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In the last article, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we’re going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain “high quality” links. We’re also going to talk briefly about Google’s PageRank.

First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are

1)     The address which it links to

2)     The text of the link

3)     The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let’s analyze this information one by one. First, you’d naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says “Barbie dolls” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms “technological” or “gadget”, it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it’s essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google’s PageRank. It’s basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targetted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine results.

We’ve already optimized our blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we’re targetting, but here comes the sad news – it affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, don’t skip this step as every little bit helps when you’re competing for search engine rankings!

Now, we’re moving on to offpage search engine optimization. That is, factors that are not on your blog but affect your search engine rankings greatly. There are a lot of offpage factors, but we shall study them one by one. The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog.

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links.

For example, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like ant round a sugar bowl.

The most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for it. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information to the site’s readers, chances are the webmaster(s) will link to your blog and even be happy to write about you!

Let’s talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to link to your blog. We’re discussing this based on the presumption that your blog is really content rich and offer high quality information to anyone in your niche or topic of discussion. The most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster.

First, let’s look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that you’re targetting. In this case, let’s search for “technological gadgets”. The first few results, www.t3.co.uk and www.acarplace.com/brands/gm/gadgets.html are commercial sites, so don’t bother asking. We’re looking for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Seems like www.gizmodo.com would be a good option!

So, compose an email to the webmaster of www.gizmodo.com (whose email address you shall find on the site). They even have their AIM contact there, so it’s also a good choice if you use AOL Instant Messenger. Start by stating how you came across their site (i.e. “looking for gadget information”, NOT “looking for link partners!”) and how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really good about their site and do it honestly.

Then, suggest that so-and-so content on your own blog will be a nice complement to their site’s content and vice versa. Put a link on your blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to weld a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and your blog.

You will find people who won’t even respond to your email, so forget about them and move on. Remove the links from your blog to their site if they have not responded to your email within two weeks, which is a pretty long wait.

Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up, and before long you should have quite a few good sites all linking to you. In the next article, we shall explore further the more advanced offpage factors, and ways to improve them!

Now, you should be building up a blog with content you have passionately written. It might become a grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, we really hope it’s not just a lifeless factsheet.  It has a picture or two, a joke, a quote  and  maybe an anecdote or two.

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information.  SEO for blog posts is a way of telling a search engine what a post is about so that it can serve up your link when someone searches by a keyword for a topic.             

Simple enough. However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com, to name a few more popular ones. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, but that doesn’t stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. There are more complex techniques that are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords  but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let’s determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. Just do a normal search and look on the bar above the result. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so.

Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That’s more manageable, but it will be better to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadget” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML!

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the <h1> and </h1> tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the <h1> </h1> tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog posts will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic.

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and drop your ranking into oblivion… So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!

Finding something to blog about is not hard, making money blogging can be. There are many factors to consider when blogging to actually pull some income out of the ether.

Finding a niche is the starter block. Because search engines index by keywords, general topics are hard to market, one needs to drill down to a specific subject and choose some relevant keywords before one even starts. This is called Niche Marketing because you are finding one little niche in a big drafty castle.

Niches that don’t have a wide fanbase, like collecting bottletops say (but don’t quote me, I havn’t researched it – this might be a hot topic!) generally won’t make money however well you market them. So you need to find a Rich Niche just like a miner striking gold, and then you need to be very quiet about it or someone will steal it from you.

Once you have found a niche and selected some keywords you need to build a site and an aura of links to get traffic to your site and then you need to be providing the links out from your site to the affiliate programs or advertising links that will pay you.

There is a new package of multimedia tutorials that will help you do just that coming out soon from http://www.richnicheblogging.com  so bookmark the page and keep an eye out for it. Consisting of videos with how to add monetizing factors to your blogs, a library of books on blogging, audio interviews with some well respected marketers and ebooks all to do with affiliate sales, blogging and researching niche markets, it looks like it might be the new bloggers answer to his prayers.

