In short, SEO is the process of optimizing a website by tweaking both internal and external factors to drive website traffic that originates from search engines.

Here’s a brief rundown of SEO and what takes place when a website is made search engine friendly.

A Basic Explanation of Search Engines

If you’ve worked with an internet marketing company, you’ve been told that it’s important to ensure your website is search engine optimized so that search engines can pick it up in certain keyword searches. Search engines are text-driven programs that crawl the different web pages to find what’s on them. The search engines then index everything they come across during the crawling process.

During the indexing process, pages are assigned to certain keywords, which is how search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo determine which pages show up in searches. Next, the search engine processes the information by comparing the page to pages that are already indexed; relevancy of the page in comparison to what has already been indexed is also calculated. Lastly, the search engine retrieves the results and shows them in your browser, sorted in a range from the most to least relevant.

Keywords and Keyword Density are King

When you’re looking to work with an internet marketing company, you’ll likely consider purchasing SEO packages that select keywords for your website. The most successful keywords are generally two- and three-word search terms.

Internet marketing companies will use certain algorithms to determine which keywords will help drive users to your website. It’s also important to ensure keywords have the proper density, which helps determine how relevant a page is considered when it is crawled.

Dividing the number of keywords in the copy by the number of total words, then multiplying by 100, determines keywords density. The basic idea is that if a page has a higher keyword density, it will be considered more relevant. For major keywords, a density of 2 to 4 percent is generally accepted, with a density of 1-2 percent being ideal for more minor keywords. Be sure not to over-stuff keywords into your copy. That can penalize you in search results.

A Good Internet Marketing Company will Seamlessly Implement SEO

When SEO became a standard practice within the last decade or so, many companies tried to stuff their clients’ websites full of keywords, making the copy unintelligible and hard to understand. Thanks to the complicated algorithms used by top search engines, it’s impossible to get away with that type of SEO abuse today.

Instead, good SEO means integrating the keywords into the existing copy on a website without altering the meaning of the text. This helps preserve the original tone and voice of the client’s website and, most importantly, will ensure the site is indexed properly when crawled by the search engine.

After reading about how an internet marketing company will use SEO to improve your site’s performance, you’re probably interested in learning more about finding an internet agency. Guest post written by Michelle.

Photo source:

jandscomputerservices.com

talent-shout.com

One thing that is pretty specific to the blogging industry, however, is the idea that a blog is a one man operation. For some reason, bloggers are very territorial over their blogs. I think this is because it sometimes takes blogs a long time to grow, and in many cases someone manages a blog while still working full-time somewhere else. In other words, blogging is a one man operation for a long time. However what bloggers need to realize is that if they’re good, a day will come when the blog is bigger than the owner.

Therefore, it is very important that a blogger understands when it’s time to ask for help. Most bloggers will admit they need help when they feel overwhelmed by reading guest articles and posting them onto the webpage, but the worry usually stops there. While this is a great reason to get some help with a blog, there are other reasons that need to be considered (and not continually ignored).

Top 3 Other Reasons You Need Blog Help

1. When some of your social media networks are being ignored.

Most bloggers are fluent in social media, so they don’t feel like they need the help of someone else. Connecting with readers and other bloggers is one of the best parts of blogging, so many don’t want to give it up. They may admit they need help because guest articles are piling up, but they simply won’t admit that they need help managing social media accounts. However, the truth is there are so many social media accounts available that it should be hard for one person to keep up! If you have an account on several sites and are finding that some of your accounts on those lesser known sites are being ignored, it’s time to ask for help. It’s never a good idea to have a static account on a social media network no matter how un-popular it may be. This will eventually give your blog a bad reputation.

2.    When there is a big moment coming up in your life.

Bloggers often have another job, so the workweek often exceeds the typical 40 hours. While this may work for a while, it simply won’t work as things begin to get more hectic. If you have a major event coming up in your life—having a baby, getting a new job, getting married and moving out—those 40+ hours per week will be extremely difficult. Although it may make sense to put your blog on hold for a short period of time, it’s important that the blog does continue strong overall if it’s making you money. Therefore, it may be a good idea to cut back on the work hours and hire someone to help keep your blog managed. If you try and do it yourself and find that the blog is slipping, you could lose readers forever.

3.    When you don’t have time to write articles for your own blog.

The point overlaps a bit with the “too many guest articles to read” point, but is important nonetheless. Many blogs that are entirely based on guest posts are successful, but it’s generally best to have a few regular writers and a few articles from the editor. This gives the blog something unique. A blog full of guest posts can seem very random, but a blog where you can get advice from a certain person time and time again keeps things consistent. Not only do readers like hearing from those in charge, but blog owners are typically happier when they get to share their voice.

How Do You Begin Finding Blog Help?

Bloggers often try and tell themselves they don’t need help because there is no one that understands the blog as well as they do. This is certainly true, but it doesn’t mean that someone can’t learn certain aspects of the blog such as what you expect out of a piece of content or what you expect out of social media. There are two different ways you can find someone to help with your blog:

• Consider asking one of your regular contributors. This is the ideal situation because you have seen his/her work and they have a good idea about the focus of your blog. You likely already have a strong relationship with this writer, and in most cases they would be happy to help.
• Put out an ad just as a traditional company would. You will likely get a lot of interested candidates, so you will be able to narrow down your favorites. Looking at resumes is important, but when it comes to blogging the best thing you can do is look at just that—a candidates blog. Check out how they manage their blog, their writing ability, and how active they are on social networks. Once you interview a few people, do a basic employee background check and you’ll have yourself a great helper.

The most important thing to remember is that you are still in charge. You built the blog from the ground up, so you should want the blog to continue to grow. Many blogs have continued to be successful because the owners enlisted the right help at the right time. In other words, if you find that you might need help with your blog, take it as a great sign that you created something and are moving it in the right direction.

Photo Credit: spiritwomen.blogspot.com, meetcoco.com, en.wikipedia.org

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to credit card processing. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

But difficult doesn’t translate into impossible, by any means. You don’t have to worry about competing in the beginning. Instead, what you have to be focused on is knowing how to generate a high traffic site by taking baby steps toward that end. That can be done in several key ways that are less complicated than you might think.

Accept That It Can Take a While

Time is the key ingredient to any blog’s success. You can’t just expect to put up a couple of posts and have everyone flock to see them. There is content to build, and there are connections to make, reblogs to receive andmarketing tactics to try. Even just leaving it there while you continue to add more content will work, but again, it all takes time.

Realistically, it will be a year or so until you start seeing real traffic, much less revenue from AdSense. The point of change will begin after a couple of months, where you notice more spam comments. This is actually a good sign, and soon you will see genuine visitors reading.

Communicate With Others in the Niche

Other blogs and forums are a truly indispensable resource when it comes to generating interest in your own site. The first thing you should do is start commenting regularly, both on well known and lesser known blogs. But make sure they are good comments related to the post, offering a perspective or comment worth reading – nothing spammy or copy/paste.

Before long you might be able to exchange guest posts with a few of them, which can give you a whole new pool for traffic. Not only will you get your name and content on their blog, but you will draw their readers onto your own by having another writer there providing occasional posts.

Forums will help you to build up a relationship with other members, and give you a platform for finding new readers.

Reduce Setbacks

You want to have a blog that is on a reliable host, through a paid domain and with a backup in case things go wrong. The best thing you can do is find a good, well known place to put your blog, put it on automatic payment and backup regularly.

If you want to make some of this easier, including reducing the risk of the site going down and getting fast backups, install WordPress. It was designed to take a lot of the hassle out.

Post Regularly and With Fresh Content

You don’t have to post every day, or even every weekday. But you should set at least three times a week to do regular, well written and thorough posts. If you can find the time, try to post smaller things in between to give you a good boost through the week. Having fresh content is the fastest way to get noticed.

If you don’t have the time to really write yourself, hire others to manage the blog for you. Freelancers are a dime a dozen, and most have very fair prices.

Post Some News, but Not All News

News posts are a great way to alert users to changes in the market, and possibly get onto Google News. This will really increase your traffic. But even mainstream media sites don’t post news all the time, so you have to find the correct balance between what is too much and what isn’t enough.

I would suggest setting aside two days a week for news posts, even more than one. If you want to do it more regularly, feel free. But make sure you also do regular blog posts that aren’t time sensitive or unlikely to lose popularity.

Remember that AdSense Funds Build

Don’t, for the love of all things holy, click on your own AdSense ads. Also, don’t ask others to click on them for you. This is a breach in the terms and conditions, and will earn you a lifelong ban from Google’s AdSense program. All for a very small amount of cash.

Believe it or not, AdSense works, but only over time. Within a year or so you should start seeing a check. But you have to wait, or you won’t end up with anything to show for it.

Conclusion

Running a successful financial blog is far from impossible. But it takes a little bit of time and work to get it going. Be patient, post regular and high quality content and network with other bloggers. You will notice things getting better and better by the month.

Sonia Tracy works as the content editor for PsPrint‘s blog and website. When she’s not working, she’s usually making nerdy “Star Wars” references or mastering her downward-facing dog pose in a yoga class.

Image credit: 1, 2, 3, 4.

All of this includes a great deal of exposure, even if you are just starting out. Changes in search engines have brought the smallest of blogs onto everyone’s radar.

Most of your concern is going to be divided between content and marketing. These two factors will dictate whether or not you are being followed by a large-enough number to make it a business. If you are a freelancer of any description, it could also be what makes all the difference between getting and not getting that dream project. It is your livelihood at stake.

But it isn’t the only concern. Organization and discipline are two must’s of running a blog; otherwise you see unprofessional jumps and gaps in both quantity and quality of content that can ruin your chances of developing a dedicated following. That is the death of any mainstream blog, no matter the niche.

The trick is knowing what else should remain a priority. One of those elements to put on your to-do list is the creation of an editorial calendar.

What Is an Editorial Calendar?

As a blogger, there is a good chance that you have heard of this before and that you are asking the most common question: Isn’t an editorial calendar only used by advertisers who place ads on your blog?

This is a common misconception that trips many people up. Although an editorial calendar is the method of organization found to be very useful for advertisers looking to customize content running alongside posts, there is a greater implication for both the writer who maintains
the site and the readers who read it.

Essentially, an editorial calendar is a schedule that shows when you will be running certain posts, when and what topic they will cover. Not only does it make it easier to keep up with a series, space out content to work over time and give you a way to tell what is coming up, but it forces you to use discipline in the running of the blog. It might also keep you on track, if you have trouble establishing a content flow.

The Pros and Cons

Besides those listed above, there are other pros of using an editorial calendar. A lot of it has to do with finding the motivation to get work done while establishing a set schedule that requires a certain number of hours per day.

For example, say you want to run a series and have that series feature one article every other day for two weeks.

You would be able to write them ahead of time, knowing what you had planned, and then schedule them for publication on those days. This would cover two weeks worth of content, with writing only a couple of days a week to handle the work flow.

As for your readers, they can have the benefit of knowing what is to come. More and more blogs have been putting notes about “coming soon” articles on the bottom of current posts, especially if they are part of the same topic. It is much easier to remain relevant to the same content and give your readers consistency using this method, which in turn is a positive for them.

There are some cons to this process, however. The biggest one will always have to do with creativity and flexibility vs. the strict following of any schedule. Some writers find deadlines restrictive, and they end up compromising quality in order to keep to it.

You should never be tempted to follow so closely to an editorial calendar that you end up producing something less than great for your blog. It will give a serious blow to your credibility while lessening the impact of your website and putting the rest of your content into question – especially with future clients or other blogs looking for guest posts.

