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20 Best Free WordPress Themes for Bloggers

2011-07-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

Writing is like a divine experience which every blogger wants to undergo. Getting a feedback and appreciation for your thoughts and knowledge is for getting exposure.

There are hundred and thousands of blogs and standing out among this clutter can be tough. No doubt content is the king but its presentation is also very significant. Today we are presenting the 20 Best WordPress Themes catering the needs of different segments of bloggers. Guess what … they are priceless, too (we mean free)! So download the one you like and blog in style.

Drustan

Drustan uses light brown and grey color combination. This is a 2 column theme with right sidebar. You can put your Twitter updates and social bookmark icons. Its all in all an elegant theme for bloggers. Download Here

BlueGrey theme

The BlueGrey theme is a professional Blogger WordPress theme in low key gray and blue colors to give a idyllic look to your overall web design. It displays your featured posts at the top. Its a three column layout but it looks like a two-column design thus combines the benefits of both designs. Download Here

Firecrow

Firecrow is a dark and stylish Grungy theme designed for your personal blog. Its a two column theme with social bookmarks. You can customize your banner ads and also highlight your polular posts by placing them on right side of the page. Download Here

Irresistible

Irresistible is a cool theme that gives you the freedom to share your multimedia like pictures and videos with your readers. You have nine different color options to choose from. It has groovy video-options and widgets to choose from. Download Here

Seven Five

Seven Five is a quality wordpress theme suiting your blogging theme requirements. You are free to style your web page with custom background, colors (for fonts, borders and even links), menus and widgets. Download Here

Ashen wordpress theme

Ashen wordpress theme is a multi colored theme for bloggers. You can display your popular posts as the featured post, which will be displayed at the top of the site. It has multi page and twitter support and with threaded comments you can get responses of your readers. Download Here

UpSide

UpSide gives you five color options for customization. It also has two different layouts and a stylish menu bar. You can display your popular posts, latest posts and social media icons for more followers. Download Here

Lined

Lined is a decent theme that has three columns. It gives you featured content option and it backs post thumbnails. This theme can also be used for magazine styled sites or news blogs.

Spakball Theme

Spakball Theme can be considered as a special treat for blogger who love sports, especially football. You can show your football fever with this two column theme which comes in green, yellow, and red color palette. Download Here

Arras Theme

Technology geeks are certainly going to like Arras Theme as its just perfect for embedding their knowledge with their readers. Arras comes in seven different styles and customizable options that will make blogging a delightful experience. Download Here

Bluezine

It seems that WordPress developers love Blue color when it comes to developing a theme. Bluezine is again a blue colored theme with two columns. It gives you immense customization options and a featured post gallery. Download Here

MusicNation

Are you a self proclaimed music buff. Start your blog in the melodious manner with MusicNation. It has Three columns to show all that your love to display. MusicNation is also a SEO optimized theme. Download Here

Blue One

Blue One is a three column wordpress theme which is painted in blue and white. This one will be most preferred by the ones looking for clean design. It has a pill style top navigation bar. Your archives and categories will be displayed at right and ads on the left side of the page making your content center of attraction. Download Here

Cyangant

Cyangant has a beautiful pattern on background and exhibit two columns. Here you get Social bookmarking under each post so that a word is dispersed widely about your each and every post in the right manner. Download Here

Zexee

Zexee is for you if you write bright colors. A superb combination of red and white, this theme focuses on Typography. Now you can blog in style. Download Here

Side Blog

Side Blog is a perfect theme for blogging and it is powered by customization and content management options, widgets and more. So pick the color you like and start blogging now. Download Here

BlackRust wordpress theme

BlackRust wordpress theme is a beautiful themes that Bloggers can use. Black background with an articulate contrast of gray text gives it a majestic look. It also has integrated twitter button. Download Here

WPESP Theme

WPESP Theme is again one striking WordPress theme that is minimalist. You will simply love the design and our web developer friends among other can use this theme for posting tutorials etc. Download Here

P2

P2 is a minimalistic theme where the content is the only thing displayed. You can post, edit and update things on real time. You can use this theme if you are interested in wrting short and crisp posts and want to avoid going to wordpress engine even for the slightest of changes. Download Here

Money wp theme

This is the world of social media and to be successful here you need to advertise properly. With Money wp theme, you can also showcase your social media icons along with your posts. Your readers also have the option to rate your articles, so you get to know if direction of your posts are amiss. Download Here

WordPress SEO

2011-06-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.
Note: this article hasn't been updated yet since the beta release of my WordPress SEO plugin, but that plugin does cover a lot of the stuff needed below, so do check it out! When that plugin goes into a more stable development mode, this article will of course be updated.
If you're more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It's an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what's in here too. If you'd rather have me figure out what you should be doing, feel free to order a full site analysis by yours truly.
As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don't have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.
As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, check out the table of contents for some quick jumping around.

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there's a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you'll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the "custom" setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.
Once you've done that, you'll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to "Modified posts". Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO'd permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.
WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you're on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don't enable both, some search engines still can't handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won't hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.
URL stopwords
The last thing you'll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won't get those ugly long URL's when you do a sentence style post title.

Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is "Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title". For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this with HeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don't have any annoying separator in there.
After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what's in the page they're clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.
Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you're thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet... If you don't use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.
Auto generating a snippet is a "shortcut", and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default "Read more" link with something meaningful for every post. It's small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you're helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what's otherwise hidden to them.
You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don't have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image's alt and title tag:

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You'll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like "Home > Articles > WordPress SEO". They are good for two things:

They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an

, and nothing else. Your blog's name should only be an

on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an

.
These are easy to edit in the `post.php` and `page.php` templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they're not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don't have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I've highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I've recently switched to VPS.net myself, and they've proven to be better than anything I've ever seen in hosting, if you want to know more be sure to read my article about WordPress hosting.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you're not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you're allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.
The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren't necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren't helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you'd only want on sub pages.
Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you've done all the basic stuff, you'll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

date based
category based
tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author//, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.
In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. We're going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install my robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won't show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That'll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don't think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don't think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you're not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO...

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you'll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts...
There's an easy fix. Jaimie Sirovich wrote Pagerfix, a plugin that helps you make your pagination look like this:

To reach that, install that plugin, and change this section in f.i. your index.php:

Into this:

Do that in your index.php, your archives.php, and all other archive templates you might have.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You'll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you're using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. A site structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They're diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You've probably noticed by now, or you're seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually... not a post. It's a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a "daughter"-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that's where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.
That's why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you've changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

create a new page with updated and improved content
change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
publish the new page under the old post's URL, or redirect the old post's URL to the new URL
send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you've updated and improved on your old post
wait for the links to come in, again;
rank even higher for your desired term as you've now got:
- more control over the keyword density
- even more links pointing at the article
- the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it's content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you'd lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone's benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that's exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.
There's a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I've found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization

Get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don't have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.
That's why conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven't subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)
One of the things I've found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber (aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.
Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they've just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That's why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: "Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!"
Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use my own comment redirect plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization

Get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they're nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you're building a relationship!

6.1. How you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog's readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.
Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link "No comments »"? Or is it "No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »"? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they've commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get's annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.
Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc. Note that some people think this is spam, and that laws in several countries might prohibit the use of this. I can't tell you, because I'm not a lawyer.
Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirect plugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific "thank you" page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure they stay in the conversation. That's why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you've followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you've got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn't. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There's been a movement on the web for a while now that's called the "You comment - I follow". They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to "reward" your visitors. Now I do agree, but... That get's you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog... What I do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.
If you think that's a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That's a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2. Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the "cool" people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.
To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3. Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you'll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

8. Conclusions on WordPress SEO

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your blog. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There's a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you'll have to actually do most of it.
If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, and hear more tips as I come up with them, then subscribe to my WordPress mailing-list right now. If you need help implementing all the tips in this article, or want me to review whether you've done a good job implementing it all, order a full site analysis!

9 Important Blogging Tips For College Students

2011-01-31T06:31:00.000-08:00

Blogging is a culture in most developed countries like USA and UK. But in developing countries like India, very few people know about blogging and WordPress. As the time is passing, more and more people came to know about it. It is getting more famous among students.
There are some college students (most of them from engineering college) who spend day and night to fulfill their blogging dreams. Unfortunately, most students do not attend their classes and spend their precious time in researching and writing articles. This habit ultimately effect their overall academic performance.

Image: Extra Ketchup

Here are few tips for them to maintain a balance between College and blogging:

1. Attend Your Classes

It is true that blogging gives lots of fame and money, but you should accept the fact that degree is most precious thing for any student. Companies judge you by your academic performance, not from your blogging experience. So never ignore your studies. Attend all the classes and maintain a good percentage.

2. Make A Proper Schedule

Make a time table and decide the time which suits you for blogging. Don’t do research and blogging whole night. It affects your schedule. Try to complete your work and go to bed before midnight. Take at least 8:00 hours of sleep.

3. How much time you should devote

It totally depends on your college timing. If your college ends up at 5:00 p.m then you have 7 hours for blogging and studies. Try to create a balance between these two work. Both work are necessary. Stick with your schedule.

4. Tell everyone about your blog

Try to tell everyone about your work. Don’t become a suspicious guy among your friends. Give your blog address to your friends and ask them to read your blog and leave comments.

5. Part time job

In college many students join call centers and various part time job. But blogging is a favorite part time work and it pays more than any other part time job. Try to catch some web publisher and show your writing skills to them. You can easily get work if you are efficient writer.

6. Attend Meetings in Your City

Try to catch some famous people of your field. Attend blog camps, blogger’s meet and Tweetup organized by various bloggers in your city. Register for these events and catch big fishes of your field and discuss them about blogging. You can also ask for help regarding any subject.

7. Organize Blog classes in your college

If you are an established blogger then you can organize blog camps for other students of your college. You can take permission for the classes from your head of department of director of your college.

8. Impress your friends

Blogging is an immediate source of fame for any student. You can become famous among your friends by showing your blogging skill. Try to research for different articles on your niche and write about them on your blog. Try to solve various technical problems of your friends through your blog.

9. Read blogs related to your branch

If you are a student of Computer science then you can read blogs related to your study. Lifehacker and Howtogeek are very well-known blog for computer users. Similarly you can read Howstuffworks, Techcrunch and Mashable for knowledge of various startup companies and Social Media.
These are the basic tips for college students. Are you a college student who love blogging. Do you follow any one of the above mentioned tips. Kindly leave a comment.

Starting Your Own Small Business and How to Make it Work

2010-12-14T21:43:00.000-08:00

There are a variety of reasons you may consider starting your own business, including gaining freedom from the "daily grind" that sees you working hard for someone else, as a means of self-fulfillment, to capitalize on a great idea or even because of an innate entrepreneurial drive. Regardless of the reason for starting a new business, however, there are a series of steps that new business owners can follow during the startup phase to ensure that they succeed. Just because most small businesses fail within one year of their startup does not mean that yours has to be one of them.

Surround Yourself with a Great Team

This is advice that you may or may not hear often, but it’s probably the single most important thing that a small business owner can do. By "team," I mean the team of professionals with whom you work. This will typically include an accountant, an attorney and a technical specialist. For those whose specialty falls into one of those areas, you can of course serve in place of another professional in that area, but trying to "wear too many hats" is a common failing of business owners.

