You have a website, and you’re acting somewhat like a liaison- having promotional or coupon codes for a company or different website- hoping to have people use this link to buy. You’ll be getting a “commission” by doing this, and the company is getting business.

That’s pretty much the simplest form of affiliate marketing. There are billion of techniques and tactics, but I won’t be getting into that for this article.

There’s actually a good amount of risk involved with affiliate marketing. You have to know it’s coming. In the internet industry, anything that can be regarded as awesome, and makes you money, has to have some kind of risk involved or the capability or fraudulent activity.

It’s so easy to pull a fast one over in affiliate marketing, so here are some things to be cautious of- along with some solutions you can take.

For one, everyone is at risk- whether it be the affiliate themselves, the consumer or the merchants. Don’t feel like you’re less likely to be targeted- everyone is a target. If you want to play nicely in the affiliate marketing space, you have to be able to watch your own back- as well as others.

The risks to be aware of are:

• The duplication of legitimate sites;
• Mass email spamming under the cover of the “actual company”;
• Squatting on domains that are a common misspelling of what the user might be searching for;
• Diversion by creating links that won’t pay the intended affiliate;
• Faking clicks to drive up CPC earnings.

So what are some of the solutions?

The easy solution to preventing affiliate marketing fraud is communication- you need to be able to communicate with affiliates. Once you’re clear on their tactics, you’ll be able to smell if something doesn’t seem right. Forums are another great area for communication because you can help to caution others, like yourself, who may be new to affiliate marketing or may not realize what to be careful of.

You can also blacklist affiliates that you’re having issues with- this way you can share your blacklist with others via forums- or just keep it for your own reference.

The other check systems really have to do with doing your homework. Make sure you’re looking over the affiliate’s site. This is probably one of the easiest and most necessary steps. Also, never have an automated approvals when you’re adding your affiliates.

Paying attention to the above points should help you conquer as an affiliate marketer and protect yourself in the industry. You never know what shady marketers is doing- and you certainly don’t want to be involved with them.

Every time I asked someone to describe which kind of content is the best for them, I get different answers. But, at the end all answers have something in common. That is what I am going to tell you here, which elements should every quality and good content must have!

Useful Content

Useful content for every person may be different. That is why you need to concentrate your attention to the targeted audience every time you write down your post(s).

“Useful content” may be any of the following and may be interesting for different audience. Remember that you can not write an article that can be useful for every reader or visitor to your own blog or a website!

• Tutorials & Guides – This is probably the common way to provide some useful content through your blog. People like when you try to help them in area they are trying to be better. Every niche on internet can contain some kind of tutorial content.
• News & Information – Some people would like to read the most recent news and information related to the niche they are interested in. Many successful blogs are actually developed under these kind of contents.
• Entertainment – Entertainment blogs are used for entertainment. People tend to visit these places for laugh, gossip and to find other fun contents. Entertainment blogs are quite popular on internet these days.
• Education – A lot of people like to learn something new. Blogs are increasingly the places where bloggers try to educate their readers about some stuff they might do not know. Some popular blogs are primarily interested into education.

You need to know that every blog can be successful in some different way. People like to learn something, explore and read useful contents in general.

Unique Content

It is not secret that unique content is much more productive and effective for a bloggers. Visitors to your (or any other) blog like to find out something new and unique – they have not seen anywhere else on the internet. So the most important way is to keep your blog unique and filled with quality content.

For a blog to be successful, your content needs to be unique and quality! And that is the only guaranteed way to do that!

Unique content can be mixed with quality content. And if you apply these two factors into one, the overall quality of your blog is also improved too! To be unique, you will need to follow some basic rules and apply them to a blog:

• Something absolutely new – Develop or write something absolutely new on internet. It is the hard task but it is possible. Writing down some absolutely unique contents may improve your blog authority and ratings easily.
• Old but with new info – A lot of bloggers use this technique to generate some unique content for their blogs. I actually like this rule to apply on my contents. This way you find some “old” content and fill it with some new information. Readers like to read something refreshed and unique in your own style.
• Do some case study – This kind of content is less presented on blogs. Probably because they are quite hard and long to write and compose. Develop an unique case study about some area in your niche and research it yourself. I found these contents very quality and useful!

These are just some rules that can improve your content quality and uniqueness ratings. Almost in every niche and thing you do, you can be unique in your own way! Keep that in mind.

Research your Readership

The best possible advice, undependable for a blog niche is to research properly your readership and take the necessary actions from the results you get.

Knowing your visitors, you may take the actions to improve your blog overall quality and authority. This research may help you to improve your contents too. Knowing who visit your blog mostly may help you to build a blog around that particular audience.

You can do some things to improve your blog quality by using some following actions:

• Ask them – Ask your readers what they think about your blog, what they want to improve and anything you actually want. This can highly improve your overall blog quality and improve your blog authority in your area.
• Communication is important – Your own communication with your visitors is important if you have a blog. By communicating constantly with your readers, you automatically build a strong and effective community around it.

Researching your readership may give you an impression what they would like to see on your blog. Which kind of content they like (or not) and much more vital things. You can use all these information to develop a more quality blog.

A website design is also giving out the first impression and probably these two factors are the most important for your visitors when they visit your blog for the first time. So, it is very important to know how to write down your titles on your blog.

Why Titles are Important

Titles are important because of lot of things, including the following ones:

• Search engine attention – This is where titles are very important. They are displayed as title elements on every search engine on internet. Allowing visitors to decide what they are going to click and where they should go. Good titles are those which can attract many traffic from the search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing.
• Subscribers attention – In a very similar way to search engines, your titles may grab an attention from your RSS and email subscribers. If they find your content attractive and interesting they would go and probably read it – if they do not, the answer is obvious.
• Social bookmarking factor – I have found that most social bookmarking services like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and many others have their front pages filled with interesting, descriptive and useful titles and contents. Some websites actually receives thousands of quality visitors from this factor because they have developed some good titles and content.
• Search engine optimization – There are many factors which may directly (or indirectly) affect your overall search engine optimization. But one of the most important on-site factors, that you can directly affect is your content titles. Search engines takes this factor very seriously, and with combination with good and quality content, you will get more quality visitors for sure.

There are many other things, but the above ones are probably the most important for a bloggers and a website owners.

How to Use Titles

There are many strategies which you can apply when you deciding which title you are going to use on your blog article. Most of these strategies strongly depends on your article content and type of your website, so take care about all these strategies below:

• Keep them simple – The most effective titles are short ones. Readers like to read titles quickly and decide fast what they are want to read, rather to read long titles. Short titles are good for search engines because most of them would not show long ones completely. I recommend you to use up to 40-50 characters (with spaces) in your titles to ensure search engines to display them completely on search engine result pages.
• Attention grabbing – Titles which grabs the attention are one of the most effective ones. You need to draw your readers to open and read your content. So the first thing you should ask yourself is: “In what I would be interested in?” before deciding which title are you going to use. By all means try to grab some attention from your potential readers and visitors.
• Descriptive – The majority of readers would go to read the article if that title shows them what they are going to read in. Of course, most readers would like to know what they can expect in your article and hopes that you would give them the right information. My recommendation is to always try to keep your titles descriptive and easy to understand.
• Use main keywords – Well this is mostly done just because search engines. Most search engines takes this factor into consideration when they are trying to display information on their result pages. Using main keywords (but not too much) in your title may easily improve your search engine rankings and positions.
• What your readers need – Always think about your reader needs and requirements. What they should expect from you to write, and then try to apply that on your titles too. Your loyal readers would know how to appreciate this for sure.

Take your time developing quality titles for each your article. This way, not only you may improve search engine traffic but you may improve overall organic traffic as well.

Take at least a few minutes before you are going to publish your article to think about the perfect title for it. This way you will get the best possible result for sure.

Visitors like to share something useful, unique and helpful with other users on internet. Treat your title as mini advertisement for your website and keep in mind how would you search for it through search engines. This may be a huge advantage for you and your work would be eventually paid-off in the future.