Creating Your Own Editorial Calendar

I have seen a lot of advice on this front, and all of it is good. But the truth is, you don’t have to have any specific process to making your own post schedule. All it really takes is some thought and asking yourself a couple of questions:

• What categories do I want for my blog? Try not to have too many to start out with and clean up if you have a lot already. You can add more as you go along, but the more general they are, the better.
• What kind of posts do I want to write? The themes will be another big part of the schedule, such as top 10 lists, tutorials and guides, reviews, posts on specific elements within your niche, etc.
• What kind of tags should I use? Developing a specific tag system will help you in the long run.
• When and what should I publish? You should decide now on what days you want posts to appear and what they should be about. For example, have top 10 lists once a week, a guide once a week, a short post twice a week and a review once a week. Then choose what days for each.

Conclusion

Creating your own editorial calendar is fairly simple to do. All you have to really know is what you want and make something to fit to those needs. There isn’t a right or wrong way, only what works and doesn’t work for you and your blog.

Sonia Tracy is the content editor for PsPrint and editor of PsPrint Design Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company specializing in brochure printing. You can follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint.

However, this doesn’t mean that sports don’t have a great deal to teach us about competition, cooperation and overcoming obstacles. The truth is that every match, game and event is a contest between talented competitors and the winner is determined by a variety of factors, many of which apply equally well to our every day struggles.

In that way, sports actually are a microcosm for life itself and there’s a lot we can learn from it. However, that doesn’t mean that all of the lessons are straightforward or even pleasant. After all, sports in real life are nothing like sports movies.

So what are those lessons? Here are five to consider as you work to grow or improve your blog.

1. There is an “I” in Team

There’s an old adage about there not being an “I” in team and it’s completely wrong. In many sports, if not most, one or two really good “star” players can turn a team around. Sure, the other players are important and everyone has to work together (teamwork is still a very real thing) but the difference between a mediocre american football team and a championship squad is often just a good quarterback.

When you’re working with other bloggers, it’s important to keep this in mind. Whether you’re working in a team to write for one site or cross-promoting between blogs, you need to make sure that you have the right mix of people. Also, it’s important to know where you fit in with this mix of people.

Bear in mind, in some groups, you may be the star and in others you may be a regular team player. But it’s important to be honest about your role so you can do the most to help your team thrive.

2. Talent Isn’t Everything

On the other hand, while its true that one “star” player can turn a team around, it’s also true that talent isn’t everything in determining who is or is not a great player.

Sure, talent is important, but a mediocre player with a great leadership or presence can do more for a team than someone who is merely talented at the game. The same is true for heart and determination. After all, a mediocre player willing to work tirelessly for his team is more important than a talented one who does only the bare minimum.

However, on the other side of the coin, looks also matter as does showmanship. These are ugly truths but they are clear when you look at the history of great athletes.

Blogging, as well as most things in life, is the same way. Talent is important, but it only takes you so far. At some point, you have to go beyond your gifts to do something great.

3. Points are What Count

Baseball, for example, doesn’t care how many doubles or triples you hit. Until you cross the plate, you haven’t put any points on the board and you are no closer to victory.

Life and blogging is very much the same way. You have objectives and goals and, if you don’t meet those goals, then you need to figure out how to adjust to meet them next time. It doesn’t matter how good your posts are or how solid your SEO seems, if you aren’t converting, gaining subscribers or seeing the traffic you want, you need to adjust and try again.

Doing well doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t putting points on the board. Period.

4. The Officiating is Never Fair

Every sport has to have rules and those rules must always be enforced. However, machines aren’t capable (yet) of enforcing the rules by themselves so humans are the ones that have to do the dirty work and that’s why we have referees, officials, umpires, etc.

Sadly, humans aren’t perfect and, as such, the officiating will never be either. To make matters worse, one bad call can change an entire game.

This is true with anything else in life and, with blogging, the rules are enforced by Google and by your host. Unfortunately, both of them are fallible and can penalize you unfairly.

The best way to deal with bad officiating is to play the game so well that one or two bad calls won’t hurt you. The other is to make it crystal clear that you are playing by the rules to minimize bad calls and learn how to talk with the officials to get the outcome you want and deserve.

Because, one area blogging does differ from sports is that, with blogging, sometimes you can argue with the referee and win.

5. You Truly Can’t Win Them All

Finally, though it’s an old cliche and cold comfort for the losers, it is also true: You can’t win them all.

A mediocre team will win half their games. A good team will win most. A great team will win nearly all of them. However, no team wins every time.

As a blogger, you’re going to have bad days. There will be good ideas that go bad, articles that fall flat and site changes that create an angry mob at your door. It happens.

The best thing you can do in these situations is pick up and try again tomorrow. Not every swing will be a homerun and not every day will be a victory. The key is to not dwell on it and, instead, learn from it.

If you can improve in the face of defeat you weren’t really beaten at all.

Bottom Line

Sports, when looked at the right way, are a great microcosm for life and just about anything you do in it. Conflict is conflict and just because a battle plays out over points and on a field doesn’t make it less educational that one that plays out in our own lives.

Though I’m not saying you should become a sports fan or that you need to be in order to glean its lessons, by looking at other’s struggles, wherever they may be, you can learn a great deal about what separated champions from those who merely showed up.

That, in turn, is an important lesson that can greatly help you with everything you do, including blogging.

As with any social activity, there are social norms that develop and pertain to the way that bloggers interact with one another. These aren’t necessarily laws (though there is some relationship when you look at copyright) but they are general guidelines to help ensure that bloggers don’t needlessly injure one another and work together for the betterment of the larger community.

What exactly those standards are is up for debate. Often times, what one sees as the norm will depend as much on other factors as it does their role as a blogger. But still, there are a few generally-agreed upon norms out there, but they also happen to be very easy boundaries to cross at times.

So what are some missteps you might be making in your interactions with other bloggers? Here are five of the more common ones.

1. Commenting When You Should be Emailing/Vice Versa

When you run across a post you like on the Web and you want to reach out to the blogger about it, you are faced with a tough choice: Do you comment on the post publicly or send an email directly to the blogger.

Generally, the question to ask yourself is: Would this, if posted as a comment, further the conversation or make the post better?

If you’re highlighting a point in the original, adding information or putting something up for broader discussion, it’s probably best to put it up as a comment. If you’re just wanting to say “Good job” or point out a typo, you probably should send it via email.

Also, anything that might be disruptive to the conversation should be sent via email as well. If you have reason to believe that your conversation could get heated or is simply a tangent to the original post, it’s probably best to send it via email to keep the on-site conversation more focused.

With blogging, there’s still plenty of times where a private letter is a better choice and it is important to know when to use it.

2. Spammy Comments and Extra Links

While we’re on the subject of blog comments, blog commenting can be a great way to promote a site, especially a new one, but it is important to realize that comment marketing means much more than simply posting wherever and whatever you can.

It’s important, with every comment you post, to make sure that the comment is both relevant to the post and, as mentioned above, adds to the conversation.

However, equally important is the issue of linking. If the blog provides a link to every commenter, as most do, it’s considered poor form usually to put a link to your site in your comment itself, unless the link is extremely relevant to the conversation.

Many bloggers, often without realizing how spammy it is, will post a short “Good Job” comment and follow it with their name and URL.

Always remember, make your post relevant and that you get one link per comment (the automatic one usually) unless there is a drastic reason to break that rule.

3. Providing Bad Anchor Text

Bloggers, generally, love it when you like their content enough to write about it and link to it. That’s what every blogger strives for to some degree.

However, a big part of that linking isn’t the direct traffic one gets from the original post, but the SEO benefit from having another site “vote” for them via an outbound link.

For better or worse, a lot of that SEO benefit comes from the keywords used in the anchor text. For example, if, on a post about widgets, you say “This great post on widgets” it is better than simply linking to the original article with the word “Source”.

If you want to list the original article as a source link in the footer, consider using the title of the post as the anchor text instead of “Source” or “Original Article”.

4. Editing Your Post Without Clear Explanation or Credit

No blogger is perfect so, if you blog enough, you’re probably going to have to edit at least a few of your posts to put corrections in. While most corrections are minor, a typo here or a missing word there, sometimes you might get a fact wrong or state something in a way where the reader gets the wrong idea.

These things happen but how you correct them is important.

If your correction materially changes your story, you need to make it clear in your post that you made a change (probably using strikethrough rather than actually removing text) and explain why.

Equally importantly, if you got the correction from another blogger or commenter, it’s best to give credit and thanks for the help. The last thing you want to do is seem bitter about being told you were wrong when you were, that’s a great way to ensure that no one ever helps you again.

5. Unnecessary Pingbacks/Trackbacks

Perhaps surprisingly, pingbacks and trackbacks are still very much around. They are tools used by blogging platforms, including WordPress, to track when other blogs create inbound links so they, in turn, can link back.

Many blogs have disabled this feature because it’s become a popular tool for spammers, but other bloggers, realizing the potential, have taken to adding unnecessary links to their posts to get trackbacks on other sites. In fact, there are actually plugins and tools that can do this automatically.

While a “related posts” addition to your site may be appropriate, sending trackbacks and pingbacks to sites and entries you aren’t actually referencing in your post is a pretty big annoyance to other bloggers, especially those who have to clean out dozens of such notifications every day.

Bottom Line

Most of these missteps are merely annoyances to other bloggers. It may result in a deleted comment here or a mildly disgruntled blogger there, but those are the exact things that undermine any blog promotion and growth effort.

In short, the best way to grow your blog is to become a part of the blogging community and that means learning to respect and follow the rules/guidelines that are a part of that community.

While some bloggers manage to do well breaking the rules, remeber that you violate them at your own risk and, if you do it too much and do so intentionally, you’ll likely find that there are many bloggers with negative opinions of you and some who are actually very angry with you.

However, that raises a tough question: What business models can work for a small-to-medium sized blog?

There are actually many that can work, they just aren’t as easy as slapping a bunch of Adsense ads on your site and calling it a day. In order to make money from your visitors, you need to be prepared to extract more value from them and that’s going to mean putting in more effort.

But that doesn’t mean it’s difficult or even time-consuming, just that you have to take an extra step or two to make it happen.

That being said, here are 5 business models for bloggers that have a lot better potential for revenue than basic advertising.

1. Sponsorship

Sponsorship is advertising’s cousin but, instead of putting up a large number of ads in hopes that visitors will click on them, you put up a smaller number (perhaps even just one or two) and sell that space directly to buyers for a flat fee per week or per month.

Sponsorship isn’t right for every site, but those that get some level of prominence in a smaller niche may find it to be useful as they can trade more on their expertise and reputation than their traffic and keywords.

So, if you have a well-established and well-respected site that you can pitch for sponsorship deals, you’ll likely make more money than with vanilla Adsense ads as advertisers will pay a premium to know exactly where their ads will be displayed and for how long.

2. Selling Virtual Goods

eBooks have become extremely popular in recent years and it’s not just because of the rise of the Kindle, iPad and other eBook readers, it’s also because they are popular among their sellers.

Once you take the time to create an eBook, there are no costs (other than transaction costs) related to selling it. If you sell an eBook for $10, ever sale nets you about $10 in profit.

Look at it this way, if you’re earning $.25 cents per click and getting a CTR of about 1%, you would need 40 clicks to make the $10 through ads and about 4000 pageviews to get those clicks.

However, in that same time, you only need to sell one eBook.

You can also sell other electronic goods such as photographs, music files, movies and more. Be warned that there are other issues with selling electronic goods, such as potential piracy problems and dealing with the (hopefully rare) dissatisfied customers.

3. Selling Physical Goods

If you have a brand that does well on T-shirts, mugs or other items, you may want to consider selling physical goods. You can also sell physical books, CDs, prints of photos and printed copies of your work as well.

Physical goods usually cost more and make less of a profit. The reason is the added costs of materials, shipping and so forth. They are also more of a hassle to create and send for the same reason. However, you can partner with sites like CafePress to handle most of the production and shipping for you, at a cost.

