Ways to Monetize Blogs

Commercialization of your blog must undergo serious thinking and evaluation on whether you’re up to the challenge or not. Monetizing your blog is a higher level of blogging compared to the early days of blogging where you just express your feelings, write about your interests, or just want to create networks. It is considered a higher form of blogging since your main goal is to generate income. Now, if you’re up for the challenge of earning income through blogging, here are some ways on how to maximize that writing talent of yours.

Advertisement
Web pages and blogs nowadays are full of these advertisements. You have the Contextual Advertising, the most popular one, probably due to Google Adsense. It has made a major impact because the advertisements are more targeted, and are more likely to be clicked. Another one is Text Links Advertising or Link Popularity which uses the text link ads or adbrite. This advertisement specializes on placing a static text link ads on high quality websites where there is high traffic. There is also what they call Direct Advertising. Here you create a page or dedicate a portion of your blog which offers options to businesses to directly place banners or links on your website.

Commissions
The other way you can earn is through commissions, others may call it affiliate program. Here you write something about the product and if someone buys that product you earn a percentage of there income. Sometimes it can be through a link inyour blog that leads them to the the page where they can purchase the product. The commission maybe big depending on the cost of the product being sold. .

Begging/ Donations
it never hurts to ask your readers directly for donations. It is not a shameful act especially if you have a good, honest and well composed blog. But of course you have to ask them in a polite way.Readers who truly value you work will be more than willing to support you. This is advisable if your blog has already a lot of followers.

Selling Products
If you have already mastered the way of blogging and already have a lot of follower, you may now sell the content of your blog through CDs. Your readers might want a compilation of your works. A good review of something you are selling could also result to a profit. You can also sell or endorse other products. A lot of big companies hire bloggers in order to promote their products.

Selling your blog
Sell your blog for a handsome amount of money. This way of monetizing your blog could be the most lucrative among the rest. But like any other product your blog must be on top of the line, must have a great content and a high level of traffic..

Monetization of blog will not happen overnight. It takes time, more good blogs and good traffic. Continue creating great blogs, and it’s pretty sure revenues will soon follow.

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Guidelines for Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a trick to optimize or improve the volume or quality of traffic to a certain web site. There are two types of SEO. First is the “black hat” SEO where search engine optimizers’ main goal is to achieve high rankings in the search engines through any possible means, even in an unethical manner. Optimizers breaks search engine rules and regulations, and unethically presents contents in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and users. The second type is the “white hat” SEO, where the usage of SEO strategies, techniques and tactics focuses on human audience opposed to search engines. This type is also called the Ethical SEO because it completely follows search engine rules and policies. Both types’ primary goals are to increase the visibility of your website, to gain high rankings and for internet marketing.

Here are some guidelines to achieve the primary goals of Search Engine Optimization.

1. Clear Hierarchy and Text Links.

Webmasters should make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Each page of your site should be reachable from at least one static text link. In giving very informational heading tags, the bots will see the hierarchy of the page. This is very important foryour site to be very visible to bots. Webmasters should choose the right text to be used as links in each page and should put relevant Tag for clear hierarchy.

2. Site Map.

Create a site map for your users. A site map lets the search engine know that the pages that might not be discovered through spiders exist. The site map must have links that points to the important parts of your site. If you have a large website with so many links, you can break the site map up into many pages.

3. Useful and Information-rich content.

Having a solid content would entice more the users to continue reading and browsing through your site. Therefore it is very important for your site to be full of useful, clear and accurate information about your topic. Your content should be original and should make sense. Throw relevant keywords in your content, and have it updated once in a while. Besides, it is what your users are really looking for.

4. Keywords.

Don’t use words that are too generic since it would be very hard for you to optimize for them. Try to pick keywords that are specific; words that users would usually type when searching. You make sure that these words are found in your article or blog. Research your keywords and know which of these are most possibly going to be searched by most users.

5. Use texts instead of images in displaying important names, contents, or links.

Search engines don’t recognize images. So instead of displaying names or contents through images, it is advised to have it displayed through text. And if you need to use images for your content, try using the “ALT” attribute, where you can include some words that would describe that image.

6. Descriptive and accurate Title elements and ALT attributes.

You should make sure that what you wrote in the TITLE Elements and ALT attributes should be descriptive of the content of your site. What you write in the title element and the alt attributes will be used by search engine to find the articles related with the user’s given keywords. Feel free too to make bold the texts that are important since bots will tend to give value on bold texts.

7.Check for broken links and correct HTML.

