Increase Page Rank..Trackers can increase your PR

Getting backlinks (links to your site from others) is necessary to increase your Page Rank in the long term.

Google bots are quite busy. So it is useful to have a page listing all your backlinks to tell them what pages they should analyse. That's why I recommend to dedicate one page of your site to list the pages linking to your page - I say page and not website in purpose-.

But if you're using spamming on blogs, forums and other websites to get backlinks, it would be better to keep track of those backlinks elsewhere than on your website.
Because if your website is linking to too many sites that are not related you may suffer from a downgrade backlash from Google.

So the best tool to keep track of those backlinks (the referrers) to my viewpoint is

Have a look to the tracker created for this blog: My Tracker

All my referrers are listed. When Google bots analyse this page they collect the links. And when they crawl (analyse) them later, they will find links to my blog. For a website it would be better to have a tracker for every page, but for a blog it's easier with only one.

NB: not many backlinks on my tracker because I'm not actively promoting my blog, this blog is indeed a kind of non-lucrative initiative. ;-p

Extreme Tracking has some credit with Google bots, because it's an old domain (the older your domain the better). So the tracker you set up may get a good PR with time (so put the keywords you are competing in the tracker's name when you create it !).

Other aspects of trackers:

Trackers also allow a better understanding of your visitors: you may know the referring link, the keyword used in the search engine and much more.
Data-mining may help to improve your website.

To keep track of your visitors, here below a list of free trackers (but not for SEO):

StatCounter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Activemeter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Motigo Webstats Logo + PopUnder Ads :-(

I strongly recommend the invisible counters. Unfortunately even if Motigo is user-friendly it cannot compete because of those 'damned shit' PopUnder ads.

Top 10 SEO Tips

The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation with a half a dozen websites, mostly those of our clients who insisted they should be on the first page of the search engine results pages. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please read our eBook.

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.

Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.

Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.

You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.

SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors

It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information

Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:

Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.

SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title

The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.

SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title

There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.

Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:

This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:

1. description
2. keywords

Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:

SEO Tip #5: Use Headings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.

Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:

SEO Software

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.

It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.

SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".

Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:

SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.

Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

 

    http://www.example.com/

    2005-01-01

    monthly

    0.8

 

The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:

SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.

Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.

The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.

One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.

Other SEO Tips

If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.

How to Earn Money Online with Desktop Publishing

Desktop publishing is about using the computer and software to create documents, flyers, newsletter, brochures, book and other publications for commercial purpose.

If you know about desktop publishing and like to be creative, think about starting an Internet business with desktop publishing. There are no expensive machines you have to buy to start making money with desktop publishing. All the documents are created using one or two software in your computer and printed out using your color printer. So, you can begin with small capital and build it up gradually.

There are demands for desktop publishing service. A lot of people want to create creative documents, brochures and other publications using computer but they don't know how to create one themselves. So, you can make money by providing them your desktop publishing service.

What skills are needed?

Since everything is done using the computer. You need to be able to use several types of software programs for desktop publishing and possess some design skills. It will be even better if you have natural talent on this area.

What equipments are needed?

You will of course need a computer and below are other tools you must possess as well:

• Desktop publishing software
• Photo editing program
• Printer (laser or color)
• Scanner
• Good quality paper for printing

Once you obtain all the above necessary tools, it is time to start your desktop publishing business.

The first important thing you need to do is find a niche you want to target on. You will be putting your marketing efforts into this single niche to make money with desktop publishing.

You are going to need to build a website to market your desktop publishing service to the selected niche. Your website should look professional and include samples of your work to show your expertise in this field to your target prospects.

How to get your target prospects to visit your website and check out your service?

This will involve the use of Internet marketing methods:

Pay per click advertising - The method that can give you instant target prospects is pay per click (PPC) advertising. With PPC advertising, you will pay each time a targeted visitor is sent to your from PPC search engines such as Google and Yahoo. It is a good method for getting targeted visitors for short term. But, you shouldn’t rely on it for long run as it can be very expensive to you.

Press release - You may hire someone to write a press release about the service you are offering and then submit the press release to news sites. It may bring in some clients for your business.

