As a challenge to myself, I have set myself a challenge of taking this blog from a trickle of visitors to 1000 page hits per week, by the end of September. So, about 3 weeks on and at the end of the month, how am I doing?

March saw just 113 page hits, April had 255 hits and May had 273 hits. For June, the traffic level has increased to 466 page hits. No way near the 1000 target per week!

The best week was the week I started this self imposed challenge, seeing 130 page hits that week. So traffic is up, just not as much as I want to see. I think a few more unique articles are needed and I have a huge series of articles about to come off the press – along with the long promised Ebook…

Sadly, my efforts at commenting does not seem to be generating much traffic, although I have been choosing Do Follow blogs, so hopefully there will be a search engine links benefit there in the long term. Most traffic seems to be from Ezine Articles, which is always a good source of traffic. A couple of recent articles seem to have generated more visitors than others, so maybe these will really take off as they have only just been published.

However, a lot more work is needed so I’ll be experimenting with Twitter, maybe Facebook, and a few other tricks. I’ll post back in a few weeks a summary, sooner if I start to see a lot of succes with any of the methods!

Not sure what the difference is between a forum and a blog? Wondering which you should install and use on your website? Maybe you should use both?

If you are not sure what the difference is between a forum and a blog then we will start with looking at what each of these does.

What is a forum?
For a start, a forum is a way of members leaving comments and talking with each other. You as the site owner will create different areas of the forum, which are the high level topics. Members can then visit these different areas and create a new thread, which is a conversation. Other members will see the new thread and read the first post, adding their thoughts in new posts.

So a forum is a way of members starting and running conversations. It is good for your website as the members will visit frequently to see what new threads other members have started and to place replies on the threads that they are commenting on. Your members are generating loads of website comment, which could drive more visitors to your website!

What is a blog?
A blog in the traditional sense start with you the site owner, possibly with a team of other authors, writing posts about whatever subjects that you choose to start writing about.

Members of a blog are readers and they might follow your latest writing through email alerts or by watching your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. This alerts them to the latest posts and they can go straight to the posts that interest them.

Their involvement in the blog is to read your posts and if there is a real community feel they might even get around to leaving the odd comments. You might want to reply and on occasion they might reply back.

Where are they the same?
The purpose of both a forum and a blog is to get your visitors coming back time after time and feeling like they are part of the community of the website. They are both tools that build up a community of the website and hopefully customer loyalty. In both, your visitors can leave comments for others to read.

So, where are they different?
There is a huge fundamental difference between the two features of a website and both can be used together. In a blog, you the website owner write a post about whatever you want and readers may then leave simple comments. But in a forum, it is the readers that start the discussion and they are more than likely to come back and add more thoughts to the topics being discussed. Your involvement as the website owner is probably just to keep an eye on the posts and remove any inappropriate entries.

So a forum and a blog are both tools to make visitors feel that they are part of your site, keep them interested and returning to find out what it going on, but in a blog you are in control totally of the topics that are being discussed whereas in a forum the members can start new discussions.

A blog can be anything you want it to be for a variety of applications. What will use yours for? Here are some of the many uses of a blog that I know of.

A blog can be your personal inspiration!
Are you training for a marathon or trying to lose weight? Do you often wander from your goals and need a helping hand steering yourself back on track? Then blogging in a community could be just what you want. Start a simple blog, using a free community blog, and start describing your goals and ongoing training and exercise regime. Thinking of missing a session or just feeling low after a bad session? Then write a new post and share it with others and hope to get some positive comments back. Read through other blogs in the community and share your thoughts with them.

A blog can be a home business.
If you want to earn a little extra cash from home, then you can blog for an income. Create a blog and write about something that you know and start working on building traffic to the website. Then add Pay Per Click adverts, banner advertising, affiliate links and paid posting. You can quickly and easily turn a simple blog into a decent income.

A blog can inform your customers.
If you want to release news and the latest information to your customers then a blog can be an excellent way of doing this whilst building a community feel. Encourage your customers to visit your blog and learn the latest about your company, maybe providing free hints and tips to help them in their own business. Get them commenting on your posts and they will visit your site more often and be more loyal customers.

A blog can be a full website!
Blogging tools such as WordPress.org do not just need to be used for blogs – they can also be used as a content management system for a complete website! After you install your blog and set it up you can then create the pages you would in a normal website along with features such as contact forms, whilst being able to easy to update through the CMS system.

A blog can keep your business on track.
Add security to your blog so that only certain people can see relevant pages and you can use a blog to keep projects on track. Add a category for each new ongoing project and add posts for major changes, using the comments to discuss the changes and amendments and record them as complete. The blog then becomes an easy project management tool.

