This is the part 07 of our ” Create a blog and make money blogging series“. Many site owners will consider this is the toughest yet most important part when trying to take their web sites off the ground.

You might have built a beautiful blog site with the perfect content. All your family members and friends might be adoring it and praising you. But is that all?

How can you showcase your blog to a world wide audience? Without the help of Google and other search engines all your efforts will be fruitless.

Blog Seo

I had a big problem when I started this blog. I did not know how to optimize my blog to get search engine’s much needed love towards me. I remember I wrote a post on October 31 st 2008 with the title, “My Desperate Attempts To Get Some Google Love“.

In that post I have explained what I have learned and implemented in order to get the attention of Google. At that time my traffic was heavily depended on social media traffic and organic traffic was very negligible.

Nearly 8 months have passed after I wrote that post. Now more than 80% of my traffic is coming from yahoo and Google. So I must have done something right. And I implemented the same methods for a blog site I started on 20th March 2009.

Look at the traffic levels of that new site.

I guess it is not too bad for a 3 months old web site. Go ahead and read my previous article to learn exactly what I have done to get Google’s attention.

Your SEO work does not stop there. Consider that article just as a foundation to your Search engine optimization work. After you are done with on site optimization, try to develop many back links as you can. Back links are the backbone of your web site.

Getting BackLinks.

There is no secret formula behind this; produce quality content and people will link to you. They will most probably not do it when you are new, but let your blog grow for 6 months and keep on producing quality material.

Keep commenting on blogs related to your area and let them know that you exist. Throw them a link or two whenever you get a chance. You will get their love back when the time comes. Do not stuck only with No 1, 2 and 3 ranked blogs in your niche. You have a better chance with the rest of the top 10.

This is how I got my first mention in an other blog. This is one of the best ways for a new blogger to getting their stuff out into the world.

Submit your articles to social book marking sites. Search engines place zero value on those links but you will get more traffic and more page views which will definitely help your cause.

Join the top 3 Forums in your niche and use your web site link as the signature. You are double lucky if they have enabled the ” Do Follow” setting.

Upload related videos to video sharing sites and use your web site link in the description area.

Write at least 5 articles a week and submit them to article sites such as Ezine Articles. There are hundreds of article sites which allows you to place a link to your site in the resource box.

The importance of directory sites have faded away. Most search engines do not give much value to these type of links. Save this time and use it for things which are much more important.

You can increase the time you spend in related communities. Every niche has blogs, forums, community sites where the like minded people hang around.

If you are a blogger, join communities such as Entrecard and blog discussion. Give your web site the best possible exposure you can give. There is a high chance of getting some link love from these community members.

Keep doing these simple things for 6 months and there will be amazing results. You do not need to hire expensive SEO experts or spend hours trying to break the Google’s code. You do not need any black hat methods to be successful at what you are doing. I spent hours reading search engine optimization guide books but only the simple things did the trick for me in the end.

Do not ever forget this; It is the content that matters. Your SEO efforts will bring you traffic. But your success will be dependent on what you have to offer them. So, Never underestimate the value of producing quality content.

Write on the comments section If you have something to add to this article. All valuable ideas will be given a place inside the main article body with a link back to your site.

Good luck with your blogging and money making efforts. I wish you all the best and will write to you nice people as soon as I can.

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There is a hard way and an easy way to get this done and keep your blog going. Both will give you results but the universal truth about everything applies to blogging too. The harder you work, most likely you are to achieve the desired results.

I do not believe in short cuts. I will first explain you the right way of blogging. If your desire is to build a successful blog the golden rule is,

“Be Interesting”

Easier said than done. It is a fact that no one will be a part of your blog if you cannot make it interesting. Your blog will most probably die within the first 3 months if it does not have a supporting community around it.

Jon Morrow of copyblogger wrote a very good article about how to do just that. “Be interesting”.
( Read)

Choose your blog niche carefully.

It will be very difficult to keep blogging after few weeks If you do not know what you are talking about. So no matter how lucrative the niche is, do not jump in if you do not know about the subject matter well. Of course you can learn. But my advice is not to do this with your first blog.

Later on you can experiment with different topics but when you first start out, stick to a niche which you love talking about.

I started this blog last year after I achieved considerable success from 3 of my product selling web sites. All I did was making money and reading ways to make more money. My head was full of ideas and I was experimenting a lot with different projects. This blog was the mean of communicating my ideas and that is why I never ran out of things to write.

It is important that you blog about something you really like. There are people who proved this wrong. You can join that group if you work really hard and if you can keep the motivation going.

Try to become an authority blogger in your expertise area.

If money is your primary motivation of having a blog, Do not worry ! there is money to be made in almost all industries. Do not start a ” make money online” blog just because you want to make money blogging. That would be a wrong approach. The truth is, there can be more money in other niches.

