One of the best things about using WordPress for a blog platform is the inherent SEO benefits it has.

However, all the things that make WordPress good for getting indexed, ranked, and some unique visitors also makes it conducive for low conversion rates for some of your “money pages”.  In order to make more money from blogging you have to convert more of your traffic into sales.

A “money page” is a piece of real estate on your blog that sells something, or in many blogger’s cases, attempting to sell something.  Reducing the distractions on your money pages leads to more sales, plain and simple.

What are the distractions causing your money pages to not convert as well as they could?

• Sidebars
• Social bookmarking icons at bottom of post
• Site header
• RSS feed icons
• Displayed tags and other entries

I have seen almost miraculous increases in blogging income just by focusing on making these money pages more appealing but I had to hack my WordPress theme stylesheet, templates, and add special code to all of my pages in order to get them to appear less distracting.

So, even though it was well worth my while to edit each money page to not having all the inherent distractions on the money page, I still didn’t apply this blog tweak to all of my sites.

When I first started blogging I considered it useful for list building since the blogs get good traffic and exit popups would build the lists for me on autopilot.  However, there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to get on yet another email list, thinking they’re going to get a barrage of promotional emails and further crowd their email inboxes with stuff that distracts them from their goal of making more money on line.

Therefore list building is not the only reason to build a blog, obviously…

You can and WILL make more sales and income by converting more of your one-time visitors into buyers.

There are several expensive WordPress themes like Thesis and Affiliate Theme that can do this for you, but at some point your site looks like every other Thesis/Affilaite Themes site out there.  Thesis and Affiliate Theme are good themes but they’re not very user friendly, and you need to switch over to their theme and activate it if you want to use their special features that will increase the conversions of your money pages.

My buddy Peter create a theme and plugin that allows you to keep your current theme activated while giving you the freedom to create or edit current money pages that do not have all the inherent distractions of a regular WordPress blog.

His theme is called the Monetize WordPress theme and he also has a plugin called Themes Manager that is espeially powerful.

The theme set allows you to make mini-sites out of your blogs without losing any SEO benefits.

It also makes great looking, distraction-free money pages for you with a click of a button.

The plugin allows you ot change the font size of all your posts and pages on an individal basis which is crucial for making easier to read money pages.  WordPress by default only allows you to change your font size to;

Paragpraph,Heading 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc…

but Peter’s plugin allows you to increase font size on a font size basis font 12,14,16,18 etc…

I wish I had come across this theme and plugin prior to hacking my WordPress themes to get them to do what I wanted them to do for my money pages.

If you want to make more money with your blogs by easily increasing your conversion rates, then you should get Peter’s theme and plugin, plain and simple.

Here’s an example of a money page about where to get backlinks that only has half of the distractions removed.

Here are some blog writing tips I thought you could use:

I often show my Marketer’s Relief members this blog you’re on right now as an example of how to Structure and Optimize a blog, but they often say to me,

“Dan, it looks like you’ve spent years and thousands of hours building that blog up to what it is today”…

Well, that’s not exactly true… This blog is less than a year old and I’ve spent some hours on this blog but not thousands of hours.

You see, once a blog is set up and configured the way I want it to be, the rest is merely writing.

1. The #1 hardest part for many people who want websites of their own is getting them set up the way the want it to be.
2. The #2 part is getting comfortable adding content to it.

THEN…. if you have a site set up in a “passion-niche” then the only thing left to do is write good content once the motivation to do so “hits you”.

So how do you write often, and write well?

Write when you feel motivated, and you got something to get off your chest, and the words will flow naturally.

“It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The content will be good and won’t seem manufactured, like you’re trying to “go after” certain keywords or whatever with your writing.

As a matter of fact, as I’m writing this I have no idea what keywords I will optimize the post for but I will get to that later.

I just want to share a writing tip with you because writing is essential to creating good, unique quality content not seen elsewhere, and this type of content is NOT achievable via outsourcing.

