One theme did stand out among the blogs that had a great business model and effective marketing strategy - apart from having a Page Rank of 4 and above, the site owners had taken the time to target their site content at a second audience - advertisers or the money making channels that they wanted to earn from. So if you are someone whose sole objective is to earn money online, I suggest you think about this second group of audience and how you can reach them effectively by leveraging your site or blog.

This post will be addressing 2 groups of audience: one, blog owners who have a passion for blogging with the intention of building their blog into an online money making business and two, people who simply want to site up a site simply for the purpose of making money, and that can run by itself once it has been set up.

Tactics of Targeting Advertisers

Define Your Main Advertiser. Before you start monetizing your blog / site, it is important that you decide which what sort of advertisers you want, and who they are. While most beginning bloggers rarely have an idea of how they want to monetize their blog and how they should go about doing it, that doesn’t mean that they can’t start thinking and planning for it right from the start. The implications of doing this lies in:

1. The site / blog layout. If you look at the many blogs that talk about how to make money online, and blogs that are monetized, you realize that many of them have very similar layouts, with some minor differences in graphics and placements of buttons and widgets. The common layout used will be the all familiar right broad column that houses affiliate / private ad buttons, followed by featured sites, ad network widgets and so forth. The more sophisticated layout of online businesses that target advertisers as a secondary audience are Facebook, Google Maps and Lonely Planet.
Case Study 1: Facebook

Facebook was created as a social network for people to find both old and new friends. Its structure and model was deliberately created to be a viral vehicle, and its real target, or the secondary audience, are really advertisers. Facebook is an ingenious online marketing tool where members are already segregated by geography, demographics and user interests. This makes it very easy for advertisers to reach their target audience by word of mouth marketing and referrals. And a popular product or service can become viral in a very short time via primary and extended networks of individuals.

The advertiser page for Facebook reads:

Social Ads
Pair your targeted ad with related actions from a user’s friends.

Advanced Targeting. Target by age, gender, location, interests, and more.
Content Integration. Get noticed, not skipped.
Flexible Pricing. Buy clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM).
Trusted Referrals. Attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

Facebook Pages
Represent your business, band, product and more by creating a distinct and customized profile.

Free Presence. Users can find you through their friends, search, and more. Communicate directly with fans.
Quick Setup. Update with easy tools.
Easy Customization. Display rich media in a flexible layout.
Viral Distribution. Users’ interactions with your Page spread naturally to their friends.

In its very structure itself, Facebook was designed to be an advertiser’s dream online marketing tool.

Case Study 2: Lonely Planet


Since lonely planet got bought over, the new owners did not hesitate to convert it into a major monetized site. Where previously there were no ads or transactions available, there are now a plethora of product and service offerings ranging from hotel bookings, flight bookings, and travel books and tours. While previously Lonely Planet has focused only on its primary audience of travelers, it has now defined its secondary audience, which are essentially hotels, airlines, bookstores and travel agencies. Take a careful look and you’ll see that this site while seemingly targeting people who love traveling, the site setup, features, layout and content are all structured to interest various advertisers to their site.

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll cover Site Features of sites / blogs that target advertisers, How they brand their site / blog, and the target keywords usage. So stay tuned for more!

Today, I am writing a blog review on a food blog started by a friend who calls herself Steffles. She writes and owns a blog Foodcraft, which was birthed out of her love for cooking. It contains posts of themed dinner parties complete with gorgeous photos, recipes and cooking instructions as well as descriptions of dishes from fine dining at restaurants. The dishes featured in the blog are varied - from Spanish food to local Singaporean seafood - and unique as Steffles is always up to modifying dishes and pastries to zest them up and make them interesting. The reward she gets is the satisfaction in knowing that people who read her blog are trying out her recipes and enjoying them.

Steffles’ life has changed since she started blogging. Firstly, it requires time in writing, and Steffles has since invested in a macro lens to capture quality pictures for her blog. Also, friends have had to learn to wait until Steffles has taken photos of all the dishes on the table before the feasting can begin. Those who used to cringe while waiting for her to take photos are now asking her for recipes and to recommend them places to eat once they got used to the idea that Steffles runs a blog, and a good one at that. I will be using her blog as an example of how someone like Steffles can make changes to her blog to market it and eventually earn enough money from it to quit her day job.
About Foodcraft
Steffles is someone who loves fine wining & dining, and the only thing that she enjoys more than that is cooking. She started Foodcraft in March 2005 and updates it weekly. She does not do much marketing for her blog except via word of mouth and a digital signature with the URL of her blog in her personal emails. The little monetization she has is a couple of Google Ads at the top of the blog.

Upon doing a little research, I discovered that despite the weekly and sometimes infrequent posting, Foodcraft still enjoys a ranking of PR3 though my guess is that the number of unique visitors per day is not as high as it should be, based on some Alexa stats. Articles in Foodcraft have been bookmarked 64 times on del.icio.us, and has 10 technorati links. As no RSS feeds are being offered on the site and corresponding number of subscribers, it is difficult to tell what kind of traffic Foodcraft is getting on a daily basis.

I sent Steffles a list of interview questions, to which she graciously provided the answers to.

Steffles got into blogging when a girlfriend, author of Sweetoven introduced her to

“…this amazing webworld where you can share recipes and your passion with others.”

Ironically, her girlfriend stopped blogging when she went back to work, but Steffles continued to update her blog.

Steffles’ key target audience is anybody and everybody who loves to cook or bake. The purpose of her blog is to share her special recipes with like minded “cooks” and as a place where she can store her recipes for future reference. A secondary purpose is to keep her friends informed of her latest culinary adventures and where they can exchange personal anecdotes. Last but not least, it would also be an online heirloom for her daughter, as a way of passing down her recipes if she grew up to become interested in cooking and baking as well.

After defining her target audience, Steffles focused on keeping her regular readers happy and coming back for more cooking recipes at foodcraft. Recently, due to the birth of her daughter, Steffles has had her hands tied and only recently started posting regularly again.

Steffle’s response when I posed her the question on what would she say if I told her she has a real potential in earning good money from her blog was:

“Wow - being paid for your passion is fabulous!”

So I have decided to dedicate this post to advising Steffles exactly how she can do that. And she doesn’t really need to put in a lot of effort as she already has a great blog going with unique content. The only thing that she needs to work on is getting the marketing and monetization systems set up.

