5 Proven Tips for Blogging Success
These days blogs are everywhere. Most businesses have them, many people have at least one, and lots of trusted news outlets deliver their content through them. If you search for just about anything online you are likely to come across at least one blog. And the number of blogs on the internet is growing exponentially each year.
With that in mind, there are a few things you should do if you are thinking about starting a blog, or if you already have one, and you want it to be successful. You can’t just throw one up and expect readers, rankings, and money to come pouring in. It takes a lot to time and effort to become a successful blogger.
Here are some proven tips that almost all blogging professionals followed to become successful…
1) Valuable content is always king. High quality, original, useful content should be the base of any blog. Your readers need to find lots of value in your content or they won’t keep coming back to read it. If your blog focuses on news of some sort, be sure you are providing up to date information. If your blog sets out to teach the user something, be sure to teach in a clear, concise and practical way. If your content is not engaging then nothing else you do with your blog will matter.
2) Don’t hide. If you are the only person posting content to the blog, you should put a picture of yourself along with a short bio on the sidebar, and link it to the “about” page where you go into more detail about you and your blog. If the blog has multiple authors, give each of them a page on where they add information about themselves. Readers want to feel connected with the person(s) providing the content on a blog, so show them you are real and can relate to them.
3) Encourage interaction. Try getting people to post comments as much as possible. You want your readers to feel like they are able to interact with you and network with other readers. By allowing, and encouraging comments, you are creating a sense of community and belonging. If your readers feel like they are a part of the site, they will keep coming back.
4) Make it Fun. Find ways to keep your readers entertained and coming back other than just to read. Make use of polls, games, social media, pictures, videos, and so on. Your writing is important but it’s always good to spice things up a bit too.
5) Frequent Updates. Although not quite as important as quality, the quantity of content on a blog is still very important. People want to see new posts quite often. Try to set a schedule for regular updates and stick to it. If you need to write a bunch of posts in one day and schedule them out to post automatically later on, then go ahead and do that. Just make sure your blog is being updated frequently. Subscribers and regular readers will begin to lose interest if you don’t give them a reason to keep coming back.
There’s no doubt that it takes a lot of hard work to build a successful blog, but in the end, it’s more than worth it. Follow the tips above and you will be well on your way!
So You’ve Got Unnatural Links…
So yeah… BMR… that has turned into a giant pain in the butt. And it seems for a change Google has decided to not only de-index the network of sites linking out, but to issue warnings to people who used BMR on webmaster tools. When I went and looked at my dashboard here is what I saw:
3 of my 10 sites in this dashboard were hit by a warning of unnatural links. Bummer. What’s notable is that that my biggest site, while it got hit HARD for traffic at the same time as BMR went down, doesn’t have a warning. The site is old and has over 100,000 backlinks so I guess it doesn’t look as unnatural. Anyway I’m cutting and running from BMR, which is painful since I’ve invested hundreds of dollars of membership fees and thousands of dollars worth of content on the site.
Now to combat these unnatural links BMR, in their usual decent guy ways (hard to hate them), are making it easy for people to download their content (3123 live posts for me) and remove their content from the BMR sites… and that’s exactly what I’m doing. So ok I’ve downloaded my content (for use at a later date) and removed my links. BMR says it will take them a week to fully remove the links, but I’m betting it will be a lot faster than that. Anyway I’d give it a couple of days before moving onto the next step.
…a couple of days later
Ok now we’re going to ask Google to remove the unnatural links warning from our site, which will hopefully help our rankings. The first thing your going to want to do is go and make your sites are looking very legit. I’d remove pretty much any advertising that’s on the site, especially above the fold stuff and anything that might look like you’re selling links yourself. Google will have someone look at your site, so impress them with a nice theme and whatnot.
Go back to your webmaster tools account and click the “View Details” button beside your unnatural links notice. Then click “submit your site for reconsideration” and you’ll be asked to write a message to google explaining what went on. I suggest a mix of both admitting you did something wrong, and shifting full blame to someone else. Something like “I use the services of an SEO company and when I inquired if they were utilizing any methods that violated google’s terms of service they said they would review all my links and do their best to remove any links that are in violation. This work has been completed, please review my site and advise me if my site is now within google’s TOS and can have the unnatural links warning removed.”
If all this hardship has taught us anything it’s that we should be listening to Griz circa like 2006 and be building our own sites to support our winning sites, not relying on junky networks like LV, BS, ALN, BMR, or whatever the flavor of the month is out there no matter how quick and dirty a solution it seems like.
