Saturday, 24 May 2014
Monday, 19 May 2014
ECB's Mersch: Likelihood of action at June meeting has grown substantially
- Governing council unanimous in willingness to deploy conventional and unconventional tools to counter risks of very low inflation over a prolonged period of time
- No signs of deflation but must be prepared for deflation risks
- Too long period of too low inflation risks unmooring inflation expectations
- Securitization markets should be revived; global initiative would be
desirable but it would be appropriate for Europe to go it alone.
EUR/USD dipped toward 1.3700 briefly before returning to the high 1.37-teens.
Nothing we haven't heard before, but it does increase the odds of a June cut, if that is possible since a move is almost certain at this juncture.
US Housing Starts and Population
Housing starts are the best barometer for the construction industry's
contribution to national economic activity. When the industry's
recent... read more
Monday, 12 May 2014
How To Create A Profitable Blog
www.addmefast.com
Would You Like to Start a Blog (Website) that Makes a Difference in People’s Lives and Makes Money?
Keep
Reading to Find Out How I Will Set Up Your Very Own Blog (Website) for
FREE! Look for my “FREE OFFER” Below In Step 3!
A blog can be a wonderful platform to build a business around, the kind of flexible business you can run on your terms from anywhere in the world.
So many people, just like you, are finding that blogging is a profitable medium.
Whether you want to earn a few extra dollars a week to feed your Starbucks habit, earn some part-time cash to pay some extra bills, or maybe you’d like to get to a point where you are able to make a full time living from your Blogging – there are tens of thousands of bloggers who make money blogging! And you can too!
Dear Friend:
I got started almost a decade ago with my 6-Figure Woman blog
and I now earn a living from multiple streams of online income as a
result! That’s right! No job, no boss, no commute, no
stress!
When you’ve followed the steps here, you’ll be on your way to a better life… more money… and more FREE time to spend it all.
Nicky
Leonti, an early childhood teacher from Australia, has always wanted to
start a blog “Tiny Chefs”, which is a unique and
engaging Gardening & Cooking Program for the Early Years
Classroom.
Nicky followed the steps below, and in one evening I created her Blog for FREE! Now Nicky is on her way to building a Blog that makes a difference & makes money! Nicky has made several changes to her blog as it evolves as she does. To take a look at Nicky’s new blog, go to:http://tinychefs.com.au/
You just need 3 things to be seen and get found on the web, and those are:
STEP 1: Write a Tagline for your new Blog. It’s critically important that you service a need of a group of people who use the Internet to meet that need.
Write a 1 sentence tagline about your blog and be able to recite it by memory.
Having a clearly defined purpose for your blog from day 1 is paramount
to your success. Before you do anything, I want you to answer
these 2 questions: Who is my ideal audience? What problem is my blog going to solve for them? Don’t over think this. It’s very simple. You want to create a blog that fulfills a real need and solves a real problem.
You also want to personalize your blog with YOU and let people know why
you are the perfect person to help them solve their problems.
Once you have the 1 sentence tagline for your blog, memorize it and be
able to recite it verbatim when someone asks “So what’s your Blog about?”
Here are a few examples of taglines from real blogs I’ve come across:
Personally, I have used Bluehost for many years and can’t say enough about how wonderful the company is. They have top of the line customer service and hosting. I even have a discounted link you can use at Bluehost.
Disclaimer: I do earn a commission if you choose to go with Bluehost as your host for your new Blog. There are many other hosting companies available, but this is my personal recommendation based on what I use to run my online business as well as all of my clients’ websites and blogs. I want to thank you in advance if you do purchase through my affiliate link!
Let’s say I want to write a blog post about “starting a blog“. First, I would go to Google’s Keyword Planner (FREE) and I would type in “Start a Blog“; next I would get a list of dozens of keyword phrases that show the number of searches per month globally and locally for those keyword phrases.
