Funny Comment Spam

I’ve been getting this spam comment showing up in my Akismet folder lately:

Our young daughter had adopted a stray cat. To my distress, he began to use the back of our new sofa as a scratching post. “Don’t worry,” my husband reassured me. “I’ll have him trained in no time.”

I watched for several days as my husband patiently “trained” our new pet. Whenever the cat scratched, my husband deposited him outdoors to teach him a lesson.

The cat learned quickly. For the next 16 years, whenever he wanted to go outside, he scratched the back of the sofa.

Immediately followed by links to sex sites. I have to admit, if I’m going to get spammed, it’s nice to get a laugh out of it.

On a sad note, the Trackback Submitter comments keep coming like clockwork, always that same one line misspelled comment. You’d think the software would have some way to verify if comments were getting through, and stop submitting them if not.

Ah, the joys of being a blogger!

Why Editing Old Posts is a Good Idea

Many bloggers think of older posts as being over and done with, and are eager to move on to new posts.

As far as search engines are concerned, older posts are fair game. They’ll show up in search results the same as new posts, and continue to attract traffic. In fact, that’s one of the benefits of daily blogging, building up such a huge amount of content on your site that the traffic you attract from search engines continues to grow.

To get the maximum benefit from all this old content, you do need to give it a bit of care now and then.

Updating an old post makes search engines happy. Updated content, from a search engine perspective, is more relevant than content that wasn’t updated recently. As you continue to blog, you’ll gain in skill and knowledge, and it’s worth your time to rework some of your new insights into older posts now and then.

For example, after I’d written my How to Make Your Own Website For Free series, I found an easy way to embed graphics in posts. Since that series had, at the time, been a major source of traffic for the blog, I went and updated every post in the series with screenshots. I added value to the readers of the series, while at the same time keeping the content fresh for search engines.

Comments also count as updating the content of a post, so your visitors can help you to keep old posts fresh by commenting on them. I’ve heard some bloggers complain about getting comments on old posts, but that’s one of the ways of keeping those posts high in search engine rankings.

When you see in your traffic stats visitors hitting your site for a keyword but not getting to the post that is the best fit for that keyword, you can go back and edit the old post to be a better fit for the keyword. In that way you provide value to those visitors, ensuring they’ll arrive on the post that best answers the question they typed into the search engine.

It’s easy as a blogger to be focused on the new content and the next post you plan to write, but don’t forget to give the old posts some love now and then. Search engines will throw extra traffic your way as a result.

Why Comments on Blogs Are Important

A blog lives and dies by the traffic it attracts.

You can use various techniques to get traffic, but the best way is to get it through search engines. This traffic is free, and they are already interested in what you have to say. Search engine traffic is largely driven by your content.

And your content includes the comments other people leave on your blog. Comments can cause your blog to get traffic you never expected, and attract readers from new audiences. As an example, Online Opportunity recently had a visitor who was searching Google looking for ways a 14 year-old could make money online. They ended up at my post about how to make money blogging.

That visitor wasn’t due to the content I put into the post, but due to a comment left by Carl Ocab. In the comment Carl shared that he was 14 and made money blogging.

These trickles of traffic add up over time to a steady stream. Comments give you content that is different from what you normally write, and help you to attract visitors you might not otherwise have attracted.

Also note that comments on old blog posts make it seem to search engines that the page’s content has been updated. Search engines like pages that update their content regularly.

In the early days of a blog, it can be tough to get people to comment. Later, when a blog has a thousand visitors a day, every post will get some comments. New blogs need to be a bit more creative, though.

One creative approach is being taken by Mr. P over at Cash for Comments. You can find the full details here, but the short of it is that in exchange for 5 comments on his blog and a review, he’ll return the favor and give you a review and five comments on your blog. The scheme seems to be working out well for him.

Other approaches to increasing comments include closing posts with questions, or holding contests for comments. An example of a contest for comments is over at Pure Blogging’s $200 contest. Basically, $100 is awarded to whoever submits the 1,000th comment on the blog. So go comment on Pure Blogging, and maybe you can make an easy $100!

