"Get Your Rapid Mass Traffic - Starting TODAY!"

If you already spend a fair amount of time blogging, money may come to you literally as soon as you ask for it. Once you have an established blog with a regular readership, it is easy to turn a profit through advertising. By hosting sponsored links or banners, you can see income from your hobby almost overnight. Even if you did not start your blog intending to turn a profit, making supplementary income from your blog may be easier than you think.

Of course, even for people who have spent months or years blogging, money from advertising revenue may not add up to a large sum. The amount of money that you can make as a blogger depends on a lot of different factors, but perhaps the most important element of the equation is the topic of your blog. If your blog is on a subject that appeals to a demographic that advertisers have a strong desire to reach, you will be more likely to be able to turn a large profit on your blog than if your blog is on a fairly obscure subject that does not draw the kind of audience that advertisers need to appeal to.

Of course, the only way to find out where you fall on this spectrum is to try hosting some ads. If you are already blogging, you have nothing to lose.

"Get Your Rapid Mass Traffic - Starting TODAY!"

In blogging, using the correct blog software tools can help you manage the goings-on of your blog. When it comes to publishing your blog content, there are two kinds of blog software tools that you can use, such as

1. The server-based tools
2. The client-based tools.

Both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages and it is up to you to choose the one that is right for your blog.

The Client-based Tools
One of the two blog software tools that you can choose from is the client-based tools. These tools’ purpose is to aid you with publishing your blog and they are normally installed on your computer and also run from there. Additionally, client-based tools are also categorized as small blogs that are able to run from your hard drive.

Client-based tools also have text editors that allow you to perform word processing applications from your own computer. Thus, a text blog editor enables you to create and publish your own content at the comfort of your own desktop.

Obviously, the first advantage of using client-based tools, like the text editor, is convenience. Most bloggers choose to publish their work with a desktop tool rather than a Web browser, which entails logging into the blog software’s control panel and accessing the Web-based text editor.

Additionally, client-based tools can be managed either locally or remotely. Such tools can allow you to manage and edit your posts remotely. More so, the content of your blog can also be managed locally by saving drafts to a local computer. These can be very beneficial to those with limited Internet connection since accessing and managing the content of your blog remotely and locally can be done without the need of being connected to the Internet.

Lastly, you can manage multiple blogs through the use of client-based tools. If by any chance you are publishing more than one blog, it might be easier if you consider using a blog editor. The blog editor can be easily configured to manage all your blogs. You only have to enter the same information that you use to log in into your server tool combined with the particular kind of server software you are using and the blog editor can save that information in its
configuration.

The Server-based Tools
Another kind of blog software tool that you can choose from is the server-based tools. There are two varieties of such tools

1. Blog hosting service provider tools
2. Server-based publishing tools.

The first variety is automatically provided by your blog hosting service provider. Hosted blog software tools are very easy to use and you do not have to install any software or manage any configuration too difficult to comprehend. These kinds of tools can help you focus on publishing your content.

With the use of hosted software tools, you are also provided with an assortment of design templates. These can help you in choosing the desired layout that suits your blog. More so, the layouts can be easily customized, including the fonts, columns, colors, etc.

On the other hand, publishing tools you install on the server has the advantage of giving you the level of customization and control you need over the configuration settings. Through the use of these kinds of server-based tools, you can decide how much storage space you allocate, extend the features of your blog through plug-ins or add-ins and make custom layouts and pages.

"Get Your Rapid Mass Traffic - Starting TODAY!"

Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic grasp of blogging technology. However, very few people manage to reap the profits they want from their blog. Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons.

1. They have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging.
2. Lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it.

To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you. However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will need in order to make a profit isn’t easy. As more and more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to market your blog effectively.

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project. Certainly, updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines like technorati, and once your readers know that you update frequently they will return to your site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so don’t skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using some of that time to draw new visitors by building backlinks, setting up link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in the blog community, and following other established modes of winning traffic.

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all likelihood it will be at least several months before you are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed to your blogging project during this initial rough period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

"Get Your Rapid Mass Traffic - Starting TODAY!"

I have received some more emails requesting clarification on some common blogging myths, so let’s take some time today and try to straighten these out.

