I have been in this blogging world for a couple of years now and have witnessed many a blog move from bottom to the top of the ratings for a particular niche. Most have been rewarded to their good work and are earning decent money.
How did they reach there is one of the points I would like to discuss today. After preliminary marketing and brand building most of the blogs were doing quite well and were receiving decent traffic. But once they achieved this, the growth rate of their blogs went more or less stagnant. No visible increase in blog popularity. Some of them organized contests to attract more readers, giving money and different products as prize money. But these tricks were being used by most of them and so there was no change in comparative popularity. At this point of time some blogs decided to use controversy as a marketing tool.
They understood that if you give the reader a tinge of surprise before returning to the normal condition it could do wonders with your products. And they did it, some of them told we are going to sell our blog, and thus received popularity through blogosphere. Some said that we are fighting with other bloggers, organizing a competition and thus aroused a controversy either ways.
They gained success within days and are on the top of the ratings now. One thing can be said though they used brains to reach there and I must say everything is fair in business and war.
I am in no mood to write any serious and boring article today, so it would be off for all you guys who came to have a blogging lesson. I am going to share a video with you which I found while browsing through YouTube. So sit back and enjoy this funny video while I too take a small break from work.
Most of the blogs these days make money but the flip side of the coin is that more than 99% percent of the blogs never make anything more than 100$ a month. That is by no way a big amount. Like everything in this world blogging has some basics as well. it’s not that if you follow this basics you will definitely succeed in your blogging career but it is 100 % sure that if you don’t they you will definitely fail in your quest to become a successful blogger. We for some days from now would be discussing these basics and we would highly appreciate if you follow this closely and don’t lose sight any one of these any time in your blogging career.
First and foremost we would like to discuss the importance of updating your blog. It has been a major observation by many surveys and people around the blogosphere that most of the blogs start with a adrenaline rush and the owners do post there all important thoughts and tips on the blog for the initial period of maybe say 15 day or 20 days and once this period is over the post frequency lowers down to ultimately no more posts. You all guys have to understand one important fact that nothing kills a blog faster than the scarcity or adequate loss of updates. You have to choose the frequency of posts for yourself and then stick to it all round your blogging carrer. It can be one post a day, five posts a day or two posts a week. All you have to understand is the importance of regular updates.
Last time we brought to your notice the importance of Alexa rankings and this time we have got some valuable tips for you which will surely help you in increasing your Alexa rankings. All these tips and trick will help you also help you increase your traffic.
I know, you would have surely made it out from our last post that Alexa toolbar is the deciding factor behind Alexa rankings and therefore first in the list of tips is installing the toolbar. Once you have installed the toolbar you should make sure that you visit your site daily so that Alexa records the visit to your site.
Once done I would also recommend you to give a link to download Alexa tool bar add-on so that all your readers can download it as well. This will ensure that every click that comes t your site gets recorded by Alexa and it will definitely result in increased Alexa rankings.
Our second tip would be to focus more towards a webmaster oriented theme as it is more likely that webmasters will have Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. Some other valuable tips include using signature links in webmaster forums, distributing articles to various sites, using Alexa redirect, directory submission.
I would recommend you to go through these tips and tricks first and then leave your observation here. I have seen it work out in my other sites and I am quite confident that it will work in this site as well.
One more thing that can seriously affect your blog authority and its likability is when you start blogging only and only for money. If you are doing this as well we would suggest you that you better don’t do it. All those unsuccessful blogs that we told about in our previous posts are a perfect example of this behavior. Ehen you only blog for money it really hurts your blog readership and reputation in the eyes of all important Google. Most of the successful blogger are successful because of the fact that they do not ever blog for money. Money should be perk from blogging career and not the sole reason to blog. I bet you would never succeed if you are going to blog for money.
Other point that we will be discussing today is that you should never try to hurry through a post. You won’t I have seen it with many a bloggers and no I firmly believe this is a growing disease, though a curable one. All of you all bloggers have this tendency to get a post as soon as you know about news. This should be avoided and a multiple check should be used in case of any post.
One of the most important mistakes that bloggers make is that they start behaving like a news channel and just give the thing they are discussing about. Remember though by getting online and telling people about things we do become a part of media but we are in not a BBC or CNN which would show the news as it is, we are here to express our personal opinion about topics that are important to our readers. One thing that all of us will have to remember is that each and every one of us has our different perspectives these differ from individual to individual. If a person comes to your blog with his own perspective of a thing and walks away with a different and changed perspective due to your conviction in your thought process that would be exactly what real blogging is all about.
