102 Blogging Tips All Bloggers need to Know

By admin

As 2008 comes to a close, I want to wrap up my first year of blogging with some things I’ve learned this year. Many of these are mistakes I’ve made, so hopefully you can learn from them.

Expectations and Prep-work

1. Write about what you know

2. Post as much as you can

3. Don’t get started unless you have the time to finish

4. Don’t do it for the money

5. Blogging should be a hobby, not a frantic attempt for cash

6. The bloggers who succeed are those who know what they’re doing

7. Don’t fall for the John Chow Effect

8. The only secrets to blogging are consistency, and originality

9. Sadly, more posts beats larger posts

10. Focus on content, and the rest will come

Setting Up your Blog

11. Read blogging tips blogs, pretty much anybody on this list is good.

12. Create the essential accounts, twitter, stumble, digg, feedburner, google…

13. A good design is important, but a bad one won’t destroy you.

14. Prepare yourself for a roller coaster of success and failure

15. Use wordpress, not blogger.

16. If you know how to get your own domain

17. Write as many posts while you’re in the mood, because there will be those days…

18. Start networking right away.

19. Read this article

20. Study a little, these topics in this order, CSS, HTML, SEO Traffic Generation, Social Networking, and Social Media.

Essential Plugins (for Wordpress)

21. Top Commentator List

22. SEO All in One

23. Not a plugin but use the latest version of Wordpress and keep updating.

24. Comment Luv

25. If you’re picky about comments, Keyword Luv

26. I love Social Book Marking

27. Large RSS and Email Subscribe Buttons

28. Akismet! It’s blocked 450,000+ spam comments on here

29. Full Text Feed

30. Google XML Sitemaps

Content

31. Make content your focus at the beginning, not marketing.

32. Set up a recommend/featured posts set up, so that you can advertise your top posts.

33. Write in lists and use pictures

34. Conduct lots of reviews, studies, and polls

35. Use lots of links, to yourself, and to other bloggers

36. If it’s under 500 words don’t post it

37. Humor is ok, as long as you’re still giving them good information

38. Read some stellar posts so that you get an idea on how to do it.

39. Bold and Italicize your keywords, this helps catching the readers eye, and the SE spiders like it.

40. Use spelling and grammar checks

Marketing

41. Comment like crazy

42. Look for free links like Q/A posts, or top commentator lists…

43. If you have good information to share, share is as good information, not as obvious spam, The Secret to Millions Online

44. The best way to get quick links, is through sponsoring a popular contest

45. Learn How to Comment successfully

46. Learn Popular Social Media Sites

47. Email people, and have a contact page.

48. Read and study. Learn from the experts, and other people’s failures.

49. A Failure is better then never even trying. Because then you’ll probably succeed next time.

50. Accept that some posts will do better then others, and market those ones.

SEO

51. Use the SEO All in One tool. I know I already said this, but use it from the beginning, that way you have meta tags, and descriptions on every post.

52. You don’t need to be an expert on SEO to be able to use it, learn the basics and you’ll be fine.

53. Use comments for SEO purposes

54. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to choose your keywords

55. If you’re in this for the long run, aim for popular keywords now. It’d be annoyed to have to re-optimize later, for a different keyword.

56. Make your title tag your top keyword, and put that keyword in your meta description and keywords for your homepage.

57. Use beginner and advanced squidoo tips, to bring traffic and Link juice to your site.

58. Google respects powerful sites. Just keep focusing on content , and dont‘ use too much flash, and you won’t be sandboxed.

59. Google isn’t the devil people make it out to be. They’re just scared of it, because they don’t understand it.

60. If you comment enough, then all your posts will be added to google anyway. You don’t need to worry about submitting your posts to it, and don’t’ waste your money on those people saying pay them to add your site to search engines.

Traffic Generation

61. Social Media is awesome, and highly successful. Learn Digg and stumble!

62. Comments bring traffic.

63. Guest posting brings traffic, links, and markets your site. This is one of the best ways to market your site.

64. The Viral Effect can happen to anyone, at any time. Be prepared with either a big enough server or run away from digg, cause it’ll blow.

65. Word of mouth/email is still the best way to get traffic. You need your readers to be telling other people about your site.

