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I was researching something SEO related today when I cam across a great article about getting more traffic to your website or blog. The article actually lists 20 great ideas. There were some suggestions that I’ve been utilizing since the stone age, but there were more that I’d never considered - as in EVER.
It’s a great read and I think the suggestions will lead us all to the type of traffic jam we’re all looking for.
You’ve heard how fun (and financially rewarding) a website and/or can be. Your only problem is that, like most people, you don’t know how to build one.
…or register a domain…
…or make the graphics…
…or submit it to search engines…
…or add pictures…
…or add Google ads…
…..etc. after discouraging etc…..
To cut to the chase, you need a little help!
Your options? If you want a blog and you want one as fast as possible - Blogger.com is a pretty good place to start. It’s absolutely free and you can actually be blogging in a matter of hours. Less if you don’t do any customizing to the template. With Bloggger you don’t even have to worry about registering a domain.
Even though I run a Web Publishing business and a great deal of my income is based on creating blogs and websites for people, I wholeheartedly give Blogger.com two thumbs up. It’s a great place to start.
However, if you are serious about making money online and doing so in a professional manner - you need a domain as well as a professionally-done website and/or blog.
My suggestions are as follows:
1. Hightide-Web Pubishing specializes in the kind of service you need. If you’re new to the arena of websites or blogging, you need someone who will take the time to help you each step of the way. When our clients hire us, we rally around them to create just the sort of online presence they need and want. E-mail me today ( joisigers @ aim . com ) and tell me exactly what it is you’re thinking about. We’ll get back to you asap with your best course of action, as well as what this course would cost!
2. Another excellent place to start would be www.GoDaddy.com. Known for being the number one Domain Name Registrar, Go Daddy has a reputation that simply can’t be topped. However, they do a lot more than that - Did you know that Go Daddy also offers professional website design and hosting. You could, literally go to www.GoDaddy.com
and get everything you could possibly need to create your online presence!
Whichever route you go - your worries and headaches are only a click or two away!
by William McRea
The Internet is full of Saturday Morning Bloggers. These bloggers ignore their blogs all week, then they post a few dozen articles in their blog and then spend a few hours adding comments to other blogs. This is a great way to spend a Saturday, but it provides very little SEO marketing benefits.
Search engines need a steady flow of content. Most blogs that appear in a web search have a post that has been published within the last few hours. Dozens of blog search engines operate for the sole purpose of alerting the big five search engines of new content. The posts that you publish on Saturday are already out of the lists by Sunday afternoon. That is why it is important to provide the search engines with fresh content daily.
A steady stream of content is so important that some blog software programs have a delayed publishing plug-in. This lets the blogger upload multiple articles at one time, but it waits until a pre-determined time to publish each one. This is a great idea, but it is only half the solution.
The blog search engines must be pinged shortly after the blog is posted. There are several good pinging services on the web. Most of them ping a few dozen blog search engines, telling them that your blog has new content.
This confuses most bloggers. They believe that tagging an article with a blog search engine like Technorati or Del.icio.us is all they need to do. Tagging is a method of introducing a list of your articles to potential readers. Tagging has nothing to do with building in-bound links or a web pages rank. Tagging is for peoples benefits. Pinging is for the benefit of search engines.
Publishing one blog a day and then pinging the blog search engines will ensure that the big five search engines never forget your blog. www.weblogs.com gives a visual of how blog pinging works. Each of the blog posts that appear on the page have pinged the blog search engines.
An overly simplified method of explaining pinging is by comparing it to crawling a webpage. Instead of waiting for a robot to crawl the blog, ping the search engine while the news is still fresh.
Another excellent strategy is to invite your reader to leave a comment. Comments are picked up by search engines as new content. The only problem with allowing comments it the potential from comment spam.