Your titles may easily improve the chances for someone to read your whole article. And you should take this factor into consideration once you decide which title you are going to use.

Every single blogger out there have a different answer to this question. But after all, they all have something in common when it comes to measuring a blog success in general. Below, I am going to show you factors that directly impact on your blog success.

Traffic is Important

I constantly repeat that traffic is probably the most important factor for every single blog online. If you have a good and constant traffic improvements, that means you have a successful blog and you are working just fine.

Measuring a traffic is quite easy these days. Most bloggers use Google Analytics tool to precisely measure their traffic nature. Tools like this are quite useful and may provide you with some very good stats and information.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors are also very important for every blog. These are those visitors which visit your website from different IP addresses. The more unique visitors you get, the better success you have for your own blog or a website.

There is no a 100% accurate tool that can measure these visitors. Google Analytics tool will present you with some close results that you may use for the measurement. These tools measure these visitors by IP and cookies.

These both methods have their own problems. Your IP address can be static and dynamic. If your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address, it will be different every time you re-connect to internet. And a lot of users delete and clean browsing cookies from their computers too! That is why these tools can not accurately measure these unique visitors.

Advertisers especially like to provide them with these results. Also, if you are going to sell your own blog, it is always good to provide your unique visitors count. This may highly improve the price of your website and increase your ad sales.

Page Views

Page views are the total number of pages your visitor read on your blog. Most advertisers and potential customers would like to know these values for your blog.

You can measure this stat like daily, monthly or even as average view per visitor that comes on your blog. Page views reveal information about your visitors nature and loyalty. The more page views you have, the better success you have on a blog.

Page views are always higher than visits and some websites manage to get some good stats here. Making their websites good and recognized online. Page views are also good for ad networks like Google AdSense, because this way you increase the chance for someone to click on your advertisements and potential leads.

RSS & Mail Subscribers

Subscribers are quite popular today among bloggers. Most of them actually try to get more subscribers every time they can. Subscribers gives an impression how your blog is popular actually and reveals how your visitors are loyal to you!

We can separate these subscribers into RSS and Mail subscribers, both types are good for different approach to your blog or marketing strategy:

• RSS Subscribers – Those are the people who read your articles through feed updates. They use feed readers read your own blog, and might never visit your blog at all! Those subscribers are your loyal visitors and they might read your updates much more than any other visitor.
• Mail Subscribers – In addition to RSS-based readers, many bloggers actually provide updates through email. The most popular service to measure your email subscribers is FeedBurner. Works on same principle like RSS updates, but visitors read your updates through email.
• Newsletter Subscribers – These are another email-based subscribers. Through this way they would be subscribed to your newsletter updates – not your articles! This is a good way to present some things to your loyal visitors and good way to improve your affiliate sales. Most popular bloggers today have this opportunity too!

Your subscribers are very important for your future growth and development. If you manage to get more subscribers, your blog will be more and more creditable.

Links

Links are probably the most important for search engines. The more links you get, the better positions on search engines you will get.

Links are currency of the world wide web. The count of your incoming links may be a good indicators for your advertisers and potential customers to determine your blog success in general. Which may lead to successful marketing and overall sales boost.

Your search engine rankings are quite important and may be the right indicator how your blog is successful actually. There are numerous of ways with which you can measure your links, and there are some good ones:

• Google Analytics – Yes, among other things this great free tool can do – it is capable to measure your links and search engine stats (and traffic).
• Google Webmaster Central – This is a specialized tool, created for website owners and bloggers. Allowing you to measure easily your incoming links, keyword popularity and more.

There is no easy way to get thousands of quality links online. But some techniques may improve the chances for someone to link back to you.

Some Other Factors

All these factors above directly affect your overall blog quality and success. Through there are more factors to consider, such as:

• Social Media Factor – This factor is very important today. For some users it might be the most important factor to determine a blog success. Considering all factors there included and connected with your own blog, such as: Twitter & Facebook profiles, delicious.com bookmarks or links on other social networking websites.
• Community – Your community power is quite important when measuring a blog success. Your visitors and readers try to communicate with you through your comments and contacts. It is important to interact with them and build up some good and respectful community around your own blog. Your blog success can be measured with this factor too!

Of course, there are some more factors that may directly or indirectly affect you to measure a blog success. Great way is to check all things you can to properly determine a blog success. The more information you gather, the better results you would get.

The more pages your regular visitor read, the better job you do on your blog. I have found on internet that an average visitor visits 1.4 pages per visit. Some blogs and websites have a much larger page views count.

In this post, I am going to show you what you as a blogger can do to improve your page views. Actually, what can you do to draw your visitors to view more pages on their visit!

Why Page Views are Important

Page Views are very important for every website on internet. Below, I am going to show you why they are important and what they can get for you and your website:

• More loyal visitors – A loyal visitors are one of the most important things for every website on internet. If you can draw more people to visit your website again and again, it’s quite sure you will end up with more traffic. It’s more likely your regular visitor become a loyal one if that visitor go to your website and view your page regularly.
• More ad revenue – For contextual ads like AdSense, a page views are important such as regular visitors which visit one page per visit. Every page view counts and improve the chances for someone to click on your advertisements.
• More credibility – If you are going to sell your blog, a page view stats can easily boost your credibility and authority. This can only help you to sell your blog for affordable price.
• More motivation – If I see some page view improvements, I get more motivated to work on my blog. That is because I know I do some things right.

Tips to Get more Page Views

Below, see what you can do to boost your page views on a blog. Usually all these tips are very effective and may improve your stats easily:

• Related posts – This is probably the most common thing bloggers do to encourage readers to read multiple pages on their blogs. Show related posts below every post you write and let your visitors do the rest.
• Interlink within posts – Another very effective way, and most probably the best one to improve your blog page views is to link to the related posts in your post contents. If you write a post that may have some information similar to one of yours previous post, all you need to do is to link to it from that one. And always use this technique on your blog!
• Write a series of posts – A post series is actually one large post compiled with two or more posts related to that particular topic. Yes, it requires time to write them but they are very effective and useful for your visitors. You can see mine post series [LINK] to see how it’s done!
• Most favorite posts and categories – All your visitors would like to see some posts that are favorite to you! Also, do not be afraid to place your link to archived categories in sidebar. This can only improve your visitors click-through and page view count.
• Use excerpts – Some bloggers actually like to display the full article on their home pages. I actually don’t like this, mostly because I have to scroll all way down to find something I am interested in. If you are like me, use excerpts displayed on your home page rather than full posts. This may improve your page views too!
• View the most popular posts – I like to see which posts are the most popular on blogs I regularly visit and read. Today, you can easily put these on your sidebar and tell your visitors which are the most popular posts on your blog right now!

There are so many other things that might improve your blog page views. I am absolutely sure that below tips are the most popular today on internet and yes, they can give you some very good results and stats for sure.

I would like what do you use to improve your blog page views? Feel free to post your opinions below using our comments form. I would be more than happy to hear what do you think!

If you are a blogger, you have probably get some of these requests from other people. I have to say that most of these offers are generated automatically by spammers who want to get some links required for better positions on search engines.

In this article, I am going to show you how to request links from bloggers properly. Requesting link exchange with other blogger may only work if you do it politely and respectfully.

