such as hand-picked personal blogs and news sites.

The blogmasters and webmasters then take the script generated from the aggregator and insert it into their blogs. This then creates an RSS feed that automatically pulls news items and blog posts whenever they appear. Whenever the blog or site page is refreshed, it will display the latest items.

This is good for two reasons. If you use your own RSS feed, you can get your content syndicated across the Internet without actually paying to submit dozens of press releases and contact dozens of blog owners and webmasters.

Additionally, using RSS feeds is good if you own a blog and want to add fresh content. This will allow you to constantly put new content links and summaries on your blog without spending the time to hunt around for related information. All you will have to do is select a feed aggregator and select a potential feeds from a list of news sites and authority blogs. Additionally, you will be able to input your own selections, allowing you to create custom feeds.

So what is RSS? RSS is a simple way in which to drive traffic to your blog and to display summaries of other blogs.

5.2 How Can RSS Benefit Your Blogging Activities?

How can RSS benefit your blogging activites? RSS can benefit your blogging activites in two different ways: it can help you generate traffic and it can help you retain traffic. RSS can benefit your traffic-generation efforts by adding fresh, optimized content to your blog automatically; and it can benefit your traffic retention rate by providing better, updated content for your blog visitors.

Also, how can rss benefit your blogging activites in other ways? If you own a blog, you will have to constantly update it with fresh content, so you can ping more often and so you can get higher rankings for your targeted keyphrases. Aggregating and using RSS feeds can benefit your blogging activities significantly by allowing you to add fresh, targeted content to your blog without actually updating it yourself. Whenever a search engine visitors your blog, it will record your RSS feed updates as fresh and possibly unique, targeted content.

How can rss benefit your blogging activities in other ways? If you own a blog, you can further enhance the amount of unique visitors you get by using RSS to syndicate your updates. In addition to netting you several backlinks on blogs and websites (which will increase your offpage search engine optimization score), it will also net you some unique visitors through direct links from other blogs and sites.

How can rss benefit your blogging activities by recycling traffic? If your site aggregates a number of important authority sites via RSS feed, you will become an authority site aggregator at the very least, which is useful for people looking to find authority sites on your given topic.

In summary, how can rss benefit your blogging activities? RSS can benefit your blog by generating traffic – by improving your actual search engine rankings and by increasing the amount of direct click-thrus you receive – and by helping you retain traffic – by positioning your site as an authority aggregator and by providing better, original content for blog visitors.

5.3 Adding RSS Feeds to Your Blog

Adding RSS feeds to your blog is a relatively simple process, even if you are unfamiliar with XML. You can start the process of adding RSS feeds to your blog by looking for something

called an RSS feed aggregator or reader.

An RSS feed aggregator will collect RSS feeds you collect and create a code you can use to display these feeds on your blog. Whenever the blogs or sites from which these feeds are pulled are updated, your blog feed will also self-update to fit the latest site or blog update.

I personally suggest getting a trial version of an RSS feed reader or getting a free version before you pay the full price if you plan on adding RSS feeds to your blog. One such free RSS feed reader is CARP, which is not limited by any trial stipulations.

Once you have your feed reader installed, you will want to begin looking for related feeds for when you begin adding RSS feeds to your blog. One good place to look for news feeds is Yahoo. Yahoo will provide you with dozens of RSS categories you can use for feeds. When you select a given feed, Yahoo will send you to a page with XML code. You will copy-and-paste the URL of this page into your aggregator, which will then develop a small piece of code that you can insert into your blog. Whenever a visitor stops at your blog, a new set of summaries and links will be generated by the RSS feed you added.

Another way to go about adding RSS feeds to your blog is to look for blogs on Blog Wise or on some other blog directory where you can search by category. Once you have found a good blog that posts news-worthy information on your subject, you can then click the “rss feed” button the blog – and copy and paste that URL in to your aggregator. Inserting this code into your blog will only provide you with one source of information, but if it is relevant and news-worthy, it could be even better than a Yahoo feed.

6.1 Link Exchanges

Participating in link exchanges is a crucial part of blog promotion for any budding blogger. Link exchanges – organized and unorganized – allow bloggers and webmasters to get backlinks on sites and also allow them to add useful reasources to their own blogs or sites.

One of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings is by tuning your offpage factors – or all the factors that you cannot control by optimizing your blog. The most important offpage factors are the links incoming to your blog – reciprocal or one-way.

