Category Archives: Best For Blogging
10 Most Important things, you must know for monetizing any blog
Blogging is the well known money making way. You may notice that whenever you google anything, there will be more than 70% of results from sites that are actually blogs. All these blogs can give you every bit of information you want and these blogs are not only surviving but also making big bucks. Blogging is the way that everyone can adopt to make money online. But every blogger is not making money from their blogs, though most of them are trying hard.
With all my blogging experience and researches, I have managed to identify the secrets of the popular money making blogs. Here are the 10 most important things that a blogger or blog owner must know for monetizing any blog.
1. Content is King
Every reader or visitor of a blog expect some new information with each post. So it is extremely important to provide unique and fresh content with each post. This is also important to get maximum exposure in search engine results. Blog’s content is primarily responsible for blog’s search engine rankings. Google and other popular search engines are always hungry of fresh and unique content. Good Search engine positions can provide you massive organic traffic.
2. Presentation of Content
A blog can have lots of good, fresh and unique content and it will be well appreciated by search engines. But all of this will be worthless, if blog reader does not find it interesting to read. In this era of web 2.0, a page full of only text lines will look so boring. So it is very important to use other media like Images, graphs, slideshows or videos at every possible part of each post.
3. Impress the visitors, Do not irritate them
As mentioned in top 2 points, we really want to impress search engines and blog readers/visitors. Blog readers have very important role in any blog’s success. With my research on popular money making blogs , I found that each one of those blog has massive amount of regular readers of their respective blogs. They impress new visitors to make them regular reader and subscriber of their blog posts.
Placing many ads,many social media icons and many links around blog posts, really irritates readers/visitors and they feel like leaving those blogs quickly, no matter how good information you have provided in your blog posts.
4. Communicate with your readers/visitors
Replying or commenting to the readers comments, make them feel that their views are important to the post author or blog owner. Sharing thoughts and resources is extremely important in this social media dominated cyber world. This is very certain that it is impossible to attend each comment of each post but a time to time commenting from author, will make post more lively.
Author: Andrew Finch
Andrew Finch is a Web developer and entrepreneur. Please provide your views or thoughts on successful blogging. Let me know if you think that i have missed some points here.
More Posts (1)10 WordPress Plugins That Can Make a Huge Difference to Your Blog
WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world because of its open source capabilities. Anyone can program a plugin for WordPress, so there are thousands of options out there for any budding blogger. The list has been culled, and here are ten of the best WordPress plugins that can make a huge difference to your blog.
This is a great solution to interlink your blog posts, getting the most out of your SEO. SEO Smart Links will automatically take the keywords and phrases on your blog and link them to the relevant categories and tags. Increasing the number of links within your blog has a chance to boost your page ranking and page views.
Keep your readers informed with a link to subscribe to comments on your posts. Readers are notified by email about further entries to a post, enticing them to return to your page and respond to the response. Commenters have plenty of options available to them: they can block the notifications, unsubscribe to posts, and even change the email address to which they are notified.
Top Commentators creates a widget in your sidebar to show who is commenting the most on your blog. There are options and customizations for this plugin that make it even easier to use.
Mingle WordPress changes your WordPress blog into a social water water cooler. The plugin allows for Profile Pages, Friending, Friend Activity Pages and a Full Member Directory. Instead of having ‘just a blog,’ you can develop a full blown community with this plugin.
Know How Awesome Your Blog Looks On Ipad with iPad Peek
I am sure that most of us know about the new iPad that has just been launched recently. Looks cool right? But have you ever wondered how will our WordPress blog looks when it is being browsed through iPad?
Will it looks like in the iPod touch or iPhone?
For those who are interested to know, there is actually website that will let you know the rough idea of how your WordPress blog will look in iPad. I have checked mine, it is still looking great while in horizontal and also vertical position 
.
By the way, the site is called iPad Peek.
The sole purpose of this site is simply to give the ‘peek’ on how will your blog will look in iPad. There are no advertisement banners or even about page which make I love the site. However, do keep in mind that this site is not functioning exactly like iPad as there is no Flash for iPad. So, to get closer ‘iPad’s experience’, I would suggest you to disable Flash in your internet browser.
Below screen cast will show you how well the site is being built to give the rough idea on how will your WordPress blog looks on iPad.
10 Seconds Secret in Getting Fresh Blogging Idea
I am sure that most of us do agree that getting fresh blogging idea and updates are important to maintain the excitement in our WordPress. Unfortunately, the process in getting those can be hard as it is hard to get control on news that being published every second through blogs and Twitter.
Previously, I have share with you on how to get fresh and new blogging idea through Tweetdeck. In case you have missed the post, you can read the post through below link.
Generate Fresh and New Blogging Idea through TweetDeck.
However, the drawback of this method is it will only cover news and buzz from Twitter. How’s about those articles from the million of blogs which not being tweeted yet?