Physical goods can be great, especially around this time of year when people are looking for gifts, but it’s not right for every site and is either much riskier (having to buy up stock to sell) or less profitable (partnering with 3rd parties).

4. Referral Links

Many online retailers have referral or affiliate programs where you, after signing up, get a specially formatted link to direct visitors to their site. Anything they buy after clicking your link, you get a percentage of.

Referral links are sometimes controversial because visitors feel that they are tricked into using them or that bloggers tint their reviews differently based on whether or not they can earn money from referrals.

However, if you do them right, namely disclosing them directly or using them in a way that makes it clear, they can be a good source of revenue.

The beauty is that, in many cases, you earn a percentage of whatever your visitor buys. If you use a referral link to a DVD, your visitor might skip that and, instead, click around and buy an expensive camera, giving you a cut of that sale instead.

Once again, referral links are similar to advertising, many retailers even offer ad-sized widgets, but with a lot more earning potential per click. Just be careful to keep everything above the boards.

5. Consulting

Finally, if you can’t sell your visitors, you may be able to sell yourself. If you’ve obtained a certain level of expertise in a field and there are businesses who are interested in your knowledge, you may be able to make a living doing consulting work and using your blog more as a promotional tool for that.

Considering that you can get thousands of dollars from a modest consulting client, it could literally take millions of pageviews to get that kind of money from traditional advertising.

Though it’s not a solution that’s right for everyone, especially if you don’t want to take on yet another job, for many bloggers it is by far the most lucrative way to earn an income and even a living from their site.

Bottom Line

Are any of these methods of earning revenue perfect? No. Though some are easier than others, all require extra work beyond just adding advertising code to your HTML. Even affiliate links require you to write content that enables its use and proper disclosure.

Furthermore, none of these are the “one true path” to riches for all bloggers. If you don’t have a strong reputation for being an expert, consulting is not for you and if you don’t have a brand that will sell well, physical goods sales are not for you either.

You have to be honest about yourself, your site and what you bring to the table to find a business model that’s right for you. Your site has value, it’s just a matter of finding what that value is.

Bear in mind that part of finding that value may be experimenting with business models and trying out multiple at the same time. After all, nothing says you can’t offer consulting services and an eBook, if the two go together well.

Simply put, the more you try, the more you learn and the more you learn, the more money you can eventually make.

While it’s a system that works great for some bloggers, for a vast majority it’s a road to nowhere. A select few get rich, a few more get some spending money and the majority never even see a check.

For most blogs, advertising is a terrible business model. For them, it doesn’t work, it can’t work and it never will work. It’s that simple.

I learned this the hard way myself years ago and I cringe as I was other bloggers go down the same path, usually falling flat on their face.

Why is advertising such a terrible business model? The reasons are painfully obvious when one takes the time to look for them, but few, blinded by the promise of easy money, see the reasons until they’re staring at their paltry earnings report.

Still, for those who want to know why this is a bitter truth, I’ve outlined five reasons below.

1. You Need a Lot of Readers

There’s no such thing as an average click-thru rate (CTR) for ads. Every industry, every site and every ad is different. There are simply too many variables to account for. However, in many circles a 1% CTR is considered pretty good. This means that you need to get 100 pageviews to get a single click. A site with about 1,500 pageviews, well above the “average” for a blog, especially a non-pro one, would get about 15 clicks. If a blog has 500 pageviews per day, it gets just 5 clicks. Etc.

However, many, if not most, blogs don’t optimize their ads well enough or target a strong enough audience to reach that level. Instead, they get a CTR well below 1%. That means those already weak numbers go down even lower.

Still, none of this would be a problem if it weren’t for the next fact.

2. Most Keywords Pay Nearly Nothing

A 2005 poll on Digital Point found that 75% of all Adsense users were paid an average of less than $.25 per click. While the data is old, it likely hasn’t changed drastically (though it probably has gone up at least some).

The truth is that some keywords are hot, most are not. If you write a well-targeted site that aims at very pricey keywords, you could be getting several dollars per click. However, most bloggers, at least according to reports, get much, much less.

If we use that $0.25 earned per click as a starting point. If you have a site with 1500 pageviews per day, well above the norm for a upstart blogger, and he’s getting 1% CTR, a pretty good return. He’s making a grand total of $3.75 per day (before discussing Google’s cut). While that is $112.50 in a 30-day month, it’s still nowhere near enough to live off of.

At these rates, you’d need probably 10x-50x the traffic to make your site remotely viable for even a significant portion of your income. That’s a lot of blogs to set up and maintain.

So, unless you are one of the fortunate few to have a pricey keyword attached to your site, you’re likely going to be earning pennies per click

3. Your Visitors Will Hate It

Though most visitors understand that ads are a necessary evil at times and don’t mind ones that aren’t intrusive or excessive, the simple truth is most visitors prefer a site without ads to one with ads. Some even go to the extreme of blocking ads.

This is worse when you start out with an ad-free site and then put ads on it. Visitors will notice and they will complain. How much depends on the site, but at the very least it cheapens the site and, in extreme cases, can be seen as a betrayal.

Basically, the day you put ads on your site is the day you go from solely serving your visitors to attempting to sell them to advertisers. Even those who understand completely and support you won’t look at your site the same way after that.

4. You Send Your Visitors Away

Most advertising online is paid per click. This means, in order to get any money from your ad, you have to wait for your visitor, which you worked hard to write great SEO-friendly content t earn, to click the ad and go away, likely never to return.

If you’re sure that they are going to come back or you know that a $0.25 (or less) is what they are worth, then this is fine. Otherwise, someone else is getting the lion’s share of the value from your visitor, the one you worked so hard to draw in.

While larger sites and well-established ones may be able to trust that visitors will return after clicking an ad, most blogs don’t have that luxury. As such, you’re selling your visitors to another site, which has proved that it can make more money from then what they are paying Google, which is what you are getting a cut of.

5. It’s Not as Easy As It Looks

The pitch for putting ads on your site always sounds the same. Put ads on your site, earn money while you sleep, go on vacation, etc. While it’s nice to earn at least some money while brushing your teeth, as mentioned above that money is usually just a pipe dream. But, even if things do work out, it will, likely, be some of the hardest money you ever earn.

First, you have to be perpetually tweaking and adjusting your ads. Not only does a drop in CTR hurt your bottom line, but you also have to be vigilant against unwanted ads, such as those from your competitors or that might be seen as offensive.

Second, you have to be constantly writing high-quality content to attract both good visitors and good advertising keywords. It’s not enough to write engaging content that your readers will enjoy and search engines will find useful, you have to make sure to target keywords that will bring a reasonable amount of money.

Finally, companies generally consider advertising and other promotion as an unneeded expense and it’s among the first things to drop off in bad economic times (such as right now) and one of the last things to come back. Though Web advertising has been growing in the most recent numbers, the pace of growth is well behind the growth of the Web itself, meaning that each site if fighting for a piece of a pie that has to be cut more and more ways.

This competition can be brutal and does’t leave much room for even the most successful sites to rest on their laurels.

Bottom Line

To be clear, advertising can and does work for many sites. Everyone can name dozens of sites that earn their living from advertising. But the reason we can name so many is because they are also extremely popular, one of the key requirements to making advertising work as a business model.

Most of these sites have traffic stats that blow the average blog, or even a well-trafficked blog, clear out of the water. While we all hear the tales of sites that earn thousands and even millions from advertising, we never hear about the millions of Adsense accounts that have never collected a check or the bloggers collecting pennies a day.

However, this article isn’t meant to sway bloggers away from trying advertising, at least not completely, but from going into it with pipe dreams of getting rich quick and earning huge checks easily. It’s not a matter of never trying advertising, but knowing that the odds are against it working without a huge stream of traffic.

So what is more likely to work? That’s a topic for next week’s column.

Whether you want them to come back later, tell their friends about your site or even become a customer, a visitor that reads your content and leaves does little more than move your hit counter. While that can be somewhat useful if you’re selling ad space, an engaged visitor is much more valuable in every way, no matter how trivial that interaction is.

That’s why your site needs a good call to action, something to tell your visitors what you want them do to help you and your site. This is a crucial step that haunted attraction websites, generally, do very well but blogs do not .

If your site is missing a clear, concise call to action it’s time to review what you want from your visitors and, more importantly, how you can ask for it. Failure to do so is not only limiting your site’s growth, but likely costing new fans, customers or subscribers every single day.

Why You Need a Call to Action

Let’s say I’m visiting your site and I really enjoy what I’m reading. I landed on a post you wrote via a Google search and loved what I read and even stuck around to check out a few other things. I’m really happy with my experience but I’m done reading for now and ready to leave.

What should I do now?

If the answer is to simply leave, there’s a good chance that I’ll never be back. How will I remember your site? What will prompt me to return? After all, your site, as good as it is, will probably be one of a dozen that I visit today and enjoy, most of those I’ll never come back to, at least not intentionally.

So, even though you’ve put the work in to design a visually appealing site, write great content I enjoy, build good SEO to attract me as a visitor and manage to keep me on your site for at least a few minutes, I’m going to leave without coming back or doing anything that can help you, the webmaster, in any way.

For all intents and purposes, I might as well have not been there at all because, other than moving the visitor counter up one, I’ve been completely useless.

So how do you turn your new visitors into recurring visitors, customers or clients? You ask them to do so.

How to Write a Call to Action

First, you need to decide what your call to action is and should be. Do you want your readers to like you on Facebook? To subscribe to your newsletter? Share your post online? How can an individual reader help your site the most?

Then it comes time to craft the actual call to action. On that front, if there are two words that describe a good call to action, they are “simple” and “clear”.

Simple just means your call to action should be something that they can do easily, preferably with just the click of a mouse. The easier it is for them to execute the call to action, the more likely, you will succeed in getting them to do it.

Clear simply means that there should be no question as to what you are asking them to do. Use as few words as possible to both get their attention and spell out what you want them to do.

For example, “Enjoy this post? Like us on Facebook!” with a link to your Facebook page is a solid call to action as it gets the readers intentions and gives them simple instructions that are trivial to follow.

Likewise, “Enjoy this post? Share it via Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus” is less useful as it forces the reader to make a choice. Ideally, your call to action should be an instruction, not a decision as the reader may decide to do nothing at all

Finally, “We really hope you liked this post and will consider subscribing to our site or sharing it with your friends” is an even worse one as it is too long as it is unclear as to what you actually want them to do.

In short, a good call to action gives the reader one task, makes that task easy to do and does as much of the work as possible for them. The easier and clearer your call to action is, the more likely it will be executed.

That being said, some call to actions can be more complicated, such as buying an ebook or getting a free quote on consulting services, but those are situations where fewer people will fulfill the call to action, but those who do are more valuable than those who would complete another action.

It’s important to weigh these trade offs carefully and, possibly, experiment with multiple actions to see which is of the greatest benefit to you.

Bottom Line

If your site lacks a clear call to action, you’re most likely wasting many of your readers. Simply put, many people who visit your site, no matter how much they enjoy it or how useful they find it, will not lift a finger to help you unless you ask for it.

This isn’t because your readers are bad, lazy or apathetic people, it’s because they don’t know what to do and they need you, or someone else, to explain it to them.

If you can do that and make your message clear, concise and easy to follow, you’ll likely be surprised just how many people take the time to help you out.

The reason is simple, people generally want to support success and, if you give them a way to, especially a small and easy way, they will likely do it.

If you don’t, however, they will likely just shrug their shoulders, hit the “back” button and never return again.

But while haunted houses and other haunted attractions can be a good and scary time, they’re also businesses. Like most businesses, they need to have a Web presence to promote themselves, pass out critical information and, most importantly, interact with potential customers 24/7. Also like most businesses, haunted attraction sites have a particular style associated with them.