The more important point to consider here is that the content flows outwards from brain  > to keyboard  > to published blog post rather quickly when you write without regard for the distractions such as keyword optimization, what to write about etc…

Again, the secret to writing a lot and writing well is to write when you have a burning desire to do so, and/or an important tip to share

When you have something to share, just share it, because those are the times when you can just forget about SEO and KeyWord optimization for a second and just focus on writing good content…

As I mention in my Increase WebSite Traffic Tips newsletter in the very first email in that eCourse…the #1 best SEO tip/thing to do is to write excellent content, or good enough content that gets noticed and linked to without having to ask for it.

When you write with a passion…when you write with a lot to say and  to express, you will find the words just piling up and coming to you.

You may also find out that you actually have a lot more to say that you thought when you first went to publish a new post.

Why is this writing tip important?

Because I said so, that’s why!  Just kidding… 

Writing unique, impassioned content pieces will make your content stand out from all others in your niche.

What are most other blogs you see in the internet marketing niche like?

They’re mostly..

1. Joeblow released his latest product to day here it is…
2. My review on XYZ product, here it is….
3. I went to this seminar, here are some pictures

• What going to make you and your blog stand out and be original?
• What’s going to make your content something people will remember you for?

If you have something you want to share, and it’s something you want to get off your chest, then throw it out there and just write…

In today’s ADD generation, it’s especially important that you adopt this writing method/style since you may not find your focus again and may lose the chance to write that piece of content that makes your site different from everyone else’s.

Why did I write this and what is the purpose here, what do I want you to buy?

Nothing to buy, except into the idea that anyone can be a proficient and prolific writer, especially with a blog…

I wrote this because I saw someone perceiving that creating a blog like mine (such as it is.. fake humility there) as an obstacle because they see my content and all the articles and think,

“Ill never have a blog like that with all that content on there!”…

“I’ll never never have enough stuff to write about!”

“I don’t/can’t write that well!”

Since this niche is my passion, I write as the moment hits me or an important announcement needs to be made, or review posted etc…

But this blog only has about 150 posts on here, when means you could have just as much content if you posted twice a day for 75 days, which is 2 1/2 months.

Overcoming mental hurdles about writing and blogging is the first step towards unleashing all the content you have stored up inside you.

Once that comfort zone has been achieved, and you see just how easy it is to post new content, you will become a writer.

NOTE: I’ve FORCED some Marketer’s Relief members and fellow marketing buddies to get blogs going and now they thank me profusely.

I even have some Marketer’s Relief members posting to their blog from work on their lunch breaks now, then again when they get home because in the 7 hours that had lapsed from when they blogged at lunch, their lunch-time blog post got indexed, and their site is now waiting for new content.

Therefore, 75 days is all it takes to “catch up” to me…

2 MORE FINAL BLOGGING AND WRITING TIPS…

I know, I know I should make this into a series of posts, maybe later right now I’m zooming along here and content is flowing so let me wrap this up with 2 final writing tips…

1- Blog with Firefox

Use Firefox when writing to your blog since it has a built-in spell-checker that I don’t see working when I use Internet Explorer.  As I have come to find out from using Firefox, my blog posts are unprofessionally replete with typos and thanks to Firefox I realize this now and I will slowly fix these typos as I come across them.

2- Don’t Fix Your Typos As You’re Writing…

The thing that wastes more writers’ time is fixing typos as you are writing.  so you write a sentence or two, then go back fix something, another sentence of two, go back and fix etc…

It will take you an hour to write a decent blog post that way, so what you need to do instead is focus on getting what you have to say out of your head and onto “paper” so to speak and most importantly..

DO NOT INTERRUPT THE FLOW…

Don’t stop writing to fix your typos because that interrupts your writing flow, makes it take longer to write what you have to say, and the constant stopping and starting will make your content less unique and less readable because your flow keeps getting broken…

Writing is important and a skill you must learn and anyone that can send an email can have a great blog with great content…

REMEMBER…

I was inspired to write this post due to some feedback I heard from people and if they were experiencing these thoughts then so will others…

THAT means I’m writing about things that my niche is truly concerned about, but doesn’t show up in any Keyword research tools, and it’s why you need to adopt this method of writing.

P.S.

I just noticed this post is well over 1000 words and could have been broken up into 3-5 separate blog posts, but this only took me 30 minutes to write and publish.

