Blog-Journey Tips And Methods To Help You Improve Your Blogging Skills .

Facts and myths about Making Money Online Blogs.

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:55:00 +0000

Few days ago I came across a discussion on blogcatalog.com that really got my attention, the discussion was about the high frequent increasing of “Money Making Blogs” and how that could be so much annoying for people who are visiting blogs for different subjects and interest instead they are distracted by MMO blogs that invaded the blogsphere . It’s not that I have a problem with this kind of blogs it’s just there are so many things that are way to far from the reality about this blogs that must be revealed.

In fact there are few things that are true about MMO but there is a lot of hidden triks surrounding this blogs, and marketing “charm” that spins your head before you know it and makes you believe that you can make thousands of dollars overnight by signing up for this affiliate program or join this or that… The sad truth, there are people that actually buy this stuff and believe that they can make easily and a lot of money with their blog without any effort, and when they try to make their own they don’t know witch topic they’re going to blog about, so they make a blog about how to make money online, and that’s why there is this huge wave of MMO blogs that crawled through the blogsphere very fast, and when they can’t make money at all they give up and let the next wave to break on the rocks shore of reality, most of these blogs last about two to three months then an other wave appears to the surface and so on.

The truth must be told, there are few people that actually made it and they are making a decent amount each month, not because they know a secret that you don’t know (well, as far as I know) it’s just because of their skills, determination, competent, patience and little love for what they are doing.

Advice:

Instead of focusing on how to make money online try to focus more about how to improve your contents it’s the core of your blog not the ads, next time I’ll try to put the spotlight more on how to improve your blog.

Good luck.

Multiple Affiliate programs a curse or a bless?

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:40:00 +0000

Multiple Affiliate programs a curse or a bless?

Affiliate programs such as Google Adsense , Yahoo Publisher Network , Chitika, Clicksor, AdSonar were yesterday’s news, they used to be the dominating companies of there sector ( The Web Advertisement), the World Wide Web is growing very fast, now it made the Web Advertisement much easier and available for everyone. Monetizing your blog it’s not a hard job anymore thanks to the diversity of the web and the new competitive small companies that made this possible for bloggers.

All you need to do to monetize your blog is have a blog, good contents, decent traffic and affiliates programs, choosing the right affiliate program is not hard as it was before you just need to pick up one, sign up, place the ads and start collecting your income. This looks like heaven to bloggers, but is this a curse or a bless?

These days the vast majority of bloggers pick up more than three affiliate programs to monetize their blog and to bring more income, it’s an easy way to promote company’s products on your blog or websites without bothering, because the company handles the transactions, the products, and the shipping, you only need to drive customers and get your commission, it is a bless because you can work from home, change the products or the company if it does not work for you, and you only need to drive traffic. Do you still believe it’s a bless? Think a gain.

If you have more than three affiliate programs to “decorate” your blog with, the visitors will lose focus on the contents of your pages and if you keep change the ads you never reach the minimum paying threshold, especially if your blog traffic is low, it may take years for you to get the minimum amount. In addition if you have an average or duplicate contents and a lot of affiliate links will make people think that you are only interested in money not providing actual and helpful information.

The advice I can give you is: don’t put to much ads on your blog and always try to choose just two affiliate programs to run on your blog, it’s easy to manage, and more focus on the niche you are targeting. After all affiliate programs could be a bless as much as it could be a curse.

If you have any comments, criticizes or anything to share with us, please leave a comment.

The importance of graphics in your blog

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:18:00 +0000

Hi bloggers, I’m sorry to day my post is going to be short because I’m so busy these days with my exams, wish me luck.

I’m talking to day about the importance of graphics in your blog, because many bloggers focus upon the contents of their blog, but it’s note the only way to attract visitors to your blog, a good blog design may also drive you traffic.

If your blog has a beautiful design and an attractive look will definitely make the visitor come back again, unfortunately the majority of bloggers forget this point and they don’t give it much concern that it deserve.

Im going here to propose some websites that offer you free blog templates for your Blogspot or WordPress, and some cool websites for nice graphics.