There are two important things to take into consideration when creating link text or code for future link exchanges: the text in the title and the text in the description. According to most search engine optimization experts, the text in the title is most important. You will want to put the keyphrase you wish to optimize for in the title. While there is more debate over the relevance of the text above and below the link, most experts agree that there’s a good chance that it will affect how your site is ranked. For this reason, you may want to attempt to optimize it. Additionally, when you engage in link exchanges regularly, you will want to switch your title text relatively often. This will allow you to optimize for multiple keywords.

The last thing you will need to consider is how you will go about finding link parts for your blog. You can start by looking up related blogs in Blog Wise. You can then send a personal email to each of the blog owners, asking whether or not they would be interested in some link exchanges. At the same time, you should consider signing up for a free link exchange system, such as Link Metro, which will allow you to freely exchange links with other bloggers and webmasters by looking up their sites and then sending them an automated message.

6.2 Submitting Your Blog to RSS & Blog Directories

Submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories is considerably easier than submitting fully-functional sites to website directories. This is because there are free, automatic systems in place that allow you to submit an updated version of your blog to directories without doing any form-filling.

This automatic system for submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories is known as pinging. You ping your blog at sites like kping.com and pingoat.com. When you ping your blog, the system will automatically send the latest update from your blog to all of the largest blog directorires – usually on the order of about 40 or so. This means that submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories can actually be as simple as filling in your URL and title – and then hitting submit. The only thing you will want to be careful about is the title you use. You will want to make sure that you use your most targeted keyword in the title you submit, as that will be attached to all of the backlinks you receive from these directories.

Additionally, submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories will get your blog placed on the front page of a number of blog directories. This may generate some quick traffic for you from people who are looking at the latest blogs to be updated.

Once you are finished submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories via ping, you will then want to search out directories that you cannot ping and submit to them individually. Vilesilencer.com provides a fairly complete list of RSS and blog directories. You will want to first submit to directories that offer certain perks (i.e., first page listings) or have higher PR – as this will confer higher more PR to your blog. Since you cannot submit to most RSS directories via ping, they will probably make up the bulk of your submissions.

6.3 Leverage on Article Marketing

Article marketing – or the process of getting traffic by submitting articles – is considered to be one of the most effective forms of traffic generation currently available today. However, there are a number of important things you should take into consideration before you begin to gain leverage on article marketing campaigns.

The first thing you will want to consider is your use of keywords. While it might seem like a good idea to optimize your articles for keywords you will use for your own site pages, this actually could be a serious faux pas in the long run.

This is because the article directories to which you submit will unquestionably have more backlinks and higher page rank scores, which means that a well-optimized article could effectively prevent your own site from capturing the first spot on the search engines, decreasing your leverage on article marketing efforts.

This is especially true if you optimize for relatively obscure words for which you do have a chance to capture the first spot. Additionally, as you gain leverage on your article marketing campaign, you may lose leverage on the algorithm ranking of your site. This is because an identical article will only count as unique content on one site. If you submit to a directory, that directory will get spidered before your site, which means that directory will get recorded as having provided the unique content, even though it was actually your work.

If you want to gain leverage on article marketing and site optimization, you will need to follow three simple steps: 1) select keywords for which you will not optimize; instead, use your site optimization keywords in your resource box and link title; 2) modify articles if you perform multiple submissions (i.e., make each article look unique without ruining the information or readability); and 3) ensure that articles actually contain high-quality information that will inspire enough curiosity to drive visitors to your site.

6.4 Using Ad Swaps

There are two major types of ad swaps: list ad swaps and site ad swaps. Either ad swap can be quite beneficial if done correctly. When using ad swaps, however, it is crucial to pick target lists and site s that sell complements to your products, rather than substitites.

For instance, let’s say you’re selling wood. A good complement site to swap ads with might be a carving tool site or a carpentry site. But if you decide to swap ads with a similar-sized site that also sells woods, your results will be unclear; at best, you will gain some customers. At worst, you will end up losing customers if they provide superior service or products.

There are a number of ways to go about using ad swaps. One of the more common ways of doing it is finding an ad swap group or an ad swap system. This will allow you to either directly link up with ad swap partners or find them through a third party for a fee.

If you plan on using ad swaps without a third party system, you will want to first compile your list of possible complement sites. You will then want to send each a personal proposal for an ad swap. You could seriously boost your credibility if you take the time to figure out the webmaster’s name.

Another good way to engage in using ad swaps is to swap solo ads with other list owners. Again, if you can find complement sites with mailing lists, you could greatly benefit by swapping advertisements.

Before you actually being using ad swaps, it is crucial that you determine whether or not the products potential partners plan on selling are actually high-quality. You wouldn’t want to advertise anything to your list that plainly is junk. Additionally, you will want to carefully consider your solo ad to ensure that it will draw a high conversion rate. You can do this by sending it out to small segments of your list at a time before using ad swaps; each time, make small alterations until you have created the best-converting solo ad, which you will use for all ad swaps.

