Promote a Blog With Link Building
A writer at one of my favorite article sites InfoGoRound wrote a good article on link building, another area that I need to get better at when it comes to how to promote a blog. Many of us that have WordPress sites not only enjoy blogging, we also like to make money with our website. I am certainly not one of those internet “gurus” but just another techless blogger that is trying to do better when it comes to promoting my blogs and does not mind sharing good information such as this link building article.
One of the most important factors, of the many considered by search engines in calculating your search ranking, is how well your website or blog is linked to other sites. Almost nothing you can do to improve your ratings will have as dramatic an effect as increasing the number of these links. There are several simple and inexpensive ways to improve the number and quality of the sites linking to you. By concentrating on this one metric, you can have an amazing impact on how well your site does in a search for a particular keyword.
The simplest thing you can do to improve this link count is to start visiting other blogs and websites that have to do with the keyword you care about. By visiting these sites, you have the chance to comment on posts and leave a link back to your site. These all add up over time to help improve your link count.
You could also start your own blog, or even a group of blogs related to keywords you care about and link these back to your site as well. Be sure to add appropriate links on these blogs to your site to help build additional links to specific areas of your main site. This will encourage visits by people that read your blog and you may get additional links from them as well.
Submitting your site to website directories is another good idea for helping to boost your link count. These directories will naturally link to your site and can help direct traffic your way as well as raise your sites ranking. The thing to remember with site directories is to submit to a few each week and not to do them all at the same time. Some search engines will punish your ranking if you suddenly appear in a lot of directories at once. Also, the ranking of the directories you submit to can impact your ranking as the search engines give more credence to sites with a higher ranking and will raise your ranking accordingly.
Writing articles that your publish on your blog, or on your website is another great way to build additional links. You could submit these articles to other blogs for additional exposure as well. Each of the articles you write should have both your name, the name of your website, and a hard link back to your site. Most blogs that accept submissions will publish them with this information intact and help you build even more links back to your site.
A recent phenomenon is the availability of sites with good search engine rankings that are willing to sell you links on their site back to your site. These sites will give you an immediate and dramatic boost in your rankings for a keyword based on the link they provide back to you as a trusted site, it’s like they are vouching for you. Be cautious with this as some search engines are aware of this and will punish you if you use it too often.
Another thing a lot of good webmasters do to help raise the ranking of their sites is to visit and participate in some social networking sites on the web. These sites allow you to submit content from your site and comment on posts or articles they publish and also allow you to post your name and a link back to your site. This helps them with traffic, and helps you with another source of links and traffic.
The final approach you can take is to find other websites and blogs that center on your main keyword or topic and see if you can trade links with them. This is a fairly common practice and really helps raise the ranking of both sites involved in the trade. You might be surprised to find how accommodating a lot of the folks that run these sites can be. Most of them are more than willing to trade links with you and may even be willing to trade content as well.
Applying these techniques to your sites will certainly help their rankings with the search engines. The number and quality of the links back to your site by others is a very important factor in determining your search engine ranking. By spending a little time and effort, you can improve it dramatically.
WordPress a Fantastic Tool For Your Online Business
In 2003 WordPress was introduced to the world by two young programmers, Matt Mullenwag and Mike Little. In a few short years WordPress has became a tremendous success. WordPress was developed on Open Source code making it free for everyone from the smallest home user to major Fortune 500 businesses. This software which is an ongoing creation by a community of thousands of developers around the world has personally made it possible for techless individuals such as me to develop from a single to multiple websites. Read more
Is SEO and SEM the Same?
Terms are thrown around on the internet the way one might mix hash and so often we just become confused. If you were an expert at the internet you probably wouldn’t be visiting a non techie site like Terry Lile the Techless Blooger. Fortunately for me we all aren’t technical minded for that still leaves me a following to share my blabber with. Let me ask you, Do you really understand the difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)? Read more
How to Promote a Blog With Traffic Exchange
I am constantly reading articles on how to promote a blog. While I have heard about I have never tried promoting a blog through traffic exchange. As I have told you before, I belong to InfoGoRound an article sharing site. While visiting it today I ran across this article on traffic exchange and thought that it would be a good article to share with you. A traffic exchange is a membership website where the members can promote their own web pages by earning or buying “credits”. Credits can be earned by viewing other members’ web pages – otherwise known as “surfing for credits”. Read more
How to Promote a Blog Raising Search Engine Ranking
Raising search engine ranking is a very import part of searc engine optimization (SEO. This is an area I continue to learn more about every day and while certainly not a great expert in it I am willing to listen to others that are. If you want to start a blog or promote your blog by raising search engine optimization here are a few methods that other are using successfully. Read more
SEO Techniques for New Bloggers
If you have just set up your first WordPress blog and are not quite familiar with the processes and tools of SEO or search engine optimization here are a few tips to help you get a start on it. You can rely on different programs and individuals available online. As a beginner, you will find that everything is relatively easy to understand, provided that you have the right background and know your customer, products and services very well. Your company can benefit more through the heightened visibility and improved search rankings so just go about it at your own pace and have fun. Read more
Email List is Vital to the Growth of an Online Business
As previously discussed I am a member of InfoGoRound and this site provides me with some very good and very timely articles. For those that keep asking how do I build a blog or how do I promote my blog the following article makes a very good point about email list. I need to make a big improvement in building and utilizing an email list and found this article informative. Let me share the article and you can see what you think.