See all of us are here to give our opinions on different things and it is very important that we do it sincerely and with pure conviction and determination behind our thought process. Believe me it has got to be their otherwise you are going to face tough times being a successful blogger. After all why would anyone come to your blog and leave a news channel which would offer a far more comprehensive view of things.
It sometimes gets to the point where we face that we have absolutely nothing to blog about. So what can we do in these situations? I personally follow my 5 step never fail strategy to overcome this problem if I ever face one. I would be helping you out with this problem with my five simple options.
Have a look at your blog comments and you would probably find many a things to blog about. Even if you don’t just blog about the number of posts you have and the comments those post have got. Second option is to check out what other blogs in your niche are writing. Get a tip from them and generate your own content for the matter. One more thing that you can do is look back in your blog archives’ to figure out that if there is anything worth publishing now. If there is then go ahead and publish it with a new date and have rest for the day. But remember this will only help if you have large number of posts say about 200 or more. I sometimes also derive inspiration from my email, and you should too. Some readers who like off topic but important conversation contact via email and in the same time also give you topics to write about. Even after these four wonderful tips you still haven’t got anything to write I would suggest that you find a thought provoking or a hilarious video and post it with your own thoughts.
Off late I have been doing some reviews for various sites on my other blogs to help me with funds that are required to maintain the development process that is going on this blog. I have written more than 60 reviews in the last month and I would like to share my thoughts on this month with all you guys. Starting off it was easy job to write reviews as I got easier opportunities that were targeted to help sites which receive first time users but as I became some sort of a pro in this field I started getting offers in which I had to write about sites (no problem here) that often wanted the attention of frequent visitors.
You would be thinking what is the difference here, right. I will tell you. All these articles that bloggers publish are supposed to help sites in achieving high traffic rankings for particular keywords. These keywords are called anchor texts and link to a particular site. What happens is that search engines being idiot computers do not prefer or linking words like for, in, the and others similar words. What this results in is that frequent users also start preferring not to use these key words. Here is the problem when we as bloggers have to write about such sites with distorted anchors we have to unfortunately make up sentences which hardly follow any grammatical rules (and advertisers hate this). This results in low rankings by the advertiser and low work opportunities for bloggers.
By now you must have got what I explain. Just because of silly and idiotic search engine computers we have to face so many problems.
I have been going through “make money online” blogs for quite some time now. I have started this ritual not to learn how to make money, but just to observe how MMO blog owners carry themselves. How do they get new topics to discuss every day? Yes there are lots of topics which most of us can touch upon but they have to be something related to what we write. We are not news channels that would go talking about same news over and over again.
All right here is what I have observed. Most of the major MMO blog owners are in their high thirties or mid forties. They have been blogging about MMO for about 3 years now (this is average). So calculating everything we end up with one question, which is what have they done all their life? What I felt that most of them started making money online as hobby and when they felt that they had the opportunity to earn more than they could ever at their jobs, they decided to leave their jobs and began their online money making career. It was not that they all started blogging immediately but they first settled down as marketing professionals, selling different things to people and earning the commission. These things used to be hosting accounts, domains and other things. Once they had regular source of income they started blogging about their experiences and the blogosphere welcomed them with open arms.
Now they sell experiences or things that they have learnt over the years. People love them for this and now they make money through their blogs.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Well inventions do take place in the blogging world as well and these inventions are primarily aimed at building links to a website. The links help in achieving traffic and I don’t need to tell what traffic helps in. Well, I have talked about it over and over again and I would talk about it once more. It is the quality of links that will take you higher in search engine rankings and not the quantity of links. So the whole idea is to get some quality links (toughest thing to do).
In this blogosphere nobody is generous enough to give you a backlink unless he sees some profit in it. Unless you show them it’s good for both and especially him, it won’t matter that he is a John Chow or some Peter he would not link to you.
Quality comes at a price and most of us have small pockets. So what can we do to get some back links to our ever so dear site? Well there are still other ways like commenting on do follow blogs and submitting articles at sites like Ezine articles, Digg , Stumble upon and others but still the most preferred ways these days is link baiting.
