Your Blogging Services Portal

If you are new to blogging and still feeling your way around, or if you’ve been blogging for some time but you’re making less money than you expected, it could be time to examine your blog for simple mistakes that most new bloggers make. Correct those mistakes then set your course for a lifetime of profitable blogging! These are the most common early blogging mistakes:

• Failure to Plan. Which means if you don’t plan your blog by choosing a layout that suits your purpose and determining what to blog about and when, you will just end up wasting your time, and making nothing. Spend time planning your blog before posting to it, look at other people’s blogs and adapt their ideas to suit your purposes (do not copy too closely and do not breach trademark and copyright laws), study ways to grow traffic to your blog or else you could be blogging forever with no one ever to admire your work.
• Failure to Focus. Be focussed and choose a definite subject for your blog. Niche blogs tend to rank higher in search engine listings than blogs having no special order or theme. This is because, when people search online, search engines look for sites rich in information to benefit their customers and will choose themed blogs over others containing information about anything and everything and sometimes nothing!
• Expect immediate visits. Don’t expect immediate results and do not stop blogging if your blog doesn’t attract visitors or profits during its first month online. As for any web site, the more content you add to your blog the higher your blog will rank in search engines and the sooner you’ll attract regular visitors.
• Create boring posts and titles that no one wants to read. Make your posting titles unusual, make them cryptic, this way you’ll incite curiosity and ensure your visitors actually read your postings and probably also join your mailing list or buy one of your recommended products.
• Failure to promote. Promote your blog every day, use free and low cost traffic generating techniques. Write articles, for example, featuring your blog in the resource box; post on other people’s blogs and link back to your own; post in forums and mention your own blog as a source of helpful advice to solve common member problems and queries; place free classified ads. on and off the Internet offering free gifts to people who visit your blog.

After all that you really can expect regular high traffic and good overall profits for all your hard work.

Targeted Web Traffic is getting visitors to your site who are interested in what you have to offer. These visitors have to be able to find your web site first. The two most common ways visitors will find your site is by typing in a word phrase into a search engine or linking to your web site from another web site. There are several ways to get your web site on the search engines results page and on other web sites. Many of these ways are free. Here are three free resources you can take advantage of to get targeted web traffic to your site.

Writing articles and publishing them on article web sites is a great way to bring attention to your web site. And sometimes these same articles will quickly rank on search engine results pages. This gives you another opportunity for visitors to find your site. These articles should have keywords or search phrases in them that visitors use to find information on your website topic. For example, if you have a website on aquariums. You would want your article to have phrases in it about aquariums or fish. These keywords should be considered in all three ways I discuss to get web site traffic.

Keep in mind, one article will not get the amount of targeted web traffic you are looking for. You will need to write and submit several articles focusing on the topic or niche of your web site. Most article web sites do not allow you to put links to any web sites in the body of the article. However, they do allow a bio box about the author to be used and a link can be placed in this text that points to your web site. Before publishing any articles, review each article web site’s policies.

Social media sites like Squidoo or Hubpages are sites where the members create and provide most of the content for the site. These types of sites allow you to directly link to your web site. So, you can create a page on the site that discusses the topic that your web site is about. You can include links to your web site allowing the visitor to the social media site to follow the link or click through to your site. This then brings targeted web traffic to your web site because the visitor wants more information on the topic of your web site. As with all 3 of these web site traffic ideas, these social media sites want good content and not one big advertisement. Being spammy and not providing any useful content may get your page deleted. And there goes all your hard work.

Blogging and Microblogging are similar and are both ways to get targeted web traffic. Blogging can be done by having your own blog web site or using a community blogging website. Wordpress has both types. I believe it is better to have your own blog so you are in control of the blog contents. Blogging is a platform that encourages the question “What’s on your mind?” to be answered. This type of site allows you to put in your own content, create links to your sites or other sites, similar to social media sites. Updating your blog weekly is a must. The search engines love new content. These updates can be short. Microblogging are sites that encourage very short entries, some only a couple of lines. One of these sites is Twitter. If blogging asks, “what’s on your mind?”, microblogging asks, “what’s on your mind right now?”As with blogging, you can link to your web site with microblogs, but be sure to provide good, informative content.

Using all three of these traffic generating ideas together will help bring in a steady stream of traffic. All of these ideas should be done on a consistent basis to keep the flow of targeted web traffic going to your site. Although I have only listed a few resources, there are almost unlimited resources that can be used to get web site traffic.

There’s no doubt about it – Twitter is a phenomenon. It has absolutely taken the social networking world by storm and is currently the fastest growing social platform with a massive increase in visitors every single day. However the world is split between those that ‘get it’ and those that really don’t have a clue and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Usually, those that don’t understand what it is and what it does usually come up with some excuse about it being a complete waste of time and totally pointless. I’m being unfair – it’s not an excuse, it’s a very valid reaction to something that they don’t understand yet everyone else appears to think is a big as the second coming.

But what is it and why is it taking the world by storm?

Well, Twitter explains the concept quite well themselves – it’s simply ‘micro-blogging’ or a platform by which you can type a really small message (140 characters – yes, less than SMS!) and this gets sent out to all your ‘followers’ (the people that are watching what you say). That’s it.

So, a bunch of people have expressed an interest in the information I put out on Twitter every day. Essentially, my 140 character nuggets of wisdom are important enough for them to want to read them and so they ‘follow’ me. Every time I utter something, they read it.

That’s it.

It works in reverse too. I follow them, they say something, I see it in my ’stream’ and if I like it, I can reply or ‘re-tweet’ it (essentially send it to all my followers).

Now, the answers to all the big questions are in that text above. The biggest question of all must be ‘how does this help me?’ and now I’ll provide the answer, it’s a humdinger.

Let’s say you are an accountant. You have 1000 followers on twitter and mostly you’ve been talking about the weather, the type of beer you like and the odd nugget of information about some odd accounts thing you do. But then you happen across something really interesting – you have some knowledge that will save people about 10% off their tax bill. You nonchalantly post this tidbit of information and suddenly people take notice. They also want to save the 10%.

One of your followers has 2000 followers of his own and he posts your information thinking it will be interesting to a lot more people. He’s right, suddenly they’re following you too. Your message has now reached up to 3000 people. What if some of those re-posted your information?

All well and good and you might get some extra followers but what you’re now doing is ‘networking’ and some of those followers will get in touch directly to say “can you save me that amount?” and you’ve got a customer.

So don’t dismiss Twitter, it is far more powerful than many people imagine and it’s really going to change the way we do business.