How to Request Links

Following these below advices, you will have a much better chance to get some quality links:

• Be human – This is probably the best possible way to get some link juice for your website. You have to leave the impression that you are a human being, not some automatically generated robot which experienced blogger recognize fast. The more automated your request feel, the more likely it is going to be deleted!
• Be polite – You need to know that other blogger does not owe you anything! According to this, he/she may approve or not any of your request without worry. After all, you are sending a request for favor and there you should be polite and nice in every single way.
• Be honest – Probably one of the most important factor is to be honest to them. Do not try to lie that other blogger. If you want to exchange links with them, tell them why you want it. It is always good to tell them what do you like about that blog they are writing and some own experiences with them.
• Be specific – Try to be more specific in your link exchange request. We all hate when someone try to get around some facts, trying to tell us what is right or wrong. Do not try to be smart, only try to get some real descriptive facts and things.
• Be interesting – After all, you need to sell your proposition to them. You need to know that people would not like to link to you just because you ask them. Try to write down some interesting request, different from all other automated mails and keep your first paragraph count. If you do this right, there might be a high chance for your request to be accepted.
• Be deserved – It is important to tell them why they should exchange link with your website. No one would like to link to you if you do not have something to give out in return. You are trying here to sell something, so tell them what they would get – not you!

Of course, there are much more ways to get some links from other places on internet. And probably the best possible way is to use link bait technique [LINK] at start.

Facts you should know

If you do want to exchange some links with other bloggers related to your niche, the most important thing is to be interesting and different in your own unique way. We are all tired from the same automated link exchange requests from spammers. Try not to be one!

Other very important thing is to know your limits. In 99.99% of cases, bloggers automatically requests links from the big guys in their niche. This is probably the worst mistake at the beginning, because these large blogs does not need anything from low trafficked and unknown websites!

My recommendation is to start with lower websites, similar to your website traffic and rankings and go up as your website grows.

Another important fact is that two-way links are counted less for search engines than one-way links. So you (and your link exchange partner) probably would not get some huge impact on search engines. But, at the end, these links are counted too by them! And every little helps!

The more related affiliate product or service is, the more chance you would have to earn some money through it – you simply need to know this! But you also need to be careful when recommending a product or service to your loyal readers.

This way you suggest your readers to purchase something online, so you do not want to suggest them to buy something that not work properly. This way you will loose your valuable visitors and loyal readers of your blog.

The best way is to find more information about that product you are recommending to your visitors! Some bloggers even purchase these product and then recommend them to their visitors to be most secured and sure about them!

Tips to Use Affiliate Programs

Below, you will find some interesting and useful tips which can tell you how to use affiliate programs on your own website or a blog:

Discover your audience

It is very important to know your audience. Put yourself in your reader head and try to think what they could buy from your blog or what they might get interest in. Are they interested into some service, specific product or are they looking for some kind of similar related product you own? These are all questions you need to know to maximize your affiliate programs potential.

Get them know

Today, thousands of products and services are promoted through affiliate programs or they support them! All you need to do here is to pick up the most appropriate service or a product that really fits on your website and it is going to be useful for your readers!

Do not in any case recommend some product if you are not a 100% sure that program will be useful for your readers and audience. If you have doubts, it is better to try to find something better then just recommending anything you might find.

If you are going to recommend something to your readers, try to include all information about that particular product or service. Including both its strength and weakness! People after all want to buy something if they know what they can expect!

Use links deeply

This is a very effective way to maximize your sales through your blog. So, try to place some affiliate links anywhere you have a chance on your content. Do not only put advertisements on your website and think they would work properly for you – this is not the case if you want to successfully make money through affiliate programs online.

Look for example the contextual advertisements. They are so successful and available on the internet over the years – simply because they works! Secrets of contextual ads like AdSense is that these ads perfectly match with content.

And what are contextual ads other than just an ordinary links on your website? A banner on your header area or in sidebar won’t be anywhere near as effective as multiple links through your blog, advertising products that are related to them!

Good example is that if you write down some mobile phone review, link directly to a page selling that particular phone. This is the perfect way to improve your chances to sell things from your blog and earn commission for every sale you provide!

Traffic is very important

Of course, traffic is very important here like with any other advertisement technique. Affiliate programs really have a huge potential if you do things right. I have to say that you can earn much more money compared to the contextual, or any other pay-per-click advertising method.

Like with other monetization technique, your traffic is very important and may directly affect your earnings in general. The more people visit your blog, the more of them would see your affiliate links and click them.

Affiliate partners would not pay you for every click you get to them, but they would give you a generous commission if that visitor (which comes from your affiliate link) purchase something from their website. In most cases this is the way it works with all affiliate programs out there.

I will give you one example, related to above mentioned example:

Let’s say you have affiliate link to a mobile phone sales page. That mobile phone costs $200.00 and commission is 10% for you as affiliate. Now let’s say you have only 100 clicks on that item and 1% of these visitors purchased that mobile phone! In this case you would earn a whole $20.00 as reward.

You can now see the power and importance of traffic, right?

Check your Affiliates

Of course, you would need to check out all products or services you actually recommend to your visitors through a blog.

This does not mean you need to purchase all these products you are referring to, but to try to find more information about them. One good and effective way is to contact your affiliate and ask for some kind of trial or testing period, so you can try out how it all works before recommending it to your audience.

In most cases, affiliate would give you some kind of trial or testing period of the service they are trying to promote and sale on internet. So, give yourself some time and do not be afraid to ask!

Additionally, the most today’s affiliate programs and networks on internet have some kind of stats for every single affiliate product they have in database. You can also browse through them and find some valuable information you might use.

The first thing you should consider here is when is the time. When to start money online? Many bloggers actually have some different answers to this question. And I am going to show you my own opinion regarding this topic.

When to make money

When to start making money is a question with no proper and correct answer. I would say that making money contains so much things. Below, I am going to provide you some valuable and interesting concepts which can help you to determine when to make money online from your own website or a blog:

• Start with ads – A lot of bloggers actually start using advertisements on their blogs. This may be good for many reasons and your visitors get used to them, also improving your experiences with ad customization and optimization techniques.
• Run ads when you establish some traffic – Some users run ads when they establish some readership for their sites. This is good for one reason, you will potentially start money right after you place your ads and receive a lot of clicks from all your visitors (old and new ones).

Through you need to take care about all these factors below, which can help you to choose the appropriate time to start money making process:

• Earnings potential – You can expect to earn less money at the start. So here is question is it really worth to place ads at the beginning? You will receive some traffic but probably not enough to actually make some money out of it.
• Design potential – You need to consider that ads are on right places in your website design. A lot of bloggers do this mistake and place too much ads on their sites. On the other hand, some of them place them in spots that are not attractive for their visitors.
• Readers expectations – Another factor you should consider here is your readers. We all write for our readers and they mean all to us! It is important for your visitors to know where they should expect advertisements and actually to get used to them easily.
• Experience in monetization – Experience requires time, so to have some experience you need to check out all possible things you might use to improve your earnings and overall experience in monetization techniques. Explore any opportunity you might use and most probably you will find the perfect match for you and your website.

Factors to Consider

Then you should consider what ads would get for your website at the beginning. These factors are very important and you should take them seriously:

• Is your niche worth? You probably know that every single niche allows you to earn different amount of money. There are some highly-paid niches and those which are overcrowded. After all, it depends on your niche competition and demand on market.
• Is it really worth? You should ask yourself this question when deciding to place advertisements on your website. Is it really worth to earn $0.1 per day but to risk someone to visit your website again because you have placed ads on your website?
• Ad distraction – Weather we like it or not, advertisements usually distract your visitors to read your contents. Well, their “job” is to do that after all. Try to place less ads on your website trying to design them to fit perfectly on your website.

As you can see, there are so many factors which you are going to consider even before you are trying to start making money from your website.

After all, you can try to use any advertisement opportunity on your website and see how it works in practice. According to your results, you should use that monetization way on your website with which you have the most success.

Hosted platforms are those which are installed on servers which contents you can not change and they are managed by someone else! A self-hosted platforms are those where you can install blogs manually and manage them by yourself.

Hosted Blog Platforms

A hosted blog platforms are usually free or very cheap, when we compare them with self-hosted ones. You can setup your own blogs here and you do not need to worry about technical stuffs.

This is a type of blog that many bloggers start out with, mostly because they can create a blog quickly, easily and can do that completely for free!