This style is determined by a large number of factors including the nature of the business itself, especially how seasonal it is, what customers are usually looking for in a haunted attraction and the relatively limited number of design firms that work on these sites.

However, in that style there are a lot of great lessons for other webmasters, including bloggers. While this is definitely a broad generalization, as someone who has visited dozens, if not hundreds of haunted attraction websites, not counting the site for the one I operate, I see a lot of things that these sites do right and a lot of things they do wrong.

As such, here are my lessons that everyday bloggers can glean from haunted attraction websites, including both the things everyone should emulate and the mistakes to avoid.

(Note: To illustrate this article, I’ll be using websites for haunted attractions in and around my hometown of New Orleans, LA.)

What Haunted House Sites Get Right

Obviously, haunted house sites do a great deal right as the haunted attraction market has been growing year over year, including a new year-around attraction in New York’s Time Square.

When it comes to bringing in customers, it seems haunt sites are doing their part.

But how they do this is actually pretty straightforward, haunted attraction get a lot of things right (usually), including:

1. Great Branding: Haunted attraction sites are usually very visually appealing and are branded to work well with print, TV and outdoor advertising that accompany it. It builds an instantly-recognizable presence that customers remember.
2. Keeping it Simple: Haunted attraction sites usually have less than a dozen pages including a home page, ticket information, calendar, an about page and directions. It’s easy to find the information you need and the site never strays far off message.
3. Social Media: The haunt industry was one of the first to start heavily using social media, all the way back to when Myspace was king, and they are very good at it. You’ll be hard pressed to find a professional haunt without a good Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and other social media presence.
4. Discounts and Reason to Visit: If you want the best prices on tickets, you usually have to visit their site. Though House of Shock here recently ran a Groupon and a few other daily deals, most haunts save the best deals for their site.
5. Great Call to Action: When you visit a haunted attraction site, you know instantly what they want you to do, namely buy a ticket, and they make it very easy to do so. They even offer great incentives for buying online (see above point).

For the most part, haunted attraction sites do their job very well, however, there’s still a lot of things that they get wrong and problems that may actually be costing them at least some customers.

Where Haunt Sites Go Wrong

For all of the things such sites do right, the fact we can generalize them so broadly isn’t a positive sign. After all, you’ll be hard pressed to, at a glance, tell the difference between two haunted attraction sites as visually they are often very similar.

But that isn’t necessarily the biggest problem that they face, there’s a slew of other issues that help to keep the humble haunted attraction site from reaching its full potential, including:

1. Flash-Heavy Design: If you thought Flash-based Web design was dead, you haven’t visited a haunted attraction site lately. Just look at The Terror Test site for proof. Most, haunted attraction sites use Flash for the entire layout, not just elements that need it, slowing loading and hurting visitors without Flash. It also, in many cases, limits the ability to copy and paste relevant information.
2. Poor Mobile Support: Haunts are getting better about this one and many haunts have mobile versions of their site, but many still lack a good mobile version. Very annoying for people looking up information on the road.
3. Auto-Playing Music/Sound: My biggest pet peeve. Many haunted attraction sites auto play music and/or sound on loading, including The Mortuary here in New Orleans. Makes it awkward for anyone visiting the site in a public place, such as a computer lab.
4. Designing for Print: Most haunt sites look like posters, meaning visually they are great but functionally the navigation is often out of the way or otherwise navigating the site is confusing. The Midnight Productions Site, which operates the 13th Gate in Baton Rouge, is an excellent example of an attractive site that can be tough to navigate.
5. Limited Information: Most haunt sites skimp on the details to promote a sense of mystery but leave off important details like how long it takes to go through the haunt, average wait times, etc. This can be important for people planning a trip on a schedule.

While some of these problems are minor, they all make getting information off of haunted house websites a chore. When you visit several in a year, this can make the process of getting the info you need tedious and really turn off a customer that might be on the fence about stopping by.

Still, despite the drawbacks, I think haunted house sites do a lot more right than they do wrong and, as such, offer a lot of valuable lessons other webmasters should pick up on.

Bottom Line

So what can bloggers learn from all of this? It’s simple: Your site needs a clear, effective message, good branding and to be easily accessed by everyone who needs it (access in every meaning of the word).

You have to ask yourself what every haunted attraction has to ask itself when building its site: What do my visitors want? What do I want from them? And how can I make it easy for those two needs to both be met?

If you can do that with your website, even if your traffic isn’t very high, you can be very successful. After all, the easiest way to improve your station with your site isn’t to attract more visitors, but to make better use of the ones that you have and that’s something haunt sites do very, very well.

Whether you’re blogging for business, for passion or for fun, this can be a pretty heavy thought. After all, whether it’s dollars or eyeballs, you don’t want another site taking anything away from you, especially after you’ve worked so hard.

But competition online isn’t anything like competition in the bricks and mortar world. In the real world, every dollar you spend at restaurant A is one you don’t spend at restaurants B-Z. You only have so much money and can only eat so many meals. Furthermore, there’s only a certain number of people in a your region, meaning only so many people who CAN visit any of the restaurants in it.

On the Web, there’s no such limitation as there’s no cost in visiting most websites, people can literally come from anywhere and one’s time available for reading sites on a particular topic is limited only by their interest in it.

While competition on the Web is something you have to address, it isn’t something you have to fear. So what should you do when your blog faces some stiff competition? The answer is, most likely, to greet them with a hug rather than a clinched fist.

Why “Competition” Is Different Online

When businesses compete in a bricks-and-mortar world, they are always competing for things that are limited in quantity. Whether it’s potential customers in a region, the limited spending dollars those customers have or fulfilling a limited set of needs for those customers.

On the Web, those “limited” elements are either much less limited or, in many cases, completely unlimited.

Imagine, for a moment, a Web where there was just one site about the iPhone. No matter how great it was, it probably wouldn’t be nearly as popular as similar sites are in the real world as people simply wouldn’t be in the habit of turning to the Web for information about the product.

However, open up a few more sites and a community begins to form talking about it. People start to regularly turn to the Web for information and this causes the potential audience for these sites to grow. Couple that with better linking and SEO opportunities and every site in the niche has the potential to do better.

In short, though you could see all of the sites as being competition to one another, they are actually working together to grow the niche, making it a true example of a rising tide lifting all boats.

To be clear though, this doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as competition online. It’s just that many of the things that are finite in the physical world are infinite in the Web-based world. There are still some finite things, like money, but healthy competition can help encourage others to open up their wallets more by confirming the validity of the niche, thus creating new customers.

So, even if there are finite resources that you’re competing over, most likely “run them out of town” isn’t a good response to your competition. Instead, it’s important to realize just how valuable healthy competition can be to both customers and businesses alike.

Responding to Competition Well

Once you realize that competition on the Web means something very different than in the physical world, you can also see why trying to run your competition out of business is not, most likely, your best strategy.

Not only is that a lot of effort spent on doing something that won’t help your site much, but such hostility may actually hurt your niche and cost you dearly in the long term.

Instead, if there’s enough room in the niche for both of you, it’s probably wiser to spend that energy on growing your niche and make even more room for all of you.

This means doing something somewhat radical, embracing and befriending your competition.

Rather than focusing on trying to beat your competition at what they do, find ways that you can work with them. Take different angles on the niche, cover different areas and link to one another. Most importantly though, reach out to them and talk with them, make them your allies and not your enemies.

In short, treat your competition not as business rivals, but as neighbors.

Think about it, you don’t try to run your neighbors out of town just because, without them, you’d have a bigger yard. Instead, you find comfortable boundaries for all of you. Also, realize that a strong community has a lot of benefits to everyone, including “competition” websites.

If you work together as a community, you can attract new people to your niche and cause those already interested in the topic to spend more time and get more involved.

Think about it this way. Though car dealerships can be found all over, they generally cluster into strips that will have several or even dozens in a very small area. Though the dealerships are competition to one another in that most customers buy only one car, most customers visit more than one car dealership. As such, having so many in one place makes that area an attractive one for a potential car buyer to shop, increasing foot traffic and eventually sales for all the dealerships.

Websites work much the same way. A good community coupled with good SEO can generate a lot of interest, even among those who might not have visited such a site in the past. That means that everyone is better off with cooperation rather than warfare.

Bottom Line

Of course, the bigger problem with the Web is that it is an extremely crowded medium. Even if you are able to push one competitor out of business, two more will likely be there to take their place and you’ll likely be weakened by your efforts.

While competition does exist online, as I said before there are still finite resources you can vie for, most sites aren’t in competition, especially direct competition, with anyone.

If you do something original and offer something unique, no matter how many sites are in your niche, you’ll have a place carved out for you. By building that community, rather than killing your neighbors, you can make that place more valuable and larger over time.

Killing off your neighbors doesn’t improve your neighborhood, it just makes room for even worse ones to move in later, something you can avoid by making your community a better place.

Before you believe everything you read and follow in the footsteps of someone you don’t know and who really has not earned any credibility, you need to be aware of the truth regarding three popular myths. 

You Can’t be Successful Without a List

How in the world does having a list have anything at all to do with your success? It doesn’t! Sure, a list is a good place to start; create a timeline with realistic goals and you have something to work toward. However, a list is not going to build you a following, get you ranked in search engines or make you sales. A list is nothing more than a place to keep your thoughts straight when you’re feeling overwhelmed, it has nothing to do with whether you make money or not.

You Don’t Need a Product 

How are you supposed to make money without a product? Even if your goal is to make money with Google, Infolinks or Chitika with your blog or website, you still need content which acts like your product. It’s very naïve to think you are going to make a ton of money without offering anything in return.

You have to Build a Niche

Writers from sites like HubPages, Squidoo, Suite 101, Wizzley, etc., will tell you that you don’t need a niche. Once upon a time, niche sites were easier for search engines to pick up but that’s no longer the case. Bots are advanced enough that they can see the difference from one page to another even if the content is different.

That being said, what is important is that you come across trustworthy in your field. This is why niche sites are often a bit easier to be successful with because then you only have one topic to master.

It is important to understand that earning money online often takes a lot more time than most are willing to invest. Many people don’t see the results they want in a month so they just give up. Well, there’s a reason why others have been making money online for years; it is possible. You cannot quit your day job right away and you will feel like you’re working two jobs at first but it is well worth the effort.

If others tell you one of the above three myths is the way they made money online, ask for proof. Remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Making money online takes time, if you’re not willing to put forth the effort, you won’t be successful.

This guest post was provided by Neil Jones, head of marketing for eMobileScan, an ecommerce site dedicated to offer solutions to help their customers cut costs and increase productivity through the use of devices like the Motorola MC9090 and MC65

The problem is that blog branding is extremely important for your site. Not only is it one of the best ways to reduce your bounce rate, but it’s what gets your content taken seriously and lets your writing speak for itself.

As we’ve talked about before, you can’t ignore blog design and blog branding, no matter how much you want to. To make matters worse, contrary to what promotional material for various CMSes say, you can’t just download an attractive theme and go.

Unfortunately, if we’re playing the odds alone, chances are that your blog branding sucks right now. While it’s not your fault, you can rest assured many of your visitors will blame you for it and hold it against you and your content.

The good news is that if you avoid a few simple mistakes, you can go a long way to building a good blogging brand and giving your site the chance it deserves to thrive.

1. Your Logo is Garbage

Your logo is the first thing most people see of your site and it’s the lynchpin of your branding operation. It sets the style, colors and general feel of the site. If you have a bad logo, everything else falls apart.

The easiest way to design an effective logo is to create a simple text-based logo with strong colors. If you want to go beyond that but don’t have the graphic design experience to do a great job, consider using a logo design service. You will have to spend some money, but considering how much it can actually save in the rest of your design efforts, it’s cash very well spent.