So when you write the way I recommend you do, the words will flow.  The 30 minutes it took me to write this blog post could translate into 4 blog posts that took 7.5 minutes per post to write…

Leaving you with 22.5 or 52.5 minutes left for your office lunch break  

Click Here To Get My Top-rated ebook about making insane profits with your blog

I know that blogging with WordPress is the Average Joe’s dream for content publication and for use as a content management system, but how do you get your blog indexed quickly?

First of all, sooner or later your blog will be indexed if you continue adding fresh content to it, but most people will spend a lot of time building the “perfect site only to wait and rest until it gets indexed.

That’s not exactly the best way to go about getting traffic to your site because while you’re waiting for the search engines’ spiders to visit your site and index it, you could be busy creating more site content.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you create a blog and get it published with at least one post and several pages created.

Here are some things you can do to get indexed quickly

• Submit the url of your blog to some RSS sites like feedage.com and feedagg.com
• Comment on high traffic, high PageRank sites or urls and link back to your blog
• Get some social bookmark-style links back to your site
• If you have another site that is getting spidered frequently and it is related to your new blog, point a link towards it from within a post on the “already-indexed” site and also add it to the blog roll, if the other site is a blog.
• Use a good ping list to increase the spee din which your new posts get indexed.
• Re-purpose your blog content and use them for articles you submit to article directories. Link back to your site from the author resource box and link to inner pages of your site form the body of the article itself.

NOTE: By re-purposing your content, what I mean is, take your blog post/site content and edit it to make it acceptable to the article directories for publication, then get those articles accepted/published for free backlinks and more traffic…

IF you’re too busy to do the blog commenting and article writing and social bookmarking, then a good PING list and a one-time RSS submission for your site url should do the trick

The Reality of Automated Blogging and Automated Niche Blogging

With truly automated blogs, you only have to maintain them, and never tweak them, add content to them, upgrade them etc…

However, many people think that Automated Blogging is as simple as installing WordPress and configuring a few plugins.

It goes far beyond that but once you do the initial work, then it’s completely on autopilot.  With automated blogs, you need a lot of them to make a decent income (in 90% of the cases) and you may even get a few winners that make 150-200/month, but most automated blogs will not be SEO powerhouses or major bread-winners for you.

There is strength in numbers with this business model because 200 sites making $1.00 a day is a nice income.

But imagine how long it will take you to make 200 sites, especially if they’re blogs!!!

Another thing that gets most people worked up about created an automated blog is that they’ll read an ebook on how to make money with them but they are presented with way too much detail or urged to buy more stuff in order to get started properly.

And as usual, they’re left holding the bag, or half the bag in most cases.

I’ve been blogging for about 8 months now and have learned how to harness the power of blogs and what really is working for SEO and blog automation.

• Did you know that when it comes to site flipping, the sites that sell the best are those that are automated and making some sort of income already?
• Did you know that it’s somewhat easy to create sites that make a small amount of money per month if you have all the hard work done for you?

Well, I’ve created a program where you can have automated blogs created for you.

It will be called the Total Marketing System because it does a lot of marketing for you once it is set up:

• You will have WordPress installed on your site for you
• Unique content gets posted regularly
• You can sell the sites that are created
• Get some free backlinks to your sites…
• All the plugins you need to have a full-blown blog optimized for the search engines
• You wil have all the settings pre-set to make sure you don’t make any configuration mistakes
• All your plugins will get automatically upgraded for you, so you don’t have to do anything on that end.
• RSS plugins, widgets, Aweber forms, themes, you get all of those pre-installed for you.
• Five Niche Research and Keyword Research video tutorials
• The Double Your Blog Traffic report
• The Blog configuration guide
• and more…

This is for people who want to Flip Websites or generate automated income via automated niche blogging.

My recommendation to you is to decide whether or not you want to make sites to flip later on, or to increase the number of sites you have that make a few dollars a day each.

1. Entry into the program is $197.00, (one-time fee).
2. If you build the right sites and flip them, you make this back with the first site you sell.
3. If you build sites and hold on to them, they will gain value over time.  Either way, it’s a win-win situation for you
4. Hosting is free for the first month, and $37.00/month afterwards.  (You will have to get the hosting with me because I know I know that everything will work properly with my hosting company.)
5. If you flip these sites, you can also avoid the hassle of transferring a site to new hosting by telling your client that they can get hosting with me and I’ll reset their cpanel information…
6. These prices will go up after the beta testing period is over, so bookmark this page and wait for the next update.

