Saturday

Are You Making Money From Your Blog?

Are you making money from your blog? I am, that is after three months blogging. It's not an easy task, but with a lot of hard work and determination, I finally can harvest the fruits. The money comes from the programs that I joined such as affiliate marketing, pay per click, per per lead, pay per poςt and pay per search. I'm making a little bit from each of these programs, a few bucks here and there. The fact is I am really making money from my blog, and after accumulating everything the total that I make is about few hundred dollars a month. It's not bad, because the money I'm getting does help me to pay my bills and at the same time I can invest in getting more traffic.

I also get traffic for free by following tips from 77 ways to get free traffic. Off course I have not tried all of them, but I think I did follow about one third from the 77 ways. Through the traffic report, I found most of my traffic comes from the search engines like Google and MSN. The rest are from the social bookmarking sites, the forums and the link exchange sites.

Lately, the traffic from search engines are getting lower because my site was being sabotaged by some jokers. I also found that my link popularity also decreased from few thousands to few hundreds because of that.

Now I need another two to three months time to do the hard work again so my site would be back to the original position as before. But in the meantime, I will buy more traffic from the reliable source, so I can still make money from the programs above.

I know that some of you are hardly making money from your blogs. Some are making few dollars only from Google Adsense. My advice, you should also join other programs, because Adsense is not the only source of making money from internet. Although my site is towards Pro-Adsense, but frankly speaking, only some people can make big money from Adsense, such as Problogger. And the main key to get the BIG BUCKS is 'the traffic'. No Traffic, No Money.

There are so many programs in the internet but you have to try as many programs as possible, because every blog has different visitors with different interest. You should be able to recognize which programs suit with your blog after few months experiment, then only you can decide and concentrate on those making money programs for your blog.

Tuesday

Adsense Decoded – Scam Or Breakthrough

Adsense Decoded seems to offer credible methods to turning your Adsense business around - the magical kiss that turns you from an Adsense frog into an Adsense prince.

First of all, of course you cannot help but notice Patrick Hillenbrand’s earnings claims. They jump out of the page at you - $10,852 in the first month - and that without any natural “organic” search engine traffic. Obviously, he has an earnings disclaimer page that basically says that you may or may not get similar results, but the interest is there.

The next thing that hits you between the eyes is the fact that the program is in fact a series of videos, just ten in fact, and each one very short. Now, that is not what you would have expected from a course costing $117! But after further thought, you realize it is not the videos themselves that have the value, it is the information contained in them. If they really do give you an over-the-shoulder, step-by-step explanation of how to boost your Adsense earnings, then they could be worth more than ten times, or even over one hundred times as much.

Let’s have a quick look at what you can expect to learn. (More details are on the Adsense Decoded site here, so I will just give you a run down of the video lessons as an overview.)

Knowledge is Power: Knowledge of Adsense is Projecting Power

Pretty vague title here for the first video in the series, but it is basically reiterating that old adage that the knowledge of and application of the techniques you can learn through Adsense Decoded will have a dramatic effect on our Adsense earnings.

A bit of a weak start, possibly. This is more a kind of introduction than anything else. Let’s get into the meat!

The Most Profitable Ad Formats & Important Account Settings

Now we are getting into the nitty gritty. I would definitely like to know which are the best formats, and if I am doing anything wrong in my Adsense account settings, I definitely will want to plug the holes there. So here you can discover real tangible things you can do to boost your Adsense earnings.

Adsense Tracking That Puts You More in Control and Makes You More Money

I know from my day job that tracking is very important. That is what has helped me figure that only one third of the budget my company was spending on Adwords was getting the results we wanted.

These days there are many great tools to track visitors’ activities on your site, one of the most feature-rich being Google Analytics, which I am using on Adsense-Decoded-Review.com.

By using the free tracking tool Patrick recommends to track your Adsense ads, you can be sure that you are optimizing your unique site to make the most out of your visitors.

Preferred Adsense Ad Positioning Techniques

This video is where the claims of 50% click through rates come to the fore. It’s all about positioning your ads and then how you present them. Techniques he will mention will be things like blending the “look” of your ads into the overall design of the page are common knowledge, but Adsense Decoded shows you techniques that have been tested to destruction by the author to make huge profits. You can’t argue with real experimental results like that.

