If you are interested in growing herbs and in home schooling, the best way to find out is to browse through http://kcbcc.org for useful information. On this website there are posts at present which talk about herbs and home schooling and you will get interesting and useful information on these topics.

Herbs are small plants whose leaves give a delicate perfume and when added to food, enhance the flavor. If added to tea, they make tea tasty. Some herbs are used in candle making and scented oils as well. Herbs can be grown from ready made plants which are transplanted into your chosen area. Or they can be grown from seeds bought in the market. You have to decide whether you want the herbs to grow inside your house, or outdoors in your garden or on your patio.

It is quite easy to grow herbs. First of all, you have to choose which herbs you want to grow, where and why. There are many varieties. Some of the most basic ones are thyme, garlic, oregano, basil, dill and chives. Delicious tea can be made using lavender, peppermint and chamomile.

Herbs need good soil, enough water and drainage, room to grow and sunlight. They need six hours of sunlight daily and if this is not possible then a special growth lamp can be switched on for the purpose. When grown at home, you can use beautiful pots on which you can paint lovely designs. You will have a good dcor which is pleasing and cool.

Many parents prefer home schooling for their children. Most areas have home schooling but in case your area does not have one, you can start one yourself. You can talk to parents of children and form a group. You can share the responsibilities or take on home schooling by rotation. You can start in a shed, or if the weather in your area is good, in a park, or you can also have it at home.

There are certain rules and regulations which have been formulated so that every child has an all round development and gets quality education. Though the basic rules may be similar in all states, it is always better to find out the exact rules of your area. Otherwise, if you don’t follow them you may land in jail.

You can; of course, register as a private school and then you can experiment with your ideas and do what you feel is good for the children.

If you are starting a home school you can do it from your own house, or use your shed or an open park if weather permits. You can have the home school by rotation in the other children’s places. It is advisable to know the parents of other children well. Child socialization is also important. You can take the children to other programs, for exhibitions, shows and the like where they meet other children of their age and learn how to socialize.

Millions are now paying to get a ride on the Information Super Highway everyday. Now, it is widely known that the Internet is an accessible resource of many income-generating activities. Whether you belong to a private sales company or you are just interested in internet marketing, PPC affiliate programs can be a powerful venue to make money from the Internet.

A partnership with an affiliate merchant is a win-win situation for the merchant and the affiliate. Because of exposure and traffic, sales are soaring while the affiliate is earning good cash.

To make things easier, the affiliate merchant provides a strip of advertisement and pays you when someone clicks on the ad’s link. You can get a commission of $0.10 to $0.30 for every click, but it sometimes it can go higher depending on your merchant affiliate.

Sometimes, merchants require a quota ($1.4 for every 1000 clicks). Plus, you can get discounts from your merchant affiliates if you happen to like their products too. You can just kick back and relax while your website is generating cash. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

What is PCC Affiliate Program? PPC means pay-per-click, wherein you get in partnership with an affiliate company that literally pays you for every click. There are actually two types of PCC affiliate programs. Those who pay a commission based on sales and those who pay based on the number of clicks.

The pay-per-click scheme is much more popular than pay-per-lead because the affiliate gets paid by just clicking the ad, regardless of whether the visitor buys from the affiliate merchant or not. Plus the chances of a visitor purchasing something from the affiliate merchant are not really that high.

In choosing an affiliate program, read the fine print carefully because some pay-per-click programs get the ratio of the number of people who went to your site and the actual people who clicked on the ad. If you have a heavily targeted website, this can hurt your earnings.

How do I start? Of course, you need to have a website. Depending on your target audience, choose the best affiliate merchant that is most related to your topic. For example, your website is about Carpentry then you can search for affiliate programs that sell tools used in carpentry.

However, if you don’t have a website, that’s not a problem. You can put up a content site about absolutely anything under the sun like Taking Care of Dogs or Decorating your own Home. But wait, its not over yet. We are faced by a dilemma on how to increase traffic! You first need to get internet surfers to see your website, then the ad. Click here for an Excellent Way To Increase Traffic!