For this example, I decide to go with “How to Start a Blog and Make Money” because longer keyword phrases are better than shorter, broader ones. For example, there are 200,000 searches per month for “start blog” which means my site would get lost in those numbers and people most likely wouldn’t find this article and my site. So I decide to go with “How to Start a Blog and Make Money” which has only 2,400 searches per month. Less is more and I would rather have this targeted traffic to my site.
So start writing blog posts that not only give unique and well written information, but that helps your audience solve their problems! And remember, in order to be successful and to drive traffic to your blog, you must write on a regular, consistent basis!

Sign up below to get a copy of my Special Report: “Top 10 Ways to Make Money Online with Your Website/Blog”:
In summary, these are the steps you are going to take to Build a Successful Blog:
*Affiliate Disclaimer
In an effort to be completely transparent, we want to let you know that we have an affiliate relationship with some of the companies whose products or services we recommend. This means that, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a commission or credit if you decide to buy any of their products or services. This is one of the ways we pay for maintaining this site and providing valuable information to everyone. Just to be safe, you can assume that any link that you click while on our site or using any of our products is an affiliate link and we will earn compensation as a result. We urge you to not spend any money on any of these products or services unless you really need them.
Start a Blog for Free and Make Money
Would You Like to Start a Blog (Website) that Makes a Difference in People’s Lives and Makes Money?
Keep
Reading to Find Out How I Will Set Up Your Very Own Blog (Website) for
FREE! Look for my “FREE OFFER” Below In Step 3!A blog can be a wonderful platform to build a business around, the kind of flexible business you can run on your terms from anywhere in the world.
So many people, just like you, are finding that blogging is a profitable medium.
Whether you want to earn a few extra dollars a week to feed your Starbucks habit, earn some part-time cash to pay some extra bills, or maybe you’d like to get to a point where you are able to make a full time living from your Blogging – there are tens of thousands of bloggers who make money blogging! And you can too!
Dear Friend:
I got started almost a decade ago with my 6-Figure Woman blog
and I now earn a living from multiple streams of online income as a
result! That’s right! No job, no boss, no commute, no
stress!Why Do You Want to Start a Blog?
- Fame
- Fortune
- Fun
- Freedom
How to Start a Blog for Free and Make Money in 6 Easy Steps
Making money online is easy if you stick with it (commit) and follow my lead. I’m going to take you step-by-step, and walk you through the easiest way I know to get your BLOG up and running TODAY!When you’ve followed the steps here, you’ll be on your way to a better life… more money… and more FREE time to spend it all.
Let’s take a look at someone who followed the steps on this page, and got their FREE Blog up and running in one evening…
Nicky
Leonti, an early childhood teacher from Australia, has always wanted to
start a blog “Tiny Chefs”, which is a unique and
engaging Gardening & Cooking Program for the Early Years
Classroom.Nicky followed the steps below, and in one evening I created her Blog for FREE! Now Nicky is on her way to building a Blog that makes a difference & makes money! Nicky has made several changes to her blog as it evolves as she does. To take a look at Nicky’s new blog, go to:http://tinychefs.com.au/
So here’s a little BLOG 101…
First of all…a website and a blog are basically the same thing and many people call a website a blog and a blog a website. The main difference is that you can put up a website and not include a blog on it. All of my Blogs/Websites run on a open source software called WordPress which is used by over millions of other people all over the world!You just need 3 things to be seen and get found on the web, and those are:
- A Domain Name. The website address that people go to in order to find you. For example, my domain name is www.becomea6figurewoman.com
- Web Hosting. This is required to host your website on the internet so that people can visit it. *You can purchase your domain name and hosting at the same company. (See Steps 2 and 3 Below for my personal recommendations)
- WordPress. This is what will help you run your website, this free software will allow you to add, edit and delete pages and posts on your website. You can easily customize it with a free or paid theme (see my offer below under Steps 2 and 3 for a FREE install). You also can customize it with plugins.
These are the 6 Steps for you to Start A Blog and to Start Making Money:
STEP 1: Write a Tagline for your new Blog. It’s critically important that you service a need of a group of people who use the Internet to meet that need.
