Self-updating blogs were all the rage not too long ago. In some circles they are still popular. People hope to make money mostly with AdSense and even with affiliate products. AdSense advertisers may see some short term success, but in my humble opinion a self-updating blog is not a good long term, money making strategy. Why? Because essentially they are junk blogs and while you may get a visitor to click on an AdSense ad one time, they are likely never going to come back to your blog because it offers nothing of value. Therefore, you will spend all of your time, money and effort trying to get new visitors to come to your crappy blog.
It would be a much better use of your time and resources to create a really good blog that people will naturally want to come back to and tell their friends about. This will allow you to spend less time and money on visitors. It is a much wiser use of your resources to pay for a visitor once and then benefit from them over and over without further investment.
Well then if self-updating blogs aren't a good, long-term strategy what is?
Great question! A quality blog offers the reader good, updated information that somehow improves their life or experience. Interaction and ongoing dialogue is also important. It's not brain science or rocket science, but it works. When you make the effort and the commitment to find information, stories, articles, videos and pictures that might interest your reader then they see that, appreciate that and will likely come back to see what you have written next. The formula is simple, you just need to execute it.
Provide Good Information: Your blog posts do not have to change the world but they do need to be informative or satisfy something that the reader is looking for. If you are having trouble coming up with things yourself, check out Google News or some of the free article directories for topics.
Provide Daily or Consistent Updates: The beauty about blog posts are that they do not have to be very long. 250-500 words will work just fine. Therefore, it should not take you very long to throw together a quick blog post. If you don't feel like writing it yourself, pay some one to do it, add a video from Youtube or provide a link to an interesting story or article.
Create Some Sort of Dialogue: If you create some sort of dialogue or respond to the common concerns of your reader, they are more apt to become invested in your blog. Therefore, make sure that you do not ignore your readers. Write blogs on topics that they are interested in learning or reading more about.
By Larry McCullough
In the world of Search Engine Optimization, Ranking plays such a vital part, that it is crucial to understand how it works if you want to achieve the highest rankings for your own websites.
There are many different facets to ranking, and it is important to remember that different search engines use different ranking methods, however, lets just focus our attention on Google's page ranking system.
Google's PageRank technology is in fact the very heart of the Google algorithm, and because it determines page ranking based on popularity, it can be likened to a giant electronic voting system. Using that terminology, It stands to reason that the page with the most votes achieves the highest PageRank on a scale of 0-10.
However, it is not just about attaining the most votes. Notice how Google explains PageRank voting:"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B..."
It appears then, that not all "votes" are viewed in the same way. A page that already has many votes will carry more weight than one that only has a few.
"Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance."
So PageRank is determined not just by link quantity, but also by link source importance. So in order to increase your PageRank, you need to get as many links as possible from other websites into yours, especially sites with the higher PageRanks, as they can have an amazing impact on your rank. For example, just one link from a PR10 page would normally be enough to increase your websites rank to PR8, but to get to that same rank from a PR3 page would probably require somewhere in the region of about 350,000 links.
The way PageRank functions across the entire web is by means of a logarithmic pattern, where there are very few pages with a PR10 (PageRank 10, the highest you can get), but hundreds of thousands with a PR0 (the lowest). In order for the average to stay at 1, any increase in the PR of one page is offset by a very small reduction in the PR of every other page.
However, there other factors involved as well, such as the location of keywords on your web page. Now you may wonder what the relevance is regarding where your keywords are placed, does it really matter? With Google's PageRank, it does.
It would appear that the higher the particular keyword appears on the page, the higher the ranking, and this applies to your title tag as well. For example, if you had a website that sells laptops, which would be one of your keywords, but you didn't use the word "laptops" in your title tag, then your ranking would be lower than a website that did. This is because keyword placement is a fundamental aspect to search engine optimization and is something that Google's PageRank analyzes.
The frequency of keywords also plays a factor in PageRank. A page about laptops which uses that word 5 or 6 times, may receive a higher ranking than if you used that word only 2 or 3 times. Of course one must be carefully not to overdo it as that could be viewed as keyword stuffing, resulting in your ranking dropping like a tank falling from the sky, or worse, being banned altogether.
By Steven Chappell.
If you are a blogger, you might agree that Digg is a good source of traffic for your blog. Digg is a community-based popularity website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication as the main attractions.
