Have you always wanted to be an author or even a publisher? I started writing when I was seven years old. There weren’t blogs then to publish to there was only pen and paper. I wrote short stories and poetry, riddles and essays and most of them were pretty bad. Although the poetry wasn’t too bad. Some of my classmates used to come to me when they had to write for school and I’d happily do their assignments as well as my own.

Writing for a blog is often a different kind of writing. Usually you are teaching something, passing on useful information on a topic but there are many blogs that are all about creative writing and some of these are excellent. I wish that I had had the opportunity to share my writing this way when I was younger.

I’d like to see a list of really interesting creative blogs. Does anyone have any suggestions?

If you are still hesitating about becoming a published writer, if you are unsure whether people will want to read what you write – why not jump in and try it out. You can get a free blog with Blogger or Wordpress and it really doesn’t take much time to work out how to put a post together. Gradually you will learn all you need to as you continue to write.

This new and easy way of self publishing is an opportunity. Don’t be faint hearted, go for it. Spread out the wings of your imagination and fly. There’s a light breeze blowing, it’s a Summers Day. Below you are the roofs of houses and the tops of trees, way off in the distance there’s the ocean and the world is yours to describe.

What will you write about? Do you have a skill that you can communicate. A biting wit about social situations, insights into psychology or politics, a unique experience you want to talk about? Have you travelled or are you travelling and can you share those wonderful places with people in another country? There are so many things people could talk about.

For people interested in blogging for the first time, writers and publishers to be that haven’t yet taken their first steps to blogging regularly, there is a new course coming soon called Rich Niche Blogging. If you are interested in learning more, sign up for the Mini Module at http://www.richnicheblogging.com to find out all about it.

With the modular course comes access to a library of books about blogging. With this kind of reference library to back up the course you’ll soon turn from amateur to pro if you want to. If you too have dreamed about becoming a writer, find out about Rich Niche Blogging and launch yourself into a new career.

We’ve discussed about using Google Adsense programme and other merchants’ affiliate programmes to generate profits from your blog. However, we have a lot of other options ot monetize your blog, so we’re going to look into that today.

The first option we’ll be looking at is Chitika (www.chitika.com). Chitika is a very innovative contextual advertising programme because it can serve very detailed advertisements. For example, on your technological gadget blog, Chitika will show advertisements for tech gadgets such as iPods. The way they show it is in different tabs: one for “Best deals”, another for “details”, another for “reviews” and so on. This way, it is more of an informational section for your visitor rather than an advertisement, and naturally the click-through will be higher. You can apply here: https://chitika.com/application.php?type=mm

You can also be an affiliate for Amazon.com. Amazon offers a wide range of products but its predominant domain is in books. Whatever your niche is about, you can probably find a book about it on Amazon.com. Join their Associate programme here: https://associates.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html/

Once you join them, you can refer visitors to them and earn up to 10% commission. It’s not a lot but if you can manage to refer big volumes of visitors, Amazon is for you. This programme really shines when it comes to the ways you can refer visitors: you can use their predefined templates to pull up recent items that match a certain criteria you set, you can target your ad to show a specific item on sale or you can just simply weave your referral links into your blog posts.

Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs like http://xiaxue.blogspot.com. That blog receives over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog’s owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog popularity.

To gauge how much pageviews and visitors you get everyday, just use the free tool available at www.statcounter.com. They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won’t go into it.

If your blog has not acquired large amount of visitors yet, you can still sell ad space on your blog on a per click or per impression basis. Just visit sites like www.adbrite.com. For a complete list of these sites, visit http://performancing.com/node/60.

Hopefully, that will help you maximize earnings and profits from your blog!

Getting links from other websites is not the only way to attract visitors to visit your blog. This time, we are going to explore alternative methods to attract high quality traffic with both free and paid methods.

The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to recycle all the content you have written on your blog. What I really mean is to turn your blog posts into little “manuals” or articles that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to article directories. These article directories are like aggregators that collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day.

When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On most article directories, you are also permitted to include a “resource box” where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. This is where you can truly leverage the traffic of the said article directories.

Some good article directories to get you started:

www.eZineArticles.com

www.ultimatearticledirectory.com

www.submityourarticle.com

Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that is based on your niche. To find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter “<your niche> +forum”, without the quotes. You would want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members, and preferably always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum.

When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to append a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums.

People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affilliate since they are already convinced you’re an “expert” in the field.

The strategy we’ll discuss is word of mouth. Let’s say you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift and posted it on your blog, asking that a visitor refer three of his/her friends to visit your blog and the gift will be his/hers for free? If your small report or gift is lucrative enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will maybe refer their friends to your blog .

You can also utilize the “blog and ping” technique that everyone’s talking about. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as www.technorati.com know by pinging them. You can ping a lot of portals at once by using the free www.pingomatic.com.

Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space. A thing to keep in mind when buying paid traffic is to always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads. If your profits do no offset the expense, you will end up losing money, so choose wisely.

If it looks complicated they lose interest.

What’s the new blogging platform that has a minimalist interface, is totally simple to use, is like eavesdropping on gossip in a cafe and has so many leads to interesting articles that it’s dangerous to go there when you’re working?

I’ve been tweeting on twitter!

I’ve also discovered this book and been reading it tonight and now there’s so many ideas in my head I wish I had a thousand lifetimes to implement them all. Widgets and bots and gadgets and gizmos and ali babas open sesame!

Twitter Traffic Gold

I love twitter! I love it’s two line format because it can be profound or stupid and it’s not important to be careful because it’s like a conversation – you can toss a comment in the mix and it’s forgotten soon after. Yet there’s urls going up and taking you off to bargains and words of wisdom and thoughtful tutorials and glimpses of people’s feelings.

And there’s also comments like put the baby to bed and played guitar on the beach or peeling potatoes for tea – all mixed in with stuck in traffic, bush fire drama and earthquakes.

Its kind of a microcosm macrocosm and megacosm all together (I know, I know) Now I’ve had my rave I’m going to put the widget on the blog and you can see what inanities I have scribed as well. I’m not the poet I used to be – ah well – in another thousand years…