Write a 1 sentence tagline about your blog and be able to recite it by memory.
Having a clearly defined purpose for your blog from day 1 is paramount
to your success. Before you do anything, I want you to answer
these 2 questions: Who is my ideal audience? What problem is my blog going to solve for them? Don’t over think this. It’s very simple. You want to create a blog that fulfills a real need and solves a real problem.
You also want to personalize your blog with YOU and let people know why
you are the perfect person to help them solve their problems.
Once you have the 1 sentence tagline for your blog, memorize it and be
able to recite it verbatim when someone asks “So what’s your Blog about?”Here are a few examples of taglines from real blogs I’ve come across:
- http://www.bakeorbreak.com/ “Adventures of an Amateur Baker“;
- http://www.home-ec101.com/ “Skills for Everyday Living”;
- http://whatwouldanerdwear.blogspot.com/ “An Archive of a Grad Student Style”;
- http://www.nomadicmatt.com/ “Travel Better, Cheaper, Longer”;
- http://becomea6figurewoman.com/ “Where Smart Women Come to Learn How to Make Money Online”.
STEP 2: Decide on Your Domain Name (**purchase it with your hosting package in Step 3).
There are a couple of schools of thought on selecting a domain name for your blog. One is to include the “keyword” that people would be searching for on Google to find you and the other is not to focus on keywords, but on a more descriptive name that may be cute, clever, endearing, fun, funny, etc. It’s really up to you. There are many successful blogs that have the keywords in the domain name and many that don’t. Just make sure that when you say the domain name it’s not too hard for the average person to understand what it means. For example, my blog is “Become a 6-Figure Woman” and when I say that I don’t need to explain it. People get it. Or one of my favorites is Yaro Starek’s blog: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/ And Yaro has a great tagline on his blog which is “Down to Earth Tips and Advice for Internet Entrepreneurs”! Simple and easily understood.STEP 3: Get Your Own Hosting for Your Blog
I highly recommend you have your own domain and hosting for your Blog. The “hosting” account is simply where your blog resides. There are “FREE” ways to put up a blog, but I don’t recommend them and here’s why:- When you create your blog with one of these FREE blog sites, they always include extra wording in the domain name that makes it sound “unprofessional”. For example, if I created the Become a 6-Figure Woman blog on Blogspot, the web address would be http://becomea6figurewoman.blogspot.com/ instead of http://www.becomea6figurewoman.com
- You aren’t able to advertise on many of these sites (ie., make money) and you are limited to what you can do as far as really customizing and personalizing the site.
Personally, I have used Bluehost for many years and can’t say enough about how wonderful the company is. They have top of the line customer service and hosting. I even have a discounted link you can use at Bluehost.
FREE OFFER…
***As a “thank you” for using my Bluehost link , if you email me your Bluehost receipt, then I will Install WordPress on your site and will also Install 1 free “CHILD THEME” install from Builder Ithemes. The license I have costs me $297/year, so you are getting a professional paid theme for FREE! Here are the choices of “child themes” from Builder for your new Blog: ITHEMES Just pick one and I’ll install it for FREE on your new site!Disclaimer: I do earn a commission if you choose to go with Bluehost as your host for your new Blog. There are many other hosting companies available, but this is my personal recommendation based on what I use to run my online business as well as all of my clients’ websites and blogs. I want to thank you in advance if you do purchase through my affiliate link!
STEP 4: Installing WordPress on Your New Blog
WordPress is awesome! I used to have a very old, outdated HTML site that didn’t get much traffic and then I switched to WordPress and I doubled my traffic and my income! WordPress is free to install and then you can customize it with a “theme” (paid or free) and by adding what are called “plug-ins”. When you use my Bluehost link above, I’ll install WordPress (and the paid theme of your choice as noted above), then I will also email you the top 10+ Plugins I use on all of my sites. NOTE: In my heart-centered online business package, I charge clients $1,497 for a fully designed, written and optimized website. **So, you are getting the set-up here for FREE! Now I won’t be installing the plugins for you or writing the content, but it’s very simple for you to do yourself; and will save you lots of money!STEP 5: Start Writing Strategic/Keyword-Rich Blog Posts
Since your blog is new, you really need to start driving traffic to it right away. As an amateur, you would probably just pick out some titles and subjects and start writing random blog posts for your new site. I want you to do what the Professionals do and research the proper keywords BEFORE you write your blog posts.Let’s say I want to write a blog post about “starting a blog“. First, I would go to Google’s Keyword Planner (FREE) and I would type in “Start a Blog“; next I would get a list of dozens of keyword phrases that show the number of searches per month globally and locally for those keyword phrases.