How do I increase my traffic? First, design your website in such a way that it will attract internet users. A user-friendly site is always recommended so that the customers will know which one to click. Take into consideration the feel and look of the advertisement. Click here for an Excellent Way To Increase Traffic!

If it your website doesn’t look professional, most likely, users will just ignore it. Place the ad on a strategic location. One where users can see it clearly. Visibility of the ad is always important.

Another way is to post a link to your website in forums, web communities, ezine articles or bulletin boards. However, this method requires a lot of effort that defeats your purpose of getting easy money in the first place! The key is to do something once and forget about it.

It is like putting your business on autopilot. To maintain your pay-per-click business, be sure to track down site activity, so you are updated on how much money you are making.

Can I make more money? If you think you can go to the next level, you can try a two-tier affiliate program. This gives you the power to recruit affiliates. Other than the money you get from your website’s clicks, you will also get a percentage of what your affiliate generates.

You should be able to manage and monitor your affiliate program. If you can recruit more affiliates, then you can get paid more without even moving a finger! Choose affiliates that can most likely attract more internet users and bring more traffic. You just have to know the right people.

Did you know that there’s something called the Incy Wincy Spider Liberator? Well, they’re ladders that help spiders escape drowning. You set it up in your bath tub before you turn the tap on, and if there happens to be a spider in danger, it can get to the ladder and climb out.

The Santa Claus detector is excellent. It is an alarm that you can hang in the most unsuspecting places. As soon as Santa Claus enters your living area, this alarm will set off with all the gung-ho of a merry-go-round.

If you’re quite at ease with the natural order and the survival of the fittest, and you have a cat, you might be interested in a little gadget that combines a bird trapper with a cat feeder. Yes, you got the gist quite right.

All of these weird and wonderful things can be found in a handful of blogs aimed at sharing the wealth of this strange knowledge. How and where people find out all of this and the fact that they actually invent such things is a marvel.

Wouldn’t you consider it your duty to pass on information about things such as the spider liberator and the Santa detector (which incidentally comes with an extra facility to attach a shot gun!).

Whether you agree with the necessity for such inventions is another story altogether, but some of these interestingly strange inventions actually serve a good purpose. Take for example, the air-conditioned shoes. It’s probably not possible to do, but you can’t help wondering if it can be done. After all, it will get rid of smelly feet and keep you freshened no matter how much you walk.

The world wide web is flooded with all sorts of information, often absolutely unnecessary, strange and silly. It doesn’t make sense and is weird. This kind of information is written by people who believe in writing about the unconventional aspects of life.

Whether you believe in the conventional or not, going through a few of these blogs can keep you entertained for ages. If you take a fancy to it, you could always dig up a few such tidbits of your own and put them up on your own blog, and give other people a laugh – and have a blast doing it.

Wordpress Membership Videos reveal how-to start your Wordpress membership sites with Wordpress and totally free plugins.

Wordpress is the easiest way to make your first income generating membership site. A great set of four videos have been made to show you how to create a Wordpress membership site in just minutes. Get more information from the Wordpress Membership Videos website at http://WordpressMembershipVideos.com

Membership sites are a great business model for creating passive income. Your main job is to create and provide quality content to your subscribers. I don’t know of too many other ways for you to make a steady income on the internet. What you do is make a one-time sale and get paid for the lifetime of each customer. Provide a great value and people will stay members for the long haul.

The main problem many people encounter is getting started, ie. putting a membership site together. A lot of people have great ideas for a service or product but they get stuck on the membership angle. Wordpress Membership Videos solve that problem.

Some membership software that exists currently is quite expensive and complicated to use. From speaking with a number of beginners, I have found out that they are looking for something that doesn’t cost that much (below $40) or is free. They need something that will do the job for them and is easy to implement. That’s where Wordpress rises to the top.

