Choosing a topic for your new blog is easy, or is it?

I am fortunate — I have located my passion, and I’m living it. Imagine blogging about the things you love day in day out. Therefore, with this post, I would want to assist you to begin determining what you love to blog about. This happens to be just about the most common problems of the many new bloggers— including a few who recently responded to me on Facebook and Twitter.

This should be the matter that provide encouraged to wake up at dawn, to cry out, “I’ve finally found what I want!”. And also to shock your family members or anyone who is dear to you.

My guide probably won’t be complete, and yes it won’t find your passion to suit your needs. However it can help you to discover the topic that would keep you going and going and going…. Here’s how.

1. Do you know what you are good at? Unless if you are only starting out in  life, you should have acquired several talent and skill, and exhibited some sort of abilities. Even if you’re only starting out, it’s likely you have have some talent while you were young, even when your elementary school days. Ever remembered being a good writer, speaker, artist, organizer, builder, teacher, friend? Do you recall being proficient at ideas, linking people, martial art, sports? Let’s ponder for a moment. Take at the very least half an hour, going through these questions — generally we overlook things we are spontaneously good at. Recall, as far as you could, to jobs, projects, hobbies. This might be your passion. Or perhaps you could do this. List down a scroll of potential possibilities.

Source: thesun.co.uk

2. What turns you on? It could be something on the job — a small component to your work that stimulates you unknowingly. Maybe it’s a little something you are doing after working hour— a hobby, moonlighting, your volunteering work or a parent or a spouse or a friend. It may be something you have not done in awhile. Again, you need a bit of time to ponder through these questions.Coz in case you don’t, you could be doing yourself a disfavor. Think up answers to your list.

3. What kind of books or reading materials are you interested on? What kind of topics do you follow when you log into the internet? Go through the magazines that you read? How about blogs that you follow? Which section of the bookstore do you peruse? List down as many topics as possible.

4. What do you day dream about? You may have some preposterous dream job you have always aspired to do — a novelist, a clown, a diver, an architect, a doctor, an entrepreneur, a programmer. However certain fears, have held you back, has led you to dismiss this idea. Maybe there are several. Add them to the list — no matter how unrealistic.

Source: silverwoodhypno.co.uk

5. Start learning, ask question and take note. Right now, you’ve got a list. Choose the one thing from your list that excites you the most. Here’s your first candidate. Take a reasonable amount of time to review it, speak with people who have been successful on the field (via their blogs,should they have them, or email). Build up of notes of things you have to find out, ought to improve on, skills you need to master, people to speak to. Study deep but never wait too long. Begin diving into the next step.

6. Try and experiment. Here is where learning really comes about. Stop studying those theories, start to do the thing you’ve chosen. Remember what Nike says— just do it. It might be while in the privacy of your own home, but as soon as possible, publisize as soon as you have started. In this way, you are always motivated to improve, it gets you feedback, plus your reputation will improve as you do. Give thought to your emotions doing it — could it be something you see yourself doing daily, that gets you stimulated emotionally, that you love to share?

7. Start shortlisting. I would recommend that you pick 3-5 things through your list, if it’s longer than that, repeat steps 5 & 6 with them. This may take month, or possibly you have undoubtedly learned all about and tried them out. As a result, here’s what you should contemplate: which gets you the most turned on? Which of them could generate something people is willing to pay for or get excited about?What can you see yourself doing for years or decades without feeling burnt out (even though it isn’t a conventional professional route)? Decide on one, or maybe two at the most, and concentrate on them.

Source: faqs.org

8. Put your fears aside. Fear is actually the biggest obstruction for many –and not forgetting self doubt. Tell yourself, you are going to confront and banish it. First, accept it instead of ignoring or denying it. Second,write them down (your fears!!), to externalize them. Yeah, bring them out into the lime light. Expose them. Third, get yourself to acclimatise with them. Fourth, ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Usually, one would realize that they are not as dreadful as one think. Fifth, get yourself prepared for going ahead with it anyway, and just do it. Take small steps, imagine yourself a toddler taking that first step. Celebrate your success, no matter how small they are.

9. Allocate time for your new venture. Don’t have the time to pursue your new found passion? Just make time for it! Make this your priority right now knowing that it will change your life for the better— go back and rearrange your schedule even if it means less TV time, less night life. This may mean waking up earlier, or blogging about it after work or during lunch, or on weekends. Do what must be done.

10. How to blog for a living. There are said to be overnight legends but I haven’t really heard of them. You must focus on your topic and work on your blog deligently, get proficient at it, be passionate about it. The open secret is to get enough targetted traffic into your blog and this could take months or even years. You need to find the fun out of this. The incoming traffic would reach a point where someone would pay you for it. Once the traffic comes, you must start focusing on different ways on how to monetize on your blog; be it Adsense marketing, affiliate marketing,banner advertising and whatever that can help you to get out of the rat race.