Adsense Composition Techniques Explode Your Earnings

You get into some real details on this video - fonts, colors, text sizes, borders, headlines. It looks like it could be a pain to get everything set up just right, but take the time and the results will follow.

You should also note that Adsense Decoded specifically mentions that you need to be careful with images in proximity to your Adsense units. There are still people out there promoting this method, even though it has been banned by Google for a while.

6 Powerful Recommendations to Increase Your Adsense Smart Pricing Position

Have you ever heard of “Smart Pricing”. What is it? The Adsense Decoded site even says that this is not something that Google has made any official statement about.

So what is it? Well it seems to be some sort of quality rating for your Adsense site. Crack this part of the Adsense code your Adsense earnings will break through into another level.

Adsense Wake-Up Calls: Most Profitable Ad Targeting & Targeted Content Creation

There is some controversy in this video as Patrick Hillenbrand sets other Adsense techniques in his sights and explains why they have no long-term future. There are so many so-called experts out there, it is good to be able to have the gold sifted for you by an expert.

How and Where to Source Instant and Highly Productive Adsense Traffic

Your site needs traffic. No traffic, and your ads will sit there lonely waiting for their first click. Building organic search engine traffic can take a long time, but remember that Adsense Decoded’s Dr. Patrick Hillenbrand claims that he made over $10,000 in one month without any search traffic at all. So where is he getting his visitors from? This video reveals his sources.

Adsense Plug & Earn Revenue Streams

Video nine is about monetizing your visitors in ways other than Adsense, but at the same time not overwhelming them with the traditional affiliate links. And finally there is this statement: “An easy but brilliant technique that allows you to get paid on every visitor…. guaranteed… up to five times per visitors & approved by Google.” Monetize every visitor? Get something from every visitor, and you can’t lose!.

Monetize Your Adsense Traffic Further

This video is perhaps a bit of a weak finish. Nothing like the concrete techniques promised in the previous ones, but who would turn their noses up at the idea of automating their Adsense income? And living in Japan, the idea of Adsense giving me stacks of airmiles as well is definitely appealing!

Do these videos really give you the inside track on Adsense riches? Follow my progress on the Adsense-Decoded-Review.com blog as I implement these strategies and see where they take me.

About the Author

Stephen Munday lives in Japan and is currently starting his own online business testing Adsense Decoded

This article is (c) Stephen Munday 2007. Permission is given to reproduce this article in whole with the URLs correctly hyperlinked.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Stephen_Munday

Monday

SEO Principal

SEO is a vital thing for you to optimize your site and content to get high traffic. Basically, SEO is done through exchanging links to other by Feeds, publishing the original content of your site with others' makes your site well known to others. Many experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recommend the use of articles-based as a the main key to your site's search engine visibility. Relevant articles are solid SEO performers because they increase site rankings and at the same time providing your potential customers with the information they need to make an informed choice regarding your product or service.

Another good recommendation for SEO is to get inbound links to your website. For example, if there are 100 sites link to your site/blog this means your site has something worth visiting. If you get thousands links, this means your site is registered as a great level of trust for others.

Inbound link together with original content is the premise of various 'Article Exchange' programs. By supplying original article content to a similar or complimentary site, you will get the inbound link from that site. Furthermore the article you supply also contain a link that directs the reader to your site.

In a best-case scenario you will provide content that will be used by another site while allowing the search engines to discover the inbound link connection. In return, they will rank your site higher while you also stand to receive increased site exposure from individuals who read the article on other sites and click on the article's link.

By submitting your articles to free articles sites like ezinearticles.com or getmyarticle.com is also a great way to spread your expert articles. This strategy allows you to be fairly selective about who can use your material and whose material you will use. The end result is you assist another website while increasing the visibility of your own. It may be one of the few times you may actually want to share what you have with someone else.

Linking strategies have proven successful for SEO and an article exchange may provide one of the best solutions to simply exchanging links. The article-based content provides the greatest form of exchange. The articles provided should be helpful and on-target. If it's not, the reader will not even get to the link before leaving the site. You must make sure that the article you provide is well written and informative.

Sunday

Sporting Wives' Get Together



Eva Longoria and Victoria Beckham have been bonding over their shared positions as wives to sporting stars. Over some sun, lemonade and salty air, Eva spills the beans about what it's like to be Tony's wife.