2. Your Colors Hurt People’s Eyes

When designing your logo, you need to make sure that you use colors that you can build the rest of your site from and make it both readable and attractive.

Black and/or white are natural inclusions as your text will most likely be black text on a white background (or near-white) but it’s important to choose attractive accent colors as well as elements you can pull down into the rest of your site’s theme.

Generally, you don’t want your site to have more than three colors (other than black/white): Your main color, an accent color and possibly a second accent/highlight color.

If you need help picking colors that look good together, for example you’re like me and have trouble matching colors, use a color scheme chooser that makes the process simple. Just choose your main color and watch as it finds the best compliments.

3. Your Design is Unfocused or Crowded

When a user visits a page on your site, what is the first thing they see? If the answer isn’t your content there’s almost certainly a problem. If the answer is that you don’t know, there’s a definite problem.

Good Web design is well-focused and directs the reader to look at exactly what they what. That, in turn, should also be what you want.

This means that, on a single post page, the user jumps straight to your content, on the main page, they look right at the newest content.

It’s also important to make sure that your design has enough negative space so that the reader’s eyes don’t become confused and lost. For example, if a reader reaches the end of a line in the article and finds themselves in the sidebar, there’s an issue.

Remember, Web design is not the same as print design and you don’t have to pay extra if you go over a certain amount of space. If you interest your reader with engaging content that is easy to read, they will scroll down.

So let your content and your site breathe a little bit.

4. There’s No Clear Message On What Your Site is About

Very quickly, explain to someone who has never been to your site what it’s about. If you can’t get that message across clearly and accurately in a few seconds, you may need to refocus your site.

More importantly though, if you’re not conveying that message to new visitors, you may be losing potential long-term readers simply because they don’t know that they’re interested in what you’re doing.

Make it clear what your site is about and get that message across clearly, succinctly and prominently. The tagline is a great place to do this though some may use their sidebar. Though you should always have an “about” page for a more in-depth explanation but there needs to be something short and sweet to let readers know if they want to investigate further.

5. Your Branding Doesn’t Carry Over Well

Finally, no matter how great your branding is on your site, it doesn’t do much good if you don’t translate that branding elsewhere. After all, the whole point of a good brand is that it identifies you and your site wherever others might encounter it.

For example, if your site looks great but your Twitter and Facebook pages either look like garbage or, even worse, don’t look like they have anything to do with your site, readers are going to get confused and the impact is largely lost.

Likewise, if you do a lot of face-to-face marketing, such as at conferences, consider getting business cards and possibly even letterhead made up with your logo and information. If done well, everything that’s connected to your site should look like it fits together, at least as much as possible, and readers should recognize immediately that your other “homes” are a part of your network.

Bottom Line

In the end, very few bloggers really want to be involved in Web design and branding in any major way. For proof of that, look at how many blogging and CMS platforms pitch their “easy” and “fast” template systems as a major selling point.

However, branding is a crucial part of any site’s long-term success. Though good content can survive bad design, it can only truly thrive when paired with a good layout and a good branding effort.

So, rather than making your branding an afterthought, give it some time and try to make it work well for you and your site. You’ll likely find that your site does a lot better and the effort you put into your content goes much, much farther.

A website or blog needs to have a content strategy that would cover the bases and help it succeed. You have heard that content is king, but remember that throughout history, we all have seen bad kings alongside great ones.

What kind of content should you have on your site to make sure you succeed?  Here are four:

1.  Exclusive research.  This could be industry-specific white papers, research studies, or simple survey results.  Take a look at your business, your industry or your niche, what do you think would interest your customers and your target market.  For example, if you are a mobile retailer, you may want to create a survey of features that people would generally want in a Smartphone, or perhaps whether teenagers in your area would prefer an Android device or an iPhone.  This content that you create for yourself is based on an objective, impartial and scientific study.  Not only will it lend credibility for you and your business, but it will also give you content that would be tremendously useful for your stakeholders.

2. Personal thoughts, rants, raves and reviews.  The whole point of putting content online is not to sell your products, but to engage your customers.  Selling your products and services is an offshoot of this engagement.  So whether it is on your business blog, website or Facebook page, you should be aiming to engage your customers through discussions and conversations.

Note that people do not connect with brands.  They connect with other people.  This is why you should take time to provide content that has a human voice to it: your voice.

Do not be afraid to put up personal thoughts on things you like or do not like.  This is what your customers would want to see, and this is how connections are created, fostered and developed.  Be careful not to go overboard though.  Politics, sex and religion are still taboo, unless your brand is connected with it (i.e., you sell adult toys).  Also, try to be discerning in what you share.  Stick to business, instead of complaining about the lousy service at a restaurant when you sell computers.

Pepper your blog post with “I think,” “I believe,” “I like.”

3. Other people’s content.  You simply cannot write about anything and everything.  If you come across relevant, useful and informative articles from others, then do share them with your people.  You can rewrite them and attribute them to the original source, or you can simply post a link to the original article and just add in your thoughts.  This would give your customers the impression that you are definitive and comprehensive and the go-to site for anything that is related to your niche, business or industry.

Thus, you are providing your target market a service by being the single and reliable source for relevant news and information.  This helps them by reducing the time and effort they spend to search, research and educate themselves.

Not only that, it will be much easier to gain their trust because you are not just selling your products, but really trying to educate them.

4. Content that lasts a long time.  You have heard that Google and other search engines like fresh content.  That is true, and that is why you should always have a steady stream of new content available on your site.  But you should also have evergreen content. Evergreen content are those articles, blog posts and Web pages that have a long shelf life. Its main purpose is to target certain keywords and drive traffic to your site through search engines.  Evergreen content, therefore, is keyword-rich and written for the long haul.  For instance, tips, how-tos, guides and tutorials make for great evergreen content.  So do encyclopedic material and historical entries.

A caveat, however, is that most people think that it is not necessary to update evergreen content.  This is a very dangerous thinking. Make sure that you keep evergreen content relevant and up-to-date.  For example, if you have a comprehensive guide of European backpacking sites, and one of those sites on the list closed down, you should update it and take off the information regarding that site.

SEO Inc. provides search engine marketing services and understands that by focusing on creating good content, SEO, and social media, you pave the road for your customers to come to you.  Come visit Search Engine Optimization, Inc. on Facebook

Google may decide which site is most relevant for a particular search term but it is the searcher who decides if that site is what they are looking for and Google can monitor this through a sites bounce rate. If the majority of a sites traffic bounces away with in seconds of landing on that page Google will monitor this and may decide to recommend another site over yours.

There are a handful of common reasons why a visitor may decide to bounce away from a web site. Anything from a slow load time, a clunky and unappealing design, to poor quality content.  All play a deciding factor in why that visitor decided to leave your site.

Most of us are willing to forgive a slow or badly designed site if it can provide the answers we are looking for, what is however unforgivable from a searchers point of view is a site that offers them no value with poor quality content that does not answer their questions.

Filling your sites with quality content will not guarantee your sites will receive the traffic it deserves . I’m sure we all work in niches where poor quality sites seem to continually out rank us, it is clear for all to see that these sites offer the searcher no real value but it is not as easy for Google to see this because they can only base their assumptions on a sites bounce rate.  When you come across these sites its clear to see that the webmaster has focused the vast majority of their time and effort on manipulating the search engines so they can achieve these rankings, with very little attention paid to the traffic they receive once they have achieved these rankings.

This is why quality content and SEO should always go hand-in-hand. Search engine optimization is vital for the success of any site but sacrificing the quality of the content you produce so you can spend all your time building links to manipulate the search engines is not the answer.

If you feel that your time is best spent in trying to achieve the rankings that your site deserves then the best thing to do is to outsource all your writing needs to a writer who can devote the time needed to produce the content that searchers are looking for and will appreciate. Paying a skilled writer to produce the type of content that people are looking for will undoubtedly put a strain on your budget but if you have the dedication and determination to see the site through to a stage where it has reached its potential then you will be able to recoup your outline much faster and you will have a site that is not only a valuable resource for people, it will also generate a stable and consistent stream of income and this is the real reason why quality content and SEO should go hand in hand to overcome any issues with bounce rate.

This is a guest post from Neil at eMobileScan. Based around Europe and currently running a total 18 ecommerce stores dedicated to selling professional handheld computer like the Motorola MC75A or barcode scanners like the Motorola s2208

One of the key components of that fire is the conversation that starts up around your post and your site. That’s where the community around your work starts, it’s one of the key motivations for sharing your work and it’s an important tool in growing your site and your presence online.

However, nurturing this conversation is much more than offering a comment box and a Tweet button on your site, It involves an active effort on your part to stoke the flames and keep the interest alive.

While it might be annoying, especially for bloggers who just want to write and not think about these types of issues, ignoring the social aspect of blogging often leads to one’s site stagnating due to lack of interest and no ability to give potential readers what they want.

So how do you encourage this conversation and, more importantly, not miss it or kill it? To understand that we need to first take a look at how dialog happens on the Web and how this can work both for and against you.

Where the Conversation Takes Place

On the Web, there’s actually three different types of conversations about your work that you need to understand and be familiar with.

1. Private Conversations: First, are the conversations you’ll almost never hear about or be able to participate in. These are private conversations that may take place over email, IM or even face-to-face. People talk about your site and your work with friends in non-public places. Of course, some of these conversations may be with you directly, especially if you use a good contact page, but most often they won’t.
2. Off-Site Public Conversations: Sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. have made it so that people can converse about your work in public with friends and strangers alike. Though the level of privacy varies, these types of interactions can usually be at least tracked and, in many cases, you can actively participate in any conversation taking place.
3. On-Site Conversations: This is basically your site’s comments, forums or any other dialog you encourage on your site itself. This is conversation that you are not only aware of and can participate in, but also in control of.

Though most bloggers would love it to have all of the conversation take place on their site, where they are most aware and in control, the truth is that dialog on the Web takes place in all three spaces and that is actually good news for bloggers.

After all, how can word spread about your work if some of the conversation doesn’t take place away from your site? Without a mixture of all three conversation types, you can’t grow your site beyond its existing audience.

So the question becomes, how do you avoid killing this conversation or, even better, how do you nurture it?

Nurturing the Conversation

The first and most obvious step to encouraging conversation about your work is to post engaging and interesting things that people want to discuss. Good content is virtually irresistible for people to talk about and, with it, the conversation will survive just about any attempts by you to stop it.

That being said, there are a few things you can and should do to encourage the online dialog.

1. Make it Easy: Offer email, Twitter, Facebook and other buttons/links on your site so that people can trivially share and talk about what you’re doing. A lot of times people decide what they want to talk about impulsively and these buttons encourage that behavior.
2. Ask a Question: Don’t just write a post and close what you have to say, ask a question and invite others to answer it. This makes the reader a part of the post and gives them a reason to respond. Best of all, people find it very hard to resist answering questions when they either know the answer to or have an opinion on.
3. Leave a Door Open: Rather than trying to write a definitive piece on a topic, you can leave something out, a place for others to chime in. This may be difficult if you’re trying to be an authority on a topic, but most bloggers can do this easily.
4. Ask For It: If a topic is truly important, consider asking others to tweet or like the content directly so that it’s shared and the conversation spreads. While you don’t want to overuse this method, it can be powerful when done right.

However, starting the conversation is just half of the story, once it’s going, you, as the subject, have a role in keeping it going and trying to make sure that it’s as productive as possible.

On that front, there’s a simple mantra that can help you know how to respond to a conversation about your site.