Source: visualparadox.com

It’s important that you try to get the right topic for the very first time. Let me remind you that blogs about blogging and making money online are practically saturated as narrated by many gurus. I am going to tell you again that don’t expect to get rich overnight. I have been with you since Nov 2009 and I’m still not wealthy yet. It requires loads of self-reflection and soul-searching, in the beginning, followed by iron like courage and persistency in learning and experimentation, and finally steadfast commitment.

But listen to me on this, it’s all worth it— every second, every ounce of courage and effort. You will reach milestones that you never dream about. Remember I told you that HowToBlog.org is a joint venture between my mentor and me. Well, it’s mine now. The new earning milestone from my Adsense had convinced me that blogging is the way to go and I’ve decided to buy it for a mere USD 700.

I hope you would be able to find success by following this guide, coz I wish you all the best in finding your true passion. Open this link on learning How To Set Up A  Blog

I run this blog as a business. Like any other business, this blog could be my escapade into entrepreneurship success or, it could make me to be so disillusioned  that I may just give it up abruptly one day. You know, I’ve been trying to find inspiration from my daily encounter, be it with the people I meet, the books I read, the blogs I digest….nothing come close to what I could gather from my daily driving experience while commuting to and fro from my office.

Let’s face it, when human get themselves behind those wheels, this combination collectively creates a simulation that reflects whatever your earthly journey might be. Don’t believe me. See how I relate driving to blogging.

Blogging tip 1: The Porshe Cayman vs my Nissan Sentra

There is a speed limit imposed on all Malaysian roads. In town and inner cities, it’s usually limited to 80 km/h. In highways, it’s always 110 km/h. Therefore it doesn’t matter whether your Porsh or Diablo could go up to 220 km/h without the slightest shiver, my little sedan would still reach her destination as long as I stick to my final destination.

Source: Flickr.com

Likewise, it does not matter whether you are using a free WordPress theme downloaded from WordPress.com or if you prefer to buy a premium theme like Thesis, both options would work well as long as you the blogger know where you are heading to.

Blogging tip 2: Taking Public Transport vs My Own Car (even if it’s a small car!!)

Ever experience taking a public transport to work or to your client’s place? You tell the cab driver where you want to go, he switch on the meter, you reach your destination, you pay the fares and that’s the last time you see the taxi. Sometimes, you are standing alone and no taxi or bus turn up…imagine it’s raining and you are drenched. The thought of buying a car could be daunting to some individuals. “Anyway taking a bus only cost me a few dollars daily”. But imagine the autonomy you possess when you own that first ‘stallion’, even if it’s just a ‘mule’.

The taxi is like free blogs like Blogspot, Bloggers.com and your own transport is like your own domain.  Whatever links that you build in your own website belongs to you. Guess who owns the backlinks that you build in myname.blogspot.com??

Nobody can question you when you want to fix an extra muzzler onto your own car. You decide what you want to do with it.

Blogging tip 3: A Good Technician To Tend To Your Car

How often do you send in your car for check up? Do you go to a reputable workshop endorsed by your vehicle’s manufacturer or you don’t really mind who the technician is as long as it’s cheap? My question is, how sure are you that your friendly neighborhood workshop is using original parts for your mobile asset?

You got yourself a nice domain. You can’t decide whether to use a free host or a paid web hosting service?

Imagine the nightmare when you are travelling at 120 km/h on a federal highway and all of a sudden your car engine died off abruptly?

Blogging Tip 4: Switching Lanes And Getting Nowhere Faster

You are stepping on the accelerator because you are late for an important appointment. Damn! The car in front is road hogging.

You swerved your V6 to the right lane to overtake the inconsiderate snail and a whole new world opened up in front of you. 50 meter or so, a traffic congestion stopped your advances. Stuck, you glance to the left lane again. Isn’t that the bloody hogger who had just passed you by, you even see a smirk on the chap’s face!! If only you have listened to the radio about the massive pile up turning into Holland Street, you would have stuck to the slow lane and you might be able to meet your client on time.

This happens to new bloggers occasionally. You started your blog full of enthusiasm. You even worked day and night working on your blog because Chris Brogan said you have to post content at least 3 times a day. After 3 weeks, you still don’t see your site indexed anywhere in Google, not  to mention Bing and Yahoo.

If only you have some basic knowledge about SEO, on how to use the appropriate keywords in your post, maybe you wouldn’t have given up on your blogging so soon.

Blogging Tip 5: Oooh! No policeman!

Ah…it’s 5 am in the morning. Red light? No problem. Those goons are still probably sleeping in a cool morning like this. Whoosh…..

F*** another slow coach blocking your way. Double lines? Nobody will see you overtaking this car, it will only take you 6 seconds.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Ever heard of Black Hat SEO? Keywords stuffing, buying links from link farms, doorway pages etc. Never mind those Search Engines. They won’t know. Google is too busy to monitor what’s going on with my site…;)

Blogging Tip 6: My Car is Japanese made. So What?