In link baiting you encourage other fellow bloggers to link back to you by offering them something that that forces them to link to your site. There are many possible ways of link baiting on which we would be discussing in detail in our next article. So till then just wait..
We were discussing in our last post that how important it is for a site to have a unique and a proper domain name that is identifiable in the online world . This time around we would throw some light on the basics that you should follow before selecting a domain name for your project.
First basic is to check that the name you are choosing is expired or not. You should never register a expired domain name. This process will prevent you from two things, first paying high fees and second trade mark conflict with the previous owner.
How to select a good domain name is the next question. Well I would say it depends a lot on your mindset while going for the domain. Most of us have a name for the site which we would like to buy, but if you don’t have any such idea you need not worry we have a simple solution about it as well. First start with the thought that what would you like to have the domain for , i.e. what is the purpose of the domain. We suppose here that you want your site to be an SEO relates site but you can’t get a name for it. Go to any popular search engine of your choice and type the words expired domain names, it will open up a list of such sites. Once you land up at one of these sites type the keyword you would like your site to be about , SEO , in this case and the site will come up with many names. Take a cue from these sites and name your own site. Simple, isn’t it.
Memory cards were developed and designed in the years around 1995. At that time the technology used in mobile phones and digital cameras was evolving and becoming even more complex. These days it’s pretty normal to have a mobile phone with camera of 5 mega pixels that allows you to take high resolution photos .All this added features were heavy on the memory and the in built memory being only around 10 mb in normal phones, there was a need for extra storage and therefore the memory card, were developed. The SDcard was one of the first memory cards that were built for mobile.
Though the SDcard was the first card to be pioneer this story, it was not late when the MiniSD card, MicroSD card, the MS Micro2 card and the Micro SDHC card were introduced. One of the earliest manufacturers which hung to this roller coaster ride t for the need for memory was SanDisk. There are many a manufacturers now. Memory cards were not only used in mobile phones and cameras and camcorders they were have also found their use in video games controllers on the devices like the Xbox , Game, cube and Playstation.
Memory cards are available from64kB to 8GB which is usually used in the high end digital camera range. SanDisk products like 8GB memory stick M2 are used in Sony Ericsson mobile phones.
As you must have noticed we had nothing going on 13th of this month. We were just a bit skeptic about it as it was Friday the 13th. Anyways the day has gone harmlessly and we continue from where we left on 12th June.
Some other plugins that we have been using are:
Show top commentators: After installing this plugin, I have observed an increase in my traffic considerably. One of the major reasons behind this is the fact that the link that a commentator gets from this kind of widget is do follow and he also gets added publicity for his blog.
Sidebar Widget: according to me this is one of the best plugins for wordpress. Why?, because even though I am not a tech freak or something similar I can still change the look of my theme without banging heads with some silly language called php.
Recent Comments: it is helpful in increasing the reader’s interest in a post.
Related Posts: this is very good plugin that helps in increasing the page views and it is also very helpful for new readers to look for similar post and build a background about the topic in question.
Last plugin that we would tell you about is Google sitemap generator. I haven’t used it for long enough to tell anything about it but yes it does help in faster page indexing.
We would be updating this post if we find some newer and better plugins for you guys.
Most of bloggers use wordpress as their blog software. There are quite a few reasons for this as well. Firstly wordpress is free and simple to use and secondly you can install plugins of your choice to make it even better. I would here discuss some of these essential plugins that can make your blogging experience much better. In this post and some other post to come I would be discussing some of the important plugins that I use.
Akismet: Akismet generally comes preinstalled with wordpress software and I would recommend you to always keep it on. I have been getting over 20 spam comments a day and without akismet it would take some pain to go through all these link saturated comments. For blogs with greater traffic rankings this value of number of spam comments goes somewhere up to 500 comments a day.
One Click Installer: this is one plugin that we abuse the most. It is a wonderful plugin and allows you to directly upload a file from your computer or from a remote source. You must have us changing our theme and plugins more often than not. It is all credited to one click installer.
So the whole idea is to get some quality links (toughest thing to do).
I have been getting over 20 spam comments a day and without akismet it would take some pain to go through all these link saturated comments. For blogs with greater traffic rankings this value of number of spam comments goes somewhere up to 500 comments a day.