About the Author:
The Commentator is a unique program that blocks comment spam, while it builds a double opt in mailing list. For more information visit The Commentator.
by Matt Rhodes
Many folks who try to make money blogging are often short-sighted in their monetary goals. At first glance, for example, Google AdSense seems to be the absolute best and easiest way to generate income from your blog, especially if you generate massive amounts of traffic. After all, you’re receiving hundreds of clicks daily, and they add up quickly. Ultimately, however, you’re trading $20 or $30 sales for 10 or 15 cent clicks. Although you’ll have more clicks than sales, simple math tells you that even if 1% of your clicks bought a product that earned you a $20 commission instead, you’d be doing $5 or $10 better than with AdSense. The truth is though, if you have a credible and respected blog, your income could be five or ten times that amount.
If you have a solid reputation for providing quality content to your visitors, they will trust any recommendations that you have. Think for a moment just how much power that puts into your hands. If you have users who visit your blog religiously, they’ll feel the same way about your recommendations. Recommend high quality, relevant products to your visitors and not only will you receive a hefty commission, they’ll actually be thanking you for helping them and will be even more eager to follow your recommendations the next time. Sometimes, if they know you receive a commission from the product, they’ll purchase it just to support you. You could make these recommendations like clockwork - every 2 weeks, recommend a great new product or service your users *need* to have. You’ll see a nice, big number in your checking account soon thereafter.
Compare that to AdSense. One click, 15 cents in your pocket, and they’re gone. They don’t trust you anymore than they used to, and - most importantly - they could be buying a product through a Google Ad that would’ve earned you a massive commission if you had just recommended it. If you think you can have both AdSense *and* affiliate products, think again. The AdSense ads will just distract your users from the offer you’re presenting.
Long story short: get rid of AdSense, start recommending quality products, then watch your bank account soar. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the results.
About the Author:
Matt Rhodes is the Editor and Webmaster of Blogging Money Maker, a blog that reveals FREE articles, tips and tricks about how to make money blogging. Go to http://bloggingmoneymaker.blogspot.com!
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The opinions above are those of the author of that particular article. The owners of this blog actually use Google along with other affiliate links. Since Google is contextual, it often includes quality information that our readers are looking for. It all depends upon your own content. With some content, their ads are very relevant - while with others, they’re so far off base you forget what you were reading about in the first place!
My own recommendation would be to experiment and see what works for you. Also, keep an eye on what Google ads are actually showing up on your page(s).
by hafiz lecky
http://webmillionaire.blogspot.com
One of the most important skills of any marketer (or anyone else for that matter) is the ability to do research quickly, effectively and to communicate information that differs from what “the masses” do. This article presents a 3 step strategy for using blogs to help in this. Over the past year or so, blogs have become huge. Before the 2004 U.S. election, scarce anyone heard of blogs. But with the bloggers doing their own version of the news, even computer illiterate people have at least heard of blogs.
So I want to talk about blogs. But not from the usual angle of creating and maintaining one. I want to talk about it from the standpoint of USING other people’s blogs effectively.
If you already blog, then this will be obvious to you, though you might have been so focused on creation that you didn’t pay attention to consumption. Common problem. I’m here to help you get past it.
The amazing thing about blogs - the good ones at least - is that they are like finding information gold mines.
The owners maintain them and their quality for several reasons.
1. To generate new content that search engines love to keep people coming back for more 1. To sell their stuff in a low pressure marketing context. 3. Self-fulfillment through self-expression. There are likely other reasons, but I consider these the relevant ones.
These motivations push the publishers to keep the quality of good blogs high. If they stop, their traffic dwindles. If they start hyping stuff, then the low-pressure context is gone.
Thus, it is that blogs form one of the most intensely useful sources of free information anywhere.
So the question is, do you effectively blog surf? And more to the point, how do you do it? Well, I don’t have THE ANSWER for how to do it. But I do have some suggestions that have generated great results for me.