Wordpress is one of the most powerful blogging system available. It can be used in so many different ways. When its used to create membership sites it has the added advantage of helping your site get ranked in the search engines. Its one of the foremost content management systems (CMS) you can use. Adding the correct plugins to Wordpress allows you to turn it into a powerful membership site and Wordpress Membership Videos show you how to do that (WordpresmembershipVideos.com).

There is nothing further for you to buy when you get the Wordpress membership Videos solution from http://www.wordpressmembershipvideos.com – The hard works has been done. You need to watch and implement. The video series takes you through everything one step at a time. The Wordpress Membership Videos series includes the crucial free plugin that will make your Wordpress blog an income generating, profit-making membership site in minutes.

Wordpress Membership Videos reveal everything ranging from “How to install Wordpress using Cpanel or manually” all the way through to “How to set up a single level recurring membership site.” You get some really good videos and you also get resale rights that allow you to sell the videos and make profits. Get more information http://WordpressMembershipVideos.com

Use totally free Wordpress plugins to create and start your own profitable Wordpress membership sites. Wordpress Membership Videos teach you how-to do it.

Wordpress is by far the easiest way to create your own income generating membership sites. A new set of videos have been created to show you, step by step videos show you how to create Wordpress membership sites in minutes. More information is available from the Wordpress Membership Videos website at http://WordpressMembershipVideos.com

Membership sites are very profitable. There’s no easier and better way for you to make a steady income on the web. What you do is make a sale once and you get paid for the lifetime of each customer. Your main job is to create and provide quality content to your subscribers. Provide a great value and people will stay members for the long haul.

The major hurdle a lot of enthusiastic people face is just getting started and putting things together at the very beginning. So many people have such great ideas for great products. It could be a service you’d like to offer but you’re stuck on the membership part of the equation. Wordpress Membership Videos show you how to get round these issues.

Some membership software that exists currently is quite expensive and complicated to use. From speaking with a number of beginners, I have found out that they are looking for something that doesn’t cost that much (below $40) or is free. They need something that will do the job for them and is easy to implement. That’s where Wordpress rises to the top.

Wordpress is one of the most powerful blogging system available. It can be used in so many different ways. When its used to create membership sites it has the added advantage of helping your site get ranked in the search engines. Its one of the foremost content management systems (CMS) you can use. Adding the correct plugins to Wordpress allows you to turn it into a powerful membership site and Wordpress Membership Videos show you how to do that (WordpresmembershipVideos.com).

The hard works has been done on your behalf. A 4-part video series takes you by the hand through everything. One step at a time. The Wordpress Membership Videos series includes the crucial free plugin that turns your Wordpress blog into a powerful, profit-making membership site. There is nothing further for you to buy.

Wordpress Membership Videos reveal everything ranging from “How to install Wordpress using Cpanel or manually” all the way through to “How to set up a single level recurring membership site.” You get some really good videos and you also get resale rights that allow you to sell the videos and make profits. Get more information http://WordpressMembershipVideos.com

With thousands of wp blogging graphic themes now on the market for no charge and for money you can bet it’s hard to decide on the elite wp blogging graphic themes, but I believe I have come up with a great answer to this burning question. Now there are many no charge wp blogging graphic themes that are very nice and I use many of them but they can’t justify being # one on the list.

To be # one the theme needs to have some exclusiveness, but at the same time still be available to the general public. I’ve seen some very incredible wp blogging graphic themes that are unique to just one person’s blogging but in this case we won’t be choosing from that.

I have looked through the top Wordpress themes on the internet that cost anywhere between $20-$200 and I have come up with the top Wordpress themes.

It was a fairly difficult decision to come up with a winner for the top Wordpress themes but after viewing themes for a long time I decided on choosing the Revolution Wordpress themes.

There are currently eight Revolution wp blog templates for sale and each one of them are very well constructed and thought out. Each one of theme are constructed for a specific niche blog and I feel that the designs were kept simple enough to use and didn’t go overboard on the options.