Article marketing - There are large traffic article directories that will publish your articles. Keep on writing articles related to your service and publish them on the article directories. This way, more people will know about your business and click the link in the resource box of your articles to learn more about your offer.

Other than using your website to get potential clients, you may also join those freelance bidding websites (guru.com and elance.com). These freelance sites have an online marketplace for freelance projects and jobs; and new opportunities are posted everyday. So, they may be good places for you to find more desktop publishing work.

MAKE MONEY WITH A PC

Edward Bulwer-Lytton stated "The pen is mightier than the sword." These days, not may people use the pen to write with. More often they use typewriters or, even more frequently, computers and word processors. But make no mistake, the written word is still very powerful, and if you own a word processor you are sitting on top of one of the most powerful money-making machines ever created.

Most people use their computer to do simple tasks, such as their taxes. Or they buy a word processor so their children can write term papers and get better grades in school. Very few people realize that their computers can make them money as well as fulfilling all of these other functions. If your computer is taking up desk space but not bringing you any extra income, it's time for you to put that machine to work for you.

Of course, the logical question is "How can my computer make money for me?" Computers are extremely versatile and can be programmed to do almost anything. Many different computer functions can be incorporated into a home-based business, but one of the easiest to master is the word processor. There are dozens of word processing programs on the market, and you should be able to master one in about five or six hours of practice. And,if you don't have a computer, don't worry. You can still cash in on this great business idea. many computer companies make word processing machines which are like super typewriters, combining the functions of both typewriters and computers.

Once you are familiar with your word processor, look out! You will be ready to take on the world with your home-based, word-processing business.

WORD PROCESSING RICHES

Using your word processor to make money is easy. In fact, it's easy as finding someone who needs a document created and selling your service to them. Once you've read through the following suggestions, you will have lots of great ideas on how to use your computer to make money.

NEWSLETTER WRITING

A successful company needs to keep their employees up to date on company activities (such as corporate buy outs, company recreational events, and policy changes) and trade news (such as new legislation affecting customers, competition news and manufacturer updates). The easiest and least expensive way to do all of this is through an employee newsletter.

The problem with this is most companies especially smaller ones, do not have the capital to hire a full-time writer. Many companies attempt to designate someone within the organization to write their newsletter, but this person is not a writer, in fact the one in charge of the newsletter is usually the secretary. Using nothing more than a typewriter, she tries to produce a nice-looking newsletter in a few minutes she has to spare between projects. Needless to say, the result is usually less than spectacular.

That's where you and your word processor come in. Using your computer, you can easily put together a newsletter that looks very professional--with columns, bold headlines, graphs and even pictures. Bring a sample newsletter into a business and have the manager compare it to his current newsletter (if he has one at all). Then tell him that by subscribing to your newsletter service, productivity and profit will rise for two reasons. First, because he will not be paying someone from inside the company to write the newsletter. Second, his employees will work more efficiently because they will be better informed.

Before you know it, you will have 10 to 15 companies paying you to write their newsletter, and will probably be just about all you can handle. Since each one will be paying you about $300 a month for the service, you will need to make the decision whether to continue to expand your service and hire more help, or simply relax and let the money keep rolling in.

MAIL ORDER REPORTS

Fads and trends come and go, but one thing that will always sell is information. With your word processor, you have one of the best mediums for presenting information, and you can make a bundle doing just that.

Just walk through your local book store or library and notice how many self-help, diet and how-to books there are. This should give you a feel how hungry consumers are for this type of information. Once you've read through a few of these types of books, you should know enough about the subject to write a brief five to ten page report. With the computer, you can make the report look very professional through the use of page numbers, double columns, pull quotes in the middle of the pages, and a bold catch title.

When the paper is complete, it's time for you to begin the marketing procedure. Take out an ad in the classified section of your local newspaper. Word the advertisement so that customers will be enticed to send you a check to learn more about the subject. Here are a few examples.

Tired of reading through useless diet books? TRY THE SECRETS OF CONTROLLING YOUR WEIGHT. Just send $3 to...