Pure Blogging is also giving $100 to a random blogger who helps spread the word about this contest. This post doesn’t count, since it isn’t in a post of its own. So if you want to enter that portion of the contest for a chance at $100, click the link above and check out the contest rules.

However you do it, increasing the number of comments on your blog is a great way to increase the amount of traffic you’re getting. What are your favorite ways of getting visitors to comment?

Picking a Domain Name for Your Blog

I don’t recommend the use of Blogger.com for blogs you intend use to make money.

The reason is that blogging is more than just writing interesting posts. You’re going to do a lot of work building backlinks to your blog. If you eventually outgrow Blogger.com and want to move to your own domain name, you’ve lost all those backlinks and have to start from scratch.

So if making money is your goal, start with your own domain name. You can get your own domain name with free hosting (see my JustFree.com series on making your own website for free), or you can go with paid hosting (my favorite paid host is Site5, their $5 a month deal gives you enough space and bandwidth to run several websites).

Having your own domain name helps in two ways.

Branding Your Blog

Branding your blog is the process of making its name recognizable, and considered as a resource for your niche. A domain name for branding purposes doesn’t have to have anything to do with the topic of the website. Consider how Amazon.com has become a household name for an online bookstore, or Google.com is synonymous with search engines.

Branding makes it easy for people to tell others about your blog (“Hey, have you heard about FruFru.com?”).

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines, unromantic that they are, consider a website to be relevant to a keyword if the keyword appears in the domain name. The effect is not huge, and can be overcome if your domain name has nothing to do with the topic of your website. But if you’re starting a site from scratch, consider if using your site’s primary keywords in your domain name is a good idea.

For example, if you’re starting a blog about car repairs that can be done at home, you could use FixMyCar.com and get a relevancy boost for people typing in “how do I fix my car”. Yet it’s still a brandable name, if not as obscure as Amazon.com.

Don’t worry too much if you can’t get the exact keyword domain name you want. Like I said, you can overcome the small relevancy hit you’ll get by not having keywords in your domain name. Search engine optimization is mostly about backlinks and anchor text, with domain names playing a smaller part.

For this blog, I wanted a domain name that was brandable and yet would also be meaningful for the topic of making money online. Online Opportunity seemed like a good choice. The .com wasn’t available, and I wasn’t willing to pay a premium for it, so I went with the .org.

If you have a blog already, how did you pick your domain name?

How to Pick Your Blogging Niche

You think you want to try blogging as a way to make money, but aren’t sure what the first step is? Lucky you found this post!

The absolute first step in starting a blog is to pick your niche. Before keyword research, before getting a domain name, before picking a blogging platform, before anything else, you must decide what it is you’re going to blog about.

Here are some tips to help you pick a niche that will work for you.

The Niche You Know

Topics you know and are passionate about work well. If you can’t get both of those qualities, then pick something you’re passionate about, whether you know anything about it right now or not. You can gain knowledge through learning and research, but it’s hard to gain passion if it doesn’t exist at the start.

Why is passion so important? Simply put, you’re going to be writing about this topic for a long time. A daily posting schedule is great for building readership and keeping your readers interested. But think about what a daily posting schedule means. Seven days a week, you have to come up with content that’s interesting enough to be read. Days when you’re not feeling like writing, days when you’ve had a fight with your spouse, days when you couldn’t sleep, days when you missed the mortgage payment. You still have to write.

If you’re not passionate about your topic, you’ll skip days and lose readers, and eventually stop writing altogether. There’s a reason most blogs don’t get past the six month mark.

Popular Topics

If you have a choice between passions, blog about something popular. You want to make money with your blogging, which means getting as many people to read your blog as possible. A blog about the wear patterns on ant thoraxes might be interesting, but probably won’t get you the volume you need to make serious money.

Don’t be afraid to blog about topics you don’t think are popular, though, if that’s where your passion is. It’s a big world out there, and you never know who else happens to be Googling looking for a blog about ant thoraxes.

