Tales From the Blogosphere

I entered the blogosphere fairly late in the game. More than three years after starting and managing several busy forums and web sites, I dabbled with blogging through regular entries to one of my aviation web sites. Within weeks I got tired of the discipline ?not of writing ?but of ftp抜ng everything to the web. I gave up as I decided blogging wasn抰 for me.

Fortunately, I didn抰 stay away as I saw a challenge, and an opportunity, in front of me. Having blogged on other people抯 sites, I felt that if I could blog there, I could blog anywhere, including on my own blogs. Taking a look at my options, I decided to download WordPress and I now run two blogs from two separate web sites.

I am thrilled with each blog抯 success and have no plans of giving up on what I am doing. In fact, I am mulling over starting a couple of more blogs as I see the value of this type of medium online.

So, how are my site抯 doing? Very well according to my sites?statistics. No, there isn抰 much activity as far as comments go, but my information is getting read and the blogs are bringing additional traffic to both sites. Let抯 just say that the traffic increases alone have been enough to keep me going, but other factors weigh in including:

Blurbs ?There are times when a full length article just doesn抰 cut it, but a blurb [pithy paragraph] does. Blogs are great for showcasing tidbits of information and allowing bloggers to link to the full article if more information is desired.

Links ?On my Jet Movements blog, I added over 200 aviation related links recently. Within days, traffic to my site increased and the first page rankings came back from Google. Less than six weeks after starting, the traffic to this particular blog has been great.

Showcase ?My second blog, The Article Writer, has helped me communicate better to my customers. Now, my customers can read about my writing style, my comments on raising SEO, book reviews, and more. This blog has given a 揾uman touch?to an otherwise good, but too-business-like web site.

Idea Farm ?Some of my blogs have turned into articles as I have taken a short, concise work and expanded on what I wrote through an article. Saves me time, too, as all I have to do is add a couple of extra paragraphs and my article is usually done.

Yes, blogging is a great way to communicate for business folks as well as teens. Some have thought that blogging was a fad, but I must say that it isn抰 and it is certainly here to stay. Have you started your blog yet?

Tag and Ping ?Get Your Blogs Indexed Fast

What is a tag?

Tags are keywords that you use in your blog post. If you have a blog about dogs and you just write a post about dog food, your possible tags would be, say: dog, dogs, dog food, natural dog food, dog food recipe, and any other keywords that you used in your post.

How to use tags

Tags using your blog URLs:

<*a href="http://www.yourblog.com/[tagname]" rel="tag">[keyword]<*/a>
(remove asterisks in actual code)

Examples:

<*a href=http://www.yourdogblog.com/dog+food rel=攖ag?dog food<*/a>

If you are using Wordpress blogs you can set tags using Wordpress search function:

<*a href=http://www.yourdogblog.com/blog/search/dog+food rel=攖ag?dog food<*/a>

Using Technorati Tags:

<*a href=http://www.technorati.com/tag/dog+food rel=攖ag?dog food<*/a>

Ping Technorati and IceRocket using following URLs to your ping list:

rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

You can also ping Technorati and IceRocket manually by going to
www.technorati.com/ping/ and www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping

You can use www.pingooat.com to ping more than 60 ping services in the same time.

Technorati and IceRocket will index your blog posts according to tags that you used.

Some of Technorati tags pages are highly ranked in search engines. Search engines bots spider daily these pages and when it finds your tags it will index your blog posts too.

It is recommended to use this method for each post that you write. By adding tags to your post you can drive more targeted traffic to your blog.

By using this method you can index your blogs in 24-48 hours depending on the popularity of the tags you used.

The Benefits of Blogging For Business

It goes without saying that maintaining a blog is a good idea for the health of your business. Have you ever asked yourself Why? Being familiar with how blogs work and how to effectively utilize them for the health and wealth of your business will pay you back substantially for your efforts. Ineffective Blogging will simply waste your time, efforts, and this tremendous marketing tool.