1. Duplicate Content.

The most common question I get ( almost daily ) is in regard to “duplicate content”. Google decides what is duplicate content and what is not, but Google does not immediately discard every piece of content it has already seen. This myth needs to be understood, so let us spend some time on it today.

Let me say, firstly, that if you simply grab any cheesy old piece of content, rewrite a few sentences and bang it up on your page, you deserve to incur the penalties that Google inflicts. PLR articles have a purpose, but unless you are among the first handful of people to access a particular piece, a quick rewrite will not suffice. You should be taking the core essence of older articles and rewriting them completely. Newer articles with PLR rights will require less work to make them acceptable to search engines, but you can never be sure of how old an article is so you should err on the side of caution and rewrite as much as possible.

The correct use for PLR articles is more along the lines of constructing reports, or content for your ebooks, than for web page content. Having said that, I still use PLR content on my blogs. There are ways to use them and not be penalized for duplicate content.

1. Completely rewrite the content using the core essence of the original article as a guide
2. Take a complete paragraph from the article, put it in quotation marks as the start of your blog post and change the text to bold italics. Present this as an “excerpt” of an original document and expand on the principle outlined in that paragraph to create your own article.
3. Start out writing an original post and, when you feel you are running short of ideas to finish the piece, flick through your PLR articles until you find something related. You can then either use the article as inspiration and ‘paraphrase’ some of it, or grab a complete paragraph and present it in the middle of your document as an excerpt the way we did earlier. If you do this, be sure to add some original content afterward to strengthen the content value of the finished piece.

These are just a few ways to use PLR content without being penalized for duplicate content. As much as Google’s policies can be a pain in the &%$, they are in place for a reason and, as such, can be navigated with a little care. After all, if Google did not want us to reference each others work, it would not give us credit for doing so. That is primarily the basis of the logic behind backlinks – high quality sites referring to content on other sites reaps a small benefit for both parties.

And don’t forget article sites – these sites thrive on the fact that you can re-use their articles on your website as long as you do not alter them in any way and include the original resource box. Now, if duplicate content was such an issue for Google, these sites simply would not be as prolific as they are.

2. Backlinks.

This brings us to the second most popular question I received over the last few weeks – How do I know if the backlinks I am building are actually helping me?

The answer is basically – you don’t! Well, not immediately anyway.

The first thing I recommend you do is add the SEOQuake plug-in to your Firefox browser. If you are not using Firefox, then feel free to crash through into the 21st century and catch up with the rest of us. Use it for a week and, if you are not absolutely thrilled with it, contact me through the link at the bottom of this page – I would love to hear from anyone who is not amazed at the difference between browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera as compared to the features and benefits of Firefox. NOTE:- I do not gain anything by you changing to Firefox, I am not supplying a link to the download, I am not an affiliate, I don’t think they even have affiliates, the program is free – TRY IT.

But I digress. After installing SEOQuake, you can analyze all your critical data as often as you want. This data includes all the meta data that we added in an earlier tutorial, ( if you missed that go to:- http://www.internetsalesmadeeasy.info/BloggingGuidebook.html ), as well as all the efforts you have made since creating your first blog. Data such as

• Page Rank
• Indexed pages
• Inbound Links
• Outbound Links
• Traffic
• Google Rank
• Keyword density

is only a very small part of what this plug-in tells you. By monitoring all this data on a daily basis you will be able to see your backlink building efforts paying dividends. Having said that, don’t expect all your backlinks to show up immediately, they can sometimes take many weeks to get indexed. You can speed things up a little by pinging your backlinks, but generally it simply takes time. Your Google Rank, however, will change almost daily depending on the amount of content you add to your site. This is a good way to keep your motivation, as you watch that number drop from somewhere in the millions when you start, to a much more impressive number after only a few weeks of dedication. Keep that number dropping and you will be rewarded with organic traffic, and that is the aim of the game.

A quick note on Meta-tags before we go further into backlinks. For those of you who are using WordPress to its fullest and adding meta data through the “Appearance/Editor”, remember to review that data after you update your WordPress version, because WordPress will revert all those base templates back to original during the update, which removes any alterations made by the user. It takes a few minutes, and can be a pain in the freckle sometimes, but if Google reviews your site and notices metatags missing that were visible on their previous visit, you will notice a change in your ranking and it won’t be a good one.