Like posting blogs post to other social bookmarking site such as Furl, posting your blog contents to Digg is a must if you want to get your blog well-known. That will make your blog visibility in the blogospehere better in addition of raising the chance of gathering back links from other blogs. It might as well bring more subscribers to your blog if you're concern about it. Do you know that many high traffic sites get their main traffic from social bookmarking websites?
Strategy of Digg-Traffic :
- Post only latest content that have never appeared in Digg before. Ask your friend to digg the news and leave the comment. A good strategy is to subscribe to news feed of some tech-related industry websites and get the latest info faster than your competitors. Write it as blog entry and post the url to Digg. (Don't forget to include the source where you got the news from). Story that is old oftenly did well as the fresh one.
- If you're creative, write something that is unique or offer some services from your site as a part of traffic luring strategy. People usually do not want to read what they have known. From my experience, I can conclude that if you write a good post people will naturally spread them to those social-bookmarking sites by themselves. Place the Digg-submitting button (html codes) in each of your blog post. People also like to read list (like what I've been doing with this article) so make a list for a tutorial post.
- Now, this is the basic trick we should master. Use a catchy title like we always seen in a computer or gossip magazine but make sure that you don't overdo it. Otherwise, Digg folks will consider you're spamming the Digg site. Since Digg users are tech enthusiast that eager to read new articles in their free time, if you can write something that can benefit them such as a personal development article. If you don't have valuable information, don't post your link. It's like a taboo for the community.
- Make sure that your web hosting is Digg-proof. Traffic from Digg.com can last for few days and that may make your site's bandwidth boosts from little to hundred thousands of megabyte per day! A good webhostings that are believed to withstand heavy traffic from Digg.com are Dreamhost and HostGator. If you are using dedicated server it would be find. If you are using free webhosting instead, your site might as well disabled by the provider (my firend's case). So bought at least a shared server for your blog in preparing for the high traffic effect.
- Be patient as sometimes a story will take several months to go to the front page. Have many friends at the Digg community so that they can help to your post. Spike the vote liked community is a no-no. This may get you banned from Digg as that is considered cheating. Just be consistent. If you have wrote a good article why not post the story to Digg each time you got something new to be shared. Don't put payperclick ads in your blog before the story came to the front page since Digg folks did not like to vote for website that has ads within it. Got the trick?
As I said on my previous post, having a Google AdSense site is a great way to make money. And to create an AdSense site, all you have to do is have a Google AdSense account (which is free), a website or a blog (which is free), and some articles (which are free if you write them yourself). Once you get your site up and running, the AdSense ads will be targeted to your content.
Therefore, those looking for your content will come by, read your articles, and have a high probability of being interested in the targeted ads. Every time someone clicks an ad, you get paid! That is, as long as you have designed your site to maximize AdSense clickthroughs (CTR) !
Let’s look at seven tips for creating AdSense sites that create money.
1. Keyword Density
Before you place ads on your site, be sure your keyword density is good. You will want to be sure that the right kinds of ads are placed on your site. A free way to determine what the ads will look like on your site is to go to this site and type in your keywords. You will then be able to see exactly what ads would show on your site.
If you don’t like what you see, then you know that you need to make changes to your keywords! You can get keyword suggestions from Results Generator from Overture or from the free trial version of Word Tracker.
2. Focused
Not only will the ads be based on your keywords, but they will also be based on your content. You definitely want your keywords and your content to match as closely as possible.
3. Write Often
The more information you have the better. Why? Because the more content you have, the more visitors you get. Many people suggest that you write a new article every day since no one wants to come back to your site to find the same old messages!
4. Choose The Right Format
AdSense allows you to choose many different ad formats. Research has shown that wider ads are more successful. The top three formats are:
- 336×280 large rectangle
- 300×250 medium rectangle
- 160×600 wide skyscraper
Additionally, the 468×15 horizontal ad link under the navigation bar is also a good bet.
5. Color Counts
You have the option to create a Google AdSense ad in any color of your choice. The best thing to do is to make your ad blend well with your site color scheme. You should make the border color and the background color the same color as your web site. You will want your text color to either be black or the color of your main content.
When creating your Google AdSense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background color.
