Adsense - The Beginners Course
October 5, 2007
Google Adsense is by far the most popular PPC (pay per click) advertising service in the world. There are many others, but Google Adsense is by far the best at delivering targeted, and (if done correctly) high paying ads. But how do I begin?
First things first… sign up for Google Adsense by clicking the link at the end of this article. Signing up couldn’t be easier, and the whole process should take you less than five minutes. One thing to remember is that Google Adsense is just one of many monetization methods, and unless your last name is Shoemaker, then you aren’t going to get rich from using Google Adsense, but you will earn a bit of extra money by using some of that space in your sidebar.
After signing up for Google Adsense it’s time to pick out some ads, post them, and wait for instant millions! Alright, it’s not that simple… I promise! Read more
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Write In Your Own “Voice”
October 3, 2007
One of the things that you must do early on to become successful in this community is to find a voice. This is the simplest, yet most important thing you can do to differentiate yourself from all of the other writers in your niche. Finding your voice is all about the way you communicate with your readers. If there isn’t something to set you apart, what keeps them coming back?
Ask yourself these questions -
- What do I do differently than others?
- Do I have a unique idea or concept that others will find valuable?
- Would I read my posts?
- Who is my target audience?
- Do I do enough to reach my target audience?
- Can people pick up on tidbits of my personality through my writing style - or does it sound like I’m writing for a newspaper?
- How can I inject my personality into every post? Read more
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The Truth About Money Blogging
September 29, 2007
I run a money blog. So does John Chow, so does Darren Rowse, so does Yaro Starak. Most of you are probably also included in this category. What’s my point? There are a LOT of us!
I hear people say things on a regular basis like
“The make money blogging niche is saturated, you’ll never make a dime”
I think that’s complete crap. With 100 million blogs out there, can the market really be THAT saturated? Let’s not forget that there are an estimated 100k new blogs started every day. That’s over 30 million blogs a year! Market saturation? I think not. Let’s dig deeper. Read more
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Building Pillar Content
September 26, 2007
For a blogger to succeed they must start with a solid foundation. The foundation of your blog all starts with pillar content. Pillar articles or pillar content, is just that, the articles that establish the foundation (or tone) of your blog. Without a few articles establishing a direction, the reader might get lost in the shuffle.
What is Pillar Content?
Pillar content is simply a timeless article (or mostly) that you can link back to when you mention something similar in a future article. It can be a story, a how-to, or even a biography about yourself. The important part to remember when building pillar content is that it has to provide value. These value posts are going to be articles that serve as a reference later, so you need to make it something your readers will want to read.
Why do I need these?
If you just start spewing articles out, there isn’t a solid and defined direction that you are heading. By building pillars, you are in fact adding foundation, framing, and a roof to your blog. Your house couldn’t stand without it’s foundation, and your blog can’t stand without pillar content.
How much pillar content do I need?
As a blogger your first couple of weeks need to be NOTHING BUT pillar articles. Would you read a blog if it weren’t helpful, entertaining, or informative? Probably not. So why would the audience you are targeting? After you have a few of these Pillar Articles built up in your archives, you can move on to do just about anything. Yo
u have a strong foundation, it’s time to build the house. You should strive to create at least one pillar post a week for the first 6 months, but you should never STOP creating Pillar Content, you can just slow down the frequency so that you can write about other things, but don’t ever abandon it completely. Just like any other foundation, it may need maintenance.
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Making Connections One Blogger At A Time
September 22, 2007
The easiest way to build a loyal readerbase for your blog is to get out there and start making connections within the community. The Blog-o-Sphere is just that, a community. Just like a real world community, members don’t like neighbors that are bums. Being a bum in the blog community consists of the “me first” bloggers, and nobody cares much for them.
In order to be in it for the long haul, you are really going to have to make a conscious effort to please those around you. The blogging purists are going to tell you that it doesn’t matter, just write for you and others will follow. This is definitely an old-school train of thought. With over 100 million blogs out there, if you write this way, and run your blog in the “me first” manner, what keeps them from ditching your blog from their daily RSS reads as soon as they find another blog similar to yours? “There isn’t a blog similar to mine”… Uh huh, if you believe that, I’d like to sell you these magic beans. Email me, I’ll give you a great deal.
A few easy ways to start building relationships
- Comment on other blogs in your niche. There isn’t a single easier method to build targeted traffic than this dandy.
- Email a blogger just to tell them how much you enjoyed their blog. This goes a long way in feeding an ego. The fastest way to a man’s heart might be their stomach, but the fastest way to a bloggers heart is definitely through their ego!
- Link to other blogs. This might just be the easiest way to gain a reader. When you link to a blog, the other blogger is almost guaranteed to come check it out. As a blogger, we are always curious to read anything with our name in it.
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What is a Blog?
September 18, 2007
The word blog was derived from it’s parent - the weblog. A blog or weblog is basically an online journal that allows you to document your hobbies, passions, thoughts, or day-to-day occurrences for future recollection. As more and more people are starting to realize, the blog is also a valuable business tool. Blog’s make it easy for web novices to start and publish content, without having to toil through learning to design a webpage, or even worse… having to pay for someone to design it for you! The internet god’s have made it easy for you to have an internet voice, without having a “static” webpage.
The Blog as a Business Tool
More and more Dot Com Preneurs are realizing the immense power of the blog. From fortune 500 CEO’s to your next door neighbor, blogs are sprouting up everywhere. With conservative estimates coming in at about 80 million blogs in the blog-o-sphere, and roughly 200,000 new blogs appearing every single day!
So how does a blog become a business tool? Well, there are blogs that exist for just about any topic that you can come up with. From fly-fishing to video games, blogs are in every corner of the internet. However, there are very few blogs that are (less than 10%) of blogs that are correctly optimized to serve your business. And when I say serve your business… I mean make you cash! With so many topics available, why not create a blog that advertises your business, product, or services? It’s easy advertisement, takes less than 30 minutes to create, and you can update it as often as you like with little-to-no web knowledge.
Why Blogs Are Better Than “Static” Webpages
Search Engines - Ever wonder how the search engines decide who gets the top spots? There are a number of ways they calculate what constitutes a “relevant” result (which I’ll cover in a later article), but two factors are how often a webpage is updated, and how many total pages a site encompasses. Since it’s so much easier to produce massive amounts of content, and update a blog regularly, it generally fares much better than a “static” page when it comes to SERP (search engine results placement). This is one of the things that Dot Com Preneurs have recently caught on to.
Ease of Use - When you make something available to the masses that gives them a voice on the internet, people will generally take advantage of it. I can’t stress enough how easy it is to create, maintain, and produce content for your very own blog.
Marketability - With website marketing becoming the fastest growing internet trade, it’s no wonder more and more internet marketers are choosing blogs for the means by which they deliver information. With the right SEO (search engine optimation) techniques, web marketers can now bring their product pages to the front page of major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This translates into a significant amount of extra pageviews every month with little-to-no extra work. More money + Less work = Happy Dot Com Preneurs.
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