Steps to Marketing Foodcraft

Steffles is already doing something right in marketing her blog - she has been actively interacting with fellow bloggers in the same niche, exchanging pointers and dining places, as well as exchanging links. She has tried recipes posted from other bloggers and given comments on their blogs. She has also established relationships with a few of them such that they co-own a couple of blogs together. In doing this, Steffles is making herself visible to visitors of the other blogs who are also her key target audience. She is “stealing” traffic from related blogs to an already targeted audience. All she needs to do is to be more active at commenting at other cooking blogs which are receiving good traffic and giving valuable pointers to steer some of the traffic in her direction. She should also do a guest blogging exchange with another similarly popular if not more popular blog. This will help to introduce readers of both blogs to the other site, essentially sharing their traffic and boosting readership.

The next step that Steffles can do to is to participate in cooking & baking forums. I did a search, and came up with a list of forums that Steffles could actively participate in to exchange cooking pointers and tips. Not all of the members of the forums will own a blog as many of them are simply looking for a community where they can exchange recipes and pointers. But all of them will be people who love cooking - Steffles’ key target audience. So she should go through the list below, choose a few forums which she is interested in, and just start getting involved in the discussion on a daily basis if possible to establish relationships and build contacts. She should make sure that her signature in the forums include the URL of her blog though she should be careful in reading the terms and conditions of these forums as some of them do not take to this well and will ban her as a spammer. The key is to establish relationships, and try to refer them to her blog for recipes or cooking tips to increase her loyal readership base.

List of cooking / baking forums, to name a few:

• Chef 2 Chef Culinary Portal which is part of Chef2Chef dot net
• ChefTalk
• eG Forums
• Group Recipes
• Bake Space

If Steffles has a little more time and cash to invest, I would suggest that she starts to actively participate in social networks systems like StumbleUpon, MyBlogLog, etc. and buy a little advertising with Google Adwords. She could also start writing reviews at hungrygowhere.com, a popular local network site that Singaporeans use when they want to locate a good eating place for their culinary requirements, and the associated credit card discount at these places. With a ranking of PR4 and a cult following of its own, being a regular and recognised contributor to this site would bring quality traffic to Steffles’ blog.

Monetizing Foodcraft

Most blogs start making good money off private ad sales and affiliate marketing once they manage to work up their Page Ranking to a 4. Foodcraft is already a PR3 blog and with some simple installations on the site, a little effort put into marketing and regular weekly posts, Steffles should be able to get Foodcraft up to a PR4 in no time. However, before she can do that, there are a couple of things she can do to her blog so that advertisers can sit up and take notice of her blog.

1. Firstly, she would need to install Google Analytics or some sort of traffic tracking software to give advertisers some stats on her traffic.
2. In addition, she should provide an RSS feed and try to get her regular readers to subscribe to her blog. The number of subscribers are also what advertisers look at when they are considering approaching a blog for ad space.
3. Next, Steffles should add the “favourite me” technorati button on her site. Currently she has links from Technorati on what other blogs are linking to her and her profile somewhere near the middle of the page. This doesn’t really do anything for her blog, and she already has a profile on the top right hand of the page. What Steffles should do is remove the Technorati widgets from her blog, and then add the “Fave this Blog” Technorati button and ranking if desired right on top of the right column, under a RSS subscription button, above the “About Me” blurb.
4. Finally, Steffles should seriously think about writing an eBook that contains her best cooking tips or recipes and offer it as a free download for everyone who subscribes to her blog. Later on when she is more established as an authority in her niche, she can then start writing and selling eBooks for a fee.
5. An added step for Steffles will be to sign up for Sponsored Reviews as a publisher. This makes her available to advertisers who are looking for a related blog where they can buy an advertorial or review of their restaurant or site. Steffles will get paid to review a product or service, and the advertiser gets exposure on Steffles’ blog. Or if Steffles is uncomfortable in working with ad networks, what she can do is to regularly write reviews on restaurants, recipes in books, quality of ingredients purchased at departmental stores, etc. In her posts, she should also try to get comments from her readers. This adds to her influencer index if people start responding to her reviews. This is also an index of what advertisers look for, and will enable Steffles to approached by individual business owners who will pay a fee for a review or for an advertising spot. This will give Steffles more control and selectivity over the kinds of advertisers she has on her site.

In conclusion, an alternative that Steffles can take is to sell out her blog if she was looking for a quick way to make some decent money. I posed the question to her if she would ever intend to sell out her blog, and her reply is that a blog is only special and bias free if what is written is from the heart. She prefers to earn money by converting Foodcraft into a metablog, but will be very careful about who advertises on her blog as she wants her blog to be genuine.

That said, my rating for Steffles blog is as follows:

Potential for Growth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Content Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Monetizing Potential Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Do you have other suggestions on how Steffles can market and / or monetize her blog? Are there other rating factors you will add to the above?

Yaro Stavak, creator and author of Entrepreneurs Journey has launched a step by step visual audio course at Blog Mastermine to teach new bloggers how to make money online in just a few short weeks. Yaro is a well known name in the blogging circles, and if you don’t know this already, you should really check out this course out.

What I like about this course is that you will be able to see Yaro’s desktop performing steps that you can follow and recognize. His narration of the tasks required to perform an activity while you are watching them being done is concise, clear, and informative. All video/audio lessons come with full transcripts in case you prefer to read instead.

The topics covered by his course are:

• Lesson 1: Let’s Get Blogging!
• Lesson 2: Blog Foundations
• Lesson 3: RSS, Social Proof & Plug-ins
• Lesson 4: Finalizing Your Blog Structure
• Lesson 5: Set Up Key Content Pages
• Lesson 6: Content Focus and Structure
• Lesson 7: Authentic Content
• Lesson 8: Personal Branding and Sourcing Content
• Lesson 9: Hiring Bloggers
• Lesson 10: Copywriting For Blogs
• Lesson 11: Marketing Through Conversations
• Lesson 12: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 1 - Forums
• Lesson 13: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 2 - Article Marketing & Blog Carnivals
• Lesson 14: Leveraging Content For Traffic Part 3 - Guest Writing
• Lesson 15: Search Engine Optimization For Blogs
• Lesson 16: Impact Marketing
• Lesson 17: Podcasting
• Lesson 18: Publicity
• Lesson 19: The Traffic Secret Every Blogger Knows
• Lesson 20: The Monetization Process
• Lesson 21: Testing Monetization Part 1 - Contextual Advertising
• Lesson 22: Testing Monetization Part 2 - Affiliate Marketing
• Lesson 23: Testing Monetization Part 3 - Direct Advertising
• Lesson 24: More Monetization Options
• Lesson 25: Email List Profits
• Lesson 26: Buying and Selling Blogs
• BONUS - Lesson 27: How To Make Blogging A Business

To help you decide if this is the right course for you, Yaro is giving Lesson 11 free as a sample lesson. This course will probably take you a couple of days to work through, and helps you to cut endless hours, days and months learning how to make money online through experimenting, mistakes and restarts. Yaro is offering this course at USD$77 per month with a 30 day money back guarantee. I’m not exactly sure how the delivery system of the course works - if you will have access to all lessons at the same time so you manage how fast you want to finish the course, or if each lesson is mailed to you on a weekly / daily basis.