A blog can be an online newsletter.
If you want to run an online newsletter then a blog can be the tool to use. Each new issue becomes a post, with the advantage that your readers can also participate by leaving comments whilst making sure that they can get the latest posts by following your RSS feed.

A blog can be anything that you want it to be. Just get blogging!

If you are blogging then the last thing that you probably want is to get know as a bad blog. So, how can you maintain a clean reputation?

Avoiding claims of a being a bad blog is quite a simple task. Maintain your blog to high standards and keep it running well. Very simple, but what does that mean?

Write Good Posts – Make sure that you are posting genuine new content regularly. Your posts should be written by you yourself manually and in good English (or whatever language you write in). If you are typing up directly into your blog’s admin, install a spell checker into the toolbar and once you have finished your writing click the button to check the spelling, correcting the errors identified. Better still, if possible write in an application such as Word in which spelling and grammatical errors are immediately identified.

Make sure that you take the time to read your posts before you submit them to check for obvious errors and swat up on your grammar and punctuation skills, maybe even get someone else to proof read for you.

Other people’s work – Whilst it is fine to include the odd post from directory sites (as long as you stick within their limits of reprints) make sure that you include the original author’s biography in whatever form they require. There is no point claiming their work is yours – it is bad practice and if your readers notice, they will flee. Make sure that for every article from a directory that you post you write a few of your own to prevent the site looking like a spam blog.

One of the worst blogging ‘crimes’ is scraping information from other blogs. Do not do it! These automated post writing systems are bad and should always be avoided.

Balance advertising – We all love a bit of easy cash, but keep it in balance. For advertising on the page just place adverts in one or two blocks on the page. Any more is too in your face and can be counter productive – readers stop coming back and do not trust the adverts so don’t click them.

If you are writing paid posts then make sure that your blog does not consist of just sponsored posts. Aim to write at least 2 genuine content posts of a reasonable size for every paid post that you place and make sure that you are clear that some of your posts are sponsored.

Check Your Comments – If you are not watching every new comment that is posted on your blog then you might find a whole array of unsavoury comments are being left on your posts. Whilst obviously not your doing, the lack of removal of these comments will reflect badly on your blog. Take action to review all comments from new comment makers and as many comments as possible from those that have previously commented.

In short, to avoid claims being made that you are running a bad blog just make sure that you run and maintain the blog in an honest and open way and keep an eye on what is happening.

If you are wanting to get started blogging then there are a multitude of ways to do so. But, what is the best way to get started? How can you quickly set up an easy blog, with no hassle?

There are a few standard ways to start a blog and depending on your needs there are a few different systems that you might look at as the best blog start out kit.

But, what is the best for you and your blog? Well may not what I think is the best for me. We all have different technical abilities and skills to fall back on. For me, I always start a new blog with WordPress.org. To me, this is the best blogging platform above all others, but it does require some technical skills so if you are just starting out in the blogging world, it might not be for you.

Use a ready made hosted blog
Instead, use an off the shelf blog on a hosted platform. The two biggest and best known are Blogger and WordPress.com. With both of these, you can just sign up for an account, select a name for your blog and then choose a template for your blog.

Further down the line you can customise your blog more, but this is enough to get your blog running. So, which is the best?

Thinking of the future
A lot of bloggers will look to blogging as a way of earning a bit more cash. For this, you may want to install Adsense blocks, include paid advertising or take part in paid posting schemes. And this is where the deciding factor as to which is the best blog start out kit is.

If you sign up to WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress.org, which you install on your own hosting) and take the time to read the terms and conditions, you will discover that you are not allowed to include paid advertising on a WordPress.com blog.

So the best quick and easy blog start out kit in my opinion is Blogger.

Starting with Blogger
Go to Blogger.com and sign up for an account, choose you blog name and get blogging. I recommend it as a start up kit because it really is easy to use and once you are up and running the settings are easy to change to customise it for your own uses. There are also monetisation options to include your Google Adsense code very quickly so that you can earn commissions there.

But if you are wanting to really get into blogging long term then a domain name using a blogger subdomain does not look that good and give the impression you really want to give. But being the great tool that it is, Blogger has a way around that built in.

Flick through the settings and you will find that you can sign up for your own blog URL through the system, or use any URL you have registered elsewhere. In a few easy steps you have your own blog name, a layout that you want and opportunities to monetise the blog. All in a few minutes.

WordPress.com is good, but Blogger allows more. And that is why I count it as the best blog start out kit!

For many people, a small blogging income is a desired benefit from a new hobby. And the easiest way to do this is through displaying advertising on your blog. So how do you do this and where do you find advertisers?

Advertising on a blog is about the easiest way of creating a blogging income. The hardest parts of this are preparing your blog ready to earn money and then finding the advertisers. Here are the steps.