When this is ready to go, 20 beta testers will be able to get in for $77.00, then price will go up to normal.

Bookmark this page

You want your blog to get noticed not only by the search engines, but also by other visitors as well.

In the last blogging tip, we discussed your Ping List and how having a good one will help get your site noticed quicker and spidered more deeply.

NOTE: By the way, the ping list discussed in the last post really does work well, as it was during the writing of that particular post that I updated my ping list to a better one.  My most blog posts take about 2-4 hours to get indexed, but the last one (with the updated ping list) got indexed in less than 2 hours, so a slight improvement was seen there.  That is definitely a better ping list to use, so use it!

Once your latest blog post is indexed, you will gain some traction somewhere in the search engines and expand your “share” of the traffic available for whatever it is you wrote about.  But again, not everyone is searching on Google or Yahoo for your content.

Some people, in fact, many people are hanging around social networking sites reading the latest news items and interesting articles recommended to them by their “friends” in those networks.

How to get automated backlinks and visitors to your blog and blog posts:

There is a plugin called Autosocial Poster that allows you to post to a random number of social networking accounts you’ve set up already.  Here’s how this works:

• You get the plugin, upload, install, and activate it
• It tells you what sites it can auto-post your content to (you don’t need to do them all!)
• You select how many accounts you want posted to with each new post you make.
• You write a new blog post and it updates to a random number of accounts you have in your name.

This means you get backlinks and traffic visitors from those high PageRank sites.

Some are turning their links into NoFollow now, but there is still value in those links because they are still backlinks to your post(s) and have the ability to bring in visitors you may not have otherwise received from the search engines. Social networking traffic or social bookmarking traffic isn’t the “stickiest” of traffic but it can be automated and still can get you a few interested parties.

Also, since many people still don’t know what RSS is, or how to use an RSS reader, there is a good chance that the “social marketing traffic” wil increase the RSS readership of your blog because those people are more techie-inclined…

There’s also a way to automate the RSS submissions of your latest and greatest blog posts to RSS sites,

(more on that later)

Blogging Tip #11- Working With WordPress Blog Widgets

It’s time to clean up your default WordPress installation/blog by deleting some plugins and blogroll links.
1.    Delete or deactivate the Hello dolly plugin- Go to plugins and DE-activate Hello Dolly Plugin,or FTP into site and delete the plugin that way
2.    Delete the default Blogroll links- Go to Manage tab of WordPress Admin Panel, select Links, and delete all the default links already populating your WordPress install.

Working With Widgets
You used a text widget to create RSS feeds and Aweber optin forms, but there’s more you can do here…

Add your EzineArticles widget to sidebar-

If you’re writing articles and publishing them to article directories like Ezine Articles.com then you can always grab your Article author feed and place it on the sidebar of your site.
Go to Design Tab, widgets sub-selection, and add a text widget there, then paste in the feed code that EZA gives you to display your feed (or someone else’s…)
This helps when you have a visitor that doesn’t see something in your most recent posts that’s of interest to them, but if they see your “EZA feed”, they might go read one of your published articles dispayed in EZA feed snippets on sidebar…
Of course, you will link back to your site from those articles, so that helps keep your visitor “dialed in” to what you’re saying without losing them for good by sending them off your site to read something.

Add a Tag Cloud to your sidebar-
Supposedly this is good SEO because it displays “tags” that show the keywords that your site has content on. Go to Manage in WordPress Admin panel, TAGs tab, to add new tags.  Then go to Design Tab, widgets sub-selection, and find the TAG Cloud widget and add it to a sidebar

Should you add a Calendar to your sidebar?
I never understood why people choose to display a calendar on their sites.
·    What’s the purpose of this, to tell me what time and day it is when I have a computer that tells me this anyways?
·    Is it to show the search engines that some thing has been updated on your site (ne wmonth now, yay!)
From what I’ve read about calendars’ effect on SEO and spider crawls, having a calendar on your site sends the search engines spiders into an endless loop of crawling activity that eventually causes them to stop digging thorugh your site.  If the spiders get confused your site suffers…

I say get rid of the calendar and choose to optimize your web space with more effective displays…

Blogging Tip #5- Configure Your NoFollow and DoFollow Settings

This Blogging Tip is going to address the concepts of DoFollow and NoFollow.