As long as you keep your car in tip-top condition, who cares whether it’s made in China, India or Japan. Even a continental car from German can breakdown and leave you high and dry if you don’t take the trouble to take care of it. A Mercedes will carry you to Singapore, so is my Nissan.

All blogging gurus would ask newbies to get a .com domain whenever possible. Of course, if you compare camera.com with camera.biz, you definitely should take the former if you can afford it. However, if you would compare camera.biz with camerabloggingsite.com, I don’t know about you but I would go for camera.biz. To me, as long as the domain name is a good one to two words generic, good name and non-copyrighted by somebody else, the TLDs do not matter unless of course you are a domain speculator.

The point is, I just want to develop the website and hopefully it will bring in recurring income in a few months time. The domain name will determine the SEO, not the TLD. A dot mobi domain should be able to rank as high as a dot com if the webmaster spend ample time and passion in developing it.

Blogging Tip 7: It’s Alright To Take A Rest When You Are Tired

You have been driving non stop for 4 hours from Penang to Kuala Lumpur. Take a nap if you are tired. You need the rest to continue on the journey safely.

Do you ever feel tired blogging? It happens to me all the time. If you are feeling overwhelmed, disillusioned, discouraged or whatever emotion turmoil at any time of your journey, just take a break will you. Blogging like any other business is a marathon. You need endurance to ‘walk’ the journey and if you want to be big, there is no destination at all. You tweak your approach along the way and learn whatever you can to sharpen your acumen.

Source: all-funny.info

Blogging Tip 8: Enjoy The Scenery

I have experienced my share of ups and downs when I drive. But you know what I observe? The days when I prepare early for my journey and stop focusing on the destination are usually the best. Make short glances to both sides of your car and enjoy the floras that wheez by. Come on, we don’t drive a Delorean which zaps from one place to another after reaching 90 miles an hour.

Source: centex.com

You will bound to learn some new skills and experiences when you think about your next content. You don’t have to stick to a silly schedule of blogging at least once a day to drive visitors to your blog. It’s utter absurdity!! Putting contents and learning the right things to incorporate into them for twice a month consistently for the next ten years is better than burning yourself out daily with lousy posts. There is something you have to understand as a blogger. Search engines especially Google will reward you for updated posts, regardless of whether its on daily or monthly basis.

As you learn how to set up a business blog, I will show you some of my personal insights. Business blogging is usually a different ball game to blogging for profit which, subsequently, is entirely different to a social blog. The type of blog you maintain will establish the voice, design, and identity of your blog along with the work you probably will set into marketing it.

Business blogs must be professional and even appear to be it. Regular posting on topics that your potential audience will genuinely like can promote you for an specialist within your discipline. A blog are able to keepthe queue of contact between you and potential prospects open. It allows you to publish relevant, keyword rich postings that encourage new traffic and improve yourcustomer base.

This is far from an exhaustive list but here are ten tips to keep in mind when building a business blog:

Tip 1: Identify Your Objective Early

In pretty much every guide you ever come across, it says “identify your objective or goal”;it could be a adage but it’s true. Having a business blog your probable goal would be to improve revenue but other deserving targets may include:

•Interacting along with your present or potential clients

• Sending organization information
• Responding to inquiries and issues
• Offering instructions for existing clients

• Providing a website to anything beneficial linked to your market

The look of the website,kind of content to incorporate, whether to feature ads, and several other decisions are going to be ruled by why you begin blogging. The sooner you understand precisely whatyou would like to accomplish, the quicker you’ll attain it.

Tip 2: Make use of SEO Friendly URLs and SEO Plug ins

WordPress is an excellent SEOapplication. It’s a dedicated Content Management System but, more importantly, it features a team of fiercely loyal users that create themes, plugins, widgets, and much more and provide them totally free to other people. Among these power tools are a myriad of SEO related tools which you can use to ascertain your meta description and title tags.

A straightforward but potentially efficient SEO fix would be to alter the format of permalinks or URLs in order that they dispense using the default page id to become substituted for a less strenuous to read and keyword optimized page URL. This can be done with the WordPress dashboard.

Tip 3:  Consider Your Media Positioning

Incorporating photographs and illustrations, logos, videos, as well as other types of mediaare ideal for reader engagement, but you should think about all of your blog assets and put the most important and valuable in the most prominent position. The faster you are able to grab a reader’s attention, the greater your chances will be to maintain it longer.

Certain themesenable you to easily embed video and slideshows in to the sidebarof one’s blog which will be an extremely useful tool to produce your site appear more appealing while relaying genuinely useful information.

Tip 4: Think about Your Ad Setting

The main targetof your business blogisn’t usually to make money directlyfrom the blog itself. Therefore, the inserting of 3rd party ads just isn’t necessarily the ideal choice. However, you can include ads to your company or service in addition to associate websites. You may also add banners to specific categories, tags, or pagesinside your blog. Don’t overdo the number of banner ads along with other distracting advertisements though and continue tomaintain your interface professional and clean.