1. If You Can, Moderate the Conversation: For conversations on your site, be a good moderator and work to build a constructive place where people can talk and bring new ideas to the conversation.
2. If You Can’t Moderate, Participate: If you can’t control the conversation, participate in it. Track Twitter and other other social media mentions of your content and engage with those who share and talk about your work, get involved with the dialog.
3. If You Can’t Participate, Observe: If you can’t partake in the conversation but can watch it, do so. See what others are saying and try to learn from it. If truly necessary, you can always respond on-site.
4. If You Can’t Observe, Accept: Finally, if you can’t be involved in the conversation in any way, accept the fact that it’s going to take place and is a good thing. Even if it isn’t ideal, it’s a natural part of all human interaction.

In short, the more active you are in the conversation, the better. However, it isn’t always possible and it’s important to not get too caught up in the conversations you can’t join in on.

After all, your time is best spent growing and enjoying the conversations you can be involved in, not worrying about the ones you can’t.

Bottom Line

Dealing with conversation online is tough. Give it too much free reign and it becomes like a wildfire that consumes everything it touches, try to control it too much and it’s smothered until it’s extinguished. A properly nurtured and controlled dialog burns bright and spreads constructively.

Like most forces of nature, you don’t really have any control over the conversation and it can turn against you at any time, but you can still use it and benefit from it, if you’re willing to put an effort into it.

In short, the more you learn and do in this area, the better and more productive the dialog around your work will be.

However, those few who do “make it” often don’t fare much better. Those who achieve even a small amount of fame online often find that being known can be just as bad, if not worse, as being an unknown.

Even someone, such as myself, who achieves a tiny amount of fame in a very small niche quickly learns that any notoriety comes with a slew of responsibility and, at times, headaches.

So, before you set on the path of trying to become a famous or semi-famous blogger, you may want to take a moment and look at some of the drawbacks and problems that come with it.

Fortunately though, most of those problems can be easily mitigated, but one has to be ready for them in order to stop them from ruining everything they’ve worked on.

The Perils of Getting Big

On one hand, there is certainly a lot to like about being well-known, even moderately so. People tend to listen to what you have to say, they share your work via social media, treat you as an authority figure and value your opinion. It can be nice and it is definitely a huge boost to the ego.

However, while that attention shines a bright spotlight on all of the good that you do, it shines the light equally bright on everything that you do poorly.

Others, many of whom may want to tear you down so they can build themselves up, will pick apart your words and ideas. Others, possibly wanting to trade on your name and reputation, will criticize you, often pointlessly, and even go as far as to libel you online.

Depending on the size of your fame and how controversial of a figure you might be, the attacks can get downright vindictive and reach a point where nothing is sacred. Friends, family, employers and anything in between can become targets.

That, in turn, is precisely what happened to Pamela Jones of Groklaw in 2005 when a reporter published information about her personal life, including her mother and photos of her house.

Though attacks that go that far are less common, smaller ones are regular for almost all bloggers of any notoriety.

In short, while it can be tough to have no one listening to you, it can be far worse to have them listening to everything you say and, even worse, screaming as loud as they can to drown you out, literally at any cost.

Dealing With “Fame” and Silencing the Trolls

The first step to dealing with fame is realizing that you have it to begin with. Many bloggers might look at their traffic stats and believe that they are not popular at all when, in reality, they’ve got a good foothold in their niche, at least enough of one so that people are paying attention.

Just because you aren’t getting tens of thousands of visitors a day doesn’t mean you aren’t a celebrity. What does count is that the people who need to know who you are known do so and that they are taking interest in your work. After all, they are the same people who can destroy what you’ve built.

With that in mind, it’s time to stop thinking like you’re screaming into the wind and start realizing that people are actually paying attention, even if it only seems like a few.

With that in mind, here are a few good steps to follow:

1. Thicken Your Skin: First, realize that you need to develop a thicker skin to insults. When you only get a few visitors a day on your site, you can respond to every negative comment and fight every flame war. With even a little bit of traffic that becomes impossible. Learn to not let insults and criticisms bother you and how to move on from them. Sometimes you just have to walk away.
2. Watch What You Say: Be careful about what you say on your site. Word things very carefully and make sure that there’s no room for misunderstanding. Be especially clear with your titles as they are the most commonly read part of your blog. Also, be wary of what you say on Twitter, Facebook and other social media as they can haunt you as well.
3. Take the High Road: Remember, no matter how dirty someone gets with their responses to you, take the high road. You might be able to get some cheap traffic with smearing someone else’s name, as with the recent Gizmodo story, but long term success comes from being the better person.
4. Learn How to Handle Mistakes: When you make a mistake, always handle it carefully. Be honest, be open and do your best to make it right. Any attempt to cover it up, no matter how innocent, may be seen as an attempt to exploit your position unfairly.
5. Paint Yourself as Human: It’s easy to forget online that we’re talking to and about other human beings. Always work to present yourself as a human being and make sure that others don’t see you as a faceless name. Have your image on your site, share a few personal stories and be honest about your weaknesses. Not only do people relate better with other humans, but they are less likely to attack them too.

The most important thing, however, is to simply keep your eyes on why you started blogging and not let the problems outside of that get you down.

If you have a goal in mind and a purpose for your work, even if it is as simple as making people smile, it’s a lot easier to stay focused and not get caught up in the distractions.

Bottom Line

In the end, if you find yourself in a position of authority, no matter how small that position may seem to be, you need to show respect for it. Even if just one person trusts your opinion or wants to know what you have to say, you owe it to that person to treat their trust in you with respect.

If you do that, then you and have a good understanding that, sometimes, the Web can be a very uncaring and unfriendly place, you should be fine.

The problems usually arise when one thinks no one is listening, ignoring the audience they have, and then wondering why the mob is out to tear them down.

Unfortunately, as a blogger, you’re just a passenger on someone else’s ship on the Web. Whether it’s a free hosting service like Blogger or WordPress.com, or you have your own server, most likely, some other company is providing the hosting and the access to you. But as reliable as they might have been in the past or as great as they are now, there’s always a possibility that things could change.

Simply put, hardware breaks, companies get sold and people change jobs. What was great service and support one day could be catastrophic downtime tomorrow and it’s important to be prepared for that possibility at all times. Sadly, this has nothing to do with avoiding unlimited hosting or using a bad host as even the best, most honest hosts can have a problem.

Instead, this is an issue about being prepared for the inevitable, that something will go wrong eventually, and that you don’t want to be the one who goes down with the ship. It’s a grim situation to prepare for, but one that every blogger has to.

After all, just a few moments of preparation can, literally, save you many hours or even days of headache down the road.

The Pitfall

Imagine waking up in the morning and finding that your site is offline. Worse still, after checking with your host, you find that the error is not a temporary one but is much more serious, likely requiring hours or even days to fully repair and there’s a possibility that, even after they get back online, that data loss could prevent your site from being restored.

Immediately you’re faced with several difficult questions. Do you stick it out with your current host and wait for things to return? Do you move to another host and set up shop there? Do you even have the capability to move your site and, if you do, how much of your data will make it with you?

For even the best prepared, these are difficult questions without easy answers. For those who aren’t prepared at all, these decisions can feel like choosing your death.

In these situations, you want to be the person with the options rather than the one who has to go down with the ship and hope it eventually rights itself. While it often does, sometimes it doesn’t and you can watch your site, your hard work, your built-up SEO and your audience disappear, forcing you to start over.

Sadly, there’s no easy way out of this situation, but there are steps you can take right now to mitigate any problems and put yourself in a better position when disaster strikes

How to Avoid it

Unfortunately, if you blog long enough, you’re going to get bit by a hosting disaster. Something, somewhere, sometime will go wrong and you’re going to be in a situation where you need to take drastic action to either keep your site online or get back.

So, before you get into a situation where need to take drastic action, it’s important to make sure that you are prepared for a disaster and can respond in an effective, productive way.

On that note, here are a few questions to ask yourself today to avoid a disaster tomorrow.

1. Do You Know How to Move Your Site? With today’s one-click installs and blog hosting solutions, it’s possible to create a site without any clue about how to move it or rebuild it. If you are relying on someone else, whether a friend or a company, to do the dirty work for you, you need to make sure that you can take responsibility for your site and can save it if needed.
2. Do You Have Backups? Backing up your blog is crucial and it’s important that these backups need to be under your control, not your host’s.
3. Do You Know Where You Will Go? Every escape plan needs a destination. Do you know what company or service you will use if you need to leave in a hurry? It’s best to do your research now so you can setup an account immediately rather than having to spend time researching and making a decision.
4. Do You Control Your Domains? If you don’t have control over your domain, meaning that you registered it with your host and it is tied to that account, moving becomes a lot more complicated. Likewise, if you don’t have a domain, such as with most free blogging services, moving to a new host means changing URLs and that can be a big problem.
5. Do You Have Alternate Means of Contact? Finally, even if you are as well prepared as possible, how are you going to get the word out to your readers that you have the situation in hand? You need to have a Twitter, Facebook and other off-site presences so that you can remain in contact with your readers during your downtime.

While none of these things are very difficult to do, they all require at least some pre-planning, ideally before you even start blogging. However, if your answers to these questions are not to your liking, there’s no time like the present to fix them.

After all, tomorrow could be when things go sour and you have to take drastic action to save your site.

Bottom Line

No matter how well prepared you are, hosting disasters are always difficult but they are much easier and much less stressful if you’ve got plans in place when they happen and you’re able to move on quickly.

The situation you don’t want to be in is waiting for your host to fix the situation and see when and if your site will be back online.

You’ve put too much effort and energy into your site to just hope and pray that another company, one you only pay a few dollars per month to, is going to be able to save your blog. You owe it to your self to take responsibility for your site and be prepared should the worst happen.

If you do, some day down the road you will be very, very grateful that you did.

However, making complete strangers trust you and count on you is no simple task, especially when they will most likely never meet you. It can require years of tireless, consistent work, the ability to repeatedly prove that you are capable of delivering on what you promise and constantly striving to build a reputation for high quality work.

But for all of the work required to build trust, it can be lost in the blink of an eye. One breach of that trust, no matter how small, can set you back months, even years in terms of trust and some incidents can even overshadow your entire history, becoming damaging “buts” to an otherwise stellar reputation.

Learning how to build and keep trust is critical for every blogger. If your readers are going to let you in as part of their lives, no matter how small of a part that is, they need to know what role you’re going to fulfill and that you will do it well. Trust is often what separates the one-off or casual reader from the avid fan, trust is how you build inbound links and trust is how you grow your site.

Fortunately, building and managing trust is easier than many make it out to be, but it isn’t quite as simple as just doing quality work either. To build and keep trust, there are steps you have to take to ensure that others are receptive to your work and will notice your efforts, thus ensuring that your hard work doesn’t go to waste.

The Pitfall

Trust is something that is gained with months of tireless posting and work, but can be lost in a matter of minutes with one poorly-handled mistake or one act of dishonesty.

In short, with blogging one misstep can, quite literally erase months, even years of high-quality work. A reputation is slow to be built, but quick to be blemished and there is no avoiding that reality.

But as fragile as trust is, it is at least equally valuable. Trust is the very foundation upon which a reader base is built upon and it is what keeps people coming back to your site, causes them to tell others about it and even link to it from their sites. A good reputation even impacts casual readers or newcomers, encouraging them to link to your content when they are interested in it and to trust your content as reliable, even if they don’t visit it regularly.

In short, the more trust you’re able to build, the more likely your readers will come back, the more they will spread the word about your site and, over time, the better it will do in the search engines for relevant terms as inbound links grow.

This makes trust absolutely essential to build and maintain, but it’s not going to be easy to do and the best time to start thinking about these issues is day one. However, if you haven’t been pondering these issues, there’s also no time like the present to get started.

How to Avoid It

There’s no simple key to building and maintaining trust. The vast majority of the process is simply a matter of doing consistent, high-quality work over a long period of time. The better the content you create and the more regularly you provide it, the more people will trust in your ability to keep providing it in the future.

