Many people have been told that blogging helps increase your visibility on the Internet. That’s true enough, but if you are in business at what cost?

Let’s assume your time costs $100 an hour and that you spend a total of two hours a week adding to your blog. That’s $200 a week or $10,400 a year. That’s the cost of blogging to your business. You really should calculate the amount of time and its value to your business.

Once you’ve found out how much blogging is costing your business, you need to consider how much money it is actually making. How many people boughtitems or services from you as a direct result of your blog? If you don’t know, you need to add tracking codes to your blog links to ensure you can work this out.

Also, add up all the advertising income or affiliate income you’ve generated via your blog. Then look at the total. If it is less than the cost, you’re wasting time and losing money by blogging. Don’t let the fashion for blogging overcome traditional business requirements of profitability. For many people blogging is actually draining their profits, but they are unaware of this because they are not measuring their blog.

Ensure you measure your blog using tracking codes so you can check the real value of your blogging efforts. To do otherwise could seriously affect the profitability of your business.

True enough, blogs can raise your visibility on the Internet and can help boost search engine rankings. But being top of the search results for a particular keyword is of no value to you in business unless being top of the page actually translates into sales. Far too many people chase search engine ranking at the expense of chasing customers.

If you are using a blog to gain search engine ranking, but have not measured the income generated as a result, you could be wasting your time by writing your blog. As ever in business, measurement is essential if you are to do your best. So don’t blog hopefully; measure its real impact.

Source: Free Articles

If you like to write, and are looking for a new place to display your work, blogging may be the answer you have been searching for. There are a couple of blogging tips that you should keep in mind before starting. First off, there are many blogging sites that will allow you to have your own web page for free. These free blogging sites can be found through a simple Internet search. Of course, if you want to get more serious about your blog you can register your own domain name and compile your blog their. Another tip to keep in mind is that if you do not want to write about your personal life, blogging for business may still be right for you. There are thousands of businesses that also run blogs as a way for their customers, and prospective customers, to stay informed. Blogging for business has taken off in the small business sector over the past year, and it is surely going to reach a wider audience as word gets around.

If you had to ask yourself “what is blogging”, you probably are not aware that you can make money off of it as well. Many people start blogs as a way tomake money. The best way to do this is by signing up for a Google adsense account. This has been proven as one of the best ways of making money with a blog. When you sign up for an account, Google will place targeted ads on your blog that will earn you money every time somebody visits your site and clicks on them. So, if you have a lot of traffic on your blog you will definitely be able to make some extra money.

There are plenty of blogging tips that are available by searching the Internet. It is important to read these blogging tips so that you know exactly what you are doing, and where to start. Making money with a blog is also very possible if you can garner enough traffic to your site. Even though blogging is still relatively unknown to a lot of the world, it is sure to pick up more steam over the next couple of years and become even more popular.

Copyright ? David Nettey

Source: Free Articles

Building an active community around a new blog can often seem like an uphill struggle. You’re constantly working to create the best possible content and to promote your site yet often the initial returns are meagre. The fact is that most websites experience a “snowball” effect where the results can be slow to start but over time you will start to see your readership, natural inbound links and commenters increasing at an ever-increasing rate.

The problem is how to get to that exponential growth phase in the first place. After all, the internet is littered with “dead blogs” that have been forgotten by their owners due to lack of results. And even a blog that is still being worked on can look a bit sad with a feed readership of just 5 people and a total of two comments since it was launched (one of those being from your Mom).

It’s important to appreciate that “social proof” of the value that your blog brings is important and social proof can either be positive or negative. Visit a blog with hundreds of comments, a massive readership, a well-known name and so on and you’re likely to sit up and take notice. The evidence suggests this is a blog worth reading even before your eyes have glanced at a single article.

But the reverse is also true. And that’s what this article is all about; quite simply how to build up your blog without it suffering from “digital tumbleweeds” that are driving away the few visitors you currently receive.

Blog Comments

Blogs are built for comments; they’re built for discussions and interaction and a blog without that discussion is going to give a bad first impression. Worse, as anyone who has ever tried to start a forum will attest, getting your first few commenters is hardest. Nobody wants to stick up their hand and be first in line. But blogs that already have a number of comments are far more likely to receive additional comments both because of the “social proof” factor and because of course there is already a conversation going on. More comments mean there are more things for other people to comment on and so on.