Friday

Blog Marketing Tips - Technorati Explained


You should know by now, by having a blog can really increase traffic to your site. Blog is search engine friendly so your site can get higher pagerank in the search engine.

But there is another way to increase traffic to your blog easily. Just register your blog with Technorati, this site can take your blog to the next level. Technorati will ping your side automatically once you update your blog. You can create many keywords tag for your blog and that would make your blog easily reached by Technorati users.

By using specific tags in Technorati search engine, users can find many articles which are updated daily. Those keywords are the main keys to get traffic.

Technorati functions like search engines except that you need to register with them first before you can submit your blogs. They also use complex algorithms like Google and crawl any new content appears in your blog.

You don't have to wait for Technorati to find and index your blog because each tag will automatically get your post listed for that keyword. Each tag will help Technorati categorise your content and all posts with the same tag are grouped together and ranked with the most recent at the top.

Even if your website is only a few days old, you can still get the content on your blog listed in a matter of days, immediately enable your site to get more exposure and attract more people to your blog.

You can submit as many blogs you want and it's free. Technorati also allows other bloggers to add your blog to their favorite list. If you have quality and informative content, your blog will quickly get the high ranking and there are chances to get many back links.

Thursday

Spam Or Abuse Articles

Have you ever come across with people who simply report or comment your site or your article as spam or abuse?

Such people love to irritate people with bad intentions. The victims are always bloggers. I have experienced with these type of people. They simply commented my article as spam at one of social bookmarking sites. They claimed I submitted my own article, so it's regarded as spam. Is it really spam if you submit your own articles in any social bookmarking site? I don't think so. Social bookmarking sites are very useful tools to drive traffic to your site. Everybody submit their own articles to social bookmarking and at the same time bookmark other people sites. It's a win-win situation for bloggers.

One of the people that I found doing such thing is a lady named Keri Morgret of (www.morgretdesigns.com) who claimed that she is SEO expertise. She once commented one of my original articles (I just started blogging that time) in one of social bookmarking sites as 'spam'. Then she commented another article about my site ranking with stupid question "How many links that you point to this site?", then she listed down all my three blogs, in a way claiming that I have manipulated my search ranking by pointing all that three blogs to this site (Refer this article for SEO and search ranking). Can you really manipulate the search ranking by having only three blogs linking to your site? And later which is the worst, she submitted negative comments on my site at other people's blog/site. Her comment is irrelevant to the article on that site. She purposely pointed my name as I had given my comment for that article. She tried to deliver the message to me through other people's site and at the same time accused me stealing content from her site and commented many content from my site are not my own and my content are not relevent. Isn't it immoral? Is it an appropriate action by someone who claimed herself as SEO expertise? Hey look, you can comment on any articles from the owner's site BUT NOT from other people's site. I don't mind receiving her comments on my site which is ordinary for all bloggers, but condemning me and my site at other people's site is really pissing me off.

And in one of her articles, she mentioned that she reported many sites to Google which she thinks violating internet rules, but no action is taken by Google. That really shows what type of person she is (A Sabotager). She simply likes to interfere with other people's site and simply report the site as abuse although that particular site has done nothing to harm her or her site.

She is better off not to interfere with other people's site unless, the site or that person violated her policy or rights.

As you can see, there are some articles here copied from ezinearticles, which is free and legal and I did post the author's name. The rest are my own including this one. People like Keri Morgret is very dangerous for bloggers and for new bloggers who would like to maintain their sites. Is it fair if you find your blogs/sites suddenly being banned or penalized by Google or Yahoo caused by these type of people?

Is it wrong if there are some irrelevant topic on your sites? I don't think so. It's your site, so you can do whatever you want with your site. Blogging gives freedom to write....that's the true message. But submitting negative comments about people and their sites on other people's site/blog with the intention to tarnish such blogger's image or reputation is WRONG!

So beware and do watch out for these people who simply want to sabotage your site!

Monday

Why XML Important For Blog

This is the main principal you should remember which will transform the way you see how internet works for blogs visibility. This principal is the reason why XML important for blog and is regarded as standard communication languages that convey information.

XML is one of those three letter acronyms that stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is basically allows computer to share information and documents on a very high level that allows software programs to talk and share information with each other, which is highly powerful than HTML. XML facilitates websites, search engines and software programs to share information in ways never before possible. XML is not a language that you probably would ever want to learn or read but it is very very important for the survival of your blog.