Google – Goldmine of Bloggers
For today post, I would like to share with you the method that I am using for most of the time at the moment. This method will not only cover any news from Twitter and blogs, it will only cover everything that has been indexed by Google.
First of all, let’s assume we want to know what is going on with the new Google Nexus One so that we can blog about it and give the latest update to our blog readers. However, there is always news about it being released and a lot of site claim that they have the latest leaked information about it and there is high chance that we will miss it.
So, how can we know every sites that have such information?
The best way that I can suggest you is through Google. However, it is not simply search and click because the results that will come out are not necessarily the latest one as it is depends on the relevance. Do you want to blog and share with your readers the last month news? I guess not…
When you get the search result for the term that you are searching (in this case, Google Nexus One), you will get roughly the same screen like below.
And to get the any latest news that has just been released, you have to click on the ‘Show Options’ link and click the ‘Latest’ link which you can find at the left hand side.
Right after you click the ‘Latest’ link, every blog posts, website pages and even tweets that have published for the last one hour will appear in your screen. The parts that I love most are it covers almost entire major source of information especially Twitter and the search result page will be kept updated with latest news and tweets as long you keep the page opens in your internet browser.
How can you make full use of this secret?
Especially for those blog which main purpose is not giving latest news and updates to your readers, you can make full use of this great feature by simply creating a new category for your blog specifically. The category will be specifically for latest news and developments.
For example, if your blog is about making money online, you can use the category to give your readers update on any latest news and development that will directly and indirectly impact your readers such as the FTC rules. By doing this, instead of only giving tips which almost all the blogs within you niche do, you can add some variations to your blog by providing latest news which will have impact on your readers.
I am sure your readers will love it.
If you plan to give daily updates, you simply have to click on the ‘Latest’ or ‘Past 24 hours’ links and if you plan to give weekly updates, you can simply use the ‘Past Week’ link. How convenient right?
And to make it easier, simply bookmark the search results page. So, each time you want to get the latest updates, you can simply the button and do not have to keep doing the same process all over again.
What is your secret?
I have shared my secret. What do you think? Will you use it to help you to prepare blog post in future?
And, how about you share your secret on how you get the materials for your blog post? I am sure everybody will be excited to know it.
Cheers!
Coupon for Bloggers – Best Way to Save Money for WordPress Bloggers
For those who just started blogging, the cost of setting up WordPress blog can be pretty high for some of us. Bloggers that will definitely feel the impact are especially for those who want their WordPress blog looks great but at the same time, they are in country which the currency makes them to be at the losing end.
However, in this internet age, it is almost possible to get something at a lower cost if we know the way. Rather than have to pay the full price, we can at least save few dollars which can be used for the purchase of other products, for example.
Online coupon site – The best place to start
For those who do not know, there are a lot of online coupon sites which you find discount coupons for most of online products in the internet. The most popular online coupon site is RetailMeNot. For your information, I have saved a lot from the coupons that I found in the site.
However, to find online discount coupons that are related to WordPress can be tough as in the site such as RetailMeNot have no specific area allocated to WordPress. So, it can take a lot of our time to find discount coupons for WordPress related products from what RetailMeNot claimed, 50000 online stores.
Coupons for Bloggers – Online coupon site for bloggers
For your information, there is new online coupon site, Coupon for Bloggers that has just been launched by the owner of WpRecipes.com, Jean-baptiste Jung. The best part is the coupons that are being listed are only for blogging related products. So, it would be easy for to find any interesting coupons which can save a lot of money if know how to use it well enough.
For your information, the coupons are being categorized into 5 groups. They are:
Hosting – For those who are planning to buy new web hosting for their WordPress blogs
Domain names – For those who want have new domain names for their latest blogging project
WordPress – For those who are looking for premium WordPress themes and plugins to make their blog looks and works better
Ebooks – For those who want to broaden their knowledge and skills on blogging
Blogging tools – For those who are looking for blogging tool such as Aweber for newsletters
Need other alternative?
Besides the normal online coupons site like RetailMeNot to get bargain on blogging related products, there is also another online coupon site that you can go. It is called Theme Coupons.
As compared to Coupon for Bloggers, this site focuses on more specific area i.e. premium WordPress themes. However, this site is still new and not many coupons that are available for the users. I expect that this site will grow bigger and have more coupons in few months time when the site gets the attention of the WordPress communities.
Have you use online coupon site?
Do you usually visit online coupon sites first before making any online purchase? Which site that you usually go? And what do you think about the two new online coupon sites which have been set up specifically for bloggers?
Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences. I am eager to know more about them.
How to make landing page in your Facebook fan page?
Facebook has now become a really important platform and social media site for WordPress bloggers to expand their networking and get quality incoming traffics.