If you really want your Internet business to thrive you absolutely must succeed at email marketing, and the only way to do that is with a good email list. Maintaining a good email list can provide all kinds of benefits for an Internet business.
To start with, regardless of whether you are trying to make sales, promote an affiliate website, provide content production, or just generate ad revenue, e.g., adwords campaigns and the like, you’ve got to have customers. With a good email marketing campaign you can give your customers a sense of real appreciation. Reinforce that you did not forget about them the moment they gave you their money. Their business mattered to you, and you want more of it. In a world where business dealings are becoming increasingly impersonal, this is a sure fire way to build a rapport with your customers that will ultimately boost your bottom line.
Not only do you need to keep track of the email addresses of your existing customers, it’s essential to try to obtain the email address of any prospective customers as well. Whether it’s by keeping a log of customer service emails, or setting up some kind of membership feature, you should try to get their email address. If they are interested enough to have found your website, they are interested in whatever you may have to offer. You may not be able to get them to buy your product, subscribe to your pay service, or even click an ad, but you will be able to let them know when you have any specials, or any new content for them to look at, or any new services that they may be interested in. If they did not have any interest at all in what you had to offer, you would not have their email address in the first place.
The best part about having a good email list, and using a clever email marketing campaign, is the way it can generate revenue. If you can drive Internet traffic to your website and get a steady flow of new customers, that is great. It would be even that much better if you could obtain there name and email address to add to your list.
If you want to grow your volume, and grow your business, you are going to need to make sure that you not only get new customers, but repeat customers. The longer you work at building the customer – business relationship with an email marketing campaign, the more people you will manage to pull into your customer base. As your customer base expands, so does your business, and your profits.
If your goal is to expand your Internet business until you are living comfortably, working from home and working for yourself, you absolutely must maintain a robust email list, and conduct effective email marketing campaigns.
Why Use Google Analytics for Your WordPress Blog
You have built a WordPress blog or website and perhaps you are wondering if you should use Google Analytics on it. So what is Google Analytics anyway and will it work with WordPress? Google Analytics is a free statistical tool that you can use to analyze your blogs visitors. Once you start using this tool you will find it very easy to use. You will first need to sign up with Google for this free service and add the URL of your blog. Once you do you get a bit of Java Script code that you add to the pages you want to track. Read more
Good Reasons to Submit Articles to Promote Your Blog
Writing and submitting articles is an extremely powerful method for promoting your WordPress blog or website, products, and services. Here are just a few of the benefits you’ll receive by submitting articles to directories and social media sites: Read more
Paid Membership Site Benefits and Criteria
WordPress is a great for promoting your traditional business, internet marketing, setting up a personal blog or even setting up a website for an club or other organization. Another use that one might consider WordPress for is the development of a paid membership site.
What are the Benefits of a Paid Membership Site Anyway?
First of all a paid membership site provides recurring income. A small amount paid monthly by every member can quickly add up to either valuable extra income or even a full-time work from home income. If you were to have several membership sites and if you have a higher priced membership fee, you can quickly earn a very substantial annual income.
Why Would a Person Use a Paid Membership Site?
People will buy information that they could probably find on the Internet themselves if they had time and knew where to look, but often there is a higher perceived value when they have paid for it.
How Do You Attract Members to a Paid Membership Site?
The challenge then is to find customers and then provide them with such good value that they will retain their membership month after month and hopefully also recommend your site to others because you pay them a generous affiliate fee.
There are four main criteria you need to consider to achieve this and they are:
1. Your site must be in an established membership type market.
2. You must provide excellent value content or service
3. You need to use software that will password-protect your site so that non-paying members cannot get the content for free.
4. A marketing system to attract new subscribers and retain them once they sign up.
Criteria 1 – Your Membership-Site Market
In assessing your potential membership-site market, consider both online and off-line habits. Ask yourself whether people with an interest in this subject would buy monthly magazines, belong to a club or organization about it and perhaps whether there are books on the subject on Amazon’s best popular seller lists. Online, check if there are eBooks that sell well, blogs, forums or other on-line communities about this subject.