There are a few most popular platforms you can use here:

• WordPress – For sure, it is the most popular self-hosted platform on internet. Allowing you to create a blog on their hosted servers but with some limitations. Does not require you do pay monthly fee but have some additional paid services to extend functionality of your blog.
• TypePad – TypePad is the only hosted blogging platform that require you to pay monthly fee in order to use it. It is a very advanced platform with a few good things and tools integrated. This is usually used by experienced bloggers and users.
• Blogger – Blogger or a Blogspot is a hosted blogging platform which allows you to completely free host your blog online. I have to say that allows more features than any other (available for free) hosted blogging platform. By the default, it allows you to use your own domain names, change the themes and many more.

These platforms are “hosted” because they host your blog on their own domain names. After usually a very easy process, they would give you a sub-domain name attached to their domain. Which after you can change to your domain name if that service supports it.

Hosted Blog Platform Advantages

Using a hosted blog platforms has many advantages. I will list you a few most important ones which you need to know about:

• Free or cheap to run – A hosted blog platforms are quite cheap or even completely free to use. This is very good for a beginners and amateurs who want to learn more about blogging and get some required experience for their future development.
• Quick and very easy setup – These blog platforms are very easy to setup and this all can be done within a few minutes. Allowing anyone to create their own blogs easily and quickly.
• Updated automatically – A hosted blog platforms are updated automatically. So, you do not need to update them manually like you need to do with a self-hosted blogs.
• Search engine friendly – Blogs hosted on these platforms are usually very fast crawled. Search engines tend to crawl these blogs quickly giving them advantage on result pages.
• No need to worry about hosting – Of course, you do not need to worry about hosting and maintaining your own blog. It is all done by someone behind. All you need is to create a blog and to work on it regularly.

Hosted Blog Platform Disadvantages

Although there are several advantages of using hosted blog platforms, there are always some downsides for everything:

• Less configurable – A hosted blog platforms have so much limitations when it comes to the configuration of your blog. With these platforms you can do some basic things but for full effect you will need to use a self-hosted platforms.
• Design limitations – A blog design is usually limited to a few default themes which that service offer to you. Allowing you to customize only a few things – but not all! Exception is with blogger blogs, where you can use some third-party themes and customize them by yourself.
• You don’t own it completely – This is a big downside of these blogs. You actually do not own your own blog here! Mostly because they have so much limitations required for advanced customization and work.
• URL customizations – With almost anything else, this is also a limited with this kind of blogs. In most cases, you are not allowed to use your customized domain name (for free) and do not allow you to change your URL structure.

According to this, a “hosted” blog platforms are good places to begin with your blogging journey! I know several bloggers which actually make some affordable amount of money using blogs on these “hosted” platforms.

To be honest, I have actually make my first $100.00 using a free hosted blogging platform. I honestly think that anyone can use this platform to make their first money online and to learn some basic things about blogging in general.

Self-Hosted Blog Platforms

The other type of blog platform is where you download, install and maintain your whole blog yourself. This is the mostly used blogging platform for “serious” bloggers, because it allows you to easily customize and do practically anything you want.

This is a type of blog which allows you the complete control over your blog. Allowing you to install anything you need on it. There are some standalone blogging platforms available on internet, but 99% of bloggers uses WordPress to host their blogs.

There are many reasons why they use this free platform. But mostly because there are many available third-party plug-ins and extensions with which you can easily extend your blog functionality. The same works with themes and all other tools developed primarily for this platform.

Self-Hosted Blog Platform Advantages

I have already mentioned that both blogging platforms has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. Here are some benefits for self-hosted blogs:

• Absolute control – A self-hosted blogs allows you full control over your own blog. Allowing you to install or delete anything it is available on your server. This gives you unlimited options for you and your own blog to be functional and effective like you want it to!
• Extensions support – A self-hosted blog platforms like WordPress gives you the opportunity to extend functionality of your blog with thousands of free plug-ins or extensions. This may help you a lot if you want your blog to look professional and good.
• Free platforms – Through you need to pay for a domain name and hosting, a blog platforms like WordPress are completely free to use! And most third-party plug-ins are available completely for free, so you do not need to pay to use them!
• SEO potential – These blogs have a huge search engine optimization potential. Allowing you to use your own customized domain names and URL’s; change your meta tags and much more. This is very important because this way you can easily improve your search engine rankings!

Self-Hosted Blog Platform Disadvantages

A self-hosted blogs are the most popular today among serious bloggers. But of course, there are some downsides which may force you to stay with “hosted” blogs instead:

• Hosting and Domain Costs – A domain name and web hosting costs some money. At the best case, you would buy a domain name for $10.00/year and pay hosting for $5/month. If your site grows, you will need to pay even much more!
• Complicated setup – A self-hosted blog platforms have a bit complicated setup. It is especially hard to move your website to another server. Some bloggers does not know how to do this because it requires some experience and knowledge.
• Hosting problems – I really do not know a website owner who at least once did not have problems with hosting. Hosting problems may be different and can take you a lot of time and nerves to solve.

It is not important you use a hosted or a self-hosted service, you need to be aware to back up your blog in case something happen. Of course, there is more chance to have some problems with a standalone blog platforms than with hosted ones. But after all, it is always good to be sure and secured.

If you are looking for a self-hosted blog, it is very important to choose right domain and hosting for your blog. Choosing the right domain name and hosting may save you a lot of work and problems in your future blog development for sure.

A self-hosted blog platform is good for experienced bloggers and people who know a little more about blogging and web development in general. So, it is recommended to start with a free hosted platform then to switch to a self-hosted one. This way you will learn some required things and find out how to blog properly right after you start your “real” blog!

A good design can really improve your blog in many ways: improve reading of your content, pointing out on important parts or simply draw your visitors to come back again. This all gives you blog more credibility and functionality, improving your subscribers count.

Before choosing which kind of design your blog should have, you need to take care about some vital things regarding to a blog itself:

• Why you blog? It is important to know why do you actually blog. Is that because of the money or something else? Are you aiming on AdSense contextual ads or to sell some products from it? This all depends on which kind of design you might need.
• Your targeted audience? Your design may strongly depend on which kind of audience you expect to visit your own blog. Knowing the appropriate audience targeting, you may choose a different design for your blog. Because there is no some kind of universal design which all your visitors would like.
• What are your requirements? You probably want some kind of extended functionality on your blog. You will decide faster if you know exactly what do you want to include on your own blog. Actually, it is all up to your needs and requirements at the end.

What to include in your blog design

There are some functions you should consider importing into your own blog design. This may easily improve your blog functionality and productivity.

Contact info – Place some contact information on easily-spotted place on your blog. This lets your visitors and potential customers to contact your easily if they have some questions or offers to ask you. This is a must-have for all blogs out there.

About me section – Write down some basic things about you and place them into your website. It is always good to let your visitors know who stands behind a blog. This may open some new opportunities for you and improve your visitors loyalty.

Advertisements – Almost every blog on internet include advertisements to sell. Give your potential customers opportunity to know what they can purchase on your website and prices for ads you are selling.

Good Navigation – This is probably one of the most important things for every blog. Be sure to place some good navigation which can be accessed easily by anyone. It is always good to place your categories links, archives and pages on visible area on your blog.

Own Logo – Today, a logo is required for every serious blogger. In most cases it can be done by yourself, but if you do not know how to do it – it is the best way to ask some designers to create one for you. Prices for logos vary today, but they can be found pretty cheap these days on internet.

Subscription buttons – Let your loyal visitors opportunity to subscribe to your RSS feed updates. I usually use this kind of subscription for all blogs I follow and read regularly. So, place these buttons on easily spotted area on your blog.

Newsletter subscription – If you have a newsletter you run regularly, it is obvious you would let your potential subscribers to sign up. Let them know why they should sign up and place the form on visible area in your blog design.

Search option – Your visitors might not always find information they are looking for. So, it is important to let them opportunity to search through your blog easily. This is also a must-have feature for every single blog out there.

Recent/popular posts section – I like to know which kind of posts are most favorite and recent on blogs I read regularly. This is a very good way to get some visitors to browse through your website to find more valuable information easily.