Tip 5:  Provide Your Readers the opportunityto move You Around

Add me, share this, retweet, and email this functions ought to be offered for yourcustomers. Once you post something helpful and your readers shares it, it’s got the potential to go viral that will createlots of coverage to your blog and for that reason your site and your business. Thisfunctions especially good with extremely unique user generated contentand may be textual content,audio tracks, video etc.

Several themes have these abilities constructed into them, but do make sure they’re enabled. On the other hand locate a sidebar widget or even a social bookmarking plug-in that provides the identical functions and set up this. Many blog readers read several blogs regularly and by allowing them to add you to social bookmarking and social networking sites you might well create a lasting rapport together whilst allowing them to notify others of that which you offer.

Tip 6: Maintain Excellent Content Coming

Attempt to set your self a frequent routine but don’t forget that it could be broken and it can be included to at the appropriate interval. If news breaks, then post your comments onto it. Should you work in product reviews and posts that correspond with your business then attempt to schedule these. Ensure you publish frequently, at least every week, and devote more time to getting active in the community that builds around your blog.

Tip 7:  It need not be just about advertising

So long as you fill your blog with appropriate,fascinating, and well crafted posts then website visitors will make an effort to check around, read several posts, and also clíck the ads to your website to be able to see precisely what you have to offer. Not each and every post must include multiple links aimed at your website pages.

It is possible to download plugins that furtherthe chance of users reading more posts. Some adda listing of related posts to the bottom of each entry even though many themes offer the opportunityto exhibit “hottest” and “most commented” posts to further direct the flow of traffic around your blog.

Tip 8:  Reply Where Responses are anticipated or Warranted

Running a blog is much more than posting a missive on the week’s news every Friday. Regardless how often you post you ought to devote more time to reaching the community that develops around your blog. Respond to your questions and inquiries, provide ideas, and allow an answer whereyou are requested.

A business blog should invariably be professional, meaning maintaining posts and messages which are too personal away. Similarly, spam comments can be extremely damaging to your SEO along with the trust your readers place in the business. There’s decent spam settings in WordPress and you may further extend these.

Tip 9: Run into the writer’s block? Engage in Web 2.0

More specifically study forums and blogs, wikis and news sites associated with your business. Search for those information, stories, articles, and videos which you like the most and therefore are strongly related your blog and write about them. Read the commentswithin your blog and check through your analytics to ascertain the pages which are most in-demand with readers.

Take a look at emerging keywords and news topicsand then try to take appropriate steps swiftly. Slant the resulting article in favor of your business,when possible, after which post this to your blog too. There’s lots of online portals and sites for newswithin your market and you mayutilize email updates, RSS readers, and browser or home page plugins to show them regularly as well as in an orderly and comprehensible way.

Tip 10: Blogging is ideal for Business But Clients are Also Great for Business

Getting stuck right into a blog and truly growing your blog community could be a terrific way to build traffic aimed at your website and develop clients for your business. Reading related blogs and becoming a dynamic member in social networks can assist you discover what your readers want and deliver it regularly.

Blogging and Web 2.0.generally can easily become addictive.It ought to be treated being a tool to help in managing your web business, meaning you need to focus on the other facets of your business. Outsource your blog development and content creation if requiredand relish the results.

How To Set Up A Blog

How to set up a blog?

Unfortunately, many people do not know where to start. We hear so much about what a blog can do for our business and yet, it seems like only a privilege few can afford to hire IT programmers to set it up for them. What’s next?

The problem is most people use the internet only for surfing and sending emails. A blog is a totally different creature. Some may suggest that you engage a free blog like WordPress.com and Blogger.com. However, please bear in mind that you don’t own blogs that you set up in such platform. The autonomy belongs to the host and you can practically forget about having your own advertisements, affiliates and other money making plugins that you can install in your own blog site.

The fact is, not many of us are technical savvy enough to set up our very own blog site. It used to be, when you want to have your own website, you need to know programming languages such as HTML, Dreamweaver and PHP. Many people has actually failed to start when they thought about all the time and resources that need to be invested. Some may even give up thoroughly.

Those who managed to learn up Dreamweaver for example may not necessary be able to get their blog found in Google and Yahoo. You see, setting up a blog site is not just about putting in place some colorful frames and contents. Without doing Search Engine Optimization, your blog can never be found in search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc).

However, all is not lost. With the current technology, you can actually learn starting up a blog and get it running within 10  minutes. Take immediate action now because knowing how to set up a blog would open up a whole new money making opportunities for you in the internet.

Emerging business trends are excellent platform for the launching of your blog theme. Look at it this way. People may still be searching for keywords like ‘typewriters’. However, the reason arise not because that the searcher wants to learn about how to use a typewriter, but most probably because he is a collector. Anyway, these are the global business trends that you should be taking advantage of in order to attract traffics to your blog or even to your website.