The spiders will stop the search if they find broken links in your site. Check your site thoroughly for broken links in order for the bots to have something to crawl through. You should also create a proper 404 page in casethe search engine gives the visitor an old URL. Include in it the appropriate link in the error page for the visitor to know where to go.

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Search Engine’s Web Crawlers: its importance to web rankings

Ever wonder how search engines rank your sites? What these engines do to determine how popular your site is, especially the crawler-based search engines? Crawler-based search engines have what they call a “web crawler”, and that will answer if not all, most questions lurking in your mind.

What is then web crawler? How does web crawlers work? What does it do or what is its purpose? Well, a web crawler is a simple, automated program or script that “crawls” or scans throughout the internet pages. Some call this crawler, automatic indexer, web spider, web robot or bot. This leaves traces in your access logs, which means that, if you know what to look for, you will know too that a spider has visited your web site.

You can also tell what it has or has not recorded. This unmanned program is operated by search engines. And how does this works? The web crawler visits each Web site and, each and every pages of your site. This then reads the visible texts, hyperlinks and contents of the tags used. In short, it reads all the contents of the site’s page and the pages of your site. It then determines, using the keywords gathered, what the web page is about. Then records all the words and notes each links to other sites.

The web crawler indexes the information and stores the web site into the main database of the search engine it’s working for. And from there, the web page will then be included in the page ranking process. A web crawler is programmed to follow web links from one web page to another, and from one website to another. The more links this web crawler finds in you site, the more they will visit your site for indexing.

These web crawlers are important for it serves many purposes. Linguists use web crawlers. They use web crawlers to perform textual analysis by determining the words that are commonly used now a days. Market researchers may also use web crawlers in order to determine and to assess the trend in a certain market. This just means that web crawlers can be used by anyone who are collecting information on the internet. But the web crawlers’ most common purpose is associated with search engines.

These search engines use web crawlers to collect information from web pages for them to quickly provide the internet users or surfers with websites that are related with the keywords they [meaning, the internet surfers] have inputted in their website. This web crawler is your most important visitor. If you allow these to have an easy access to your site and make it easy for these crawlers to go around your site, then you will have more points, which also mean higher search engine rankings. Search engines use web crawlers to collect data and to keep up with the rapid internet change and expansion. These help search engines in keeping their databases up to date.

But recently, many search engines index only up to a certain number of pages, often it indexes at about 400 pages, then it stops. This is due to the rapid expansion of the world wide web. It has become impossible to index everything. We cannot really determine up to how many pages the web crawler will index. It is therefore important for web developers to submit each page of the site that you want to be indexed, especially those pages that contains important information, hyperlinks or keywords. This just means, web crawlers are very important for web developers too. Through these, search engines will know the sites that you linked to and the sites that are linked to you. The number of links to your site indicates popularity, which will then boosts your ranking.

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Optimizing Your Website Brings Traffic

If you want your website or blog to get good traffic, you need to apply some Search Engine Optimization tricks to entice the search engine spiders to visit your site and rank it highly in the results pages.

Many people avoid using SEO techniques because they think SEO is complicated and difficult. SEO can be complicated and is often best left to professionals. However, you can take a few simple steps to greatly increase traffic toyour site.


The first step in optimization is keyword research. Keyword research is an easy process, although it can be a bit time consuming. Thanks to several online tools like Wordtracker or the Google Keyword tool, you can find keywords yourself and begin using them inyour site content. Start by typing in a word or short phrase that best describes your business service or features. If you are selling auto parts, for example, type in “auto parts” and let the keyword tool go to work. It will show you how often the word is searched for on a regular basis. It will also provide a list of similar keywords used in website searches.

The next step in choosing keywords to optimize your site is to choose the top five or so keywords and run a Google search on them to determine how much competition there is for each one. If a keyword is searched for 1,000 times a day, but there are 2,000,000 websites in the search engine results for that particular word, you may want to consider a different keyword without quite so much competition. By creating more precise keyword phrases, you can whittle down the search competition.

Once you have your list narrowed down to about five keywords, it is time to start using them strategically on your website or blog. For instance, an ideal use of a keyword is in your domain name, but many businesses have already established a domain name and cannot easily change it. You do have other options to use your keywords There are several other places you can add your keywords to help optimizeyour website for the search engines.