Make no mistake, you will be responsible for everything from writing the company business plan to taking out the trash at the office and making copies, but when it comes to the specialty areas, don’t skimp on accounting, legal and technical services. A good accountant and attorney tandem can assist with setting up your business’s structure, i.e. - a sole proprietorship, LLC, "S" Corporation or other, and can advise you on things such as tax write-offs, financial reporting, intellectual property and a host of other issues that you will likely face as a small business owner, regardless of the industry in which you will be operating.

Make Sure to Network - It Works

For those who hate to "schmooze," being a small business owner may be a painful experience. Unless you’re starting your small business with a partner who will handle this aspect of the business, it is crucial to get out and network with like-minded people. The number of business opportunities that can arise from casual meetings, a brief meeting over coffee and more formal events cannot be overstated.

Take the opportunity to look for events sponsored by your local Chamber of Commerce and local business associations, then go to the events to get in touch with people who also own small businesses in your area. You may not gain something from each trip out, but sooner or later the continuous contact will lead to some deals for your new company.

You Must Advertise to Succeed

It is generally said that businesses are "growing or dying." If you want to avoid being the latter, make sure to advertise, in addition to networking, to make your business continue to grow. While it depends on your business what types of advertising will work best, a website is a key component almost regardless of what your business does. Likewise, there are a number of online advertising techniques that can be used by a small business owner to establish a web presence that contributes meaningfully to the success of the business. For those with a bit more of a budget, television, print and radio ads may work as well, but in this instance it will likely be best to seek the advice and assistance of a professional.

You’re Probably In for Some Long Days (and Nights)

Needless to say, starting and operating a small business can be exhausting and all-consuming. Even in the evening, when work is supposedly "finished" for the day, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to escape entirely. While there is a certain freedom from operating your own business, keep in mind that you’ll likely be working longer hours than you did in your "real job" - at least for a while. With some hard work, and adherence to the advice above, it really can work.

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SEO Tip: Google Insights for Search

2010-12-05T05:17:00.000-08:00

The Google Insights let you see what people are searching for. The first time I used it, I chose last 90 days then I clicked the Search button. The output was a list of Rising Searches of the last 90 days:

Rising searches are defined as searches that gained significant growth from the specific time period. This makes sense if you want to know what keywords people are looking for. It is also a good way to discover popular things that you might not be aware of (i.e. in my case it is red tube, item #4, further search lead me to a porn site!).

To zoom in on a specific locale, choose the country and specific location you want to analyze. In the example below I searched for Texas, USA:

The top searches included search engines, youtube, and shopping sites like ebay and craigslist. The result is too broad as expected, so let’s see if we can narrow it down to a specific category:

To do this, choose a category on the Filter panel. I chose Lifestyles for the example below:

The output is now a little more interesting:

The top 3 searches are bible, names, pregnancy. Top 5 entry is “baby names”, while top 10 is “babies r us”. From this alone, I can conclude that Texas could be a good market for companies who sell baby stuff.

Now for the Rising searches… at the top is Shelley Malil, she must be a celebrity or something… this proves my theory that I could be connected to the Internet for the most part of my entire day Digging and still miss a famous person that everyone else is searching for.

After a Wikipedia research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Malil, I found out that Shelley Malil is not a woman but a man! He appeared in a movie called the 40 Year Old Virgin but people are digging him because he is a suspect for stabbing his ex-girlfriend at-least 20 times! Indeed gruesome but that is how he got to the top of the searched entries.

The best feature for me of this tool is it’s capability to map out the planet and color code the volume of search for a specific keyword. I typed in “Paris Hilton” and I got the interesting results below:

The darker the color of the map, the heavier the search interest. The Chinese seem to have less interest to Paris Hilton than the Australians. Makes sense, the Chinese have their own share of celebrities caught on their own homemade videos. From the list of countries, Honduras tops the list. Seems the Hondurans like to search for Paris Hilton more than the Americans.

Overall, Google Insights is a great tool for researchers and SEOs. The capability to view the regions (countries) and cities color coded by the search volume is an easy way to gain an insight to what locales are searching for any keyword. The capability to narrow a search via categories are very helpful on identifying a specific target market or audience.

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Get keyword ideas using the Google Keyword Tool

2010-12-03T04:08:00.000-08:00

Search engines use keywords to identify which sites match a particular search phrase. SEOs need to identify which keywords are searched for so that they can use those keywords and get found by the search engines and eventually by their target audience.

For example, if you want to optimize a website about “computer tips” you should see how many searches for the keyword are being submitted to Google monthly so you can have an idea if readers are looking for you or not. You can do that by going to external Google Keyword Tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter the keyword or phrase that you want to analyze then click Get keyword ideas:

You will see a tabular report of all related terms along with the search volume generated for the previous month and the average search volume.

In this report you will see if you are using the right keywords based on the Google search database. If you think you should target “computer tip” instead of “computer tips” then think again because the difference on the performance of each phrase is about ten times for “computer tips” (22,200 VS 2,400).

Also take note of the advertiser competition information, the longer the bar the more fierce the competition:

If you are a starting up a new web site and the competition is strong, it is a good idea to start with keywords with less competition then work on those higher volume keywords later.

Another cool feature of this tool is that it can show you the average cost each time a user clicks your ad on the associated keyword. To add the estimate cost per click (CPC) column on the report, go to the dropdown selection labeled “Choose columns to display” then click “Show estimated Avg. CPC”.

You should see the CPC column on the report:

Isn’t it a very convenient way to analyze your web site’s earning potential? This way you can earn more money by targeting keywords with higher CPC. Well, that is of course if you can make them come to your website. We will show you how to do just that in the future articles as we go into more in-depth SEO tips.

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A Complete Guide: How To Download Books From Google In PDF Format

2010-11-28T05:52:00.000-08:00

Google Book Search has thousands of books, magazines, and documents available for free for the public. You can read them online, but what if you want to read them offline? Google should have a build-in feature to download books since most people are not always connected to the internet. What if I want to read a book while traveling and there is no internet connectivity? Google Book Downloader a handy tool which you can use to download books directly from Google and save them directly in PDF format.

Here is how it works, you have to provide the book code in order to download it. But where exactly is the book code? It is given in the URL, the screenshot below will make it more clear to you.

The book code is the set of different characters after ‘id=’ and before ‘&’. In my case the Book code is ‘_kYBqLc5QoQC’. Now enter this book code in the tool and press Check.

It will begin retrieving data page by page, once the process is complete, click Download all. This will download every page of the book one by one which will take some time, you can see the status in the progress bar.

Once the progress is complete, click Save Entire Book as button and save it anywhere in PDF format. It’s that easy. Enjoy!

Update: If you are one of those people who are having problem using this method, you can try an alternative method. If you are using Firefox browser, download the GreeseMonkey add-on and grab Google Book Downloader script. Now you will find the download button whenever you browse a book in books.google.com.

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How to write blog post titles while keeping SEO in mind

2010-11-24T23:52:00.000-08:00

How many times do you happen upon a post written by a fellow blogger whose title makes you wonder what the post will actually end up being about? Note that many times that you do run across these posts, they do not have a high PageRank or get very much traffic unless they have been Dugg, etc. And even if they do, could they get more traffic if their post title was optimized?

When I first starting writing for my blog in March of this year, I didn’t even know what the term SEO meant and hence wrote post titles that would make a seasoned blogger cringe! Even though I have read it over 100 thousand times, it seems that a lot of bloggers out there still don’t understand how important it is to write a good title for each post.

And what’s more baffling is that everyone intrinsically knows how important titles are because each person reads a newspaper on a daily basis. For example, if you were to whip open the New York Times web site right now, the top headline is as follows:

“New Stem Cell Method Could Ease Ethical Concerns“

Now that title makes sense! It’s also very search engine friendly since it’s short, yet has enough keywords that it would show up in a long tail search. Now consider what you would think if you were to read the following headline:

“Medical Ethics”

If that were the title for the above article, do you think it would be as easily searchable through Google as the first title? HELL NO. And you may read this and laugh and say that “Awww come on man, that’s retarded, that title is not even close to being a short form of the original title, it’s not close at all!” Well I would agree with you, but that’s a major problem with many blog post titles, they have nothing to do with the content!

As a technology blogger myself, I find this issue to be even worse among our niche because most bloggers are writing about software, computers, technology, and other items whose names don’t have anything to do with their ultimate purpose.

For example, here’s a couple of blog posts that I feel are really bad post titles because they lack keywords, do not describe anything, and are just plain useless to the search engines.

Bad Post Titles

“Unlocker for Windows” – This blogger is writing about a piece of software that you can use in Windows to get past errors like “Access is Denied” when trying to delete or move files. Does anyone search on Google for UNLOCKER FOR WINDOWS? Of course not, someone is searching for “cannot move file” and “access is denied”. A better title for this would be “How to unlock a process for access is denied errors in Windows” or something similar.

“iConcertCal” – This article was Dugg, but still who is ever going to find this product with this kind of title? The software monitors your iTunes library and lets you find concerts in your local area. A good title would be “iConcertCal – Find local concerts in your city via your iTunes libarary”. At least write something!

“HeatEatReview” – This is a great site that reviews all kinds of frozen dinners, etc so that you can buy the best stuff from the store. But who the hell is going to search HeatEatReview! Even some simple text after the name of the site will be much better.

“Joox.net“ – Can you guess what this site is all about? No idea? Well obviously since Joox is not even a word! This site allows you to watch some old and new movies in DivX quality. Would it not be better to write something like “Joox.net – Watch Hollywood DivX movies online for free”???
So what is considered a good title? Well, you’ve probably seen most of those already, but I thought I would mention a few anyway.

Good Post Titles

“Stage6 – Upload video clips, share, watch, download videos” – This site is similar to the Joox.net site mentioned above, but look at how much more descriptive the title is. It has all the keywords that it wants to rank on included in the title. No one knows what Stage6 means and nor do the search engines!

“Photojojo – The best photo tips, DIY projects, and gear in the whole wide world’ – Can anyone possibly be confused by what this site is all about? Not even a search engine! Good keywords and pretty straight forward.

“Dealing With Website Plagiarism: When Someone Copies Your Blog Content” – If someone were to steal your blog content, what would you search for first? Probably something like “blog plagiarism” or “blog content stolen”, etc. This article will probably show up higher since the keywords will match in the title.

Conclusion

So when writing post titles, always try to think from a searchers perspective and what they would type in if they were looking for this product or service. Yes, backlinks and the content of the post matter a lot and I’m not denying that, I’m just saying that if ALL OTHER FACTORS WERE EQUAL, the post with the better title would win out.

Also, I’ve noticed that if someone is not paying attention to writing correct post titles, they are probably also missing important keywords in the body of the content. If you’re not sure what keywords to use, check out keywords tools such as Google’s Adwords tool or Keyword Discovery.

Any comments or thoughts? Post a comment! Thanks!

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50 Self-Reflecting Questions To Ask Yourself As A Blogger

2010-11-21T22:34:00.000-08:00

This is something I have been wanting to write up for a while without it sounding too cliché. This is not a post full of questions to ask yourself before starting a new blog, but a post to reflect on your current blogging habits.

What I want you to do is just go through this post and read all the questions either out loud or in your head.

Then, simply answer them. Now, I am not asking you to share these answers with anyone else if you don’t want to. I’m not even asking you to share your answers, period. What I am asking you to do is be as honest as possible in all of your answers. Don’t answer questions like #13 with a lie, because then you will be missing the whole point of this post.

