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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!

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.

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!

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.

A Blog or web log or online diary or modern website or profit machine is – the easiest way to start to have an identity on the web. Whether you choose a site that hosts blogs or install a blog on your own host is your choice, and you can also create your blog externally and point it to your own domain. Any option is your choice and whichever is easiest is best while you learn.

Regarding these several options ( host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog) for starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com. Wordpress is a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable. There are a huge range of themes and plugins available to truly individualise your blog and add functionality like adsense and RSS. It is worth starting with this just to get an API key that you will need if you host your own blogs.

Blogger.com is owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. If you first get a gmail account then logging in is a breeze and access links can be on your desktop on the google page. Bookmark your login pages otherwise so they are easy to find.

Wordpress is a relatively new blog option, but growing rapidly – unfortunately I don’t know the speed of getting indexed by search engines for it. However, Wordpress is a better option in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com/signup.g) or Wordpress (http://wordpress.com/signup/). Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates on the different tabs. It’s easy and its fun and the results look very professional.

As to blogs you have to pay for – If you are looking for a very professional blog platform then choose http://www.typepad.com . It’s for serious bloggers who are very creative and professional and small business blogs.

Here are a few common “blog-related” words to help you out:

1) Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.
2) Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.
3) Pinging – Like a horse and carriage -blogging is often paired with pinging when either one is mentioned. Pinging is the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their directory website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

For now, I shall leave you playing with your new blog and exploring the features that come included with it. In the next articles, we shall discuss the many ways we can gain profit from a blog, as well as tips on how to write posts that keep visitors glued and keep coming back for more!