Flaming happens when someone (possibly a commenter) attacks someone else (possibly you) on your blog. It is typically very personal and vicious and can offend not only the concerned parties but also the other subscribers on your blog. No matter how careful you are with your posts, it can still happen, hence it is important that you know how to handle it. Some bloggers actually post written policies (or disclaimers) about inappropriate behavior on their site, which then enables them to remove offending posts (or totally ban a certain IP address) without complication.

Handling Flaming Properly

When one of your readers attacks another reader of your blog, then you had better do steps on handling the situation immediately. Failing to handle this situation will appear as if you are condoning such behavior. If you are serious about your blog, then you will want to show your readers that you value them – you need to make sure that they are not attacked while participating in a discussion on your site.

The first thing you should do is to delete the flaming post. Once you’ve done this, you can contact the person who was attacked and let them know of your actions. You should also apologize for the offense and assure them that you will do your best to avoid flaming the next time.  Next, you will want to contact the poster and inform them that you cannot tolerate such behavior on your blog. You can issue a warning or if the post is extremely offensive, then you can permanently ban them from the site.

What If Someone Is Flaming You?

Personal attacks directed at you (the blogger) must also be addressed correctly. You need to protect yourself from such action in the same way you would protect your readers. You will also need to show that you accept feedback (both positive and negative), but you have to draw the line between pure feedback and flaming.

You can follow the steps mentioned above, or you can follow Darrel Rowse’s method: RESPOND. Some flamers just wish to attract attention to their site and would make controversial remarks on your posts. You may choose to debunk the flamer’s “claims” but do it as articulately as possible. Also, it helps to remind your readers the proper behavior in interacting on your site. By doing this, you can promote a healthy environment where you and your readers can discuss (or debate) issues without fear of rising to the level of inappropriate behavior.

• Will I Earn Money Right Away From My Blog?
• 7 Useful Tips to Increase Page Views on Your Blog
• Having a “Never Say Die Attitude” Towards Your Blog
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• Maintaining a Great Blog without Posting Anything Yourself
• How To Build A Blogging Community And Get More Comments?
• Top 5 Blog Maintenance WordPress Plugins
• How Often Should I Post On My Blog?
• Microblogging and how it can Help Improve your Business
• Getting More Traffic To Your Blog By Using Free Tools

Maintaining a great blog needs some amount of dedication and commitment, along with the adoption of right strategies. But you don’t need to write anything yourself to maintain a great blog. There are many ways of getting traffic to your blog without adding any articles on your own. This will let you focus on promoting the blog and strategies to monetize the blog. Here are some ways you can ensure that the stream of articles keeps growing.

Hire quality bloggers

Finding good content writers is not very easy but not very hard either. The trick is to find the writer who suits your requirements. Writers vary in flamboyance, flair and knowledge. If you are sure about the goal you have for your blog, the tone and the direction you want to take it towards, you can hire bloggers who fit in that mould and write in that tone.

Invite guest bloggers

There are many bloggers who would be pleased to write as a guest blogger on other sites, to generate some traffic for your site. It will give them exposure and the opportunity to interact with more readers. Inviting guest bloggers smartly every now and then, will give you the extra quality and variety too. You can invite guest bloggers to write about specific topics or their opinion.

Article directories

This is one of the ways you can have a great blog without writing anything yourself. This is why there are a lot of article directories that are very popular and get lot of ad revenues. Article directories act more like a pool of articles on all topics. The writers benefit from submitting their articles because they will get additional traffic to their own site. You will benefit from all the content that you get from the writers. This is like a symbiotic relationship where both the article directory and the writer benefits from mutual collaboration.

Outsourcing your blog work

Leveraging the talent of other writers is a very good idea to maintain your blog. If you have a list of topics on which you need articles, you can always get others to write for you on a pay per post basis, instead of a permanent employee. This way, you can get various writers to fill your blog. You can also choose to go for a revenue split where you choose to share the revenues from ads between yourself and the blog writer. Therefore while you focus on getting ads and raising the traffic to your blog, writers provide the much needed content. There are quite a few sites online where writer gets a royalty for his or her blog. This royalty is a percentage decided prior to publishing the post.