I want you to really reflect on the kind of blogger you are, and lying won’t help you do that. The reason for this is because some of the questions I came up with will really cause you to think about your actions and motivations as a blogger. With those thoughts in your mind, it can really help you make the changes needed to become a better blogger.

If you have any questions, or need clarification, just comment. I respond to all comments, so I will be more than happy to explain anything left unclear.

50 Questions To Make you Think

Is it okay to be hypocritical in your articles?
Do you think you owe someone for commenting on your blog?
Do you define your blog as a success if you [intlink id="2270" type="post"]make a lot of money[/intlink] from it and get a lot of comments per post?
Are you a conformist, or an independent?
Is anything you write truly a great piece of writing without some lies or a little over exaggeration?
Is it better to get facts from someone else, or conduct your own experiments for results?
Is everything a “guru” says always the right solution for you?
Do you truly think PageRank is worthless?
How would you honestly feel with a PR0 blog?
Is it worth replying to comments on your blog knowing that most of your replies will never be responded to or even read again?
Do you think your blog will still exist next month? 2 months? 3?
Have you discovered that writing your post first will help you write a better post title?
Are the links you include in your blog posts really meant to help other people, or are you just trying to sell an affiliate product or drive traffic to another website?
Are you really blogging to help others, or just to make profit?
Have you ever thought of not approving a comment because it is negative knowing nobody will find out?
Is it wrong to comment on your blog under a different name?
Do you plan for the future, or for the present in regards to your blog design?
Is it worth emailing larger bloggers knowing they probably won’t get back to you or even read your message because it doesn’t “meet their standards of being replied to”?
Are you ever willing to edit an image you use in your blog post to make it look more appealing and eye catching?
Are the images you use in your blog posts have a literal or metaphorical meaning that relates to your article?
Do you think people who comment on your blog with keywords in their name are worth being replied to, or even acknowledged in your blog?
Are you a “thinker” and “planner” instead of a “doer”?
Have you realized from experience, or by seeing that list posts are not as hard to make as they seem to be?
Do you think it is beneficial to make a change to your blog that your readers will like, but you may not be fond of?
Is there something you have been wanting to change/add/remove from your blog, but haven’t gotten around to it?
Do you value every comment you get on your blog the same, regardless of the content of the comment?
Do you ever leave out information in your posts and try to let your readers fill it in in the comments section?
How many times do you think about your blog when you’re away from the computer?
Do you avoid posting controversy on your blog because you have none to post, or you’re afraid someone might disagree with you?
Are you easily discouraged?
Do you think that hard work now will pay off later, even after months of hard work and no results?
Do you avoid trying to create relationships with other bloggers because they have a larger blog, or are more well known than you are?
Are you making the best of your social network/media profiles?
Do you ever add personality into your posts (ex: smiley faces, jokes, etc.)?
Do you add “friends” on social network/media sites because you want them to read you blog, or because you actually want to become friends with them?
Would you feel more accomplished if you got 20 comments from “regular” bloggers, or just 1 comment from a highly respected “famous” blogger?
Are you being as personal as you can with your readers (picture of yourself, small bio, etc.)?
Do you believe comments on your blog with more writing should be valued and rewarded higher than comments with less writing?
Are you more embarrassed when someone points out a spelling/grammar mistake, corrects wrong information, or when someone strikes down your article?
Do you think your posts should be concise, or filled with extra information?
Do you make the title of my posts clear so the reader understands what the article is about before jumping to the content?
What do you think when a post you put less effort into gets a bigger response than a post you put more effort into?
Does it bother you to see someone younger than you have a more successful blog?
Are you afraid to make an investment in something that could help your blog substantially because you’re afraid it won’t work?
Do you add a fresh perspective to a subject, or just regurgitate it?
Do you tend to cut out some information that could be useful to some people because you don’t want your post to be “too long“?
Look at your blog articles. What is the ratio of pillar articles to regular articles?
Have you kept up with posting consistently over the last month? If not, why?
Are your blog posts full of information that will remain relevant over a long period or time, or for a shorter period of time?
Are you afraid to ask questions to your readers that you don’t know the answer to?

No More Questions!

I know there were a lot of questions, and I hope you didn’t feel overwhelmed. Hopefully this post has helped you figure out and come to terms with the kind of blogger you are. Let me know what you thought of this post. These questions weren’t the easiest things to come up with as I wanted to go a little deeper than most bloggers would.

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How to Write Magnetic Headlines

2010-11-19T22:53:00.000-08:00

Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist. So, from a copywriting and content marketing standpoint, writing great headlines is a critical skill.

Here are some interesting statistics.

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of your title, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

Remember, every element of compelling copy has just one purpose — to get the next sentence read. And then the sentence after that, and so on, all the way down to your call to action. So it’s fairly obvious that if people stop at the headline, you’re already dead in the water.

The better your headline, the better your odds of beating the averages and getting what you’ve written read by a larger percentage of people. This 11-part series will provide you with concrete guidance that’ll have you writing better headlines in no time.

For the other fundamental elements of writing great copy, check out Copywriting 101.

BACKLINK- CLICK HERE

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30 Real Ways to Make Money Blogging

2010-11-14T22:25:00.000-08:00

Looking for ways to make money with your blog can be frustrating. Either you don’t have enough traffic or you are not sure what to do. That is why I have put together this list of 30 Real Ways to Make Money with a Blog“.

This post isn’t your average directory of money making tips either, it has summaries for what each element is, how to use it, and where to find resources. The blog earning tips are also divided into Beginner, Novice, and Problogger based on the differing qualifications and needs of each.

Making money online is mostly about customizing a monetizing formula for your blog. Depending on your skill level, network, and current traffic levels your blog has a variety of options. So find your blog’s formula below to maximize your earnings.

Beginner

You know who you are… Low levels of traffic, relatively new blog, little or no internet experience, no design or seo skills, and probably a sense frustration over the lack of earnings.

Some of the options in this section are better then others and matter of fact all of them can be used no matter what level you are currently at. Novices can use any beginner level monetization methods and Probloggers have the luck of using everything and anything they see fit.

PPC – Pay Per Click is an advertising program in which ads are placed on your blog and you are paid whenever your visitors click on the ads. It is the most common method bloggers use to make money online. It involves almost no effort and is so incredibly easy that many blogs have too much advertising on them. Money is maximized as traffic levels increase.

Resources: Google Adsense Chitika Yahoo! Bidvertiser Adbrite

CPM - Cost Per Thousand (“m” is roman numeral for thousand) is an impression based advertising system. This means advertisers place ads on your blog and you are paid based on how many times the ad shows up. This can be profitable for blogs with big traffic, and can start to bring money to even the smallest blogs. All you need is pageviews to increase this monetization method.

Resources: Value Click Tribal Fusion

Money Widgets -A very simple advertising system is easily integrated into your blog’s sidebar with widget advertising. Just embed the widget into your sidebar and watch the ads begin.

Resources: The Newsroom WidgetBucks ScratchBack SmartLinks

In-Text Ads – You know what these ads are. You have probably seen them all over small blogs and websites on the internet. They are links with double-lines below them. While sometimes useful for blog owners pockets, they eventually irritate and annoy most readers into leaving the blog and not returning/subscribing. In-text ads should be used with caution.

Resources: Kontera Vibrant Media

Parked Domains – Have a few domains you are planning on using soon but are not ready to start? Parked domains serve the purpose as advertisement and traffic redirection. This is perhaps the easiest way to make money, although in small doses, online. Just get a domain name and use the very easy parked domain programs.

Resources: Parked Google Parked

Donations – We have probably all seen the little button that says “donate” in someones sidebar. It is an easy and perhaps out-of-date way to try and earn some revenue. Many programmers use this still, but very little revenue is earned through the donation feature. For example have you ever donated? But still it is simple and if you don’t mind the button then go ahead and try.

Resources: Paypal – it really is the only major ‘donate’ resource around!

Affiliate Marketing – Perhaps the most lucrative process for earning money online is by using your blog to recommend useful and relevant products to your readers. The best examples are seen by the many bloggers linking to different themes, ebooks and other products. The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you are only marketing the product and not selling it. Just make sure the product is relevant and not over-used. Read more.

Resources: ClickBank Commission Junction Azoogle Ads Link Share

Text Link Ads – As your blog builds reputation and traffic your posts/pages become great places for links. Many people will even pay you to put their link on your website or page. While it has earning potential, be leery of this form of revenue as it may be detrimental to your blog in Google’s algorithm. So study it out before you make your decision.

Resources: Text-Link-Ads Text-Link-Brokers

Feed Ads – An easy way to increase the advertisement on your blog is by adding them to your rss feeds. The simplest way is to get Feedburner and set it up for your blog. Once you have done that then click on the monetize tab and Google Adsense will be added to your feeds in almost one-click!

Resources: Feedburner BidVertiser Pheedo

Paid Surveys and Polls – It is just what it says it is. You fill out surveys and polls or place them on your blog for others to fill out and earn money. In doing this option be careful to find survey or poll companies that have credible backgrounds as this is a source for scammers.

Resources: VizuAnswers

Pop-up Ads – These pesky and annoying advertisements may be great for some of your niche blogs or sub-domains. Not worth putting on blogs you actually want to build a community on, pop-up ads offer decent revenue to blogs looking to exist but not grow significantly. But be aware that it is annoying to the reader.

Resources: Adbrite Tribal Fusion PayPopup PopupAd Adversal

Audio Ads – “You are a winner”, “You may have just won a free Ipod”, etc. These audio ads can be very targeted to your traffic and very successful or completely useless. For instance, many surfers do not even have their sound on while they surf to avoid such advertisements. I would recommend not using this sort of advertisement for long-term projects.

Resources: NetAudio

Article Marketing – A two-edged sword. You get both quality backlinks to your blog and its posts while also creating earning potential. I use Squidoo and Associated Content personally and earn enough money to support my blogging efforts and some advertising. It’s also very easy through the simple resources available to you. Using this blogging income source is both potentially lucrative and excellent marketing.

Resources: Squidoo Hubpages Associate Content

Novice

Now that you are novice you have more experience and a lot more traffic. Because of the increase in visitors the potential to earn more is also greater. Here is a few extra things you can include into your earning formula from the beginning level. Again, make sure to find what is right for your blog.

Direct Banner – With ppc and cpm advertising there is potential to make money, but direct banner ads bring advertising on your blog to a new level. It takes a little more work but you can find yourself making much more money and doing it pretty quickly. I use OIOPublisher and it is a premium plug-in that completely rocks. It even offers affiliate incomes to others who will try to get advertisers for your blog.
Read more.

Resources: OIOPublisher , Ad Rotator Plug-in

Premium Content – Great example of premium content is SeoMoz. They have lots of great content on seo for free, but to get the ultimate seo resources you have to pay a monthly fee. To make premium content on your blog just creat a post or page usign WordPress. Then in the publish toolbox click on “edit” on the “visibility” option. Then choose “password protected”. Set your password and publish. The only to do then is create a lead page that explains the premium content and allows people to pay, using paypal or another source to get the password emailed to them.

Resources: WordPress, Paypal

Sponsored Reviews – These are reviews of products through direct contact by the product owner or through a review site. A good example of a product review is WP Content Robot. It is easy and you usually get to try out some pretty cool products for free.