Links to favorite posts – Your loyal visitors would like this feature. They want to know which posts you like on your blog. This also improve some browsing through factor on your blog. Additionally, your loyal visitors might like the posts you actually like.

Comments section – I like this module on blogs. This section encourages visitors to comment on your blog but in exchange you will get them some links to their blogs and sites. This may highly improve your comments count for sure.

Of course, these are only some ideas of what you might place in your blog. Improving some part of it may be a huge advantage for you and your future blog development.

I would like what do you place on your blogs? Feel free to post some comment below if you have something to say regarding this topic!

This may help you to see which kind of blogs are the most popular today. Discovering which niches are popular, how much they post and so on. Knowing how “they” maintain their blogs help you to improve your blog in general, so take these stats seriously for your blog too!

There are several things I will cover in this case study:

• Blog age – Showing you an average age for top 25 blogs on internet.
• Post frequency – Shows you the average post frequency per blog niche.
• Length of post(s) – The average length of posts on top 25 blogs and per niche.
• Blog niche – Showing you which niches are the most popular today.
• Social media factor – Social media factor is very important for these blogs.
• Generated revenue – Showing you how “big guys” earn money online.

Blog Age

I have personally do some research on the most recent top 25 Technorati’s blog list and discovered that the average age of all blogs listed here is 6.5 years! On below graph, I am going to show you the average age for all these blogs:

We can consider only a few most popular blogs today as “new”. But that does not need to bother you – with a lot of work, a bit of luck and persistence anyone can be popular. Just – do not expect to be popular very fast!

Post Frequency

Also, I have personally do some research in this area. Clearly showing you that the most popular blogs have more posts-per-day than others. The average post frequency for all top 25 blogs is 14,36 posts per day. Here are the separated niche results:

Well, almost all these blogs are maintained by more than 1 authors. And most of them allowing guest posts – this drastically improve their post frequency ratings too.

Length of Posts

If you are wondering how much these blogs have words per-post, I am going to tell you that on all these top 25 blogs, the average length of posts is 423,11 words per-post. Below, you will see these results separated under blog niches:

Note: I have take the latest 10 posts for every blog and count the words using Word processor. Giving you the average post length for all. This can help you to discover how much they write (work) for every single post.

Blog Niche

A blog niche is one of the most important factors which can directly affect a blog’s popularity and functionality. I think it might be interesting to see which niche is the most popular today among top 25 most popular blogs:

You see that most blogs in this list are under Politics and Technology niche. This does not mean we recommend you to switch to this niche, but to show you the most popular blogging trend today.

Social Media Factor

According to my research, I have discovered that social media networks are filled with content from these top 25 blogs. I have do research for 3 days and discovered that more than 15% of all content on these social media networks coming from these blogs.

I have used the most popular social media networks today such as: Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Riddler and Yahoo! Buzz. The results from other networks are not included here. This shows you the power of social-media factor in general!

Generating Revenue

According to this research, the vast majority of top 25 blogs uses some kind of advertising. Where 40% of them uses direct ad sales, 37,5% uses affiliate products and only 22,5% uses Google AdSense.

I have combined all blogs and taking all factors into consideration. Using the following ad types and formats to count:

• Direct sales – Under this category are all blogs which offer some kind of product or service for sale. Or if they sell advertisements directly through own systems.
• Affiliate products – Here are all links and advertisements related to affiliate products and affiliate contracts between blogger and advertiser.
• AdSesne – Of course, telling you how much Google AdSense is used.

In my following post, I am going to analyze all these results to help you to build the perfect blog. Thanks to this research, I hope I’ve give you the inspiration to improve your blog in all aspects. I would be happy to hear what do you think about it?

Feel free to post your comment using our comment form below! And yes, feel free to subscribe to know when we publish that next post.

Link baiting is often mentioned negatively. But I would not agree with this. For me it is a great way to get some quality incoming links to your website – without purchasing them or even asking others to link back to you.

Get Attention through Link Baiting

There are many ways where you can use this technique. Directly or indirectly implicated by you or your visitors. Some of them may work better, through some of them do not. It all depends on your technique and strategy – but eventually you will get some quality incoming links.

Since this link building technique can give a sense of trying to trick someone to linkback to you. Actually it is just one more promotion technique that most website owners uses today – that is simply the reality, whether we want it or not.

To prove this, all you need to do is to check out these main “link baiting” techniques later in this post. Then you need to ask yourself how much times you saw all these contents on main websites or blogs you are following?

Wondering why link-baiting is popular today? Well, the most simple answer would be the following: “Link baiting” simply works, and it is a great way to receive some quality incoming links with minimum effort from your side.

Some webmasters would say that “link baiting” is not ethical. But what can we do? It works and it may strongly improve your website’s general ratings through search engines. Like almost anything online, people use link-baiting technique for good and bad purposes. We can not change that!

Successful Link Baiting Techniques

It is not possible to do the complete list of these techniques. They may be vary from website to website and from service to service. But at the end, they all have something in common: They are all trying to get some link juice from other online sources.

• Competitions – This is one of the most popular link-baiting technique online. There you should organize a contest or drawing with a valuable prize. The prize can vary but at the end if you have a higher valuable prize to offer – you will have more competition participators.
• Lists – List the best 10 blogs in your niche or 101 tools you use to get some quality link-bait effect on your website. If you check out the most popular social bookmarking websites online, you will see there are so many these kind of articles are popular.
• Tools – Create some quality and unique tool that can help someone to do things easier online. Believe me, this is one of the best possible way to get the maximum link-bait effect. Of course, the more quality tool or a service means more link-bait effect.
• Quizzes – Quizzes, surveys and personal questions have long been popular among people through internet. Create a quiz on your website to get some quality link-baiting effect completely for free and without using too much time and energy.
• Statistics – Do a survey, complete all information you get and release the results. I found these kind of posts are quite popular on the internet. Through they are not widely used on other websites. It is a very good way to get some link-baiting effects, but may use a lot of time and energy to produce such articles for your audience.
• Freebies – Oh yeah – we all like when something is free and available within just a few clicks. Check out only how many online freebie articles and directories are presented online and you would see they are all quite popular and interesting. Give away something of value to get something valuable back.
• Interviews – Another thing to get some good and effective link-baiting to your website is to arrange an interview with a celebrity or someone popular in your niche. Afterwards, compose all the questions and answers and publish them on your website for a visitors.
• Scoops – This is another very quality and one of the most effective link-baiting techniques available online. Be first to publish the news or try something new and useful anyone didn’t do yet. It is quite hard to achieve this, but it is possible for sure.
• Resources – Resources have been always popular online. That is because they are highly helpful and may include loads of information on the specific topic. Create the ultimate and unique resource list or reference for a topic to get some positive link-baiting effect.

Whether you like the link-baiting or not, you need to agree that all these popular techniques are strongly helpful and useful for the rest of us.

In most cases, a website owners do not ask for a link back. But because these contents are quite interesting and useful for most people, they are willing to link back to them – with or without knowledge or permission from the admin.

But like with any other link building technique, this one requires the time. Next time you bookmark or remember something online, think why you have done that and use that knowledge to improve your next link bait – this is the most effective way to improve your link-baiting for sure!

This is a guest post by Richard Chidike from Motivatory.com. If you want to add your post here feel free to submit it using our guest post page.

You will definitely be able to generate loads of targeted traffic to your blog or site through Facebook but you need to know the proper things to do. The first thing you should always bear in mind is that Facebook is a social networking site even though lots of marketers are there to gather prospects for their businesses.

Bearing in mind that the site is social-interactive in nature will help you not to be too aggressive in your marketing efforts while maintaining enough marketing tempo that will keep bringing in leads to your network marketing enterprise.

These are very essential because there are some kinds of aggression that would put off your potential prospects while you may not achieve much if you fail to do enough marketing while socializing on Facebook.