Royalty works well for a few sites, because there are a lot of people who know about the site and the traffic is taken care of. The writer might not get the same traffic on his or her blog, so writing on these sites where there is a prospect of generating revenues are more attractive.

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• How Often Should I Post On My Blog?
• How Do You Handle A Flaming On Your Blog?
• Should You Hire Someone To Write Your Blog For You?

YouTube is quite a popular tool online and you can use it very effectively to enhance blog traffic. There are some simple strategies to use YouTube to market your blog. Given the large audience base that YouTube has, there is a great opportunity to develop a steady stream of traffic and also get valid feedback, allowing you to improve.

Video linking

The first step is to make a video and upload it on the YouTube. The video has to be good to impress the audience. You can use that video to bring visitors to your blog too. To promote, you can actually flash the URL of your site on the video, so that users take note of it. In fact, some videos even have a supporting audio, where the blog name can be spelled out. Popular videos on YouTube get propagated very quickly, which is why you should make good use of it. Once you have a successful video, it is a good idea to follow it up with more videos and connect them all from the same profile so that you develop a devoted fan base who offer a steady streamline of traffic to your blog.

Comment on the videos

Offering intelligent comments along with additional information on the YouTube video is another way of increasing blog traffic. Those who are impressed by the video usually want information or background on that video. You can offer the information along with the URL. Those who are browsing over YouTube could be moving from one video to another. Hence when you have their attention, it is better to make things convenient for them so that they are led to find out more information from your blog.

Reply to comments

A lot of people, who watch videos on YouTube, ask questions, give feedback and raise concerns. This is the kind of audience you are looking for and it is good to indulge them. It is not a bad idea to reply to those comments satisfactorily and consistently. Mentioning your blog URL would lead this audience to your blog. Communicating with those who take time out to watch your videos and comment on them, will help you develop a dedicated visitor base which would be looking forward to updates.

Upload often

There is no point in being a one video wonder. Even if you get a lot of traffic initially it will fade away pretty soon if you don’t follow it up with more. You must utilize the initial interest and ensure that the traffic you generate is steady and you also build it over a period of time. Uploading often will also help you to interlink the videos and the blog. There is a greater chance of more people stumbling on your videos when you have more of them. Once a visitor arrives at any of the videos, he or she would be interested to know more about your content. This way the chances of increasing your blog traffic are enhanced.

• Getting More Traffic To Your Blog By Using Free Tools

Blogging has engulfed the world like a raging wild fire. Today, every other person wants to have a blog of his or her own in order to express their views to the world. Though the internet is filled with thousands of blogs, it is only a few that manage to make a mark on the reader and get them asking for more. Every day, there are hundreds of people starting out with their own blog – some with the intent of just speaking their mind and some with the intent of earning from their blogs. In either case, in order to be successful there are a few crucial tips that every newbie blogger should keep in mind.

Tip #1: Have a clear objective

Before starting out on creating a blog, have a clear objective and goal in mind. You should have a thorough understanding of why you intend to write the blog. This will help you reach out the right way to your target audience. Even if you want to write about almost everything under the Sun, determine if you want to portray facts or the most recent news about a particular topic.

Tip #2: Keep the content crisp and to the point

When you start writing a blog, it is easy to get carried away and try including information about almost everything you know in just one blog post. This can prove to be a costly mistake since the readers tend to lose interest in extremely lengthy blogs that have no direction whatsoever. Stick to the content you had in mind. Do not include anything that is not relevant to the topic on hand.

Tip #3: Induce humor

No one would like to read a drab blog post, especially long ones that do not have any humor in it. Humor acts as a catalyst to get your reader to read the entire blog and get the right picture. Remember to stick to humor that is easy to understand and not something that is sarcastic or sadistic. Writing conversational blogs with a touch of humor is a great way of engaging the reader all through to the end.