Resources: ReviewMe Sponsored Reviews

Sponsored Post - Like a sponsored review these are posts paid for by others. What this usually looks like is a post created about a specific website or allowing the post to link to another blog with very specific and targeted keyword links.

Resources: PayPerPost

Theme or Template Sales – To get this money making product going you first need some serious design skills or the money to pay for someone to develop it. Once a unique design is created premium themes can go from $19 -$200. There is great earning potential in creating themes and another very advantageous bonus. When you create your theme a link is put into the footer of the theme with your blog’s url. So the more themes that are used the more backlinks to your blog.

Resources: StudioPress DIY Themes

Private Forums – Creating a private forum is a great way for bloggers to capitalize on their contacts and build a tight-knit and motivated community. Some of these communities can be used for social media manipulation and many other “secret” and “exclusive” means. You can make the fee yearly or monthly if you wish and start to build a steady income through member participation.

Resources: vBulletin Simple Machines Forum phpBB Vanilla

Site Flipping - The process of site flipping usually involves the creation of design, content, and some traffic to then go and sell the blog. The easiest way to do this is by forming a partnership and getting someone to design the blog while the other writes content and markets it. For more about Site-Flipping.

Resources: Digital Point Sitepoint (both are great for selling your site)

Plug-in Sales – Warning: programming required! If you can develop or know someone who can develop a plug-in for wordpress then you have the potential to make and sell premium plug-ins. The first step is to find something extremely useful and unique. Then create an affordable plug-in to assist bloggers in their task to rule the blogosphere.

Resources: How to Create a WordPress Plug-in

Email Newsletters – These are becoming extremely popular. The purpose of the email newsletter is to build up a mailing list of email addresses and then use the emails you send to drive traffic, sales, or income in a variety of ways. Creativity is the best way to use this revenue source. Additionally it is important to start building your email list as soon as possible. But be warned that most newsletter services of any value cost money (but not a lot).

Resources: AWeber PHP Autoresponder MailChimp

Ebook Sales – Writing an ebook is a great way to establish credibility and expertise in your niche while also providing a handsome income. The way it works is that you provide a very useful resource – like an electronic book and then others buy it. The best way to understand the process is by learning how to write an ebook and then how to sell it.

Resources: E-Junkie WP E-Commerce (2 great ways to sell your book)

Freelance Work – Once you have established yourself you can start consulting, writing, designing, and offering other services through your blog. I have had a lot of experience with consulting and it is a great income and a lot of fun. So use your blog to showcase your skills. Blogs are the ultimate portfolio.

Resources: Paypal WP E-Commerce (ways to sell your services)

Membership Site – If you have the drive to make great lessons, tutorials, classes, or other content worthy of a membership site then you should definitely do it. They are all the rage right now and show a great way to earn a regular income. With new products online, the set-up has never been easier. I would definitely check out the resource if you have ever thought about a membership site.

Resources: Wishlist

Problogger

So you are an expert at getting traffic and building your blog. The next thing you need to do is apply all the right things from the list above and use your traffic to leverage the new moneymakers below. You’re the expert so get started!

Job Boards – Big blogs and bloggers have realized that there is great money in job boards. A great example of this is Problogger’s job board. He gets a monthly fee just to post the job opportunity and creates a lot of buzz for his blog with it too. When you become the place for people in your niche to come to, start a job board.

Resources: JobThread Web Scribe Job Board SimplyHired Job-o-matic Jobbex

Event Sponsors – Having events on your blog is a great way to get more traffic and revenue. For example hold a blogathon (blogging marathon), contests, featured story, giveaways and other events to bring traffic and get sponsors to pay you for. A good example would be to have a webinar that is extremely publicized and then to get a relevant company to sponsor the event. Thus you are getting more traffic and money in one big hit.

Selling or Renting a Single Page – Doing this is difficult but far to under-utilized. The process invovles building a great blog with good traffic and especially good pagerank and then selling internal pages/posts to anyone willing to pay. They get a sales page or whatever on a great blog and you get an income. A good example of this is Pagerank10

Marketplaces – Sitepoint is the best example of a marketplace. It is just like it sounds, a place for everyone to sell products, sites, domain names, services, etc. on your site. You get the traffic and links along with commission in many cases while the user gets to buy or sell. Traffic or a very unique niche is a must to succeed with this income earner.

Hardcover Book - After you have established yourself in your niche as a leading authority you can now publish a book on your topic of choice. Some publishers even go from blog to book with almost no effort. So if you are interested in seeing your book in the flesh (paper flesh) then look into these resources.

Resources: Blurb Lulu Self Publishing iUniverse WordClay

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45 Link Building Tips To Help You Promote Your Blog

2010-11-10T02:08:00.000-08:00

In an ever changing approach by bloggers to keep up with the Google SERP algorithms, many of us get carried away with our “SEO Techniques.” It’s not a surprise nor a shame, because without this experimentation, we are bound to hit a plateau in progress.

Unquestionably, even here at Blogussion – we try many new things, in combination with the old to help build on the traffic from search engines. Whether it be validating the site using the W3C Markup or just typing a new category-description, Search Engine Optimization is a never-ending process that evolves on a regular basis and it is our duty to keep up with it.

However, in trying new things – we shouldn’t forget that some techniques will never die out and must be practiced as regularly as possible. I would just like to outline 45 tips that will help you build quality back-links to your site, with minimal to no costs!

Quality back-links serve two main purposes. Firstly, it helps crawlers find and locate your site. Once this is accomplished, the search engine crawler goes about indexing your site. The next purpose; back-links help crawlers identify how important your blog really is.

The first purpose obviously only applies to new blogs, but the second one will still be valid even 10 years down the track. These back-links also help the Google Crawler to assign your pages with a Google PageRank. Simply to put, the more authoritative websites that are linked to your site, the more important it is perceived to be.

List of 45. Starts Here.

Getting Links for Writing Content

1. Write content that is useful – Writing resourceful content will always attract links, hands down. If you write an article that is overflowing with useful and resourceful information – people will link to it.

2. Don’t forget trackbacks – This handy feature for WordPress can be great way of returning the compliment for a dedicated link.

3. Remind your readers to link to you – After each posts, just throw in a quick reminder that your article can be socially bookmarked or linked to.

4. Make a Top “X” List – Alex’s post on “100 Lists To Become A Better Blogger” is the most successful post on Blogussion, to-date. This just goes to prove how much people love “lists posts” such as your “Top X [Something]”

5. Debunk a Myth – There’s only one thing better than coming up with an idea, is to prove someone else one wrong. People love opposition and to see a debate bubble up, so don’t be afraid to challenge other people’s opinions.

6. Write with a touch of conspiracy – Just reinforcing tip #5. If you can create that atmosphere of retaliation, it will always raise a few eyebrows.

7. Spread the Love – Dedicate a post or two per week to link to other blogger’s posts that you found useful. More often than not, they will tell their readers “Mr.X linked to my post, how cool!”

8. Trade articles with webmasters – Similar to guest posting, just swap articles with a fellow webmaster.

9. Release a Press Release – This guide shows you how to write + submit a good Press Release.

Freebies/Giveaways for Link-Baiting

10. Hold a contest with an incentive. Contests are great for link-baiting because when people talk about it, there will always be “Check it out here” tagged along with it.

11. Release a free design. If you can make/buy a custom WP-Theme then release it for free to your guests, you can really kick off on a viral market. Just don’t forget the “Designed by [YOUR LINK]”

12. Release a free plugin. This serves a similar purpose as a design, but not so much with a direct back-link. Instead, if your plugin is useful, the incoming links will just grow exponentially.

13. When running a contest, reward your referees that bring the most referrals. This will encourage them to blog about your contest.

Connecting With Communities

14. Become active and post on relevant forums

15. Become active and comment on relevant blogs.

16. Try not to forget your signature on forums, otherwise the whole thing is an epic fail.

17. When commenting on blogs, try to use post URLs instead of just your Blog URL – This can help regulate your links evenly amongst your blog, and not just solely to your front page.

18. DON’T spam communities with your links to your site, offer a reason for them to visit and contribute with a purpose.

19. Submit your blog to directories – These are still helpful when it comes to getting indexed, especially these directories listed here.

20. Search up DoFollow Blogs/Forums – These will carry the most significant back-links.

21. Browse Craigslists and they can provide you with a free or cheap link.

22. Build on your Technorati Profile

23. Become a Sponsor – Whether it be a theme, whole website or a small project; the sponsors always get mentioned.

24. Run for Charity, and request others to help spread the word.

25. DON’T spam. This tip cannot be reinforced enough. A deleted comment will server no purpose.

Directories, Social Bookmarking + Discussion Groups.

26. Write content for Article directories – Publish content for directories such as eZineArticles, GoArticles or iSnare. In the “About Author’s” area, you can leave a link to your website.

27. Build a Squidoo Page – It’s easy and if you have the time to develop it, it can be very authoritative. If you don’t there’s heaps of services out there to help you out.

28. Join Discussions over at Yahoo! Answers – Providing useful answers, along with a link is an easy way to earn a back-link.

29. There’s also Google Groups – It’s almost the same as Yahoo! Answers, but owned by Google.

30. Submit your voice on Digg – First build a solid profile, where you have a network of loyal diggers. If you can hit the Digg front page, you are likely to get linked to by a lot of web-masters.

31. Build on your Twitter profile then link to your site using your “Bio Area.”

32. Tweet about your posts using Twitter, then request retweets from your followers.

33. Offer a “Tweet This Post” link on every post your write, this will make Tweeters easier to tweet about your article.

Direct Link Building

34. Contact your fellow bloggers with a personalized email – asking for an reciprocal link exchange. However, keep this to a minimal and be very selective in who you choose to trade with.

35. Post around on forums asking for reciprocal link exchanges, but yet again be warned on your selection.

36. If you are a part of organizations, clubs or schools – Ask them if they can link to you, because these types of websites are more often than not; authoritative.

37. DON’T ask Darren Rowse, ShoeMoney, Matt Cutts or Yahoo, MSN and Google for back-links. It’s just a waste of time, especially the last three “contacts”

Paid Link Building

38. Buy a Review – Most sites that offer reviews will naturally link to the reviewed product/site.

39. Many webmasters buy links on popular blogs for authority, even though it’s against the Google TOS (Use at your own risk)

40. Rent links from others website – Text-Link-Ads is most likely your best option.

Using Blogussion for Link Building

41 Leave a comment – All our comments are do-follow, so the link you chose as your URL will get link-love automatically.

42. Top Commentators – As you can see on the sidebar, we use this awesome plugin. Every month, our most contributing members will be rewarded with a link.

43. We use CommentLuv – Every comment you post, will carry a link to your latest blog posts.

44. Link to our posts – We utilize the uses of ‘trackbacks.’ Hence any links to our posts, will automatically be rewarded with a back-link to them! So, Why not share this post with your readers and followers?

45. Buy a Paid Review – We link to our reviewed sites/products.

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Cheap Search Engine Optimization

2010-11-05T03:29:00.000-07:00

Before you hire an “SEO specialist” to optimize your site, make sure you’re doing all the quick and easy fixes that make for cheap search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization isn’t an exact science — at least not to site owners. Google wants to display the most relevant content to the given search. Bloggers simply want the traffic from showing up high in the search engine results pages (SERPS). And sometimes those two goals are at odds with each other. Google doesn’t publish their results algorithm and they change it often both to make it better and to keep people from gaming the system. So search is mostly a matter of trial and error and experience. And there is always ongoing debate about what works and how important it really is.