Why does your business need a Blog? Credibility would be a good answer. Posting about news in your industry, links you'd recommend to topics related to your industry or post valuable information from the inside or your personal experiences, your readers will see you not only as a valuable information source but as a community minded business.

Building traffic and list building are two more reasons why your business needs a blog. These tools are Solid, Effective, and Proven Tools for marketing your Goods and Services Online.


Blogs are great for your customers.They're not seen the same as your basic website or sales page. Postings are usually informal. At times entertaining yet informative. Their accuracy and effectiveness will peak the interest of your readers, establish you as an Expert, and build trust between you and your readers.

Having the ability to offer subscriptions to your blog through sources loike bloglet.com, your readers can simply opt to recieve notices of your most recent postings, delivered directly to their inboxes. Provided your postings remain relevant to your readers wants and needs, they'll continually come to you first.

If you set up your blog to accept comments, this will give your readers the ability to post feedback on your posts. This will give you valuable insight and ideas regarding your next product or project.

How to build traffic with your blog. Your blog provider may provide potential readers the option of a search box. This tool gives the reader the ability to search for a particular blog using a word or phrase. By using those particular words or phrases in your title you'll boost your chances for acquiring some targeted traffic.

Don't forget to submit your blog to the search engines. Also remember, this is "The Information Super Highway". Blogging is information and the Search Engines Love them. After every post, Simply 'ping' your blog, (this announces
your update. I use http://www.pingoat.com/) and the search engines will pick it up.


So jump on the blogging bandwagon take advantage of one of the cheapest and smartest marketing tools available. It's easy and profitable - so build yours today!

How to Use Craigslist and other Alternative Classifieds to Make Money Online

There’s been a lot of talk about Craigslist marketing for small businesses and affiliate marketers and I’ve tried using Craigslist and its alternatives for a short period of time.

Personally, I think they are an excellent avenue for freelancers who plan to make money online through their specific skill sets. These online classified boards can also provide small businesses with a channel to sell their services through the internet.

It’s basically free targeted advertising because of the ability to categorize services and products according to specific categories.

As an affiliate marketer, these classifieds can also provide a source of revenue but the likelihood of listing links to your sell page or website is very minimal as they are often deleted very quickly, at least for Craigslist. There are however, several other ways to use these classified services to earn some side income.

Using Craigslist-style Classified Boards to Make Money Online

Offer freelance services. Do you write, design or photograph? Are you good at data entry or languages? The job sections of these boards usually allow you to pitch your services.

Get paid to blog. I’ve tried offering ghost blogging and content creation services for specific niches and topics and actually did receive responses from business owners and webmasters who needed part-time bloggers or article writing.

Promote your Online Business. Movers, computer repair and delivery services traditionally do well on classified boards. But that’s not to say that online businesses won’t do as well either. You can use the boards to promote your web design, copy writing, translation or online marketing business.

Acquire interested leads. This concerns affiliate marketers. Links and obvious entries created to sell a product are deleted rapidly so an alternative is to write a general but targeted entry (without links) which collects responses from clients you can convert later.

Time-consuming but this is a pretty powerful tactic that has worked for me. Just remember to be ethical and respect the privacy of those who sent you an email.

Dosh Dosh’s List of Online Classified Boards

There are probably a lot more than what I’ve listed below but these were the ones that I’ve tried. All of them work similarly to Craigslist so if you are familiar with CL, these boards should be relatively easy to use.

Note that most of them are strongly geared towards North America and the U.S in particular and none of them comes close to Craigslist in terms of ad and response volume. If you’re pressed for time, I suggest focusing on Craigslist, GoogleBase and Backpage.

Craigslist

Google Base

Adoos

Dorm Item

Postaroo

Backpage

Gumtree

Edgeio

ListSomething

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The Basics of Blogging and Web Site Creation - Part Two: Introduction To Keywords

Okay so now we know content is king. And of course since we are creating our own blogs, (remember blogs is short slang for Weblogs - which is what their "formal and official" name is), most of our information is going to be "unique" and "Original". Yet every now and then, since we are only human, and since we simply cannot "create" more and more information, we will copy information from other web sites. That is cool. There is no problem with that, UNLESS, you decide that "copying" and/or "linking" is simply better and forego writing anything.