What you need to know.
Advertisers do not pay you just because you exist. They want something back in return and this is one of two things:

1) Some extra search engine optimisation through a link from your high search engine ranking blog

2) Some extra buzz from exposure to your readers.

Of course, being able to offer both in the same blog is the best!

The preparation
For a high search engine ranking blog you need to do your preparation through building lots of incoming links. There is enough written about this in detail already, but in short you can achieve this through writing articles, commenting on do-follow blogs, guest posting and similar tricks.

For high traffic blogs you need to target your work carefully. Target your search engine work at keywords you know will drive traffic and leave comments on high traffic blogs. Write highly targeted articles for directories with good readerships, join in with forums, go social with youtube and Twitter etc and other such high traffic driving tricks. There are a lot more tricks out there to create traffic!

The advertising
There are a few sites where you can sign up for banner adverts, but these are not the best sources of income. There are really just three good methods for advertising on your blog:

Google Adsense – excellent for high traffic blogs, especially those within niches that are popular with Pay Per Click advertisers. Very simple to maintain, you just sign up for an account and install the code on your blog. Google then take care of choosing which adverts to display on your blog and pay you once you reach the minimum payout amount.

Affiliate Marketing – probably the traditional blog advertising, here when you are talking about something you provide a link to the item in a suitable shop. For example, on my diving blog I can advertise a shop selling diving gear, linking to the item I am blogging about. The problem – well it only works on high traffic blog when the traffic is from the a country that the advertiser can sell to.

Paid Posting advertising – this is the widest form of advertising and there is probably a source for every blog. Through sites such as PayPerPost, you can sign up your blog and then wait for offers to arrive. This site provides opportunities for blogs from brand new and no traffic to high traffic and high Page Rank blogs that have existed for years. But most Paid Posting schemes are more interested in the established blogs, demanding that you have been blogging regularly for over 3 months.

So, these are your best three options for advertising on a blog. Let me know how you get on!

Adding a mailing list to your blog can result in a lot more visitors. But, is it easy? Does it involve a lot of effort and cost or is there a simple way to run a blog mailing list?

Putting a simple mailing list on your blog need not be that complicated. In fact, there are a few very easy ways to do this and to then make sure that you are getting the best from your efforts. There are a few steps to take to make sure that you are seeing the very best results.

Personally, I use two different ways to run mailing lists. There is a third way that people sometimes try thinking it is best, but in fact it turns out to be very problematic. And that is the manual approach. Do not try this! Some people think that if they have a simple contact form to collect email addresses and then send emails through outlook they can run a basic mailing list. Do not bother – it is doomed to failure through spam detectors and upsetting your ISP.

So, what are the realistic mailing list choices? Well the first is to install a plugin, such as the imaginatively titled Newsletter pluggin and to use that. It is very easy to install and set-up and really needs no explanation. The only issue is the bulk sending of emails might offend your ISP.

Therefore, the next best solution is a free mailing list provider. For this I use ymlp.com and sign up for their free service once the trial period is over. This is a good one to use, although there are plenty of alternatives. Again this is simple to install. You just tell them what fields you want to collect (for example name and email) and they give you the html for the form. Copy and paste that into a suitable page on your blog and you have your double opt in mailing list set up.

That is the sourcing of the mailing list sorted, but where do you collect the information? Ideally on every page! Within the side bar of your blog copy and paste in the mailing list form and this way every visitor gets to see the opportunity to join. But, will they be convinced? Probably not, so you also need a clear link to a page about the newsletter.

On this page repeat the sign up form and talk a little about the newsletter. Maybe mention how often you send a newsletter (with me, not very often!), make an offer or incentive for signing up (like my free ebook!) and promise not to sell or misuse email addresses. There is nothing worse than signing up for a mailing list and then getting loads of spam.

Maybe even, if you are using a service such as YMLP, link to earlier copies of the newsletter, this shows the quality of it and can convince more people to sign up. Also, tricks such as the so call slide ups (the new versions of pop ups), which show to new users can also make sure that plenty of people are joining your mailing list.

So, to put a mailing list on your blog, grab the pluggin or sign up for a free service, install the capture form in relevant places and make an offer that readers cannot refuse!

I have struggled for ages on this one, but finally Technorati has fully acknowledged my three blogs and I am listed!

What did I do? Well, I ignored it for three weeks, forgot about the system and got on with my own business. I just happened to sign on to look to see if by some miracle there had been an update and I was amazed.

So, out of all of the changes that I made to the three blogs that weren’t listed, which do I think helped? Well changing the RSS feed and the permalink structure was a waste of time – I only did that to one blog. Deleting and starting again did nothing – the same screen dump was used! And again, that only affected 1 blog.

