Relayblogger

I haven’t been following the meta bloggers that much since last summer. There are a couple of them still on my bloglines feed list though.

On the quest to restart this blog I went to john chow (who dropped out of my feed list long ago) to find out what a money making blog looks like nowadays. I guess he still makes some money but to me his site looks way to desperate to be taken serious.

Then I went to problogger (that I normally follow through bloglines) and to my dismay found it equally ‘in my face’.

So, is that the way to go for a startup blog in an over crowded niche? I don’t think so.

One could guess that most people that follow them regularly use their RSS feeds so they need to throw lots of ads on the emerging internet entrepreneurs before they get involved enough to discard all ads.

I think we will never know, in the fight for readers in a small niche I guess full disclosure is not always a good thing.

by: Peter Nisbet

Improved search engine rank is difficult enough to obtain without you having to trawl through all that has been written about Google Page Rank in order to find the truth. There are many misconceptions about Page Rank, and Part 2 of this article dispels the most common of them, the first being that Yahoo and MSN have their own version.

In fact this is not so. Yahoo had a beta version of a ‘Web Rank’ visible for a while, ranking complete websites, but it is now offline. MSN has no equivalent as far I can ascertain. The term ‘PageRank’ is a trade mark of Google, which is why I refer to it as Page Rank and not PageRank. A small difference, but a significant one.

If you are one of those that believe that the more links you can get to your website the better, then you are wrong. When Google started the Page Rank frenzy by putting that little green bar on their toolbar, they didn’t realize the consequences of what they were doing. People fought to get as many links to their website as possible, irrespective of the nature of the websites to which they were linking.

That is misconception Number 2. You do not link to websites, you link to web pages, or should I say, you get links back from web pages, not websites. It is, after all, the link back that counts isn’t it? The link away from your site doesn’t count. Wrong! Misconception Number 3. The link to your web page counts no more than the link away from your web page. In fact, it could count less. You could lose out in the reciprocal linking stakes if your web page is worth more than the other person’s.

Let’s dispel that misconception right now. When you receive a link from a web page (not web site) you get a proportion of the Google Page Rank of that web page that depends on the total number of links leaving that page. When you provide a link to another web page, you give away a proportion of your Page Rank that depends on the number of other links leaving your web page.

The Page Rank of the website you get a link from is irrelevant, since that is generally the rank of the Home Page. You will likely find that all these great links you think you have from PR 7 or 8 websites are from a links page that has a PR of ZERO! So you get zilch for the deal. If you are providing them with a link from a page on your site even of PR 1, then you lose! Most people fail to understand that.

No incoming link can have a negative effect on your PR. It can have a zero effect, but not negative. However, if you have an incoming link with zero effect, and an outgoing reciprocal link with a positive effect to the target page, then you will effectively lose PR through the deal. Every web page starts with a PR of 1, and so has that single PR to share amongst other pages to which it is linked. The more incoming links it has, the higher PR it can have to share out.

If your page has a PR of 4 and has three links leaving it, each gets twice the number of PR votes than if 6 links leave it. Your page with a PR of 4 has to get a similar number of PR votes incoming as it gives away to retain its PR. In simple terms, if your PR 4 page is getting links from a PR 8 page with 20 links leaving it, you lose out big time! It’s simple maths.

No page ever gives away all of its PR. There is a factor in Google’s calculation that reduces this to below 100% of the total PR of any page. However, that is roughly how it works. You don’t get a proportion of the whole website ranking; you only get part of the ranking of the page on which your link is placed. Since most ‘Links Pages’ tend to be full of other outgoing links, then you won’t get much, and will likely get zero.

That is why automated reciprocal linking software is often a waste of time. If you want to make the best of linking arrangements, then agree with the other webmaster that you will provide each other with a link from equally ranked pages. That way both of you will gain, and neither loses. Some software allows you to make these arrangements.

Another misconception is that only links from external web pages count. In fact, links between your own web pages can be arranged to provide one page with most of the page rank available. Every page has a start PR of 1, so the more pages you have on your site then the more PR you have to play with and distribute to pages on your website of your choice.

Search engine rank can be improved by intelligent use of links, both external and internal, but Google Page Rank does not have the profound effect on your search engine listing that many have led you to believe. Good onsite SEO usually wins so keep that in mind when designing your website.

About The Author

Peter Nisbet normally has several pages his website listed within 2 days, and he shows you exactly how he does it on his website http://www.improved-search-engine-rank.com using screenshots and actual examples

by: Eric Sullivan

Anybody who has a website wants to increase the search engine traffic that will lead people to their site. You can’t just snap your fingers and expect to have a lot of search engine traffic, you have to put some work into it. You need to be able to grab the search engines attention.