Unpopular Topics

If your passion is on a topic that is distinctly unpopular, that’s fine too. Note that I don’t mean unpopular as in nobody else is interested in it, but unpopular in that everyone hates the topic. You can generate a lot of blog traffic by being unpopular. Controversy is an amazing attractor.

Stay Away from Making Money Online

Just because you want to make money online doesn’t mean your blog has to be about making money online. There are plenty of people making respectable incomes blogging about various topics that have nothing to do with making money online. You might want to make money online, but are you passionate about sharing your knowledge on the topic with others?

Think carefully before starting a blog in this niche.

Write Daily Articles

Once you have a topic picked, then it’s time to write some articles about it. Don’t setup a blog, don’t pick a domain name, just write an article a day about the topic for a week. This is your dress rehearsal, to see if you can actually write about the topic and keep your passion for it.

When you make it through the week and still feel like you want to keep writing about the topic, then you’ve found your niche! Now it’s time to pick a domain name, do keyword research, identify categories, pick plugins, etc.

After you setup your blog, you already have those seven articles written. Post them all at once to make your blog seem lived in, and then start writing your daily posts.

So how did you pick your niche?

Maintaining Your Blog’s Focus

When writing a niche blog, one of the most important things you can do is maintain your focus on the niche.

It’s tempting, when you have a blog and are having trouble finding something in your niche to write about, to toss in an off-topic post here and there. That’s not a good idea for a couple of reasons.

First, off-topic posts draw untargeted search engine traffic. These people will come to your blog expecting it to be about one thing, when it isn’t. They won’t click on your ads or read your other posts. They’ll realize they’re in the wrong place and leave. This is what happened at Selaplana.com. The blog gets a large amount of daily traffic, but most of it’s drawn by the off-topic posts and doesn’t convert well for the on-topic advertising.

Second, your regular readers read your blog because they’re interested in your views on your niche. An off-topic post doesn’t provide value to them. Put enough off-topic posts in, and you’ll lose the interest of your regulars.

If you have a significant amount to say about a topic other than your blog’s niche, then start a second blog targeted to that new niche. Maybe you have to cut down your posting frequency in your old blog to contribute to the new one, too. That’s okay. Pick a posting frequency for both you can live with, and go to it. Your regular readers in your old blog will still get content that’s valuable to them, if perhaps a bit slower. Readers to your new blog won’t be attracted thinking it’s about one topic, when it’s really about another.

I’m probably in the minority in my thinking on this, but I consider paid reviews to be off-topic for most blogs. Sometimes the topic of the review matches the blog’s niche closely enough that it’s valuable, and you can imagine the review would have happened anyway, but most of the time there’s the sense that the review wouldn’t have happened without the money. Paid reviews are a way to make you money, but don’t provide much niche value to your readers unless you’re pretty strict about which reviews you accept.

Also off-topic are the various viral marketing schemes designed to increase your blog’s page rank or search engine results positioning. If you have a blog that’s about SEO, then testing these schemes is entirely on topic. But I haven’t seen yet a blog that comes back with concrete data on the results of using a viral marketing scheme.

Of course, if you’re writing a personal blog, then anything goes. JohnChow.com is a good example of a non-niche blog. It’s supposed to be about making money online, but covers such a variety of other topics that I’d consider it more of a personal blog than a niche blog. A personal blog is where you post about whatever you feel like, airing your rants and wisdom equally, which pretty much sums up John’s blog.

People read niche blogs for the information they provide on the niche. People read personal blogs because they like who you are and how you present yourself through your writing. It’s important when you start a blog to know which kind you’re starting, and to keep your focus.

Examples of niche blogs in the make money online niche that keep their focus are Self Made Minds and DoshDosh. Every post is about the niche itself.

I’d love to hear other examples of niche blogs that do a great job keeping their focus on their niche content. Leave a comment and let me know your favorites.

A DoFollow Directory

I’d mentioned in a recent post that I’m now using the DoFollow plugin as a way of rewarding commentators to the blog with a link that search engines will follow.

