Each and every day thousands of people want to know what is a blog even in 2009 people want to know more about blog definition and its role in the world wide Internet. In this post you can find the detailed answer of what is a blog and its main difference in comparison to the website.

To get started lets get through the simple blog terminology that every blog reader knows.

what is a blogger? >a person who runs a blog is called a blogger

what is blogging? >the act of performing inside a blog is called blogging

what is a post? > an article inside a blog is called a blog post

So What is a Blog?

First blogs created in 1999 where usually made for some additional data of a website, – (what is a weblog?) or as officially called a weblog. Today there are several million blogs on the web, with their authors who are called bloggers. Millions of posts are published each day starting from the simple online diary up to professional high quality blogs. Even though we separate a blog from a website the website still stays in the base category of every Internet based structure which contains an image, text – useful information, so everything starting from forums, up to a blog is just a type of the website. In new Internet era everything is changing very fast, we started to invent different kinds of web based structures and now we call a website with a following structure a blog.

Example of a Blog Structure in comparison to a website:

Blog vs Website | What is a Blog

Usually articles on the main page are listed chronologically from Newest on top.

So why should one create a blog and not a website? The main reason is the efficiency that a blog brought to webmasters who make money online and the ordinary people who want to popularize themselves or just share some info with their friends and family in a fastest way possible. Here is a list of some of the basic options and differentiations of a blog.

Blogging gives an opportunity to communicate via comments, which are one of the basic distinctions between a blog and a website. People leave comments on different type of blogs, they state their opinion and get the interested visitors to their own blogs. You can also find or leave comments at the end of this post.

Rss is an easiest way to read your favorite articles from different blogs without even visiting those blogs. You can get every fresh post into your rss reader (get one with google reader ), or you can get an e-mail with all the fresh info straight into your inbox when subscribing for an e-mail. Usually it is hard to visit the blogs that I’m interested in, so now I’m reading about ten new posts every day from my rss reader and e-mail. If you can see an orange button on the site that you are visiting, than you can definitely say that this is a blog or at least a feed for another blog.

You might want to start with subscribing to progrecious rss feed to get fresh updates straight into your inbox.

Nowadays traffic is one of the most important factors for a site to exist and to continue its functionality. There are different kinds of media which are made for blogs to bring big traffic.

Blogroll is a special part on a blog where bloggers can put or exchange links with other bloggers and websites

Plugins are basically created for self hosted blogs with wordpress, they are special tools which are designed to help bloggers to find free solutions for generally complex problems. There are hundreds of those plug-ins and everyone can use them for their own will.

blogs are beneficial – Even for professional webmasters blogs have became a main source of income. They found out that communication is a first symptom for better sales and that customer can always ask questions simply by leaving a comment. Rss feeds which can promote your products and deliver fresh news. And of course the best free traffic that a site owner can get. All in total it becomes much easier to make money online.

Yes, everyone can create a blog

It really easy to launch a blog with a ready made platforms like: Blogger.com, wordpress.com and of course self hosted blogs with wordpress.org – almost every hosting company who has “fantastico” enabled which can automatically install the wordpress script to your server. See the list of the best blog hosts with fantastico enabled. 5 years ago I had no idea of what was the blog had never even heard of blogs in general, all I knew was that some wise people have been creating their own blogs about the things they been doing. So I thought why not create my own blog? When one can something to offer something to share there is nothing to be shamed of.

Now after you are already an informed reader with potential blogger’s quality, see the video for a visual info on what is a blog.

All the above mentioned statements are highly approved by more than 70 million bloggers who became the basic power of the Internet efficiency and functionality this days.

Listen to most advanced bloggers or start communication by leaving your comments together with them. You can also check the blogs of each blogger by clicking the names just above the comments.

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What is a Blog?

We will discuss most top of the free Seo Tools for Search Engine Optimization which is highly effective strategy to bring more visitors to your site. Even though Search engine optimization might need dedication and a lot of spend time, I believe every blogger or webmaster can make it for free with this special seo tools.