6. Position Counts, Too
It is well known that visitors to a website scan the site to determine if it is worth reading. You definitely want them to see and scan your AdSense ads. Therefore, the best place to put them is in the top left part of your page or directly under your headlines.
7. Increase The Number
AdSense allows you to use up to three AdSense units on a page, two AdSense search boxes, and one unit of ad links. Using all that you can increases the chances of earning money.
Keep these seven tips in mind when creating your AdSense site and you will find that your clickthrough rates increase, thus increasing your money making potential.
Google’s Adsense is making a huge impact for website owners both large and small. To put it simply, if you own a website, and are accepted by Google, then you can make money with Google Adsense straight away. Most website owners earn enough revenue to not only cover their hosting costs, but to make a nice additional income as well.
So what is Adsense? Basically, when you have signed up for their program, Google will provide relevant ads that are closely chosen to match the content on your pages. There are a wide range of banner and button sizes to choose from, as well as choosing colours and backgrounds to blend into your site.
By pasting the code into your templates and pages, you can concentrate on providing quality content for your website, whilst Google does the hard work of finding the best ads to use in your pages, and you can make money.
You are still permitted to use Google Adsense ads on your site, even if you already have affiliate links. It is not allowed to imitate the look and feel of the Google ads for your affiliate links, however. One of the things you can do though, is to use Google’s palette facility to customize your Google ads and make them appear as part of the web page itself. The idea behind this, is to match the background and links of the ads to the theme of your site. Most people surfing quickly click on a link that is blue, and if the Google ads have the same theme, it makes them seem to be a portion of your “content.”
Even if you run many sites, you need only apply once to the Google Adsense program. Once accepted, you are given a unique “publisher ID”, which you can use on any site you own. By cutting and pasting a small Javascript code into your site in the location you wish the ads to appear in, your job is over, and Google’s begins!.
Google ads are very easy to customize, and as you can place them anywhere on your site, you can experiment with their position, colour, and theme. It really pays (literally!!) to experiment with their placement and design so as to optimize the amount of revenue that you can generate from each page..
And now the good bit - Payment! The payment rates can vary enormously. The payment you receive per click depends on how much advertisers are willing to pay per click to advertise with the use of the AdWords.
Advertisers can pay as little as 4 pence and as much as10-12 pounds, and occasionally, sometimes even more. You, as the ad publisher, earn a share of the money generated.
Assuming that your website has great content, and many visitors, experimentation with the placement of google ads is the key to your success. If your results are stagnant, it can help if you try and simplify your pages so that the ads can catch the visitor’s eye. Also, it can sometimes pay to differ from the methods that other people are using. Google has many tutorials on their Adsense site, including a “heat chart” which shows you where the best placement for ads are. You will need an account to access these tutorials. Sign up for an Adsense account by clicking the button below.
For the beginner, It is wiser to look at other people’s websites and format your Adsense in a like manner. An old business saying is to “find a good business model, and then copy it.” Initially, let others do the hard work for you, and learn from a successful site. Look at sites which have a high page rank, and observe the layouts, content, and placement of their ads. A little time spent doing research can put pounds in your pocket later.
Publishers have the option of choosing to have their ads displayed on only certain sites if they wish. You can also have them displayed on a large network of sites if you so desire. Google now has the option to allow other people to advertise on your site. This only makes good sense. If you are marketing to a tightly defined niche, you can place your own ads, written by you, on site that allow this option. The choice is yours, depending on what you think will work best to your advantage.
Free Wordpress Theme: Evolution
The Evolution Wordpress Theme is a clean, dynamic theme which BloggingTips, the author, have released under the Creative Commons License.
The theme is available in blue, red and green and the blogger has the option of changing the color scheme by simply changing the stylesheet which it uses. The theme is widget ready and has been designed for use with Wordpress 2.5+.
You can get this theme for free by downloading (only 241 Kb) at Here or Here, and if you want to see the real demo of this theme, you can visit here for blue, red and green.
You'll find two folder on the zip file above after extracting it. The ‘evolution’ folder contains all of the theme files and should be uploaded to your ‘wp-content/themes’ folder. The second folder is called ‘evolution-plugins’. This contains all of the plugins the theme uses and should be uploaded to the ‘wp-content/plugins’ folder.