Now let me make this clear. If you are offering a service to people, where your main business is to offer out links to other places where people can get information, in other words you are a repository where people come to get links, because you already did all the research - that is fine. Because what you will loose in content, you will make up in "eyeballs" and "hits". Remember the end result of good search engine listings is just that. MORE HITS - MORE EYEBALLS - MORE PEOPLE VISITING. And content is not the only parameter an Search Engine looks at. Not by a long shot.

This is a critical point to keep in mind. Everything we will talk about, every method, from content to email to lists to whatever, (hehe my most unfavorite word in the English language pops in - Whatever - see my post on that word in my blog), has but one goal in mind. To consistently and constantly increase and build your website "hits". To make sure you have an ever-growing "fan" club "motivated" because of the service you are offering, to come back. So please differentiate between the end goal and the methods. Content (discussed in our first article) is a method towards the goal of getting listed in a good position on a search engine, and the goal is to have people use and come to your web site or blog, and create a "buzz" about it. (We will talk about this much later in our series.)

Let us go back to content for a moment. Here we are talking about something that all writers know about and are familiar with. Text, words, phrases. Original, unique text.

So in order to continue on our own fairly logical path, we will now concentrate on the "text" and what has to be in it. Which brings us to the subject of "keywords". Before explaining just what these are and either their importance or total invalidity and worthlessness these days, (and this is up for debate) let us define keywords more carefully.

If you have a website selling hair beauty aids, you will want to sell your material writing content around what you are selling. Obviously if you write something about the difference between different models of dishwashers, this is not going to relate to the "subject matter" and content of your site. So you will write articles around your hair supplies. You will write articles on good hair care, on how to dye your hair, how to get rid of split-ends, how often to shampoo etc. etc.

Our magic hair website is called "Hair Is Not Forever", and it is at www.hairisnotforever.com (I have no clue if such a site exists so please don't hit that link!) But this is our site for now and we will keep it as we go along. hairisnotforever also has a blog. This blog we will call "SilkyFairHair" and we will put it, for the sake of our example in blogger.com under the name of the proprietor who is aptly named Mr. Nor Hair. So now we have as follows:

1. Web Site - Hair Forever @ www.hairisnotforever.com
2. Blog - SilkyFairHair @ http://norhair.bl.com (this URL is fictional)

These names ARE important and so are the URL's. (URL stands for Universal Resource Locater). So keep them in mind as we go along through these articles especially when I get to the article on the importance of finding the right name.

So Mr. Nor Hair and his wife, Mrs. Purple Hair work together. They create the site, get all the necessary stuff to sell something on it, write a couple of articles about hair and sit back and wait for the people to come beating their "virtual" door down. Well as we say in Hebrew, "Boker Tov" (which literally means "Good Morning"), or as you say in English, "Knock. Knock. Good Morning! Anyone Home?"

Okay the Hair couple know about keywords. So they create articles in which EVERY sentence has the word hair in it (or balding). But hair is the name of the game. They make sure their content is original, and once they have written two HTML pages of hair articles, strategically placed by their cousin the graphic artist (who is bald) around the advertisements for hair products and now they think they are done!

Woah! Not by a LONG SHOT! And here is where it gets depressing for the uninitiated and non-dedicated people.

Let us deal with the "keyword" issue.
Keywords are like indices or if you wish, categories. A keyword is something that the search engine will look for and validate (in our day), to use as one of the parameters as to how to list your site.

The keywords we refer to are in two distinct and totally different places. The first in the page header of the site.
in what is known as the section for "meta" tags. We will deal with meta tags in a different article, however let us just say these are the keywords most search engine look for (with their "bots") when visiting your site.
An example meta tag for keywords on our site may look like this:

Again in our article(s) on meta tags we will discuss these keywords, and meta tags, but for now take it as a given these are some of the keywords that will be in the meta tag.