1. The Great Depression

There is a Chinese saying “heroes are bred during the chaotic eras”.

The real economic stimulus does not come from the USD 700 billion bank bailout. The actual stimulus comes from the Great Recession itself. Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ job market index reported that 8.7 % of job seekers gained employment by starting their own business during the second quarter  of 2009; as compared to 2.7 % in the last quarter of 2008.

Dane Stangler of Kauffman Foundation says, ” Ten, fifteen years from now, there will be a slew of companies that we’ll point to and say they started in the recession. You don’t see them yet, but you can be sure they are out there.” Do you know that more than half of today’s Fortune 500 companies were founded during a recession?

2. The Green Awareness

Source: www188.pair.com

The government incentives and public sentiment have powered the green movement. Stimulus plan poured billions into renewable energy, automakers are all predicting the emergence of the electric gridlock within the next few years.

Cleantech Group revealed that venture capitalist are in full force into green technology; solar, biofuels, batteries and the smart grid, which overtook IT and biotech for the biggest piece of the VC pie.

3. The Aging Population and Wellness

Source: www.immortalhumans.com

Do you know that The Chronicle of Higher Education has named gerontology as one of the hottest academic field for the future. For example, the University of Southern California debuted a new master’s degree in aging-service management to meet the growing interest in the field.

Businesses targeting the retiring baby boomers are like it’s name sake, booming.  Bladders are deteriorating, visions are blurring and all these are spelling opportunities for savvy business (and even bloggers) executives.

4. Thrift

Source: tfptest.files.wordpress.com

Consumer spending is reportedly down for more than 30 % from this time last year as reported by Gallup poll. Wal-Mart’s earning increased more than 5 % in 2009 whereby Neiman Marcus reported a 15 % drop in sales.

Imagine owning a website selling cheap accessories. In 2009, secondhand shops reported an increase revenue of USD 223.3 million, according to Ibis-World.

5. Buy Locals

Demand is sky-rocketing for locally grown and made products. Governments from around the world are trying their best to stimulate domestic demand through various incentives like tax-cut for local manufacturers and sales coupons to consumers.

Many may not be aware that the “buy local” has its roots in the farmer markets movement. Nearly 60 % of consumers from the United States say that they try to shop at farmers market. Such awareness is of course further enhanced by USDA’ own “Know Your Farmer, Know your Food” marketing campaign.

6. Education

As with all recessions, this is the time when many people are going back to school, thinking that education would give them a new lease of life after being redundant for so many f******g months. There are others who revisited education for other purpose, maybe as a get away from all the depressing news, skill enhancement or what have you.

Anyway just some facts and figures. IbisWorld senior analyst reported that the total enrollment at universities and colleges is closing 12 million and climbing, most likely due to unemployment. 2010 will be a booming year for higher learning education.

Rest assured that people will be interested in learning about how to blog for business, social media marketing and other related topics so that they won’y be phased out due to their lack of knowledge in the new media.

7. Life Support

Despite the depression, more people are paying professionals or free lancers or whatever you call them in helping out the domestic chores like baby sitting, checking in on mum, tutoring, scrubbing toilets. They call this ‘Parental outsourcing’.

From an entrepreneurial perspective, many of these businesses are low cost start up. Maybe you can set up a blog teaching and guiding these would-be-entrepreneurs in finance, inventory management and human resource to make their life more bearable.

8. Texas

Ok ok I may not be an American. But all of us who follow the news know that Texas has fared better in this recession than most other part of the US! According to Brad Burke, the MD of Rice University’s Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, Texas has become more diversified over the last decade. The state is investing in growth industries, cost of living relatively lower and real estate still inexpensive.

9. Pets

The recession may have destroyed the manufacturing and financial services sector, but not the pet industry. According to Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer once said, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.”

Do you own a pet? Why not start a blog about your lovable pet; its nutritional needs, habitat and diet.

10. Booze

Source: www.funnypart.com

The alcoholic beverages industry grow steadily for the past 3 years and is expected to reach USD 455 billion in 2009.

If you are a beer lover, you know what to do.

Building backlinks is perhaps the single most important objective for your blog. Inbound links from related blogs by prestigious bloggers will drive what we call, referral traffics to your selected landing pages. In other words, you get more backlinks, you grow your visitors faster.

Source : thebronzesculptures.com

Occasionally, a great blog or website would just put your link in their blogroll with nothing more than a simple request. However do bear in mind that getting this kind of high quality inbound links to your website is akin to striking a lottery in the internet.

Let me share with you on how you should present your request when sending emails out to your potential links.

1. Address The Person.

This folly happens when you use a software to send mass link requisition mails. Imagine sending a request and addressing the person as ‘webmaster’. Your odds in getting the link drop drastically this way. Identifying a personal email address together with the webmaster’s name will improve your chances enormously.

2. A compelling subject line helps.

Your utmost task is to get your email opened and read. A subject titled “Link Requisition” or “Request for link” will not do you any good. Think through why your prospect would be motivated to endorse your request. Perhaps a subject line: “A 10 MegaPixel Could BE Yours” would be a better bet.