I have personally signed up for the course, and will be starting soon where I will provide as much information about the course (not content) as possible, including a short review / write up at the end of the course. Do note however, that Yaro is offering the USD$77 deal until Dec 10 where he will close enrolment of the course, with a hint the course fees will increase after that. So if you liked the free lesson and course topics, sign up for his course now.

In Part 1 of this topic, I talked about how Pepsi usurped Coke by diversifying their products. As Internet Marketers, there are similar benefits that we can gain by following PepsiCo’s move to diversify their product range. In this post I will elaborate on further benefits in addition to those listed in Part 1.

Converting the Frequent Visitors. When you are in consumer marketing, a large percentage of your customers will remain in the gray zone. These are customers that have not committed themselves to your brand or blog. You are well familiar with them - they are those who will come back to your blog frequently to check if you have any interesting posts, but do not subscribe. And they form a very large part of your audience. In a sense, they have not reached the tipping point yet to convert into loyal subscribers and lurk under the “Direct traffic” segment of Google Analytics or make up part of the “referred traffic” from social networks.

Pepsi understood the economics of converting this group of “unconverted” consumer base - or the brand switchers. To convert them, a special strategy was needed to convert them into loyal consumers. Pepsi had foresight that people will be increasingly concerned with weight and health matters, and launched Diet Pepsi in 1964 by replacing sugar with aspartame. This appealed to consumers who may like the drink but watch their intake because of weight issues. Diet Coke was only launched in 1982. After Diet Pepsi, followed a series of products like Pepsi One, Pepsi Wild Cherry, Pepsi Blue to capture different audience demographics. We see the same strategy happening with other brands of consumer goods - shampoo and toothpaste for instance.

How do you extend this strategy to your blog? Diversify yourself. Offer videocast or podcast to audiences who prefer listening and watching than reading. Publish eBooks for different topics of your blog. Some people read your blog because they want to learn about SEO tactics. Others want to learn how to make money from affiliate marketing. And yet others want to know how to build traffic. These are your “niche” audiences who may be interested in only a particular topic. Create an eBook for them, and provide updates if possible. Provide an online interactive course teaching people how to make money. This will help to convert the large slice in your Google Analytics pie chart of return visitors to subscribers and even paid customers. The key is being able to promote your blog brand while similarly targeting segments within the scope of your target audience for increased conversion. The important thing to remember is that while diversifying yourself, you do not stray from the main focus of your blog and end up adding another 20 or 30 categories to your blog that are unrelated.

Diversifying Income Source. When you diversify yourself on your blog, you have a stronger representation of diverse segments of your target audience, and have the opportunity to diversify your income source. For example, if you are writing targeted eBooks for each segment of your target audience, the content will be highly specific and include important resources. You can sell your eBooks for a fee. If you have set up an online interactive course that consolidates all the important information into a 3 week or 6 week course, you can charge a fee for people to attend the course like what Brian Clark of Copyblogger has done. Similarly you can also package your lessons into mp3 / mov files instead where readers can easily pay for and download off your blog. There ARE other sources of earning income to your blog besides advertising.

Instilling Confidence in Your Stakeholders. By diversifying your blog, you not only increase your “market share” on the blogosphere, but you also instill confidence in your readers and advertisers. You show your readers that you are interested in reaching them effectively, and advertisers will be more assured that your blog will not close down in the next year or few months. Any blog that earns money from advertising alone is at the mercy of advertising networks and Google Page Rank adjustments. Look at traditional publishing. In its heyday, publishing companies earned a lot of money from advertisers but as more publications entered the market the slice of pie started to become thinner and thinner. Then came the invention of the Internet with no critical barriers such as geography and high printing costs, and many publishing houses closed down within a few short years. The publishing piece of the pie is now even smaller now that online publishing has entered the publishing game.

While it took quite a while before traditional publishing took a huge cut in profitability, do remember that things speed up on the Internet. A year’s development in online technology and publishing is equivalent to five years of development in publishing. Even now, Internet giants like Google are starting to change their policies. Google Adsense has remained largely unchanged in the past few years, but as other monetizing programs are now offering publishers other alternatives for earning money online, it has thinned out the slice of pie for Google and they are keen to keep advertisers happy. Thus, things are going to get tougher for online publishers who want to earn income from advertising alone. The next big thing on the blogging horizon is viral marketing and video blogging. Big money makers like Hollywood and the music industry are putting their money into viral videos. While I am sure that the blogging phenomena will stay for another 5-10 years, who is to say how drastically the form and shape of blogging will change?

By diversifying your income source and instead of relying on advertising alone, you will protect your blog business from shifts in the blogosphere as advertisers, search engines and other publishers fight to enlarge their piece of the pie. Having other sources of income like selling eBooks, an online course, or a tutorial package will cut out the middleman or third party and stabilize your blog income despite the changes in the blogosphere.

Do you have a strategy for diversifying your blog? Are you planning a campaign to reach segments within your target audience? Or do you think advertising alone is enough to give your blog a healthy income?

A short announcement before the beginning of the post - I have decided to add a little something for subscribers to my blog. I will be posting a weekly podcast where I journal the “latest news” read on the web that I may not blog about, and where I got the idea to blog on a particularly popular post of the week. Each podcast will be published as a single post, so that subscribers can comment and discuss on the content of the podcast. I will run it for a month, and if it is successful and my target percent of subscribers increase by 50%, I will put it as a permanent feature for my blog.

Now to my post for today. I have wanted to do an article on product diversity for some time now, how that can apply to Internet Marketing as a viable strategy for building a successful blog. First, let me give you a legendary example of product diversification, and how that has helped a secondary brand usurp a market leader.