66. Use Press Releases, and take advantage of current events to be the first to be writing on your evolving niche.

67. Use forums on your niche to your advantage. And don’t be afraid to ask questions on this.

68. Use your connections to market your site/products.

69. Sell something that’s really good. Spend a while on an Ebook and give some free promotional to start the viral effect rolling, and get the traffic flooding in.

70. Try the new rage, Video Posting

Stat Trackers

71. Alexa and technorati are both awful and misleading, try not to use them when you’re analyzing sites.

72. Though still skewed, siteanalytics is a good way to compare site’s traffic.

73. Use websitegrader to give you useful information about your stats, and site SEO.

74. Get listed in lists like 45n5’s and Winning the Web’s.

75. Use every stat tracker you can find.

76. Every stat tracker will be different, but analytics is the most trusted.

77. Aweber isn’t legit, don’t use it, and people don’t trust it. People use it to try and say they get hundreds of visits a day, but it’s not true.

78. Feedburner is the best feed stats tracker.

79. Use these tools to get untrue and unrealistic monetary values of your site.

80. Understand that visitors are not what makes a blog, but it’s active readers that create a community.

Monetizing

81. Have a creative original 125×125 ad.

82. Have an original site slogan that people will remember.

83. Don’t do it too early.

84. You can always monetize later, but monetizing too early can greatly hurt your site.

85. Ebook sales are awesome, once you have a popular enough blog.

86. Don’t try and sell something you don’t know.

87. Monetizing=Marketing You’ll only sell as much as you can market it.

88. Private ads are the top money makers for most people.

89. Affiliate Marketing can be a huge money maker if you know how to do it.

90. Sponsored Reviews and PPP, programs like that destroy your Page Rank. Be careful what programs you start up.

Extras

91. An About page is not an essential, but you should make one if you can.

92. A Contact Me Page you Need!

93. Advertise pages are more then just for buying advertising. I read all advertise pages just to see what type of stats they have, and which ones they use to get an idea of the blog. If you see them relying too much on illegitimate sources you can realize how important money is to them.

94. Patience and Perseverance are critical to succeeding on the internet. You’ll probably need to wait a while awhile before you will see anytime of monetary success.

95. Use Google Reader to stay informed.

96. Learn twice as much as you write. This way you always stay a step ahead of your readers, and have an inexhaustible amount of posts to write.

97. Don’t let stat results get you depressed. Good content combined with time, will always succeed, eventually…

98. Getting the first 100 subscribers is the hardest. After that, it only gets easier.

99. Have a good archives system set up, so that people can find the posts they’re looking for.

100. People Love Freebies! Give as many freebies as you can.

101. I got this post idea from Thoushallblog’s 101 blogging tips list. Make sure you check out his as well, because he has some great stuff on there, that I didn’t cover.

102. Stay One Step ahead of the other bloggers in your niche.

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Broken Links

By admin

The dreaded 404 or 403 redirect page. Or the, “this link is broken page.” Now many people debate what exactly are the effects of broken links, for your SEO. You can relax somewhat, it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. However, it does have some effect, and if you can fix it, then why not?

It’s really hard to avoid broken links completely, especially if you’ve ever made a large list of something. Or if you are changing your site around, and the links get messed up. Now despite what people tell you, having a broken link is not a sign of sloppiness and being unprofessional. Broken links will happen, however, it is a sign of laziness not to fix them. They will occur, but now it is quite easy to be notified about it, and to get them fixed. Nothing is more frustrating, then when you’re reading a post, and they say click here for more information, and “here” is a broken link. So I’ve compiled a list of free sources, that allow you to easily check your links, to make sure they are all legit.

*Note* I haven’t tried all of these yet, so some may be easier to use then others, but they should all do the job.

First, check out this site. It has a bunch of free downloadable programs, that allow you do do fun stuff like link popularity, checking backlinks, but mainly to check for broken links.

Second, there’s a great program called linktiger. That sends you an email with how many broken links you have. I use this one, and it’s pretty useful. You can just login and see which links are broken. It sends you weekly updates, of all new broken links.

Third, there’s a wordpress plugin that you can install, that will show up in your dashboard, every time you have a bad link. You can always trust wordpress, and so this one I would highly recommend. Unless you don’t use wordpress this is a great free option, and you should be checking your dashboard regularly anyway, so you’ll be able to fix the problem immediately.

