Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Is blogging obsessive?
Ask a blogger how much time they spend with their site every day, every week, every month. You might be surprised by the answer. Most bloggers with successful sites spend many hours making sure links aren’t broken, comments aren’t spam, and articles are posted regularly.
Successful bloggers will enjoy the challenges of getting readers and improving their search engine ranking. These things do not happen over night, which means there is a lot of effort that needs to be invested before results are seen.
Once you do start seeing subtle improvements, it will fuel you on to continue growing your blog. This is where things can be obsessive. Most of us are saddled with a full time job in addition to blogging. This means that blogging (and all things associated with blogging) occur during the evening hours and weekends.
Now if you are juggling a full time job, a blog, and a family, you probably have found yourself torn on more than one occasion. I do believe blogging can get obsessive and this can be a problem. One of the easiest ways to get around this issue is to get your family members involved with the blog.
You can have someone monitor the comments on your blog for spam and delete the inappropriate ones. If someone is particularly good with Photoshop (or whatever graphics program you use), have them edit images for your blog. Get creative and think of interesting jobs for family members. Then you can enjoy blogging and spending time with the family all at once.
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Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Managing your blog while on vacation
Getting a blog established takes a lot of effort and time. Once you have a successful blog, it can be extremely difficult to walk away from it in order to take a vacation. Your readers get used to a routine and if that changes, you risk losing them. There are a few things you can do to ensure that your blog will continue to operate smoothly even while you are away on vacation.
The first thing you need to consider is how frequently you post on your blog. You will want to continue this same pattern. The easiest way to do this is to spend some time in advance writing articles for your blog. Then you can schedule them to post on the days while you are away.
There are a few instances where posting your articles in advance is not an effective way to run your blog. This is particularly true if your blog focuses on current events. If this is the case, you need to find a guest blogger that can post articles in your absence. Of course you need to be confident this person will post quality articles on the days when it is necessary.
As your articles are posted, your readers are likely to add their comments to them. Along with legitimate reader comments, your blog may also be subjected to spam comments. It is important to keep these under control while you are on vacation. You can do this with a great spam filter like Akismet. If spam comments are a serious problem on your blog, you may consider disabling comments altogether until you return.
Whenever possible, it is always nice to have someone back at home (who is trustworthy) keep an eye on your blog. They can fix any issues that pop up so you don’t lose your readers! It also never hurts to let your readers know you will be away if you have established that type of style on your site.
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Rid your blog of spam comments
One of the most annoying things that bloggers will encounter is spam comments. It takes a lot of hard work to think up and write new blog posts. Great comments are your rewards for these posts. When these comments are lost in the midst of a bunch of spam comments, it is very frustrating and devalues your blog.
To overcome spam comments, consider activating a plugin that comes installed with WordPress. Akismet is a great anti-spam tool that will help you keep your blog filled with only the good comments. While I’m specifically referencing the WordPress version of Akismet, this product is also available for other popular blogging platforms!
In order to activate Akismet, you need to get an API key. This is easy to do and there is a link included directly from the plugin’s info in WordPress. All you need to get your API key is an email address. Keep in mind that Akismet is free for personal bloggers. If you make more than $500 a month on your blog, Akismet asks that you purchase a commercial license for their product!
Once you get your API key and Akismet has been successfully activated, you will need to click on tools to monitor this plugin. The Akismet tool will show you everything that has been flagged as spam on your blog. You will then have the option to approve the comment if it was accidentally flagged.
Every comment that is flagged as spam goes into the Akismet database. This actually makes the plugin stronger as future comments from the same person will also be captured in the spam filter. Over time, you will notice the amount of spam on your blog has decreased tremendously!
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Make Money Online With Google Adsense using the right type of ads for your blog
When it comes to you wanting to make money online with google adsense you need to learn what thing. Patience. No one earns a living income overnight by blogging nor do they earn it typically within the first year. It takes a long time and a lot of work to actually make money with google adsense.
You need a powerhouse blog and loads of traffic. You need the right ads on your site that are in the right location and blends in with the theme you selected. You need the right content to drive higher paying ads to display on your blog so that you can make more money per click than your typical ad that could display.
Research what you are going to write about and find out how much money per click you could earn based on different keywords. Work your way to page one as quick as possible for that specific keyword and you could start making money online with google adsense the next day however, you won’t be on the first page for a topic that is actually paying decent money anytime soon. Why? Well, blogging is not new. You are not coming up with a new idea, others have thought before you hey I could make money blogging so let’s write a bunch of articles and see what happens. Like I said, you need to get in a line. Eventually your time will come but only if you are STILL in line when that happens and you were steady in your blogging to get there.
So build your blog. Research themes that are google adsense ready and go with one of them. Find the right ad for your site based on locations available. Write on a normal basis. Check back in a year to see if you are earning money. Simple. Right?
Earning Money Online Begins with the right domain selection
When I wanted to create this blog I thought out my plan for blogging topics and decided that the bulk will surround the idea of how a person can earn money online with Google Adsense.
Once I had the idea and focus in my mind of what I wanted to blog about I went to the google keywords tool and typed in a few terms that were similar to the topics I wanted to write on. The google keyword tool returns a ton of results including how many hits per month the phrases get as search terms in Google. Obviously the more hits a month, the better the phrase would make as a domain. The words in your domain play a role in ranking within the search engine result. This is a basics SEO Tip that in the formula which is used to derive page one of any given search terms, your domain plays a big part more so in fact for Yahoo! than for Google but nonetheless, traffic is traffic and you want to rank on page one as soon as possible.
So after I:
- Thought about what I wanted to blog about
- Had a focused plan on topics and categories for my website
- Researched popular search terms related to the topics I wanted
- I picked the domain I could purchase with the most hits per month as a search term
The result? I now blog about how to make money online specifically using Google Adsense as the primary source of income using the domain Earn Money Online With Adsense. Had I selected something like Blog for money as the title this is good but sort of generic. Generic means much more competition against other bloggers who are also trying to write about blogging and making money. By focusing in on one specific topic or division on how a person can earn money online using Google Adsense my blog has a better chance of getting ranked higher as time goes on.
The lesson?
The more generic your blog, the harder it is to get on page one. The more your domain matches what you will write out and is using popular search terms related to your topic, the more successful you will be.
Filed under Blogging, Make Money Blogging
Adsense secrets – How to make your google adsense match your content
When you put a google adsense ad on your blog it does not randomly pick something to show or links to display in hopes random people will click random links. Google scans your content and checks what keywords you are targeting and then matches against what people have paid them to target for keywords. Adsense secrets #1 is to understand the other side of the business.
Pretend you are a business owner and want to market with google adsense. You setup an account, you select which keywords you are targeting and when your ad should be displayed and then you set your dollar limit for how long your advertisement should run for. Okay so now understanding that when google looks at your blog it is looking for keywords to match against customers requests. If you are random and have not focused on marketable keywords than you really limit the number of advertisements or people who want their ads to be displayed on your blog.
Adsense secrets are all about making your blog profitable and showing how by making small changes to what you are doing you can make more money online with google adsense. For this secret, all you need to do is pick the right keyword and then write twenty articles around that keyword. Take synonyms and long tail keywords of the same set and again write ten or twenty more keyword driven articles to make your blog tie nicely to marketable ads. When all is said and done your content will drive traffic to your blog and then your ads which will now be displaying related material will get clicks otherwise you will have great content but not related ads and no one will ever click them.
