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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Submitting to Social Media Sites

By admin

Social Marker is an incredible tool for any blog. It is a great way to save time, when your  submitting your site to social  media sites. Now, be careful with Stumbleupon, because they have a policy against submitting your own sites. But most of the sites, are ones like Digg, with a voting format. So it’s fine if you want to submit your own ones. The only time consuming part in this whole thing, is creating accounts on each of the sites. That would take Forever!

So what I did, is just to make accounts on the big ones, like digg, stumble, propeller, mix, reddit… That way you can just do the top 15 ones, and save alot of  time. Most of the others ones won’t get you very much traffic anyway, so your really not missing anything. Hopefully, you should have accounts on most of those sites anyway, so you can just go right in and start submitting.

It has little click and drag boxes, at the bottom of the browser, that are so useful, because then you don’t need to retype everything again and again.

Another feature it has that is very nice, is the social marker button. You can add it to the bottom of your posts like a digg button, and if a reader clicks on it, it will automatically submit the information at socialmarker.com for them to submit. However, I wouldn’t recommend adding it yet, because at this point it would just be clutter. There aren’t enough people using socialmarker yet to make it worth it, but in the coming months it’s popularity should grow so be ready to add it.

I’ve included a video on using it, I’ve never used a video before so let me know if this is helpful, or if I shouldn’t bother again.

If you liked this post please subscribe to my feed, for more tips on How to Blog, and How to get Traffic.

Making your Blog Succeed

By admin

The key to succeeding on the internet, is to not have to high expectations starting off. Most bloggers have not quit their jobs, and are not relying solely on their blogs, unless they are already making a lot of money from it. Most of us, are doing this for a hobby on the side, and hoping that we might pick up a few bucks here and there along the way. If that is your mindset, then you will definitely succeed. However, if you are doing this working yourself crazy trying to make 1,000$ a day like John Chow and Steve Pavlina, you’ll… well… drive yourself crazy… There are very few bloggers who actually make that much money, and yet everybody talks about it, like it’s so easy. You need to be Very patience and have an inexhaustible niche to be writing in. All of those success stories, blogged for years. Yet, now we have all these people who think they can make a million bucks in a month or two. Statistics say 90% of blogs don’t last longer then two months, if you last longer then that, then just think about the possibilities. That means your site will be in the 10% left in competing in search engines, social sites, for traffic… If you are expecting right off, to make a bunch of money, and get a lot of traffic, it just won’t work. Patience is key, as well as knowledge and insight. You have to have the ability to find a popular niche, but not one that is overcrowded, and then be able to give new insight on that topic. In most niches, you’ll all be writing about the same things as everybody else, but you need to be able to analyze it in a different way, and to twist it to give it new meaning.

My #1 advice for you in blogging is this, have low goals starting off. Have high ambition, and a good work ethic, post as much as you can, but if your goal starting off, is to get 100 visits in one day, that’s fine. 100 is not very much, but if you start small, and let the success of your blog determine your goals then you’ll never get frustrated, because your blog will never be underachieving. But then once you get those 100 visits, move it up to 150, or 200. These last couple weeks I was getting more and more frustrated as mastersofseo didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped. Then I realized, that I was seeking an unobtainable goal at this stage. Maybe in a year I can have those same expectations, but not after only a month. So don’t get frustrated with your blog if it’s not doing as well as you wanted to, keep writing, keep researching, keep searching for new ways to market yourself, and don’t let other people influence your goals. Start small, and let it grow. 

Let me show you an example using my site. When I first started, here were my goals, for my first month.

1. 100 visits in a single day,
2. 1000 visits in a month,
3. 1$ in money

Those were all very obtainable goals, and I surpassed them in about two weeks, so I made them a little big larger.

1. 250 visits in a single day,
2. 3000 visits in a month,
3. 5$ in money

Again, pretty easy goals, are you noticing a trend here? All along the way, I was very excited about my blog, because it was always performing better then I expected. Since then of course, I have moved on to much more lofty goals, but I still follow the same format of start small, and let it surprise me or not, but either way I am not disappointed.

Now you maybe saying, but I did set low goals, and I still didn’t match them, what do I do!?!? Then just remember what I said earlier, blogging is a slow ride, it’s a test of patience. If your not matching your goals at first, then make the goals lower and lower until you can match them. As long as your getting at least one hit a day, then you can always have goal. And if your not, then email me at mastersofseo@gmail.com lol because I can send you at least one hit a day.