For this example, I decide to go with “How to Start a Blog and Make Money” because longer keyword phrases are better than shorter, broader ones. For example, there are 200,000 searches per month for “start blog” which means my site would get lost in those numbers and people most likely wouldn’t find this article and my site. So I decide to go with “How to Start a Blog and Make Money” which has only 2,400 searches per month. Less is more and I would rather have this targeted traffic to my site.
So start writing blog posts that not only give unique and well written information, but that helps your audience solve their problems! And remember, in order to be successful and to drive traffic to your blog, you must write on a regular, consistent basis!
STEP 6: Create An Income Strategy For Your New Blog, here are my Top 10 Ways to Make Money with Your blog/website:
I actually created a Special Report so you can download this right to your computer and access it anytime.
Sign up below to get a copy of my Special Report: “Top 10 Ways to Make Money Online with Your Website/Blog”:
In summary, these are the steps you are going to take to Build a Successful Blog:- Find out where there is a need in the market and learn how people currently search online for answers to that need. (Step 1 above)
- Build a Blog/Website that helps people solve their problem and meets their need. (Steps 2, 3, & 4 above)
- Consistently Provide Relevant Content that helps them solve their needs. (Step 5 above)
- Drive traffic to your website and convince a portion of those visitors to join your email newsletter. (Covered in Special Report)
- Start making money from the audience you build using advertising, affiliate marketing and selling your own products. (Covered in Special Report)
- Automate the entire process so you don’t have to work long hours to keep it going. (Covered in Special Report).
*Affiliate Disclaimer
In an effort to be completely transparent, we want to let you know that we have an affiliate relationship with some of the companies whose products or services we recommend. This means that, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a commission or credit if you decide to buy any of their products or services. This is one of the ways we pay for maintaining this site and providing valuable information to everyone. Just to be safe, you can assume that any link that you click while on our site or using any of our products is an affiliate link and we will earn compensation as a result. We urge you to not spend any money on any of these products or services unless you really need them.
Latest news
Retail positioning data and the FXstreet's Forecast Poll reflect the
belief that the euro trend remains powerful and its current sell-off is
lacking fundamental depth. From a pure chartist perspective, the market
reacted on the 1.40 psycho level which will act now as a big attractor.
USDJPY downward pressure building
USD/JPY is trading at 102.15, up 0.29% on the day, having posted a daily high at 102.18 and low at...USD/JPY is still trading comfortably within its 3-session range and its broader 3-month 101.20 to 1.0413 range.
Latest news
GBP/JPY rises back above 172.00
FXStreet | Mon, May 12 2014, 18:32
United States Monthly Budget Statement came in at $106.9B disappointing expectations ($114B) in April
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
: Boko Haram abducted 11 more Girls and killed about...
Boko Haram abducted 11 more Girls and killed about...: Boko Haram abducted 11 more Girls and killed about 300 people in Gamboru Ngala, Borno State. IN another daring operation, members of the ...
Wednesday, 23 April 2014
starting a blog for income
When I created my first blog, I was able
to earn over $5000 in my very first month because I provided value. It
was quite simple really, I found a problem on the Internet, I provided
the solution on my blog and then I monetized it with affiliate offers.
Most bloggers will tell you to blog about your passion, this is wrong, you should blog about a Profitable Passion or interest you have. If it was just simply your passion, I would be blogging about something rediculous. Instead I blogged about web design because that is what I enjoyed and knew I could make money from. To give you a good idea of what niches make money, go to ClickBank and click Marketplace and any category they have, are niches that people are selling things in, for example, gaming, health, fitness, design, marketing etc.