The work begins with the content of your site. You need to zone in on your target audience and make your site about that. Then you need to make sure your content is full of keywords that are connected to the content of your site so you can pull in the search engines. Be careful not to overfill your website with key words, this could make the search engine think you are trying to cheat. Keyword rich is just blending the keywords in with main content of your site. You will need the most significant keyword to the content of your site in the domain name as well. Plus, if your site has been in the search engine for a while, you need to update the content or change it so as to keep the interest of people as well as the search engine.

Another way to increase search engine traffic is by posting links to your sites on other sites. It does not matter if it is another one of your own sites or a site that belongs to some other person or business, get your site noticed with many other links. Plus, submit you site to as many search engines as you can. Common sense will tell you that the more opportunity that you give people to access you site, the more chance that you will have traffic. Adding links to your site in other places and by adding your site to many different search engines it bound to increase the search engine traffic, there in, leading people to your site.

When you don’t have the time or energy to keep up your site but still want to increase search engine traffic, then you should consider hiring a professional search engine optimizer. They will make sure that your site is complying with all of the search engine rules, while keeping the information up to date and seeing that the search engines will like your site. This may cost you a lot but for bigger companies this is a must. A professional will take the stress off of you while increasing search engine traffic to your site.

About The Author

Eric Sullivan
Copyright 2007 Trafficbasics.com
http://www.trafficbasics.com

Learn traffic building techniques by getting the basics first, Trafficbasics.com

by: Theo Swan

When working with internet marketing, making websites designed to generate affiliate commission, it is sometimes difficult to find new niches to make websites about. Trying to find a niche with competitive commissions, but without the following fierce competition is of course hard, but it is not at all impossible.

One popular way of making money online is by using small websites designed only with adsense – or any other contextual advertisement – in mind. These sites – often referred to as mini- or micro-sites - are made to target unusual search phrases, often in highly competitive niches. This way, they can reach fairly high search engine rankings without to much work. The terms targeted will not bring many visitors, but the traffic it does bring will be highly targeted, thus converting well.

When using contextual ads – as with any form of paid-per-click programs – the main objective is to make visitors click the ads, they do not necessarily have to end up buying anything. That’s for the webmaster buying the clicks to worry about.

When working with pay per sale affiliate programs, one needs to take a different approach. Most affiliate programs operate by a pay per sale model, making it essential to send good traffic their way, i.e. visitors who will actually buy the products promoted.

Compared to a PPC model, this sure is far more work, but the upside is huge. Working in a similar way as with contextual ad websites, you can easily target odd search terms in highly profitable niches, thus receiving search engine visitors of good quality. You might not get that many visitors, but if you are working with the right keywords, many of them will be searching for exactly what you are offering.

There are a lot of online tools to aid you when looking for a niche with good potential revenue, but a fast and easy way to get a grasp of a niche is to do a few searches on google. Looking at the number of results for any given search term will give you an idea of the competition. Mostly this is closely related to the potential profit, as more money naturally attracts more competitors.

Click a few of the sponsored ads, to see what landing pages people are using when buying traffic on that keyword. Remember people are paying to have a visitor see these landing pages, so in most cases they are very well converting, making them excellent to study before you make a website in the same niche.

To fully take advantage of the visitors you send to an affiliate program, you should find a program offering residual commission. This way, you will not only get a commission on the first sale, but get a commission of all future sales to this customer. In a way, it’s your customer.

Considering the limited amount of visitors expected, another important factor to consider before joining an affiliate program is their promotional material. Are you looking for text links only, or are you looking for graphics for banner advertising on your page? If you can find an affiliate program in your niche, offering affiliate links to specific products rather than the main page, it will make it much easier to target your visitors better. If you are getting visitors using the same search term, it’s not hard to find a specific product to present them with.

Many websites offer free stuff and/or an initial discount when a new customer joins them. Make sure you are using all the promotions available to you when you join and promote your affiliate program - preferably found at http://www.affiliateranker.com/directory

About The Author

Theo Swan - Writing about affiliate marketing and how to make your website stand out. Read more about converting traffic, or find a new program, at http://www.affiliateranker.com

by: Ron Skruzny

Here is one method that you can use to get traffic to your web site. It relies on choosing some niche keywords based on your web site theme. The process is fairly simple and can be expanded to get tons of traffic to your site. Here is how.

It is often tempting to chase after popular themes and then select the major keyword as your target. However this is not a great move, well, not in the beginning anyway. You first have to build your credibility with the search engines before they will place you near the top.

The key is to choose a keyword phrase that people are using in the search engines such as Google but have very few web sites that cater to that keyword phrase. How do you find such valuable keyword phrases? Here’s how!

