Want to Learn How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog.. for FREE? CLICK HERE Now to Find Out How!

Great! All the technical stuff is done and you can now start filling up your blog with content. We suggest that you at least have 10-20 posts before you even start thinking about telling people about your blog. A blog with no or little content will get nobody excited but yourself. If your blog at least looks the part, visitors will get the idea that they are dealing with an established blogger, someone that could teach them a thing or two, so they’ll be back.

You don’t want to be perceived as the new kid on the block because readers just can’t be bothered with yet another new blogger. Appearance is everything!

Speaking of appearance, make sure that you double check the facts for each and every post before you publish. You don’t want to get caught with your pants down, when it turns out that something you’ve been telling your readers isn’t true. Don’t think people will bother visiting again when they find out you’ve got no idea what you’re blogging about. After the facts, make use of your spelling checker. Nothing turns a reader off more than bad grammar. (Luckily for us, English isn’t our first language, so we can get away with the odd mistake here and there).

With sufficient content in place, you can now start looking for visitors. Networking with peers in your niche is key here. Seek out established bloggers and make sure you start leaving interesting comments on their posts. We say interesting; because that is the only way you will spark their reader’s curiosity. If they feel your comment was a good addition to the whole discussion about the topic, they will hit up your blog to see what else you’ve got to say. Just be genuine with your comments and do not become a comment spam whore, as most readers will be on to you in a second and never visit your blog, EVER.

Remember – “if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain”.

There are tons of ways to get your name out in the blogosphere. Sign up with blog communities like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and Entrecard. In time these sites will help with your name recognition and branding. Do not expect a lot of visitors from them straight away, but it is important that you become a familiar face. Make sure you use only one avatar and stick with that all over the place. Preferably something in your blog’s colors. If you have a mascot like us, use it!

Another powerful tool us bloggers have at our disposal are the social networks that are all around us. If you use the right approach, these can give you tons of visitors from outside the somewhat restricted blogosphere. Here you will find all sorts of Internet users, not only savvy webmasters and bloggers. Why is this good? Because they have probably not heard of whatever affiliate scheme you’re promoting, and they might actually sign up, unlike your peers! Yes, you need to find and target the right crowd if you want to make money online.

Be sure to use the big social media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com and Del.icio.us with care. Do NOT go around submitting your every post. You’ll be banned before you can say moo, cutting yourself off from a great deal of potential exposure in the future. Preferably, don’t even submit a single one of your own posts, just make sure your readers have a quick option to submit it for you. Use a social plugin for your wordpress blog, perhaps something a little visual, to remind them that they can share whatever post they think is worth sharing. If it’s worthy of sharing, it will be shared. Oh, and don’t forget to ask your online friends for favors, just make sure you don’t start spamming them with requests!

So now you’re commenting on all the right blogs (popular blogs in your niche), you’ve signed up with the blog communities and you’re getting a bit of traffic coming in from social media sites. Well done, on to the next step – contests.

A contest is a great way to get others to write about you. As you are in charge of the entry rules, so you can have other bloggers write about your contest! (e.g to win this fantastic prize XYZ, all you have to do is write a little post on your blog about this contest.) Needless to say; The bigger the prize, the more participants and the more exposure you’ll get. Besides the linkbacks in their post, you could ask them to link back to you with a specific anchor text to increase your SERPS for that keyword. (Careful with this one, Google frowns upon these kind of link building tactics.) Try to find a sponsor - a company that has a lot in common with your blog’s niche. You’ll always have NO if you don’t ask!

Checklist:

• Make sure you have plenty of content for new readers before you start your self-promotion. No content equals not interesting equals not coming back.
• Quality control. Enough said.
• Network with your peers. Comment on the right blogs. Get your name on the blog networks. Use social media with care.
• Organize a contest, preferably sponsored by a company in your niche. (Companies have the money to put up a big prize, and big prizes attract big crowds!)

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

26 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Knowing what you want before you dive in is extremely important, otherwise you will end up getting sidetracked, wasting precious time and energy on things that won’t make you any money, but instead bring you frustration and disappointment. Nobody ever said it was easy to make money online. Well, we think someone should have, because it is!

The thing you’ll need though is a solid game plan, to tackle any challenges, which will undoubtedly cross your path to .COM riches at some stage. Prepare yourself for what’s coming. Channeling your efforts into one subject at a time is 100x more productive than going at it like a loose cannonball.

The problem with trying to do everything at the same time is that you’re more likely to encounter multiple issues at the same time. The best way to become a unmotivated blogger is to stack up a nice pile of problems for yourself. And it’s easier to quit than to keep pushing isn’t it?

Unfortunately, quitters don’t make money online.

There’s no rush into setting up your blogging operation. Make sure you over think every step before you take it. If you’ve done your homework, and you have created a solid ground for your blog, the only way is up. If you rush through things without thinking, you will probably run into issues sooner or later.

Just imagine:

You’ve picked the cheapest web host plan you could find, only to be unpleasantly surprised at a later stage that there are tons of limitations to their service. Bandwidth restrictions, shared CPU time, insufficient memory. All these things equal downtime, pissed off readers and loss of income.

• You could have gotten a bigger or scalable plan with the right host, but now you’re looking to transfer your blog somewhere else. Most likely facing database problems, DNS issues and ofcourse, more downtime.

  We use a dedicated server from our sponsor, Top hosting Center. Obviously this is overkill if you only have one blog, but they do great blogger hosting plans too.

You’ve downloaded the latest version of WordPress, start blogging away without optimizing the CMS (Content Management System) first. Months down the road, you find out that Google doesn’t like your site, and organic growth isn’t going as fast as you’d like to.

• You will now have to dive in and start fixing things. Unfortunately it’ll be too late for all your previous posts with the SEO unfriendly permalinks. http://example.com/?p=N just doesn’t work as well as http://example.com/best-post-ever in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Google updated its infamous pagerank, and despite your entire link building strategy, you only got a mediocre PR3 (like us). Would you have gotten a PR5 or higher, you’d be laughing to the bank because your advertising spots would have been worth at least twice as much as they are now.

• Since you didn’t bother with the WWW or no WWW preset, Google now thinks you have two separate blogs. You’ll find that the backlinks are divided between your http://www.blog.com and your http:// blog.com.

  Oops! Fortunately there’s a great WordPress plugin that takes care of that issue. Also make sure you have the right settings in your WordPress > Options > General section. Stick with either WWW or no WWW, so Google knows it has to put all the pagerank it for you has towards your one blog.

Get your own domain name! This is extremely important for any blogger that wants to build a reputable brand name online for themselves. Anyone can setup a free blog at Blogspot or WordPress.com, but again, these free options come with a lot of restrictions. Besides that, people tend to think that personalized domains are more authoritative than the free variations.

A .COM domain is the number one choice, followed by .NET and .ORG as second and third option. Stay away from exotic sounding TLDs (Top Level Domains) like .WS etc. Our sponsor is offering free domain names for everyone that signs up for one of their $6,75 hosting plans. (That’s cheaper than just the name at GoDaddy!)

Checklist:

1) Make sure you’ve got the right hosting plan, keeping your blog’s future growth in mind. A good start is half the job done!

2) Before even writing and publishing that first post, get your wordpress configuration SEO friendly. You’ll thank yourself for doing this a few months down the road when you see the amount of organic traffic (free traffic coming from your SERPs) ever increasing.

3) Set your online identity with your personalized domain name so people will recognize your blog the next time they stumble across it. If it looks familiar, chances are they’ll stick around to read it again.

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

22 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post