The plugins which are used in this theme are :
Although not essential, we believe these plugins improve the usability of this theme:
The evolution theme is widget ready. The blogger can change the contents of the sidebar and the footer via the widget panel in the admin area of your wordpress blog. This gives you, the blogger, complete control over what is displayed on your blog.
- Sidebar Widget Area : This sidebar widget area is directly underneath the multi tabbed information box which has the recent posts, categories and archives.
- Footer - Left : The left box in the footer area.
- Footer - Center : The box in middle of the footer area.
- Footer - Right : The right box in the footer area.
As we know, many bloggers try to get money from their blogs with joining some affiliate and ppc programs. The most famous is Google Adsense. If you're beginner for this program, I'm sure these free 3 ebooks can help you.
Download, read and learn them:
This WP theme uses 16 plugins and ready for Google Adsense code. You can see the real site that use this theme at here.
Plugins that used In this theme:
Feedburner
FeedBurner to power your feeds and make them available for everyone to subscribe to. It makes your feed easy to view and subscribe to when viewed in a web browser. FeedBurner makes it easy to receive content updates in My Yahoo!, Newsgator, Bloglines, and several other news readers.
Tell a friend
Share This is a plugin that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to send a link via e-mail to a friend.
Get Recent Comment
This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your site.
Google Xml Sitemap
This plugin will create a google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.
PHPList
This plugin gives you the ability to easily allow users to subscribe to your newsletter from any page on your blog.
Optimal Title
It mirrors the function wp_title () on your blog, but moves the position of the separator to after the title rather then before. This way you can make blog post name, or category name appear in front of the blog name in he
Popular Articles
This plugin lets you automatically highlight your best posts to your readers. It keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
Post Star Ratings
Post Star Rating allows blog users to rate posts in a classic five stars way.
Related Post
As the name suggests, this plugin generates a list of related posts based on the text of blog entry.
Simple Tags
Allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. Supports multiple words within tags. Also allows in-post tagging of words by enclosing them in [tag] tags.
Social Bookmarking
Share This is a plugin that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites.
Subscribe to comments
This allows your readers to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments.
Contact Form
It creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you.
Wp Print
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog's post/page.
Other Functions
Google adsense, Widget Ready, Digg, Technocrati, del.icio, furl, reddit, tailrank, newsvine, blinklist.
Installation Instructions:
- Extract Subscribe zip, you receive two folders (a) greenleaf (b) plugins
- Upload subscribe folder to your wordpress themes folder wp- content/themes/
- Open plugin folder and upload all the files/folders to your wordpress plugins folder wp-content/plugins/
- Go to the WordPress plugins admin panel and activate all the plugins.
- Go to Write pages in the wordpress admin panel, and create two pages, (a) About Us page and Contact Us Page.
For Adding Google Adsense or any other ads:
Open sidebar.php in any text editor, you can see /* Start Ad Tag*/ and /* End Ad Tag*/ insert your add codes in between them.
You can place two 336 x 280 or below adds and one 160 x 600 adds, if you want to place more adds in the sidebar then please see /* More Adds Place Here*/, insert your add codes in between them, but remember no more width than 336px.
Get this great theme at Here or Here.
Free Nice 69 CSS Web Templates
Feel free to download these free 69 CSS Web Templates for your site or blog. Below you can see preview of some of them. One the authors ask is to not remove the link on the footer.
Download all at Here.
Would you like to communicate more with your blog's visitors? Now, Google has launched a new Google Talk feature that lets visitors to your web site chat with you. Google call it "chatback" because instead of you doing all the talking on your blog, your visitors can talk back to you. Sure, they could leave comments, but those are public and hard to use for a real conversation. With chatback, it's a real instant message session.
To use chatback, you must have a Google Talk account, but your visitors don't have to! They don't even need to have an email address, or to have ever used instant messaging.
When they visit your blog, they'll see a badge like the one on the below showing your online status (available, busy, offline) and, if you're available, they can just click and start chatting. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don't need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.
Of course, chatback isn't just for blogs. You can use it on any web page that you can add HTML content to. To get started, visit the chatback start page. Then just copy the provided HTML snippet to your web site. Visitors will then see a badge on your site indicating your availability, and can click to start a chat with you. If there's a time when you don't want to be distracted, just set your online status to "busy" and visitors won't be able to chat with you until you change your status back to "available."