XML is capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Languages based on XML (RSS, Atom, OPML, RDF) are defined in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their form XML is very readable from a computer-to-computer level, which means that the search engine spiders like content in this format and they will quickly index this information.

By presenting information to the search engines in XML, you can have the search engine bots automatically coming back to your site at your command, instead of having to wait up to a month to have them visit your site. The bots will come and index immediately after they have been told that you have an updated XML file. This process is called pinging. XML allows for your information to be delivered directly to the consumer’s desktop once they choose to subscribe to your XML file (in a feed reader). HTML displays data. XML describes data. Remember this statement, it is a key point. The main difference between HTML and XML is that HTML is about displaying information, while XML is about describing information.

Thursday

Building Traffic From Content

Who are you writing for?
The answer to this question is twofold. Your website copy has two audiences: people and search engines. A successful online strategy must address both of these. By writing for the search engines, you can drive traffic to your site. By writing for people, you can best present your website, service, or product, and convert these visitors into customers.

Although the tactics for targeting these two audiences differ, with a little bit of knowledge and a lot of practice, you can create website content that can:
•Help drive traffic to your site
•Sell your website, services, or product
•Increase your search engine results
•And much more!

Content for the people
Jakob Nielson heads a large body of research that has found that websites users do not read content word for word. Instead, most of people scan pages, picking out individual words and phrases.

We can use this to create content that is best suited for scanning. For example, text elements that are bold, in a different color, or displayed in lists are usually the items that grab our attention first.

We only have a few seconds to hook our users, so here are some helpful tips to make your content more success:
•Group content into small, meaningful chunks of content – one idea per paragraph
•Use highlighted headings to mark these paragraphs
•Headings should be descriptive and meaningful
•Frontload your content (use the inverted pyramid style) to start with your conclusion
•Be concise, clear, and use language that is simple and to the point (avoid jargon!)
•Use bulleted lists

Content for the spiders
Your content is targeted towards your audience. We want it to resonate with them, and provide an emotional connection. However, there is another silent audience that you must consider when creating website copy - search engine crawlers.

Search engines will bring people to your site, so with a few small tricks you can help elevate your search engine results.
•Establish the most important keyword(s) and phrases and work these into your copy
•Use the opening paragraph to summarize the page (see Inverted Pyramid bullet above)
•Pay attention to keyword density – use your keywords and phrases in different forms, but don’t repeat the same phrases too often on a single page
•Make sure your anchor text is descriptive when linking

Conclusion
Creating content for the web challenges you to write effective copy for both people and search engines. But remember that although search engines will bring traffic to the site, ultimately it is the content’s connection with the reader that will convert visitors to customers.

Wednesday

How To Get Search Engine Traffic Without SEO

Here's one traffic tip that I learned recently. And this is the next best thing to being listed on the front page for the keyword that you want. And it's cheaper than PPC too.

Here's how you do it ...

First you Google the keyword that you want. If you are selling an ebook on losing weight, you can type in the word "lose weight" in Google right now. You know how expensive that keyword is with Adwords, right?

I am not really sure but I know that it's expensive.

So the next best thing that you can do is to advertise at the websites in the search engine results for that specific keyword. You may want to negotiate a small investment first, and see how the traffic is converting.

And if the website has Adsense, you can try to look for that phrase "Advertise on this site". And here's a trick if you are going with the "Advertise on this site"

What you can do is have an ad that also calls out the name of that website. I found this website here when I typed in lose weight:

http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/loseweight/loseweight.html

So your ad can be something like:

I Love SoYouWanna.com
Lose weight at my site.com

If there's no "Advertise on this site", you can look for a link that says "Advertise" or "Advertisement", or anything like that.

And you can't find that either, and you are a portal or content site, you can even find their contact details and ask them about advertising rates.

Here's another tip ... rather than asking them their rates, you can straight away suggest a rate that you are comfortable with ... say maybe $1.50 per CPM (thousand impressions). You can say that you want to try out the first 10,000 impression before committing to a huge investment.

By the end of day, check how much traffic you are really getting, and how many sales you get. And then compare that if you were to bid for that keyword in Adwords or Overture in the first place ...

Spears Sisters Reunited



Jamie Lynn recounts the Spears sisters' first reunion since last October amidst the happy surrounding and atmosphere of her baby shower.