But there are some basic steps you can take to ethically increase your chances of showing up in the SERPS for relevant searches — snd most of them occur while creating each post. In my experience, the following 10 SEO tips are the easiest, most basic, and cheapest methods of optimizing your blog posts for search engines.

Do Keyword Research

What search terms will be used by those looking for this blog post? While I’ll admit that keyword research is actually a huge, complex topic, you can at least begin to think about what readers will be looking for and try to focus your posts on phrases that might be used to search for them.

Since basic SEO depends upon having a solid understanding of what keywords are and how they work, this is the place to spend some time. The best tool I’ve found for this is Market Samurai. It’s easy to use and reliable and you can download a free trial. (It’s available on both Mac and PC!)

The free tutorials are very helpful for beginners and really explain in depth what to look for in quality keywords.

Use Keywords in the Title Tag

Once you know the keywords you’re targeting, use them in the post title.

Use Keywords in URL

Formerly called the “post slug,” simply use more of the same keywords in the end of the URL.
Thesis makes this simple. Just enter the words you want to use in the Permalink field just under the title field. I like to use the main keywords separated by hyphens, leaving out common words like “the” or “and.”

Focused & Updated Content

Your content shouldn’t just be about the keywords, it should contain the keywords. Try to use variances of the keywords to total around two to three percent of the content. Keep posts on topic and related when possible.

Download a free report explaining how to create compelling content that ranks well in search engines. Read it. Follow it.

Regularly updating your blog with quality posts will teach the search engines that they need to crawl your site regularly for new content. Keep them coming back!

Use Keywords in Categories

Keywords used as category names reinforces the keywords.

Use Keywords in Tags

Always tag your posts and include important keywords. This also makes it easier for browsers to find something they are interested in.

Use Meta Descriptions

In the Edit Post window in Thesis, there is section just below the content field called SEO Details and Additional Style.” This optional area has great stuff. The custom title tag will show up as the linked title in SERPS and the meta description will be the descriptive paragraph after the title in Google. Put keywords here and a great descriptions to draw readers in.
[Note: I haven't bothered with Meta Keywords for years now. Google stopped using them in it's algorithm due to abuse, so I don't think it's worth your time. Instead, spend an extra minute writing good content.]

Use Header Tags Appropriately

Your title will be given an H1 tag. Use other tags (H2, H3, etc.) to appropriate subdivide your post. In the “visual” content input method, this is done easily with the Paragraph drop-down menu. The words in the titles and subtitles are deemed relevant and important to your post.

Internal Links

Link to your posts — using keyword anchor text — from other posts on your blog. Interlinking old blog posts not only helps with SEO, but helps readers find other posts on topics they are interested and keeps them on your site longer.

Note that Day #8 in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is all about internal linking!

Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is simply a list of accessible pages on a web site. Back in the day, these had to be created manually and were time consuming and easily outdated. Now, they can be created automatically. I use a free plugin called Google XML Sitemaps that makes it easier for search engines to crawl your entire site.

Good luck with managing basic SEO functions. This is the first step to getting the results rank that will get your traffic flowing.

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5 Ways to Skyrocket Your Blog Traffic

2010-10-31T05:25:00.000-07:00

One of the major problems many people face is getting traffic to a blog, and the truth in the online world is that traffic is very essential to any online business you do; it is traffic that brings about people that buy.

This post will be talking about 5 ways you can significantly increase your website traffic.

1. Blog Commenting

I just began to realize the power of blog commenting. Blog commenting is a powerful way to get traffic to your website especially if done wisely and on a large scale.
One major thing about blog commenting is that it also helps you build a great brand when people begin to see your comments every here and there.
It is very important to make use of avatars when trying to get traffic to your blog through blog commenting because this will help people take note of you when they begin to see you everywhere every now and then. Being the first person to comment also helps a lot because most people are likely to visit the websites of a few of the first commenters and they rarely visit the rest.

When commenting to get traffic, quality is better than quantity because a lot of bloggers will delete your comment if you write generic comments and readers tend to click on valuable comments more than any other comments because they believe someone with this type of great comment will also have something similar on his blog.

2. Guest Posting

7 of the top ten referrers in my analytics data are from my guest posts and all of them sent me over 150 unique visitors. Guest posting is really effective and the power of a guest post should never be underestimated.
One thing I have come to notice with guest posts is that people prefer quality over quantity; if your guest post is a great one then you will get more visitors from it than just writing anything.
Many people tend to write just any guest post because they believe since the blog is not theirs then their best post should be on their blog, this is not supposed to be because of several reasons. One major advantage of submitting quality guest posts is that it helps you build a relationship with the blogger and his readers but if you just write anything there is a probability of the blogger declining your post, and if he doesn’t his readers will not visit your blog. The better your guest post, the better your result.

3. Blogging Communities

This is one underutilized traffic generation strategy many bloggers don’t use, many bloggers tend to give excuses that they are busy, If you are busy then you might want to be submitting your guest posts to blogging communities every weekend.
Some of the best blogging communities are MMO Social Network and Blog Engage; these two networks have sent me hundreds of visitors over time.
One major thing to consider when trying to get the best from blogging communities is that you have to have high quality posts and you also have to build relationship because people tend to vote up people they know and if you have an high quality post people will be more inclined to visit your blog.

4. Forum Marketing

There was a time I signed up to the warrior forums and with only 50 posts I had already gotten over 70 visitors to my blog, I didn’t post a link to my blog in my posts, it was in the signature.
You can get great results from forum marketing if it is done properly, one great thing to consider when trying to market your blog through forums is that it is very important to try as much as possible to help others and not just spam people for your benefit.
If your aim is to go to forums to go and spam then within a short period of time you will be banned but if you focus on helping as many people as possible the end result will be you lasting longer in the forum, having more friends and building more stronger relationship and you will also have more traffic and authority.
Some great forums to get started are the Warrior Forum and Digitalpoint Forum.

5. Mailing List

I wouldn’t have put this on this list but it is also a very effective way to get traffic to your blog. I was checking my overall stats today and I discovered that my mailing list has sent me hundreds of visitors, this is a good number because I only sent my posts to them a few times.
One of the major benefits of a mailing list is the instant result it provides, people tend to respond faster because they are closer to their email than any other thing.
I have also observed mails I sent and I discovered that your titles matter, I have had sent emails have as low as 15% open rate and I have also had emails have over 35% open rate but what matters most is the title. If you have a cool and attractive title then you will get more results than having generic titles.
Getting traffic to blogs used to be a difficult task and I started noticing a difference over time. It is the tips in this post that is helping me get thousands of visitors to my 3 months old blog every week, use them to your advantage and you will be amazed at how they work.

It is also important to know that getting traffic takes time and requires constant effort, if you are dedicated to making the effective use of the above tips then in no time you will be getting a lot of traffic on autopilot.

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Blog Pages, Posts, Categories, and Tags… HELP!

2010-10-28T06:18:00.000-07:00

When should you use a blog page instead of a post? How do you know what should be a category versus a tag? After this post, you will know exactly what to do. I’ve received questions about this from readers and clients this week about pages vs. posts and categories vs. tags, so I wanted to answer them in a post for everyone else who also be struggling a little with these.

Pages vs. Posts

Blog pages are timeless permanent content. Blog pages live outside the normal date/time chronology of blog posts. Most of what you write for your blog should be posts. Frequently updated new content belongs in posts. Here are some examples of what should be in pages:

Information about you and your blog (the “About” page)
A contact form
Advertising rates
Disclaimers, terms of service, and comment policies
Products and/or services you sell
Email list sign-ups (yes, I know I’m not doing this, yet, but it’s coming)

Here are some things that could be in pages instead of being posts or being in your blog’s sidebar:

Archive links
Blogroll or resource links
Author information on a team blog
Articles (longer than posts)
Glossaries
Image galleries
Affiliate product reviews

TIP: If you plan on having a lot of pages, choose a blog design that handles many pages well, and which can work easily with parent pages. Parent pages allow you to designate any existing page as the parent of another page. This sets up a link structure that is seen in your blog’s page links (in various ways). Look for themes that have cascading menus or other navigational goodies, like expanding & collapsing sections.
Any other content you create should go into posts.

Categories vs. Tags

Categories have been around for a long time. Tags are a more recent way to classify content on your blog. There is a difference between them. Categories only live in one place, but tags can repeat themselves and live in many places at once. Categories are like big buckets to divide the information itself, but tags are ways of labeling and identifying characteristics about the information.
Food blogs are a great example of how to use categories and tags correctly. Take Feelgood Eats, for example, who is a blog consulting client of mine. Sue has categories for major types of recipes. In fact, they’re not even called categories, they’re just called recipes:

But the tags on Feelgood Eats are a more detailed breakdown of the ingredients that might end up in any recipe, plus other ways of classifying food info:
The analogy works for any kind of blog: what are your “recipe types” compared to your individual “ingredients”? Think of it that way, and you’ll be more easily able to assign categories and tags to blog posts.
Does this clear things up for you? Let me know if you have further questions in the comments!
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How Embedding Content (to Third-party Services) Benefits Your Marketing Efforts

2010-10-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

The problem of online content theft has always been hot. You may have spent weeks and months producing some great piece of content (be it a photo, a video or anything else), and once it is live online, before you know it, hundreds of website owners are already republishing it (with or without credit) and getting traffic, links and social media shares that were supposed to be earned by you.
There’s no escape… Unless you give away your content for free and even encourage people to republish and reuse it. Jeremiah Owyang had a great saying regarding this:

If you love it, let it go

If you can’t prevent people from stealing your content, benefit from them reusing it. Make your content easy to embed and re-blog and promote your brand through embedded content.
And if we take this idea even further, not only should you encourage embedding your content, but also you should distribute it to third-party service and encourage embedding from there. The most obvious (and popular) choices to upload and embed your content from are:

Youtube for videos (and here are other video distribution sites by the way)
Flickr for images (and more image hosting sites);
SlideShare for slide shows;
Proprofs for quizzes
Scribd for PDF files and documents (and here are 5 more document sharing websites)

Benefit #1: Increase your content exposure to the service users

One of the biggest benefits is added audience reach into communities loyal to the hosting site itself. All of the mentioned services are highly popular and have hundreds of thousands of users.
Exposing your content to them is GOLD. It means higher traffic, more attention and wider viral spread.
Of course, getting popular there is not easy: but the more you try, the better your chances are.

Benefit #2: Make your content “social-media-friendlier”

The users are just more willing to share the content from the sites they feel comfortable to use. Besides, most of those content hosting sites are social-media-friendly and encourage users to share your content.
ProProfs online testing site for example, prompt quiz takers to share their result right from the embed quiz:

Benefit #3: Repurpose your content

Those free content hosting sites give you great tools to make the most of your work by creating new content types:

Create an embedded slideshow out of your photo collection;
Create a .ppt slideshow out of your step-by-step guides;
Create a pdf cheatsheet out of your data collection, etc

This will both increase your content exposure and (viral) reach and, well, re-purpose it. For example, I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:

This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):

What are your thoughts on re-purposing your content to third-party services? Is it a win or a fail?
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Should You Post (or Buy) Ads on Twitter?