And Fourth, Firefox has created an addon called linkchecker. Firefox has lots of great plugins and so if you aren’t using it already, you need to switch. But this is another great free option, that can help you as well.

So now that I’ve showed you all of these free, easy, options, you have No Excuse! You Are being unprofessional and lazy, if you have broken links on your site. So install the plugin, and addon, and start fixing all of your broken links today.

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The Importance of Linking to yourself

By admin

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SEO is typically split up into two general categories, On Page Optimization, and Off Page Optimization. They are pretty self explanatory, with on page, being changes that effect the things only on your website, and off page being changes that occur off the site. I’ve already written several posts on Off Page Optimization, concerning Basic SEO, as well How to Get Links, but I figured now it was time for some tips about On Page Optimization.

One of the most important aspects of on page SEO, is inner site linking. Inner site linking, is writing links inside your posts, back to other pages on your site. Most people don’t realize how useful this can be, or they think it’s considered spammy to link to yourself, however this is an easy way to improve your site’s SEO. There are multiple reasons this is helpful, and SEO is only one of them, I will go into detail on six different reason that linking to yourself is useful, and beneficial to your site.

Maneuverability Through the Site

Sites that are hard to maneuver through, will immediately be rejected by a reader. There are many factors that can help with this, namely having a good archives setup, but if you are continually linking to yourself a few times in each post, you will allow readers to be able to find your posts easily. And you will be able to pick your best articles, as the ones you link to, thus letting your readers see your best works for a second time. This is helpful not only for readers, but also for search engines. When a Search Engine spider comes to your site, it trys to find all of your posts, the easiest route is through a sitemap. But even without a sitemap, the spider will click on all of the links on your site, if some of them are your site, then it will be able to update it’s archives of that page more frequently. The more times and the more ways a spider sees your site, the more often it will be updated, thus resulting in more search engine traffic. If you link to yourself in your posts, you help your readers and the search engine spiders find their way through your site.

Expounding on Certain Issues

Sometimes when you are writing a post on a specific issue, then you don’t have time to give all of the background. Linking to an earlier posts explaining these different parts in greater detail, will greatly help your reader. I’ve done that several times already in this post, when I wanted to give you the option for more information on a particular topic. Linking to your self allows your readers to get more information on something if they so choose.

Making Old Posts Relevant Again

After a blog post leaves the first page, it often is buried in the archives except for occasional search engine traffic. By linking to past posts, you can refresh your readers on certain issues, and most likely show them content that they probably forgot. This will allow your old posts to be read again, so they won’t just be sitting in your archives for the few people who actually check on past posts. Linking to old posts, gives more information on your new ones, and makes the old ones available again.

Extended Visits from Readers

If you are linking to several posts in each of your new posts, then this will greatly increase the amount of time your readers stay. If you are writing good articles, and linking them to your older posts, this will give them more content to read, and thus more time on your site. The longer they stay and read, the better for you, so give them more information. Make sure it’s relevant of course, you don’t want to spam them, but if the posts relate then help your reader out by giving them more information.

Increased Chance of Reader Interaction

Extended visits result in a higher chance of stumbles, links, comments… The longer readers are on your site, the more likely they will be to comment. If they stumble and link to your site it will result in more traffic, helping you even more. By linking to yourself, you are increasing the possibility of them helping you out somehow.

SEO purposes

Linking to yourself helps with the two keys of SEO, keywords, and links. Most people don’t realize this, but linking to your blog post, from another post, is a legitimate link. However, a link’s value will decrease the more times you do it on a site, so don’t over do this, but this can be very useful if used correctly. Not only is it a real link, but you get to choose the anchor text for that link. In the links to myself earlier, I chose those anchor texts, based on what I’m trying to rank for in search engines. The Anchor Text is the signpost, telling the search engine or reader what the site is about. By choosing, for example “How to Blog“ as the anchor text, that would be the search term that I would rank for. When you link to yourself, choose carefully what the anchor text is, don’t just say something like, “if you want to read my other post on this click here.” Unless you are trying to rank for the term “here.” So link to yourself, choose the Anchor Text wisely, this anchor text will be a keyword also helping your SEO, and in an easy two second trick, you just did three things to help the SEO of your site for a particular search term.

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