Tuesday

Introduction to Keyword Research

Keyword Research describes the practice of looking at what users are searching for and how they search for it on the Internet. More specifically, Keyword Research helps us understand the types of things people are trying to find, as well as the words they’re using. Using Keyword Research you can discover if “techniques turntables” are more popular than “nu mark turntables“ or if people prefer to use the word “turntable“ or “decks“ or “wheels of steel” when they’re searching for these record players. In another word Keyword Research help you to increase your link popularity.

The really cool thing about Keyword Research is that we can go beyond the basics with this information and use measures that help us find out if we should be trying to sell turntables at all. We can see how much competition we may be up against and decide if in fact we should be targeting smaller market such as turntable “slip mats” instead. So we may find ourselves a popular little niche market that has little competition – a little niche in which it will be easier for our website to be seen among the “noise” of all the other websites.

Using Keyword Research, you can actually see all the different ways that people find products like “slip mats“. While many searchers use just the basic search term, others seek more specific items such as “butter rug slip mats“. Using Keyword Research, we can tap into these kinds of hot topics. I mean unless you were in the scene, how on earth would you find out that people actually use the term “butter” and “rug“ together to describe anything at all!

Monday

5 Things To Avoid In Search Engine Optimization

When most new webmasters start building their web pages, they don’t give much of a thought to Search Engine Optimization. What does this mean? It means they could be building pages which are unfriendly to search engines. The search engines are one of the best ways to get free traffic, and to save time and hassle, there are certain things to avoid so that your site is ranked well without spending months on end trying to optimize your page.

Here are five things you must avoid to prevent getting in trouble with the search engines:

1. Never Keyword Spam

Don’t spam or hide your pages with the keyword you are attempting to target. Search engines are smarter nowadays and can smell your intentions from afar. If they think you are spamming, your site could be penalized badly in the rankings or even removed from their listings.

2. Don’t Use Frames

Websites which have frames are also unfriendly to search engines and will prevent from getting a good ranking. Try to avoid using frames whenever possible. A good tip is to add "no frames" tags between the “Head” tags.

3. Don’t Use Flash Or Javascript

If possible, refrain from using Flash or Javascript elements. These dynamic scripts don’t contain much content in terms of words and the search engines generally do not like them. If in doubt, always put content ahead of fancy graphics or effects. Besides, your visitors will love you for it.

4. Don’t Submit Your Site Too Often

A few people I know, who after finding that their site was not indexed after one week, re-submitted their site to the search engines. This is not recommended! If you do this too often, the search engines will think you are spamming.

5. Never Use Unrelated Keywords In Your Meta Tags

If you are selling sofa sets, don’t place the name of a popular person or product in your “Keywords” meta tag. Some webmasters use popular keywords in their meta tags in an attempt to attract more traffic, but this does not work, as the search engines only look at their relevance to your web page. If you sell sofas, place only words related to sofas in your meta tag.

Avoid these five pitfalls that a lot of new webmasters make, and you can prevent your site from suffering an early search engine death. After all, as the cliché goes, prevention is better than cure!

Note:
Fabian Tan is an established Internet entrepreneur who has built many online businesses. Find out how he used a popular Search Engine Optimization tool called SEO Elite to boost his search engine rankings almost overnight at SEO Elite Exposed

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Fabian_Tan

Friday

Everything About Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder, chairman, former chief software architect, and former CEO of Microsoft, the world's largest software company. Forbes magazine's list of The World's Billionaires has ranked him as the richest person in the world for the last thirteen consecutive years, and recent estimates put his net worth near $82 billion. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is widely respected by people who see his wealth as a product of intelligence and foresight, his business tactics have often been criticized as unethical or anti-competitive, and have, in some instances, been ruled as such in court. Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

In 1984, Bill Gates appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine; he has since appeared seven more times.

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a mini computer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS, and they dubbed their partnership Micro-Soft.

Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.

According to Gates, people at Microsoft often did more than one job during the early years; whoever answered the phone when an order came in was responsible for packing and mailing it. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.

Since Microsoft's founding in 1975 and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he has vigorously defended it. Many decisions that have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates' approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the definitions of words such as: compete, concerned, ask, and we. (BusinessWeek reported)

Source: Wikipedia

Thursday

What is Social Bookmarking and why should bloggers care?

What is Social Bookmarking and why should bloggers care? Good questions! It’s been around for a long time but is just now coming to the attention of the blogosphere.