Tip #4: Create a catchy title

There is nothing more important that coming up with an interesting title for your blog. This is the first thing about the blog that your readers are bound to notice. Hence, ensure you come up with catchy titles that convey what the blog is all about.

Tip #5: Do not just focus around keywords

One of the common mistakes that people do is focus only on keywords while writing their blogs. This can be a drastic mistake. While it is important to find the right keyword so you can reach out to a larger number of people, remember you are writing the blog to convey information and not just to get higher SERP rankings. Keyword stuffing will not only take away the essence of your blog post, the chances of the search engines blacklisting your blog are also pretty high.

Tip #6: Proofread to eliminate errors

Do you know what the pet peeve of readers who indulge in reading various blogs is? It is the spelling and grammatical errors in the blog post. Most of the writers think they are so perfect in their art that their piece of work does not require a second glance before they post it. It is important to stay grounded and understand that no one is perfect. Ensure you proofread your blog post before you post it so you can eliminate all the spelling and grammatical errors that may mar the impression of the readers.

Tip #7: Create links

In order to increase the credibility of your blog and to get increased traffic, ensure you link your blog posts to other relevant blogs and websites on the internet. Also, try establishing incoming links from other blogs. This will not only enhance the credibility, but also help increase the SERP rankings of your blogs.

• 7 Useful Tips to Increase Page Views on Your Blog
• Blogs More Advanced and Effective As Compared to Websites

Building a blogging community to get more comments on your blog is not something that can be achieved overnight. You need to invest certain amount of time developing the network and getting the right plug-ins in place, till you reach a place, where the process becomes self sustaining. Here are some ways of building your community.

Provide genuine comments on other blogs

The first rule of any community is give and take equally. If you want to elicit comments, you need to break ice, be pro-active and comment often on others’ blogs. These should be genuine to assure the other person that you have given thought to his or her blog. In all likelihood, you will get a similar response. Soon you will develop your own steady stream of readers, who know their comments are welcome.

Use plug-ins effectively

There are lot of plug-ins which facilitate comments on blogs. You can have plug-ins which provides the commenter to tick a box and subscribe to further comments on the blog. This leads to more conversations and dialogues on the blog post. The more consistently a commenter subscribes to others’ comments, the more the chances of an open discussion.

Another plug-in you can use is the thread comment which allows readers to comment on comments made on the blog post. These comments will be nested and will provide more encourage for readers to share their ideas and opinions and be part of a discussion.

The redirect plug-in is one of the standard features in recent times. The readers, whose comments are precious to you, are redirected to a thank-you page, letting them know that their feedback is highly welcome.

Social media

You can use various plug-ins to connect your blogs to social media networks. The easiest thing to do would be to share the social media icons at the bottom of your blog, which will allow readers to share your blog post on the social network of their choice, whether it is Facebook, Twitter or anything for that matter. There are other Twitter plug-ins wherein Twitter followers can subscribe to your latest blog posts, comments on your blogs, and your replies on those comments.

When you facilitate sharing of blog posts and comments on these networks, you are basically opening up the platform for a lot of people, who wouldn’t usually visit your blog. You also make use of the social media features like updates which are automatically broadcast to all your friends. A great value add is the ease with which comments can be replied or made on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, increasing your chances of eliciting feedback.

Reward the consistent readers

If you have a decent budget for marketing of your blog, you could give money rewards for the best comments. You can also reward the best commenter by making a special mention to him or her in your blog, like announcing a winner after a contest. This will drive traffic to his or her site, which is a temptation for readers to comment.

• How Often Should I Post On My Blog?
• Maintaining a Great Blog without Posting Anything Yourself
• Will I Earn Money Right Away From My Blog?
• Can Comments on Blog Be Trusted As Genuine Feedback?
• Can Advertising Via Social Media Work for Profit?
• How Do You Handle A Flaming On Your Blog?
• 7 Useful Tips to Increase Page Views on Your Blog
• Microblogging and how it can Help Improve your Business
• Getting More Traffic To Your Blog By Using Free Tools
• How a Do-Follow Blog Can Help You Improve Visitor Involvement to Your SIte

Did you think creating a blog was easy? Well, it is! However, having a blog does not imply just writing posts regularly for your viewers to read. You will have to ensure you periodically carry out maintenance on your blog to incorporate new changes and delete the obsolete ones. WordPress is the best software for blogs and people who have used it on their blogs swear by its functionality. This software provides plugins to carry out various tasks on your blog and maintenance of the blog is just one of it. Let us take a look at 5 most important blog maintenance WordPress plugins that can make your life simpler.