Top 21 Free Seo Tools

1.  Spyfu – Another free tool for spying your competitor it brings you those tools which help you to analyze the daily budget of your competitor. but most amazing is the spyfu Kombat tool which just brings you and your competitors face to face – showing up organic keyword stats, ads, and budget for 4 years period.

2. Traffictravis – (seo software) it is now free tool which brings total page analysis, keyword suggestion tool which suggests multiple variations on a specific keyword, such as:  back-links count, websites keyword listings, but what I like in this tool is the search engine tools which are very useful for building projects, analyze competitors websites, and page analysis or onpage optimization source which helps to better understand how well does your own content perform. ALSO the very IMPORTANT it has got all the Videos inside to help you better understand how does actually SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work.

Now the following 3 tools: Adwords keyword tool, wordtracker and seobook get the most juice from keywords when using them together. There is an easy and a hard way, but we need to stick up with the easiest way right? Sure we do! now look >

adwords has an option to type in a url a domain:

• type in your or a competitors domain nam.
• grab the keywords (download all the keywords with excel link).
• copy them in the Wordtracker or Seobook tool one by one.
• now get the Seobook for Firefox and paste it into. And this brings you to the on page analysis and seo results for GOOGLE, Yahoo, and Msn.

3 Adwords keyword tool – now everyone who has ever advertised with google knows adwords keyword tool. ( get an adwords account and use this tool free.)

4. Google Search Based Keyword Tool

5.  Wordtracker tool

6.  Seobook – keywords tool shows the average query for a specific keyword a day.

7. Seobook-FF – seo tools for firefox.

6 Seo Rank Checker is also a very useful tool to find

9. Meta Tag Generator easily generates meta tags.

10. Meta Tag Analyser: easily analyze meta tags.

11. Pagerank prediction tool a very good tool to understand how good is your current SEO strategy for Google page rank

12  Search engine position – simply shows your search engine position for a specific keyword.

13. robot.txt Generator – generates robot.txt files which are very useful when you need to restrict a specific crawler (robot) not to index your page. (post)

BACKLINKS, Bcklinks, Backlinks I know everyone wants to grow the links pointing to their site- is there any way to do this? Must be some! right?

14: Link Assistant free edition – this seo tool helps you to build backlinks to you site, discover new link partners, and generate your link directories – wonderful tool for building backlinks.

15. Seo SpyGlass – Enables you to spy on competitors, those who already rank high in search engines, this tool brings all the info about a competitor for a specific keyword. It is a free demo that you can get right now.

16. Sitemap Generator generates sitemaps for your site.

More Free Seo tools (Plugins) for Wordpress Users:

17. Platinum Seo: – a full pack of seo for your posts, including noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, noodp, noydir, nosnippet meta tags and more.

18. Seo Title Tag – Enables you to change your title to a seo friendly version.

19. XML Sitemaps – for blogger this is a most automated sitemap generator tool.

20. Broken Link Checker – automatically checks for broken links.

21. Alexa Rank Checker – That is the official site though. Read more here on how to increase alexa traffic rank.

Any more seo tools suggestions?

For those who are out of time and need support in search engine optimization LotusJump offers very cheap prices to bring your site to the Top listings.

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Top 21 Free SEO Tools

Search engine optimization the answer to what is seo? is one of the main parts to care for in order to get real readers who are interested in your site’s topic. While social networks offer various kinds of traffic growth, bloggers and webmasters lean more to natural search engine traffic, other blogs, guest posts, comments etc… In this post we will discuss: what is SEO? – Top 10 Seo Tips or internal ways for SEO optimizing your site to boost your sites traffic together with Google page rankings.

Terminology that you might want to know

Google Page rank the way of naming the position you have in Google which is determined by different ways of seo calculations.

Keywords are those words that show the key factors of this or that post to the search bot

Search bot is virtual crawler that scans your posts for the search engine rankings.

