Blogging

Blogging Them Together

Posted on December 27, 2007
Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

Its nice when you can write a piece that ties up the previous two posts perfectly. I’m talking about Monika’s and my latest posts about blogs, here at Blogging Web 2.0.

Specifically its about acquiring expired domains to avoid the sandbox problem and getting a ready made platform to really kick things off with. Add to that the flexibility of free Blogger blogs where you can delve headlong right into a happening niche and develop a ton of traffic almost overnight. 

Well, put those two ideas together and you have a recipe for a dynamite entrance onto the niche blogging stage if you use good judgement and trip over a little good luck along the way.

The luck will come from finding an expired domain with some decent age and page rank - with solid traceable backlinks and not de-indexed as can happen. The good judgement will come from chosing the right niche to launch your free Blogger blogs into.

Then you use one to really boost the other.

I mean use the heavily PR laden domain to link to your free blogs to add weight to them in the SERPs. Better if you can find a few good domains in the same niche with PR and then you’re laughing all the way to the bank! You’ll have a veritable army of blogs to smother the competition out of the niche that you want to dominate with your high PR Generals bringing up the rear of an army of free blogging Infantry to take the SERPs by storm!

Now doen’t that sound like something you should be doing to make some money?

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

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Get Kick Ass Traffic with Blogger

Posted on December 21, 2007
Filed Under SEO, Blogging | 5 Comments

Terry wrote a great post about domain registration and how much better it is to start off with a pre-owned domain opposed to registering a brand new one. Not only will you avoid the sandbox, but you’ll have a good chance of getting a good PR for a decent price.

In the meantime however you can kick ass with blogger blogs. Grizzly wrote a top pillar post on let’s make money right now and I’m not going to repeat what he said.

Let me tell you one thing: if you are desperate to make money on the Internet (which applies to around 95 % of you) then you need to go and read Grizzly’s post! And while you are there you also hop over to Vic’s blog and learn what you have been doing wrong all this time.

I blog about the blogger blogs to show you my results since I have taken Grizzly’s golden tips on board and run with it 2.5 days ago.

As Griz suggested I went and registered a blogger blog. I chose a subject that is popular and started of by using the keyword in the blogs URL

It would read like this: http://yourkeyword.blogspot.com

I then set up the blog using one of the pre-fab themes there and also made sure to use the keyword in the description field.

Next I started writing some blog posts using the keyword often but not so much that it looked crappy or couldn’t be read. To date (2.5 days later) I have 10 posts on the blog that are all related to the main keyword I’m targeting.

In the same time frame I’ve had 2,844 unique hits to the blog so far and still counting. If you are not excited by this stat alone, you need to get a reality check!

Since my Writers Manifesto Blog is now around 8 months young and I’m getting 800 unique’s + a day getting 2,844 unique’s in 2.5 days to a brand new blog is just out of this world.

image The point of this post is not to brag to you - actually far from it. But it is to show you that it can be done by anybody if you follow the advice given. And I’m telling you right now, I won’t hold your hand doing this either and silly questions on “but how did you do this” will be ignored.

This would only show to me that you didn’t read Grizzly’s post and therefore nothing will change for you.

Money wise I have only made a couple of dollars in that time frame which shows that I need to monetize better. This is probably were I struggle most. I need to learn what works best for my audience and I suspect this is often a hit and miss too.

I’m excited about what happens when we do the right thing and once I manage to make some sales I will be onto a true winner.

Monika Mundell

Blogging Web 2.0

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Widgets, Grommets and Thingamajigs…

Posted on November 20, 2007
Filed Under Internet Marketing | 1 Comment

That title came from a module which was part of a three week residential operations analyst course I went on back in the 1980s when I was working in IT for a UK Bank.

The course was, of course about becoming an Ops Analyst and entailed studying various analytical methodologies that applied to IT operations in those days. Part of that course was centred around a fictitious company that used IT to handle its day to day working and inventory. The widgets, grommets and thingamajigs were the fictitious products it produced and distributed and we were charged, in a role-playing situation and in teams, to work out how to make the company run more efficiently and economically.

That was before the idea came about that simply getting rid of three quarters of your loyal and hard working workforce would make your company a ton more economical…

What has any of this got to do with blogging in the twenty first century?

Well, as a blogger and internet marketer, I still use some of those old ideas to run my online business as economically as I possibly can. That’s out of necessity as well as being an interesting challenge, so it’s one I enjoy racking my brains over in the constant and perennial scramble to make this online business profitable – and some.

When you put your economy hat on, your mode of thinking alters drastically. You go into survival mode and begin looking for every trick, technique and means for making money out of nothing but your own guile!

And every free product, system or service you can get your hands on!

What actually inspired this article was in fact a widget. One widget in particular, actually. The one sitting in the sidebar furthest from the top of the page – yes, the WidgetBucks widget. The reason it inspired an article all to itself is not because I want to promote it – far from it, in fact. It is to put my own two penn’orth in here.