When you allow DoFollow, this tells the search engines to Follow the sites you link to in post, comments from blog commenters, and lends PageRank of blog down to your categories and posts

IF your blog has Page Rank then if could be lending PageRank and importance to whatever you’re linking to from your blog whether it be blog posts, categories, or comments made on your posts.

Interlinking from one blog post to another is automated with the Related Posts Plugin on the YARRP (Yet Another Related Posts plugin, as seen in Blogging Tip #4- Gather Your WordPress Plugins.

Now, even though the Related Posts at bottom of your blog posts display links to other posts based on relevancy factors, those are like footnote links. You also want to link to inner pages of your site from the body of the post itself, too (see example above where I linked to Blogging Tip #4).

Should you allow DoFollow on your Blog Comments?-

Yes, if your goal is to lend some PageRank to people commenting on your blog, which also encourages more comments

No, since you’re bleeding PageRank when you do this, and it also cuts down on the number of inane comments you receive on your posts.

Look at it this way. Your blog can be an asset if you provide good content.  Your good content is added to when people post quality comments and they benefit from their useful feedback and contributions, too.  Read the post on How To Get Traffic From Blog Commenting (the right way).

Encouraging more comments by providing DoFollow link-love for blog commenters may be a short-sighted strategy here.  That’s just my opinion tohugh, do what you want here.

Should you allow DoFollow to Blog Categories and Blog Posts?

That depends on whether or not you want to rank well for your Main KWs or for blog category and post keywords.  Over time, lessening the Page Rank-bleed will allow your categories and posts to rank well anyways.

Should you allow DoFollow on links to inner pages of site?

Same as above, no, not really since it’s the same as lending Page Rank to posts…

Do Nofollow links still have any value?

Yes, they do, since they’re still seen by the spiders, but not valued as much since there’s no Page Rank being lent to them.  If a blog is DoFollow and post itself is a PR4, your link will still be seen by the search engines, but won’t get Page Rank points for the comment(s).

Note:  The way you design your blog is important and I’m not talking about graphics or themes or anything like that, but how posts are linking to each other beyond the NoFollow and DoFollow discussion.

Blogging Tip #6 will show you how the SEO Experts are saying you should design all sites nowadays to make your site more user and spider-friendly… (think silo site)

When you write your first blog post, I recommend you do it with a goal in mind.

Think about what kind of traffic you want to get and what you’ll “do” with this traffic once they get there.

What should you write about on your blog?

• If you’re in business for yourself, what’s the point of attracting a visitor and not having a goal in mind for them?
• What if they like your content a lot, but are left without any course of action to take from here-on in? (buy something, get on the email list, become the next RSS reader…)
• If your blog is about something you’re passionate about, then it’d be easy for you to write a lot on just one topic. And that is perfect for SEO, site navigation and for your readers.!
• When you start writing to your blog, a good strategy is to fill up one of your categories with 5-10 posts on that subject matter.  The category could be Blogging Tips, or 10 Dog Collars Reviews.
• Once you’re done with the first 10 posts, re-purpose your blog content for article submissions by using the effective time-saving power of the 10 Articles Method to build backlinks to your site and generate some initial traffic to your blog.

10 things You Should Do When Posting To Your wordPress Blog

1. Have goal in mind for what kind of traffic you want to get and what to do with that traffic (if anything)
2. Use the All In One SEO section of the writing area of WordPress to place the correct keywords in the title, description, keywords area, tags, and excerpt.
3. As you write more posts, add more tags to your WordPress Admin panel.  This is the easiest way to not get overwhelmed by thinking up all your tags ahead of time.
4. Social Bookmark your blog and blog posts from a stumble upon and digg account, for starters…
5. If you haven’t claimed a technorati blog yet, you should do that ASAP.  Just jon their site to claim your Free blog.
6. Comment on a few blogs that have written something specifically related to your latest blog post, and leave a link to a blog post of yours that is most relevant to the post of theirs you are commenting on.
7. Submit URL of latest posts to RSS aggregator sites
8. If post is not your first post, link to another post on your site whenever applicable and relevant
9. Rewrite the blog post to make it acceptable as an article submission.  Publish the article and link back to blog post form body of the article you published.  This is almost the same as blog commenting, but article directories are Authority sites, so you’ll definitely gain a lot from doing this as well.