If you are a fan of WordPress, SmashingMagazine.com can provide you the latest information about web designers and developers and some really nice ready to use templates for your blog.

If you are using Blogger/blogspot you can find with Geckoandfly.com some pretty good templates for your blogspot.

When you need nice pictures you can visit these websites Deviantart.com, Blogcomics.net and Blaugh.com.

How to get listed in Google in less then a week

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:46:00 +0000

Once you start posting on your blog, the first thing you have to do to get traffic is you must submit your blog to different search engines and directories, Google is the most used search engine on the web, by submitting your blog to Google your blog will appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), this sounds nice, simple and easy?

But the sad truth my dear bloggers, is your blog will not appear in Google SERPs, even if it did you’ll find your blog in the tail of the search result.

How webmasters manage to make there blog listed in the 10 first places of the search queries that are relevant to there keywords within few weeks?

Big websites that are listed in Google has a high PR+5 (Page Rank), those websites are crawled more often then other websites with lower PR, it is a great opportunity for you to seize, try to find websites or blogs with high PR, and buy a backlink to your blog. This will cost you money.

You can have free backlinks to your blog from PR+5 or higher by writing comments including your blog address. Those kind of blogs are regularly crawled by Google, then the search engine will start spider your new blog, it is known for sure that if you have a backlink in a PR+7 website, your blog will be listed withing few days.

Here are the top 50 websites rated by PR you should submit your blog to.

1. dmoz.org PR9

2. portal.eatonweb.com PR8

3. stpt.com PR7

4. open-site.org PR7

5. lanic.utexas.edu PR7

6. gogreece.com PR6

7. polishworld.com PR6

8. 123india.com PR6

9. elib.org PR6

10. ezilon.com PR6

11. christiansunite.com PR6

12. aardvark.co.za PR6

13. payvand.com/yp/ PR6

14. findingblog.com PR6

15. canadopedia.com PR6

16. webworldindex.com PR5

17. info-listings.com PR5

18. vxbox.com PR5

19. zensearch.com PR5

20. imegamall.com PR5

21. canlinks.net PR5

22. searchsight.com PR5

23. dewa.com PR5

24. great-british-pages.co.uk PR5

25. jamjaa.com PR5

26. illumirate.com PR5

27. finditireland.com PR5

28. directory.ldmstudio.com PR5

29. global-weblinks.com PR5

30. worthwhilelink.com PR5

31. lii.org/pub/htdocs/home.htm PR4

32. blogrankings.com PR4

33. bloggernity.com PR4

34. bloguniverse.com PR4

35. sacentral.sa.gov.au/site/page PR4

36. businessweek.directorym.com PR4

37. toronto1.biz PR4

38. canadianeh.com PR4

39. bluedir.com PR4

40. josh.nu PR4

41. megri.com PR4

42. my-india.net PR4

43. pedsters-planet.co.uk PR4

44. slsites.com PR4

45. allfreethings.com PR4

46. uk-web-index.co.uk PR4

47. podcastzoom.com PR3

48. femina.com PR3

49. siteranking.com PR3

50. gimpsy.com PR3

How to drive massive traffic to your blog

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:32:00 +0000

Getting traffic to your blog is the hardest part of the blog journey and definitely the most frustrating job ever, but it’s the only way to get a good traffic to your blog without spending any money, in other words you have to invest your time and effort to get what you want.

There are many ways to drive decent traffic to your blog, in this post I’ll give you the easiest ways, but keep in mind it takes time to see the fruits of your labour.

SEO (Search Engine optimization) .

The internet is a wide place and it’s getting wider day after day, there are thousands of blogs and websites that have good quality contents, it’s a wild competition going on out there you have to play hardball as well.

Submitting your blog to deferent search engine websites like Google, Yahoo, Live and others is the first step to get you started, then you should optimize your blog so it appears in the first top 10 places of the search result, you can do that by making your blog appears in other blogs or websites that have high Page Rank (directories, partners or friends..), and using relevant keywords in the Meta tag on your HTML code.