There are a number of ways to deal with the lack of comments on a new blog.

The first is simply to turn off the comment function until you manage to build up a significant readership. Then once you have lots of people visiting you can turn comments back on at which point the discussions can start. This is simple enough to do but there are risks involved. One example is that if you operate in a niche in which there are lots of blogs your visitors will no doubt expect to be able to comment. Not giving them the ability to do so may frustrate or annoy some people, reducing the odds of them returning.

A second option is to start a blog comment contest. Offer up some kind of prize for the “top commenters” at the end of the month to encourage people to start adding comments. I took part in a contest like this last year where I spent significant time adding content-rich and useful comments to a new blog and ending up winning an iPod Shuffle for my efforts. Let me assure you there was quite a bit of competition so this method clearly works.

Commenting on other blogs can be helpful as many bloggers will check out the websites of those people who comment on theirs. We all know that commenting can drive traffic so there is a good chance they will return the favor and comment at your blog hoping to generate extra traffic as a result. So load up your feed reader and take some time each day to comment on other blogs.

There are a number of free plugins that will display comments about your content that have been made elsewhere. For example if you tweet about each of your new posts then Twitoaster will gather any retweets or comments relating to that tweet and display them as comments beneath your blog post. If you make a video version of your content and upload it to YouTube then the Genki YouTube Comments plugin will draw any videos comments that get placed on YouTube and display them as normal comments at the end of your blog post.

You can also use a number of WordPress plugins to reward your commenters. Examples of these include the Top Commenters plugin to show who has commented the most, the CommentLuv plugin to offer a do-follow link to any commenters blog and KeywordLuv which allows these links to be keyword rich.

Whatever you do ensure that you are actively requesting comments such as ending your blog posts with a specific question you’d like your readers to comment on and try to respond personally to every comment made.

Feed Readership

If you use Feed Burner then it’s easy to display a button that shows how many people subscribe to your blog. If it says you have 28,000 readers then paste it up nice and prominently because it’s another form of social proof to show how popular your blog is. But why do people add this same little widget when it says there are currently just 16 subscribers to your blog?

Until your subscriber numbers get into the hundreds I would strongly advise you *not* to display your subscriber stats publically even if indirectly anyone interested can find out your readership through Google Reader.

Twitter Followers

In a similar vein it is possible to use TwitterCounter to display how many followers you have on Twitter and of course the higher the number the better. So again until your follower numbers grow it’s best not to display these figures.

However this is one area where you have a degree of control. After all, when you start following other people a percentage of them will start to follow you back so simply by searching for, and then following, people with similar interests you can quickly grow your Twitter following.

Whatever your opinions on such software there are also automated solutions that with a few clicks of your mouse will start to find and follow hundreds of other tweeps. In a short space of time this can grow into a significant number of followers, at which point TwitterCounter can start to become beneficial to your results.

Post Regularity

Blogs that don’t get updated look unloved and forgotten. If I visit a blog that hasn’t been posted to in months (or even years) then I take it as a sign that the information on it may be dated, that the owner doesn’t really care about it and so I’m far less likely to visit it again or subscribe for updates. Why would I if there simply aren’t updates being made?

As a result of this, even if you currently only receive a trickle of readers try to post on a semi-regular basis at the very least so at most a few weeks have gone by since your last update. The more content you’re adding the more reason there is for your existing visitors to actually bother subscribing.

As Featured On…

One form of social proof that you can have some control over is who your blog is associated with. There isn’t always a direct link between the quality of your blog and the traffic that you’re receiving and it’s possible to leverage your great content into higher traffic and more community through th use of guest blogging.

If you really know your subject well and put the effort into your writing then there is no reason you can’t get some guest posts featured on the top sites in your niche. Doing so will not only offer direct traffic as a result of people clicking on the link to your website that is added to a guest post but also by association you will gain credibility. If you’re featured on ProBlogger for example then Darren Rowse thinks you know a think or too about blogging and other readers will pay more attention to you.

Furthermore you can add a section at the top of your blog navigation panel that displays a list of the authority blogs you’ve been featured on. If I see you’ve been mentioned or featured on the top 5-10 blogs in my niche you better believe you just increased my interest in digging deeper into your blog.

In closing try to think of your blog from a new visitors perspective. What do they see? What is the first impression? Does your blog suffer from “digital tumbleweeds” or does it give the impression of an active and valuable resource – irrespective of your current traffic levels?