Plugin #1: Maintenance Mode

First of all, when you are carrying out maintenance work on your blog, there are chances that the visitors may not be able to access the posts on your blog and read it. Though the reason for it is the background maintenance work that is being done, readers may assume that something is wrong with your blog. Chances are they may never visit it again. In order to prevent this from happening, it is important to have a splash screen on the blog telling the viewers that the blog is under maintenance and it will be up shortly. This will give the right picture to the readers and you will be able to successfully retain them without losing them to competition.

Plugin #2: WP – DB Manager

If you have a database installed in your blog, then this is the plugin that can be of great help to you in maintaining it. This plugin will help you backup the WordPress database automatically. You can use this plugin not only to back up the database, but also to restore, repair and optimize the performance of the database. This plugin will also help you remove the obsolete and unwanted tables and run queries to retrieve information. You can preset regular time intervals at which you would like the database to run a complete backup.

Plugin #3: Antivirus

Any blog or website on the internet needs to offer sufficient protection from the various viruses on the internet. Antivirus is a WordPress plugin that is specifically designed for blogs to protect it against spam and other spyware, malware and viruses. This plugin can also be programmed to conduct daily checks on the blog to ensure security. Though you can schedule the check to be automatic, there is also option for the manual checks to be done.

Plugin #4: WP Security Scan

This particular plugin by WordPress is designed to check for various weak points in the blog that may, in the future, make it prone to attacks. This plugin will run a pre-emptive check on the blog to find out the weak spots and suggest measures that can be taken to overcome the potential problem. It scans the permissions, files and WordPress Admin Security and database security periodically.

Plugin #5: Trash Manager

This is WordPress plugin introduced into the recent versions of the software. There are times when people accidently delete posts that they don’t intend to. This plugin is embedded to prevent such mishaps from happening. None of the comments, pages or posts can be deleted automatically. You should first send them to trash and delete it from there. However, if you are sure about wanting to delete the post, there is a “delete permanently” option that can be used.

• How Do You Handle A Flaming On Your Blog?

A blog can suck for quite a few reasons. Unless you pay proper attention and try to make it interesting, it would end up as just another URL on the internet. Here are some of the reasons why a blog can really suck and fail to capture the audience’s imagination.

It is a cut paste work

A good blog has its own niche and people come to it to learn something new, which they wouldn’t find anywhere else on the internet. However, your blog could really suck, if all you really do is copy paste from quite a few sites, rewriting the sentences and just reusing the content. You could end up doing a bad job with it, coming up with an article that is not coherent and lacks the basic flow. The problem of that is that visitors, who land on your page once, might not really prefer to revisit, which is the last thing a blog needs.

You spin articles

Even if you use all the latest principles of search engine optimization, you can still get to a blog that sucks purely because it lacks content. If you simply post for the sake of posting, by spinning content, your audience is going to stay away. This would obviously be the case, as they wouldn’t get to read anything new on your blog. Spinning articles could be a choice when you want to post on multiple forums to get back links, sometimes. But it is not the preferred option especially when you pick other articles online, spin them and post of your own blog. Authenticity is the need of the hour.

You spam your friends

Over dosage of a blog can also make your blog unpopular. True, you can give the link to some of your friends and fans and ask them for their feedback. However, spamming all the friends on your Facebook page or on other social networks, even if they haven’t shown a genuine interest in your blog is not advisable. Promoting your blog is fine, but you should take time and not overdo it.