It is because, rather just having personal Facebook profile, we can also make a fan page for our WordPress blog which our readers can join and interact with us. Therefore, instead of mixing fans from different sites to one personal Facebook profile, we can separate them up into groups based on interest.
So, it would be easy for us to build relationship and post something which will only suit our Facebook fan’s interest and needs.
Make full use of Facebook fan page
Due to the flexibility that Facebook offers through the development of applications, we can expand our Facebook fan page towards different kind of directions. For this post, I will guide you how you can use one of its application i.e Facebook Static FBML to build a landing page for your Facebook fan page.
For those who never use this application, this application will let you to bring html element into your Facebook fan page. Therefore, you can put in images, forms and links into the fan page which is the important elements of good landing page.
By having landing page, you can easily ‘influence’ your readers to subscribe your blog or newsletters, promote the best sections of your WordPress blog and promote them to join you in other social networking sites such as Twitter.
With this tutorial, I am going to show you how can you let the landing page to appear first instead of the fan page’s wall when someone comes from your fan page’s link. To give you rough overview, image below is my landing page for my latest project – Kissing Crust’s fan page.
The steps are…
Actually the steps that you have to take to create landing page for your Facebook is simple. You just need to follow below steps.
First, after you have formed your Facebook page, you have to go to its “Edit Page” section to install the Facebook Static FBML application.
Then, you have to go straight to the end of the page and you will find ‘More applications’ section which will recommend to you application that you will probably interested with. Usually, there will be Facebook Static FBML application.
Then, click on it.
You will be directed to the application page. At the side of the application’s page, you have to click on the ‘Add to my Page’ to install the Facebook Static FBML application into your fan page.
After you have installed the application, you need to edit the application and put in your html code for your landing page. You can find the edit link in the ‘Edit Page” section.
For me, for the image that I put in the FBML page I designed using free open source editing software – GIMP and then, I uploaded them into my WordPress’s blog.
For the arrangement, I simply use table function in the ‘Add new post’ page. In case you don’t have the table function, you probably have not install TinyMCE Advanced plugin in your WordPress blog.
After you satisfy with its arrangement and design, you just need to simply copy the html and paste it into the FBML box.
After you have decided the name and saved the changes that you have made in the Static FBML page, you need to head to ‘Edit Page’ section again but for the last time. Click on the Wall settings and change the ‘View Settings’ for ‘Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else’.
There will a drop down menu that lists all of your Facebook fan page’s tabs. You have to select the tab that have the name of your Static FBML page that you named earlier on.
By selecting that page, the Static FBML page will be the first that appears in your Facebook Fan Page instead of your wall.
And now, you have your own landing page for your WordPress blog’s fan Page. The steps are easy and straight forward right?
Your thoughts and opinions…
Do you have Facebook fan page for your WordPress blog? Does it help you to build closer relationship with your readers?
And what do you think about this tutorial? It is important for WordPress bloggers to know it?
Feel free to share thoughts and opinions. I am eager to know more about it.
WordPress Freelancer: Get Hourly Rate Using FreelanceSwitch Calculator
Rather just being only WordPress blogger, some of us have gone further up by becoming freelancer after gathering enough skills and knowledge on the topic that they are blogging about.
They are also WordPress bloggers who take WordPress project as they are have familiar enough with WordPress and believe that they have enough knowledge to take up simple WordPress project at early stage.
What is the best pricing approach?
However, it is crucial for us to know what is the hourly rate that we should charge on any project that we are going to take. It is because we must balance up between profits that we decide to earn and the customer’s bargaining power as there are probably a lot of people out there that offers same service at cheaper price.
We should think what is the reason customer will choose us as compared to others and priced our service accordingly.
Freelance Swith Calculator – Simple tool for freelancer
FreelanceSwitch is a site that is specifically being set up for freelancers which has blog, forum, job board and freelancing resources. Among the freelancing sources that it has is tool that can give freelancer rough estimate on hourly rate that freelancer should charge.
The tool is called FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator.
This is the quote from the tool page:
We have developed this hourly rate calculator to give you a guide based on your costs, number of billable hours and desired profit. It is a simple tool for you to play with.
The way how it calculates the hourly rate is consisted of four elements which is business cost, personal cost, number of hours we can actually bill and amount of profit we would like to have.
What you should know about this tool is you will only you the benchmark i.e. rough idea on hourly rate that you should charge your client. The rate should be adjusted accordingly depends on market demand and complexity of the project for example.
Personally I think this is a great tool as rather just take only business cost into account, it also takes into consideration the personal cost that we incur which we should considered before taken any freelanced project. I also love for the fact that it will give us two final hourly rate figures which are ideal hourly rate and hourly rate to breakeven i.e. cost equal to revenue.
Few screenshots of the tool:
What do you think?