There is no hard and fast rules to your choice of domain . The conventional rule is to use a keyword in your domain. For instance, if you write about pets, your choice of domain name should probably include keyphrases such as “pets”, “dog” or “cat”.
However, keep in mind that most good domain names has long been taken so a combination of two or more keywords is recommended here. When working on finding a new domain I use a great FREE tool called Instant Domain Search which will straight away tell you as you type each character if the domain is taken. I currently register all my domain names with GoDaddy which is a very popular service among most website owners.
Once you’ve registered a domain name you can call your own, the next course of action is buy yourself a reliable hosting provider. We have partnered with one of the best and most reputable hosting provider in the industry – HostGator which gives you the right hosting package with superb support system at the most affordable price.
What comes next is to point your domain to HostGator of which the whole process is actually quite simple and takes only a minute to do.
For the sake of simplicity, please refer to How to Change Your DNS to HostGator.
Installing WordPress isn’t as difficult as what other make you think otherwise. A neat little script called Fantastico makes setting up a blog as simple as pie. No real technical knowledge of required.
If you think installing WordPress is only for the technical savvy, let me share you “How to Install Your Blog using Fantastico the Easy Way” Anonymity is the privilege and the fun part of blogging. But your readers deserves the right to know who is talking to them and whom they will be talking to. In such an impersonal world of blogging, a little introduction about you makes it more personal and improve your credibility as a blogger. What you want to reveal is really up to you but just don’t hide behind the mask of your blog.
I’m subscribed to the notion that “First Impression Counts”. If you can’t convince your visitors to stay engaged in the first one minute or so, you’ll probably not gonna be seeing them again.
Personally, we use a Wootheme for a few of our sites, they have FREE and Paid Themes, obviously the paid ones are better, setting you back $70 for two themes. We personally use the Headlines Theme for this site and BusyBee for IncomeDiary.com.Installing your theme is easy, once you have downloaded it from Woothemes, go to your WordPress Admin, click Themes > Upload > Upload Zip File and Activate!
What is a plug-in? In layman term, it’s an external code that add a specific function to expand the functionality of your blog. With plug-ins, you can practically do almost anything you can imagine to your blog. Though WordPress works right out of the box, a plug-in help to optimize your blog and it’s for this very reason, WordPress has been the preferred choice of blogging platform for most bloggers. Due to a plethora of plugins, it’s also important to keep in mind that your choice plug-ins should be ones that best serve your blogging needs. Here’s a checklist of 10 post-install plugins you ought to install right after the initial setup. I can’t say enough how indispensable tools like Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to track the performance of your blog. While the core functions of both tools are primarily to improve your SERP (aka: Search Engine Results Position). Each has its own specific uses you can’t do without. If you don’t please Google
Despite what you are blogging for, your ultimate goal of everything you do is to drive traffic to your site and convince your visitors to subscribe (read: follow) your blog. The most common approach to facilitate the process is to register your blog with Feedburner which is a 3rd party application designed to easily manage your RSS subscription and simplify the process of subscribing with just “one easy click”.
Nothing can be any easier than that. However, from my own personal blogging experience, you also need to take into account the non-techy visitors who are know little about RSS. Hence an alternative in the form of email subscription may be a good complimentary option. Most internet markets choose to use a service called Aweber so they can have full controle over their email list. Unless you are getting the right premium themes from reputable theme developer i.e. Thesis [insert your affiliate link] theme, some of the code of those freely available themes may not be compatible across major browsers, IE in particular. In fact, why 50% of users are still on IE is still beyond me. A nifty online tool – IE NetRenderer allows you to check how your site is viewed by Internet Explorer 8, 7, 6 or 5.5 and it’s completely free!