Still, there are several key steps that bloggers can and should take to ensure that their hard work has the maximum possible effect and to minimize the potential damage and slip up or problem can cause.

Here are a few such things any blogger can do today:

1. Use a Professional Theme: First impressions do matter. If your site has an unprofessional theme, you start out with a negative amount of trust with every visitor and have to claw your way back to zero with good content. Spend the time and/or money to create a good, professional theme and your visitors will respect you more right off the bat.
2. Be Human: People don’t trust websites, they trust other people. So, try to make yourself as human as possible. Include a bio, a photo and just enough personal information to let people know that you are a real, live person and not just a faceless site.
3. Learn to Say “I Don’t Know”: Admitting you don’t know something publicly can be the hardest thing a blogger has to do, especially if they are trying to position themselves as an expert. However, admitting the limits of what you do and do not know increases trust in the things you do say. We all have limitations so it is best to be honest about them.
4. Interact With Your Audience: People trust others that they “know” and the best way to have people know you online is engage with them. Reply to comments, answer emails and encourage participation in your site. Once people have interacted with you, they are much more likely to invest in you emotionally and trust you moving forward.
5. Make Your Case: There’s a fine line between being a braggart and explaining why people should trust you. Be sure to talk about your accomplishments, list any mentions you’ve gotten in the press and anything else that might show you to be an expert or otherwise trustworthy. Even small awards can be a big deal for newcomers looking for a reason to believe in you.

For additional tips, check out Andrew Rosen’s article last year about how to build trust on your site.

However, all these steps are, at the end of the day, are boosts to your trust and not magic tools for creating it out of thin air. In short, they are meaningless without putting in the work and effort to consistently produce high quality content and the knowledge to handle mistakes well.

In the end, it’s the day to day grind, more than anything, that builds trust and generates respect, even if it is the least sexy or interesting part of the process.

Bottom Line

On the Web, trust is difficult to earn, critical to have and easy to lose all at the same time. If you run a blog and you want it to grow, you need to focus of building and sustaining trust.

Obviously, this isn’t going to be easy and it will require a lot of hard work, but if you take steps to nurture your site’s reputation and consistently do good work, you’ll likely find that the trust flows naturally.

After all, the best trust is the kind that’s earned organically, not the kind that’s won over with slick marketing copy or grandiose promises. Earned trust is the only kind with any staying power, that can weather small storms and even absence.

In short, people don’t forget when you earn their trust, as fragile as that trust still is, but you still have to set your site up to make your readers receptive to giving you a chance.

But if you do that, put in the time and produce the content they want, your readers will trust you and that is something no amount of advertising can buy.

If you blog long enough, it is bound to happen to you, even if you aren’t aware. Someone will take your content and republish it on their site, sometimes with a link, sometimes without, sometimes the full work, sometimes just a snippet. There are a million ways your content can appear on other sites, some ways legitimately and other ways less so, but they are all interesting lessons in how your readers interact with your work and, in some cases, problems you have to address.

Because, while most content reuse is fairly harmless. Some uses, especially by plagiarists and spammers, can have a negative impact on your site. This makes it important to know both how to track your content, what your rights are regarding your work, when is a good idea to step in and, most importantly, what you can do if you find that you need to.

Unfortunately, the issues are far more complex than what we can discuss in a single column, but we can definitely give a good overview of the situation and what you can expect.

The Pitfall

The pitfall here is fairly simple, people are going to want to use your content on their sites. Some will have noble intentions, such as quoting your content in a response or linking to it to let their readers know about it. Others, however, will have less-than-pure motives, including spamming the search engines in an attempt to gain a higher ranking and to plagiarize your work to take credit for it.

Most of the time even the most nefarious use is fairly harmless and goes unnoticed. However, there are times that a site will either be successful in using another’s content to game the search engines or manage to convince a large number of people that they are the author of a work.

Smaller sites and newer sites are especially vulnerable to these issues. Since they don’t have the trust with Google or a large reader base, it is trivial for other sites to swoop in and replace the original. Spammers, who often have large link farm networks, can often times take the content from new sites and outrank them for unique terms and can be very difficult to unseat later.

This can be a major drag on the growth of a new site, especially one that is in a spam-friendly niche. However, too few bloggers are aware of these problems when they arise and when they are aware aren’t certain what they can or should do.

Fortunately, most of these cases can be easily prevented or resolved, if a blogger is willing to give some thought to how they want their content to be used and are willing to enforce their rules.

How to Avoid It

On my main site, Plagiarism Today, I talk at great length about content misuse issues and what bloggers/webmasters can do to prevent, reduce or stop it. However, much of the process comes down to seven steps that can to be repeated for every site:

1. License Your Work: Determine what conditions you want your work to be used under and mark it accordingly. If you are comfortable with some level of reuse, consider getting a Creative Commons license to clearly explain your terms. If you are not comfortable with any reuse, be sure to add a copyright footer that includes the year, the © symbol and “All Rights Reserved”. Though the latter is not needed under the law, it helps prevent confusion.
2. Track Your Content: For your blog’s main content, use FairShare to monitor where it is being used on the Web. For content that is outside of your RSS feed, consider using Google Alerts with several key phrases from your work. Both will notify you automatically when duplicates of your content appear online and both are free services.
3. Contact the Site Admins: If you find that your work is being misused, contact the site admin and ask that they stop. This is known as a “cease and desist” demand and can take a variety of forms and tones. These requests can be threatening and professional or friendly and polite, the choice is yours based on your approach and the case itself. Sometimes you are forced to skip this step, as with spam sites.
4. Notify the Host: If the site is within the U.S. or another nation with a notice and takedown system, contact the host of the site to have it removed. You can find who the host of a site is using WhoIsHostingThis or Domain Tools. When sending a notice to a U.S.-based host, you’ll need a to file a DMCA takedown notice.
5. Notify the Advertisers: If the site has advertisers, consider notifying them about the infringement if you believe it to be intentional. Most major ad networks will discontinue accounts of those who infringe copyright.
6. Notify the Search Engines: If contacting the host doesn’t get results or is not practical, consider filing a DMCA takedown notice with Google and the other search engines to have the content removed from there. At the very least, you will not be competing with your own work.
7. Consider a Lawsuit: Though in most cases of online content misuse, a lawsuit is neither a practical nor an adviseable step, if all else fails, it may be worth considering if the case you are dealing with may be the exception to the rule.

If you take these steps, you’ll likely find that the amount of content misuse you’re dealing with is kept to a minimum and you are able to handle any incidents that do arise. Though it is by no means a perfect system, it is one that is easy for bloggers to follow and doesn’t require any money to complete.

In short, it is meant to be a simple, effective and free way to protect, monitor and enforce your content on the Web.

Bottom Line

All in all, protecting your content from misuse is fairly straightforward and shouldn’t take a great deal of time and energy. If you’re doing everything correctly and focusing on the important cases, it won’t be a distraction from your regular blogging efforts.

However, this means being smart about how you enforce your work and realizing that, as a blogger, not all reuse of your content is bad, especially those that create an inbound link. If you license your work to encourage good use, you’ll likely find that very few people actually abuse your content and those who do can usually be stopped quickly.

This will let you protect your work while encouraging its spread and still not spending too much time thinking or worrying about these issues.

After all, if you spend all of your time thinking about copyright issues, you’re not blogging or growing your site and that could be the biggest disaster of all.

Imagine sitting down to your computer one morning and opening up your blog. However, instead of finding your homepage your admin panel staring back at you, you instead see a bright red warning screen telling you that malware has been detected on the site and you are advised not to enter.

The realization quickly sinks in that, if you are seeing that error, so is everyone else trying to visit your site. You begin to hurry and try to figure out what happened but quickly realize that your site has been compromised and, if you’re even able to log in, you have a very big mess to clean up. Worst of all, when you’re done, you have to apply for reconsideration with Google and other security companies and then wait 12 hours or more for the warning to clear off.

It’s a painful process and, in the best of circumstances it can ruin an entire day and, in the worst, it can destroy an otherwise healthy site.

Still, it is an all-too-common occurrence on the Web. Bloggers learn too late that their sites are vulnerable and are left to clean up the mess an attacker leaves behind. That mess could be as simple as adding malware to the site, inserting spam links into the theme or defacing the site but in some extreme cases, it can go as far as to delete everything the blogger has done.

To help keep you, your visitors and your site safe(r) from hackers, you need to make sure your server is secure. Fortunately, it isn’t very complicated but failure to spend the time and energy today can be very costly tomorrow.

The Pitfall

Sadly, security is one of those things that few bloggers seriously think about until after something goes wrong. However, at that point, it’s pretty much too late. Once a site has been compromised it is almost impossible to trust again, either from the perspective of a blogger trying to clean up their site or a visitor who may have been infected or attacked through it.

For all intents and purposes, every site on the Internet is vulnerable to some degree, there is no such thing as a perfectly secure site. However, there are definitely sites that are more secure and less secure and the easier it is for your site to be hacked, the more likely it will be.

Typically, hackers go after after blogs that have known exploits that haven’t been patched, sites that can be easily attacked through a simple script and/or sites that can be opened up through a very simple attack. In short, most website hacks are not done by elite hackers targeting a specific domain, but attackers running scripts to exploit a known vulnerability in as many domains as possible.

That does not mean, however, that these hacks are not dangerous. On the low end, they can deface a site as a joke, in extreme cases, it can result in a site being deleted or destroyed, something that may not be able to be recovered from without good backups.

Any attack will erode hard-earned trust with your visitors, creating a setback that will remain long after the hole has been closed and the hack cleared up, but a particularly nasty one may be a blow your site can’t recover from, bringing an abrupt end to a site you’ve worked very hard on growing.

How to Avoid It

As mentioned above, there is no way to be 100% secure with your site. If someone is motivated and skilled enough, there are always ways to attack your server. Rather than focusing on being hack-proof, the goal of security is being a tougher target. The more you raise the difficulty in attacking your site, the fewer people that will have the skill and interest in doing so.

On that note, much of the responsibility falls to your host. They, usually, have the duty of making sure your server software, including OS and various applications, are up-to-date and properly locked down. However, very few hacks actually attack a server from that angle, though at least some appear to, and most instead focus on what you put on your account, something that is your responsibility.

With that in mind, here are seven crucial steps to make your blog much more secure, regardless of where it is.

1. Choose Good Passwords: Regardless of where you host, your password is your first line of defense. Using a bad password is like buying an expensive safe and leaving it unlocked. Make sure all of your passwords are difficult to attack, including the one for your admin area, your database and your site’s control panel. Any password that can be easily attacked is an exploit waiting to happen. Also, avoid reusing passwords and consider using a login manager such as LastPass to help generate and remember all of your passwords.
2. Keep Your Software Up-To-Date: Though not relevant for bloggers on hosted solutions, for those who host their own sites make sure you keep your software up to date. This includes your blogging platform and any plugins you use. Likewise, be careful of any plugins that you choose and make sure they are maintained, current and follow the same coding/security practices as your main application.
3. Harden Your Installation: Also, if you run your own software, make sure to harden your installation. This means making sure folders don’t have unneeded permissions, blocking access to key folders, installing security-related plugins, etc. WordPress users can see our previous guide on WordPress security for more tips.
4. Be Mindful of 3rd Party Services: Any service you add to your site is a potential avenue of attack. Consider, for example, what would happen if an attacker found a way to insert code into every single Facebook widget. They would instantly have their code running on millions of sites. That type of access makes these services tempting targets for hackers and an easy way for your site to get attacked. Only run services with a good track record of security and reliability. According to security experts, this is the number one flaw that opens hosting accounts to hacking.
5. Be Wary of Social Engineering Tricks: Amazingly, the easiest and most common way for hackers to break into an account is not to take advantage of a computer exploit, but to trick its human owners into giving them access either through phishing or cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Be careful of who you give your password to, where you type it in and what you do while you are logged in to your site.
6. Seek Outside Help: Consider having your site monitored by a service such as Sucuri to help spot malware attacks or other alterations to your site before they impact your visitors or are noticed by Google. They won’t help you prevent an attack but they will help detect and clean up after one, thus minimizing the damage.
7. Create Off-Site Backups: Having backups is crucial but it is not enough to have them on your server, keep backups of your site in several locations including on your computer and, if possible, elsewhere on the Web. Consider using services such as Backupify, SiteAutoBackup or VaultPress to ensure that you can pick back up no matter what happens to your server.