The search engine spiders will check you title first, so use your keywords in your website title and page titles as often as you can. Headings and subheads are other great places for your keywords to be noticed when your site is scanned. Using keywords in these two places will increase your visibility in the search engine results. However, because the rules the search engines use to comb sites change on a very frequent basis, it can be difficult to keep up with these changes. For many business owners, hiring a company specializing in Search Engine Optimization is the best route to get their websites ranked quickly and frequently on the results pages of the popular search engines.

Debbie Dragon is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.

Edward Roberts Jr. is a owner of GlobeTourGuide, a tourist destinations blog who managed to appear his blog on first page of Google and Yahoo search.

How about you? How do you manage your website's traffic?

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Tips in Optimizing your Website/Blog

Blogosphere is getting bigger and bigger each day. According to David Sifrey’s alert on The State of the Blogosphere 2007 report, Technorati is now following over 70 million weblogs, and around 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day, approximately 1.4 blogs/ second is created every day! Thinking that the report is dated 2007, blogosphere is really huge now.

If you are a blogger, you would be worrying about how would you makeyour blog stand out with a huge number of blogs published every day. With this info you’ve got in your head, you surely will ask yourself on what to do so thatyour blog would get the attention of active blog followers out there. You might think of it as a big task for you. But hold that thought out, there are a lot of tactics available for you. You just have to scan through several tips, apply those tips onyour blog, if you think they will best help you, and then, voila! You’ll be good to go.

I’ve browsed over some websites offering guides for bloggers out there who wants their blog hit the top rank and collected some of their tips which I find is very helpful. And here is the list of very helpful tips you might find helpful foryour blog: 

Comments and Trackbacks. Make sure you allowed trackback pings to blogs you cite on your posts. Press releases distributed via PRweb will in turn link to your blog, so pay great attention to this. This is a great way for driving traffic. Also, don’t forget do leave comments on other blogs and useyour blog name in the field since your name will be linked to the blog url you’ve entered.

Post Often. Frequent posting means the more likely internet bots will stop by on a more regular basis and the more is the probability that your site would be added on their top ranks.

Ping Other Sites. Don’t forget to ping your new entries in sites such as technorati and Feedburner. Pinging let them know you have updated your site. Also, make sure you ping Google’s Blog Search for faster indexing in their blog search engine.

Manage Your Trackback & Comment Spam. These spams won’t do good to your site. So make sure you add a tool to manage both trackback and comment spams.

Use a Good URL Structure. Never use permalinks (www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123) which would not define your entry, instead use you entry title (www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title) so that bots can crawl on them easily.

Register your Domain for a Lengthy Period.Google looks over the length of your domain’s registration in ranking it. This is because many spam sites only have a short registrations. registeryour site on a lengthy period indicating that you are creating a site with a substance.

Make Sure It’s DOFOLLOW. When building a link, make sure the links are dofollow or else, they won’t count. Do follow links don’t have the rel=”nofollow” attribute on them. A list of dofollow blogs, dofollow bookmarking sites, dofollow social media, dofollow top commentators and free directories to make your link building much more convenient are made available for you so take some time to drop by on them.

Build Links From Relevant Websites. Ask yourself, “Is it better to get a few links from releveant websites than tons of link but from unrelated websites?”. If you answer YES, then get links from other blogs or websites related to your entry.

Use Keywords As Anchor Text. Anchor text is the text contained in a link. They link one “anchor” to another “anchor” in the World Wide Web. Make sure you use these anchor texts as your keywords of which you want to be found by search engines. And as much as possible, include these keywords inyour blog’s title tag and domain name.

Google Page Rank. “I know that some people will disagree with me but Google page rank still matters. Otherwise, Google should have just dissed out page rank as a factor in their search engine ranking algorithm.
Other than looking for relevant websites and using appropriate keywords as anchor text, it should be worth while to build links from dofollow and relevant websites with high Google page rank.” (5 Link Optimization Tips entry)

Less External Links, The Better. “When link building, choose to get links from websites with fewer external links on them. The more external links, the lesser the link juice you get. As a general rule, don’t build links fromwebsites with more than 100 external links on them.” ( 5 Link Optimization Tips entry)
These tips may be found important but still, nothing compares to the density of your contents. So take a good look at your entries, make sure they are quite reasonable and sensible to read. Balance content density and site optimization.

So how was it? :)

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RSS Feed Subscriptions for Your Blog

Being a blogger, you will always anticipate for that moment when you can see regular followers and readers. Then you would think of ways and means for special services you might be able to offer to your loyal readers. I tell you, you can absolutely do that via offering subscriptions buttons. Yes, subscription buttons, because eventually your readers would want to be updated to your every post. Why not do that with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds?