3. Always use simple body format

Do not put pictures, forget the use of colorful fonts and quit using HTML email. Use simple and universal font like a 11 point Times New Roman . Remember, it’s easy to ignore and junk an email that makes your brain churn because its lines are wrapping in all the wrong places.

4. Express evidence that you visited the recipient’s site

Begin by complimenting something about the site to distinguish your request from other spammy emails received every day.  Ensure that you took the time to send a personal request so that you look like someone worthy to pay attention to.

5. Sell your blog

Explain to your prospect why this link is good to his or her site. Read carefully because this is critical!

You need very simple and yet compelling reason for an endorsement to your website. Your email will only be read once, probably hurriedly, so make the sale in these few sentences. For two way link request, make sure you have already placed your prospect’s link to your site and please identify what page on your site has that link.

6. Identify the page to be linked from.

Obviously, choosing a page with high Page Rank and very few links is great, but you need to get the link from the page on your partner’s site that makes the most sense for visitors, not for Google.

Don’t be afraid to include the sentence with the anchor text, or a description of where the link is headed on your site, if that fits with the page you have identified. Anything you can do to facilitate the webmaster to add the link is to your benefit, like sending the actual HTML for the linking site to use.

However, just be careful not to use the same old anchor text and phrase on every request. You need variation so that the links appear natural to search engines and so each searcher will find a link pointing to your site no matter what keyword variation was used.

7. Identify the page to link to.

Be specific about the exact, existing URL on your site you want to link to. Ensure that your URL looks permanent so that the webmaster does not think it will disappear soon.

Make sure it starts with “http://” and that it is short and complete.

8. Ask for response and follow up if necessary.

As with any sales pitch, close with a call for action. If you can inject some urgency into the request, that’s even better. Prompts like ” I will keep this link of yours from my page for the next 2 weeks while you consider my request.” If you own an e-commerce site, you may add this: ” My major promotion on ipods starts on this 22 April, and you just might want your link to be in place by then.”

So having finish providing these backlinking tips to you, I wish you good luck on your request. If you have something to add on, please comment and share with all of us who have make this blog a success.

Planning to be a problogger? Here is a list of blogging tips to see you through at least for the first 6 months

Tip 1- Prepare For Early Dissapointment

“According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.” – New York Times

Don’t be part of the statistic!

Tip 2 -A Bloody Good Topic Helps

To have a great topic, you have to blog on your expertise or on your lifelong hobby. You cannot just hope to monetize on a blog, telling stories about 3D television if all you know about this niche comes solely from Avatar!

Tip 3 - Think Up The Best Domain Name

A good domain name will help your blog rank highly on the search engines. Learn how to do keyword research properly early before you begin your blog. Contact me or continue reading my blog if you want to learn more.

Tip 4 – Learn How Search Engine Works

If you don’t understand search engines, at least learn the basis on how Google robots crawl a website. Getting your website or blog to rank highly in Google is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

Sign up for a Google account and sign into Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Using this blog tool do need some training and research. Therefore, allocate some time to do some reading on this wonderful blogging tool

Tip 5 – Familiarize Yourself With At Least One Blogging Software

In the early days of blogging, you have to learn up HTML or XML to set up a website. Later, blogging softwares began to improve and one of the more popular wares to hit the market is called Dreamweaver.

Fast forward to the present. Currently, even non-programmers can easily set up a blog using excellent softwares like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Learn how to set up a website here.

Tip 6 – Start Having Practical Experience

Now you have learnt the basic in SEO and WordPress tips, it’s time for action. Subscribe to a good web host with reasonable pricing. If you are a beginner, it’s best to engage a reputable host which can provide you  excellent technical support.

Source: automopedia.org
Tip 7 – Learn How To Write Great Blog Content

Good blog contents do not come with a blink of an eye. It comes from years of passion and research on a particular subject maybe related to your profession or hobby.

You can put in a few pages of a particular topic probably just by researching the internet. However without prior studies and in-depth focus, you would probably plough through only for the first few days.

Blog about a niche that you are really interested about and continue studying so that you can churn out content after content for months to come.

Tip 8 – Write Regularly

Read Tip 7.

Tip 9 – Use Social Medias To Promote Your Blog

I’m sure you know about Twitter and Facebook. Depending on the topic of your blog, they may not be the best marketing tools available.

For me, I started finding success in using LinkedIn. In fact, there are various other sites that may be useful to your blog marketing campaign like Ecademy, Bebo, Zing…I’ll talk more about those  later!

Tip 10 – Articles Submission

Apart from social medias, you could also write unique articles related to your topic and submit them to sites like Ezine, GoArticle, Article Dashboard and many more.

Tip 11 – Press Release

Another piece of tool you can use to promote your blog or website is via press release. However, you must learn the proper way to write a great press release for this to be effective. There are many templates available in the market just for this purpose.