When the Search Engine technology first became popular and meta tags were implemented, the keywords tag was critical. Search Engines looked at the keywords in the meta tag and assumed that was what the site was about and listed the site under those keywords. This was caught on to immediately, and humans being the crafty devils they are, began listing keywords that had nothing to do with their sites in order to drive traffic to the site. (Remember - the end result is the oh-so-important one: Hits & Eyeballs)

So porn sites especially, adopting this as yet another "fool the engine" technique, would put keywords like "hair", "technology" etc. into their meta tags, and give the site an innocuous name and voila, more traffic.

So in the never-ending battle Search Engines caught on, and did a few things. They deprecated the importance of the keywords in the meta tags according to their algorithms, UNLESS the content on the site actually did match the keywords. Of course, this was not enough as porn sites will put "real" content around their stuff. I will give you a REAL example which I find funny, but it is very serious.

In one of my posts on my blog, you can see my bio which is picked up by search engines. The other day I received an email from an old flame of mine saying "I freaked out. I googled you, under Ted Gross Writer, and you are connected with a site about tushy's!" So I go and Google it, and sure enough in like the fifth position is this: "Ted Gross's Unofficial Bio - The Real Version by Tushy" and of course I click and get led to another site (no url here as I do not want to publicize that site for obvious reasons) and I come to a porn site which ripped off, out of all the content on the internet, MY profile to place around their porn adverts. UGH! But you see that is how crafty people are!

(Here we are not going to talk about "splogs" - meaning "spam blogs" yet. But keep it in mind.)

Okay now what happens - not in theory but in practice.

Two scenarios:
1. You have keywords in your meta tag (and you should have them!) The little Search Engine "bot" (that is a software program whose job it is to travel around the Internet, never sleeps and never eats and gets into all those porn sites too!, and picks up information on ALL sites so the information can be categorized), comes to our site of hairisnotforever and reads the keywords on the page. Then this little bot makes a snapshot of the web page. Then the algorithms take over and match the keywords in the meta tags to the text and stuff on your site. (Remember Search Engines don't "see", they are NOT visual (males are visually oriented not Search Engines!) so graphics are not taken into account unless you use the alt tag.) The algorithms get more and more sophisticated as time goes on and they look for content, keywords, phrases etc. (Remember original content!)

2. You have no keywords in your meta tag so the engine just looks at your content.

So our happy couple figures okay lets put the word hair say, in every sentence at least three times. NO! Don't do that. Overuse of a keyword is a red-flag to a Search Engine and you will be penalized for it! It should be used and used frequently, but NOT overused.

Now when you Google for hair products using the word "balding", the Search Engine has the keyword, and based upon a million parameters decides what position for that specific keyword, hairisnotforever will have, and feeds it out.

So our couple figures what the hell. We will also sell mascara, and they put in a picture advert and the word mascara in their keywords, without having any content for it. Well then www.hairisnotforever.com will probably be listed as the last of the last of the last for anyone looking for "mascara".
So for this lesson the formula is:

"Content+Keywords in the content+Keywords in Meta tag."

The Basics of Blogging and Web Site Creation - Part One: Content Is King

My fellow writers at the Absolute Writers Forum (known lovingly as the AW Water Cooler or just Cooler) are the reason for these next series of articles so I wish to thank them.

In the next few series of articles, I will try and deal with some of the very basic technical jargon and skills that one needs when facing this daunting world of web-site creation, blogging and getting listed and noticed by the Search Engines. Some of this I take from things I posted at AW and others from my own articles on Web Creation and still others from my own blog, Cobwebs Of The Mind.

Let us start with the few important factors that are required today on the web. There are quadrillions of articles on this, most very poorly written, but the message is always the same.

On the web today, "content is king". But that is not all their is to that rule. Let us change it a bit to fit the reality of the web, search engines, and the sophisticated algorithms being deployed by the search engine trinity of: Google, Yahoo & MSN.

"Content is King, but Original Content is the King of Kings."