The Cola Wars

Coca Cola started out as the market leader of Cola drinks in 1886 while Pepsi was only invented in 1898. Most of you will remember the cola wars, and today who really won resides in the minds of consumers and fans. However, Fortune quotes that

The great irony of Pepsi’s rise is this: It has never sold more soda than Coke, even today.

and

“Pepsi’s been on fire,” notes Robert van Brugge, beverage analyst with Sanford Bernstein. Over the past five years its stock has risen more than a third, while Coke’s has sunk 30 percent.

What led to Pepsi’s success over Coke, from the stock perspective? It was Pepsi’s ability to detect the rise of an emerging market. When you become a brand as big as Coke, it is easy to sit back, relax and think that because you have a stronger brand than other competitors in the same category, you only need to invest in brand maintenance to protect your market share. Coke failed to realize that the market changes as the world evolves. While a brand may go down in history as the greatest brand that ever lived, it does not necessary mean that it is always marketable / sale-able.

What Pepsi did, was capitalize on the tastes of this new emerging market that preferred non-carbonated drinks, and they quickly diversified themselves and manufactured other drinks besides cola. By the time Coke realized that they were losing good market share, they were already behind in the game. Give it another generation, and not many people will remember that Coke was actually the leading brand before Pepsi arrived on the scene. That is also because Pepsi has been doing a great job of targeting a clearly defined audience as the trendier, hippy and edgier youths of today.

The Benefits of Product Diversity

What was it about diversifying their products that caused Pepsi to win the market share war? Note it is no longer about the taste or how many bottles of cola sold, but where the market share and stock price of these 2 brands stand.

It Provides the Opportunity to Capture Emerging Audiences. Let’s relate it to your blog. If you have started a blog for Palm Treo users and realized with the launch of the iPhone, you are losing a huge chunk of your audience to blogs on apple gadgets and devices, what do you do? Put more money into advertising, rave about how buggy the iPhone is in forums, close your blog, or you can start another blog that compares the latest models of PDAs or PDA phones and recommending the best model to your readers. Remember, don’t focus on fighting the battle and losing the war. The focus here is your market share in a target niche and/or the profitability of your blog. Don’t lose out on that because of what I call Brand Pride. While you could still do a lot of promotional activities for your existing Palm Treo blog by running contests, giving free gifts, and so forth, it requires a lot more effort with smaller returns than choosing to move with the emerging trends and riding on it.

It Dips into Related Niche Markets Without Brand Deviation. As today’s competition gets keener, it is no longer enough to target the “broad audience”. While blogs on “How to Make Money Online” are popular, very few of them stand out except A list bloggers who have been dominating this niche category since 2005. How would you diversify your blog in capturing market share for this much desired niche? The couple of options at the top of my mind are geography and vertical markets. Everyone in this niche category seems to be going after the North American market, and that is understandable given that the technology, history, culture and social developments of blogging all started from there. However, if you are willing to just turn your head a little to look at other regions like Asia and Europe - the number of Internet users in these 2 regions supercede that of North America. A list of the top 20 countries in terms of Internet usage shows China having 162 million users while United States reports a total of 211 million users. The difference is that while the “Make Money Online” niche is already saturated for the American market, it hasn’t even begun to evolve in the China market. If you wished you were John Chow or Darren Rowse who penetrated this niche during the “golden era” of blogging, it may not be too late for you if you are willing to invest a little more money in translation or even picking up the mandarin language and putting your stake in China or Japan.

If language is not your forte and you dread the hassle of managing translations, another option for diversifying your blog is to look at vertical markets. While A list bloggers are still broadly targeting the “Make Money Online” audience, very few are diversifying into posts on how to make money online for the securities & banking sectors, or Internet service providers and online retailers. According to Fortune 500, these are among the top growth industries in 2007. If you tailor your articles to audiences involved in each of these industries, target private ad sales to specific advertisers, and participate in affiliate programs in these niche markets you stand a good chance at making some very decent money. You may not become as big a brand as John Chow in the general “make money online” niche, but you will be big in the individual niche markets and could end up with 80% market share in each niche rather than having 5%, 10% or 20% in each of the differing markets.

I will elaborate on further benefits of diversifying your blog in the next post. If you have had success in running blogs on how to make money online in specific niche markets, I would love to hear what you have learned.

From his description, I am sure that the course attendees would be able to find the same information free of charge on the Internet, from blogs like yours and mine, John Chow’s, Skellie’s, Shoemoney’s, Aaron Wall or SEOMOZ, etc. In fact, I am sure they might have been better off paying USD325 for Six Figure Blogging, a course run by Andy Wibbels and Darren Rowse of problogger. Apparently in this course, part of the practice lessons was getting students to sign up a dummy account in Google Adwords and activating it to see how it works. A couple of weeks down the road, my friend received a notification that he owed Google $3 odd, and realized that people had been clicking on the dummy ad he created in Google Adwords that had an empty link. He quickly went into his Google Adword account, and suspended it. When he received his credit card bill that month, he was charged $13 by Google, and after an email exchange with them, was informed that he had to pay an extra $10 for setting up the dummy account. Feedback was promptly given to the local course organizer for adjustment of future lessons.

I am sure that if John Chow had run the course, he could easily get a lecture room full of over 200 attendees from all over the world. Or any of the A-list bloggers for that matter. And it would be worth every cent of the course fee. If all the information is available free of charge on the Internet, why would people pay that kind of money to attend the course?

• Ignorance. They do not know that it is available online for free.
• Lack of Exposure. A lot of business people do not have a clear concept of what Internet Marketing is, what they need to know, and where to find the information. In fact, many of them do not know half as much about what’s happening in the online world as you and I.
• Lack of Time. Many people and companies who are looking to extend their marketing activities to the Internet do not have the time to research, compile and implement Internet Marketing strategies gleaned off blogs. Reading and researching is extremely time consuming, especially for an amateur to online marketing. People will pay good money to have all the essential Internet Marketing information packaged and handed to them on a silver platter where they can then pass to their IT and / or marketing department for implementation. And it is cheaper than hiring a consultant.
• Learning Style. Bloggers are people who learn by reading and doing. Not everyone is wired up to learn that way. Shoemoney for one admits that audio books work better for him than “text” books. A majority of people learn best through face to face classroom style. This allows for the greatest degree of interaction with the speaker, and brings them closer to the authority of the subject. That is why people will fly down from all over the world to hear a well known speaker though he could have published the same in a book.
• Networking Opportunity. Of course, there is also the agenda of networking with the speakers or fellow attendees for potential business relationships.