1 - Google the following - with the punctuation as I show them:
+blog +”subject phrase”
Thus if I’m interested in blogs on fly fishing (a niche if there ever was one), my google would be
+blog +”fly fishing” (over 61,000 matches)
If my interest was in sequential autoresponders then my search would be: +blog +”sequential autoresponders” (243 matches)
This gives me the ability to get a list of blogs on the subject which I then …
2 - Bookmark for future reference. Create a folder for, say, fly fishing. All the high quality fly fishing blogs you find go into that folder. Make new folders for blogs on other subjects.
Now if I’m interested in seeing what’s new in fly fishing, I go to my bookmarks and have a virtual field trip.
But there’s one more thing I do, too. And this is critical if you want to keep your blog surfing fresh:
3 - Bookmark the search results page.
Why?
Because the results delivered up by the canned search will vary over time and as Google changes their criteria. The top blog today might turn out to be 5th next month and a complete newcomer might end up 1st on the list.
Now you have an effective method for blog surfing. Enjoy.
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Who Else Wants A TON OF COOL FREE STUFF FROM THE BLOGGING YOUNG GUN WHO EARNS UP TO $1860.11 PER DAY,,,YES…jUST Click Here!
by Brian Kindsvater
RSS feeds are the latest craze. Supposedly, they will replace email and RSS does have its advantages. However, it is time to put theory aside.
In the real world RSS feeds can be used with email. This powerful combination has been overlooked by many webmasters and Internet users.
Unfortunately, many websites have shifted to RSS entirely when it comes to delivering the latest news or information to their visitors.
They have used RSS to replace email, ezines, and emailed newsletters. Everyone is concerned about spam, and the deliverability of email can be hampered by anti-spam filters.
With RSS, you know your message has been delivered because the person receiving the RSS feed is using software to get their feed from you.
However, the bigger question is how many people are getting your RSS feed?
That is the real question. If your email deliverability rate is 90% to 1000 customers, and your RSS feed deliverability is 100% to 10 customers, then you’ve really missed the boat if you sacrificed email for RSS feeds.
Did I say just 10 customers? Is that an unfair comparison?
Nope. The fact is, hardly anyone uses RSS feeds to get information, but everyone uses email. The most common use of RSS feeds seems to be webmasters using each other’s RSS feeds to create content for their websites.
A recent poll on a major Internet marketing forum bore this out. These are people on the cutting edge of technology and those most likely to use RSS feeds.
They do, to get content for their websites. But it turned out hardly anyone was using RSS feeds to read information and keep abreast of the latest news. They were using email for that.
While that poll was certainly not scientific, it is illuminating.
That has not prevented many online businesses from blindly jumping on the RSS bandwagon and making new company information only available via RSS.
The solution to this problem: online businesses making new information available by RSS feed, but online visitors using email to obtain new information they want to read, is obvious:
Deliver RSS feeds by email.
Surprisingly, there are only a couple options available for this, almost all of which are encased in techno-geek, difficult to set-up, and just plain are not adequate for the average consumer.
Testing at Internet Profit University fortunately did find a couple good options. One of which really stood out: RSSGecko.com.
This online service is free, and it allows you to simply enter the RSS feed you are interested in, your email address, and that’s about it. Very simple, but extremely powerful. The RSS Gecko service also has a unique option allowing users to select the days and times when they want to receive updated information from their RSS feeds.
If you use the web, and we all do, an RSS to email service is extremely valuable. Everyone is already using email, and setting up another program to access, add RSS feeds, just to read the latest news is unnecessary.
Combining RSS feeds with existing email technology is an excellent way to easily get current information from your favorite websites.
About the Author
Internet Profit University is always looking for excellent online tools. RSS to Email by RSS Gecko is free and will deliver any RSS feed into your email box.
There’s a great article, 5 Ways Blogging Can Help Your Business - Just in case there’s anyone out there who hasn’t jumped on the blogging bandwagon yet!
Be sure to check out the “Related Links” to the side too. Good stuff, sure ’nuff.