They even have two blogs that will be talking about niches and monetization.

Monetize Your Blog   and  Hot Topic Niche

When there is a lot of competition in a market, such as in Internet Marketing, people would be wise to steer clear of it. It’s not a Niche – its a ballroom and it’s hard not to be a wallflower. Pick something that has a wide appeal but which most people won’t think about promoting a product in. Then you have a true Niche.

All you have to tackle then is getting traffic and converting it into sales.

As your blog’s content increases and it becomes known and read, people in your niche will definitely mention you for intelligent or interesting discussions. This is, in a sense, an initiation of an interaction. When people speak of you, you should thank them for the mention and build up the interaction!

You can use a traffic tracking script such as the free www.statcounter.com,  and can see where traffic comes from. If a large number of visitors come from a certain blog, you can be sure they have mentioned you in their latest post or linked to you from their sidebar or links page. What you should do is pay them a visit, leave constructive comments on their posts and build up a conversation!

As you continue doing this, you will start to gather a lot of friends in your niche. This is helpful later on when you decide to do collaborations such as interviews. In fact, when you’re out of ideas for writing on your blog, you can interview other blog owners in your niche!

If you’re using Wordpress, Textpattern, MovableType or any other advanced blog engines, you can also post trackback links on your posts. This means you can post an article about what other people have posted! Your particular post will then appear as a link on that post you have written about.

This is definitely a great way to get traffic if you post brilliant insights about a post on a very famous blog. Since the famous blog already has a per-existing pool of readers, this is like a shortcut to hog their visitors! The only thing you will want to observe is to keep your posts sensible and insightful, don’t just visit and leave an ad for something or you’ll be viewed as a spammer.

If you’re using Blogger, you would not be able to use trackback links. However, you can post insightful comments on other people’s blogs and subtly include a link back to your blog. You can make it seem like you’re pointing to your blog as an extra reference to the subject of discussion. Of course, this technique is not only limited to Blogger users and users of other blog engines can employ this strategy as an additional traffic source.

Join the conversation. Don’t just talk to yourself. Relevant links back and forth tell search engines that you are worth listening to.

So you’ve managed to get some good-quality, original content on your blog and you have even attracted a some traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.

There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google’s Adsense programme is probably the easiest.

Visit their website at using the widget on the side for adsense and you’ll find out more about their advertising programme there, but there are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.

First, Google’s Adsense programme is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do there. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they may see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog.  You’ve just made your first virtual cents!

It’s true your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. Placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors will get you more clicks. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances are that someone will notice an ad on your blog.

Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s really simple. With the new widgets  tab for wordpress themes, it’s easy to add a text block in your sidebar and add adsense html code to it.

Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services.

Anyway, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affilliate programme. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.

If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.

Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for <your niche> +”affiliate programmes”. Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche.

The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate some profits from your blog. You don’t have to make a career out of this kind thing but it will maybe cover your costs so you can blog about what you want and a little income will pay your hosting. Or you can study how to get a lot of traffic and concentrate on making money with reviews for affiliate products. There are many excellent ebooks available to help you learn how to do this.

I have to be honest here that I have trouble remembering to water my plants, check my post office box and blogging regularly. I  know I need to face the fact – my blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Yet sometimes a month slips past like a raging river  after a storm and  seems to have no room for a quiet conversation in it.

But this is an article about what it’s important to do and not about my own personality defects although I do sometimes feel a trace of hypocrisy passing on such great advice when I am so poor at taking it. Ah well. 

We have discussed how to write attractively, so now we are going to discuss what we are going to write on. I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate and interested in. If you’ve chosen to make blogging a career because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about something that you’re not interested in is as torturous as as any mundane job!If you are blogging for pleasure – then  stretch out and open yourself to  your creative passions.

Your feelings and emotion show through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.  There is a quote that goes  dance as if no one is watching.  The same goes for writing, write as if no one is listening, write to express yourself.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and try and make it a habit to post at least once every day at the start, even if it’s only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally reach your full speed. Then, it’ll take a lot of effort to stop you instead!