Plumbers charge over $100 dollars to make a house call. BE YOUR OWN PLUMBER, a new informed book, costs only $5. To order, send to...

Since printing costs will be minimal (between 25 cents and $1 per report) most of the money you collect will go directly to profit. And, since these reports are easy to produce, you can use some of that income to write and print a new report and sell it the same way. See how easy it is to make the whole thing snowball?

Here are some more subjects you can easily write brief reports and sell through the mail:

• How To Grow A Garden
• Selected Mexican Recipes
• Stop Smoking
• How To Paint Your House
• Mail-Order Marketing
• Making Your Own Patio Furniture
• Camping Made Easy
• Easy Baking Techniques

If some of this appeals to you, think of something else. Just remember, the idea must appeal to a wide arrange of customers or you will not sell enough products to defray your production costs.

TYPING SERVICE

When you begin to use your computer, you will quickly see the advantages you have over a standard typewriter. You can easily check your spelling and grammar, set your margins and type face as you wish, and make universal changes throughout the document without retyping the entire thing.

Because of these extensive features, your computer saves you time and effort when typing documents, and you can pass those savings on to your customers. With your computer, you can easily input a document, proofread it, give a draft copy to the customer for approval, make changes, then print a final version--all in less time than it would take a standard typist to type a single copy.

This is one of the easiest businesses to run once you master your word processor because all you need to know is how to type, no other talents are required. If you have a modern (telephone hookup) for your computer, you can even send documents across the country or around the world just as easily as you can deliver them across the street.

Your main concern in this business is finding customers who need typing done. Here are some customer suggestions and tips on how to get in touch with them:

Writers: There are literally thousands of people in this country who enjoy writing either for a hobby or as a source of extra income. By running an ad in one of the many writers magazines (such as Writers Digest or The Writer) you will get responses from writers all across the country who want their manuscripts typed.

Professionals: Small businesses often cannot afford the luxury of a secretary. Larger businesses sometimes have large projects to type but do not wish to hire someone extra. In either case an outside typist can be a valuable service.

Students: Many high school and college students don't have the time to type their own papers even if they do have the ability to. Especially during mid-terms or finals, a typing service can really make money at a school. Post flyers in every classroom and every bulletin board you can find.

The only requirement you need to stick to in this business is accuracy. No matter who you are typing for, they will stand for less than 100 percent perfect documents. Always check, double check, then triple check your work before you send it to your clients.

COMPUTING THE POSSIBILITIES

As you can see, with a computer or word processor, you can open up a whole new world of business opportunities. If you are one of the few business people who are still operating without one, you really should look into making that big purchase. While the initial capital outlay may seem high, a little ingenuity is all it takes to make the computer pay for itself.

Top 5 Ways to Get Your Site Banned From the Search Engines

Getting your site ranked high for your main keywords is an absolute must if you are serious about developing a profitable online business. There are many steps you need to make in order to achieve those top rankings and in the process many developers make critical mistakes that some are even unaware of, that get their site banned from Google and other search engines.

I'm presenting to you here the top 5 practices that will get your site banned in the hope that you will avoid using them.

1. Keyword stuffing

As you should know, having a good keyword density on your content pages is highly beneficial as it will help your search engine rankings. However, over doing it by stuffing your main keywords all over your articles, in title tags, in outbound links etc will surely get your site banned. If your keyword density reaches 10% on any given page then you are taking a high risk - it is recommended that the keyword density be kept around 5%.

2. Linking to link farms and other suspicious/low-quality sites

Google considers every outgoing link from your site as a vote of relevance and quality for that particular site. If you exchange links with a link-farm type site that will get you banned from most search engines, not just Google. You will also get banned if you provide links to sites that promote pornography, violence, racism, hacking, cracking, gambling, prescription pills etc or sites that for one reason or the other are already banned from the SE's. It is highly recommended to check your link partners on a regular basis or it may harm your business.

3. Illegal/Duplicate Content

We all know that content is King as far as the internet is concerned. Having freshly written top quality content on a regular basis will help your site and your rankings flourish. However, using someone else's copyrighted content on your sites will likely get you not just banned from the search engines, but in serious legal trouble as well. Using articles already published on other sites can harm you to a lesser degree, mostly if that article is old and has already been published on thousands of sites. Article directories however aren't usually affected as all their content is submitted by original authors on a regular basis.