I installed this widget on several of my blogs about two months ago when it first hit the blogosphere and thought they’d make me a nice little sideline. All they made me was angry because they were irritatingly slow to load up and tended to clog up the smooth scrolling of my pages until they had completely loaded. After over a month on my higher traffic sites and zero money to show for their trouble, I started to remove them, one by one. Two or three still remain in place (only because I haven’t gotten around to removing them too), but I found they simply didn’t have the range of products that I could reasonably display on my sites and expect to get clicks from.

Maybe the product range has improved now, so I don’t want to put anyone off if you’re thinking of trying it out. It is *free* after all and I believe they have increased the load up speed (although I didn’t notice much of a change there).

The moral to this story I suppose is that of course you should try all the free stuff that comes your way because you might just hit upon a winner for your particular site or niche. But don’t expect miracles whatever the sales blurb might say.

Producers of products or services like this want you to use their free resource, of course, because if you can make some money out of it, then they will make a whole lot more!

Terry Didcott
Author and Begetter of Blogging Web 2.0

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Advertising Your Blog

Posted on November 6, 2007
Filed Under Advertising | 3 Comments

Advertising your blog can be hard work if you’re not sure what you’re doing. There is a right way and a wrong way and plenty of variations in between!

Of course, the obvious way of advertising your blog is going through the adsense route and paying for ads. This method does work extremely well as long as you get your ad copy right for the few words that you are allowed in the tiny text ad and of course your keywords match exactly to you blog. It can also cost quite a lot which might be off-putting to newer bloggers, who ironically are the ones who need to advertise the most in order to attract readers to their blog.

A more wallet-friendly way of advertising is then needed.

Of course the most satisfying advertising methods are the free ones, especially when they do bring traffic to your blog. And there are plenty of them to choose from, but I’ll only cover the most effect ones here.

These are free methods of advertising that I’ve personally found work very well in bring lots of visitors to my blogs.

The top method is making full use of social networking sites, like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Bumpzee and many others. They are all free to sign-up with and allow you to create your own profile and submit your blog(s) so that other members can see you and your blog(s). They will get around to contacting eventually you but it’s better if you get busy and start making contact with other members who have blogs or interests in the same niche as yours. That way they get to know about you straight away and will most often visit your page to see who you are and then click on the link to your blog to have a look for themselves.

Trust me, after only a few days of busily making new friends in these sites, you’ll see a huge increase in traffic to your blog. Assuming your blog is well written, interesting and updated regularly, these people will keep coming back to it to see what else you’ve written.

Another good way of advertising your blog is to visit other blogs in your niche and make comments on the newest posts. We’ve covered commenting in here already, but suffice it to say you should make your comments relevant to the post and something that if you were to sit back and read it as if you were someone else, you could honestly say that it was an interesting comment!

Using forums to advertise your blog also works well, but take a bit of time to build up your credibility and get your self known, but once you have done that you will see traffic coming from these sources as the members start clicking the links to your blog that you will place in your signature.

Writing original articles and submitting them to article databases and ezines with a link back to your blog is another effective free method of advertising the presence of your blog. Make sure your article is unique and interesting an on-topic and the readers will be sufficiently curious to click your link and visit your blog.

Lastly, submitting on-topic posts to this site will get you a lot of free traffic and a valuable one-way link back to your blog! Simply register for free and submit your original post and not only will you be joining some great people who are already doing this, but you get automatically entered into our monthly competition!

So get writing!

Terry Didcott
Author and Co-Founder of Blogging Web 2.0 

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Content Stealing

Posted on October 25, 2007
Filed Under Blogging | 12 Comments

This is a real problem, but one that we here at Blogging Web 2.0 as well as every other blogger can actually use to our advantage.

I noticed some similar spammy, adsense loaded sites doing this same thing to my own blog, which made me angry to think these slimy gits were leeching off me and making money from my content which they hadn’t paid for. So I thought it best to fight fire with fire.

Here’s how to beat these swines at their own game.

In every post that we make, we simply enter an anchor link to the site at the beginning of the post, somewhere in the centre, like this: Blogging Web 2.0 and near the end. That way, when they publish our article, even if they cut off the author credits at the bottom of the article we still get some free back-links from the content thieves.

As content is indexed by the search engines according to the date and time they were created, the originator (Blogging Web 2.0), or owner gets accredited with the original content and the thieving gits get hammered for having duplicate content on their site.

Payback in every sense!

Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0

PS: There is an even dirtier trick to getting these sites hammered where it hurts the most - in the pocket. But I’m not going to tell right now.

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Comments Equals Posts?

Posted on October 23, 2007
Filed Under Blogging | 3 Comments

No, that’s not a typo in the the title, it’s deliberate! Sort of a writer’s artistic license to mess with grammar in order to catch the attention of the reader.