When building you backlinks, don’t take shortcuts! The possible shortcuts I speak of include paying people to build backlinks for you or using “canned” comments on other peoples blogs. Many services are available for purchasing backlinks, some paid services are quite reputable – many are NOT.

While a service such as ‘Link Dominators’ will charge you about $80.00 to build a couple of hundred links per month for 3 or 4 sites, this is far better value than paying someone from Fiverr.com to build you thousands of links at a time. The quality of the links is all-important and these huge backlink packages from Fiverr members are generally nothing more than a wholesale ping festival done on your behalf. Google is not impressed by this behavior and will only tolerate so much before it loses interest in visiting or ranking your site.

I have had successful link campaigns created by Fiverr members ( Cathy-Rey will run a campaign for you and create between 125 and 140 backlinks in a day. I have done this once a week with one of my sites to measure the success and was quite impressed with the results after 6 weeks ), but generally these members will use the fastest possible method to create links that never see the light of day. While I would recommend Cathy-Rey, there are few others who are worth your time or  your $5.00.

I covered the difference between backlinks and pings a few weeks ago, make sure you understand the difference before engaging anyone to run backlink campaigns on your behalf.

This brings me back to SEOQuake. While performing the necessary blog commenting for backlinks, use the data provided by SEOQuake to decide if each site is worthy of your time.

• Is the site description relevant to yours?
• Is the Page Rank higher than 2?
• Is the site fresh?
• Is the Google ranking in an acceptable range?

Ask yourself these questions about every site before you take the time to read the content. If these questions are all answered to your satisfaction, then read the content on the page and find a post that you can make a quality comment on. Add the comments in your own words, avoid “canned comments” at all times.

Services such as Comment Kahuna have their benefits, but do yourself a favor and ignore the option to pre-write a comment for use in every site that they present to you. Read the content and then formulate a comment. I have 1 clown that visits all my sites and dumps the same comment on 2 or 3 posts per site – and he does this 3 or 4 times a week! I actually enjoy dumping all his comments in the trash, they will never see the light of day on my sites because he hasn’t even taken the time to read my posts.

If you show me that you have at least taken the time to read my content, you will have a better chance of having your comments approved, and almost all bloggers feel the same way. This poor misguided fool is spending hour after hour on Comment Kahuna pounding out comments to hundreds of sites every week and probably only getting a handful of them indexed. Why? Because he has been misled from the start. Some know-it-all Guru has thrown together a quick course and outlined a backlink method. He hasn’t given enough detail because he is planning to sell a dedicated course on this later. Meanwhile, this poor fool newbie actually believes every word he has been told, and has dedicated hours of his time to a method that is doomed to fail.

Leaving ill-informed comments on a site is poor form, but, because not everybody has the same opinion on every subject, these comments will most likely be approved because they have a human aspect to them. Comments such as:-

“I have often wondered about this and have looked to find out more.”

or

“I stumbled on your site by mistyping when looking for something else.”

or

“I like this site and will be back again for more of your information.”

are the type of comments I receive from the newbies using Comment Kahuna. This rubbish will never see the light of day on any respectable site.

Take a breath, step back and have a look at what you are doing – you are wasting your own time! The most precious commodity to an Internet marketer is time. There is always more money if you happen to waste a few bucks on something that doesn’t work, but if you burn hour after hour on a method that doesn’t pay off – you are screwed. You can’t get that time back – it’s gone forever!

Spend your time wisely.

1. How Often Do I Post?

Another common question is “how often should I post to my blog?

I recently had an email from a newbie who claimed he was told to post every day. I thought “that seems fair enough” as I continued to read the rest of the email. It turns out he has a multi-niche blog. He covers about 15 different niches on 1 blog, separated by category, and was tearing his hair out trying to find content for each category on a daily basis.

Okay, let’s wade through the problems here.

Firstly, try to avoid cross-promotion wherever possible because it detracts from your ability to project yourself as an expert. No-one can be an expert in 15 different subjects. Your task, as blog administrator, is to build confidence with content. By adding quality content daily you will eventually be seen as an expert in your chosen niche. Once you have established that you have some quality information, and the visitor numbers increase, you can begin to build the promotions – but only to related products.

If your niche was dog training, slowly begin to make reference to such products as collars, leashes, food, food bowls, bedding, etc. Don’t start offering bridles and saddles, you will confuse and alienate your readers.