Despite what others think that it’s no longer necessary, personally I think submitting your blog to Google index is still worth the effort. Google is indexing and updating billion of pages every day, a little knock at its door does not do your blog any harm, does it? After all, what have you got to lose to submit your site that will only take less than a minute. Here’s where you can do it.
More often that not, this one of the most important yet overlooked to-do-list right after the initial bog setup. If it’s isn’t in your post install checklist yet, I can begin to say enough that ignoring it has detrimental effect to your search engine visibility. Here I’m referring to your choice of post title. A careful choice of title with the proper keyword research is part and parcel of your SEO (aka; search engine optimization) effort. Speaking of which, not only you should write for both search engine and more important, your readers.
Basically, your post title is what your readers will see while the blog title is what the search engines robots view. Basically the purpose of creating a robots.txt file is to improve site indexation by telling search engine crawler to only index your content pages and to ignore other pages (i.e. monthly archives, categories folders or your admin files) that you do not want them to appear on the search index lest it leads to the problem of duplicate content. In layman term, it means that you can’t have two or more pages with the same content words for words. Google will just ignore the duplicate contents and not list them in the index. If your blog is new, the last thing you’ll ever need is not to be in Google whitelist, so to speak.
While Robots.txt instructs search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, a Sitemap tells search engines where you’d like them to go. From a search engine perspective, sitemap is useful for better and faster indexing while a plain HTML sitemap with the use of plug-in provides ease of navigation for your visitors.
With that being said above, the next best option is learn and explore the art of affiliate marketing. In simple term, affiliate marketing is about promoting someone’s else products where you’ll be paid for every referral sale. Depending on the products, you are referring, the referral commission can be as high as a few hundred dollars. If you are looking for products and eBooks to sell on commission I would recommended Clickbank and Amazon Associates Program. To touch upon what I’ve mentioned above earlier, if writing is in your blood and copywriting is your forte, doing a review for someone else’s product or services can be one lucrative source of income. All you need to do is to write an honest review and offer constructive criticism and you’ll get paid for it. Now those of you who have the skills for say, design, coding or copywriting for that matter, I’d recommend to learn how to leverage your blog to showcase your portfolios. I’ve seen how others are successful using their blog to sell their service and earn a decent income out of it. One notable example of this Jacob Class . Last but not the least, though it’s one method I’m not advocating when your blog is new is private advertising where usually advertisers are willing to buy an ad space on your blog. However advertisers are smart of investors who are only willing to spend the kind of money in a blog with a decent traffic and certain rankings. There are various metrics advertisers are concerned about, among them are the no. of your subscribers, PageRank, traffic stats and just to name a few. If you don’t have any of those yet, this option is certainly one that you shouldn’t think about in the beginning. Instead first focus on building traffic and social networking and advertising opportunities comes naturally thereafter. However if you do have traffic you should definitly get the OIOpublisher plugin which allows you to quickly and easily sell private advertising on your blog.
Most bloggers will tell you to blog about your passion, this is wrong, you should blog about a Profitable Passion or interest you have. If it was just simply your passion, I would be blogging about something rediculous. Instead I blogged about web design because that is what I enjoyed and knew I could make money from. To give you a good idea of what niches make money, go to ClickBank and click Marketplace and any category they have, are niches that people are selling things in, for example, gaming, health, fitness, design, marketing etc.
There is no hard and fast rules to your choice of domain . The conventional rule is to use a keyword in your domain. For instance, if you write about pets, your choice of domain name should probably include keyphrases such as “pets”, “dog” or “cat”.
However, keep in mind that most good domain names has long been taken so a combination of two or more keywords is recommended here. When working on finding a new domain I use a great FREE tool called Instant Domain Search which will straight away tell you as you type each character if the domain is taken. I currently register all my domain names with GoDaddy which is a very popular service among most website owners.
Once you’ve registered a domain name you can call your own, the next course of action is buy yourself a reliable hosting provider. We have partnered with one of the best and most reputable hosting provider in the industry – HostGator which gives you the right hosting package with superb support system at the most affordable price.
What comes next is to point your domain to HostGator of which the whole process is actually quite simple and takes only a minute to do.