4. Invisible text

Some webmasters try to fool search engine spiders by adding invisible text - that has the same color as the site background - in an effort to raise the keyword density. While this technique used to work in the "old days" of the internet, search engines spiders have become a lot smarter and this sort of "black-hat" technique will get you banned.

5. Cloaking

Cloaking is another "black-hat" technique that involves content separation, meaning the spiders see one highly optimized page while you and I see something completely different, usually different types of promotions. Just another powerful way to get your site out of major search engine rankings, so make sure to avoid this one too.

So there you have it, 5 great ways to get your site kicked out of Google and any other decent search engine out there - hope you'll use this information wisely.
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Using Blogs for Social Media Optimization

Blogs are one of six broad types of social media. This post will discuss how PR and marketing professionals can use blogs (even if you don't write your own) to increase brand awareness and credibility; the next will discuss all of the other tools of social media.

Blogs are a big deal; they are mainstream and competing with traditional media. There are a lot of them—Technorati tracks more than 15 million active blogs, and although the rate of growth has slowed, there are still thousands of new blogs started each day. Blogs help with SEO, whether you have your own or are generating links to your website from others. More than 60% of U.S. Internet users, and more 70% globally, have read a blog within the past 12 months. And blogs have become a key source of information for executive decision makers.

The first step in developing a blog strategy is understanding the landscape of blogs in your industry. You can search for relevant blogs using keywords pertaining to your business as well as searching for competitor names. While regular search engines can be used, that's a tedious process; it's much more efficient to use blog-specific search tools such as Google blog search, Technorati, BlogMarks, Blogarama and/or Blog Catalog. In addition, check out the blogrolls of the most relevant blogs you find.

The next step is to monitor blogs to discover what's being written about your company, product or other specific topic of interest. You can set up Google Alerts for free, although these won't catch everything (they're likely to miss quite a bit actually). Bloglines is a helpful free tool for monitoring blogs you've already identified; you can add their RSS feeds and monitor posts from one spot. If you have a modest budget (hundreds of dollars per month) for monitoring, try a service like WebClipping or CyberAlert. If you've got a bigger budget (thousands of dollars per month), you can step up to a professional-strength PR monitoring and current awareness tool such as Vocus, Moreover or YellowBrix.

Once you have a feel for the blog ecosystem in your industry, you can begin blogger outreach:

Commenting is a great way to start. Make sure your comments add something to the conversation and aren't simply self-promotional.

Contact the blogger as the next step. Contact should be personal (use the blogger's name, refer to the blog directly, act like you've been there before), compelling (tell a great story) and of course relevant to topics the blogger normally writes about.

Provide assets the blogger can use to enhance the post, such as original research results, images, video, or the offer of an interview with a key executive or other expert.

Writing a guest post is an excellent next step once you have a relationship of trust established with a blogger.

Promote posts when you get coverage. Increasing their exposure (and traffic) is a key incentive in getting bloggers to write about your topic.

And finally, follow up with key bloggers on your list. If they write about you, THANK THEM. If not, ask if it's okay for you to send them an occasional update on your firm/product/service and any interesting developments.

If you have your own blog, you can use many of these tactics to increase your audience through exposure on and links from other blogs. But even if you don't have your own, you can use these practices to increase exposure and build credibility for your company or product in relevant industry blogs.

How to Make Money on the Internet - Blogging

The internet is full of ways to make money and there are a lot of different approaches you can take to make money on the internet. Let me introduce you to blogging - more specifically let me explain to you how people make money on the internet with this fairly new method (think back 5 years, not 5 months).

What Exactly Is Blogging Anyway?

According to Wikipedia:

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

In plainer English, a blog is a website that shows the newest entries at the beginning, usually on the homepage. This website is a blog, and for that reason you will always find my newest writing on the homepage, at the top. As you scroll down, you will find the other entries I have written, newest to oldest.

What Are Blogs About?