Convinced? Ready to quit your job to earn money running courses on Internet Marketing and blogging?

My friend - let’s call him Mr A - who started his own business as a financial planner also shared with me some tips if you are thinking of quitting your regular job to become a full time blogger, or to start your own business.

Ride On An Economic Upturn. It is important that you choose a time when the economy is doing well, and both companies and individuals have extra cash flow to invest. Mr A quit his job just before 9-11, which was promptly followed by the SARS epidemic. The latter did not affect Western countries much, but in Asia was a major health and economic liability. Singapore went into recession, as with many parts of the world, and he had a tough time getting accounts. It took him 2 years to break even with the previous salary he was getting as an engineer in a reputed IT firm.

Follow Your Convictions. This will help you to stay on course and make decisions that will lead you to success. Mr A was very much favored by his ex-boss in his previous life as an engineer. His ex-boss took every opportunity to groom him, despite his knowledge of Mr A’s intention to start his own business. When Mr A eventually tended his resignation, he arranged for him to meet with the head of the engineering division who offered to place Mr A in other departments just to keep him in the company. However, Mr A had been convicted through a personal financial crisis he overcame that he wanted to help people understand how important the prudent use of money, funds and investments is for debt free living.

He started his financial planning career with a company that sold only their own financial products, out of sheer lack of knowledge of the industry. He later realized that he often had to bend his client’s needs around the limitations of products offered by the company, rather than being able to tailor a financial solution that met with their needs. He became disillusioned after 1 year on the job and struggled with his conscience. Does this sound familiar to you? You started a blog that you thought would offer invaluable advice to people in your niche market and that traffic would just stream in only because of the great content you have on your site. You soon realize that that is not true, and sometimes even resort to writing articles that are popular (think posts written for Digg) rather than because it was something on your heart that you think could truly benefit your audience?

Mr A was lucky enough to have a good ending. He learned from a colleague that there were independent financial houses that did not tie themselves to products from a particular company, and where agents were free to offer clients the entire range of products available in the market to tailor solutions that met with their specific needs. He immediately insisted on an interview with the largest independent financial house, promptly gave up all his accrued and recurring earnings from his previous company and took a 50% cut in commission for all financial products sold. He had to work doubly hard to earn what did previously, but today Mr A is extremely successful. He is happy, guilt free, is highly motivated, and experiences job satisfaction on a daily basis. His earnings have also superceded what he used to earn as an engineer and the investments he has made on behalf of his clients have resulted in double digit percent growth. Because he followed his convictions, it led him to make a series of decisions that pointed him in the right direction for personal, financial and professional success.

Do you have a conviction on how you can help others through blogging? Are you confident that you will be able to make a living from blogging alone?

Invest in Your Passion. Financial planning was something that Mr A had always been interested in, though his major was in engineering. It was his passion that tilted the tipping point in his decision to make a career switch, and passion also kept him in the industry when times were bad. It motivates him to constantly seek new and alternative products that would best suit his customers. His passion consistently gives him the motivation to improve his knowledge about the products and industry, which led him to become an expert at what he does and to excel in it.

To pose you that same question that Darren asked, if you had a million dollars would you blog differently, or at all? Are you constantly planning for the next “viral” post that will blow your readers away, earn you tons of subscribers and give readers great value? Or do you begrudge the time that blogging takes you away from the tele, a hobby or sleep?

Set a Success Deadline. Every self employed person will hit the 3rd month milestone of self doubt and ask themselves if they have made a wrong decision. After 9-11 and only a small number of accounts gained, Mr A had been struggling to adjust to the sudden freedom that self-employment brings. With no accountability for daily tasks and discipline, meagre earnings and a lot of negative remarks from friends on his decision, Mr A seriously considered quitting the business. However, because he had given himself a 1 year deadline for success, he stuck to that deadline and stayed in his job as a financial consultant.

Setting goals and a deadline for your date of success prevents you from making impulsive decisions whether times are good or bad. This is not to say that adjustments aren’t necessary along the way, but it is best to stick with the timelines you have given yourself. It also helps you track your progress and “success milestones” along the way. It develops patience and reminds you that if it takes you a thousand steps to climb a mountain, its still a thousand steps no matter how fast you run or climb. You may reach there faster, but it will still take time and the same amount of work.

Persistence. This word speaks volumes by itself and requires no elaboration.

Do you have what it takes to be successful as a full time blogger? Are there other factors that are important to being self employed? I would like to hear from you if you are considering becoming a full time blogger or already are one.

After a series of stumbles, I thought it would be interesting to list down the articles in my blog that have been popular with StumbleUpon users in descending order, and to give a brief analysis of these posts for a look back. While I have read in other blogs how a “stumbled” article brought in thousands of visitors with an average of 1 page view, it was encouraging to see that though the number of visitors from StumbleUpon were small for my popular articles, their average page views were closer to 2 per visitor.

Summary of StumbleUpon Visitor Statistics

• StumbleUpon Sent Me 149 Readers in One Day was my second post to get stumbled, and presented a self analysis of my post for “Writing Great Content for Your Blog” whereby I called out the factors that earned the stumble. In it, I applied the same factors that I called out as having made the first article popular with StumbleUpon users. It was published on Nov 6, and got 12 Stumble votes.

• Your Link Investment Strategy: What’s Your Link ROI? is the latest article to get stumbled, and though the first spike was not as large as other stumbles, it has a long tail end and has been consistently bringing new visitors to my site since it got stumbled, slowly rising from second last position to second rank for the most number of StumbleUpon visitors. This article also brought in the highest number of subscribers.

• Writing Great Content for Your Blog. This article started out with me wanting to write my first “great” article for my blog. As I sat there asking what could I write that would make an impact, I thought why not write about HOW to write that great article? So I ended up writing on key tips that I have used to advice friends and colleagues on generating articles that are readable and impacting. This post was published on Nov 1, and earned me my very first stumble with 1 review and 6 votes on Nov 3.

• Commenting is Not Only About Traffic was written as a reaction to the foray of articles on how commentating on other blogs can gain you traffic when there was so much more to commentating. It was published on Nov 7 and got stumbled simultaneously with “StumbleUpon Sent Me 149 Readers in One Day” with 1 review and 3 votes.