If you push your products or services to the face of whoever that comes in contact with you on Facebook or another social networking site, you may be surprised to discover that many others will begin to ignore you or even decline your friendship request.

The truth is that majority of people that are signing up at Facebook are doing that for fun reasons even though there are millions of monies that are being made from business leads generate therein. There are proper ways of showcasing any product or service on Facebook so that it will be acceptable to others and receive the needed patronage you desires.

Things to do

Here are the Things You Should Start Doing To Boost Your Network Marketing Through Facebook:

A. You have to start by choosing friends that have the same or similar interests as yours. This is unarguably the surest way of getting targeted leads in any social networking site. In the case of network marketing, all you have to do is to search for network marketers and add them as friends. The reason for doing this is that there are many prospects that might be attracted to the group and sign up with yours.

B. Another aspect of growing your leads through Facebook and other social networking sites is to try and add values to those you want to recruit. You may be eliminating your chances of getting valuable leads if you start talking or chatting about your company or product from the first contact. A better thing to do is simple give some free gift such as an e-book that will be valuable to the prospect. The more value such free gift has, the more trust it will breed for you and your online enterprise in the long run because such prospects would find it easier to follow your future recommendations without much questioning.

C. Don’t forget to add your link on your profile page. Many make the mistake of talking about their products here instead of writing just a brief and insightful contextual keyword-rich text that point to their blog or site link. You can take things further up by simply adding a link to your opt-in page here. This is one place where many begin to get it wrong because they believe that whoever that clicks on their profile page must be sold something. This is quite wrong because it is always better to have such person in your opt-in list for future follow ups instead of trying to make some sales at that point.

If you must be aggressive on your Facebook network marketing it has to be in the form of values you add to your prospects. This will be followed by creative marketing plans that will close the leads and bring you more signups in the short and long runs.

The most obvious and probably one of the most important off-site SEO factor is your website incoming links (inbound links) count. Links can boost your SERP rankings and ranking of your website in most search engines on the internet.

Inbound Links

Inbound links are those links which link back to your website from other websites and places on the internet. The most quality inbound links are one-way links which link to your website but you do not link back to them.

To keep it simple, every single link that point to your website is seen by search engines. And then they count it to determine your website’s rankings and positions on their result pages.

Well, there is a catch you should care about here. Every single link is visible through search engines , but links with no-follow attribute are not counted for ratings, but these links are visible too through search engine crawl agents.

There are some other things that may improve your inbound link quality:

• Related websites – Inbound links which comes from highly related websites are much more counted than some random inbound links. So, when you are going to use some technique to improve your inbound link count, find for some websites related closely to your niche.
• Highly ranked sites – Links from other highly ranked websites and services on the internet worth more than any other links. These are one of the most quality links anyone can achieve. But it might be almost impossible or expensive to get them at the beginning.

Instead of these things, there are more things that may directly or indirectly affect your inbound link quality such as keyword-related links, alternative attributes, titles…

It is important to know that you do not always have the complete control over who links to you, but most important thing here is to keep your count higher anytime you can.

How to Get Quality Inbound Links

This is for sure one of the hardest SEO parts for all webmasters at the beginning. How to generate some good and quality inbound links, or how to successfully improve your overall ratings in search engines through internet.

Here are some good things you can do to improve your inbound link count:

• Produce some quality content – Like almost all bloggers out there, and I too think this is the best possible technique to build some quality backlinks to your website. Create some quality contents that people would read and share through internet. Quality articles are the most important thing if you want to be a successful online for sure.
• Post comments on blogs and posts on forums – This is one old technique that allows you to improve the internal linking to your website. It is important to stay active in the community if you want to get something in return. So, comment regularly on blogs and be active on the forums you follow and read to get some quality links to your own website. Also, these places are very useful if you want to learn something new in your niche.
• Use directories – This is an old way to generate some inbound links to your website. There are literally thousands of free directories available today. Through it is not much good and effective way today, as it was before, it gives you some one-way inbound links (which counts) to your website – and that is all important for search engines.
• Fill your blogs with internal links – Well, if you have more than one your own blogs, it cost you nothing to cross-links between all these blogs. You should carefully use this technique, because many webmasters think that crossing-links with sites on the same server might get some problems with search engines. So, be aware.
• Buy Links– Many professional website owners have a budget to purchase some links and ads on other related websites. This is an expensive and high-risk technique, because Google do not allows you to purchase links on other websites. I have been heard some users gets banned from Google search engine just because they have purchased some links through other specialized networks on the internet.
• Exchange links – This is one of the oldest techniques to get some related two-way links. These links are not quality as one-way links and they worth less for search engines. Be careful with this technique too: There are so many spammers and people that will beg you for link today, so choose wisely which site you choose to exchange links with.

There are some other techniques you may use to improve linking to your websites. I recommend you to visit my Link Building category for more related articles.

I hope you have learn little more about off-site SEO techniques today. As you can see, it is actually a link building technique. Well, that is it because most search engines actually relay on inbound link quality and count and rank websites according to results.

For all website owners, inbound links are one of the most important thing. Not only they may highly improve your website’s SEO, but they can get you some quality and related visitors too! I would like to hear what do you think about it, so feel free to post a comment below.

Actually, there are many things to find them. At the beginning, you would need to find them but later, when your blog grow to some point – they would find you! It is a mixture of luck and of course credibility of you and your own website.

Preparing Process

The key to getting advertisers to your blog is to make it attractive for them! After you done that, you would need to take couple of things to make all work properly.

Following things may strongly improve your direct ad sales:

Advertising Page – Creating an advertisement page is the first thing you should do when you decide to sell some spots on your blog. Important thing here is to include all necessary things into this one page. There should be all things that may be interested to the potential advertisers. An advertising page on this blog would show you how to do that properly. Please note to let them contact you easily if they want to know more information about your advertising offers and products.

“Advertise Here” Buttons – Let all your visitors see that you offer them to buy a spot on your own blog. This can be easily done by placing an reserved “Advertise Here” buttons on spots you are wishing to sell. Helping them to see where exactly their advertisements should be placed.

Provide Some Stats – On advertising page, you should provide some statistics related to your blog – to help your potential customers to know if they are going to buy that ad or not! Good thing is to include your traffic stats, Google’s PR score and Alexa rating. Additionally, you can tell your visitors how do you rank for some of the best keywords on Google – this may be a huge advantage when we compare it to all other stats for most advertisers!

An Advertiser Packs – Not all visitors want to read your advertising page. That is why you should create an advertiser pack. Additionally, it is always better to have comprehensive information available for your advertisers – rather than a brief overview page. Here, you should collect all your statistic information and place them nicely into one document file (usually PDF) and allow your visitors to download it easily. There they would see some more information about your website, the complete stats and all they wanted to know.

Finding Advertisers

This is all up to you and your abilities. You can easily find advertisers to advertise on your own blog with some time and effort on your side. I would give you some useful and proven examples that can be done here to find an appropriate advertisers:

• Contact Them – This is probably the hardest part at the beginning. Here, you should find an advertiser by your own and convince them why they should advertise on your blog – but not on others. The easiest way to find them is to follow an advertisers which advertise on your website through Google AdSense program. That is because they already paying for advertising and they might be interested into your blog because they already advertise on it. These sites are usually top-related. On the other hand, if you know some related websites and blogs in your niche – you should contact them personally to find out if they are interested in advertising.
• Use Every Opportunity – When it comes to this, it is important to know you should use every possible opportunity to find an advertisers for your website. You can practically find them online everywhere you have a presence. Some good examples where you could find an advertiser(s) for your own blog: Through you Facebook or a Twitter profile, on forum boards you are active on, from communities and websites you visit regularly – and much more! Remember: You could find an advertiser anywhere you goes – maybe the one is there just in front of you.

How to Approach

Well, this is probably the hardest thing you should do. You need to do all right when you are approaching your potential advertiser. Actually, you need to convince that particular advertiser to advertise on your own website – and why?