Title Tag is an html element of the title, it eases the process of search bot scanning your post, and is one of the key elements for search engine optimization.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for me is a creative process of optimizing your web site by technically improving the internal and external ways for better rankings in search engine results, and thus receiving more traffic to your blog or website. The basic idea about SEO optimization is to get most from real search engines and not from adverts or paid links from other sites. And of course the inner post structure plays its own role. Posts without optimization might be not as much efficient. When seo optimizing your site gets more natural and rich, quality traffic from Google, Yahoo, Msn and others…

Generally speaking there are 2 basic aspects of advancing or seo optimizing your site: Internal and External Optimization.

What we can do for Internal Optimization is to improve our own posts for better SEO which means: to help Google, Yahoo, and other search engines better understand which post is on what topic and which article is more relevant to the specific keyword.

Just imagine that search engine is a human, keyword together with other text is a language, and SEO is just an act of improved communication.

External optimization which basically consists of link-building strategies are also very important for better seo.

Natural SEO

Now what I call natural seo is an act of performance with a use of search engine strategies where you yourself determine how to use keywords, meta-keywords etc…

Some think that you should pay for internet marketing seo your blog, but there is a less job somebody else can do instead of you, when you play the main role in website seo. For me free seo is much more efficient than paying somebody for advice, or provide with some seo tools which the internet is full of. Tip:  There are some strategies that might need to hire somebody – we will discuss this aspect in the article of External Optimization.

The Importance of Keywords

So the keywords are quite almost the main parts or items that signal the search engine about the relevancy to the search term of the reader. And of course the reader quantity and time he/she stays on your blog plays its own role in defining and ranking a page.

Top SEO Tips

Top 10 – Internal optimization

Now let me tell you how easy it is to optimize your posts internally for SEO in 10 simple steps

1. Structure the post by introduction, main content, ending, there might be also several sub-sections. (Keep your article more or less in the same topic).
2. Use a keyword in the title
3. Use 1-2 keywords or key phrases in the introduction, several in the main content and in Ending.
4. Titles Tags level of importance; make sure to put a keyword in a title. (Repeat the title of an article ones inside the post content).
5. Create subheadings use with h1-h6, So the h1-h6 is only an html language, but for seo it is a key together with keywords for determining the importance of the subheading, starting from h1-most important, up to h6. Tip: make sure not to make all the subheadings h1 because it will only lessen the importance of the main keyword headline.
6. Titles and descriptions must be interesting and inviting, so that reader who searches through the search engine clicks your link instead of somebody else’s.
7. Use bold, Strong or Italic <strong> <b> <i> on most important keywords. Use synonyms instead of repeating keywords in the same section of the post.
8. Also Use rel=”nofollow” attribute.
9. Name your images together with an ALT attribute.
10. Link your own pages. Any post or article must have all the necessary info about it’s own topic. So create pages with additional information around your topic.

How to get the right amount of keywords?

Now there is a big discussion going on the internet and various seo forums on this topic. Everyone wants to know what is the right amount of keywords that must be used in a single post? Well I would say there is no such thing! Google simply analyses your article,  the amount of links coming from different sites including yours, also it calculates the human interest in the specific topic on your blog (site) and the relevancy of this or that article to the site’s main direction (niche). The only thing you need to do here is organize your post to be easily readable by Google robots, by use of previously mentioned seo tips.

Please also note that you don’t have to overload the articles with keywords, as this might be dangerous for your site, it is called Over Optimizing. Just use them as much as you need to describe your idea – Tip: Use Synonyms.

My way of Optimization

Reveal you a little secret here; I personally prefer writing a post in a normal way without any effort to optimize it, but only until reaching the general idea of and article! Next> I structure the piece of writing by introduction, main content or Idea, put general subheadings and only after go through the post, and adjust those important keywords and key phrases which are most relevant to the article. After I continue to re-fresh the post with different examples and images.

I personally prefer using 1 keyword in Title tag, making h1 the heading, and ones in the content sometimes with bold or strong. Tip: Never over optimize one post with multiple keywords, it is always better to write 10 articles with different keywords.