Secondly, even if you were to persevere with the multi-niche blog, there is no need to add content to all of the categories every day. If you were to post good content to 2 or 3 categories per day, you would probably receive better returns and recognition than posting a low quality article to all 15 categories. Quality beats quantity, even in Googles eyes!

Thirdly, if you make an informed decision on your website name, you will be less likely to cross-promote. Do your homework and choose the best available domain name for your chosen niche and focus on it. You will find that you can easily come up with enough content if you are focused.

The same newbie’s email went on to ask – “How do I know it’s the right time to delete some content to add new stuff?”

Hmmm. I wondered what the hell he was talking about so I emailed back to him for some more details. This is what I got…

“In the WordPress setup it said I can change how many posts are on each page, so I bumped it up to 25 to give myself some more time before I have to delete some of them. I have been adding a post to each category every day like I was told to but nobody told me what to do when my site gets full. All this sitting and typing is starting to take the color out of my favorite underpants.”

Again, Hmmm.

1. You do not need to delete content…ever.
2. Change your post count back to 10 posts per page. As you get to 10 posts per category, the older posts are automatically moved onto another page, but are still accessible to your visitors via the category menu.
3. You do not need to add posts to every category, every day. 2 or 3 posts per day across the board will see Google take notice of your site.
4. Sorry, I can’t help with the underpants thing.

"Get Your Rapid Mass Traffic - Starting TODAY!"

Chances are you have seen at least one blog. Blogging is an ideal way to get your thoughts broadcast into cyber-space. A blog can be about anything you choose. In fact, your blog could even be all about your business.

Structuring your blog is a matter of personal preference. It is possible to organize your own private soapbox in any manner that you like. This means you can make your blog into a site where you write articles that have to do with subjects connected to your business.

You may toss in something that is involved with more general topics as well, such as business ethics, customer service techniques, and anything else that you think may drive the right people to your web site.

You can even use the main section of the blog to publish articles that spotlight features and benefits of various products and services that are sold on your web site. The possibilities for your article section are only limited by your imagination.

Along with the main article section, you can also use the blog to allow customers to ask questions or make comments on either the articles or your product line. These types of features can help to bring people back to visit your blog regularly, since a question and answer or comments section is fairly likely to include something new to read every few days, if not every day.

In fact, you may get some great ideas for new articles from these sorts of activities, which will also go a long way in keeping your blog fresh. Plus, if you base articles on reader response, that is one more reason for people to come back and see what you have done lately.

Of course, you want to be sure to include links over to your web site that are easy to find. They may be embedded into your articles or featured in a sidebar on the main page of your blog. Making sure that your readers always have easy access to your business site is an ideal way to tempt folks to click over and make a purchase.

Don’t underestimate the impact of colors and images when it comes to your blog. Making your own little corner of the Internet visually appealing will surely make visitors want to return from time to time.

However, be careful of using too much animation or large images that slow down the loading of the pages. This is especially important if your target audience is likely to be among the millions of people who still rely on dial up connections for Internet access.

The longer it takes your pages to load, the less chance that visitors will wait around to see what is going on at your blog. Quick loading means people will start reading sooner, and will be more likely to find something that catches their interest.

There are a number of resources online for setting up your own blog. In some cases, you may be able to become an expert on a how to site. This is an excellent opportunity, since some of these sites will pay a monthly stipend based on the amount of traffic you generate.

In exchange, you agree to keep the content of the site fresh and informative. This usually will require no more than a few hours per week, and the opportunity for generated revenue will be worth the time and effort.

If you are not in a position to piggyback on an information site, check with the service provider who provides you with bandwidth for your web site. Chances are they can also provide you with space and resources to create your own stand along blog.

While this approach does not allow you to generate revenue from the space provider, it does allow you the opportunity to promote your own business, and also sign up with an adword service to allow advertisers that have some relevance to your blog to place ads there.

You will at least make a little money off the ads, and still have the ability to redirect people to your own site.

Before you jump into setting up your blog, take some time and check out several blogs that are already online. Make note of the page layouts, the arrangement of the content, the types of graphics and images, and the space that is set aside for ads.

This will give you some ideas on what you can do with your space that will result in driving traffic to your business, as well as making a few pennies by hosting ads for related web sites.

You will find a link in the left sidebar of this blog that links to my comprehensive book on blogging.