The only act that I can explain that was applied across the board, was a Category Excluder pluggin. I am using that to remove from the RSS feed paid posts on the other 3 blogs as they, having decent Page Ranks, were getting a lot of paid posts. Now these paid posts were mainly off topic and, of course, included a link. So maybe there is a threshold that I crossed to the number of irrelevant links out you can have. I don’t think all links out are counted from looking at the blogs that link to me, so maybe it is those posts that are off topic causing a problem.

That is only a guess though. Who knows?

So you have not got much of a Page Rank for your blog, but you want to make some cash. What can you do?

If you have a brand new blog with no Page Rank and no traffic, then you need to look at our making money from a new blog article. But, if you have a poor Page Rank but you do have traffic, then there are other avenues to explore, which can be a lot more profitable.

Ideally to make the most money you need a good Page Rank and a lot of traffic. But, just one of these will make you cash and certainly a lot of traffic alone will earn money. In fact, in some ways it is the better situation and you have less risks.

In this situation you need to be making the most of the traffic and ignoring Page Rank and incoming links. There are three options (unlike high Page Rank / low traffic blogs, that can only use a version of the third option).

Affiliate Selling
Find products that your readers are likely to be interested in and mention them, along with an affiliate link, on your pages. Yes, as simple as that. What if your traffic is international? Then look for electronic products such as those provided through ClickBank.

Pay Per Click
If you have a lot of traffic then sign up for Google Adsense, grab the code for their advert units and install them onto your pages. Just a couple of blocks of adverts will do and you can be earning quite hefty sums if your traffic levels are high and the subject matter brings in good adverts. Recent reports suggest that Google is paying out between 51% – 68% of what the advertiser is paying to the website hosting the adverts, so allowing for their costs and taxes, this is a hefty proportion.

Sponsored Posting
You may think this is all about having a high Page Rank and selling links to advertisers, but it is not. There are several systems that go against this and actually add rel=”nofollow” to a lot of the links as they are just after your readers, not your Page Rank. Social Spark is a good example of this and a lot of what happens there is based on your traffic volumes, not your link building skills.

There are other sites that do the same, such as Ebuzzing, but to be honest I have never had any success with them as most of their work is for French & Spanish blogs and they appear to be struggling finding English speaking advertisers.

Don’t give up all hope if you have loads of traffic but no Page Rank. You are in an excellent position and one to be envied. Nearly all types of advertising are still open to you, but you just have to look around for the correct systems.

If you have been following the Pay Per Post category you might be wondering how to complete posts. There are always a lot of questions in this area, so here is some help!

Hopefully you have set up a PayPerPost account and claimed a blog or two. If so, then there are only two more terms that you need to be aware of – Leads and Opportunities.

Leads
The system will send you leads, which give a bit of information about the job and allow you to either say that you are interested, negotiate a price or indicate you are not interested. This, for some reason, confuses many people who have not read up fully how it works. If you say you are interested this does not mean you will be doing the job. Likewise, negotiating does not guarantee the work.

If the requested price is higher / lower than you would normally want to work for, hit negotiate and type in your price. If you are happy to do it, then hit that you are interested. As soon as you do this the lead will vanish from the screen. Select any other blogs from the drop down menu and process those leads.

If you are interested or have negotiated, then this is flagged to the advertiser who sees a star next to your blog as an indicator that you are willing to do the work. They might then invite you to do the work, which takes us nicely to the next section.

Opportunities
This is what you want! This is where an advertiser has selected your blog and wants you to write a post for them. All of the details are there, so read them well as advertisers get upset when bloggers do not follow the instructions properly. If the opportunity ask for an In Post disclosure, then you are expected to mention somewhere that it is a paid post.

But basically write a post in which you can mention the link(s) and is at least the required number of words. Usually you have to write the post around a subject that is relevant to the link. Do be careful when pasting in the link(s) as certain visual editors will remove the signs, so make sure that you paste in the links only in HTML editor.

Then publish the link, review the post and copy and paste the link into PayPerPost. It should be approved within 3 days (if you have followed the instructions correctly) and 30 days after submitting the post to the system, as long as it still exists with the links in tact, the payment moves from the pending to the earnings amount. Once it reaches $50 earned (or less, if you don’t mind the $2 cashout charge), you can transfer it to PayPal.

Many people do struggle with submitting posts and the automatic checks. These are nearly always caused by pluggins adding to or changing the link. For example adding rel=”nofollow”, target=”_blank” or some form of javascript to count the clicks. All of these will cause the check to fail, so if you are having any sorts of problems disable any plugins that could be doing this.

In the final installment I’ll look at quickly setting up a new blog – if you are interested, just look through the PayPerPost category.