The topic must be popular enough to have many potential subscribers or you will be wasting your time. It is worth offering some free material, perhaps an ebook on your subject to see how many people have an interest it it. Another strategy to test your market is to set up a simple survey, asking what issues people have. You can offer free membership to your new site as an incentive for people to reply; the answers you receive will guide you as to what kind of concerns people have on this subject.
The information most in demand on-line is that which solves someone’s immediate problem, so it is worth considering whether your content or service solves just a one-time problem or whether there could be an ongoing or related issues that you can address.
An example of a one-off problem would perhaps be a remedy for snoring and for an ongoing problem, think of new parents, who have many worries and sleepless nights when their baby cries, perhaps in the middle of the night and there is no-one they can ask for advice. A membership site that contains suggested solutions for the numerous problems new parents face would be a valuable resource for them.
Criteria 2 – Quality Content
The four main types of content are: written, audio, video and web-based software solutions. Naturally, the media type you use will depend on your site topic as some will be more relevant that others. Most sites will include a significant percentage of written material as this is still the primary method of sharing information on the Internet, but audio recordings are increasing popular because people can download them and listen when they are walking, driving, exercising or away from their computer for any other reason.
Video content is preferred when the information you are providing is instructional; “how-to” in pictures or a video can make a process very easy to understand compared with following a written list of instructions.
Another situation where pictures are helpful is showing symptoms of something. For example, for the new parent site mentioned above, there could be photos of the types of spots or rashes a small child might have on their body if they have caught any of the various common childhood complaints such as measles, chickenpox or have been bitten by an insect.
There are many sources of good content apart from writing your own if you are qualified to do so. Your own material is obviously the cheapest, but will take the longest to prepare and you need to know enough about your topic to keep providing fresh material on a regular basis.
Use other people’s material by utilizing royalty free articles from article directories such as ezinearticles.com and free content sites, free to use videos from YouTube, metacafe.com or ehow.com or good quality PLR (private label rights).
Outsourcing is another option that will be less time-consuming although you will have costs for the ghost-writer or freelancer you contract to produce your work. Apart from the well-known elance.com & rentacoder.com, there are hundreds of other sources as a simple web search on “outsourcing” will reveal. If you plan to outsource on a regular basis, it is worth the time and effort to find a freelancer and develop a relationship with them, rather than going through a ghost-writing service provider.
Interviews with experts are something you can do yourself with basic equipment. Prepare a list of open-ended questions before the interview and send a copy to the person you will be interviewing two or three days beforehand. Any sooner and they might forget about it and any later doesn’t give them time to prepare.
The following are some suggestions for interview questions that will give an expert the opportunity to give you excellent material for your membership site:
1. What is so good about ………?
2. How did you get involved in ………?
3. What do you consider the top 3 things someone should know about ……?
4. What would you suggest would be the best way to get started?
5. How long would it take to be proficient at ……….?
An hour is a good length for a value interview but you may want to go longer and edit the script later. This is easily done even with a free audio editor such as audacity.
Criteria 3 – membership site software to protect your subscriber’s investment and save you time
If you can, invest in a specialized memberships-site software package or script. There are quite a number of good choices of varying prices, for example Membergate, Memberspeed, & WordPress plugins like WordPress Wishlist, Digital Access Pass (DAP), YourMember & aMember. The advantages of using one of these is that so many of the member functions are done automatically, for example:
1. Membership levels
2. Membership types
3. RSS Feed encryption so that non-paying members cannot access your content through the RSS feed
4. Sequential delivery so that someone cannot sign up and download all the material & then unsubscribe – the longer a person is a member, the more content they have access to
5. Payment gateways – preferably more than just Paypal
6. Training and Support
7. A good strong guarantee
Criteria 4 – Strategies for Recruiting & retaining members
1. Instead of focusing on trying to sell memberships, focus on how how one particular article of your content can solve a specific problem a person might have so that you are providing a solution to that problem and also giving one month’s membership to the site for free.
2. Use free advertising by writing & submitting articles & reports, posting on blogs & forums, make squidoo lenses, hubs & other web pages.
3. Buy Pay per Click advertising and banner ads etc
4. List your membership site on Clickbank, Paydotcom etc
5. Email your list & if you don’t have one, form a joint venture partnership with someone who does & pay them a generous affiliate commission.
There are many other marketing tactics that have been written about at great length and can be found in a web search.
In summary, if you can address the four main criteria of using an established membership type market, providing premium value content, using appropriate membership software and attracting subscribers, a paid membership site can become a very profitable business model.