On your post titles try to think of most things that people always look for like “how to drive traffic, or how to recover your system files etc …”

Backlink is important to SEO and an effective way to drive traffic to your blog, it is also known as inbound links (links that are referring toward your blog or website from other websites), the number of backlinks indicate the popularity of your blog, search engines like Google measures your blog by the number of appearance in other blogs or websites and gives you more credit than other blogs ,it means your blog will get to the 10 first places of the search query, the more inbound links you have the more traffic you’ll get.

For more tips about SEO visit this link.

Social bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking websites are becoming more popular, and it has the power to drive you traffic more then what you expect, so if you didn’t submit your blog yet, and you have posts that rock, I strongly advice you to do so to more than one social bookmarking website.

Here are the best bookmarking website you may start with, rated by popularity:

Stumbleupon.com to me is the number one social bookmarking site you can find what ever you want (videos, blogs, images, …) by categories and it’s all submitted and rated by the community.

Digg.com is a place for people to discover and share contents from anywhere on the web, so it’s the coolest place for any blogger to submit a summery about his post and link to his blog and let people digg your posts.

Delicious with delicious you can bookmark your posts and your friends posts and you can share with the world your favourite articles, blogs, music, reviews and more.

I hope you find these tips useful, if you have any questions or comments I’ll be happy to read them and answer as soon as I can good luck

Duplicate contents, every blogger’s nightmare

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:26:00 +0000

I think my fellow bloggers will agree that every blogger’s worst nightmare is duplicate contents, when you have kicking posts and you update your blog regularly, a great problem comes to the surface, I don’t mean to scar you but seriously it is, the problem is - is your contents original or stolen?

Recently search engines try to filter stolen contents in order to remove them from the search results, because they want to provide users with unique contents, but the foxy webmasters make different copies with different names to deceive the search engines, this filter is so paranoid sometimes it removes original contents from the search queries.

How duplicate contents filter works?

When the search engine’s robot crawls to your website, it stores all your website information on its database and compares them with other existing information, depending on the relevancy score of your website and other factors, the search engine decides which are duplicate contents and which are not, then it filters out the pages from the search results.

How to overcome duplicate contents?

There isn’t really a way to get rid of duplicate posts, but that’s not going to stop you from taking preventive measures to avoid this issue and make search engines know that your contents is original, for instance you can go to Copyscape.com to look for copies of your pages, then flag them as stolen.

You can also include a copyright notice or a warning banner in each page of your blog to assert ownership over your contents.

Sometimes adding your own comment to your post can help you avoid the inconvenience.

There is more about this issue in Google Webmaster Central Blog.

If you’ve faced this situation before, you’ve overcame it and you want to share your precious information with us, please leave comments.

6 easy steps to monetize your blog

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:24:00 +0000

As I said before I will post an article about how to monetize your blog, now I expect that you’ve already made your blog congratulations, now you want to start making money with it? Good choice here are six easy steps to help you generate a decent revenue from your new blog.

Choose an affiliate program such as Google Adsense , Yahoo Publisher Network , Chitika, Clicksor, AdSonar and others. You can pick many affiliate programs but I strongly advice to choose from one to two in order to manage easily your ads network.

After setting up your ads network you can begin placing your ads and affiliate links on your blog pages.

Now you have to drive traffic and I mean heavy traffic to your blog, you can do that for free by using social bookmarking websites like Digg, Stumbleupon and submitting your blog to different websites directories.

Optimize your blog in the search engines to get a high page rank by using relevant keyword topics.

You can consider to put a donation link to your Paypal account or any other service, this can only works if you have a dedicated userbase, but I wouldn’t recommend this if you have a lot of advertising and affiliate links on your blog you will become greedy and users won’t help you any more.

Creating a network of blogs that are related together will definitely double your income.

Conclusion

Don’t you ever think this will come easily it will definitely takes time and effort to monetize your blog, a good traffic and a strong userbase will help a lot.

Please feel free to ask, criticize or share any experiences you have in the comments.

Good luck.

Make your blog and start earning real money

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:28:00 +0000

Making a blog is a great idea, you can offer services, present information (real estate, internet marketing, advertising…) to your visitors.