Also the top 10 tips can be efficient only when loving your own content and working on both aspects of developing high quality content and incoming links.

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What is SEO? – Top Seo Tips

Recently when checking my twitter inbox I’ve noticed the huge list of attractive messages containing offerings and proposals on how easy it is to get rich, this covers all the 85% of my messages. If bean very trustworthy that means that about 85% of twitter users make money online, either with websites, blogs, or social networks (notice that I’ve excluded the MLM schemes).

Here is an example:

Make Money Online Hysteria

What I have done is simply checked those websites – offers, and analyzed the chance of their progress, some in future and some in real time. This included the site’s age, traffic flow, rankings, etc…  and what I found out is that only 3-5 % has the real chance of sincerity that they helping people in making money with this or that strategy – this means that all the 95% offers had no chance of truthful progress at all unless they just make you waste some time.

Does this mean that most marketers are liars? Well I’ll leave that question up to you.

This tendency of massive marketing offers is growing each year; the more people see those Utopian offers, the more they do (teach) the same to others.

A little secret of mine!

Through all this time while I had a brake in blogging I made a honest decision, that from know on this Progrecious blog will focus more on real attitude towards personal qualities of a blogger, which is highly important in online business and/or in real life, rather than pure tips and tricks with which the now-days web is full of.

Now when this is not a secrete for you, let me ask you: what do you think about this decision?

Before you think about it what I think is that there is still a lot of discussions and work to undergo, around this topic and those upcoming new era marketing strategies which will be more close-trustworthy to human nature.

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Make Money Online Hysteria

Today I was not going to post anything until I saw this Video By TED (Seth Godin) he brings a very clear a very I would say Powerful concept. You can name it psychology, technology, progress, marketing ideas or whatever you like, but the thing is that the idea behind, is a clear way of  being a leader, a blogger, or just a person who can create something (You will see what) and spread it to the mass targeted or interested audience. Before you rush to read mass of technical info in your browser check this video first.

Link to Ted

He is calling leaders right? )))  Yes Sometimes Networking does bring changes, I think he wants us to gather around him right? THIS IS EVOLUTION or I guess  it will be

Some think that confidence is a main part of being a leader.

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The Real Tribe Factor Marketing

We have all been waiting for XavierMedia to produce something new, interesting and yet productive tool – so what twitter users are all after is to get followers, but since twitter released the Developers API key there are now hundreds of new tools available on the net. So what are those new possibilities and opportunities since the Developers Api release?

1. Make Money on Twitter > you can make money online with your Twitter account now! here TwittAd – TwittAd lets you place a small code into your twitter account, gives you the opportunity to price the ad box, and make almost unlimited money online depending on the number of your twitter followers.

2. Feed your Twitter account >you can use TwitterFeed to twitt your blog posts automatically

3. and most amazing you can boost your followers up to 20,000 without spamming anyone. Now this is a simple and yet effective tool to achieve thousands of  followers totally free.

Thousand Free Followers >Use this effective page to get 20,000 followers right now

Get the twitter account if you don’t have one here

More Twitter Reading

Top5 Tips to Drive more Traffic with Twitter Interesting Reading on how to grow your twitter followers naturally and effectivelly.

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Get 20,000 followers on Twitter

In my last post of monetizing series I have emphasized the most efficient tips on how to monetize your blog here on: Tweaking the affiliate ads- in the sidebar, Make Money Online with PPC 125-125 Ads, and monetizing with Monthly Advertisers. This Post will describe more on managing and monetizing your content itself.

Once again bloggers are asking me: where does this monetization end? How to create an ideally monetized blog? And my answer always stays very simple: It never ends due to fast developing market and on-growing technical solutions. Today you can monetize almost everything: A Photo, a Video, Rss Feed, Text, e-mail, any informational structured content. So where does the monetization start in blogging?