That’s about all you can do. I’ve got a few unanswered questions myself though…
- My site that didn’t have a warning still got a big slap, so I’m going to submit the site for reconsideration and see what google says.
- I have a lot of sites that aren’t in google webmaster tools that would probably have the same warning attached, so I’m going to leave one of my smaller sites and not request consideration to see if that warning goes away now that the links have been removed.
If you have any questions of your own please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer or if I can’t I’ll inquire or test it out. Best of luck in the cruel cruel MMO world!
Can You Really Assemble Crafts from Home and Earn Money?
One of the most popular “home jobs” that people tend to search for online is assembling crafts from home. That’s because it has been marketed for years as an easy way to work at home. But can you really assemble crafts from home and make money doing it? The answer is mostly NO and a little bit yes. Yeah, I know, that’s not actually an answer at all, but it is the truth. Now, let me explain…
In the vast majority of cases a work at home craft assembly job you see advertised somewhere is a complete load of crap! Most of the time they work something like this… You send them money to cover the costs of instructions and the materials required to make a sample to send to them. You get the instructions in the mail, assemble the sample, and send it back. Usually what happens then is the company will send you a letter stating that your sample did not pass their quality standards. So, now you are out the money you sent them and you don’t get the craft assembly job. A win for them and a loss for you! Typically that’s how it goes and it’s a total scam.
However, there are some (very few) legitimate at home craft assembly jobs out there. The problem is they are few and far between so the competition for them is super stiff. And when you do find one it doesn’t take long to figure out that you aren’t going to make very much money doing it. The time and effort just isn’t worth the pay for most people. It might be fairly simple work that you can do from home but sometimes going for easy money means you get paid very little for doing something very boring and tedious. But the choice is yours on that one. Everyone is different so maybe you will love it!
If after reading this you are still set on finding a legitimate craft assembly work at home job then I suggest you start by searching for Disciples Cross. I have never worked with them, so I am not making any promises and I can’t say for sure how good or bad they are, but they are supposedly a Christian work at home company, and they seem to be very popular among the assembling crafts business opportunities. I’d be willing to bet that you probably won’t earn nearly as much money as they state on their website but you might be able to at least make a little extra cash from home with them.
Just remember to be very careful when searching for a way to assemble crafts from home to earn money. Keep your guard up and assume everything is a scam until you have proof that it isn’t. That’s about all I can tell you about this particular money making idea. Good luck!
Three Great Ways You Can Make Money at Home in Your Pajamas
Many people dream of becoming their own boss and working their own hours. While one choice is to start a traditional business, most ordinary folks lack both the know-how and the initial capital required to start a business, so even if they have a great idea then their idea will not see fruition. However, the advent of the internet has resulted in many ways for people to make money online without ever having a boss. I have been in online marketing for years so I will share a few ways with you:
Infolinks: Make a blog and use ads
Millions of people have blogs but they do not know how to make money off of them. Perhaps not many people read them or perhaps they blog not for money but because they are passionate about their topic. I have blogged for years and have become a blog monetization expert in the process, so I will share three great ways that you can make money by blogging. Companies like Infolinks, Kontera, and INTENTclick are great choices to make money off of text-rich blogs. They do not work as well with video blogs but you can still put their ads in the description. Also, INTENTclick and Kontera do not mess up your Adsense ads so they are a great choice for generating additional revenue.
Write a mobile app
Android devices and iPhones are becoming increasingly popular, and the ease of writing and selling an app has brought a resurgence of small-time software developers. Many of these developers have great apps but they do not know how to monetize mobile apps, which is marketing parlance for saying that they don’t know how to make money off of their creations. This is common among mobile app developers in part because it’s so easy to bring an app to the market to sell it since all the big operating systems have mobile app stores.
Write 25 guest blog posts per day
Many companies will pay people to write blog posts for them. They do this because the backlinks in those posts will help them show up higher on search engines. A lot of companies rely on outsourced work, usually in India or Latin America, to do their blogging for them, but these bloggers usually do not have the writing skills to be published on good websites. As a result, they’ll pay a premium to American and other anglophone bloggers to get posts for them.
This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company – Influence People – do blogger outreach for a variety of clients from a small office in sunny San Francisco!
The Art of Building Amazon Sites Post Panda
Thousands of people supplement their monthly incomes through the use of Amazon affiliate sites – or at least they used to. Recently, Google introduced a major overhaul to their search algorithms known as Panda, and a lot of Amazon affiliate sites that could be politely referred to as “thin,” “spammy,” or “junky” quickly saw their search rankings plummet down to the depths where no practical Google user would ever find them.
