I have been slowly building my blog (around my full time job, wife and kid) for quite some time. It was intended to target a general area (online business). I had populated the site with a number of recurring themes (web design and tools). Over time I noticed my ranking climb, ever so slightly. My topics began to vary more through out the overall theme of my site and in a matter of days, my ranking dropped right off. I have managed to build it back up to where it was, which is still not anything to write home about, but its still a ranking and one can build on that. So the point of this is to add to your thought, be conscious of the context of your affiliate offer, and the quality. Be sure that it fits with the overall context of your blog. The big kicker for ranking, I think, is to keep the theme/context of your site very specific and consistent (as well as all the stuff Jason has above).

Cheers!

Jeromy

http://twitter.com/JeromyS

To your success,

Bryan Hee

I actually used your logo as an example of one that really sets a particular tone that works for your blog but wouldn’t work for mine.

I’m trying to remember if I’ve downloaded your Building a Business Not a Blog. I did request it again to find out but so far it hasn’t shown up.

Have you seen my post on How to Create a Successful Blog Based Business? I searched for a commenting policy to find out how you feel about links either in the body of a comment or to a post instead of the main URL in the website field. I believe this post would be valuable to anyone seeking more detailed information on starting a blog. That post is currently found in my Recently Popular section.

Another post new bloggers could really benefit from is Select Keywords First to Make Your Content Easy to Find. Doing that makes your blog search engine friendly and also keeps your posts on topic.

I’ve got to make more time to read your posts, especially those about affiliate marketing.

but since i’ve started blogging, i’ve found out that you cant really make the money(at least the amount of money) through just blogging alone, joining affiliate programs and what not is the key, but you cant just promote the products on your site..

i see a blog as a way to build an email list and follower that you can try to convince to join your email list or join an affiliate program under your referrel link or what not and try to leverage that.

this post is a good basics for startup though – the one thing i hate about myself is the fact that i cant stick to one blog “look” i always want to change it up now and then. it hurts me in branding lol

i’ve always liked reading john cow you provide a lot of good and useful content.

One more thing I would like to add is

it is important to pick your affiliate

products you are going to promote with

that blog.

I see many people choose to advertise

information that is not related to the

content.

Igor

Johncow.com is a prime example of a 2-word name. How about these, all great blogs with massive readership: CalculatedRisk, TheMarketTicker, BoingBoing, ReadWriteWeb… the list is endless.

Boiling it down: While a 1-word name is simply great, an easily remembered phrase works just as well and maybe, even better.

(disclaimer: When I first took Wordout public (it was originally private for my existing customers locally) and switched to a Wordpress platform, I didn’t get a new domain name. I left it where it was, in a ‘wordout’ subdomain. Getting to Google’s page 1 results for that keyword (Wordout, the name of the blog) was incredibly hard. It can be done (just Google it) but seriously, if you can avoid that battle you’ll be better off.

Thanks John, and good luck to new bloggers! Have some fun today, ok?