Creating flagship content.

Flagship content is about creating useful resources through your blog.

“Just like Wikipedia is the lazy bloggers go-to reference for general research, your Flagship Content is the place everyone will link to when they think of your topic.”

Besides building your blog’s authority, there are several other benefits that bring long term value to you and your blog, stuff like longevity, visibility and marketability.

I could have a put a summary here but you will gain more value if you have access to the full course by someone I really respect, Chris Garrett’.

This free ebook introduces the concept of Flagship Content and provides all the information you need to create, package and promote compelling resources that attract more attention to your blog.

All you have to do is subscribe to Chris Garrett’s RSS feed and there will be a download link in all the feeds you are receiving. This is not just for newbie bloggers. When someone in his status offers blogging advice,we all should pay attention.

Easy ways of creating blog content.

These methods are not recommended if you want to create a long term authority blog. you can practice these methods if your motivation is just to make money out of the web space you own. Earning potential is very low unless you create hundreds of web sites using these methods. It is possible because the effort you have to put in is also low when comparing with maintaining a authority web site.

Using Article Sites.

You can obtain content from article sites like “Ezine Articles”. No copy right protection laws will be violated if you follow their simple guidelines. There are hundreds of other article sites which you can use. The major disadvantage is you will be penalized for duplicate content issues by Google and other major search engines. It will be very difficult to rank high for your targeted key words.

Using content obtained through a PLR package.

PLR, also known as Private Lable Rights or Master Resale Rights is a package consists of ebooks, articles, softwares which you have the legal rights to modify / use/ distribute. Because of the high distribution usually these packages comes with a very low price.

Again, the major problem is “duplicate content” filters in search engines. You can avoid it by significantly modifying the content. I am planning to offer a 10 GB massive PLR package very soon.

Auto Updating web sites.

You can build content for your web site through RSS feeds of other web sites. Some web sites allow their full RSS feeds to be featured in your web site. Please make sure you read each site’s policy before using their feeds to auto update your web site. There are wordpress pluggins to simpify the whole process.

Hire a Freelance Writer to write content for you.

You can hire writers through most of the web master forums and through sites like elance. This can be costly if you hire professional writers. But this eliminates the major problem associated with all other easy methods. These people write original articles thus there will not be duplicate content problems. Make sure you test their portfolio before hiring them.

I came across this very informative Sqidoo page about freelance writing.

If I have missed any method of creating content for web sites, please do not hesitate to write your ideas using the comments field. I will update this post with most creative ideas with a link to your web site.

Best User Comments.
Nishada said,

“generating content is a problem for most bloggers and I think reading other blogs goes a long way in solving that problem. You have to updated about the latest in your niche and reading the top blogs in your niche is a good way to do that. This in turn helps you get new blog posts ideas.”

We are in the 6th step of ” How to create a blog and make money blogging” series. If you have missed any previous articles here is the index for your easy reference. If you have not created your blog yet, Start building one today !!!

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Update : May 19 2009
Prabhakaran’s body has been identified and here are the Television grabs of the video.

Prabhakaran was in a small convoy of a van and ambulance along with several close aides which tried to drive out of the battle zone, but was attacked and killed, the senior defence ministry official said.

Troops also found the bodies of Prabhakaran’s 24-year-old son Charles Anthony, the group’s political wing leader B. Nadesan, and the head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Peace Secretariat, S. Pulideevan.

The above picture suggests a different story than what we truely experience here. It was fabricated by Tamils who are not living in Sri Lanka and picked up by International media to increase their ratings.

If anyone have doubts, visit Sri Lanka and please let us know where this genocide is taking place.

As a Sri Lankan living, working, studying with many Tamils I can safely say that there has not been any genocide attempts against Tamils here. The war was against terrorists and not against Tamil people. Now we all can live in peace thanks to the great effort by Sri Lankan Army and the government.

This is officially the first war ended by a military solution in the modern history.

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Now that you own a blog with a beautiful theme, let’s give it all the functions you need. Sky is the limit for what you can do with wordpress with the help of plugins.

This part 04 of “Create a blog and make money blogging series” is not written for established bloggers and I am writing these for absolute beginners in this industry.

There are thousands of plugins available for various functions. You do not need all of them when you first start out. I am giving you the list of most essential wordpress plugins and later in this post I will tell you how to install them on your blog.

Most Essential Wordpress Plugins

01. All in one SEO

This is the most used SEO plugin and some call it the The Ultimate SEO WordPress plugin. This helps us to set the home page Meta description and automatically generate or manually set meta information for all individual posts.

You do not have to spend lot of time optimizing your pages for search engines. You do not have to learn coding if you do not know how to. You do not have to become a SEO expert when you can actually control everything from the Options panel of your WordPress dashboard.