However, no matter how well you know your topic, your brain is bound to get exhausted over some time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

1)     The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

2)     Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you’ll have quite an unexhaustible “conversation” ongoing, so you’ll not need to actively search for content to write about. However, if you’re still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.

3)     You can also have conversations with people with the same interest as you in the particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but not every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

Try to keep up your momentum of posting once per day (more if you have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis, hence ranking you higher and gaining you extra traffic.

At the other end of the spectrum, try not to let a week go by without a post and if you do write only once a week make sure that its worth reading.

What kind of content is suitable for blogging in order to make it profitable. First off, I want you to understand that there is no fixed scope that your blog should have, which means you can write about whatever you’re interested in.

However, the difference between a popular blog and a non-profitable blog is the way the blog is written. Just imagine, would you prefer to read your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by your favourite author? Would you visit somewhere just to see ads or are you looking for information or entertainment.

The most important point is people like to read “light” stuff most of the time. You see, when people log on to your blog, they are not only looking for information – they are also looking for something that intrigues them or delights them, something more that they can obtain easily, and better still in a relaxed manner.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current visitors coming back for more, it is very important to keep a human touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining you’re talking about a certain topic with your personal friend. A bonus for your readers is a quirky sense of humour, so try to add funny comments in your articles where they are suitable but don’t offend people.

Don’t write as if you’re preparing a speech, write as if you’re having a conversation with a single person.This will make your visitor think of you more as a personal friend rather than a person of higher authority. Human beings are very curious creatures, and naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you, as the information you’re offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog will make a world of difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need to find out information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

Don’t concentrate on the minute by minute events of your life or leave out the occasional anecdote. Just find a middle ground where you can promote a product, talk about your day, offer some valid information, tell a joke, pique someone’s curiosity or make them think about something.

Write simply as an equal friend to your visitors, write to them as if you’re talking to a someone you like and respect and establish your own personality on your blog.

Well, my report is ready and on sale for only $9.95 so I’m hoping that you’ll like it so much that you’ll leave me a testimonial. If you will, leave me a comment on this post and I’ll make sure it hits the page with a link to your site and thank you in advance to anyone who takes the time.

What is it about? My report is on using a database to hold your affiliate links, blog and site links , source code and information so that it’s all easy to find and use. It’s called Genie’s Web Links Organisational system and its to help you organise your data for use.

You can see it at http://www.imarketable.com.

All those guru marketers have shown you their paypal accounts, so you know that super affiliates make heaps of money. In fact YOU started doing this because you know people make thousands on the internet – so where’s your share?
Where’s YOUR MONEY ???

Look I wish I could nod my head and magic it into your living room, but I know where it is! It’s in all those snippets of code you’ve got stashed somewhere on your hard drive.

You put it in the wrong place!!! It needs to be on your websites but it also needs to be in one place so its easy to find and add it again and again to multiple websites. Look, I’ll show you….
Genie’s Web Links organisation

Assuming you are a web page maker, a reseller or an affiliate marketer – it’s highly likely that you can’t find your money for one of two reasons. You can’t find your links – or other people can’t find your links. If other people can’t find your links then place ads to get traffic (see the pages on traffic on the site)- and start inviting visitors. But if you can’t find your links – get Genie’s Web Link Organiser.

Remember all those snippets of information that you carefully saved — somewhere!

> emails and signatures to promote your affiliate products.
> admin link to the FAQ program you installed a week ago.
> favad code block or google code block you need to use
> banner or widget code you wanted to use on your blog
> link to the script you were going to install next week.
> login link to an affiliate program to see if you made sales

You’ve done the hard work but you haven’t completed the process. Can you find your links and code? Only sometimes? Dear, dear – you need some help! Get this and you won’t know how you completed your work without it!

Get Genie’s Web Link Organisation and find YOUR money.

Limited time – new product price only $9.95 for the first 50 customers. Just take a look.

http://www.imarketable.com

Wishing you magical success,
Genie