6.5 Search Engine Optimization

Any blog owner who wishes to get traffic without constant promotion and marketing will have to use some form of search engine optimization. While search engine optimization is a hotly debated topic, most experts agree on two things: in order to best optimize for search engines, you must establish reciprocal or one-way inbound links; and you must also optimize the content on your pages for specific keywords.

The first phase of any search engine optimization project is researching those keywords. Before you start to optimize, you must determine which keywords will pull the most traffic for the least amount of effort. You can do this by purchasing a subscription to Word Tracker or you can do this by using Overture Inventory to search “aggregate search” records for all possible keywords for which you could potentially optimize your blog. Record all of the returns you receive for an Overture Inventory search you perform on your given keyword. Your next step will be to analyze the site or page supply for your keywords. You can do this by searching for each of the returned keywords on Google. Not only will you want to record the search return data in terms of numbers, but you will also want to look at the top competitors for those keywords (i.e., are the PR 9 home pages or are they a deep page for an unranked site?) Optimal keywords for search engine optimization purposes will have high search counts, low site returns, and low-quality competition in the top slots.

Your next step should be to perform onpage search engine optimization. You can do this by using your selected keywords as titles and headers on different pages of your blog. You will then want to fill those pages will good information about the keyword in question; additionally, you will want to optimize it for a keyword density of 1.5%.

The last step in your search engine optimization campaign is to perform offpage optimization. You can do this by submitting links to directories that contain a selected keyword in the link title. You can also join link swap programs and swap with other high-quality blogs.

6.6 Getting Viral with Free Reports

Viral marketing is any form of marketing that induces the public at large to market your product for you. And giving away free reports is one of the best ways to inspire others to perform the viral marketing for you. This strategy is often called “getting viral with free reports.”

Getting viral with free reports can be quite easy. All you have to do is perform research on a given topic and then compile a report on a very specific, hot topic. You will want to compile it in PDF format, which you can do for free by either downloading Open Office or by using one of numerous free PDF creators available.

When getting viral with free reports, you will want to carefully build in some type of back-end lead capture or sales capture system. While simply giving away a free report may induce referrals to your site, it wont guarantee sales, repeat visits, or subscriptions.

How can you build in a back-end mechanism when getting viral with free reports? You can do this in two ways: you can either require site visitors to subscribe in order to get your report or you can include a back-end mechanism in the report itself.

If you wish to require site visitors to subscribe, you can do this with something called a Name Squeeze page. This is essentially a form page that requires a visitor to fill in her email address and name to receive a free newsletter before she can receive the report. Once they sign up, you will be able to send them periodical advertisements to earn commissions. If you use an autoresponder and a follow-up mailing series, you can make additional sales without creating a newsletter each week.

The other method of getting viral with free reports involves building your back-end mechanism into your book. You can do this by building an overwhelming case for something specific – and inspiring curiosity – and then requiring them to follow a link to where you can either make a related sale or sign them up for a free newsletter.

6.7 Other Notable Traffic Generation Strategies

Other than search engine optimization, what are some other notable traffic generation strategies? The most popular traffic generation strategies today are pay-per-performance (PPP), which essentially means that you only pay for traffic when you actually receive some sort of quantifiable benefit from the traffic generation service.

For instance, some of these other notable traffic generation strategies include pay-per-click (PPC), which is a type of PPP advertising that only charges you when someone actually clicks on your advertisment. Google is currently the largest server of PPC advertisements; and does so through Google Adwords, which allows advertisers to bid on keywords and create small ads that will be distributed throughout a search and content network.

Another one of the other notable traffic generation strategies which does not fall under the PPP blanket is social marketing. This consists of marketing your product face-to-face with other human beings. You can do this by contacting potentially-interested buyers through social networking systems, such as Myspace; you can also do it by making phone calls and sending emails.

The last other notable traffic generation strategies you will want to consider are viral traffic generation. This can be done in dozens of different ways. One way is simply by actually creating an excellent product and by providing excellent service for your customers. Overtime, if you hold true to your promises and you help your clients and customers, they will help you in turn by recommending your product to other people.

Another way to generate viral traffic is by allowing people to “steal” your products. For instance, you could give away free shareware products, which people could only receive through referral. This creates a “buzz” about your product and also creates as demand, as there is now a free product everyone has access to, but they must find someone else who has it in order to get their download.

While search engine optimization is important, it is crucial that you consider the other notable traffic generation strategies; otherwise, you will limit your business to a hobby.