Download and instructions

02. Advertising Manager

Earlier they call this “adsense manger”. This is not just for adsense. You can manage all your affiliate network advertising campaigns through this plugin. That is why they have changed the name now. Once you set up your banners in the admin panel you just have to select the ad name from a drop down menu.

Download and instructions

03. Contact form

I do not know why word press does not have a contact form by default. To me it is very important to have a contact form when running a web site. Thanks to the plugins developed for this purpose, we can set up a contact form in less than a minute.

I am using WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition
And I read that this plugin is also good. You can go with any plugin you prefer.

04. Track your visitors.

You can always do this with Google analytics but I prefer to analyze my visitor’s without leaving my wordpress dash board. I use a plugin called “statpress reloaded” for this purpose. This plugin shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Using StatPress Reloaded you can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories. Checking these statistics is the first thing I do every morning.

Download and Instructions

05. Interact with social media.

Social media will play a major role in your blogging career. Especially in the first 3 months where your search engine traffic is negligible. Do not underestimate what Digg, Reddit and stumbleupon can do for your blog.

There are many other social bookmarking services but above 3 is the most important when it comes to sending you traffic. You cannot do this alone and you will need the help your readers. To make their job easier, use this plugin called “share this“.

You can see it under every post and page of this blog and it helps my readers to bookmark all important posts in social networks. It brings me more traffic and gives me good exposure.

Download and Instructions.

06. Show similar posts to your readers.

One thing you have to remember in blogging is you have to keep your visitor as long as possible in your blog. If he/she reads one post and leaving your blog, your job as a blogger is not done correctly. Give them reasons and opportunities to navigate through your site as much as possible.

One way to do this is by showing similar posts at the end of every blog post. Most people use a plugin called “similar posts” for this purpose. I do it manually in this blog and use a plugin called “yet another related posts plugin” in my other blogs.

Download and Instructions.

07. Create an Archives page.

I put a big effort when writing a blog post. I do not like the fact if a post has to hide behind new posts after few weeks. That is why I created an Archives page to showcase all my posts. My Archives page is named “School of money making.”

I use a complicated system to create it due to a design clash but you can get the job done easily via a plugin called “Clean Archives Reloaded”.

Download and Instructions.

08. Adding a video to your blog post.

You might have to add a video or two to your blog once in a while. Or you can create a video blog and let videos be your major content. No matter how you choose to do it, you can do it very easily via following plugins.

If the video is in your server you can use FLV embed plugin.
They support Video sitemap generation so this is highly recommended.

If you are adding videos from other web sites like youtube or metacafe, use wpvideo plugin which helps you add videos in a super quick time.

09. Tweet this.

With the kind of popularity twitter is getting these days, it is essential to add an “Tweet this” button to each of your posts. It will help your readers to tweet about your posts easily.

You may have read about the digg effect. But do not underestimate the power of the twitter effect. I saw few glimpses of what it can do to your traffic levels recently.

Download and Instructions.

10.Manage your pings.

In my previous post I gave you a list if ping services other than the wordpress default list. There is a small problem with wordpress ping service. They notify the ping list every time you update or edit a existing post.

This will result pinging the same post again again. Most will consider this as spamming and I read many cases where Technorati block certain sites due to this issue.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer comes to your rescue here. They correct and optimize your pings so that you will never get penalize for this default problem with wordpress.

Downlaod and Instructions.

If you are following my “create a blog and make money blogging” series I have already discussed the use of “Google XML Sitemaps generator” so I have not added it to the list again. “Akismet comment spam protection plugin” is coming with default wordpress so do not forget to activate it from your plugins panel.

How to install a wordpress plugin

I have given download and instruction links to all plugins introduced here. When you download the zip file you will find a “Read Me” text file which contains set up instructions.

But things are much easier with the latest wordpress update. No download or manual set up is necessary.

Go to,
Plugins -> Add new

You just have to enter the plugin name in the search section.

Select “install” from the next window.

Select “Activate plugin” from the next window and you are done.

This post is written with the purpose of introducing you to the most essential wordpress plugins when you first start out. There are over 100 useful plugins I identified but you do not need them all in this initial stage.

However if you would like to know about a plugin which can perform a certain action for you, feel free to ask. I will try my best to find the best plugin for you.

The following plugins are not essential but I do like them a lot and worth a mention.

1. What Would Seth Godin Do
2. The Welcome Plugin
3. WP-PostViews
4. WP-EMail
5. WP-Note
6. WP-Cumulus
7. WP-Polls
8. DoFollow
9. NextGEN Gallery

Add more to the list by commenting on this post. Your feedback is highly appreciated and I would love to know the plugins you are using other than the ones mentioned here.

Where are we now? And where to go from here in the “How to create a blog - make money blogging” series?

This series is absolutely free of charge and you will gain all the information you need to create your own blog. Make use of this opportunity and start your blog today.