Have you used this tool before? What d you think about it? Does it help you to get rough idea on the hourly rate that you charge your client? I am eager to know more about it.
Cheers!
Google Adwords Keywords Tool : Secret of WordPress Blog Post’s SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has a special place in the development of WordPress blog as if it is succeed, you can help us in generating huge incoming traffics from search engines. Without knowing the basic idea of SEO, it can be pretty tough for our WordPress blog to get the traffics that it deserves.
Keywords – Key of search engine optimization (SEO)
As most of us know, the best way to ‘SEO’ing our blog post is by inserting keywords that not only related to our WordPress blog but has huge users/searchers that attached on the particular keywords.
It is because in general point of view, by taking into account both aspects, it will bring our whole blog further up in the search engine results as the same keyword will be repeated in every blog posts which therefore give strong ‘relationship’ between our WordPress blog and the keywords that we decide to use.
In more specific point of view, by using keywords that have high search volume, it can help our blog post to have better rank in the search engine result and therefore bring huge incoming traffics on that post.
However, it is important for you to know that the keywords that we have chosen suit our readers and search engine such as Google i.e. well blended into the blog post as if not, it will highly likely irritate your readers and do not stuff in the keywords which make it looks like you are spamming your own blog.
How can you know high volume keywords?
There are a lot of tools out there, free and paid that offer the service of providing you the figure of search volume on any keywords that we would like to know.
However, not each of them can give you accurate and user friendly data.
One of the tools that I find helpful for our WordPress blog is Google AdWords Keywords Tool. I have used it for quite some time and personally, I feel that this tool is user friendly and can give rough idea on which keywords should we use and consider. Plus, it is free!
Rather simply giving you only search volume for the keyword that you have chosen, this tool will give you two groups of figure – global search volume and local search volume which you change base on your target audience.This is definitely handy for those who only target their local audience due to for example language barrier and suitability of product that they are blogging about.
What else Google Adwords Keywords Tool offers?
This tool will also provide you more detailed figures that you can use to consider other related keywords. They are:
- Keywords related to term(s) entered - Add (s) on keyword that Google feels relevant
- Additional keywords to consider – Give you list of related keywords that are within your keywords area
With the help of this tool, you can know roughly how many search volume that the selected keyword has and give you suggestion on other related keywords.
Therefore, if the first keyword has low search volume, you can replace it with other related keyword which has higher search volume but will not affect the blog post’s quality directly.
What do you think?
Have you use Google AdWords Keywords Tool before? What do you think? Does it work great for you in terms of incoming traffics from search engine? Feel free to share your experience and opinions on this tool.
Share Blog Post Through Email With MailCounter
Sharing blog post through email has not really get into attention among blog readers as compared to the social media site such as Twitter and Facebook.
Base on my observation, WordPress bloggers themselves are the reason as they are hardly focus on this and highlight how blog readers can share the blog post through email.
Email: Its importance for WordPress blog
I believe that it is crucial for our WordPress blog and we should ‘invite’ our blog readers to help us promote our blog posts to their friends through email. It is because I’m sure that most of us will check out inbox for at least once each day.
There will also high possibility for the receivers of the emails to do same thing if they find our blog posts are worth sharing. The reason is for me, email has closer and more personal connection with me as compared to Facebook and Twitter.
The best way is
Before this, our blog readers can hardly find the icon that let them to email our blog post to their friends due to the size of the icon. It is definitely a huge lost as email can be another great source of quality traffics.
With the influence of TweetMeme and Facebook share button which we can easily see in most of blog posts, MailCounter has been developed by The Next Web to encourage more readers of our blog to share with their friends through email.
Rather simply a sharing tool, it will also count the amount of emails that have been sent by your readers to their friends for one particular post. It will give psychological affect to your readers as if they find out that others are sharing our blog posts, they will feel that should too.
The best part of MailCounter is its simplicity. For you to have MailCounter button in your WordPress blog, you do not need to set up and install anything. You just need to have copy and paste below codes into your WordPress blog’s single.php file.
[RAW]<?php
echo ‘<iframe src=”http://getmailcounter.com/mailcounter/?url=’;
urlencode(the_permalink());
echo ‘&title=’;
urlencode(the_title());
echo ‘” height=”64″ width=”50″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” ></iframe>’;
?>[/RAW]
However, the weakness that MailCounter has, base on my opinion is when your readers want to share your blog post with their friends through email, they will be directed straight away to Microsoft Outlook when they hit the MailCounter button.
Unfortunately, not many of us are comfortable and familiar with Microsoft Outlook.
What do you think?
What do you think on email’s role in bringing traffics to our WordPress blogs? Will it be substituted by social media sites in terms of bringing quality traffics?
And have you used MailCounter? What do you feel about this latest WordPress tool?
Share with us. It is great to have your thoughts and opinions over Huzzer Magazine.
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