Exchanging too many links

It is fine to exchange links with friends and putting up their sites on your blog. But too many links on your page to blogs you don’t even look at or are not consistent with your school of thought is a bad idea. Providing links to other blogs which have not been updated for a long time is not a good idea either.

No freshness of ideas

You don’t write blogs just for the heck of it. You write them first, for yourself and then to say a story, when you have something to say. Your blog can suck if it talks about random things without making sense and without giving the reader any value for his or her few seconds.

Speaking only about yourself

Don’t make your blog an ode to yourself. If you do nothing on the blog but just keep talking about yourself at length, your blog could really turn away people. You could speak at length about your work, if it is an interesting domain and you are providing some genuine information. It a bad idea though, to go on, rambling about yourself.

Fake stuff

People do it all the time in real life. But the last thing you want is fake information in your blog. Whether it is about the places you visited, the stories in your life or domain, talking about things which are not genuine, wouldn’t fetch you a lot of admirers at all.

Posting inconsistency

Your blog can suck even if you have posted something nice. The problem could be that the visitor comes back expecting something similar. But if you don’t post anything for the next 2 months, there is a good chance you will lose your visitors.

Grammatical mistakes

Blogging is all about how well you communicate with your readers. But if your blogs are full of grammatical errors or spelling mistakes, it could turn off the readers. You must ensure what you have posted makes sense, without long winding sentences and glaring grammatical errors which will make the reader doubt your judgement and your opinions.

Annoying items on your blog

You can really annoy your readers by playing a loud song in the background that distracts them from reading the content. Other features like ads, too many links and a messy setup might ruin the reading experience of the audience. Blogs should be neat, irrespective of the way in which you arrange the page elements, without really annoying and driving away audience.

• No Related Post

The direct answer to this question would be ‘No’. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither would the monetizing aspect of your blog be. You need to invest some time in your blog and have patience. No blog starts out as the top link on search lists. It slowly finds its way to the top.

How do you make money?

You can make money using your blog in many different ways. You can sell your own product or promote your services through your blog. The more popular your blog, the greater your chances of finding clients would be. Thus your blog would be contributing indirectly to your revenues. The best example is of all those sites of companies which sell various products like electronic goods, furniture, travel packages and house cleaning services. Even this kind of blog will take some time to get you clients and customers.

You can also make money through affiliate marketing where you advertise certain products by writing about them or recommending them. You will be in a position to do this, when you have created a niche or identity of your own and have a steady source of regular visitors looking for tips and suggestions.

Another very popular way of earning money is revenues. If the traffic to your blog is very high, companies would be willing to pay you money to put their advertisements on your site. The common ads are usually pay per click, where you get a small commission every time one of your readers clicks on the ad. For sites with high traffic, companies also agree to pay per view ads, where you get money by simply putting the ad on your site.

How long will it take?

If you have noticed the avenues of making money through your blog, you will realise none of them are possible from day 1. The key is to build the traffic to your site. This traffic should again have certain characteristics. Firstly, you should be able to retain readers, which means a steady stream of readers keep returning to your site to look at the latest posts. Secondly, you should get a good number of new visitors, either from search results or back links on other sites. A good amount of traffic is required before you can monetize your blog whether by placing ads or by promoting a product. So it could take 2 – 3 months or more than a year, depending on how much effort you put in to promote your blog.

Passive money

Once you establish a steady number of visitors, you have crossed the initial hurdle, which means making money would become a passive step. There are blogs with lot of content added over years, so much so that now, the number of visitors is high enough to provide a very good source of income to the blogger, irrespective of how many updates are added every week or month. This is passive money earned through ads, back links or affiliate marketing. Reaching this stage could take years.