2010-10-22T23:36:00.000-07:00

Credit: BigStockPhoto.com

I’m going to be up front with you. I’m not a fan of advertising on Twitter. I’m even less of a fan of posting ads to my own Twitter account. So I clearly have some bias. Twitter advertising can be a hot button issue for some though, causing followers to flee or advertisers to come a-calling. Some love it because it’s a way to monetize something they do anyway, or reach a new targeted market. Some hate it because it causes unsolicited clutter and “invades” real relationships. I fall squarely into the latter group.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-advertising in general. And I’m not saying that advertising has no place in social media. But Twitter is an exception for me. Here’s why:
It’s Not What I Signed on For
Twitter is primarily a networking tool. It’s a place for conversations, no matter how abbreviated. For most Twitter is not a tool for simply broadcasting commercial messages. Now I’m not one to say that everyone should or has to use a social media tool in the same way. That would be both ignorant and self-centered. But I will say that everyone has a responsibility to their followers.

Are you conversing or just broadcasting? - Credit: BigStockPhoto.com

Twitter can be used in an editorial or conversational way. And yes, it can be used for advertising. But unless you were already regularly advertising via your Twitter account when I agreed to follow you, those ads are 100% unsolicited. If you were already advertising, I could see that up front, and I knew it when I chose to follow you, that’s another story entirely. But in my network on Twitter, that’s rare.
No matter where you’re interacting with your audience, you have a responsibility to respect them and provide what’s reasonably expected to some degree. Behaving in one way to get followers, and then in another way once you have them is misleading at best. I consider Twitter advertising to often show a lack of respect. In my particular network, it’s not the norm. And to litter my stream with ads for (often irrelevant) products and services is a matter of wasting my time. As if there isn’t enough noise on Twitter already.
I’d “forgive” the occasional Twitter ad in general if the person usually shares great tweets or stays personally involved. But I have my limits, as do most. And those limits are fairly low. I won’t hesitate to point out and criticize behaviors that waste my time or show no forethought. I have very little respect for the companies buying these ads knowing they’re intruding on a largely conversational medium of people who have some level of trust for each other (we aren’t talking about blogs here where there are sidebars and headers to tuck ads into separate from the content, or where we have plenty of room for full disclosure). And quite honestly I have less respect for the colleagues who advertise for third parties using their tweets (although I have no objection to them promoting their own books, albums, or sites within reason given that my network is based on primarily professional connections — in a more personal network, that might be a bit different).

The Lame “Just Unfollow” Argument

I know what some of you are thinking — “If Twitter ads bother you so much, just unfollow the person.” I’ve heard that argument a lot. And do you know what? It’s a completely bullshit argument.

Are your Twitter followers HAPPY followers? - Credit: BigStockPhoto.com

Unfollowing someone should not be the primary recourse for having unsolicited ads thrown in my face. And I shouldn’t have to eliminate someone from my professional network just because they make occasional poor decisions about what they choose to advertise or how often. As I already mentioned, it’s about respect. And everyone using Twitter or any social media tool has the responsibility to know their audience well enough to know when what they’re doing could be deemed disrespectful.
Remember, just because people aren’t moving in droves to unfollow you, it doesn’t mean they’re okay with your new Twitter ad posting behavior. It just means they like the other things you say enough to stick around (or your ads are buried quickly within other Twitter noise, and they just haven’t seen it yet). But that says nothing about the potential damage you’ve done to your reputation in their eyes. Still subscribing to what you say doesn’t mean they care as much about your opinions. So think about where your “real” money comes from before deciding to make a few bucks on Twitter, and ask yourself whether those income streams could take a hit to your reputation. If they can, by all means, post away.
There’s nothing wrong with diversifying your income streams. I don’t begrudge anyone an income from what they do. Just don’t forget to have some tact. At least a little….
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20 Things to Blog About (in Any Niche)

2010-10-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

Credit: BigStockPhoto.com

Blogging can be a lot of fun. But what happens when you run out of ideas? Then it can become frustrating and more difficult to want to sit down and write. Don’t worry! No matter how much you’ve already covered in your niche, there’s always something else to say. If you’re feeling stumped for blog post ideas, let this list inspire you. These blog post ideas can be adapted to any niche, so give them a try!
Here are 20 things to blog about (or types of blog posts) that you can use on any blog when you’re out of ideas:

Share news — Search the news engines and see what’s going on in your niche or industry. If there’s news, share it with your readers. You could write a detailed post, or even just link to the news source and write up a brief summary.
Comment on news – If you have an opinion on one of those news stories you found, link readers to the original news, and then write up a blog post sharing your own viewpoint on the issue. It can be a great way to ignite some cross-blog or comment discussions.
Write a review – Every niche has something that’s available to review. Go to your library or bookstore and pick up a book that might be of interest to your readers. Review it. You can also review services, products, or even other websites and blogs!
Credit: BigStockPhoto.com
Conduct an interview – Just because you don’t have something to say at the moment doesn’t mean others in your niche don’t. Find a credible source, and interview them about a niche or industry issue. Bonus — you’ll get to network with go-to sources in your niche!
Write a “top” list — Some people love them and some people hate them, but top 10 lists (or whatever number you want) can bring in links and traffic. More importantly, they can give you something to blog about when you’re feeling a bit stumped. For example, you could share your top 10 tips for “insert whatever your readers want to learn how to do here.”
Write a resource list – These are usually longer than top ten types of lists. They compile a large number of resources that readers would be interested in all in one place. For example, if you run a blog on blogging, you might list 100 places to find free blog themes. On a PR blog of mine, I created a “big list of free press release distribution sites” because it’s something a particular segment of my audience frequently looked for. Your audience is looking for something too. Help them find it.
Assemble a round-up post — Another list-style post, round-ups are often done weekly or monthly. Basically you put together a list of links to other blog posts recently posted in your niche. Sure, it’s a bit of a cop out but it keeps your blog fresh, brings your blog to the attention of other bloggers in the niche, and gives readers access to other material they might find interesting. I like these because they’re a way to show readers trends in what bloggers in a certain niche are talking about during a given week.
Answer a reader question — If you get reader questions via email, consider answering them publicly on your blog instead of responding to the email privately. You can remove the reader’s personal information (or share it if they don’t mind). This not only gives you something to write about, but it stops you from having to answer the same questions privately over and over again.
Credit: BigStockPhoto.com
Answer a non-reader’s question — Don’t get many reader questions of your own? That’s okay! Look at answer sites like Yahoo! Answers or LinkedIn’s Q&As. Also look at comments left on other blogs in your niche. What are people curious about? What do they want to know? Share the answer to common questions on your blog, even if they’re not from your own readers. Chances are that some of your readers have the same questions, and they simply haven’t asked yet.
Update an old post — Do you have an old post that’s a real gem, but it’s so buried in the archives that no one sees it anymore? Consider updating it with fresh relevant information (especially if any details are outdated), and then change the post date so it goes to the front page as a new post again. Note: you might not want to do this if it’ll affect your permalink and incoming links and traffic, and you should probably note that it’s an update so long-time readers know why it seems familiar.
Highlight old posts – If you don’t want to, or can’t, update an older post you can still create a new post that brings it to the attention of newer readers. For example, if you run a business blog and you have a bunch of posts on handling the start-up phase, you might create a new post that serves as a hub linking to all of them (maybe with a summary of each).
Rant. Rant. Rant! — Does some issue in your niche or industry seriously get under your skin? Tell your readers why! Don’t be afraid to rant once in a while. Just know your audience’s tolerances for it before you do so you don’t get too offensive for your readers.
Have a cross-blog discussion — Did another blogger in your niche say something that caught your attention? Why not blog about it? Conversations in the blogosphere aren’t limited to the comment function. If you have a lot to say, link to their post so your readers can see it, and then post your own thoughts. Cross-blog debates can be fun, but it’s okay to share a post you fully agree with too. It shows support for an idea and another blogger.
Take a look at Twitter — Even if there’s no “official” news in your niche at the moment, that doesn’t mean there isn’t buzz about something going around. Do a search on Twitter and see what people in the niche are talking about. Then contribute with a blog post of your own (or highlight some interesting tweets).
Ask a question — We already talked about answering questions that others have. Why not ask your own? Asking a question in a post is a good way to build reader involvement, and you might get some new perspective on an industry issue (which might inspire another post!).
Credit: BigStockPhoto.com
Get visual — Is your blog mostly text-based? Do something different and share a video or a photo that might interest your readers. It doesn’t have to be your own. For example, you might embed a YouTube video. Just make sure you have rights to share something like a photo before you do (a credit link alone doesn’t make it okay — or legal).
Get personal — Why not share a personal story with your readers? I’m not talking about something completely unrelated, but rather your own individual experiences with a situation in the niche. For example, if you blog about Web hosting and you recently went through the process of moving your site from one host to another, that might be an interesting story to share with your readers.
Find out what readers want — Use a tool like the Adwords keyword tool to find out what people are searching for in your niche. You might just find some interesting post ideas in there that you wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
Share a blog update — Write a post that looks back on the history of your blog. Talk about what you’ve done, how it’s evolved, and where you’d like it to go.
Publish a guest post — If you still can’t think of anything to blog about, consider accepting a guest post from someone else in the niche. Generally this means giving them a link back (it’s a marketing tool from their perspective), but you’ll get fresh content for your readers.

There you have it — 20 blog post ideas that can work on virtually any blog! I hope you found something useful. Do you have ideas you’d like to share with other bloggers in addition to this list? Leave a comment and let us know what you do when you can’t think of anything to blog about.

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How to make money with paybox.me?

2010-10-16T00:14:00.000-07:00

What is PayBox.me?

PayBox is developing an online currency and payment processing service to make buying and selling online easier, more secure and available to everyone.
They are designing the service with the help of a dedicated group of EarlyBird users who are contributing ideas and feedback.

Stages of development planned to launch in 2011:

Person-to-Person transactions.
Small Business integration, including payment processing modules for all popular shopping cart software.
Mid-sized Business integration.
Major Online Store integration.
Debit Card linked to your PayBox account.
Currency exchange with all major world currencies.

YOUR JOB

As an EarlyBird user of PayBox, it's your job to...

Log in frequently to see where they need your help.
Participate. Share your opinion and complete tasks which can be done from the comfort of your home or office computer.
Subscribe to their blog. Their blog is the primary channel they use to communicate news, updates and information to our EarlyBird members.
Be an advocate. You may invite your trusted friends and family to join PayBox.

They'll add new tasks as they continue to grow. With each new task, you can always choose to participate (and get rewarded) or not.

I ran into PayBox.me a few weeks ago and decided to take some time to quickly go over what it is all about. PayBox offers a pretty steep $50.00 sign up bonus. To me, this raises a red flag not just because $50.00 is a nice bonus for a sign up form that will take you less than 1 minute to fill out, but because I have to wonder how long it will take to actually physically get that sign up bonus.

PayBox.me initially makes itself out to be an online currency and payment processor site where you can send money to people, but I believe this is what they eventually want to become. At the current moment PayBox looks more like a task website where you get paid to complete various tasks online. I’ve also seen a couple surveys to participate in.

Of course, like all websites, you get paid to refer others. They claim to pay you $5.00 for every referral you bring in. The only problem is that they are claiming to give you all this money, but ask for nothing in return. Kind of sounds like they might not be in business very long unless they find ways not to pay there loyal members.

Why you should join today...

