Superbly renowned as the top blogging software, WordPress is also an excellent content management system (CMS) to consider for your money making blogs. There are numerous other types of blogging softwares like Joomla, Drupal etc.

Here are 8 reasons why I go with WordPress for my money making blogs:

1. WordPress is all that I know

I was a 30 something who only knew how to use the internet to check my email and surfing. Look at what I’m doing now. I’m coaching you blogging. You don’t need a MSc in Computer Science to operate WordPress. If I can manage multiple money making blogs (with a Degree in Food Science) using WordPress, so can you. It’s so easy to manage your blogsites’s everyday changes and updates. The multi purpose dashboard can be mastered by any of your all of the employees, as it doesn’t call for any HTML knowledge as well as other hi-tech rocket formula. By the way, I’m too busy now to learn other blogging softwares now because time is money.

2. Free CMS

Once you initiate a new blog business, maintaining a low expenses should be your top priority.  Keep your blogging expenses as low as possible and therefore a free blogging software can provide big financial savings, allowing you to spend your budget in various other professional services such as linkbuilding, logo design, premium templates and even on the hiring of writers.

3. Flexibility

Due to the way it is coded as a multi-purpose CMS, just a single WordPress install allows you to develop a static page website, a blog, any forum and an entire area all based on the identical platform, giving you the ability to incorporate every tool your blogging business needs under one roof. Make a static home page together with static pages behind this or dynamic pages along with drop down menus, offer products on customized landing pages, and easily add picture galleries and social media alternatives that encourage users interaction. This free blogging software can basically be adapted to anything, thus becoming an ideal choice for growing your business.

4. WordPress is highly customizable

As a newbie blogger, fret not. You can customize your settings to meet practically all needs for your money making blogs (ok I’m trying to optimize this keyword so bear with me) are as follows:

a. Privacy.

The private/open public content setting lets you decide on what and how much of the available information you want to discuss. You may want an exclusive page for current consumers only, and public areas for everyone who visits.

b. Drafts and Scheduling.

Time is the most high-priced asset we all have; you need to use the scheduling feature to generate content well in advance as well as schedule it to post about whatever schedule you choose.

c. Categorizing and Tagging.

Adding custom made categories and tags can help you manage and archive your content and provide an improved searching experience for website visitors. The topics can be gathered together so that consumers will always be able to come across all the information they require with just one just click.

d. Media.

Managing photos and videos has not been easier. Upload and also embed multimedia content in just seconds without any the aid of a graphics specialist.

e. Plugins and Widgets.

There currently are thousands of free plugins set for downloading and to be deployed into your WordPress blog. SEO tools, affiliate marketing resources, contact forms, image galleries and museums and many more are all there at your whims and command. What’s more amazing is, you can practically find a new plugin every day. But, don’t get overly enthusiastic in downloading whatever WordPress plugins you can find because like it or not, too many of a good thing will slow down your blog – and that’s bad for SEO.

4. Interactivity

The blogging software allows you to connect with your audience by leaving comments along with feedback that helps you further tailor your website on the needs and interests of the users. Moreover, updates in your business blog can be spread online within seconds through a wide range of reports aggregation sites. Is there any benefit way to interact with your customers? And potential customers?

5. WordPress is SEO friendly

Together with plugins developed especially for the very purpose of Search Engine Optimization, and Matt Cutts stating that “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of  SEO,” your  website is more likely to acquire ranked in search engines. Better ranking brings additional visitors and more guests give you a increased chance to increase your ROIs from your Google Adsense Blog. Enough said!

6. Nearly Spam-Free

Akismet, the ultimate spam blocker plugin, is so effective that it automatically blocks unwanted spammy remarks. Other free add-ons and settings enable you to filter and dispose of crappy comments as easily.

Still not convince that WordPress is the way to go for all your money making blogs; wait till you see my next post about WordPress plugins. Ciao.

In my previous post, I was giving you some blogging insights on how to choose  blog topics. A blog topic that you are passionate about and would not be sick writing about it for at least once a week for the next 5 years or more.

Only that day, I was chatting with an old classmate of mine regarding his passion in Facebook. You see, this guy love macho stuffs, things like body building, big bikes and  paint ball.