Joi
A short definition of blogging:
A “blog” (derived from the term “web log”) is basically just a website — with two key differences:
First, it’s extremely easy to add information to it. A blog is like an online journal, so you just log in, type what happened today, post it, and you’re done!
Second (this is the really cool part) you can add a simple little feature that automatically tells a whole bunch of other websites that you’ve made an update to your blog — every time you make a change!
Blogging has actually been around since the 1990s. However, it didn’t start to gain popularity until 2003, when mighty Google got involved…
These days, getting a #1 ranking in the search engines is MUCH more difficult.
There are literally BILLIONS of competing websites, so until blogs came along recently, you only had two options for guaranteeing yourself a #1 ranking in the search engines (FAST):
In the OLD days, you only had TWO choices:
#1 You could buy your way to the top with pay-per-click campaigns (this strategy is effective and fast, but obviously, it eats away at your bottom-line profits!)…
#2 Or, you could spend thousands of dollars on search engine optimization (SEO) specialists, and get them to do all the grunt work for you.
But in this case, it could take MONTHS before you see any results… and even then, with all that money invested, your results still aren’t guaranteed!
Fortunately, thanks to blogging, there’s now a BETTER option.
Using a blog to advertise a business is also a great tool that anyone can do with ease.
Take me for example I created 3 very popular Dog Training related websites (seen below) and promote them for free using my blog.
Anyone can set up a blog and use them to earn an extra income either promoting affiliate programs or your own product.
One thing is for certain if you are not using a blog or not using it to it’s full potential you are missing out on a great opportunity.
Robert Bercume
http://www.marketingtips.com/trafficsecrets/t/818357
About the Author of this Article:
Robert Bercume is the creator of 3 Very Popular Dog Training Websites http://www.PuppyTipster.com, http://www.SimpleDogTraining.com, and http://www.Dog-Training-Sites.com. Helping thousands of dog owners worldwide with their Dog or Puppy Training needs. Robert is also considered a Marketing Guru helping fellow affiliates get started and succeed with their own online ventures.
by Martin Andrew
Everybody is raving on about blogs, it seems everyone has one, and it seems that everyone is telling you that if you want to get on in Internet Marketing you need one too!!
But what exactly is this Blogging Thing??
OK well like everything else, theres the Long answer, the short answer, and Martins Answer(often quite similar to the long answer, only, well, better:-) )
Blogging, Like MOST of the other New Trends, isnt actually new at all. Blogging has actually been around for quite some years now, I would probably say its Infancy was pre-2000 if I really wanted to push it back.
A Blog, or Weblog, is qute simply an Online Journal or diary.
BUT, Thats not what people Nowadays mean, when people talk to you about Blog and Blogging, they are *Really* talking about using this Blogging software to run your sites.
The Simplicity and Design of the software enables even the most technically challenged to add updated fresh content to their webpages, basically if you can type and use Word, you can run a Blog, this in turn is why it is becoming ever so popular, and also why most people do use it for, or at least most people *Were* using Blog and Blog software to run little Personal Diary Blogs.
However, what it really is, is a way to have a Regularly updated website related to your Business or Theme at the push of a button.
Here are the three most popular “blogs” at the time of printing this, they probably will remain like this for a long time, but although these are “Blogs” they are more along the lines of an actual real content website, rather than a Personal Diary type blog
# 1 Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things 67,001 links from 19,265 sites. # 2 Engadget 65,581 links from 14,884 sites. # 3 PostSecret PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. By frank warren 21,503 links from 12,892 sites.
The MAIN Difference between a blog and a standard website, is the fact that Bloggers tend to be more Personal, tend to leave more of a Personal Stamp on their work. Thats why those first two sites above are WAY more popular than if they had just been a standard Impersonal Website.