You start with a $50 balance and it's free.
PayBox will add up to $20 per day to your account for participating as we prepare to launch our new service.
You get $5 per person you refer to PayBox.
You'll be an EarlyBird user—before PayBox opens to the public.
You'll help shape the development of the best payment system ever designed for the Internet.
You could have hundreds or thousands of dollars in your account by the time we launch, without ever making a deposit!

CLICK HERE TO JOIN

If PayBox can pull all this off, they might have something going for them.
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Top 10 discussed ways to Reduce Bounce Rate Of A Blog Or Website

2010-10-09T23:53:00.000-07:00

It's better late then never, maybe you might have ignored your analytics bounce rate for a long time but don't worry you can still work on it and get those high bars down. It's a normal problem faced by bloggers and website owners to get more than one page views from their visitors. This is something that no one has control over because you can't tell your visitors to visit all pages of your blogs but you can always guide them to visit another page on your blog.

Bounce Rate: the percentage of web site visitors who arrive at an entry page on your web site, then leave without visiting any other pages or leave without going any deeper into the site. Bounce rate is typically measured as a percentage. The lower the bounce rate that you have the better as this is an indicator of how users are engaging with your website.

In order to understand bounce rate, you must identify it within your site analytics. Google Analytics makes this easy by placing bounce rate as default item on your main analytics dashboard. This says something in itself, if Google has included bounce rate as a metric on the dashboard, they must think that bounce rate is a fairly important metric right? Well in fact it is a key metric when measuring user engagement on your site. A high bounce rate is a good indication that users are not finding the information that they are looking for and as a result are not proceeding any further.

What is a Good Bounce Rate Anyways?

Great question. We're glad you asked. As with many items in the world of SEO and organic search, the answer is it depends. Obviously a lower bounce rate is better, but bounce rate averages can vary by industry or type of site. Sites that are information portals will most likely have lower bounce rates than sites that feature limited content. The fact is that bounce rate is affected by the user's intent. That is, based on the user's query did they find the information that they were looking for? For example let's say you were looking for information about the TV program Las Vegas and you typed in "Las Vegas" in a search engine. You would no doubt receive a lot of Las Vegas (the city) related sites and potentially you might even be returned with a result that talks about the TV show albeit briefly. You might click through to some of these sites but unless the information that you were looking for about the show is present you would most likely revisit the search results page and/or re-enter a more specific search query. The bounce rate of the sites that you did click through would be affected as you were unable to find the information that you were looking for.

So to answer the question, what is a good bounce rate, generally speaking if you have a bounce rate that is in the 40-50% range that is not bad. If you manage to have an overall bounce rate that is in the 30-40% that is fantastic. As Avinash Kaushik states "a 35% bounce rate is very good..." We'll add that anything less is pretty spectacular. For the record, we've worked with clients and have helped them lower their bounce rates to less than 20% and in some cases to 7 or 8% which is quite exceptional.

So the question becomes, how do we lower bounce rate?

1.Use good quality, fresh content

Naturally, if you want visitors to stick around, your content should be worth reading and regularly updated. This also ensures that your content gets linked to from other sites, which will in turn increase your traffic.
It also helps to make your content easy to read. Learn the rules for writing good Web copy: Use short, single-topic paragraphs; condense content to bullet lists; highlight important phrases in bold; keep page lengths short.

2.Make sure the content is relevant

In order to engage visitors, your site's content needs to focus on the topic that those visitors are interested in.

Each page of your site, as well as the site overall, should be on-topic. For example, if your site is about dog breeding, don't have a page on the site that discusses horses.
Think about your site's overall objective, as well as your audience. Does all of your content help to achieve your site goals, and is it content that your audience want to see?
Use the Google Analytics Keywords report to see what people are searching for when they reach your site. Are you attracting a lot of traffic for keywords that have high bounce rates? Maybe it would be good to add some new content that gives visitors the information they are searching for.
Each page's title should match the content within the page. Don't use misleading page titles.

3.Use "related info" links

A great way to encourage visitors to read more than a single page of your site is to offer links to related information on the page.
For example, a product page might have a list of links to related products. Similarly, you could add a list of related articles or a "further reading" list at the end of an article page.

4.Use a professional, authoritative site design

First impressions count. When a visitor first lands on your site, the look of your site design can influence the visitor's decision to stay or leave. Generally speaking:

A professional, appropriate design lends an air of authority, inspiring confidence in the visitor and encouraging them to explore your site further.
An amateur or unattractive design can put people off and send them back to the search engines. It can also make your site harder to navigate, which means that visitors will spend less time exploring your site.

Of course, you may not be a professional designer, or you may not have the budget to hire one. However, there are some basic design rules — such as minimizing the number of colours and fonts in the page — that can have a big impact.

5.User-test your landing pages

Testing your site with real people can be a great way to find out the underlying causes of high bounce rates.
Show your key landing pages — particularly those with high bounce rates — to friends and colleagues. Ask them what attracts them on each page, and what turns them off. Are they inclined to buy your products or explore your site further? Or is there something about the page that discourages them from staying on your site?

6.A/B test your landing pages

As well as testing your landing pages with friends and colleagues, you can run A/B tests on your pages: Randomly serve 2 different versions of a landing page, and see which page results in more sales or other conversions. Google Website Optimizer can help automate this process.
As an alternative to A/B testing, you can make improvements to 1 landing page and measure how the bounce rate changes compared to other landing pages. For example, if bounce rates generally stay the same or increase over the course of a month, but your changed landing page shows a drop in bounce rate over the same period, then the chances are good that your changes reduced that page's bounce rate.

7.Use clear calls to action

If the purpose of a landing page is to encourage the visitor to take action — such as buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or exploring your site further — make sure the call to action is obvious. The call to action is an element of the page — such as a button or a piece of text — that indicates what the visitor should do next.
For example, if your landing page needs to encourage people to buy an ebook then a large "Buy The Book Now" button would work well.
It's also a good idea to reduce page clutter. Remove unnecessary or distracting elements from the page so that the call to action stands out.

8.Use clear navigation

If you want visitors to engage with your site and explore it more deeply, make sure your site navigation menu is easy to find and easy to understand.

Place the menu in an obvious place, such as near the top of the page.
Use clear, simple words for your navigation options. Don't use jargon.
Try not to have too many main nav links. A maximum of 7 links is a good rule of thumb.

9. Build targeted traffic:

Work on getting more targeted traffic to your website. The only way to do is to start optimizing your website for search engines. I know it's a very time consuming task but it pays you in long term. Make sure you have corrected all the above mentioned points to start working on SEO for your website. If you somehow get high bounce rate from search engine traffic then shame on you and start over again on these tips and this time don't hurry.

10.Surprise element:

In your post content try surprising your visitors by offering them some new information but remember that must be related to the content of that post and the surprise should be pleasant of course, don't piss them off deceiving them. This will build an excitement in your readers and he would be interested to see what he is to get more in your other blog posts.

Now take a look at your own site's bounce rate and see if you can lower it. By reducing your site's bounce rate, you're increasing visitor interaction on your site. This usually means happier visitors and a more successful site. Have fun!

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5 Ways Your Blog Can Make Money

2010-10-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of stink lately about bloggers bowing out. In the most publicized example, reporter Dan Lyons decided to call it quits. The refrain: "We just can't make any money."

I won't want to be too confrontational, but: Bull pucky.

There's more than one way to skim dollars off your blog. Here are some serious, and some not-so-serious, techniques, and my experience with each.

Sell Ads

The only way to make money by selling ads on your blog is to be rich or famous first, and then write about how you became rich or famous.

Before you say "But what about...?", yeah, I know there are a few exceptions. A few. And most have 4-5 writers working in sweatshop conditions to crank out posts so fast their fingerprints have melted off. The others have names like Darren Rowse, and I'm so jealous of them I can't even mention them here.

But, that won't stop you from trying. So go ahead. Take your blog that gets 5,000 visitors per month and stick some Adsense ads up there, or even better, try to sell ads direct.

My attempt. I have Adsense ads, plus I sell direct.

My earnings. My best month ever? $200. That's with an average of 35,000 visitors per month. Told ya.

Go Affiliate

You can also hawk other people's wares. Sell enough Acai Berry for Frank's Supplements Emporium and you can make a bundle. Sell a few really high-priced items and you can make some nice change, too. Use Market Leverage or someone similar and you get great, helpful people to help you pick the best possible offers, too.

Affiliate marketing isn't a bad racket, actually. I've done OK, earning enough to keep my wife from snickering at me when I take an hour to blog instead of snuggling in front of the TV (she snickers affectionately).

But you need to pick products you can stand behind, and pick your affiliate network carefully. When I started out, I got ripped off, and I still occasionally run into situations where I don't get paid for, oh, 4-5 months.

My attempt. I sell MarketingSherpa's excellent guides, books via Amazon and the occasional event on this blog. I also sell everything from chocolate to books on a number of others.

My earnings. Great compared to advertising: $300-700/month. Pathetic when you consider the hours I put into writing.

Steal & Cheat

OK, I'm being a little harsh. If you want to Stick It To The Man, figure out 30 ways to fool folks into clicking on hidden Adwords ads, steal other people's content and risk their fiery wrath, or sell your e-mail list to the highest bidder (for $.03/e-mail).

OK, maybe I'm not being harsh.

The internet is still young, and there are plenty of ways to wring cash out of advertisers or the unsuspecting via your blog. Just don't ask me how.

My attempt. None. I have enough bad karma from times I've snapped at my kids for no reason or went 50 in a 40 zone.

My earnings. Zero. And proud of it.

Create Your Own Product

Create your own training course, e-book, book or other product and sell the crap out of it.
On the plus side, you control your own destiny. Create something great and it just might stand out from the 999,999 other training courses, e-books and other self-created products that every other blogger is hawking non-stop.

On the down side, there are 999,999 other training courses, e-books and other self-created products. Plus writing, producing and launching an entire training course may lead to permanent nervous ticks.

My attempt(s). I wrote Conversation Marketing, the book, as well as the UnScary, Real-World Guide to SEO Copywriting. I've sold a total of maybe 500 copies. Ever. In my life. Plus I have another horrifyingly late e-book on analytics due out, and a Dummies book due out in about 4 weeks.

My earnings. Not a hell of a lot. Still, it's fun, and I love to write. I'll probably keep beating my head against the wall on this one.

Use Your Blog To Build Your Business

A 100% guaranteed route to success, if you're willing to put in the effort, is to use your blog to build your business. You do that by:

Demonstrating your expertise.
Building your SEO leverage with great, link-worthy content.
Creating a history and a tone to which you can introduce prospective clients.
Building a body of knowledge that establishes you as an expert.
Generally building your presence among potential customers.
Inviting others to come read your latest creation.

It's not easy. It takes a long time. But it works, beautifully. I have yet to see someone who writes insightful, thoughtful stuff 1-2 times a week fail at it.

My attempt. You're reading it.

My earnings. If I only count clients who have found me and my company directly via this blog, $200,000 per year, average, over the last 3 years. If I count all the potential clients who I sent to the blog to further sell myself and my company, closer to $400,000 per year.

Your Choice

What strategy do you want to try? It's your choice. Just go in with open eyes and a long-term plan, and the worst that happens is you work your way through until you find a strategy that works.

BACK-LINK- CLICK HERE

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Top 10 Free Online Proxy Websites

2010-10-04T02:35:00.000-07:00

by Talk Radio News Service

You can imagine how important Internet Freedom will be when you are in a country or area where Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and some other websites are blocked, and you have to use proxy tools to visit those websites.