Social bookmarking is the process of setting up an account on one or many of the social bookmarking sites like Technorati, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo My Web, Digg, Spurl and many others. These seem to be the most popular. Setting up an account on any of these services is quite easy because they don’t want your life story, usually just a user name and password. So - the first time you go to these sites it will take a bit longer but once your account is set up, it’s a matter of clicking to the site and bookmarking your page.

Bookmark your page? What page? You bookmark the page of your blog post that you just did. You can put keywords into the form too so others can find your post by keyword. This does two things - you get a link to your post - and we all know how important incoming links are for the search engines - and you make your URL findable by keyword for anyone who uses that social bookmarking service and searches by keyword.

Think of these sites as mini search engines. If you use any of the ‘big’ search engines to search by keyword you’ll get about a zillion returns. How do you choose? Can they all be relevant to what you want to know? Of course not. By using these social bookmarking search engines, the results will nearly always be relevant if the poster picks good keywords and there won’t be a zillion returns.

How can you leverage the use of social bookmarking sites? Easy - there are plug-ins available for most blog platforms that allow you to put a line of social bookmarking sites across the bottom of each post. All your reader has to do is click on the icon for the site of his choice and bookmark that post in his own account. Presto - another incoming link to increase your pagerank.

If you are a blogger, there is really no easier way to get incoming links and get noticed by the search engines. Give it a try!

Note:
Cathy Perkins is an author, blogger, and WordPress expert who lives in the beautiful foothills of North Carolina. Watch as she builds her site, http://www.wordpressguru.com from the ground up. You will learn all you ever wanted to know about WordPress and more. Sign up for the WordPress Guru newsletter while you are there.

Wednesday

Traffic From Google Adwords - Is it worth it?

Some people would like to use Google Adwords to bring traffic and to boost their sales. But I still think getting traffic from the natural means is the best quality traffic you can get. The key here is the content network.

If you really go for Adwords, for example you want to sell computer parts, you want your ads to appear on Cnet - not home shopping network. Also, you have to keep in mind your profit margins on the product/service you're selling. You may be able to sell a ton of pc parts, but if you are only breaking even, it doesn't make sense to continue on that path. While you may only find a few margin items, those are the ones to focus on first, so that you are generating revenue while determining the best strategy to go after new phrases. Your sells and success also depends upon the relevancy of traffic you are getting and the source from which you are getting it.

Adwords is the main key source of click fraud for PPC. But if you're not averse to taking a risk, content traffic will be cheaper. It all depends on your topic and your site. I have some sites that thrive because of content clicks while other areas they are just a waste of money... so it really depends on what type of site that you have.

It also depends on just how targeted the traffic is. You can find many top ranking websites still making thousands of dollars from Adsense and other contextual advertising because on some very hot websites, real buyers are searching for the products. While in some cases, even having a number one ranking may not help.

For example, If you are just visiting the GameSpot website and a nice ad grabs your attention about the XBox, you might even click and go further to discover, and might finally buy it even if some other websites selling this item is at no.1 rank in Google, but have you visited them? No, so highly targeted advertising in some cases can bring many new orders and customers.

Besides the click fraud on PPCs, do you believe that many people click the ads just for fun! This is not very helpful for you to bring sales in fact it is just wasting time and money. I would rather buy links on high trafficked sites which will definitely drive in a lot of traffic to my sites.

Tuesday

SEO Issues

Search engine optimization (SEO) is considered by many to be a subset of search engine marketing, it is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a website from search engines, usually in "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Those efforts may also be seen in more narrow vertical search engines involving areas such as local search.

Many site owners and consultants engaging in SEO attempt to pursue qualified visitors to a site, and the quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword phrase leads to a desired conversation action, such as making a purchase, viewing or downloading a certain page, requesting information, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some specific action.

Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page or URL to various engines which would send a spider to "crawl" that page, extract link to other pages from it, and return information found on the paged to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program known as and indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words as well as any and all links the page contains, which then are placed to a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

There are many SEO techniques. In general techniques can be categorized as On-Page Optimization, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Site Optimization. The method employed by SEOs are divided into categories also referred as the two schools of CEO: white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

White hat SEOs are those that play by the rule. Black hat CEOs are those that push the limit of SEOs and employ some questionable or prohibited techniques. These black hat SEO techniques are also commonly known as spam.