For the sake of simplicity, please refer to How to Change Your DNS to HostGator.
Installing WordPress isn’t as difficult as what other make you think otherwise. A neat little script called Fantastico makes setting up a blog as simple as pie. No real technical knowledge of required.
If you think installing WordPress is only for the technical savvy, let me share you “How to Install Your Blog using Fantastico the Easy Way” Anonymity is the privilege and the fun part of blogging. But your readers deserves the right to know who is talking to them and whom they will be talking to. In such an impersonal world of blogging, a little introduction about you makes it more personal and improve your credibility as a blogger. What you want to reveal is really up to you but just don’t hide behind the mask of your blog.
I’m subscribed to the notion that “First Impression Counts”. If you can’t convince your visitors to stay engaged in the first one minute or so, you’ll probably not gonna be seeing them again.
Personally, we use a Wootheme for a few of our sites, they have FREE and Paid Themes, obviously the paid ones are better, setting you back $70 for two themes. We personally use the Headlines Theme for this site and BusyBee for IncomeDiary.com.Installing your theme is easy, once you have downloaded it from Woothemes, go to your WordPress Admin, click Themes > Upload > Upload Zip File and Activate!
What is a plug-in? In layman term, it’s an external code that add a specific function to expand the functionality of your blog. With plug-ins, you can practically do almost anything you can imagine to your blog. Though WordPress works right out of the box, a plug-in help to optimize your blog and it’s for this very reason, WordPress has been the preferred choice of blogging platform for most bloggers. Due to a plethora of plugins, it’s also important to keep in mind that your choice plug-ins should be ones that best serve your blogging needs. Here’s a checklist of 10 post-install plugins you ought to install right after the initial setup. I can’t say enough how indispensable tools like Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to track the performance of your blog. While the core functions of both tools are primarily to improve your SERP (aka: Search Engine Results Position). Each has its own specific uses you can’t do without. If you don’t please Google
Despite what you are blogging for, your ultimate goal of everything you do is to drive traffic to your site and convince your visitors to subscribe (read: follow) your blog. The most common approach to facilitate the process is to register your blog with Feedburner which is a 3rd party application designed to easily manage your RSS subscription and simplify the process of subscribing with just “one easy click”.
Nothing can be any easier than that. However, from my own personal blogging experience, you also need to take into account the non-techy visitors who are know little about RSS. Hence an alternative in the form of email subscription may be a good complimentary option. Most internet markets choose to use a service called Aweber so they can have full controle over their email list. Unless you are getting the right premium themes from reputable theme developer i.e. Thesis [insert your affiliate link] theme, some of the code of those freely available themes may not be compatible across major browsers, IE in particular. In fact, why 50% of users are still on IE is still beyond me. A nifty online tool – IE NetRenderer allows you to check how your site is viewed by Internet Explorer 8, 7, 6 or 5.5 and it’s completely free!
Despite what others think that it’s no longer necessary, personally I think submitting your blog to Google index is still worth the effort. Google is indexing and updating billion of pages every day, a little knock at its door does not do your blog any harm, does it? After all, what have you got to lose to submit your site that will only take less than a minute. Here’s where you can do it.
More often that not, this one of the most important yet overlooked to-do-list right after the initial bog setup. If it’s isn’t in your post install checklist yet, I can begin to say enough that ignoring it has detrimental effect to your search engine visibility. Here I’m referring to your choice of post title. A careful choice of title with the proper keyword research is part and parcel of your SEO (aka; search engine optimization) effort. Speaking of which, not only you should write for both search engine and more important, your readers.
Basically, your post title is what your readers will see while the blog title is what the search engines robots view. Basically the purpose of creating a robots.txt file is to improve site indexation by telling search engine crawler to only index your content pages and to ignore other pages (i.e. monthly archives, categories folders or your admin files) that you do not want them to appear on the search index lest it leads to the problem of duplicate content. In layman term, it means that you can’t have two or more pages with the same content words for words. Google will just ignore the duplicate contents and not list them in the index. If your blog is new, the last thing you’ll ever need is not to be in Google whitelist, so to speak.