I just ran across a post about a DoFollow directory. The basic idea is that if your blog uses the DoFollow plugin, you can submit it to the directory. If you want to find blogs that use DoFollow, you can use the directory.

Finding other blogs that use DoFollow is helpful for two reasons.

First, supporting those blogs keeps them alive, and increases the chances that more blogs will use DoFollow.

Second, leaving comments on those blogs will have a positive effect on your blog’s page rank and and search engine results positioning.

It’s worth noting that keyword stuffing is considered to be impolite in DoFollow blogs, though. Keyword stuffing is using a keyword as your name instead of you name, in order to rank higher for that keyword in search engines. Some DoFollow blog owners will not approve comments that use keyword stuffing.

If you have a DoFollow blog, head over to the directory and add your blog!

Blog Profits Blueprint Review

Blog Profits Blueprint is an ebook on how to make money blogging.

You’re probably thinking, “not another one!” Bear with me, because Blog Profits Blueprint is what John Chow’s ebook should have been.

Blog Profits Blueprint is written by Yaro Starak, a man who makes money blogging. He doesn’t make quite as much each month as John Chow, but his ebook is a much better read for those new to blogging.

Yaro covers the strategies and tactics of professional blogging. A focus throughout the book is that if you’re serious about making money blogging, you treat it as a business. That means learning to market your blog to gain readers and build trust. It also means making certain that your blog adds value to your readers, otherwise you’ll have no readers.

Some of the tactics covered include how to create what Yaro calls a pillar article. These are the articles that draw the most traffic and gain you readership. You’ll see similar advice in other blogs: create a top 10 list, a how-to article, give away and ebook for free, etc. Tactics also include marketing your blog.

While none of the material in Blog Profits Blueprint is revolutionary to anyone who has been blogging for more than a few months, it’s indispensable for someone new to blogging who wants to get started and have a hope of someday making money from a blog.

Yaro’s offering Blog Profits Blueprint for free. He also is going to be offering a mentorship program for those serious about making money blogging, where he offers advice and exercises to be completed.

I’d recommend Blog Profits Blueprint to anyone thinking about getting into professional blogging.

How To Make Money Blogging: What Would John Chow Do?

In any field, if you want to be good at something you look to those who are and see what they’re doing right. If there’s something that John Chow does well, it’s make money online using his blog.

I’d really love to look at what John does to monetize his blog. But that’d be a bit like telling you how Bill Gates gets business loans. A beginning blogger simply can’t use the same techniques and expect success.

So I want to go back in time and see how John started. How did JohnChow.com start off? Using the magic of the Wayback Machine, we can take a look through the mists of time and see the site as it stood on December 4th, 2000.

You’re probably thinking, “my blog’s much cooler than that!” Keep in mind that the Wayback Machine doesn’t always do a good job of capturing themes in a site, so I’m not sure if the site looked that bad. But you’re probably right that your blog looks much better.

The site doesn’t change much until late 2005, when it has become an actual blog. One of the things that strikes me right off is that the mix of posts is about the same as now. Some personal posts, some online marketing, and some technology related posts. John writes about the things that interest him, and that interest comes through the blog.

According to John himself, he didn’t monetize the site for nine months, so from December 2005 until about September 2006 the blog was run without any advertisements. This allowed John to build a loyal readership.

Too many bloggers who start out wanting to make money with their blog create a blog with no content in it and put in the maximum number of Adsense blocks possible. But it’s the reader of a blog who click on the links, and many people are turned off by advertisements on a new blog.

Do you have to wait nine months? Not necessarily. Randall Cornett waited three months, and showed over $50 in advertising income for the month. Not quite up to John Chow’s approximately $350 in his first month, but it’s a good sign you don’t have to wait quite as long to monetize your blog.

The key would be whether you have readers who are participating in your blog. Do they leave comments? Do they seem to care about what you’re posting? If so, you could probably get away with placing some discreet ads on your blog.

Keep in mind that less is often more, though. Jane May reported an increase in Adsense income from removing ad blocks from one of her blogs. The key is that you don’t want to annoy your readers…they’re the ones who make you money.