This web page monitoring software makes following hundreds of web sites and blogs as simple and fast as checking your e-mail. It will visit web sites for you, as often as you like, and notify you when it finds a change. Stop wasting time in your browser - never visit an unchanged site again!
Highlights:
- Monitors web sites, blogs and text files for changes
- Improves your productivity by working silently and unattended
- Notifies you of changes by popup, sound and/or email (NEW)
- Shows pages with changes highlighted in the internal browser
- Checks web pages for changes as often as you like
- Dynamic content like page counters and dates can be ignored
- Easily imports your existing bookmarks
- No limit in number of web pages monitored
- No monthly fees - buy once and you own it
- Never miss important news again - be the first to know
Just drag a URL to the Drop Window to quickly add the URL to UpdatePatrol. Works with Internet Explorer, Firefox and other web browsers.
More info and features can be found on UpdatePatrol's site. And you can try it by downloading at Here.
RAR PassWord: www.softarchive.net
BlogJet is a new way to keep your blog without ever launching a browser - just right from Windows. You can easily make posts with different colors and fonts, insert pictures and links without knowing how to code HTML, just like you edit documents in Word.
It displays formatted text in the editor so it looks like the same as it will appear in browser. You can post to your current blog or create a new one at any of top web log services.
BlogJet is a desktop blogging application that greatly simplifies posting to your blog. It is user-friendly, easy to use and elegant. Emphasize Your Viewpoint. You can make text bold, italics or even change colors and fonts, create numbered and bulleted lists. BlogJet displays text in editor so it looks the same as it will appear in browser. They call it WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
BlogJet can manage multiple blogs, with features no web-based blog editor can match. It supports All Leading Blog Services such as WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, Blogware, BlogHarbor, Squarespace, Drupal, Community Server, etc.
More features and info can be reached on BlogJet's site. Btw, you can download BlogJet at Here.
Want to submit and ping your blogs automatically? K.Soft Blog Blaster allow you to do it to over 30+ Blog Search Engines. Blog Blaster is an automated tool to ping and submit your blogs to over 30+ blog search engines with just one click. It is a software solution for bloggers that run Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.
"Ping" is the term used to submit a blog to a blog search engine. When you ping a blog, you are telling the search engine that you have updated your content and that your listing should be refreshed in the search results. Pinging your blogs to the search engines is the fastest way to get the search engine robots to visit your blog and gain increased traffic in a short amount of time.
Highlights:
- Ping your Blog to 30+ Directories
- Submit your blogs to 30+ blog search engines with just one click.
- Customize the List of Sites to Ping
- Add your own blog directories to create a custom list of ping sites.
- Import Blog URLs
- Importing your blog URLs from a text file makes setup a breeze.
- View Submission Results
- Real submission results are displayed after all pings have completed.
- Supports Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista
- Desktop software lets you ping right from your own PC.
- Add your blog URLs to the software and click Ping All to automatically submit them to the blog search engines with just one click.
- View the blog submit result pages to know for sure that your blogs were accepted. Then check your blog web statistics to see the blog robots visiting your site within minutes!
- Customize the list of sites to ping by removing or adding your own.
The following blog search engines are supported by default:
- Weblogs NewsGator
- Feed Burner
- Pingomatic
- Blo.gs
- BlogRolling
- Technorati
- Feedster
- Blogdigger
- Moreover
- Syndic8
- My Yahoo!
- Weblogalot
- PubSub
- BlogStreet
- 1470.net
- Bitacoles
- Bitacoras
- Blogdb
- Blogoon
- Blog Shares
- Blog Snow
- Blog.goo
- Laster
- Memory
- Ping.Blo.gs
- Bloggers.jp
- Blogmura.jp
- Cocolog-Nifty
- Exblog
- My Blog
- Pingomatic
- Topic Exchange
- Weblogues
- Blogg.de
- Add Your Own!
You no longer need to rely on a single ping site or web-based ping service to submit your blogs. You can now ping your blogs directly from your very own PC. Whether you only have 1 blog or 100 blogs, you can now ping them all with one click.
Use the Import button to read a list of blog URLs from a text file and instantly add them into the software. Blog Blaster will automatically fetch your blog title for each entry so that setup is a breeze.
You can download this blog tool at Here.
PassWord If Ask:www.softarchive.net