If you use a software tool such as Good Keywords or the Google AdSense tool, it will return you many different keyword phrases. Look for specific phrases that look a bit odd. One of the ones that I look for are those that are book titles. Sometimes the words are jumbled but after you have gone through a few of them you will easily recognize them because initially they seem to make no sense. This is often because the words in the title of the book have been sorted into alphabetic order.

If you choose this phrase and set up a web page targeting that phrase, you can then produce a few paragraphs on the book based on reviews at any of the book sellers such as Amazon. You can then have affiliate links to the major booksellers and receive an affilaite commission from them.

I have used this technique to target books on Poker which have attracted traffic where I can offer either the book of their interest or to one of the gaming clubs or to my other web pages on Poker.

A book with a similar title is “Liar’s poker: rising through the wreckage on wall street”. The tools indicate that it was searched for in Overture (Yahoo) 12,043 in one month, so probably 120,000 in Google. Yet depending on how it is entered, Google shows that there ar only 997 sites that cater for that phrase. That’s pretty good odds for you to get a high ranking in the search engines. You can then offer this traffic links to products and services related to the finance industry – a high paying industry.

If you can find other books related to this them, then you can aggregate the traffic through links to your home page. Eventually you will raise your page rank to aa fairly good level.

This is a method that you can refine on an ongoing basis to improve the natural search traffic to your web site.

About The Author

Ron Skruzny is a webmaster at http://www.criticalmass.biz, a site devoted to Search Engine Optimization. Apart from more articles on SEO, the website also offers lessons and links to a whole range of SEO related resources. If you want to get an increasing level of sustainable web traffic then http://www.criticalmass.biz may have just the right information to help you.

By Lewis Low

A blog is an online version of diary where people write and display almost anything - their opinions, photos, jokes, thoughts for the day and more. People also share stories about their pets, their passion for soccer, stamps… the limit is only your imagination!

In the last few years, blogging has emerged to become a much more meaningful activity than simply maintaining a personal diary. People use it to advertise their products and services, in fact, quite a number of companies even create their online presence by using a blog instead of a website.

Create Your Own Blog

Starting a blog is free. You can create one at blogger dot com- a free service from Google Inc. You don’t need to register a domain name or buy hosting.

When you sign up at Blogger, everything happens online. Your blog will be hosted by Blogger and you get an URL like http://yourdomain.blogspot.com. You simply log in to your account and start to write.

This is much easier and cheaper than buying your own domain and hosting, then hiring someone to do the web design, writing and coding.

Another free blogging service available online is WordPress which is also very popular and easy to use. WordPress supports more features than Blogger while allowing you to customize your blog with various plug-in. You can check it out at http://wordpress.org

Monetize Your Blog

While blogging for your own interest, you can in fact maximize the potential of your blog for many marketing or commercial purposes.

The quickest and easiest way to turn a blog into a money-making enterprise is to include advertising on your blog. This can be done with contextual ad programs like Adsense - an advertising program by Google. Basically, you get paid when people click on the ads displayed on your website or blog. Google Adsense program is free to sign up. You can visit http://www.google.com/adsense to learn more about the rules and guidelines of the program. Other Adsense type ads that you can use for blog monetizing are SearchFeed, AdBrite, and Yahoo’s Publisher’s Network (YPN).

Affiliate program is another potential way to make money blogging. By focusing on the subject of your blog post, you can promote relevant products from cost per sale affiliate programs like ClickBank and Amazon. You can write a review about the product or service with your affiliate links embedded inside so you get the commission whenever a sale is made.

Boost Your Blog Traffic

Blogs are quickly indexed by search engines, but you need to update it regularly. Search engines love fresh content and regular update will ensure that your website is indexed and ranked high up as well. The higher up it appears, the more traffic will come to your site, which means more sales. You can actively participate in forums discussion or post comments on other blogs to get more link back traffic.

Whether you use your blog for fun or for work, remember that it’s a highly potential tool any which way. So what are you waiting for? Start blogging away right now!

Lewis Low is the founding editor of OnlineBizPromo.com For more Practical Online Business Ideas and Work-From-Home Opportunities, visit his Work-At-Home directory at http://www.OnlineBizPromo.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lewis_Low

By Samuel Ng

Would it nice when your wordpress blogs are being updated with highly relevant content automatically? Without you having to do anything except for an initial quick set up.

First & foremost, why do attempt to automate blog posting? Sometimes you as a blogger run out of ideas on what to blog about, sometimes your readers what to read more than what you can post. Maybe you’re not posting on a regular basis, or just you just want to go for a long vacation away from your computer.