White hatters charge that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search ranking unfairly. Black hatter counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant.

So many people equate SEO with used car salesmen or scam artists. Why does this reputation persist? There are a few "bad apples" in every field, it seems that this whole industry has been flagged as such.

I personally know some great people who are SEOs and do their best everyday to help people make money and do better in search results. All SEOs can't be evil, can they?

Saturday

Why Search Engines Like Blogs

The rules that the Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN have established are there for a reason. Relevant fresh content is what they want to deliver to their users. A Blog is freshly updated, relevant content. Most web pages are static and rarely change. This makes them possibly old, outdated or non-relevant.

Search engine spiders read and index and update content regularly. A Blog produces an organic output call a feed. This feed may be in several formats such as: RSS, XML, Atom, and OPML. Feeds are in a language called XML. Search engines know that if you are presenting information in XML format it is most likely because that content will be changing on a regular basis. A search engines motivation for spidering the XML feeds is to find new content. XML is very search engine spider friendly for a variety of reasons.

There are some basic rules that you need to follow in order to keep your Blog on track and have the content get indexed by the search engines. The search engines also have an algorithm that looks at how frequently a XML feed is updated. They know when the feed was last updated. Based upon how frequently the feed is updated determines how often the search engines come back and index the feed and its content.

For example if the feed is updated 3 times a week it begins to form a sort of history with the search engines. They know the feed is updated on a regular basis and will come back to look for changes on their own. Conversely, if the feed is not updated but 1 time a month, the search engines will come back on a much less frequent basis. The lesson here is that the more frequently you post, the more likely the search engines will come back and index your Blog.

The following items are important to achieving improved online visibility with your Blog and to increase traffic.

- Blog Posting Velocity
- RSS Feed Validity
- Keyword Tagging
- Properly titled posts that are keyword specific
- Proper submission to the RSS & Feed Directories
- Proper pinging to notify directories of new Blog content updates
- Feed provided in multiple formats such as RSS, XML, Atom, OPML

Achieving increased online visibility for your content and business is a major reason to create and maintain a Blog for your business. Creating visibility for your Blog with the search engines is very important. Additionally you can increase the visibility by having your Blog visible in RSS, Blog Directories, Tagging Sites, and Ping Servers as well. Most people don’t realize that the major search engines also regularly index and follow links to Blogs that are listed in these directory & services.

It would be to your benefit to ensure that you create the largest online visibility cloud.

Friday

Blog Your Way To Success

An internet search reveals the rapid growth in online blogging - web and marketing consultants, politicians, journalists, media companies, authors, academics and students are all heavily into blogs (or web logs - online diaries). But it is difficult to find small firms that blog outside of those in the internet and media industries.

While chief executives of many US giants - such as GM and Sun - blog regularly, it remains unusual for a British company to have a blog. Recent research found only two FTSE 100 companies running blogs. This reluctance is backed-up by a survey published in September 2006 by web hosting company Fasthosts, which found only 3 per cent of UK SMEs intending to start blogs. This is despite there being 54 million blogs on the web, with another 75,000 created daily.

GRS Sign Company - which produces commercial signs - is therefore unusual. It started its blog in June. "It allows us to talk among ourselves, about our business," says Richard Dows, a signwriter at GRS with responsibility for its web, having previously been a web designer. The target audience is "anyone who reads blogs," he says.

With larger companies, blogs may be aimed at staff as a better system for employee communication than posters stuck on a wall. They also have the benefWhat is more, technological developments will increasingly favour blogs. There is a strong move to RSS - a form of data feed, sometimes called Really Simple Syndication - through which each new blog will automatically be e-mailed to all people who have registered for updates. This will provide a much cheaper system for sending information to customers and other stakeholders than through a newsletter or other mailing, and will be more reliable and less time-consuming than e-mails.

RSS could be the spark that ignites blogging as a real commercial force in Britain. But before starting, firms should remember that blogs come with risks as well as potential rewards. Libel can be committed online, as can copyright theft. If staff are permitted to lodge their own comments, these need to be carefully monitored for such things as inadvertent disclosure of trade secrets. And blogs should be moderated. One of the most positive aspects of blogs is to find out what customers say about you and your products - but you need to carefully observe these comments and you may not even want them to be posted if they are too critical.

Dune

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

~Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear