So this is the dilemma, we all love to see comments on our blog posts. If you are saying you don’t then I don’t think you are being completely honest either with us or yourself. The reason is pretty obvious, blog comments mean attention, interaction with an audience and evidence that you are getting traffic to your blog.
The temptation then is to accept any old rubbish that is placed in your blog comments box and leave it in place. Looks good if every post you have published is showing multiples of comments; or does it? There are problems with allowing comment spam to sit on your blog posts.
The first obvious one is that they drown out the real comments by real people that are actually trying to interact with you and establish a sensible dialogue on the subject being discussed. Anyone visiting your blog and finding the comments filled up with comment spam are highly likely to assess you as someone who doesn’t care about their visitors or have a real interest in discussing the topic content. End result of that type of conclusion is that they leave your site never to return and all the hard work you put in getting them to read your post in the first place is completely wasted.
There are many people on the Internet who claim to have expertise in SEO Search engine optimization. They range from self-proclaimed gurus, some of which, to be fair, that have taken the time to learn their trade, to people who may have only just started publishing on the Internet and actually have very little experience in promoting websites or blogs.
Many of the SEO techniques that actually work are available on the Internet totally free. You do of course have to find them and somehow you have to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, and to focus in on the techniques that work versus the ones that are absolutely wrong. This process can be extraordinarily time consuming and burn up hours of your precious time.
Sorry about that, but I needed to get your attention and being downright rude is just one of the ways of doing it. Of course there are other much nicer ways but if you are reading this then it did the trick this time and makes my point. I once saw a sign outside a public house in the UK that said ‘filthy ale and awful food’ everyone welcome. You just know that at some point you are going to have to go in and find out what its all about and whether the sign is true or just a very clever marketing ploy.
Well blogging is about clever marketing as well, without marketing your blog in a way that people actually take the time to stop and read it you are never going to convey to them that you actually know what you are talking about or give them the chance to find out that you are actually producing some great content worth reading i.e. you know how to write a good blog post.
Assuming that your main objective is to gain readership for your blog then writing a good blog post is all about 3 things: Read the rest of this entry »
It happens to us all at some time, negative thinking starts to creep into your psyche. Perhaps you aren’t getting the success you were looking for quickly enough, the money isn’t coming in as fast as you would like, the traffic statistics don’t look good enough or you simply struggle to find ideas for a post. That’s when it starts, you begin to wonder if its worth the effort, or if anyone is actually interested in what you are writing about. You may even start to doubt that what you are writing is of a high enough quality.
What you need to know is that negative thinking causes self defeating behavior and before you know it those negative feelings can send you on a downward spiral that can paralyze your thought processes. If you let it get bad enough or let yourself sink deep enough into the negative thinking, then before you know it you will be adding yourself to a long list of failed Internet marketers.
So what can you do about it how can you stop that negative thinking and find a way of overcoming self defeating behavior of the type that ultimately results in you giving up on your dreams and ambitions.
Link exchanging certainly can be a bit of a nightmare, I found this Link Exchange Scams explained site when someone tried to scam me with a fake PR. I couldn’t understand how someone was showing a PR6 when they were not even Google indexed. Hence my search and my arrival on this site. Clearly I am into SEO but had not stumbled across this scam before.
Basically what happens is that you get invited to link to a site in return for a link back to your site from a very high PR site. Looks great PR is showing to be genuine and you may be tempted to skip the usual checks. But as the site I found explains, the page rank has been hijacked from another source, and there are various means for doing this.
Bottom line is the scammer gets a good link back to them from a site with genuine page rank and you get a link back from a fake site that is likely to have its page rank disappear overnight, and is not Google indexed anyway. So anyone looking for that page in Google will not find it, and effectively the link is completely worthless.
There are many ways to use Google search to find information, but a dedicated blogger needs to know which ones are likely to help him get the information he needs.
For basic tips and tricks using Google the Google’s tips and tricks pdf is as good a place to start as anywhere. But I was a bit surprised to find how little it actually tells you, OK it shows you how to find exact phrases, how to screen out unwanted results using a – symbol and a few other helpful modifiers. But if you are blogging and looking for ways to suss out the competition and find long tailed keywords that are highly audience targeted, then it doesn’t really help. So if you want some Google search tips and tricks that might help, then read on.
The Google Traffic Estimator keyword tool is a tool that Google uses to display how many search enquiries have been made on a month by month basis for a particular search term (keyword or keyword phrase). Strictly speaking it is not a traffic estimator as it actually presents data collected from the previous month based on actual enquiries put into the search engine. It is fairly clear though that by using actual data collected on a month by month basis you can in fact make reasonable assumptions as to the popularity of particular keyword or keyword phrase and then of course use that data as a traffic estimator.
Google Buzz is the big story after its launch last week. If you choose to use it, then it links in automatically to other services such as Picasa, Google Reader, Twitter and Flickr. Lots of nice features and of course another option to place links back to your websites or blogs of interest. Although to be honest there are already plenty of options for doing that via the share icon below; which as I write is not currently offering Google Buzz. Pretty sure it won’t be long before it does though.
In my last post we discussed various ways of working from home and touched on the subject of direct sales. This is where you offer a product for sale yourself rather than through an affiliate relationship where in fact you are marketing a 3rd party product sale.
In order to be able to sell directly you will nearly always need a means of accepting online card payments if you are going to operate effectively. The vast majority of people who purchase online like to make online payments, it is a part of the whole convenience package that they are being offered. If having offered a product online, you then advise your customer that they need to make an offline payment you might find in a lot of cases that they will not proceed with the purchase.
I have to qualify that statement however by saying this is the case for the vast majority of products, but not all, and at the end of the day you will need to rationalise what is the best method of payment i.e. an offline payment option, offline combined with online, or a combination of online payment options. To maximise your chances of making a sale it is a good idea to have at least 2 ways people can make a payment.
The term working from home conjures up for many people an image of sitting at the kitchen table pushing leaflets into envelopes by the hundred and getting paid a pittance for the privilege.
But is working from home, stuffing envelopes? Not if you have a PC and access to the Internet, and that is very simply because of the exponential growth of the world wide web, the speed at which you can now access the Internet and the sheer volume of people that use the Internet both for access to information and to make purchases of pretty much every product imaginable. Companies like eBay and Amazon have paved the way to selling online and the trend for online shopping continues to grow exponentially.
Virtually every high street store now offers their products over the Internet and virtually every product that is offered is open to marketing by what are called affiliates. Simply having that computer available and access to the Internet gives you an opportunity to utilise the power of the Internet to create either a part or full time occupation. Becoming an affiliate is one of a number of ways for working from home and making money online.
3 Simple ways of earning online: Read the rest of this entry »