7.1 Is Blogging For You or Everyone?

Is blogging for you or even for everyone? I guess it all depends on how we define blogging. For instance, if we include social network blogging, blogging is indeed for you and for everyone, as a good percentage of Internet users operate some form of social networking blog. Currently, over 60 million people in the United States alone do that with Myspace.

So is blogging for you or everyone? If we consider commercial endeavours, it certainly is not for everyone. Only about 7% of Internet users operate blogs for commercial purposes.

The question of “is blogging for you or everyone?” also applies to entrepreneurs. Blogging can be an excellent tool for an entrepreneur – especially those who are sole proprietors looking for a good and inexpensive venue for promotion, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should necesssarily do it. In some instances, a private forum will be a better means of recorded, Internet-based communication between a group of people. In other instances, a website will require less maintenance and will be a better stand-alone traffic puller, especially if the would-be blogger does not have the time to constantly update and promote a blog.

However, there definitely are a number of good reasons to blog. One of the best reasons is that it’s really easy. Building a good website can take hundreds of hours. This is not so with a blog. With a blog, you can simply open up an account with Blogger and begin posting. No coding or HTML-editing is required. You don’t even need to learn how to use WYSIWYG program – or how to upload your uploads to your website.

So is blogging for you or everyone? It isn’t for everyone, especially if we’re considering commercial blogging; some people don’t own businesses, have nothing to promote, and have no interest in starting. But there’s a good chance blogging is for you if you want to a low cost means of promoting your business. It’s cheap, comparatively easy, and quick to start.

7.2 Recommended Blogging Tools & Resources

What does it take to be successful as a blogger? Aside from the patience and diligence that it takes to maintain your upkeep – to keep new information on your blog – it also takes some sort of consideration as to how you will improve your blog in the future to stay ahead of the competition.

In this article, I will provide some recommended blogging tools & resources you can use to stay ahead in terms of both innovation and optimization techniques.

The first item on this list of recommended blogging tools & resources is SEO Radio. While this tool isn’t specifically for blogs, it is an excellent resource from search engine optimization expert Brad Fallon that will help you understand how to optimize your blog for search engines. You can find out more at seoradio.com.

The second item on this list of recommended blogging tools & resources is CARP, which is not specifically for blogs, but can be used in conjunction with blogs to provide RSS feeds, which will increase your search engine rankings and provide visitors with useful links.

Another item from this list of recommended blogging tools & resources you can use to keep abreast with your competitors is Google’s blog search, which will allow you to find all of your competitors, so you can analyze their traffic generation methods. You will also want to see what new ideas they have implemented for retaining visitors.

Another resource you will want to consider from this list of recommended blogging tools & resources is Vilesilencer.com, which offers a list of blogging directories and RSS directories to which you can submit your blog. You will also want to check out searchengineworld.com and warriorforum.com/forum for marketing and optimization tips.

The last items you will want to consider on this list of recommended blogging tools & resources lists are actually blogging programs themselves. If you already own a site and want to integrate a blog, you should consider using a more complex, fully-functional program, such as Word Press (which you can use for free), rather than something like Blogger, which is easy to use, but will not offer a lot of frills.

7.3 Last Minute Blogging Tips & Tricks

You’re almost ready to begin blogging. You’ve mastered the basics. You have a rough idea of which blogging niche you want to use. You have a rough idea of where you will find content for you blog, as well as new ideas and free resources you will need to keep up with your competitors. The only things you are missing now are some last minute blogging tips & tricks to get you started.

Some of the best last minute blogging tips & tricks you can are quite simple, such as to stay on schedule and to ping on schedule. If you aren’t going to update your blog frequently, it is essentially a bad website, not a helpful tool. If this is the case, simply stick with your current website and do not add a blog. If you commit to a blog, then blog at least twice a week (on a schedule) and spend the time to ping after you blog each time. These are fairly standard last minute blogging tips & tricks you should adhere to whenever possible.

Some of the other good last minute blogging tips & tricks include subscribing to all of your blogs using your Yahoo and MSN accounts after you have spent some time on promotion and banklink generation. This will allow you to get your blog spidered and indexed faster.

More last minute blogging tips & tricks include purchasing single backlinks from large sites and many backlinks from smaller sites. This will get your blog spidered faster. Additionally, if you have already have been assigned a page rank and if your blog has been around for at least a couple months, using these last minute blogging tips & tricks could considerably improve your site’s search engine rankings.

The last blogging trick you will want to consider is called “tag and ping.” This is currently being pioneered by blog marketing authorities. You can learn more about it forums such as MasterResaleCentral.com.

7.4 Recommended Resources

Recommended Payment Processors

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