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Last week I read that Chrysler has filed for Bankruptcy.

Everyday we read how thousands of people are losing their jobs and facing salary cut downs.

It should be the same for internet marketers and bloggers. Shouldn’t it?

NEW YORK eMarketer has projected an estimate that advertisers will spend $24.5 billion online this year in the U.S. Marketers spend more on online ads, while they spend less on advertising placed in other media, such as newspapers, radio and magazines.

The current economic forces both reinforce the new advertising models and make them more permanent. Making what we do recession proof :-)

Internet marketers have increased their advertising budget to eliminate the sales gap which is created by the economic crisis. They try to reach more people in order to maintain the sales level or to see their sales grow.

There are over 50 Million web sites with a sizable daily traffic. Multiply it by 4 if you want to add the entire one hit wonders to the tally. ( Visited only by owner, his family and few friends) It is safe to say that these sites will never see a dollar.

So let’s take the first 50 million sites and divide it by the projected advertising spend. If I could magically split the $25 billion evenly among all web sites, We would get $500 each. Not impressive huh?

But this is far from reality. Web is not divided equally and neither are the dollars. The top 100,000 most trafficked web sites, which is only .2% from all web sites get 75% of the total Internet traffic. These top sites are going to take the major share from that $25 billion.

I have no complains here. I would love to be in the top 100k and if alexa is the measure I am proudly in it. The point is , no one can stop you from becoming a major player. I never believed that I can create a web site which gets 100,000 page views a day. But I did, my most recently launched web site yesterday had 100,000 page views.

I read on eMarketer that the average price for online advertising is currently $2.50 for a thousand impressions. (CPM) If we remove the price of top sits, the price for 1000 page views is $.61

If you can create a quality web site and work hard on increasing your page views and unique visitors, money will follow you.

It is not easy as it sounds but I have never seen a hard worker fails. Income from this blog is increasing every month even though I am not writing frequently as I used to do. The hard work I put in to this 4-5 months back is paying me dividends nicely.

If I am able to do this, I do not see any reason why you can’t do it. I am a Lilliput when comparing with most of the web sites in my niche. And that is what keeps me going.

I see a whole new world if I can climb few more steps. Do believe in yourself and never give up. You are aware of a recession proof income opportunity and do not let that opportunity get away.

Refer pubmatic if you have any question about these figures. It might not be correct to the last cent but it surely gives you a very good idea about the whole industry. We have not included affiliate marketing figures here. If we can predict the affiliate spending for this year, the Income potential number will be much higher.

Do not forget to read,
How To Create A Blog And Start Earning Money

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I cannot beleive why some of the blogs in Blogosphere looks really boring and ugly when they can very easily install a beautiful theme and spice it up. The only answers I can think of is either they do not know how to install a quality wordpress theme or they do not know where to find the best designs.

This post will give answers to both the questions so your blog will get a real pro look from the very beginning.

1. Best Wordpress themes available.

2. How To install a theme for your blog.

Your blog can get the look of any of the previews given here. Get the feeling of the theme by clicking the ” Demo” link. If you like the theme you can download it and later in this article I will give you step by step instructions on how to install it.

Blogging Pro wordpress Theme

Demo
Download

The Stars wordpress Theme

Demo
Download

Hamasaki wordpress theme

Demo
Download

Snapshot wordpress theme

Demo
Download

Orizine wordpress theme

Demo
Download

Hosting Press wordpress theme

Demo
Download

e Wallet wodpress theme

Demo
Download

Remedy wordpress theme

Demo
Download

Thesis wordpress theme

Many bloggers say that this is the best wordpress theme ever to hit the market. You can start with any of the Free themes I have included here. But if you have $87 to spare I strongly advice you to use Thesis from the beginning. Many of the top blogs are already using it and this investment will prove it’s worth by giving you the best SEO experience and easy customization options.

Download

How To install a theme for your blog.

1. Download the theme zip file to your desktop.

2. Extract it using winzip or winrar.

3. Upload the extracted folder to your themes directory using ftp.

public_html -> wp-content -> themes
You can very easily handle FTP using Filezila.

4. Once you successfully uploaded a theme folder to your themes directory, it will appear on your wordpress admin panel.

Appearance -> Themes
Or in old wordpress versions it is Design -> Themes

You can just click on the theme you want to apply and select ” Activate”. Not too hard is it?

Since you have the chance of creating such beautiful blogs very easily, why don’t you create a blog today. You will have the bragging rights of having an awesome blog and you will make plenty of money operating it.

Let me remind you once again about what I am planning to cover in this ” Create a blog and make money blogging” series.

Send me the links to your newly created blogs so I can feature all of them in one of my future post. If you still haven’t made up your mind to start your own blog, It is about time you highly consider doing it. The world does not stop and wait till you decide to become successful. Do it Today and Do it NOW !!!

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