When they are contacting you about your own advertising offer, you should include some more details to them – that can not be visible through your “Advertisement Page”! Well, there is no such thing as “fits for all” solution here, but you can follow these general guidelines:

• Introduce yourself to them and give out some basic information about you and your offer;
• Tell them about the advertising options on your blog and your prices;
• Give some proof about your traffic and statistic details (if they requires them);
• Be kind, polite and professional to your potential advertisers – as much as you can;
• Stick to your ground rules and prices – do not try to low the price for every advertiser you get.

To keep it short, most advertisers should be able to quickly decide if they are interested into your offer or not. So, in most cases, you would not have any trouble about that anyway.

Payment Processing

You might have all other things set good, but if you do not have an opportunity to take payments easily – you will soon end up loosing most of your deals. This is the case for advertisers too, if they are not able to pay you properly and easily – you loose again!

Of course, the best possible option to sell something online is through PayPal. Through it supports payments through credit cards and giving you the most appropriate results – it is not available in some countries worldwide.

To have a maximum effect there, you should give an opportunity for your advertisers to pay you through other payment systems and/or services. Some of good are listed below:

• MoneyBookers – Probably the best alternative for PayPal payment system. Allowing you to receive and send payments instantly, supporting credit cards and it is available in most countries worldwide! Actually much more than PayPal.
• Western Union - WU is a great way to receive a cash worldwide within couple of hours. Most banks worldwide support Western Union transactions, and in some countries it can be done through internet. Some advertisers might like this option too.

Through they are many more payment systems online, I am sure that most users would be happy with these three methods. Providing more payment opportunities on your blog means a higher chances to get someone to advertise on it for sure.

Ad Pricing

This is probably the main factor you should consider when allowing someone to advertise on your own blog. You should consider it serious if you want to get the maximum of it.

An advertisement pricing strongly depends on what an advertiser would expect from it and how appropriate value you provide for them. Remember: You can not fool and lie your advertisers, they would consider every single option before they decide to purchase an ad on your blog!

You should know that there are some very cheap advertising solutions anyone can use. So, you need to be competitive in the area if you want to get maximum effect out of it. At the beginning you should provide a cheaper price to get some early sales and later you may improve it as your own blog grows – depending on your possibilities.

Below I am going to show how much to charge for your blog ad space:

• CPM – This is a cost per 1.000 views you blog generate. You should not definitely go below $0.3 price for your 1000 views at the beginning. So, if your website generate a 100.000 views per month, you should get out at least $30.00 from your advertisers.
• CPC – This is a cost per click you provide to an advertiser. It is not such a popular method on most websites and blogs out there. Simply because they are not effective and productive for the low and medium-traffic websites. Let’s leave this advertisement option for masters in that field – an advertisement networks.

There are some websites which makes more than $10.0 per CPM online. But these websites are highly popular and have some credibility online. You can not compete with them for sure. Stick to the reality and use some modern and affordable prices to beat up competition.

There it is! I hope I have helped you out to learn something more about how to find an appropriate advertisers for your blog and how much to charge for your ads. If you have some experience in this field, I’d love to hear what do you think. Feel free to place any comment you want using our contact form below.

This is a guest post by Michael Collins from Pingo. If you want to add your post here feel free to submit it using our guest post page.

Blogs are one of the most common forms of internet marketing. Most people start blogs with high hopes of mass subscriber lists and endless affiliate sales. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to get to this point, especially at the beginning. Many people start out strong, but after a month or two of nothing, they slow down.

Eventually, they give up on the blog, and start on other projects. This is a tragedy, because in most cases, they were almost to the point where the blog starts working for them. So how can you avoid this? Here are a few tips that will help you maintain productivity until your blog gets started.

Set Small Goals

Many people only set one goal when they start a blog. They want to get to the point when they have high amounts of steady traffic coming in. This is the wrong way to look at it, because you won’t get the satisfaction of accomplishing goals along the way, and you can get burnt out easily. Instead of taking this approach, try setting mini goals for you to accomplish.

For example, you could set a goal to write ten pages of quality content. That way, you’ll be motivated to do that, and once you do, you’ll be ready to accomplish a new goal. Your next goal could be getting 200 unique visitors a month, or something else that would help your blog. This way, you help your blog while not getting burnt out.

Work Offline

This might sound counter productive, but in reality, it will allow you to accomplish much more than you usually do. The internet is filled with distractions, and these become very tempting when working on a blog. Because of this, you get much less done working online than you could. You can’t run a blog completely offline, but you can do most of the work.

You can write content, make email drafts, and plan out what you will do once you go online. That way, once you get online, you already know exactly what you’re going to do, and you can do it quickly. If you follow these tips, your blog will become much more productive, and you’ll have a greater chance of accomplishing your end goal. You don’t absolutely need to follow these steps if you don’t want to, but in general, it will allow you to get more done, and prevent you from getting burnt out.

This is a guest post by Richard Chidike from Motivatory.com. If you want to add your post here feel free to submit it using our guest post page.

It’s a known fact that there are millions of blogs on the internet today and as such, you will only be deceiving yourself if you think that you can simply set up a blog and go to sleep without making any effort to let others know about it.

Even if such a blog is just an online personal photo album blog, you still desire that people visits it to view those photos you are uploading. But your need for blog visitors or targeted traffic will be higher if such blog if set up for commercial reasons. In such scenario, you will have no other option than to find means of promoting or marketing the blog so, that it will remain visible in the faces of those that are your primary targets.

On/Off Page SEO

Many of the popular search engine optimization techniques many blog owners are conversant with are “on page” methods but, the truth is that “off page” SEO techniques such as link building has proven to be much more effective.

You may argue that you don’t have any kind of control in the off page SEO link building methods but, that is exactly why it’s more important and extremely valuable for Google ranking. The fact is that there are smart ways you can control how your blog is linked from other blogs and sites.

This can be achieved by establishing a relationship with the owners of those blogs by way of linking back to those sites. When you do this, you can advice those bloggers on how you want them to link to your blog and what keywords to use when linking to your blog.

SEO Link Building

Begin your SEO link building efforts by getting down to some of the related blogs in your niche and forming alliance with them. You can exchange links with them but it is more beneficial for your blog if you can find ways of getting just one way links pointing your blog. One way of getting inbound links to your blog from relevant and top ranking complimentary blogs in your niche is by being a regular commentator in such blog.

Make it a point of duty to always post very quality and beneficial posts or comments in such blogs. You will get at least two major benefits when you do this consistently. One of it is that your blog must have gotten quality one way inbound link that will help to push up its page ranking and the other is that you will be having targeted visitors on your blog from these other linked-in blogs.

Another SEO link building alternative for blogger is by writing keyword-rich and insightful articles for submission to articles directories. This will provide huge exposure for your blog considering the fact that there must be a link to your blog at the bottom of any article you submit.

Other SEO Facts

You just have to make sure that your articles are of high quality and you can be sure that many other blogs in your niche will like to republish the articles which will even open up more revenue basis for you.

These are just few of the many link building ways any blogger can implement in order to build his or her link popularity. Also note that whichever process that is opted for must be consistent in order to have the best result.

This is a guest post by Lena Morrish and Dima Nikolayenko from Internet Business BTS. If you want to add your post here feel free to submit it using our guest post page.

With the recession that is going on right now, people don’t believe it is a good time to start a business, even one based on the Internet.  But in reality, this is a great time to start your business.  There are many different businesses you can start without spending a lot of money, and you get a tax write-off as well.

Take it Easy

Whatever your business, and no matter the economic climate; you do need to remember that you are not likely to make millions overnight.  It will take a lot of time and effort, but with the right business, you can make a small to decent income in a small amount of time.  Continue working the business and you should see that your income will increase over time.

Having a business that is Internet based is the best to do, as most people already have access to the Internet, and people are getting more and more used to purchasing items on the Internet.  Due to most people already having access, one of the more expense costs to opening a business is already covered, which is your Internet access.