The two graphic themes I like the most from the Revolution series is the news theme and the sports theme which are somewhat similar but both very nice article style blogging graphic themes. Article style wp blogging graphic themes have been very popular and I have seen them on lots of blogs recently, but most of the no charge article graphic themes aren’t very well constructed.

Now I don’t have much coding knowledge so this is why spending a few bucks on a well designed Wordpress theme is worth it. With a revolution Wordpress theme you will stand out and look like one of the top dogs of blogging.

Now this exposure is excellent when starting out a blog and this is why I give the Revolution Wordpress themes the number one Wordpress theme.

More Traffic Sources

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

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

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

Some good article directories to get you started are www.eZineArticles.com, www.ultimatearticledirectory.com and www.submityourarticle.com.

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

When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to append a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affilliate since they are already convinced you’re an “expert” in the field.

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

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

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

Monetizing Your Blog

You have been working hard to produce good-quality, original content on your blog and you have attracted a decent amount of traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.

There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google’s Adsense programme allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You’ll find out more about their advertising programme there, but here are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.

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

But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.

Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple.

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

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

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

Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for +”affiliate programmes”. Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche. The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We’ll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!

More Monetizing Options

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

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

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

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

Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs like http://xiaxue.blogspot.com. That blog receives over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog’s owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog popularity. To gauge how much pageviews and visitors you get everyday, just use the free tool available at www.statcounter.com. They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won’t go into it.

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

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

Interactions Between Blogs

As your blog’s content increases, people in your niche will definitely mention you for intelligent or interesting discussions. This is, in a sense, an initiation of an interaction. When people speak of you, you should thank them for the mention and build up the interaction! When you use a traffic tracking script such as the free www.statcounter.com, you can see where traffic comes from. If a large number of visitors come from a certain blog, you can be sure they have mentioned you in their latest post or linked to you from their sidebar or links page.

What you should do is pay them a visit, leave constructive comments on their posts and build up a conversation! As you continue doing this, you will start to gather a lot of friends in your niche. This is helpful later on when you decide to do collaborations such as interviews. In fact, when you’re out of ideas for writing on your blog, you can interview other blog owners in your niche! Human beings are curious creatures, so naturally they would like to know more about a person whose writings they read so often.

If you’re using Wordpress, Textpattern, MovableType or any other advanced blog engines, you can also post trackback links on your posts. This means you can post an article about what other people have posted! Your particular post will then appear as a link on that post you have written about. This is definitely a great way to get traffic if you post brilliant insights about a post on a very famous blog.

Since the famous blog already has a pre-existing pool of readers, this is like a shortcut to hog their visitors! The only thing you would want to observe is to keep your posts sensible and insightful, or you’ll be viewed as a spammer.

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

Finally..

Is blogging for you or even for everyone? I guess it all depends on how we define blogging. For instance, if we include social network blogging, blogging is indeed for you and for everyone, as a good percentage of Internet users operate some form of social networking blog. Currently, over 60 million people in the United States alone do that with Myspace.

So is blogging for you or everyone? If we consider commercial endeavours, it certainly is not for everyone. Only about 7% of Internet users operate blogs for commercial purposes.

The question of “is blogging for you or everyone?” also applies to entrepreneurs. Blogging can be an excellent tool for an entrepreneur – especially those who are sole proprietors looking for a good and inexpensive venue for promotion, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should necessarily do it. In some instances, a private forum will be a better means of recorded, Internet-based communication between a group of people. In other instances, a website will require less maintenance and will be a better stand-alone traffic puller, especially if the would-be blogger does not have the time to constantly update and promote a blog.

However, there definitely are a number of good reasons to blog. One of the best reasons is that it’s really easy. Building a good website can take hundreds of hours. This is not so with a blog. With a blog, you can simply open up an account with Blogger and begin posting. No coding or HTML-editing is required. You don’t even need to learn how to use WYSIWYG program – or how to upload your uploads to your website.