But it is a very frustrating job to get a decent traffic and dedicated readers, you can’t sell product on a blog so you can’t get any money, luckily my friends there is Affiliate Programs. With affiliate programs you can sell company’s products from your blog and get paid for every sell or lead you make, you don’t have to worry about making, designing, or handling the transaction because it’s already made for you and ready to operate, the only thing you have to do is drive traffic to your affiliate links, the affiliate link has your ID number to help the company identify the visitors that come to the company’s website from your blog and give you a commission for every lead you make.

Before you start with any affiliate program you have to know few important things:

1- Make sure you read carefully the terms of the program.

2- Do not sign up with a company, whose payouts are high, it could take years to get to the minimum payout, you may never see your paycheck.

3- Affiliate programs directories are helpful tools that are available in the net for everyone.

Once you sing up with an affiliate program, you will get a link or script to put it on your blog’s pages then you can choose the color and the format to make it in a beautiful shape.

Here are some affiliate programs you may start with:

Google Adsense , Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika, Clicksor, AdSonar …

I will explain more about how to monetize your blog and how to get traffic in further posts, please if you have any questions I’ll be happy to help you out.

Good luck.

How to choose the best blog platform

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:04:00 +0000

You want to make a blog and you don’t know which blog platform you’ll use,
are you going to use a free platform? Or buy your own host? And what sort of platform should you use WordPress or Blogger?

Choosing the best blogging platform depends on the content of your blog and its purpose, I can’t tell you which blog platform you should use, because there are many competitive platforms in the market and it make the decision difficult, instead I’m going to give you some tips that will help you get a general idea about choosing the best platform that suits your needs.

Let’s start with a simple example, if you want to make a blog and you just want to offer information about different or a particular subject and you don’t want to spend a dime in it just use Blogger.com it’s the best easy platform to make your simple first blog, it’s free famous and simple. For more information take a quick tour.

The same first situation goes here if you want to make a blog and you want to make money with it and you don’t want to spend anything on it you may also use blogger.com platform, once you sing up you can go to GoogleAdsense then you’ll copy and past the script they gave you on your blog . For more instructions please visit this link.

Now if you want to play hardball and go pro you’ll have to use WordPress.org, first you have to buy your own host and domain name then install WordPress script on your host and here you go, you can put your affiliate links and scripts and even sell your blog if you like.

Some people like to make their blog in a paid host without putting any affiliate links, well if you don’t need money and you have a lots of it and you love bloggin very much you can do the same.

Many people don’t choose their blog platform depending on how it is suitable for them but just because they like it or it is used by most people, in 3^rdDecember 2007 Problogger.net made a poll asking their readers which blog platform do they use? And the result came like this:

As you can see the number one blog platform is WordPress.org with 36%, Blogger in the second place with 25%, WordPress.com coming third then the other platforms, if you like to participate in the poll go here.

Every journey has to start somewhere

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Stone) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:12:00 +0000

Every journey has to start somewhere, if your blog journey is going to start right here I’ll be delighted to here that, if it is already started I wish you luck and if you would like I hope you and I can share our experiences and start a successful partnership. Anyway if you are a beginner and you want to learn how to set up your first blog, well you are in the right place. I’ll try to simplify all these long boring definitions to make it easier for you to understand and to avoid confusion.

What is a blog?

A Blog (a portmanteau of web log) according to wikipedia.org is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

In your blog you can post textual content about particular or different subjects supported by images, videos, music, podcasting and all related media, almost every blog has an interactive format to let readers leave comments about your posts.

Every blog has archives that help you access easily the older posts or entries written in the past few months.

What do people blog about?

You can blog about anything you like, whether you want to express your opinions or provide useful information about any subject you feel comfortable in.

Is it possible to generate income with it?

Sure you can, just set up your blog, make some pretty good posts and get a decent traffic, then sing up with any affiliate program you like and here you go.

I hope by now you got a general idea about “what is a blog” I’ll explain more in farther posts, if you have any other questions please don’t hesitate, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.