• Is your Blog a Stranger to the World?
• Big Ideas Not Big Money Can Keep Your Blog Growing
• The ABC’s Of Launching Your Small Business Blog
• 1 Blog, 2 Blogs… How Many You Need to Have To Make a Good Blogging Income
• How Do You Handle A Flaming On Your Blog?
• How To Build A Blogging Community And Get More Comments?
• 7 Useful Tips to Increase Page Views on Your Blog
• How Often Should I Post On My Blog?
• Microblogging and how it can Help Improve your Business
• Getting More Traffic To Your Blog By Using Free Tools

Creating a blog and maintaining it is a task that is easier said than done. It is not just about writing posts on a daily basis and uploading them on to your blog. As you increase the number of pages on your blog, there are chances that the readers might just end up reading the only the blog posts that they see on the first page. Though the posts on the other pages of the blog might be as interesting as the ones on the first page, they may not get the necessary viewership because they are hidden away from the reader’s site. Irrespective of whether you are maintaining your blog to make money from it or just express your views, it is important that you keep in mind a few critical tips that can help you increase the page views on your blog.

Tip #1: Quality and Informative Content

This is obviously the primary requisite. You can expect readers to visit your blog regularly and read through the content you have uploaded only when you write it well and make it informative enough. Rewording the same information that they see on other websites and blogs may not be the right approach. Instead, pick a topic that is out of the box and come up with original content that can get them intrigued. Once you have managed to evoke their interest and curiosity, they will want to take a look at the other pages of your blog to find out more.

Tip #2: Internal Linking

One of the best ways to increase the page views is by internal linking. Not only will a large number of relevant links on your blog increase the ranking in the search engines and increase its credibility, it will also direct readers to other parts of your blog that have content relevant to the matter on hand. Coupled with informative and intriguing content, this strategy can work wonders. As the reader reads through the blog, he will click on the links that will take him to other related blogs to get the complete picture. Deep linking is also the best way to get more out of a single visit. You can get the reader to take a look at multiple pages with every visit.

Tip #3: Mention about related posts at the end of each post

In order to help the reader get the complete picture about a particular topic and also increase the page views of your blog, you can consider ending each blog post by mentioning the names of the other posts that relate to the one they have just finished reading and link them to that post. Most often than not, when readers read a particular blog post that is interesting, they end up looking for more information to increase their knowledge. You can give them all they want before they even leave your blog by highlighting the relevant links at the end of each blog post.

Tip #4: Use side bars to talk about your best posts

As you come up with new posts for your blog, the chances of some of your best posts moving out of site of the readers is very high. It is important to keep the best posts highlighted because it not only portrays your talent and knowledge, but also provides the visitors of your blog with a good read. One of the simplest ways of achieving this is by creating a side bar for your blog where all the important and best posts get a mention.

Tip #5: Creating posts that run across multiple pages

This can be slightly tricky, but if you get it right you have hit jackpot! You can create blog posts that run into a number of pages. For example, if you are talking about the “Top 10 romantic comedies of All Times”, you can create a page for every movie that you mention there. This will increase the number of pages that your reader will visit on just a single visit. However, it is important to ensure you have good, information rich content on each page so the reader does not get put off by clicking on the pages unnecessarily.

Tip #6: Front Page Excerpts

One of the ways in which you can invoke curiosity in your reader is by providing a sneak view of what your other pages have in store for them. Having excerpts of some of the best blogs of your blog on the front page is the easiest way to do that. While this means your front page will be loaded with a lot of content, it also implies your readers will get to learn more about the other posts on your blog and visit those pages to read more.

Tip #7: Enabling Search Functionality

Having a search functionality embedded in your blog can prove to be useful in more than one way. Not only will the readers be able to access the information they are looking for at the earliest, it will also help you increase the page views of your blog. Insert relevant keywords in all your blog posts, so any reader looking for information using the search button can find it easily and navigate to that page.

• Blogs More Advanced and Effective As Compared to Websites
• How Do You Handle A Flaming On Your Blog?
• Will I Earn Money Right Away From My Blog?
• Having a “Never Say Die Attitude” Towards Your Blog
• 7 Useful Tips for Newbie Bloggers
• How To Build A Blogging Community And Get More Comments?
• How Often Should I Post On My Blog?
• Microblogging and how it can Help Improve your Business
• Getting More Traffic To Your Blog By Using Free Tools
• How a Do-Follow Blog Can Help You Improve Visitor Involvement to Your SIte