If you have readers on an email list, send them an email notifying them about your latest blog post if you think it’s something they’d be interested in (it should be!)

If you’re doing each of these basic steps to promote your blog posts then you’d have:

• You’d have written a blog post with a goal in mind,
• Got links to your blog posts 3 different ways (social bookmarking, blog commenting, re-purposing content for article submissions and backlinks)
• Started a series of post to fill up a category of content pleasing to your human visitors and search engine spiders.

Man, I couldn’t have written this better myself!

I was doing some research for a checklist of things to do for WordPress and SEO when I came across a very interesting post.

Read it and enjoy, or weep, when you see how much there is to do to properly SEO your blog.

I have this bookmarked and I suggest you do the same.

It’s an excellent read so instead of rewriting it into my words, I thought I’d give some link love to someone that wrote a thoughtful post.

Go here to read the Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog

It’s time to enhance your blog some more before you get started posting or tweaking any settings.

Here is a list of plugins I am using at the time of this post.

You can download them all through the link at the bottom of this post

FTP them to your site to the public-html/wp-content/plugins directory, then activate and configure them…
(Akismet and AllInOneSeo have already been covered in previous posts…)
1.    Advanced WYSIWYG Editor- make your posts look nice with a What you See Is what you Get Editor)
2.    Did You Pass Math-asks blog commenter a question before they can post a comment (further antispam feature)
3.    FeedBurner Feedsmith- to Create An RSS feed for your blog (important)
4.    Related Posts or YARPP Plugin- displays links to related posts based on relevancy factors you can set
5.    Ajax Edit Comments- Nice plugin that gives you more control over blog comments, and allows commenters to edit their comments within a specific time frame after posting
6.    Global Translator-allows foregin language visitors to translate your content into their native language
7.    Google SiteMap Generator- helps you configure your site map for inclusion in Google and other search engines plus notifications of changes
8.    One-click plugin updater- very useful to have, can automatically notify and update your plugins for you.
9.    Share This- good for allowing visitors to share your posts via social networking and bookmarking sites
10.    Google Analyticator- for statistics and tracking information about your site visitors
11.   Stat Counter- same as Google Analyticator
12.    WordPress automatic Upgrade- to upgrade to latest version of WordPress automatically
13.    WP Backup- sends you an email with a backup of your wordpress blog. Better to do a cpanel backup weekly, in my opinion, but good tool to have.

The WordPress Link will Return

There are more opinions in the online marketing world than there are blogs!
One hotly contested debate is what blog platform is best for you.  You are on a WordPress blog right now.  WordPress is the only blog platform you should consider using for a number of reasons.
You own the site ( if you install blog on your own hosting and domain) and you can integrate it with many Web 2.0 friendly plugins and widgets.  WordPress is by FAR, the leader in blog platform technology, and there are many new cool features being added daily that can help make your site even better.

WordPress “out of the box” isn’t a complete solution, though.  You need to add whatever functionalities you desire to make your site even more functional.  You can get WordPress themes, plugins, and video tutorials here as part of your membership with Marketer’s Relief.
Blogs in general are very SEO-friendly, meaning that the search engine slike Google love them.  Structure your blog properly and you will get a lot of search engine traffic, even form places you never suspected.  When you combine a well organized and optimized blog with good Web 2.0 traffic generation techniques, you are in the driver’s seat with your business.

To learn more about blogging with WordPress, check out all these  WordPress video tutorials

It is easier than you think to find free WordPress Themes for your blog. The key is to find a theme that suits your topic and has the flexibility to work with the add-ons that your blog is likely to need.

More details follow.

With Part 4 Of the Blog Marketing Plan, we’re going to cover how to promote your own products via your blog.

I know that blogging can be a time-sucking distraction for many online business owners, and there’s only so much time in the day to market your blog while also doing all your various other business tasks.