1. Proxy Desktop Software

You have to download and/or install a proxy software (such as Tor) on your computer.

2. VPN
Some VPN (Virtual Private Network) services also need installation, and some only need to build a Virtual Private Network connection, but most of VPN services are not free.

3. Online Proxy Websites
This kind of proxy tools is easy to be used, nothing to be downloaded or installed, but most of them have traffic limit and themselves are easy to be blocked too.
I mainly use Tor to visit those blocked websites, but sometimes I also use online proxy websites, especially when I am using public computers. Below is a list of 10 best free online proxy websites, which will let you unblock the websites by just entering their URLs, but there are pop-up ADs, so look out them.

Top 10 Free Online Proxy Websites:

Except Polysolve, Dtunnel and Sslunblock, all the other seven online Proxy websites are also available for you to watch YouTube videos.

Some even all of them may be blocked someday, and I do not want to check out these online proxy websites everyday, so if they are not workable, you can find some other online proxy websites on below website:
http://list.glype.com/

The above website will update workable proxy website list every day.

Again, just look out those pop-up ADs from those free online proxy websites, or you’d better install proxy desktop software or VPN on your own computer.
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Top 10 Websites to Unfollow Those Who Don’t Follow You Back

2010-10-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

Get tired of those Twitter users who you follow do not follow you back? If yes, you can find and unfollow them.
Below are 10 websites which will help you find out that among your following, who do not follow you back, then you can unfollow them easily, and of course, FREELY.

1. Refollow

You can login Refollow with Twitter OAuth or Twitter account, sort the results by I’m Following and Not Following Me, then you will find out who are those tweeps that do not follow you back, and you can unfollow or block them at a time.

Go to Refollow

2. Tweepi

Besides to unfollow those inactive Twitter users, you can also use Tweepi to unfollow those who don’t follow you back. Just sign in with Twitter OAuth, you will see those Twitter users who do not follow you back on the Flush web page, and you can unfollow them all in one click.

Go to Tweepi

3. Buzzom

Sign in Buzzom with Twitter OAuth, Click the Flush button on the TwitIn web page, then you will see a list of those tweeps who you follow are not following you back. You can just select them all and Flush (Unfollow) or Block them in one click.

Go to Buzzom

4. Mytweeple

Sign in Mytweeple with Twitter OAuth, Sync with Twitter, click You Follow, then you will see those tweeps who do not follow you back, and you can unfollow or block them one by one.

Go to Mytweeple

5. ManageTwitter

After login with Twitter OAuth, you will see a list of those tweeps who you follow are not following you back, you can select and unfollow all of them just in one click. ManageTwitter also lets you find out and unfollow those inactive Twitter users.

Go to ManageTwitter

6. Justunfollow

Sign in Justunfollow with Twitter OAuth, click Show Non-Followers, then you will see who are those tweeps that do not follow you back, and you can unfollow them one by one.

Go to Justunfollow

7. Twitual

Just enter your Twitter username on Twitual, then you will see your followers as well as your following, and you can unfollow those who do not follow your back (Idols) one by one on Twitter website.
Go to Twitual

8. Tweepsect

Sign in Tweepsect with Twitter OAuth, enter your Twitter username and click Enlighten Me, then you will see a list, on which the Stalking means those who you follow are not following you back, you can just unfollow them one by one.

Go to Tweepsect

9. FriendOrFollow

Just input your Twitter username on FriendOrFollow, then you will see how many tweeps that do not follow you back, and you can unfollow them one by one on Twitter website.
Go to FriendOrFollow

10. Your Twitter Karma

Sign in Your Twitter Karma with your Twitter account or Twitter OAuth, sort the result by Only Following, then you will see those tweeps who do not follow you back, and you can unfollow them one by one, or block them in one click.

Go to Your Twitter Karma

Among the above 10 websites, Refollow is my favorite, since it has many functions, including tracking who has unfollowed you. How about you? Which one is your favorite? Or do you have any other websites to find and unfollow those tweeps who don’t follow you back? Share with me by adding a comment.
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12 Free Keyword Research Tools For Webmasters

2010-09-27T06:29:00.000-07:00

We all know that before writing any article or writing content for a website, selecting the right keywords is the most important aspect for a good visibility in search engine. And if I talk about myself, keyword research is a road to get higher traffic from search engines if you are using the right keywords for your article or website.

For finding best keywords for your blog, there are several keyword tools available online. Some of them are completely free to use while some are paid tools that also offers free version for a limited time. But there are so many keywords tools popping up online, you sometimes think which one is worth using. So, in this article, I am gathering the best free keyword research tools on the web that will help you to research the most appropriate keywords for your blog or website.

Most of these free keywords research tools will give you the analysis of amount of search for a particular given keyword phrase. This will help you to find the best keyword with higher search amount in the search engines.
So, here are the 12 Free Keyword Research Tools For Webmasters that will help you find the best keywords for your site. I believe these keyword research tools will give you great stats to work with.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS-feed and follow me on Twitter for recent updates.

1) Google Adwords Research Tools : Some time before, this tool is used mostly by Adwords bidders, but now many of the SEO professionals and webmasters check keywords according to the amount of Google search volume.

2) Google Search-based Keyword Tool : The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns. The tool goes one step further by tailoring the keywords and other data (such as the amount of competition for the keyword, the suggested bid, and more) based on your language or country/territory settings.

3) Keyword List Generator : This free keyword phrase generator tool is web based software which allows you to generate a large number of keyword phrases based on permutations of keywords you enter.

4) Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tools : Enter a starting keyword to generate up to 100 related keywords. And if you use Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or 3, you can add the Wordtracker Keywords search to these browsers.

5) Good Keywords : The main component of Good Keywords v3 is the Keyword Database Manager for the Google Keyword Tool. The Keyword Database tool in Good Keywords v3 is meant to help you get more out of your Google Keyword research. Its a small software of nearly 500 KB which you can download for free on your computer.

6) Google Insights For Search : With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. There are several approximations that are used to compute the results.

7) Keyword Playground : The basis of ALL search engine rankings is keywords. Users enter keyphrases in Search Engines to get information they need, It is VERYimportant that you optimize for such keyphrases. This tool provides you keyword suggestions and reports on their monthly search estimates. This tools has been build using the WordTracker Database.

8 ) Free Search Term Suggestion Tool : This keyword suggestion tool is an alternative to Overture keyword Suggestion. There keyword data is compiled and collected from a number of search engines to provide a far more accurate cross section of searches performed world wide. Simply type a seed keyword in the blank field and have Keyword Discovery generate the top 100 keywords for you.

9) Google Trends : This tool is a offering from Google which allows you to compare multiple keywords to find the best keyword. Just place comma between every keyword phrase and it will compile a data which is mostly used and in trend.

10) SEOmoz : This tool is an aggregation of popular search queries gathered from various sources across the web like google trends, delicious, yahoo buzz, aol, glickr hot tags of a particular day. It also show top 10 search keywords for a particular date.

11) KGen : KGen is a Firefox extension that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web pages for search engines. KGen retrieves every words of a page and lets you know how many time they appears and their weight in the page and their average position in the web page. It give you some stats on the content of the page to allows you to improve your content quality. KGen’s also a good tool to view your competitors keyword strategy.

12) Niche Bot : Type a keyword or keyword phrase and get up to the 100 most popular keyword listings.

BACK-LINK- CLICK HERE

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How To Get A Free SEO Report For Your Website Or Blog

2010-09-26T06:20:00.001-07:00

Nowadays, domain registration and web hosting is so cheap that anyone can afford it easily. But running a website is completely a different business. Its not compulsory that if you own a website, you know how to run it effectively. There is a total different aspect when it comes to running a website, i.e., you have to take care of design, images, content, promotion, update and much more.

But with more than millions of websites or blogs existed, it is very difficult to find your blog. You have to promote it regularly and several aspect go into the promotion of a website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an important role in promotion. If you focus on SEO, it will help search engines to discover your content on the internet and surely help you to gain traffic on your blog.

You can take SEO services from a company for a price or you can get free SEO advice from lots of tools available on the internet. And if there is a free option available on the internet, why you pay money? So, in this article, I am going to tell you how to get a free SEO report for your website or blog. SEOrush is a site that helps you to get free SEO report for your website or blog. Let’s see, how it works.

SEOrush

SEOrush is a one touch resource which provides you a FREE SEO report for your URL or a competitors URL. The report will return On Page SEO and Off Page SEO as well as social presence, indexed pages, validation, meta information, various ranks and standard domain information.
Enter website URL for which you want to get free SEO report in the search box at the top right hand side of the website.

After entering the URL in the search box, it will take few seconds to load all the information. The first section show about the detailed site information like domain owner, whois, website creation date etc.

The next section includes how well your website in indexed in search engines. It will show the number of pages indexed next to to the name of the search engine.

Now, “validation, meta, pagerank and traffic data” section comes. This section will help you to get if your meta description is appropriate for search engines, find out if any W3C errors are there, Google Page rank of your website.

Next is “site ranks” section that lists ranking for your URL on sites listes like Technorati, QuantCast, Alexa and Compete.com.

The last section is “social resources” that helps you to check how social media is talking about your website. The sites listed are Blog links, Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Furl. All these are biggies in social media, but I like to see Twitter and Facebook too. They might come out with this option too sometime in the future.

If you have come as far, you probably come to know that SEOrush will help you to get an idea about the areas you are doing well and where you need improvement. I think this is a great resource if you quickly want to check how well your website or blog is doing and if you know any other free tool like SEOrush, feel free to share with me in the comments section below.

Back-link- CLICK HERE

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Top 10|Social media|How to|Blogging & Resources|Guides

20 Best Free WordPress Themes for Bloggers

Drustan

BlueGrey theme

Firecrow

Irresistible

Seven Five

Ashen wordpress theme

UpSide

Lined

Spakball Theme

Arras Theme

Bluezine

MusicNation

Blue One

Cyangant

Zexee

Side Blog

BlackRust wordpress theme

WPESP Theme

P2

Money wp theme

WordPress SEO

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

1. Basic technical optimization

1.1. Permalinks

Optimize your Titles for SEO

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

1.4. Optimize the More text

1.5. Image Optimization

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

2.2. Headings

, and nothing else. Your blog's name should only be an

on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an

. These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

2.4. Aim for speed

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

3.3. Pagination

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

4. A site structure for high rankings

4.1. Pages instead of posts

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

4.3. Linking to related posts

5. Conversion optimization

Get those readers to subscribe!

6. Comment optimization

Get those readers involved

6.1. How you get people to comment

6.2. Bond with your commenters

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

7. Off site blog SEO

7.1 Follow your commenters

7.2. Use Twitter

7.3. Find related blogs, and work them

8. Conclusions on WordPress SEO

9 Important Blogging Tips For College Students

Image: Extra Ketchup

1. Attend Your Classes

2. Make A Proper Schedule

3. How much time you should devote

4. Tell everyone about your blog

5. Part time job

6. Attend Meetings in Your City

7. Organize Blog classes in your college

8. Impress your friends

9. Read blogs related to your branch

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How to write blog post titles while keeping SEO in mind

Bad Post Titles

Good Post Titles

Conclusion

50 Self-Reflecting Questions To Ask Yourself As A Blogger

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These are easy to edit in the `post.php` and `page.php` templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.