Tip 12 – Marketing Through Social Bookmarking Sites

Also considered to be part of your blog marketing tools. Social bookmarks like Digg, Stumble Upon, Propeller, Mister Wong and many more can sometimes provide great backlinks to your landing pages.

Tip 13 – Put In Adsense Early

Don’t leave the money on the table. Introduce at least the most basic monetizing tool early in your blog.

Your early posts, coupled with promotions and marketings could occasionally initiate a sudden surge to your blog’s traffic. Even a few dollars earned this way could boost your morale and prepare you for the long haul.

Tip 14 – Make Blogging Your New Hobby

Instead of watching TV, why not make blogging your main pursuit after your 9 to 5 job. After all, you will reap more from it in the long run.

How To Blog for Newbies Day 30

It would be great if you could find out how many people were frequenting your blog daily. How would you like it if you can do the following all for free:

a. Which pages your visitors were viewing?

b. How long they spent reading each page?

c. How many returning visitors vs new ones?

You know, all you need is just a Google account. Just go to www.google.com/analytics and sign in. Once logged in, Google will give you a simple Java Script to include on your site. If you are using WordPress, you would just need a suitable plugin to put in the site code and your analytic would be up for business within 24 hours.

Getting Started

Once logging into Analytics, the Dashboard would be displayed prominently.

1. The graph shows the number of visitors coming to your blog per day. At a glance, it will show whether your website or blog’s traffic is rising or falling.

After getting an idea of where the traffic trend is heading, you need to focus on specific dates to get the micro-picture. Go to the top right of the dashboard and click on the desired date duration, for example from yesterday to today’s date.

2. Move to the bottom right of the screen is your Content Overview. This panel would show you which pages on your blog are the most frequented. This piece of intelligence could help you in figuring out where you need to place your advertising or affiliate on your website for maximum effect.

In addition, try to figure out how to increase the blog traffic to less visited pages. If visitors do not come to these pages via search engines, you may be able to market these pages using social medias like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

3. Pay attention to the navigation bar on the left. For example, click on Content, then to Top Exit Pages. This view usually tells you which pages readers looked at immediately before leaving your blog.

Chances are you may identify a pattern why people are leaving via the specific pages. Can you carry out some optimization for the page like adding more links; tweeting, stumbling, digging or writing an article in ezine that could redirect traffic to it?

4. Click on the Traffic Sources at the navigation bar.

This tool can tell a story about which search engines and websites are directing traffic to your blog. Pay attention to average time spend by the visitors coming from the different refering sites. What kind of visitors will spend longer a time reading your pages? What cause those patrons to leave so early? Is it due to the misleading nature of your title?

The search engine data could imply to you which keywords lead to your site and how often they perform so. This should tell you whether you are optimizing the right keywords for your website.

5. Last but not least, the Content tab has a small link called Site Overlay. Considered to be one of Analytics’ best trick, it launches your blog with percentage click through pasted over the top. This gives you a visual impression on where visitors are clicking when they are viewing your page.

No matter what you call them, be it social media marketing, social networking or microblogging, they are tools for publicity that you can’t go without nowadays.

As a makerter, you will be known as old school if you declare that you don’t need Twitter or Facebook in any of your campaign. As a blogger, you are inadvertently a technopreneur and as such, engaging in social networking is a necessary evil. However, there are different strategies when you communicate in different Social Medias.

In this post, I will try to explain some general strategies on how to micro-blog in Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You just have to figure out the details yourself though.

Twitter

In general, the game is to express your message within the scope of 140 characters. You can choose to tweet using the customize Twitter site or you could resort to using Twitter desktop like Tweetdeck, Seeismic or Hootsuite.

Until now, the majorities of people engaging in Twitter are trying to garner as many followers as possible. Somehow, the number of followers displayed under your profile speaks volume of your ‘influence’ in the Tweetzone. ‘Superstars’ like Guy Kawasaki for example has in excess of 223,000 followers (and following 246,000).

Ask yourself, are these followers relevant? The majorities of Tweeterers would follow you back either out of courtesy or out of motives best known only to themselves.

In Twitter, its not easy to engage your ‘friends’ personally especially if you are a newbie. The real successful Tweeterers are famous celebrities like Lady Gaga, Arnold Shwarzenegger, and Justin Bieber. They have developed a cult following and trust me, they would be famous with or without Tweeter.

I’m not saying that you should forget about using Twitter. These are the few pointers that you can use when you want to use tweets to help your blog or website.

1. Select the personalities whom you think are the most relevant to your subject of interest. Photography perhaps. Take your time and select 3 or 4 person each week who are really ‘influential’ so to speak and engage them.

2. Stop following too many people all at once. Too many tweets coming from them would drown your message in no time! It’s actually happening to me now and I’m thinking of revamping my whole portfolio.

3. You want your tweets to be retweeted, not getting thousands of followers. If you can get 100 genuine Tweet accomplice who would retweet your message, you are hitting the bull’s eye.