You can grab rss feeds & allow them to be posted on your blog based on your keywords & categories.

You can do that by using rss plugin called smart rss or another rss plugin called name. Simply search for it on Google & it’ll appear quick.

This is a great way to add more content to your blog, not just content but relevant & keyword target content.

Sounds like a good idea? Unfortunately many people have no clue that such plugins actually exists! There are also those that use these plugins the wrong way.

Instead of getting keyword targeted & setting them to be posted on the right category, they just throw in a bunch of generic keywords & allow the posts to be posted automatically, then they forget it & move on.

That’s not the way to do it, we must selective with rss feeds & which category to use. Posting frequency is also an important thing, too often, such as 8 times a day will raise a red flag with the search engines.

Using news feeds is a great way to get fresh updated content, on top of that you won’t get penalized for duplicate content by the search engines, because they know that the same news is being broadcast on many different channels.

Here’s how you can create self-updating, money-making blogs, quickly & easily.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samuel_Ng

By Samuel Ng

There are just so many ways of making money from your wordpress blogs, it’s impossible to name everything in detail so you’ll be shown the overall ideas that most people do to monetize their wordpress blogs.

First thing that everyone can think of is Google AdSense. Simply by posting relevant topics within your blog & putting up AdSense ads, you can get paid when someone clicks on your AdSense ads.

Some people may not like doing AdSense or they find that AdSense didn’t pay them too well, so they switched over to Auction Ads. Auction Ads display live auctions based on the keywords you add into the system. You get paid, each time someone bids on an auction item after clicking on your ad.

Affiliate marketing would be another popular way to make money from your blogs. It’s simply selling some else’s product for a commission. A truly win-win-win situation for merchant, affiliate & buyer.

Selling your products & services. Just treat your blog as an advertising platform & all the ads focus on selling your own products & services.

Selling text links. There are many webmasters willing to pay for traffic to their websites or blogs. All you have to do is allow them to put a link on your blog & they pay you monthly. If you want it to be totally hassle free, you can sign up through a text link ad network.

Selling advertising. This can be a very steady source of income if you can get sponsors who are interested in reaching your readers with their products & services.

These are the most direct ways to earn money from your blogs, so take your pick & choose the one that suits you & your industry the most.

For more tips & tricks on optimizing your wordpress blogs for more profits, check out Auto Blogging Income System.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samuel_Ng

By Sean R Mize

It does not matter if you are blogging for personal or for business, all you want is just to get more visitors to read what you have written. It will seem that the things you wrote are useless if no one will ever read them – probably it’s just you and your relatives. So the first goal when planning on blogging is to get as much traffic to your blog.

Here are some tips that you can try so that you will be read by many.

1. Of course, when you write you need to consider your readers. Whether they are your personal whining or business related pieces, you need to make sure that your readers will understand them. People are busy and most of the times they just scan through the information. You want them to check your blog and let them linger there to read the entire entry.

2. Provide relevant information. It does not really matter if what topics you have but if you provide useful information to your readers, you can guarantee that they would return and subscribe to your RSS to know more about what you have to write in the coming days.

3. There are a lot of technical tools that you can use with blogs nowadays. But before you even think of using these tools like a music player, check if your theme would be right for using these tools.

4. Put interaction in your blog. If your readers can put on comment, feedback or suggestions in your forum, then you can guarantee that they would return to your blog and do some interaction with you.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize

by lee brooker

Doing web hosting comparison is a very important part of developing your business on the web. Its no good just picking the first one that turns up I your browser window and committing to that one!

For example if you do not do a web hosting comparison then you will not know what is fully required and needed not only from the web host itself but from your own point of view regarding your business.

Say you do not hold web hosting comparisons high on your list of priorities, and you chose a company who goes bust in a few months, a year down the line when your getting well established?

That’s right its going to ruin you. Webhosting comparisons are very important. If you were going to buy a car, generally you do not walk up to the nearest one for sale to you and buy it there and then do you. You look around, COMPARE prices and models, history etc.

A good website hosting comparison will pay you and your business dividends if done with the right amount of importance.

When doing a web hosting comparison drill into the range of services and tools as much as possible. Don’t just find what you are looking for and finish there. Chances are there are more to discover within the package you are leaning towards, and im not just talking good things either. Restriction may be applicable which could limit your functionality in the future.

But on the other hand there may be added tools within your desired plan that unlock parts of your business that you never considered. Like added forum software or guestbook’s. Ok you may not be thinking along those lines right now but they are there if you need to go that way in the future.

Much better to just have them at the ready than having to go through all the hassle of looking g into changing your hosting all over again!

So do a good in depth webhosting comparison, you will be glad you did.
About the Author
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