So is blogging for you or everyone? It isn’t for everyone, especially if we’re considering commercial blogging; some people don’t own businesses, have nothing to promote, and have no interest in starting. But there’s a good chance blogging is for you if you want to a low cost means of promoting your business. It’s cheap, comparatively easy and quick to start.

On Page Search Engine Optimization

Now, you should have a blog full with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless factsheet.

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information. Simple enough.

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

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

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

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

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

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the

and

tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the

and

tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

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

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

Offpage Search Engine Optimization

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

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

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like the Feds storming a crack den

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offpage Search Engine Optimization II

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

First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are1) The address which it links to2) The text of the link3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

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

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

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

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

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

Setting Up Your Blog

Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.

In this article, we are going to look into the profitability of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on!

First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options – host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com. If you are a techie, you must have heard of Wordpress, a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. Wordpress.com, however, is a relatively new option so I have no comparison on the speed of getting indexed by search engines. However, Wordpress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

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

1) Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

2) Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.

3) Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

Blog content

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

However, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable blog is the way the blog is written. Just imagine, would you prefer to read your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by your favourite author?

You may prefer to read the novel because it appeals more to your interest, or because it is not as mind-numbing as the lecture notes by your professor. However, the most important point is people like to read “light” stuff most of the time. You see, when people log on to your blog, they are not only looking for information – they are also looking for information they can obtain easily, and better still in a relaxed manner.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current visitors coming back for more, it is very important to add a human touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining you’re talking about a certain topic with your personal friend. An extra bonus for your readers would be a great sense of humour, so try to add funny comments in your articles where they are suitable.

Another important key point is to avoid addressing your reader as a plural unit. What I really mean is you should not write as if you’re preparing a speech. Instead, you should write as if you’re having a conversation to a single person because this will make your visitor think of you more as a personal friend rather than a person of higher authority.

Besides that, it is also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. Human beings are very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

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

So, the lesson for now is to simply write as an equal friend to your visitors, write to them as if you’re talking to a single person and establish your own personality on your blog.

Blog Content Brainstorming

Face the fact – your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Hence, you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we’re going to discuss how to do just that in this article.

We have discussed how to write attractively, so now we are going to discuss what we are going to write on. The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate and interested in. You’ve chosen to make blogging your career because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about something that you’re not interested in is as torturous as as your mundane job!

The other reason I ask you to write about something you’re passionate about is because your feelings and emotion shows through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t worry about generating traffic and search engines, because we’re going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like that of a locomotive!

I have listed a few things you can begin to do to make your blog more popular. Just remember, the blogs are built on relationships, so if you keep that in mind, you can begin to get more popular.

You will not make it with a free blog from one of the blogging domains. Spend a few bucks, register your own domain, get your own hosting, and be the owner of your own blog. It shouts out: I am not cheap, and cap actually afford a blog. This makes a big difference.

I would make it a point of visiting the blogs of people you respect, and would like to know, and start making some intelligent comments. Then, if you can get these guys to recognize you, and start answering your comments, then you may be on your way to developing a good blogosphere relationship.

Hopefully, they are active in the commenting of the blog, and will answer you back. This can now be the beginning of a blogging relationship.

The other thing you can do, which is what I do, is use you blog for your own resource.

Anytime, you figure out the steps to do something, put them on your blog. This allows you to know the exact steps you took to do something. It has saved me a ton of time by not having to look for it again. And, I also know it has helped others, because when viewing my traffic reports, I can see the pages they are visiting.

Meet bloggers personally. There are plenty of blogging conventions every month, and this would be a good time to meet some of these guys. We know the blogosphere is based on relationships, so what better way to reach out to someone than in person. This will make it more likely you will get some publicity for your blog at a later date.

There are just a couple of the things you can do on how to use your blog and to get your blog more popular.