Start your Business

You can start many Internet businesses with just an Internet connection and some time.  You may need to spend a few dollars to give yourself a professional image, but you should be able to do this relatively cheaply.

One such business is to work as a freelancer for a variety of people, doing a variety of things.  Maybe you have training in something that is easily translated onto the Internet, such as writing or building websites.  You can create your own website to explain your services, and then start promoting yourself.

For not a lot of money, you can purchase your own domain and setup your own website at your own custom domain.  Many feel this looks more professional than a website with some other site name in it.  Once you have this established, you can locate many sites that are looking for freelancers, or you can post your services on classified ads.

Selling Items & Assistance

Another business that people get into is selling items through online auction sites.  There are many different sites out there that offer this service, but make sure you read through their fee schedules so set your price high enough to cover your expenses.  For people that enjoy flea markets and garage sales, this can be a great business as discoveries that you buy for pennies can be resold for a nice profit.

Some people choose to become assistants for others through the Internet. This can encompass many different things, such as helping to maintain a website, doing office tasks, or other things that the business owner may need help with.  There are many things that you can help with without any extra costs to be incurred at your end.

The great thing about an Internet business is that you are not limited to just working in your own geographic area.  You can work for people all over your home country, or even around the globe, depending on your skills and talents.

Through these results are based on United States traffic, I guess they are not quite different for rest of the world. Google is in every single country in top 5 most popular places that people visit and use regularly. Producing billions of searches per day!

Want a little peace of that cake? Well, the first thing you should do is to optimize your websites to be more search engine-friendly! And here I am going to help you do that!

Start Point

First of all, you would need to know what is SEO. Search Engine Optimization, or shortly SEO, is an specialized website content optimization technique to boost website ratings on search engines through the internet. And yes, it can be done completely for free!

It is based on a simple process: the better positions you have for specific keywords, the more visitors you might get from to your website. So, the key here is to rank better for your targeted keywords as fast as you can!

So, I am going to show you which are the main important factors for a proper SEO of your site. I will concentrate more on Google search engine, but these techniques can strongly boost your rankings on others too!

Submissions and Sitemap

Of course, to have your site properly crawled by Google, you will need to submit your website into this search engine. Fortunately, that can be done within couple of seconds and you may improve speed for your inclusion – if you do not want to Google find you automatically!

• Add your website to Google

It is always good to submit your website into other search engines too! You might never know how much effects you might get from other search engines.

Another important step at the beginning is to use Sitemap tools to create your website sitemaps, specially created to help search engines to crawl your website more effectively.

Content is Important

When it comes to Google, the most important is your website content. There are some ground rules you should consider if you want to successfully optimize your sites for search engines:

• Quality before quantity – You should know that quality is more important than quantity here. So, you should create a quality and unique articles and not to copy-paste it from other websites on the internet. Google knows how to find and discover copied content and gives more attention to the unique ones.
• Follow the trends – Google and other search engines likes fresh content. Write down some fresh and attractive content to improve your SERP positions. To put it simple: Newer the better and this works for most search engines too.
• Use ALT tags on images – Using ALT tags on your images may improve image positions on image search engine pages. Keep in mind to use descriptive and short keywords into your alternative tag field.

Links and URLs

The links power is a very important factor that Google takes seriously. The more quality links to your website means a better PageRank of your website. The better PR means better search engine positions of your website and the better position means more traffic to you!

Well, it is simple in the theory but in the practice it is a whole other thing! So, your job is to first build up links to your website – the more links you build, the better rank you will get! The chart below would show you how many inbound links are required to achieve a specific PageRank:

You see there is too much difference between some ranks. That is why only the most popular websites on the internet have PR8+ rank! And we are usually talking about millions of inbound links that sites gets!

But all links are not visible for Google. That is why you should care about links which are counted. You should know how to recognize an nofollow links to know exactly which inbound links are visible and counted for you.

There are some other things you should consider related to an URL’s and links on your website. These methods may improve your website SEO rating as well:

• Friendly URLs – It is always good to contain some of your main keywords in URL of every article you write. Works on the simple process: First one is the best, second is second best etc… Keep them descriptive and short as much as you can for best effect.
• Related Links – Link from the website in same niche means more than links from other unrelated niche websites. Google also counts your external links quality and this works for them too. The more quality related links = more quality link building process.
• Canonical Links – This is relatively new factor that Google counts on websites. Canonical URLs are quite nicely explained on the official Google webmaster blog. Showing you how to properly set your canonical URLs in no time.
• Valid Links – If you link to not working websites, you may experience drop in your overall SEO rating and effect. Google checks where exactly you link from your own website(s) and take this information to determine your own PageRank index.

Meta-tags

Meta tags are quite important for Google. They are one of the positive SEO factors every website should use to boost rankings on this search engine. Below, I am going to show you which factors are the most important here:

• Keywords – Keywords are probably one of the most important factors for SEO. Consider to place some relative keywords (not much) into your titles, meta-tags and links. Actually, wherever you can – keep in mind to use descriptive keywords only! There are some useful tools you can use for free to choose the best possible keywords easily.
• Titles – Titles are also very important for SEO. The <title> tag is displayed right into search engine result pages, displaying your article title. These titles can be automatically generated or created manually. I always prefer this second approach.
• Description – Google no longer “relies” on this tag, but use it often. These description tags are usually displayed right below your title on search engine result pages. Can be useful for your SEO rating, but not much as it was before.

More Google SEO Info

There are some other Google search engine optimization information you should consider when optimizing your website for it. Take care about all these factors to successfully optimize your site for Google (and other) search engines:

• Website Speed – This is relatively new factor which Google uses to determine your search engine ranking. It is actually a relatively small impact change, so you do not need to panic and speed up your websites drastically. But after all – it counts!
• Domain Age and Type – Google seriously takes this factor when giving out ranking factor. For example: Newer pages on an older websites gets faster recognition and crawl. Also, an older pages are considered as thrust-places because of the age.
• HillTop Algorithm – Its Google’s patent which is all about in measuring the quality of any particular web page. The name given to those quality pages referred as “Expert”, Hilltop was totally tuned for result accuracy. It is a big time boost which can help you to rapidly boost your rank – but it’s quite hard to achieve.
• Social Media SEO – Social Media websites and services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg… are quite popular today through the internet. Using these services can get you some useful traffic and credibility for your own website. Also, it may improve your search engine rating – directly or indirectly for sure.

I hope I have helped you to find out how to properly and effectively optimize your website(s) for Google search engine. If you have any additional question or a suggestion, I would like to hear it from you – feel free to post it below using our comments form.

This is a guest post by James Mowery from laptop computers. If you want to add your post here feel free to submit it using our guest post page.

If you are a business owner, you are probably either familiar with basic search engine optimization or you are curious about its potential benefits. No matter what your business is, the majority of your website’s traffic comes directly from search engines.

It is very important that customers can find you on search engine results pages. This is where optimization is important.

Keywords

Keywords or key phrases are very important to helping search engines find your site. Do some researches on which keywords are popular search terms for your customers. A good tool to use is Google AdWords, which provides information on keyword popularity and competition. Find which keywords are important and relevant to your industry and incorporate them into your website.

Meta tags

Meta tags are simply keywords written into a web page’s code to give search engines an idea of the page’s content. Create a list of relevant keywords for each page on the website and make sure to embed them correctly for the best search results. Meta tags are not directly visible on the website, but search engines can read them and interpret content based on them.

Content

Probably the most important search engine optimization tool is great content. Search engines are very intelligent and can decipher relevant information from “filler.” Start a blog about topics of importance to your industry and keep it updated with the latest news, innovations, and resources for your customers. Ensuring excellent content that is updated on a regular basis will improve your search rankings and ultimately drive traffic to your site.

These are just a few examples to get started optimizing your website. The main key to success in search engine optimization is to know your customers. If you know your audience, it is much easier to keep them engaged.