Okay - that is the first cardinal rule you MUST understand about the web today. Now what does this mean?

There are essentially three factors in this equation:


1. You must have content - words, phrases, information - on your web site.

2. You should have "original" content on your web site. This is content which either you have created or have gotten permission to reproduce on your web site. It should be "original". Copying content from a web site, and putting it in your blog, where that content has been reproduced in thousands of other web-sites, is not going to help your Google ranking (and you may even be penalized for it.) This does NOT mean that everything, every single phrase and post and article you put up on the web has to be original and not repeated elsewhere. What it does mean though, is that the majority of your web site or blog should be just that - YOURS.

3. Your content should constantly grow. You should be adding to it on a daily or bi-daily basis. Stagnant blogs and web sites are noticed for being stagnant - dead. They drop so fast in Search Engine (search engine) rankings you have no clue! Web sites demand nurturing and work. They do NOT run on auto mode. (Just look at how much time you spend with your blog!)


Now as to why and how.

Search Engines look for content. They have developed very sophisticated algorithms to check content. To see if this content is original, or they are coming across the millionth time they have seen the same thing. This is all mathematical btw. And this is NOT the only thing they look that. (We will get to those other things in our next posts). However, Content is critical. Lets give two examples.

1. Ever notice how fast some popular Forums get indexed in the Search Engines. This is due to the fact that they have an incredible amount of page hits, and that they exist for POSTS. Posts on forums are ORIGINAL for the most part. So engines look for the Content, forums have this, they list them, they see original content - the forum moves up the list, and thus more people find the forum in the search, more people hit the forum pages, more "hits" and "eyeballs" are registered back on the Search Engine servers, and the forum keeps on moving up. The more hits - by mathematics - the more posts. The more posts the more original content. The more original content the better the listing. The better the listing - the more people find the forum. Getting the picture? A never-ending circle of success.

2. For those of you in doubt as to whether Search Engines can "read" content just take a look at Adsense and Adwords. When you go to a site with them, adverts are fed out based upon the: 1: Content of the page you are on, and 2) Your IP address to determine which country and language you speak. Since I am in Israel, I am never surprised if I hit a site say that is discussing a topic and has adsense, and though this site is totally in English and geared to people in New York City, some of the adsense adverts are in Hebrew based upon the content of the page I am on. The algorithm finds key words (more on those later) and feeds out the adverts.

So our first lesson on Search Engines and ranking and all that good stuff is about Content. Remember the rule.

"Content is King, but Original Content is the King of Kings."

An Informative Guide to Google PageRank: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has written a terrific introduction to Google PageRank that deserves to be read by anyone who’s interested in learning the details behind how Page Rank (PR) actually works as well its relevance to your blog or website.

With most webmasters eagerly anticipating the upcoming PR update, this article dispels several unfounded myths and situates the focus on PR within a balanced link building/SEO strategy.

Written for both internet searchers and webmasters, Danny uses a large variety of official documents from Google to come up with various explanations which define PageRank and examine it’s relationship with search rankings.

The article also highlights the key differences between the actual internal PR and the “Toolbar” PR, which is what you see if you use Google Toolbar or the brilliant SearchStatus Firefox extension, a extraordinarily helpful SEO tool which I highly recommend.

Here is a excerpt from the article, on the difference between internal and toolbar PR:

Internal PageRank are the PageRank scores that Google uses as part of its ranking algorithm. Those scores are constantly being updated. In contrast, the PageRank scores that Google allows the world to see — Toolbar PageRank — is a snapshot of internal PageRank taken every few months.

The conclusion to Danny’s excellent writeup is also noteworthy because he brings out an important point that can be overlooked when building links for your website:

If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for.

See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best.

So if you’re trying to rank well for those lucrative keywords that help you make money, remember to not only buy relevant ads that send you strong referral traffic but also search optimized keyword links from similar websites in your niche.

While an attractive Page Rank will help you make more money from link selling, a more important long term strategy is to ensure that your website consistently receives organic search traffic, which you can monetize through on-site ads or affiliate recommendations.

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