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My Blogging Experience – Discovering the Online Wealth Part 1

Courtesy Image from Flickr.com(Image courtesy of Flickr.com)

What is your experience in Blogging?

I hope you have not started like me. Having no knowledge about the virtual business, I ventured to find a share of the treasure which has made so many millionaires.

Blogging was a term totally new to me when I first started on the internet. My online career started with network marketing. Being a total newbie to network marketing, at that time, my upline told me that I should open up an account at free blogging site Blogger.com and promote my business. And that is what I did. Having no clue how to generate traffic or audience to my first page. I hardly got any instructions on how to build a blog page or how to post articles.

Yet with trial and error, I managed to get in my first post and anxiously waited for visitors to turn up. Well, to my disappointment  I had been waiting and waiting and waiting.

So why on earth wasn’t I getting and traffic to my site?

What was never told to me was that I had to frequently update my blog. Although Google likes Blogger.com, you need to post articles regularly, that what makes Google page crawlers look for interesting stuff in your articles. As I told you I was a total newbie to the internet, all I knew was type something on the Google search box and VOILA the answer was there for me.

Terms like keywords, page rankings, search engine optimisation etc. were things like someone was talking to me in “Martian” language. My response Yeah! Yeah! I have heard about it. But honestly haven’t had a clue what it was. Neither was I courageous to ask someone what was it all about.

So those days have been quite painful for me struggling to make that 1st appearance on the internet.

I was disappointed, still looking for answers to my questions but no where to find it. Finally, my blog went to as “sleeping mode” like a dormant volcano for about six months.

I started surfing more on the internet and came across those wonderful websites (blogs) “that is what I thought they were at that time”. These blogs had a www.Mynamedomain.com on it. That is the guys were branding themselves. I kept asking myself. How are they doing it? Why is mine tagged to a name.blogspot.com and why can’t I have one like them.

Yeah, I am sure you are laughing at me and making fun of me but honestly, I hadn’t a clue. I was mad and furious still trying to figure out how actually it works.

The saddest thing is that I was a computer programmer about 15 years back but never surfed on the internet. Internet has been very recent to me say about 3 to 4 years ago. Yeah, of course I knew how emails worked and something called internet was there but I was too much pre-occupied with the real world to get actually involved with the virtual world.

Ok, I shall end part 1 here and give you something to cheer you up.

TIPS FOR THE DAY.

You have two ways of creating blogs either free or hosted (paid) blogs.

1. The good sites  (free) that I have used so far are

a) Blogger.com

b) WordPress.com

I found blogger.com more handy in terms usability of the structure. I still have about 4 of them and I use them to bring traffic to this blog. It easy to add different affiliate programs to earn money.    You can easily add Adsense program. It is very Google friendly.

My advice: don’t create just one post and subscribe to Adsense, Google will straight away refuse it. You need to have “keyword based” articles in order for Google to be able to place ads in your posts. I will be talking about this in the coming article posts.

2. Let us talk about Keywords.

To get good search engine ranking, you need to have good keywords in your article headline and also in the articles itself

There are various methods of analysing highly targeted keywords. You will never find one best way to do it. Every marketer has his/her own techniques. One simple technique for keyword search is googles https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal#

Type in the word you would like to find. Say for example Dog Training. The tool will give you plenty of keywords based on that search criteria.

The key thing here is to go for keywords that have volumes more than 500 and above but don’t go for high volume keywords as they would be hard to rank for in the search engines

Now copy/paste each keyword in the google search bar and place “” around the word say for example you are looking for Dog Training Tips what you would do is “Dog Training Tips”. This will give you the number of people that are competing for that keyword (people like you and me for earning money).

If the number is less than 100,000 then it is a very good keyword to use. Depending on the keyword rarity I sometimes go up to 200,000.

I will be talking more about all these. Did not want to bore you all at one go. The poisonous dose is going to be slow and painful.

So until next time my friends. By the way, if you liked my article you may want to post a comment and tweet it to your followers.



The 3 Key Ingredients of a Successful Money Making Blog

Assuming you want your blog to rake in cash, you’re going to have to go about it in the right way. Sure, you could probably manage to make a little bit of money here and there simply via advertisement revenue and by promoting certain offers – but this probably isn’t going to bring in the sort of riches that you dream of.

Truth is, if you’re set on making as much cash as you can from your blog, you’re going to need to ensure that you’ve covered all your bases and are tweaked them so that every aspect of your money making process is performing in tip top condition.

How do you do that? Well, the best place to start is to look at each ingredient of a successful money making blog individually:

1. Traffic

More traffic normally means more sales. At least, it definitely means more potential customers which in turn means that you should be making more sales than previously. Course, traffic is a very wide topic and there are countless ways in which you could generate it – so what you need to do is pursue as many of these as possible.

While you’re at it you should also be aware that you’re looking for as highly targeted traffic as you can. Using keywords, you should find that you’re able to achieve this well.

2. Conversion Rates

How many of the potential customers that visit your blog actually end up buying stuff from it? In a nutshell, that’s your conversion rate (though it is normally measured as a percentage, i.e. X% meaning X sales per 100 potential customers). Ensuring that your conversion rate is as high as possible is an extremely good idea because it means that you’re going to be taking advantage of more of your traffic.

By capitalizing on as much of your traffic as possible, you’ll be getting the most out of your efforts, and not ‘wasting’ any of the traffic you’ve worked so hard to obtain.

3. Repeat Customers

Having made the effort to clinch a sale with one customer, it would be a crying shame if you simply let them leave and never hear from them again. Seeing as they’ve already bought something from you it means that they are interested in the niche that you’re in, and more importantly – they’re willing to buy products in that niche!

So if you could just take down their details, you should be able to turn them into repeat customers (or at least stand a good chance of doing so).

Yes, we’re talking about list building, though nowadays using things such as Twitter can be just as good. End of the day, the choice is yours so long as you’re able to set up some system whereby you can continue to market to your proven buyers.

If you’re able to take care of each and every one of these key ingredients, you’ll quickly find that you’re able to turn your own blog into a successful money making blog too! None of this is really all that tough, and now that you know what you should be looking at, why don’t you head over to your own blog and see what you can improve!

If you’re tired of barely scrapping by and are ready to finally make some money online with blogging, you need to check out Bloggers Payback:

Bloggers Pay-Back-Time

www.bloggerspayback.com

10 Blog Traffic Tips

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.