4. Don’t spam

Facebook

We humans are highly adaptable creature. The moment we switch to a new environment, we tend to act and speak differently.

Facebook is very much a different creature from Twitter. You don’t post one line buzz in Facebook and expect them to amplify your message. You gauge your status here through the response you get when you post a microblog.

Residents in Facebook are more concern about genuine relationship. You start by engaging your live friends and slowly branching out into their acquaintance.

These are the tips to interact successfully in Facebook:

1. Be prepared to spend more time in Facebook as compared to Twitter.

2. Engage your friends personally as what you would have done in your office. Set up an occasional outing to cinemas or restaurants with your friends using the interface.

3. Join them in their area of interest, for example playing Farmville! (Unfortunately, yours truly is never an avid gamer)

4. Set up a fan page for your website or blog. Start by introducing the page to your closest friends.

5. Engage your audience continuously in the fan page and yes, continue to play Farmville.

6. Don’t spam!

LinkedIn

LinkedIn caters to the professionals. When you use this Social Media, you have to put on a different hat.

If you want people to take you seriously, forget about small talks and gossips. Leave the informalities to Facebook. Instead of asking your followers to meet in your neighbourhood’s cafeteria, you ask your connections to meet in conferences and seminars.

In other words, LinkedIn would give you rapid traffic results if you are able to engage your audience in a professional manner. Here are the tips to promote your blog here:

1. Join groups that are relevant to your blog’s topic.

2. Observe and join in discussions and observe what makes the audience tick.

3. Be professional and polite when engaging in discussions. You will come across smart alecs and self-professed experts who would not hesitate to defend their egos at the slightest brush. Remember, you are there to connect, not to create adversary.

4. Be generous with your tips and forget about redirecting your discussions to your blog’s link all the time. Give your group members great value in all your discussions.

5. Terms like ‘make big money’ turn people off, be it LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody likes jerks who only preach on monetary subjects.

How To Blog For Newbies Day 27

At this point of your blog business, I’m sure you already have your own Twitter account. Many so called ‘gurus’ should have put in a lot of tips on how to use this microblogging tool to promote your articles and pages.

Apart from all the tricks so rampantly circulating in the web, you may be just wasting your time using Twitter to self-sabotage your own blog. Try going through these mis-steps and see whether they sound familiar to you.

Source : rlv.zcache.com

1. Follow Blindly

When starting off on Twitter, most newbies will tend to just follow anyone they can find in Twitter.com. They don’t care whether those members they are following have the same particular interest as themselves.

So the first step that you can sabotage your blog is to follow any Tom, Dick and Harry that you can find on your tweet site. Many will follow you back out of courtesy. Spammers would be more than happy to reciprocate your follow so that they can fill up your valuable twitter space with their advertising and affiliates. The truth is, halves of these people do not really care about the topic you are so passionately talking about in your blog.

A simple step than save you the agony of attracting the wrong company is just by typing your topic of interest into the ‘find people’ space at the top right corner of your account. If your blog is about mobile phones, just type in “iphone” and you will find lots of people who are acquainted with the gadget one way or another.

2. Not Maintaining Your Twitter Account

Research found that nearly 30 % of Twitterers do not tweet after registering into a Tweet account. Twitter is a free and powerful micro blogging tool that will benefit your blog marketing greatly if you would just care to use it properly.

Twitter in Plain English

3. Spamming Your Friends Away

We are given only a limited space by Twitter to post our tweets and as well as read from our associates. If all you do is to tweet about your latest affiliates program and advertising, your followers will unfollow you like a plaque. Imagine all those valuable informations being pushed to the back page by your inconsiderate and unethical act.

4. Chatting in Twitter main page

Twitter is never meant to be a traditional ICQ or chat forum. Again, the easiest method to get people to dismiss you is to chat in the main page. Not only you won’t get a respond most of the time, you will be treated as a pest in  the eyes of your fellow twitterers.

People don’t care whether you have just brushed your teeth or that you have last night’s egg tart for breakfast. Only your mum is interested. If you really want to talk and make friends, use the DM command. In this way, only your targeted audience would see your message. It will also go on to show them that you are a civilized user and know your way around the Web 2.0 ethics.

5. Posting insults

Honestly, I have actually come across people who posted insults in respond to others’ Tweets. No matter how much you disagree or how much you are irritated by some Tweets, just stay cool. Your perception of others need not be shared in the little box that only allows 140  characters of ‘gist ‘ writing.

Just unfollow and if needed to, report the person as a spam.

6. Not Keeping Up With The Latest Trend

In this cyber age, one can never afford to be labeled as a cave man. The least you can do is to keep yourself updated by subscribing to Google alert. Register in this wonderful tool and keep yourself armed with the latest information so that only the best ideas are reflected both in your blog and in your Tweets.

(How to blog and Blogging tips for newbies. How To Blog dot Org)