Ok Soon Hock, my blog post for today is going to be about your passion, and hopefully you might decide to start a blog about your hobby and maybe even earn some pocket money out of this. Remember the old saying, ‘If you do what you love, you won’t be feeling like you are working again for the rest of your life’.

This post will have more technicalities as compared to my previous post. This will be about keyword research. You see, you want to blog about your interest, no doubt about it. But, you also want to be able to commercialize your topic so that you can gain some monetary reward from it later. Remember, at this phase, the title of my blog is “How To Blog For A Living” and that’s what it’s all about. Let’s get started.

1. So You Think You May Have Found The Perfect Blog Topics

Hold on!! Don’t go about getting that domain name before reading this post.

As my friend was mentioning to me, guns that are used in the paintball game are called markers. Out of curiosity, I typed the keyword “paintball” into Google search box, and these are the keywords that come with it: paintball guns, paintball gear, paintball pistol, paintball game….These keywords come along with the singular keyword “paintball” that I typed in earlier as a guide indicating what are the phrases that are searched by hobbyist worldwide.

In other words, these hobbyist are targeted traffic, the audience you are looking for.

2. Blogging Tools To Determine How Profitable Is Your Blog Topic

After finding your topic, you will proceed to keyword research. Proper keywords are the first step in bringing long term success to your blog. There are many blogging tools in the market that can be used to determine the proper keywords to use. However, I would only focus on 3 basic ones that are free of course for your perusal.

Oooops! You may be wondering why on earth must I be interested in keywords when all I wanted to do is to write about my passion online for like minded audience to see. Keywords research are important if you want your audience to be able to find you in the internet. For example, my friend would want his blog to be found when people typed in ‘paintball guns’ in the Google box. We talked more about that later.

You have already saw the few phrases that are widely searched in Google (due to my laziness, I would only talk about Google although you should repeat the same process in Bing and Yahoo) like

a. paintball

b. paintball guns

c. paintball gear

d. Paintball pistol

e. paintball game

f. paintball markers

The first blogging tool I would use would be Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You would be asked to proof your ‘human side’ by retyping some  phrase and you are on. Type ‘paintball’ in the Find Keyword box on the top left hand corner. A list of more keywords related to ‘paintball’ will appear, in addition to the list above like:

g. cheap paintball guns

h. best paintball guns

i. sniper paintball guns

etc.

Don’t try to optimize on ‘paintball’ alone because it will be too tedious and you would probably need more than just hundreds of unique contents to appear in any of the top search engines’ first 5 pages. Click on the small box called ‘sorted by columns’ and put a tick on the Estimated Avg. CPC to gauge how much these keywords are worth individually. The higher the monetary value, the more commercial value attached to the niche. However, the value is directly proportionate to the competitiveness of getting the keyword ranked in Google.

Apart from this you can also use a free version of Wordtracker to search for what we called long-tailed keywords. Type ‘paintball’ and select the best keywords.

After visiting the two blogging tools above, you want to find out how best to commercialize your niche topic. I’m going to introduce to you a a secret that only known to a few. It’s a tool called Adlab that belongs to Microsoft and it’s not always that you get something that is free from this billion dollar company.

Go to the page on tools -> audience intelligence ->detecting online commercial intention.

Not bad, commercial-intention 0.76 out of 1. Next, we could find out what are the searches that the keyword ‘paintball’ leads to by doing this: Tools ->Keyword Research -> Search Funnels.

From ‘paintball’ the next five outgoing searches are paintball guns, eBay, airsoft, 888paintball and paintball guns. Do you realize now how we can make money from these? Ok let me share with you some tips.

3. Cool, Now How Do You Seek To Make Your Blog A Profitable Business

All you need to do is to continue on your passion in paintball during the weekends, start a blog about paintball especially emphasizing on paintball guns or paintball markers, lookout for business opportunities in selling paintball guns online via eBay and subsequently start promoting your guns…I mean paintball guns via your blog. Realize that your blog will be your most powerful media of advertising for your business once it takes off and people start coming to you for advise and free consultations.