Now, we’re going too fast with that one. Let me define these feeds first. I’ve told you about subscriptions, so what are these feeds got to do with subscriptions? Feeds are tools for websites (big or small) in distributing contents beyond visitors using browsers. They allow subscriptions to your regular updates being delivered automatically through web portals, news readers, and in some cases even the good old emails of your readers. So for easy subscription of your readers, make sure you have RSS available on your site. Many hosted blogging solution don’t have RSS available, so you may need to add it manually.

Then offer now RSS subscription buttons. Several popular RSS aggregators are available for easy subscription of yourreaders . It is also worth the time to add the RSS logo and these aggregators’ logos for one click-subscription to your feed.  With so many aggregators available, you may use FeedButton so you may be able to offer multiple aggregators (which you can even add up manually) on your site with just a single expanding rollover button.

But then, a problem arises when people are not able to get RSS. So accommodate them by offering an option to get your updates through email instead.

Here are two RSS aggregate alternatives available for your blog although there are also many other tools available to do this task:

Here are two RSS aggregate alternatives available for your blog although there are also many other tools available to do this task:

1. FeedBlitz

The FeedBlitz RSS service is a service that makes your RSS feeds better. It enhances feeds with branding, detailed metrics, browser and mobile friendly serving, integrated third party content, easy viral marketing tools and more. It’s fully supported by FeedBlitz, and integrates with the FeedBlitz RSS and blog to email service for one-stop subscriber management and communication. – FeedBlitz

Also, what’s good with Feedblitz is that you can it together with Feed Burner so as to avoid losing RSS subscribers.

 2. Feed Mailer (currently for sale)

Feed Mailer was created to keep you updated via e-mail! You select feeds that interest you then sit back and we will do the rest!
You can receive updates every hour, every day or every week!
Feed Mailer takes RSS one step further! It e-mails you the updates! We take the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by e-mailing you the very latest information that you are interested in. – Feed Mailer

Let your avid readers have the ease of reading your posts with easy subscriptions. Subscription is an easy way of letting your readers be updated to your recentposts as well as not losing your readers even if they don’t get the time to visit your site.

Have a great time getting subscribers on your blog!

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Myths and Facts in Boosting Your Website Rank

We had tackled Alexa Rank in our previous post. We discussed its importance amidst it unknownness to people who doesn’t bother to even look out on the site’s rankings. We had mentioned that to monetizing bloggers, Alexa Rank is somewhat very useful. The higher our rank is the more chances of earning more. But how do we ensure that we get a high Alexa Rank? Well, here are some pointers straight from the official blog of Alexa.

The MYTHS
Some if not many bloggers who had been giving blogging tips had more or less gave tips which will not work at all. Yes, do not be misguided by these folks posting these tips who don’t even bother check, read, understand and learn the facts before babbling about get-rich-quick wheeze. Here are some of the myths you might find listed on some blog tips you might happen to stumble upon.

1. Put an Alexa Widget on Your Site.

Some say that putting an Alexa Widgets on your site would increase your site’s rank effectively. Is that so? NO! It just isn’t right. wouldn’t be that so pathetic? Alexa widget won’t do anything for your rank.

2. Have help from people who charge you to increase your rank.

There are a number of them on the web. Don’t be fooled by these people. They might have lured a number of bloggers who are so eager to earn high rankings. If you are already paying one of them, then you are just wasting your money on these jinx. Maybe they will. But apparently, they won’t do you any good. TheirAlexa rank will serve as a proof for you.

3. Pinging.

This can’t even be counted as a good tip. This is a crime. Imagine using a phone you don’t own without asking a permission from the real owner. It isn’t good right? It is bad actually. Or let’s say, you’ll live in a land owned by someone and you haven’t asked that someone that you will be living in his land. Wouldn’t you be called a squatter? That is absolutely a crime. And that is just the same as crawling into other sites you don’t own. You are a squatter of that site. Why use it when you don’t have the rights? So if you are already doing that, might as well just cut that act out. It isn’t right, and you are doing a crime.

These are just a few. And just a little warning to those newbies out there. Be cautious about your acts and the tips you would be following. Weigh things out. Know if they are right or wrong. Don’t easily be enchanted by their get-this-and-that-quick schemes.

The FACT
Well, Alexa Blog had long given this tip, and what did it says? Simple. Get more traffic for your blog. That would be the easiest and the truest tip you would ever find on any blog tips available on the net.
For you to be guided well on how you would be getting the rank you want, might as well just visit the Alexa Help System.

Thanks for your time.

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