DONT Let this Blogging Craze Confuse you, its really not that complex, or infact that different to things you may already be used to, dont worry about this whole “Blog Revolution” thing, it is more of an Evolution than a Revolution, and the evolution involves Websites and Online Business in general, not Blogging on its own, Blogging has simply become a tool to enable the following things -
Through Free services such as Blogger, anyone anywhere anytime can start a website, without having any technical knowledge.
Through Blogging software, it has become easier and easier to add fresh orginal content to your website on a regular basis,
Bloggers Share information, ideas and thoughts with eachother through reading eachothers blogs and talking about them on their own blogs,
Those are the Simple Elements of what Blogging is.
When you start looking at the Software running the Blogs, and the Functions it has, you can see even more benefits, and why it is Much Much More than just “a Weblog” I am talking about, I want you to understand that Blogging is an ESSENTIAL Part of your Entire Marketing Campaign, along with Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and all the other aspects I cover, blogging is essential.
BECAUSE, Not only does your average Blogging software enable Push Button Content Updates, BUT it also has the ability to do a MULTITUDE of the Mundane tasks we have to undertake to build our traffic up to our websites.
Your Blogging Software can pretty much take care of all your On Page Search Engine Optimization AUTOMATICALLY!! All you need to do is post new content!!
Blog Softwares can automatically reformat your content into different Code Types readable by Different types of technology, with a little help, your blog could kick out pages viewable in Web Browsers, Palm Pilots, Mobile Phones, and perhaps the best one at the moment is RSS!!
Yes, your blog will easily produce a Reformatted version of your webpage that can be Syndicated by other sites, read by people directly on their desktops, and much more!!
I do cover a Wide Range of Advanced Blogging Tactics which I wont go into here as I would be here for TOO Long!!
Quite Simply, a Blog, is a Software to Power your websites, how you decide to use it is up to you, but one thing I WILL STRESS here at the end is that The Whole Idea behind the fact that blogs are easy to use is to use them Well, and update them regularly, to see the full benefit. Its because of this fact, that a *Good* Blog should be updated Regularly to get the most benefits, that Most Blogs are really qute a Personal Type Weblog but DONT let that start to limit your thinking about what you can do with a blog, look again at the Top 3 blogs, go to Technorati.com and look at the biggest blogs,
Dont you think, actually, that Most of the Big blogs look more like a Magazine now, rather than a Journal or Diary?
Remember what I said about Evolution and not Revolution?
You can use a blog for whatever you want, all I stress, is MAKE SURE you use it, and use it every day(or as often as you possibly can regularly)
Thats it for that, more will come soon, thanks for reading!
About the Author:
Martin has decided to share his Ideas and Experiences on Succesful Online Marketing. Read More Online Business Advice Be sure to check out Martins tips and Tricks, and follow his experiences in Success @ More Traffic Please
We’re implementing a few changes and improvements at Hightide. One will involve bloggers….(there are lots of us afoot!)…..and will, hopefully help many people improve their whold blogging experience.
We are offering hosting for bloggers for just $6.75 a month, or for $20.00 for three months. For further savings, we charge only $75.00 for a year of blog hosting.
For an extra, one time only fee of $25.00, we’ll even buy your domain name, and set your blog up for you. Customized graphics would be only $10.00 extra….UNLESS you pay for the full year of hosting - then the graphics are free!
Another change we’re making at Hightide: We’re in the process of setting up Pay Pal buttons, allowing our clients to pay with a credit card if they choose to. Don’t know why we had never gotten around to that, to be perfectly honest with you!
Finally, we’re currently adding tons (did I say tons, I meant TONS) of free wallpapers, graphic art, and forum signature pictures to the website. Our files are literally full of images we’ve created - but we’ve been flirtting with the idea of changing the layout of the website a bit, and were waiting until then to add all of them. Forgetaboutit! No more waiting - watch for them, there are lots coming….including images of the new Idols and Survivors. (Lost is also featured heavily.)
Do I love that show? I love that show.
Email us if you have any questions! joi@hightide-web.com
Joi