How To Self-Promote On your blog:

• Instead of putting up advertisers’ ad images on your blog, put ad images up of your products instead.
• Get a plugin that makes WordPress popups appear to new visitors to build your subscriber list.
• Put up a dedicated subscribe page on your blog and link to it at the bottom of your posts.
• You can even put some AWeber code at the end of each blog post by pasting in the HTML code that Aweber generates for you.
• Add to your blog roll (choose wisely here)
• Do blog commenting to get visitors back to your most relevant posts
• Ask for reviews on marketing forums to see how others view your blog
• Get your blog reviewed by others for free, or for a small fee ( these are permanent links and if the blog-reviewing site gets good traffic, then you’ve built your asset up in a wise way here.)
• Have a section of your blog dedicated to promoting your products, and use PAGES and POSTS for this.
• In your Contact Me page , make sure you spend a lot of time on that because a lot of first-time visitors will click on that to see if there’s any  reason why they may choose  to listen to you over other bloggers looking for attention.
• Be yourself!  Unique-ness is rarely seen on the blogosphere and that’s why some blogs do better than others.
• Make sure you carve out a special niche for yourself as a blogger (Adsense king, queen, niche blogging guru, business strategies etc…)

Blogging Tip #20 will be the last in this series ( for now) and I hope these 20 tips help you build a good foundation for building your blog into a valuable online business asset.

Blogging Tip #18- Your Blog Marketing Plan (Part 3 of 4)

In Blog Marketing Plan Part 1, we covered what the overall topic and blog marketing strategy is going to be for your blog.
In Blog Marketing Plan Part 2, we covered some blog Promotion Tactics and Assessment of the Competition
Part 3 of the Blog Marketing Plan will discuss 3 monetization methods you can implement after your blog has been established for a while and getting some traffic.
1.    Paid reviews- This is where you get paid to write reviews on certain products.  You simply put up a dedicated page on your blog that describes the prcoess by which someone can get their product reviewed by you.
2.    Sponsored Advertising- whereby advertisers place images or even text links on your site.
3.    Blog Affiliate Marketing- whereby you promote products not your own as an affiliate
Some recommendations for doing Paid Blog Reviews:
·    Automate this by having your dedicated Paid Review page set up with an order button of some kind, like PayPal.
·    After the person pays through Paypal have a squeeze page set up so they can get on your email list, and more importantly, so they have your email address, too.
·    Have them email you the finished product.
·    Explain that your reviews are un-biased, so if your review isn’t a super-duper recommendation, there are no refunds to be expected.
·    Allow them to fix whatever it is you deem lacking in their propduct, if anything.
·    If they improve their product enough to warrant a recommendation, modify your review accordingly.
·    Ask them for the keywords you should use for your review post.  This helps get the review more blog traffic and it serves them well, too.
·    Don’t be shy about asking to place an affiliate link to direct visitors to the product’s sales page,either.  The product owner is getting lifetime exposure for a one-time fee so it’s worth it for them to allow your affiliate link to be in the review.
Some recommendations for Sponsored Advertising:
·    Automate this as well…
·    Have a dedicated page displaying your blog traffic statistics and rankings
·    Define for them the allowable sizes for ad images of theirs to be displayed on your site (125 X 125 for example…)
·    Make the fee a monthly or quarterly payment
·    Offer a 50% discount for these advertiser for a paid review, too.  This helps get more notice to their offer and is a great incetive to reach the blog visitors that are “banner blind”.
Some recommendations for Blog Affiliate Marketing:
·    Offer a valuable and relevant bonus to those who buy through your affiliate link
·    Send them to a special squeeze page to claim their bonus for buying through your affilaite link (have them send you their payment information, and also check with the product owner to verfiy this)
·    Make sure your affiliate marketing efforts are consistently ”in-theme” with the rest of your blog’s content ( sorry, this had to be mentioned)
Part 4 of the Blog Marketing Plan will discuss how to promote your own products from your blog

Blogging Tip #16- How To Develop A Blog Marketing Plan
Do you have a marketing plan for your blog?