• Integrated Online and Offline Marketing for Money Making Blogs was an article I wrote about the importance of marketing your blog offline as well as online, with a number of ways that you can do so. It earned me 1 stumble with 1 review.

• A Blogger’s Dictionary: 25 Terms You Cannot Live Without interestingly was published on Nov 10, but only elicited a traffic spike on Nov 18. A chit sheet of 25 terms for the beginning blogger with elaboration and use of the terms, it earned me 1 review, 2 Stumble votes and 3 diggs.

Tips Learned from Successful Stumbling

It was an interesting look back for me as all the articles that got stumbled were of different topics. However, there were some principles that I drew from the look back that gave insight to what made an article popular, particularly to StumbleUpon users.

A Well Written Descriptive Title Attracts the Right Audience. If you look at my titles, you will find them descriptive in nature, and that is no accident. I could have given clever attractive titles such as:

• StumbleUpon Readers Love Great Content!
• The Secret Story of Links Told by Google Sitemap
• How Not To Publish A Blog That Sucks
• The Number 1 Invisible Enemy to Traffic (Poor Content)
• What Caroline Middlebrook Isn’t Telling You (Of course, this is a misleading title as Caroline didn’t say that commenting is ONLY about traffic. Read her comment for the article)
• Is Your Traffic Suffering From A Closet Blogger Syndrome?
• How to Graduate As A Blogger With Your Vocabulary

This is not an attempt to impress you with my copywriting skills (though I would not claim that I am great at copywriting) but to demonstrate to you that we may be sabotaging ourselves with our own ingenuity. The alternative titles I have given here is in the same order as my popular posts, and I dare say are “juicier” and more enticing to the reader. However, they do not tell the person reading your titles what your article is all about. While these titles may earn you more StumbleUpon traffic, there is also a higher chance that your article will not be what the reader is interested in, leading to shorter time spent on your blog and the “curse of the 1 page reader”.

While the titles I give to my posts may not rank high in the attraction factor, they are primarily descriptive, and are a summary of what my articles are about. Targeted keywords are also thoughtfully inserted so that readers can find content relevant to what they are looking for. As a result, my overall average number of pageviews per visitor for my blog is a healthy 2.25 (for a relatively new blog!).

The “Discovery Post” is Irresistible. When I wrote the post on Your Link Investment Strategy: What’s Your Link ROI?, I honestly did not know whether a post on links would be well received with readers. I mean how exciting is a post that talks about links?? People who read posts on link building are probably looking to improve their SEO stats by building a link campaign. However, I had made a discovery with Google Sitemap that thrilled me to bits, being the geek that I am, and as I had not seen any post on this discovery of mine, I decided to write about it out of sheer excitement.

I wanted readers to experience the same thrill that I had, so I brought them down a “discovery path” by revealing what I learned step by step, enabling the same excitement and suspense to build in them the same way that it did with me. Interestingly enough, this article is the only one that has consistently brought me a handful of StumbleUpon visitors over a longer period of time though it did receive a negative review (misled by my PageRank graphic and initial paragraphs) and did not produce the highest traffic spike. This post has slowly crawled from the second last popular post to the second most popular post since the time it was stumbled until now. I am waiting to see if the traffic it is bringing in will surpass that of my most popular post “StumbleUpon Sent Me 149 Readers in One Day” over time, though that might be a while.

Articles on “How Tos” and “Tips” Are Generally Popular. “Writing Great Content for Your Blog” is an example of a Tips post, with each tip being the subheading of a paragraph that elaborates on the use and benefits of the tip. While factors such as clarity and reader engagement were important, the main reason why the post was successful was that it was a good “Tips” post. Another example of a “Tips” post that quickly became popular was Nate Whitehill’s post on 23 Things I’ve Learned After 7 Months and 500 RSS Subscribers. However, there are hundreds and thousands of such posts. The only way to stand out is to create tips that you have personally learned yourself because even if it is the same tips offered by other blogs, it is a different list with a different angle, and different reaction to why you found something useful.

Take A Different Stand, Even if It Is Unpopular. This type of posts take courage, especially if you are taking a different stance from a popular blog or what everyone is doing / saying. When Caroline Middlebrook popularized the strategy of commenting as a way to building traffic to your blog, I loved it. For a beginning blogger with no clout in Digg or any other social networks, commenting was the only way to get myself noticed. However, I soon got frustrated as people literally elbowed each other to be a top commentator at A-list blogs but were not willing to take the trouble to leave comments on my blog simply because I had no traffic to usher to them. I was keen to see comments come in not because it made my blog look good, but because I was sincerely interested in the thoughts and opinions of my readers on what I had written. It was like I was talking to a wall day after day of blogging and putting my thoughts out there. So I decided to write a post on Commenting is Not Only About Traffic, as an outlet for my frustration, and to educate other bloggers out there that their comments could impact and shape the development of a blog. And there is no greater generosity than that. The cool thing about this post was that it got endorsed by Caroline herself by stumbling the article.

List Posts Are Overrated. I spent a lot of time creating the post A Blogger’s Dictionary: 25 Terms You Cannot Live Without as I wanted to see if I could get a post dugg to the front page of Digg, and list posts seemed to have a high rate of success. However, halfway through I realized that it was not front page Digg material, but completed it anyway. It was a post I wished I could have read when I first installed Wordpress and struggled with learning the terminology and technology behind these particular terms. I spent about 2 days creating it in the evenings after work, and a lot of time went into researching some of the more technical terms for accuracy. Writing the post was also harder work than usual. In addition, not all the terms in the list are going to be useful to everyone, and probably only a few of them would be perceived as useful to different readers. Unless you are aiming to get a major traffic wave from Digg and know exactly how to do it, list posts are an extremely time-consuming and tedious type of article to be publishing.

Social Network Users Love Articles About Their Network. The sub-heading is self-explanatory and is a reiteration of what other bloggers have said. As fact of proof, the article that earned me the greatest traffic spike from StumbleUpon, was an article about the traffic I gained from StumbleUpon.

And there you have the 6 lessons on the type of articles that StumbleUpon users love. Do you have other types of articles that have been popular with StumbleUpon users?

If you have a mature product that has had some market success and have started a blog to promote it online, it makes sense to invest in some advertising for your product blog.