Taking these steps will by no means make your site hack proof but it will go a long way to prevent your site from being attacked and to minimize the damage any successful attacks may cause.

In short, you’ll be ensuring that your data is protected and that your hard-earned trust with your readers remains intact.

Bottom Line

Blog security is not something you can treat lightly. Whether you run a small, personal blog or a major blog for your business, you are a target and you have visitors who are trusting you to keep them safe when they are on your site. Slacking in this area can and will cost you dearly.

So take a few moments if you haven’t and take a quick security audit. Take a look at the above tips read the past articles on the topic. See what you can do to improve your site’s security and take any steps necessary to ensure that you are up to code.

Though it may seem like a lot of work for very little reward, the next time a major blog hack is going around and it passes you by, the relief and security you feel will make the effort more than worthwhile.

After all, you can’t put a price on peace of mind nor can you put a price on having happy readers who get exactly what they expect from your site and nothing they don’t.

According to the story, Wrigley was on a train when another passenger asked him why he continued to spend millions of dollars when everyone knew his product and he had a virtual lock on the market.

Rather than answering the question, Wrigley responded by asking how fast the train was going. When the other passenger said, “About 70 miles per hour,” he shot back with the now-famous quip:

“Well, that’s fast enough, why don’t they unhook the engine?”

Wrigley understood that advertising and promotion was a key to growing his company and it is also key to growing your blog. However, most bloggers only focus on promotion during the earlier days and months of a blog, let it coast to hopeful success later. This can cause growth to slow to a crawl and, in extreme cases, even stop.

The Pitfall

Whenever we launch a new blog, we are initially very eager to promote it. We tell our friends, our family and anyone else who will listen. We leave comments, we get active in the community and swap links whenever we can. In short, we fight for every visitor and celebrate every comment.

However, as sites grow we become less aggressive about that fight. We don’t promote as actively, ignoring our Twitter, avoiding leaving comments and not working with other webmasters. A lot of it is pure practicality. It takes more time to run a busier blog (more email, more comments, more spam, etc.), thus reducing the time available for promotion, but much of it is that bloggers feel they have move past promotion, as if it were just a phase.

Unfortunately, some bloggers take this to an extreme and rest on their laurels a bit too hard. They stop promoting, they stop producing top-flight content and they effectively cut off the engine that has pulled their blog to where it is. The result is that blogs carry on for a time, then slow down, then stagnate and eventually begin to stop.

For bloggers who have traffic as part of their goal, this can be a very devastating problem to have and a stagnate blog or one losing traffic is at much higher risk of abandonment than one that is actively growing.

So how do you prevent this from happening to your site? The answer is quite simple.

How to Avoid It

The simplest way to not “cut off the engine” of your blog is to quite simply remain dedicated to its promotion, even if things seem to be going great.

This may not mean that you use the same promotion tactics that you did on day one, that would be foolish, but that you don’t give up on promotion. nor do you completely abandon the steps that got you to where you are.

In short, while you may have to change and hone your tactics to find more relevant ways to promote yourself as grow, you can’t rest comfortably on your status. Consider the following steps:

1. Focus on Quality Content: Good content is still your best promotion. It ranks well in the search engines and brings you new, targeted visitors daily. Keep writing good content and keep trying to outdo your previous best with every post.
2. Force Yourself to Promote: Make sure you spend at least a few hours per week promoting your site. This can be about maintaining your Twitter feed, leaving comments, writing guest posts or just about anything other than blog writing and maintenance.
3. Shift Tactics: As your site becomes more popular and you build a stronger name, you might not want to use the same tactics. Focus on broader-reaching methods of promotion such as email lists, Twitter, etc. and less on more targeted methods.
4. Don’t Forget Your Network: That being said, continue to reach out to individual bloggers and sites as time allows. Though posting comments and sending personal emails may not be very efficient, they are important steps as no site is an island and relationship building is still crucial.
5. Remember, There Are Always New People to Meet: Finally, remember that, no matter how popular your site gets, the majority of the people in the world have not heard of you and always at least some in your field who don’t know of you. There’s always new people to reach out to, it’s just a matter of finding them.

All in all, this is a pretty simple pitfall to avoid. Don’t stop promoting, refine your strategies as your needs change and don’t let your relationships slide. It’s simple. The hardest part is putting in the time and energy into keeping it up, especially as other areas of blogging take up more and more of your time and promotion is, generally, one of the least favorite blogging activities.

In that regard, blog promotion is a lot like going to the gym to get in shape. Almost everyone recognizes what they have to do, but many, if not most, simply aren’t able or aren’t willing to go through with it.

Bottom Line

The real problem with blog promotion is that, for most bloggers, it is one of the least enjoyable part of the blogging experience. Most bloggers get into it because they have a passion for their chosen topic, which is rarely marketing.

Still, when most bloggers start they have a rabid enthusiasm for promotion and are eager to get their names out there by any means necessary. However, that enthusiasm becomes more tepid once some level of success is found, making it seem less necessary and giving the blogger other things to do.

Everyone has to keep working to get themselves out there. Complacency is the beginning of stagnation and nowhere is that more true than blog promotion and marketing. If you think your job is done, then it probably is, but only because your blog is in a holding pattern and likely soon to start coming down.

The truth though is that I wasn’t the only online specialist there: my fellow bloggers Fire Extinguisher Expert, SEO Expert and Financial Spreadbetting all were there as well and it didn’t take long before the focus changed, switched to the eternal debate around blog traffic.
Fire Ex, that’s how his friends call him, SEO dude and Financial actually are really cool people but the problem is, no one knows who they are or their name and they are obsessed by only one thing: traffic. Traffic to their website.

Every time you meet them it all revolves about the same and they will do their best to engage in a conversation but they resemble those guys you meet at conferences, the ones who always tend to hand out their business card even before saying ‘Hi’.
Hanging out with them generally is cool and sometimes Fire Extinguisher Expert will even go as far as paying several rounds of drinks, even for friends, in the hope that I invite even more friends and he can brag about his awesome skills and cheap products. The truth though, although the tequila shots tend to make our nights together better, is that they all have something to about EVERYTHING but don’t provide any added value whatsoever. All they care about is to make sure that they are faster with their business cards than Lucky Luke‘s shadow.

In all honesty, it’s annoying and when stepping away from the computer I would rather not see them and the same applies to the comments they leave on blogs.

Don’t get me wrong, Fire Ex, SEO Dude and Financial are cool dudes. Interior Designs even occasionally sounds as if he has something interesting to say and in our group we are slightly more tolerant to him, we just tell him not to hand out his cards. Here on BloggingPro though we are not tolerant at all and mercilessly mark all no-value comments without genuine commenter name as spam or remove the URL field.
Our comment policy reads:

We highly encourage you to use a name and not ‘keyword’ spam for the name field in the comments. We reserve the right to remove the linked URL if your ‘name’ consists of merely keywords and might even mark your comments as spam, even if your comments are valid and add value to the discussion. Your friends at the pub do not call you ‘fire extinguisher expert’ either.

Personally I would even consider to automate moderation even more and not accept any comments if the commenter doesn’t have an own Gravatar. I do know that many a valid comment would be deleted but it would at the same time filter even more spam comments out. Comment spam is a hot topic here at Splashpress Media and every day we spend lots of time to delete illegitimate comments in our network. We use several plugins to filter comments and manually moderate as well but still have not found a solution filtering comments even better. How do you deal with Fire Extinguisher Expert, SEO Expert and FInancial Spreadbetting?

Photo Credit: Photo by Irregular Shed.

Successful Blogging is all about strategy.
And there are hundreds of how-tos written to up your game and increase your bottom line.
True?
But, equally important in your efforts is what “not” to do in terms of techniques and time management.

With this being said, here are 4 things to NOT make time for in your blogging career.

1. Worry—How many times have you agonized over your work? Here’s the typical scenario. You pick a topic after much deliberation and debate. Then you write it and revise it. Then you post it. Then you have second thoughts. Then you worry about whether or not it will be well received and responded to. Maybe you should have chosen a different topic or approach, you think to yourself. Sound familiar? Stop the madness! Give your best, then give it a rest!
2. Fear—”To be or not to be?” Some folks fear tackling certain issues. Others fear offending readers. And then there are those that are afraid of truly being who they are in their writing career. Thy think that they have to always be perfect or “politically correct.” Not true. In fact, some of the most engaging and colorful bloggers are those who break the rules and strive to be unique and “real” with their audiences.
3. Comparison—Many times in our efforts to assess our success, we compare ourselves to those in our niche areas, or those who have been blogging for a similar length of time. This is okay for the purpose of objective analysis, but don’t get mired down in it. Run your own race. Your circumstances may be different and we all have different strengths and weaknesses.
4. Negativity—Whether it exists in your thinking patterns, or comments from blog readers. Move past it to achieve your optimal best!

Remember that time is a commodity, and how you choose to invest it will determine how greatly you will be rewarded in your blogging career!

Your turn. Which of these habits are you guilty of? Do you agree or disagree with these “time savers?”

I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
But be forewarned.
If you’re a “serious” blogger or writer, at some point or another in your blogging career, you’ll be forced to take a stand or express an opinion that may cause disagreement or debate.

Sometimes it may be intentional or strategic on your part. Other times it can come quite by accident.
Suffice it to say, it comes with the territory.
Anytime you have a platform or public visibility, there’s a potential for it to happen.
Let’s face it.
Words are powerful. And whether they’re written or spoken, sometimes people can misconstrue them, “respectfully disagree”, or take offense to your word choice or delivery.

No worries. All controversy need not cause dissension.
These situations can provide great opportunity for intelligent debate and enlightenment.

Take for example an incident that happened awhile back ago within the blogging community.
I was doing my usual surfing and stumbled upon a very interesting and lively debate at a popular blogging site.

From what I could decipher, the blog owner had an issue with a design program and its functionality. To make a long story short, he said that in his recommendation, it was not the best value for one’s money.

In all honesty I couldn’t truly assess the merits of his argument, because I’ve never used the program. Still, I learned some things I didn’t know before, and the author earned my respect for honesty and courage. Not to mention, there was so much traffic on this site, that if it were a “physical” highway rather than a “virtual” one, we’d be riding bumper to bumper even now.:-)
With this in mind…
Here are 4 ways to court controversy without alienating blog readers.

1. Recognize that people have a right to disagree and to freedom of speech. Diversity of opinion is what makes for a more enriching human existence, and blogging experience. If we all thought alike, imagine how boring the world would be! It’s not what you say, but how you say it.
2. If you choose a position, have statistics and examples to support your claim. It adds credibility.
3. Never attack in your approach or your response. Don’t give specific names or identifying details that may cause discomfort or disrepair to someone’s career or reputation. That’s just plain mean and uncouth.
4. Use humor when applicable. I often find that criticism is more “palatable” when it makes others laugh. Dr. Phil often uses it even.:-) As he often states, “Be a hero.”

Remember to always remain open to opposing views. It can be refreshing. A wise man once stated that “The true sign of intelligence is an open mind.”

How about you? Have you ever had to deal with blogging controversy? Do you believe that blogging should have boundaries?

Image: Francesco Marino