Well everyone has his own style, but for me the best and most effective advertising starts inside the content. Why? Because content ads are lighter and usually relevant to the content itself:

How to monetize your blog – 3 basic techniques

1. Affiliate links inside the content- This is what I call the goldmine, this is where your content gets most relevant to your affiliate links. For those who are still beginners: affiliate link is a link which will bring your visitor to another site where you might get paid if he performs and action (Subscribe to the newsletter, buy something, or sign-up for the service whether it is free or not). Use not more than 5 affiliate links in your post or with a nofollow attribute.

2. Text-Link-Ads – well contextual ads can simply build buzz if you have some good amount of traffic. It is one of the most beneficial monetizing methods, because you get paid each time somebody clicks the link.

3. Banner ads inside your content. Now banner ads can bring even more than contextual ads if used perfectly. One of the best options is to put 300×250 or 250×250 sized ads on the right corner of your content. But the down flow is also quite high; some people get annoyed with such type of ads. If you don’t care about some annoyed visitors use animated banner- this brings up the chances that your visitors will click your ads. To be honest I don’t really like this method, even though I do use it sometimes .

4. Sponsored links- if you have sponsors you can offer them to place their link after or in the beginning of each post. “Personally I stay away from sponsored links due to Google limitations on this option – Google does really penalize for sponsored links.

5. Monetize your Photos and Videos – If you run a site (blog) with a photo or video content, AdBrite offers a wonderful service of monetizing them.

6. This is a Guest Tip by Celeb (market secret blogging): A simple question to ask yourself when thinking on how to monetize is, “What would you logically click on?” and just insert your advert there (whatever form it may be in, though text ads work really great!)

The Next series of “ only for bloggers | monetize your blog #3? will analyze the existing Rss and e-mail monetization methods.

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Only for Bloggers | monetize your blog #2

If you are a regular Progrecious reader you might have noticed that several contest have taken place on this blog. For the various of reasons this post will help to deal with contests and to create a contest that will bring you to the point you where planning before. The reason to launch a contest might be different like: to increase your Rss Subscribers, to grow your Technorati Faves or just to have many comments on your blog. Whatever you want to achieve your contests must be worth doing it and carefully structured to get your target. For example my last contest was giving Prices Worth $650 but all I get was 10 -11 participants while my 5000EC +review+link contest brought me multiple times more participants (of course I’ve got back-links and some new readers from the first one). You can have a look on both of them to see the difference but before here is that that does really effect your contest:

1. The name of the contest must be shouting this is what brings visitors to your contest page.
2. Simple and motivating rules – never ask for too much
3. Your contest must be known to other bloggers Promote your contest through your friend bloggers and e-mail subscribers. Use multiple social network services like Entrecard, Twitter, Stumbleupon, digg, mybloglog, etc…
4. Show up with good prices but not too much Utopian in order to do this you must have sponsors or you must buy (pay for) prices yourself – which is not very good idea when you can use those money for something better.

Now lets get to the basic sense of this article:

How to Get your Contest a Sponsor

If you have tried to make a contest you will have noticed that sponsoring your own contest is not an easy job to do. During my last contest I have got lots of e-mails where some very respective companies offered to be a sponsor for my next contests. But you’ll agree with me that this kind of offers don’t happen too often. On the other hand it means that many companies are ready to sponsor your contests one of which is MarketLeverage. Here are some tips that I used to make my first most successful contest:

1. I contacted one of the hosting companies, where I told about my plans that I want to run a contest. What they did was offered me several hosting plan prices for the winners. The e-mail goes like this:
Dear Manager (or put the Name)
My name is Luka Zet the founder of Progrecious.com blog. I’m very much interested in your company and do often recommend to use your hosting service to my partners (or put friends). This time I would like to bring more of your service to my blog readers and it goes on….

2. Contact any service provider with an official letter. Let them know that you are really interested in their service and would like to promote it in your contest, But let them now that nothing in this world is free. Let them become your Sponsors!
3. Another way to bring more sponsors is to ask your blogger friends to do this. This is what I did in my last contest. This is a good thing to do when you have no sponsors at all. But I don’t recommend doing it often, especially if they are your partner bloggers. It is not very exciting to have put somebody’s ad on your site. (blog).