While Robots.txt instructs search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, a Sitemap tells search engines where you’d like them to go. From a search engine perspective, sitemap is useful for better and faster indexing while a plain HTML sitemap with the use of plug-in provides ease of navigation for your visitors.
- For Search Engines – If you are on WordPress, install Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator which will generate XML-Sitemap supported by most of the search engines.
- For Your Visitors – Clean Archives Reloaded generates a list of your posts sorted by months for better navigation.
-
What is ‘Ping’? Pinging is a built-in notification system ‘pinging’ the
search or directory engines every time you post a new article on your
blog to get the search engines to visit your site more often, thus
improve indexation.http://rpc.pingomatic.com/http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
-
http://ping.feedburner.com
-
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
-
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
I’m a big proponent of blog commenting. What you basically do here to find any blog that’s is closely relevant too your niche where you can add your constructive opinions on the subject being discussed via commenting.
It’s one of the most powerful yet the least expensive tool to create awareness especially when you are new in the community. No other blog promotion can be as effective as commenting, no question about it.
This is one method that I’ve found great success with. Not only it’s an effective strategy for link building (Google loves more links pointing back to your site), one article of yours will be published in one hundred, if not thousands of other sites, depending on the quality of your article. If writing is in your greatest asset, nothing beats article marketing if you ask me. Guest blogging isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s the common practice where bloggers write article to be published on other bloggers’ blogs. If done right with a reputable host, you’ll not only see an increased in your blog traffic and gain a few extra subscribers. With guest blogging, not only will the host’s blog receive new fresh content from a different perspective, the guest blogger will gain a link and the all important exposure. Well, I’m not fond of social sites but the recent buzz of using Tweeter to promote your product and services deserves a certain degree of recognition and I think it’s pretty fair that I make an effort to promote the use of it to a certain extent.
If you are not into yet, you’ll never know what you’re missing. Mind ya, it can be addictive. The use of it shouldn’t be at the expense of other promotional strategies such as Twitter or Stumble Upon.
Marketing your site in forums is worthy of a mention too. Though it might take quite a bit of you time to partake and join the forum discussion, it’s still one of the promotional method widely used by the majority of new bloggers.
One common approach is to insert your links in your signature so that whenever you make any post, there is a likelihood of clicks from other forum posters. The success of forum marketing varied and certainly depend on the kind of niche you are in and how eye-catching your link signature is.
-
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
-
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
-
http://ping.feedburner.com
With that being said above, the next best option is learn and explore the art of affiliate marketing. In simple term, affiliate marketing is about promoting someone’s else products where you’ll be paid for every referral sale. Depending on the products, you are referring, the referral commission can be as high as a few hundred dollars. If you are looking for products and eBooks to sell on commission I would recommended Clickbank and Amazon Associates Program. To touch upon what I’ve mentioned above earlier, if writing is in your blood and copywriting is your forte, doing a review for someone else’s product or services can be one lucrative source of income. All you need to do is to write an honest review and offer constructive criticism and you’ll get paid for it. Now those of you who have the skills for say, design, coding or copywriting for that matter, I’d recommend to learn how to leverage your blog to showcase your portfolios. I’ve seen how others are successful using their blog to sell their service and earn a decent income out of it. One notable example of this Jacob Class . Last but not the least, though it’s one method I’m not advocating when your blog is new is private advertising where usually advertisers are willing to buy an ad space on your blog. However advertisers are smart of investors who are only willing to spend the kind of money in a blog with a decent traffic and certain rankings. There are various metrics advertisers are concerned about, among them are the no. of your subscribers, PageRank, traffic stats and just to name a few. If you don’t have any of those yet, this option is certainly one that you shouldn’t think about in the beginning. Instead first focus on building traffic and social networking and advertising opportunities comes naturally thereafter. However if you do have traffic you should definitly get the OIOpublisher plugin which allows you to quickly and easily sell private advertising on your blog.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)