However, do remember, your blog will not be popular overnight. You need persistence by following up on your passion’s trend and updating your site with value adding informations. Traffic will come in trickles in the first 6 months, even if you are consistently blogging for 2 times a week. But the audience would come after these.

So what are you waiting for? Start your blog now and I’ll update you on what else you need to do to optimize your blog in search engines.

How To Blog For Newbies Day 20

During 3 months of learning how to blog, it’s inevitable that I have to resort to various blog tools to make the process easier. I will try to make a comprehensive list of these blog tools in accordance to their function so that you can incorporate all or part of them in your blog management.

1. SEO evaluation tools or software for your website
There are a great number of blogging tools that you can use when you need to evaluate the SEO effectiveness of their website. WooRank is a brand new free service recommended by Techcrunch this morning. It evaluates a website based on 50 criterias, provides helpful SEO tips and most importantly it’s free for now. I’ve used the tool to evaluate some of my websites today, and connectivity seemed to be excellent as opposed to the frequent downtime complain mentioned by Techcrunch.

Another SEO evaluation tool that worth mentioning is WebCeo. Unlike WooRank, WebCeo is a full fledged software, capable of gauging the SEO effectiveness of your website; from backlinks report to competitors’ keyword usage. Honestly, I did not manage to fully capitalize on all the capabilities of this superb software even though I am just using the free version for my own sites. Honestly, I do believe that I could actually set up a little SEO firm just by using the free version of this software to impress my clients-to-be.

2. Links Checker

There are a few free blogging tools you could use for checking backlinks. The most commonly used is none other than Google Webmaster Tool. It’s the most basic blogging tool. Apart from this, you can use Backlink Watch to check on all the sites that are linked to yours. There are a few advantages in using Backlink Watch:

a. Don’t have to past tracking code into your website

b. Shows all the websites and pages that are linking to your own website

c. Comprehensive

It’s disadvantage:

a. The tool limits the frequency you can use it in checking backlinks

3. Keywords Analysis

Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to gauge on the keyword that you wanted to use on your blog title and its content. For example, if you can’t decide on which keyword or phrase to use, “blog tools”  or “blogging tools” . Just type both the phrases into the fill-in-box, then followed by clicking on the ‘Get keyword ideas’. From here, you can actually gauge which phrase has a higher search and subsequently, choose the best keyword.

4. Analyse Trends

Google Trend is still the best tool to use when you want to know about the most talked about trend being searched in Google. Google is the big brother of Search Engine. As a result, if a particular fad or trend is rising in popularity in Google, you can rest assured that, this is the trend you need to watch out for in the rest of the blogosphere.

If there is a field that you are particularly interested in, for example, blogging, you could make use of Google Alerts. Google Alerts would send you the latest news and happening of your interest to your email address.

5. Duplicate Contents

You have to be more sensitive with duplicate contents in your blog if you are hiring part time writers for your content. You are paying these writers and as a result, you would expect their articles to be original and not just pure plagiarism. Try CopyScape. This website allows you to check all the possible duplicated contents inside your website. With this report in hand, you can always ask for refunds from your writers.

6. Search Engine Ranking Checker

Thumbshots Ranking could be used to compare SERP ranking in different search engines, for example Google vs Yahoo.

Another exceptional free SERP checker worth mentioning is SERP Rank. Of the two, I found the latter to be more precise in gauging the search engine ranking of our website.

7. Page Rank Checker

For the beginners, we could just use Google Page Rank Checker to check the page rank on any site of your interest. For instance, there might be a site or link that you are interested to exchange link with. Most of the time, we do not want this link to be lower than the page rank of our own, so therefore, we carry out the page rank check.

8. Social Networking

The No. 1 tool that comes into my mind is TweetDeck. This blog tool is an Adobe Air desktop application used to access twitter. It’s built in panes that allow an enormous exchange of information tweets. An obvious advantage of TweetDeck as compared to other Tweeter browser is the former’s responsive speed and smaller file size.

Another social network tool called twables, which is said to enable you to find all of your Facebook friends on Twitter so that you can follow them, and they can follow you! For this tool, I can’t really comment much about it because personally, I haven’t really given it a try. Please try it out and give us your comments if you like!

Source : worldtouristdestination.com

(How to blog and Blog tools for newbies)