What have you done to “fake it till you make it” on your blog? Are there ideas or suggestions you feel we’ve missed? Please leave us your opinions in the comments form below…

source from: dailyblogtips

The key to being sure that email is being used properly is to have a comprehensive policy in place, according to Brett Lonsdale, founder of Lightning Tools. Seems to be research conducted by bosses with nothing better to do.

_____

People who are interested in blogging in Canada  are excited about what’s being called the first social media election in that country, but in typical Canadian fashion the stodgy people in charge there have dug out a 73 year old law that prohibits people from disclosing election results to the modern world . The provision was forwarded by elections Canada after blogger Paul Bryan was charged and fined under the law when he published results from Atlantic Canada. While it does seem that there is a new wave in that county that’s trying to bring it into the modern world, the hewers of wood and drawers of water that live there hold on tight to the old ways.

One  glimmer of hope is the new mayor of Calgary is an avid Twitter user and one of his staff members commented on the whole situation saying the law was archaic in the Internet age and pretty much unenforceable.

_____

The Independent Catholic News is reporting that at least one Catholic Bishop has a blog and he’s a regular contributor to it. However, it seems that Bishop Michael Campbell of Lancaster is the only one that keeps his blog up on a regular basis. Still it seems that his superiors are paying attention as he has been the first to report the news that the Vatican is holding a meeting for bloggers on May 2. He believes that it’s important for the Church to use the new media to get the word out on evangelisation and apologetics. It’s also less messy than using carrier pigeons.

____

At least one blogger/ freelance writer is standing up to be counted when it comes the new pre-industrial revolution policies of the Huffington Post and by proxy AOL. Jeff Pearlman recently took a good jab at the Wall Street Journal and what they paid him for a blog he wrote there. But what’s more important is the class action suit from  a prominent labor activist who filed a putative class action lawsuit against the Huffington Post on behalf of the 9000 writers who have never been paid for their work. Remember this is North America in 2011. There’s no excuse not to pay bloggers and writers but as long as people keep supplying free labor and talent, we’ll stay on that inevitable backward slope where the people with too much already prod to see how much more they can get

source from: bloggingtips

How they do these…

A blog that shares ideas how to build online business, blogging tips and tricks, google adsense tips, how to find profitable small business and niche strategy.

You know that…

A blog that shares ideas how to build online business, blogging tips and tricks, google adsense tips, how to find profitable small business and niche strategy.

A blog that shares ideas how to build online business, blogging tips and tricks, google adsense tips, how to find profitable small business and niche strategy.

A blog that shares ideas how to build online business, blogging tips and tricks, google adsense tips, how to find profitable small business and niche strategy.

Advantages of blogging for ad revenue

Many of these sites make it easy for you to get your blog up and running, providing ready made templates. All you have to do is select a username and you have a blog. This is a definite plus for those new to blogging.

The sites usually work with Adsense, but may also use other ad networks. Most sites promote new posts on their home page, helping bloggers to get the clicks they need to start making money.

If you are more experienced and know a bit about keyword research, then you can increase the odds that readers will find your posts when they use a search engine. Using the right keywords makes your posts more visible and brings you more revenue. A savvy blogger could start by researching high paying keywords before deciding what to blog about.

Finally, if you are a prolific blogger, you can earn a lot through the revenue share model. The more posts you have on the web, the more chances there are for readers to click on ads and the more likely it is that you will make money. And the longer your content is online, the more money you stand to make.

Disadvantages of blogging for ad revenue

But there is also one major drawback to be aware of with the ad revenue share model of blogging. That is that there are no guarantees. There is no guarantee that you will make money (unless the site provides an incentive payment at the start) and there is no guarantee that the site will still be around in a few months or years. That’s why it’s worth seeking a site that has been around for a while.

Many ad revenue share sites tout the big money that you can make but this only happens IF readers find your posts AND click on your ads regularly enough for you to make money. It’s also worth checking what your share of the pie is – you may only get 50 per cent of ad revenue or may have to reach a certain threshold to receive a payout.

Is it worth it?

I’ve written for several ad revenue share sites and in most cases I have regretted it. These days, I vet the site carefully to see how long it has been around, what other writers and bloggers say about payout history and what percentage of the revenue I get. If all that stacks up, then it’s worth a look. After all, bloggers can always use another source of passive income. What’s your experience been with blogging for ad revenue?