There are blogs about everything! This blog teaches people how to make money on the internet. There are blogs about sports, news, fitness, cooking, humor, teaching, parenting, celebrities, and everything else you can imagine.

Blogs are a great format for news sites. Since blogs show the newest entries first, readers can easily find the most recent news stories. Bloggers (those who blog) post news about every industry, and provide their own opinions on the subject matter.

When blogs first started, they were created primarily to be online journals, but have now evolved into websites about anything and everything.

How To People Make Money Blogging?

The simple answer to that question is that blogs get traffic and convert it into money. Getting traffic is very possible with a blog, in fact it’s much easier to get traffic to a blog than it is to get traffic on traditional websites. I’ve created an entire series of posts on why blogs are the easiest way to get traffic and covert it into money. The method is called ‘Keyword Sniping’. In a nutshell, Keyword Sniping is the fastest and most direct way for people to pull search engine traffic to their websites and create a steady, low maintenance income.

Because of the immense popularity of the Keyword Sniping posts, I’ve created a free, downloadable report called “Introduction to Keyword Sniping: Your Shortest Path to $1,000 Per Month Online” that breaks down the entire philosophy. You can grab your copy of the book by filling out the easy form below (obviously I’ll never share or sell your information - it’s completely safe with me). The report will take you through all the steps for getting your first Keyword Sniper sites off the ground.

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Blogs can develop quite a following by people interested in the blog’s industry. Popular blogs can get thousands of hits per day. Gizmodo, Engadget, and Perez Hilton are three mega popular blogs which all get hundreds of thousands of visitors per day.

The traffic of most blogs is converted to money through advertising. That probably sounds difficult to you if you’re new, but it’s actually really easy. The primary revenue streams of most blogs are:

• Ad-Boxes
  • Google Adsense - Anyone can sign up for this service and it’s 100% free to use. Google will display ads on your blog and pay you when they get clicked on. This is by far the easiest way to make money with your blog. If you look closely at my pages you will find ad units labeled ‘Ads by Google’.
  • Yahoo! Publishing - Yahoo’s version of Adsense. Yahoo’s version is also free to use.
• Contextual Ads - These are ads that are displayed throughout the text of your blog. If you look closely through my pages you will see links that are double underlined. These are actually ads and if you hover over them, a little ad-box will pop up. The contextual ad company will pay for clicks on the links or the ad-box.
  • Intelitxt - The first major company to offer this type of advertising. It’s quite difficult to get an account with them unless you have over 500,000 hits per month.
  • Kontera - Another player in the contextual ad game. Kontera is easier to sign up for when you’re still small.
• Affiliate Programs - Many bloggers sell products and services for other sites and receive appropriate commissions. There are tons of sites out there that offer free, affiliate programs including:
  • Amazon
  • eBay
  • Shopping.com
• Text Links - Bloggers can sell links from there pages to other websites. Most bloggers that use this kind of revenue stream use a company called text-link-ads.com. Their service is free to use and their company will sell the ads for you. The sites that purchase them pay monthly, and you get paid monthly.
• Direct Sales - Some bloggers sell their own products and services.

How Much Can A Person Make Blogging?

That’s really tough question to answer. Some blogs create $500,000 per year and some make $0. The amount a person can make with a blog depend on a lot of factors including:

• Blogger’s Knowledge and Experience
• Quality and Quantity of Blog’s Information
• Marketing
• Determination
• Longevity
• Luck (This isn’t a joke but it is of course possible to create luck.)

I think that it’s very possible to create an income in the high five and even six figures for individuals that posses the right talent and determination. If you are thinking about becoming a blogger, you should visit this article: Making Money Online - Is This Business For You?

In my opinion, blogging is the easiest of all the methods of making money online, at least for beginners. It is also a stepping stone for those wishing to move onto more difficult online, money-making methods. If you’re interested in starting a blog, you should read this: 5263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog. It provides the basics of getting a blog set up to make money on the internet.

Making Money On The Internet Rules
Update: It has now been almost four years that I have been making money on the internet and I can tell you that it’s probably the funnest way to make money ever. I have to say that I freaking love it!