4. Get Social Networks Sponsor You- in this modern Internet environment almost every big company needs an Ad. So why not ask social networks to sponsor you? I think it is a great idea when there is EntreCard already offering sponsorship base on their blog where you can get sponsors from EC members.

5. There is no five I will put your tip and a link to your site if you come up with some interesting idea on how to get sponsors. -Let your lazy brain think a little bit-

Share your own ideas on how to get Sponsors with our on growing audience

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How to get Sponsors for your Contests

When recently I had a small conversation with one of my blogger friend, I noticed that he was really complained about something. And at last I got the point it was:  the problem was that he was very often rejected by affiliate networks and his attempts to re-apply where totally worthless. I must admit here that he is not a newbie at all and running his blog for a period of a year. So my answer was that it is a technical problem and that anyone can be rejected if he doesn’t know the rules. I have also spotted out the key factors that I’ve got from one of Google Affiliate Network’s stuff member, and here is what we came to:

How to get approved by affiliate networks

1. Your blog must be running at least 3month – but this is not usually the problem
2. Did you offer complete and verifiable account information? As usually the domain name doesn’t provide the same whois information that you use for your application. – the problem is that: most hosting companies have the privacy feature ON by default which makes possible to hide your whois information. If you still need to hide your info than tip3 will be exactly for you.
3. What was your e-mail address you offered? – the e-mail which is usually associated with your domain name is most often best choice to get approved. –  in this occasion affiliate networks are already clear that this or that domain name is owned by you.
4. All the personal info must be completely true to your: place of living, tel number, mob number, etc. This creates more visibility and underlines that you are who you really are. And don’t forget that some affiliate companies like PepperjamNetwork have the special bar of transparency which is growing by the factor of visibility and grows your trust with merchants.
5. Your site description is where they see you- your site description must be 100% natural and written by human!!! This is where they find you as a person. Write good motivation letter if you are asked to.

+1 Tip- For those who don’t speak English but write it well- Some affiliate Networks need to contact their publisher before they’ll get approved, so if your English is really bad just ask your friend to speak instead of you. Recently I saw such topic in one of the marketing forums where one of members was really curious why he couldn’t get approved when his written English is perfect.

This 5 and +1 tips are the basics on why you should get approved by affiliate networks. If you tried them all and still no success than the problem might be your own blog or website. Make sure that your website is full of 100% legal content, and relevant to the affiliate category that you are applying for .
Hope this tips brings you more light during the simple technical situations. Have you ever been rejected by affiliate or other kinds of networks? If yes than please tell us how it happened and why you think it happened.

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How to Get Approved by Affiliate Networks

Recently Technorati launched a new serves called “Technorati Engage” beta version. With so many users of Technorati today their expansion seems far more natural than ever.

It was just a few months ago when technorati accomplished their last survey State of the Blogosphere and in October 2008 started to inform active technorati users that they’ve Acquired AdEngage and are Launching a Self-Service Advertising Network -which was yet an Alfa version – We might be seeing technorati expanding to the new level.

So with a beta version it is still apparent that they have already started to invite publishers and advertisers to their system.  For this moment they are offering “Pho Text ads” which is a mix of photo and text where image is also click-able, and Pure text ads. Publishers can earn on a Weekly or CPC (Cost Per Click) Basis. Here bloggers decide the ad pricing, and you’ll have the option whether to approve or reject advertisements, you’ll have 48 hours for this.

Here is a screen shoot of the ad types currently offered:

After the full launch of this network they will start offering:

• Pure 125×125 ads
• Leaderboard 728×90
• Medium Rectangle 300×250
• Skyscraper 160×600
• You’ll be also able to place an ad rotation system where you can serve several advertisers in one ad block.

Publishers can choose several payment methods: PayPal, Check and Wire Transfer.

You can have a look what is it all about here: “Technorati Engage”

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Technorati Engage Ad Network for Bloggers Is ON