There are many ways to advertise your product blog online. From Google Adwords, paid text links, private ads on a popular blog, to creating an affiliate program that other bloggers can participate in. The most effective method of advertising is if you get the endorsement of an A-list blogger for your product via a paid review. A list bloggers have a large base of loyal readers who trust in his recommendations, and have great influence to generate the awareness that a new product needs. In sync with that, I would recommend advertising on social media networks and submitting a product review to YouTube to generate buzz. A well planned campaign that where you build each advertising element on each other is extremely effective in creating a hype while targetted ads continue to bring in traffic well after your product launch.

I have a post on the backburner on how to create a buzz marketing campaign on the Internet, but this post will focus on the paid reviews as an advertising channel. The one piece of advise I will give bloggers looking to put a review on a popular blog is that a paid review is not an advertorial.

A Paid Review Gone Wrong?
I have come across a comment board which facilitated an attack against an A-list blogger, claiming that he was unethical by giving a poor product review of the client. That said, the advertiser did receive increased traffic from the A-list blog, and had a number of signups that should have more than paid for the cost of the review itself. Going back to the A-list blog, the reviews he had written consisted of his frank assessment as an experienced blogger and business person. While I did spot a negative review, it didn’t slam down on the product but rather pointed out obvious flaws and even suggested improvements which helped the advertiser increase his businesses significantly upon following the recommended changes.

This incident highlighted a major shift in mindset with regards to traditional media advertising vs online advertising, and is something that you will want to note if you planning to invest some money in promoting your product blog. While traditional media consists of corporations whose commitment is to their advertisers, bloggers are individuals who are highly committed to their readers and audience. Looking at traditional publishing vehicles such as newspapers and magazines, costs of printing and distribution are high and few of them are able to survive without sponsors from advertisers. This gives advertisers the power to control what, when and where of their advertisements. That is why a write up of a product in a magazine is called an advertorial, or a written advertisement that is skewed toward highlighting the benefits and advantages of buying the product and promotes the client brand.

However, bloggers are a different breed as online publishing is more a passion and a service they provide to their readers while earning money as a bonus. Personal branding ranks high, and loyalty and trust from their readers are important as they are fans that will bring in traffic for their blog and click on their ads and buy products from them. They have spent a large amount of time developing and building relationships with their audience, and are not likely to jeopardize that over subservience to advertisers. Therefore, in place of advertorials, you have paid reviews instead. The difference between an advertorial and a review is that a review consists of a frank assessment of the benefits and downfalls of a particular product or service based on the reviewer’s personal experience, where he provides his personal endorsement.

Tips for Getting a Good Review
While there are downsides to getting a paid review which includes lack of control over what will be said about your product and how many people will end up buying your product, they are outweighed by the benefits that it provides - visibility, product / brand awareness, endorsement by an authority blog in the same niche, valuable backlinks and “sold” customers coming to your site.

Below are some steps you can take to limit the risks of paid reviews:
1. Choose an authority blog in the same niche as yourself where you are an active commentator or have some relationship with the blog owner.
2. When requesting for a paid review, submit brochures / writeups that clearly highlight the benefits of your product. If benefits are not clear, and how the product works is ambiguous, you are not likely to get a comprehensive or good assessment simply because it is difficult for the reviewer to know what your product is about.
3. Make sure you have a quality product with a good business model. If you want the reviewer to have good things to say about your product, it has to be a good product in the first place so that he can give his endorsement to it. If your product is not mature yet, I would suggest you explore other advertising channels like paid text links buying private ad space or banners.
4. Read the previous reviews by the blogger. Look out for factors like how comprehensive are the reviews, does he provide visuals of products, are his reviews fair and intelligent, and the number of comments and amount of interest generated by his reviews.
5. Check if the blog owner does all his reviews himself or assigns other writers to conduct the review for him, especially for the type of product you are offering.

Do you have any experience to share on the benefits or downside to paid review advertising? Who are your top choices to get a paid review from and why?

Most of the traffic to A-list blogs are made of bloggers like you and me who want to know how to achieve the same status of these Internet Moguls and gurus. We want to know what X factor contributed to the rise and success of top blogs, and the “secret formula” that enables a new blog to gain over 1000 subscribers within 3 months.

However, not all of us are as talented as some bloggers, and others may not have the insight to their key audience.

1. Different Geography.
Looking at my traffic from Google Analytics, my top visitors come from the US and Canada (67%) and Singapore (13%). This is not a surprising figure as US and Canada are top on my list of targetted audience, and my Singapore traffic would comprise of friends for whom I originally started my blog for.

I have never been to America or Canada, and my sole source of insight to my key audience is that Singapore is a hubnub of expats from all over the world, and I work in an American MNC that promotes diversity. However, I am not immersed into the American culture and I have only met a few Canadian acquaintances here. My portal to understanding my key audience comes from the American media - series such as Seinfeld, Sex and the City, MTV, YouTube videos, NY Times, etc.

2. Unfamiliar Niche.
Apart from cultural barriers faced by someone like myself, there are also social barriers that can be an obstacle to understanding your key audience. This is true if you are not from the same niche, and will be even more difficult if your niche requires technical information. In such a case, you might want to consider running regular polls or survey questions on your blog to understand the mindset / concerns of your readers.

3. Changing Niche.
Given the dynamic nature of the Internet, this is a challenge faced by some market niches. For example, Ashley Quall of whateverlife.com currently has a hugely successful site because she is marketing her products to other 14 - 16 teenagers like herself. However, she acknowledges that in another few years, she would have to hire teenage girls who are younger in order to continue being relevant to her key audience. Or if you are writing for a blog on environmental issues, new policies and laws are constantly being introduced and revised together with emerging technology. In both cases, your target audience may be the same demographic, but they could be made up of a different generation with different needs / issues.

Understanding Your Target Audience Demographic
Handphone companies spend a lot of money hiring research companies to conduct focus groups on responses to new handphone models and TV ads. Companies that sell consumer goods spend a good part of their research money conducting market survey for packaging, product launches, rebranding, etc. They know that understanding the needs / wants / desires of their target audience is critical to the success of an ad campaign or product launch. And they invest the time and money in getting the product right for maximum effectiveness. They have invested millions of dollars into building their brand, and will do what it takes to protect the image and customer perception of their branding. It costs less to protect a brand than to rebuild it.

Blogs are very much a B2C business unless you are in the business of buying and selling blogs. To be a successful blogger, you need to invest in understanding your target audience, and approach your blog as a brand that you have to protect. It doesn’t matter if your blog is 3 months old or 1 week old. Branding requires consistent quality and reinforcement of particular traits associated with your blog.