Many people don’t have a solid plan when they start their blog and end up changing horses mid-stream with their business ideas. This blog is/was an example of that:

Quick story:  When I was told that starting a blog would be a good idea, I just threw up any old blog with a theme made for me by the staff at Authority Site Center.  Then I started writing my marketing thoughts and treated my blog merely as a communication device to get my readers’ feedback on some things I wanted to share. I didn’t want to write an email and a blog post since I’m a big fan of re-purposing content and writing…

So what happened was traffic starting coming to the blog from the search engines and that created a new twist on things..it added a new dimension to the overall marketing plan.

1. First-time visitors were seeing “public” content when they come to a blog for the first time, therefore that’s a new audience that doesn’t know me/you yet
2. With 2 types of visitors reading your blog, you’ll have to merge your writing to satisfy both types of readers.
3. The more you write, the more traffic you get and in time, you’ll have more clicks on your blog posts than you will your email being sent. Every first time visitor to your blog clicked at least once, but with email marketing that hardly ever happens.

So, it is very helpful if you realize that what I just told you will happen to you when you have a blog feeding two types of visitors.
·    You want site visitors to become email readers and RSS readers
·    You want your email subscribers to be reading your blog.

Develop Your Blog Marketing Plan… Part 1
Are you going to write reviews to get long-tail traffic to your site from likely buyers?
If so, be prepared to be the King or Queen of long tail traffic generation because the traffic only spikes during product launches.

You will also want to write unique reviews, not some template-ized nonsense that doesn’t seem unique or new, and a flat-out sales pitch.

BLOG  REVIEW SITE TIPS:
·    Be honest, completely honest about what you’re reviewing…
·    Do you have the product?
·    Did you try it?
·    What chapter was the best? (enticing hook there)
·    At the time of this writing, the default review says Product Name + Review+ Killer Bonuses
·    Be unique in you’re writing
·    Write some bad reviews, too, to seem like you’re really an even-handed reviewer and not just someone who write 100% positive reviews.

In the internet marketing and health niches where things seem to be very fad-driven, once the celebrity status for a product goes away, your traffic drops, too.

You can keep writing reviews  to keep chasing the extremely targetted long tail traffic here and stay abreast of the upcoming product launches.

…but you can also write reviews on programs or services that will be an evergreen topic, too…something that’s going to be around in a year from now, like LinkVana and Aweber

2 MAJOR SEO TIPS HERE:
SEO TIP 1- If you’re going to have a blog centered around product reviews, get a domain name ( .com or .org ) and make sure the word  reviews is in your domain name.
Example #1-
Google the term aweber review and see where my blog post ranks for that term (#6 or 7 probably).
Example #2-
Google the term  Aweber reviewS (plural) and see where my other Aweber Review site is at. Note that there are keywords in the domain name and in the title, too.  At the time of this writing, that site is one week old and is ranked #4 or #5 for the term aweber reviews.  Soon to be #1..

SEO TIP 2- When configuring your blog, make sure that the word “reviews” is one of your main keywords…  This may sound stupid to you at first, but if you want to rank well for “product names” and reviews, then you need to have a lot of emphasis at the top tier of your site structure for one of your more important keywords for your site.

Ranking for the word review even if it’s page 10,000 will help you rank well for other main keywords on your site associated with the term  review
1.    OK, what if you’re not going to do a review site type of blog, then what?
2.    What do you write about, how do you market your blog, how do you meet your competition in order to beat them at their own game?

More on that coming soon, so much to share

Here are 12 Blogging Tips that should get your WordPress blog off to a good start.
These 12 Blogging Tips make up Part 1 of the Free WordPress Set up guide

Each of these topics has a link to a separate article and some are being updated.

1. WordPress Setup
2. The Correct SEO Permalink Settings For WordPress
3. How to Configure the All In One SEO Plugin
4. What Are The Best WordPress Plugins?
5. How To Configure WordPress NoFollow and DoFollow Settings
6. How to Make Your WordPress Blog Into A silo Site Structure
7. How To Find Free WordPress Themes
8. Create, Configure And Submit The RSS Feed For Your Blog
9. 10 Things You Should Do When Posting To Your Blog
10. How To Add The Aweber Form To Your Blog
11. Working With WordPress Blog Widgets
12. What To Do If Your WordPress Blog Is Loading Slowly