For the uninitiated, an Amazon affiliate site is a website or blog that directly or indirectly promotes products sold on Amazon.com, the ubiquitous online retailer. Clicking certain links at these sites redirects you to a product page at Amazon, and when you make a purchase, Amazon pays the affiliate site owner a portion of the proceeds in exchange for the redirect. With commission rates as high as 15% and the ability to promote whatever products you’d like, including the very expensive ones, it’s easy to see how a well-implemented Amazon affiliate site could turn a tidy profit.
The trick, of course, is to build an Amazon affiliate site that passes muster in the eyes of Google Panda, and achieves the search engine results ranking it deserves.
Build Your Site Around the Niche, Not the Products
Google Panda is all about attempting to ensure that the pages ranked most highly for a given search keyword are relevant and provide the best user experience possible. As such, most of the sites that experienced severe downranking at the hands of Panda were ones that offered a list of promoted products, along with maybe a brief description of each, some keyword-rich promotional text (“This is such a wonderful product!” without any details) and maybe a few pictures. In other words, the exact same content you could find by visiting Amazon directly and simply visiting the product page. Credit to Google for sending these two-bit sites where they belong: out of the public eye.
Your job is to make your site stand out. You can accomplish this by building a site based around a niche, or a specific product category, instead of just the products themselves.
Let’s say you want to promote wireless internet security cameras. Instead of making a thin site like the one described above that simply lists and promotes the cameras, build your site around the niche of home security, and particularly the ways that technology can be used to improve it. This is something that will provide actual value to your traffic. A few examples of content ideas that could be applied to other niches as well:
- Stories of break-ins and robberies that could have been prevented with a wireless security camera.
- Comparisons of the top-rated security cameras.
- Software programs that integrate well with security equipment.
- How to set up home security equipment.
- Common misconceptions held by those purchasing home security cameras for the first time.
Once your readers see how valuable home security cameras are, they’ll be far more likely to click your affiliate links and actually make a purchase.
Know the Products You’re Promoting
Although you may be tempted to select products to promote simply based on their value or apparent immediate popularity, the post-Panda online environment dictates that it’s better to promote products that you’re actually comfortable discussing through knowledge and experience. Your readers will be able to tell whether you’re an expert regarding the products you’re discussing, and they’ll be more likely to stick around at your site if you are.
If you really want to promote a certain niche that you may not be totally familiar with, there are some good ways of conducting research:
- Visit forums devoted to discussing the products and learn from experts who use them every day.
- Watch Youtube video reviews of the products to see how they work in action.
- Download the manuals for the products to get additional details that might not be included in their general online product descriptions.
- Take advantage of return policies and trial periods. You may be able to try the products in your own home and return them for a full refund, so long as you don’t damage them. Any fees you incur in the form of return shipping will be worth the content you’re able to generate by actually using the products.
Allow for Interactive Discussion
Speaking of forums, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t set one up on your own Amazon affiliate site. Google Panda loves the idea of increased website functionality and interactivity, making a forum for your users an excellent Panda-baiting feature.
It’s important that forums are moderated and kept on topic, so don’t expect to simply create the forum, let it run itself and return to your normal daily operations. Jump in frequently to participate in discussions and answer your visitors’ questions.
Post Video Reviews of Products
Placing some multimedia content on your Amazon affiliate site can truly make it stand apart from the competition. If you have access to the products you’re promoting, record a video of yourself using them while you discuss what you like about it, how you like to use the product, your favorite features, etc. Doing so paints you as an expert with hands-on experience, and builds a higher level of trust between you and your reader.
It’s also possible to review the promoted products using video even if you don’t actually own them. Although “talking head” videos are maligned by some, the fact is that they prove that you’re a real person and not some faceless marketer hiding behind a potentially dubious site.
Think from the Consumer’s Perspective
When creating your Amazon affiliate site, it’s important to occasionally stop and think: If I were a customer researching these products, would this site provide me real, valuable assistance? If the answer is “not really, but I think I have good advertising strategies,” then your site will need a lot more work before it’ll pass the Panda test. Think about the things that you want to see when you’re researching a potential purchase for yourself, and implement them into your Amazon affiliate site.
Guest post written by: Mitch O’Conner, an online marketer and writer. When he’s not busy testing sites, generating traffic or writing content, he enjoys spending time with his wife and kids, watching TV, playing games or going camping.