For some bloggers, understanding your audience may be intuitive while for others sketching out who your target audience is may seem difficult if your niche market is a broad or unconventional one. My suggestion is that you create a mental image of who your target audience is, so that when writing or researching an article for your audience, it becomes easy for you to relate to them.

First, list down the demographics or characteristics of your target audience. List down their:

1. Age
2. Nationality / State
3. Stage in life
4. Earning Power
5. Assets
6. Hobbies or Pastimes
7. Family Status
8. Spending Habits
9. Profession
10. Social Status
11. Ambition
12. Life Philosophy

Next, Write a one page description of an imaginary person with the traits and characteristics of your target audience and give him / her a name. For example, here’s one demographic description of my target audience:

Mark is a successful and entrepreneural sales manager who has a lovely wife Mary, and a two year old daughter, Sandra. He constantly works late at his office, earns $66,000 a year, is paying rent for his condo while starting a trust fund for Sandra’s college education. Mark is 29 years old, and has a group of like minded friends who are entrepreneurs. He is a calculated risk taker, and sees the opportunity to run an online business through blogging. His ambition is to earn enough money from his online business that will overtake his salary so that he can quit his job and run his business from home as he wants to spend more time with Sandra and Mary. His favourite past time is golfing, so he has decided to start a blog about that and hopes to eventually set up an ecommerce site for selling golf clubs.

This is just one of the three demographics I have of my target audience. Having a demographic picture when I’m preparing my articles helps me decide which articles are right for my blog, what I want to cover in my article, and how I will present it. It helps me identify with their needs, what their ambitions in life are, and what information I can provide in my article that will be useful to them.

If your target audience demographic is a very unique group of people or unlike yourself, it will pay to either do an offline or online survey, or enter into some sort of activity that will put them within your reach for research. Some methods include:

• Research other blogs that are targetting the same audience as yourself. Analyze the topics and writing style and read the comment boards.
• Post an online survey and run a contest with a prize for completed surveys
• Join a group or association which they belong to
• Subscribe to the types of magazines that they read

A true understanding of your target audience gives you the key to writing essential content that addresses their needs and concerns. It determines the effectiveness and impact of your articles, and a perceived felt need where you offer help and a solution drives traffic like bees to honey. If you have not drafted out a brief demographic of who your audience(s) are, you have a real opportunity to grow your blog and drive branding by taking time to do that.

Do you have an unique audience demographic? What are some of the methods you use to understand your target audience?

1. Submit your blog to DMOZ.
DMOZ is a site that is part of the Open Directory Project where human editors review thousands of sites that are submitted each day for inclusion in search engines like Google. The benefit of submitting your site to DMOZ is that you can specify the category or niche that you want your blog to be indexed in, and you can see a list of competitive indexed sites that belong to the same niche or category. If you are a beginning blogger who is trying to decide which niche you want to target, DMOZ is a useful place to start. Remember - the less popular the niche, the chances of your keywords bringing you to the front page and top listing is a lot higher than a category where thousands of sites are plying the same keywords for top ranking in an organic search. Your strategy will differ greatly and your challenge will be finding ways to create awareness for your niche rather than fighting for top position on a Google search for a specific keyword(s).

2. Submit Your Blog to Vertical Search Engines. This is not exactly an SEO tip, but is particularly important for sites that are selling products that want to be found by a search engine. Google is great for broad organic searches where information documents are served. However, if you are searching for where you can buy a particular product online, it can be frustrating. For example, if you want to save yourself a trip to the pharmacy and order aspirin online, a Google search for aspirin gives you wikipedia information and the history of aspirin, how it works, dosage, etc. A search at thefind.com and Lasso.com.au however, will give you catalog pages of all the aspirin products there are, the URL of the ordering page, and the price of the product. So if you are an ecommerce merchant, you will want to make sure that your products are found there. A list of vertical search engines can be found at read/Write dot com.

A couple of interesting vertical search sites are Plugged and Retrevo. Plugged is a video podcast advertising solutions site while Retrevo is a search engine targetted specifically for gadgets and electronic products.

3. Optimize Your Blog Title. What this means is simply that you include the top 1 or 2 keywords descriptive of your blog into its title. Shorter titles are more effective for SEO searches, so it is not a good idea to try to squeeze in as many keywords into your blog title as possible. If you are using Wordpress, you will enter your blog title under “options” in the administrative panel.

4. Optimize Your Post Titles. By optimizing your post titles, you are increasing your chances of getting your page indexed by Google. DMOZ allows you to get the front page of your blog indexed via site submission. However, if you try to submit all the pages in your site for inclusion in search engines, you take the risk of being blacklisted. Instead, work at getting individual post pages indexed by Google via target keywords. To do this, target 1 or 2 keywords in your post that you want Google to index it by, and work that into both the title and content of the post. Wordpress plugins designed for optimizing your post titles are the Optimal Title Plugin and SEO Title Plugin.

5. Install the Wordpress SEO pack. This nifty Wordpress plugin not only lets you customize your home page title, description and meta keywords (instead of editing it manually on your index page template), it also allows you to customize your post, category, archive, tag, search, description and even 404 title formats. Most importantly, you can modify and insert post titles, description and keywords into each entry for maximum search engine optimization for each post.

6. Optimize Your Page. As the Google bot pays attention to <h1> header tags, edit your Wordpress template to use the <h1> tag for your post title and modify its look in the CSS stylesheet if necessary. Make it a point to target your top 2 keywords in your post title that will appear within the <h1> tag, and make sure that you populate the same keywords in the first paragraph and subheadings of your article. While these are the semantics of SEO optimization, don’t forget that you are writing for your audience and not for search engines. However, if your article is very specific and focused, you will find that embedding keywords into your titles, subheadings and content comes naturally. One note of caution is not to use too many header tags for your articles as this will cause the Google bot to classify your page as being a “spam”.

7. Optimize Your Images. It is typical to come across sites which name their images “1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, etc.” or directly using the names assigned by their camera such as “DSC100″ or “IMG201″. The Google bot also pays attention to <img> tags, so maximize your opportunity to insert keywords into your image file names. Using image file names to hold keywords also has the added advantage of not interfering with the flow and readability of your content.

While these are fairly basic tips, they are important in getting you geared toward achieving your goals for more organic search traffic. The more highly optimized your posts are, the more effective you will be at indexing your page / post for a specific target keyword. And it is your ranking for these keywords that will send advertisers knocking on your doors.

Do you have other SEO tips that has been effective in driving traffic to your blog?