So what John Chow did right is to start a blog on topics he was passionate about, and build a loyal readership. At the point when he started monetizing the blog, he was popular enough for it to not affect his readership.

What else has he done right?

John offered links from his page to people who review his site. By linking to other sites, John shares a bit of his PR with them…in essence, hanging around with the popular kid makes you a bit more popular, too. Of course, this resulted in more traffic to JohnChow.com which meant more readers.

Many bloggers are obsessive about page rank (PR). Now, realistically, PR isn’t that important for traffic. Traffic comes from your search engine rankings and from links to your site. PR is a result of good links to your site, but improving your blog’s relevancy to search terms will do more than raising your PR to get you sustainable traffic. But PR is a metric, and people love to maximize metrics. John capitalized on this love of PR to get links to his blog.

Let me repeat from above, it’s your readers who make you money. Growing your readership is the most important part about making money blogging.

Take a look back at the chart of John’s earnings since he started monetizing his blog, and you’ll see the dollar amounts increase month after month. This no doubt reflects an increasing readership.

So if we ask, “What would John Chow do?”, the answer seems to be to write about what interests you and build a loyal readership before even considering monetizing a blog.

Have you had different experiences with ads on blogs? Leave a comment and let us know!

How to Make Your Own Website for Free, Part 4

I know that this should have been the first of a series of posts on search engine optimization. That’ll come next. Someone asked me when the promised post about WordPress customization on JustFree.com would come, so I thought I’d go ahead and put it up.

Part 3 of the series on JustFree.com and WordPress stopped just after getting WordPress installed and the admin password changed. Since the biggest reason to use JustFree.com and WordPress as opposed to WordPress.com is the ability to use plugins, I wanted to cover how to install WordPress plugins on JustFree.com.

The first step is to pick a plugin to install. There are a multitude of plugins available for WordPress. Do a Google search on “best WordPress plugins” to get half a dozen ten best lists. I’ll use as my example the Redirect plugin. This plugin will make sure that www.example.com and example.com are treated as the same place by the search engines. This is important for search engine optimization purposes.  The plugin is available at http://www.justinshattuck.com/wordpress-www-redirect-plugin/.

Download the plugin zip file. You need a zip utility to unzip the file you just downloaded. If you don’t have one, go to http://www.7-zip.org/ and download and install 7-zip. Then unzip the plugin zip. You should end up with a single file named www-redirect.php. Different plugins will result in different files or even whole directories.

The basic idea with any plugin is to transfer the files that were inside the zip to the proper place on JustFree.com. So go logon to your JustFree.com control panel, and click the File Manager icon along the left. You should see something like this:

The directory named “blog” will be whatever you named your directory when you installed WordPress. Click on the name of that directory to go into it. This is the main directory of your blog. Click on the wp-content directory to go into it, and then the plugins directory to go into it. You should now be at a screen like this:

WordPress comes installed with three plugins by default, which are the two files and one directory you see here. We want to get our plugin files into this directory so WordPress can use them. If your plugin came in a directory structure, you generally want to recreate the same directory structure here. When in doubt read the README.TXT file that came with the plugin.

The Redirect plugin just has a single file we need to put into the plugins directory. So click on the “Upload Files” link. You’ll get three browse buttons. Click the top one and find www-redirect.php, and then click “Upload”. You should now see something like this:

The plugin is now installed. Log onto your WordPress blog as Admin and click on the “Plugins” link on the dashboard. You should see this:

 

Click on the “Activate” link on the far right of “WWW Redirect”. That whole line should now be green, indicating that the plugin is activated. Other plugins are installed and activated the same way. Some will have options under the Options item on the dashboard after they’re activated.

The trickiest part about installing plugins is installing the ones that have entire directory structures. You’ll have to use the “New Directory” link in the file manager to recreate the directory structure, and then upload files three at a time to the right spots (if you know how to use an FTP client, you can do this more quickly, but then you’re probably not still reading this if you do).

This concludes the series on WordPress and JustFree.com. If you have problems getting plugins installed, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to help.