I love blog comments, because sometimes they provide me with exactly the right fodder for fueling another post, in those times of brain fug when I can’t think of what to write about next!

In my last post, I mentioned the nine blogs that I own, well that’s only the surface ones. There are a lot more lying on free blogging hosts that I do keep fairly up to date as well as a whole brace of new blogs that I’m in the process of putting together as affiliate niche money makers.

But that’s not the subject of this post.

In the comments of my last post I was asked how on earth I keep up with the writing for so many blogs as well as write articles as a freelancer AND keep on top of so many sites? Monika is just as hard working, I can assure you! So how do we do it?

I think Monika and myself have gotten into a writing frame of mind where we can type away and come up with a lot of good stuff without it seeming to be a chore. That’s how we squeeze it all into a normal day.

For myself, I don’t write for all my blogs every day. Not possible!!!

I try to keep my main blog at The Honest Way posted daily and here in this blog of course, but the others go two or three days between posts which makes it possible to keep them relatively fresh. That way I can keep building more whilst tweaking around with the ones I’ve already got.

I find that commenting in other blogs as well as forums also takes up quite a bit of time, but it’s so worth doing it to keep my profile high and of course attract other bloggers to my blogs and sites!

So the secret to writing large volumes of content is to get into the habit of doing it every day. The more you write and the more often you do it, the more you find you can write. It becomes more of a habit to be clacking away at the keyboard than not!

Of course it helps to have an interest in what you’re writing about. Trying to write about something that holds absolutely no interest for you whatsoever can end up being a real chore. That’s when writing can seem hard work and slow, so the best advice is really to write about what interests you. If you write for a living and find you tend to take on every writing gig that you see, then you’re going to burn out by forcing yourself to write the stuff you don’t like.

Better to turn some of it away even if it means losing some money than to lose it all by getting writer’s burn-out and not being able to write for anything.

So if you’re ever stuck for ideas about what to write about, go visit some other blogs and see what other bloggers are writing to get some inspiration.

And don’t forget to read the comments - sometimes there’s more inspiration in there than you’d think!

Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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Everyone Loves a Great Blog

Posted on October 21, 2007
Filed Under Blogging | 10 Comments

Ok, Blogging Web 2.0 is a great blog (in my humble opinion!) but that’s not what this post is about!

In my last post highlighting the benefits of using free blogging platforms to increase your profile and exposure online, I hinted that there are many resources out there that can help you to achieve success.

Blogging Web 2.0 is still relatively new in the blogging world, but already has accumulated more content than its age would have people realize, unless of course they’re regular visitors here. One thing that we have come to know that’s so important here is to make many good friends in the blogging world.

I don’t mean by going out an simply adding names to a community list or similar, I mean really making
friends with real people who are as passionate about blogging as we are.

In my travels through bloggertown I’ve bumped into some really nice people that I now count as friends. I visit their blogs regularly and they in turn visit mine and I think we all have something to share with one another in terms of information, assistance and good old fashioned entertainment in the guise of a jolly good read!

This site in particular is the perfect place for friends to get together and interact.

It’s also a great place to help other bloggers by raising the profile and awareness of their blogs. Most of this can be done by bloggers commenting here as well as guest posting - it all helps to increase the profile of your blogs on the blogging map.

Another way is by highlighting a particular blog that we’ve found by ourselves (as opposed to being told about it), especially if it has something particularly valuable to offer our readers.

One such blog is run by a really nice guy called Grizzly Brears and is entitled How to Make Money Online for Beginners. There’s a lot of good reading on that site, so it’s taken me a while to get through it, but what I found in there has turned out to be an Aladdin’s Cave of precious free knowledge, a lot of which I’ve never found anywhere else.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

Grizzly’s articles are all highly enjoyable to read, although as he admits himself they can be a bit long winded. But I personally find that even more attractive as it means he gives away a lot of his thoughts in each post. They are all very well written and easy and enjoyable to read, which is so important in a blog - it makes you want to read more and eager to return often to see what he’s written next!

So what did I find in Grizzly’s Aladdin’s Cave?

Treasure is the best way to describe it.

Real treasure in the form of free knowledge and wisdom. If you’re just starting out and even if, like me you’ve been around for some time, the information in his mini-series is eye-opening to say the least. I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know before about setting up free blogs and promoting them. Sure I already knew some of it, but there were many points and snippets that I hadn’t known about before.

And I’m now incorporating them into some of my newest blogs and projects.

Grizzly has hosted this blog on the free Blogger host, just to further highlight that it can be done and he also makes a decent amount of money from his blogs, further adding weight to his expertise in this field.

So if you want to learn how to really make money online with free blogs, click on over to Grizzly’s blog, close the door, take the phone off the hook, get yourself comfortable and prepare to learn!

Then come back here and see what else we’ve got for you!

Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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