If you are thinking of making some money from your blog then you might have thought about selling advertising space? Is it going to work? Can you really make a little bit of cash that way? Or are you wasting your time?

For it to be worth your while working out where you can slot in some advertising in to your blog, you need to know that advertisers are going to be taking you up on the offer. Spending time and effort redesigning your blog to fit in some adverts and then not selling any adverts would be highly annoying.

So, what do you need to know first?

Well all advertisers are after one of two things. Provide either or both of these and then you are part of the way there. These are:

1) Traffic. If you blog has plenty of daily visitors then advertisers might just be willing to pay for an advertising space from you to raise their awareness within your readers.

2. PageRank Again, if your blog has some Google PageRank then advertisers may be willing to pay for a link on your blog, in order to help increase their own search engine ranking.

However, having either or both is not always everything that an advertiser wants. They also want to see a good looking website if their company is going to be seen to be sponsoring part of it.

Part of this is not over doing the advertising. Most blogs can get away with 1 or 2 advertising blocks per page. Any more than that and the blog looks spammy and it will put advertisers off.

So, where do you find the advertisers? Well you can try selling links, paid posting or just good old Google Adsense. All of these can easily provide plenty of cash as can affiliate selling. But again, will any of these work?

Well it all depends on just how how your traffic and PageRank is. If you are thinking of Google Adsense, you might be talking about a few dollars or pounds per thousand page hits. Fine if you are counting your daily hits in the thousands, but if you are in the hundreds, then the income is going to be low. However, for the effort of a single change to the page then in the long term the income might be worth while.

But with affiliate selling you really do need to be seeing thousands of daily hits to see a reasonable income, and with the rate that affiliate schemes come and go, unless you are seeing a lot of income it might not be worth the time.

As for selling links, if you are hoping to be paid to post and have a low PageRank, then there will be little popularity in your blog and low prices when you get work.

Yes, you can charge for various forms of advertising on your blog, but to be viable you need thousands of hits or a half decent PageRank.

Submitting your articles to 400+ article directories has great search engine benefits, but it does not always work as well as it should if you submit 400 identical articles. So how do we get about that?

Well, for a start, be very careful with this technique, do not over do it and do not use it on articles or reviews submitted to the very best article sites!

The first step is to rewrite your articles between article directory submissions. This is fabulous, but when you submit your new article to 30 websites in one go and 400+ directories in a second batch, then there is not the option to rewrite as you go.

For this reason I use MAS, which provides a thesaurus and makes suggestions as to what selected words can be changed to. Unfortunately, I have seen this techinque used to the extreme and even the titles of articles become totally unreadable, never mind the content of the piece. So be very careful when using this technique, read the output and check that it still makes sense. Go for correct English language articles rather than something that is totally changed, but absolute nonsense.

What tools for example MAS do is quite straightforward. Within your article you pick the words to change, or ‘spin’. This is then coded up and you paste the ‘spun’ version of the article into the system that you are submitting via. This system then randomly picks one option from each spin and should, therefore, even with hundreds of reprints, always end up with unique articles or reviews.

You could do this manually, but it it far quicker and more time efficient to use a tool. Merely check what it writes and post the original, not the spun version, to the best article sites!

Next, start blogging. If you do not already have a site on your site, get one. Then post copies of articles or reviews, chunks of articles or reviews or whatever, to your own blog. Sometimes I split articles down to post to my own websites and sometimes I join a couple together.

Why site even though? There are two reasons. First, you are constantly adding new, fresh content to your web site. Although you have a static web site, by blogging you have a constant flow of new content and search engines will see this and you get a huge boost. It is much better to have a fresh web site than a stale one when you are fighting for search engine visitors.

Second, if people are searching for what you talk about in your articles, then if you have them published on your web site they might just find your site and take an interest. A few make become subscribers to the website and eventually buyers.

Ultimately, you might also compile a collection of your posts into an ebook and either sell it to your traffic, offer it in return for signing up to a newsletter or give it away for several other reason.

Forget changing the code of your site, concentrate on what matters – get some articles or reviews written!

Are you just starting out with your blogging? Are you an established blogger? Are you maybe wondering what simple, but essential, weekly maintenance you should be doing? Well here’s a checklist to get you going!

There are several simple, but essential, tasks that you should do to your blog each week. Although they are basic, they will help your blog traffic and your security. In no particular order, these tasks are as follows.

Check your comments Akismet is not foolproof, so go to your spam comments list and look through them. Are they all spam? Are any ‘good’ comments incorrectly identified as spam? If so, mark them as not spam and approve them. Then delete all of the spam so that next time you look you don’t have to review them again.

Respond to comments Following on from checking spam, reply to some of your comment leavers. Those that comment often will appreciate the time taken and those that are new can be welcomed to your blog. A blog, as opposed to a traditional website, is a two way interface whereby you write and then readers leave comments and you can then chat to them.

Check your versions It only takes seconds to go through your list of plugins and make sure that they are all on the most recent versions. Also, check your theme for updates. Some times new versions are release because of security issues that have been uncovered, so do not leave yourself exposed!

Look at your stats Look at that week’s traffic stats and feedburner stats and compare them to previous weeks. Does anything stand out? Are you getting more traffic or less traffic? Is there any particular post that is really driving traffic? All of these questions, which only take seconds, could reveal a technique that could drive you lots of traffic, for example if you notice a particular subject that drives lots of traffic.

Check for broken links Especially if you are running paid posts on your website, some of those links can suddenly become invalid and not work. This does not look good for visitors and looks unmaintained to the search engines. So fix them! There are useful plugins to help you to do this in seconds.

Write some drafts Any serious blogger should have some drafts prepared. In fact, some bloggers will sit down and write all of that week’s posts in one go and schedule them for the coming week. At the very least make sure that you have a store of posts ready so that if you are busy, don’t feel well or just can’t be bothered to write that you have something to put on your blog.

Apart from writing drafts, all of the steps can be completed in just a few minutes, but are a huge investment in your blog and are well worth doing.

It might at first seem an impossible task, but if you are blogging about your favourite sport you can still get paid to blog. How though?

Blogging about your favourite sports and pastimes might be easy at first. You can post about your favourite team, your own training and competitions, views on the league and so on. There can be an endless supply of content, but then like about a quarter of all bloggers you decide it is time to turn this past time into a small income. At this point it seems an impossible trick.

Paid to blog income
The simplest way would be to sign up to a paid to blog scheme and just post about anything. And with most schemes you would be doing just that. You could be being offered anything at all to post about, from funeral homes to metal roofing to cell culture (my genuine recent examples!).

These are fine if you do not mind upsetting readers and probably losing readers by blogging about totally off-topic subject, but paid to post is probably out of the question if you want to keep your blog totally on topic.

So, what is the way forward?

Pay Per Click Options
Well the simplest and easiest answer would be to sign up to Google Adsense and to drop 2 Paid Per Click advert blocks on to your blog (the maximum allowed is three, but many people, including myself, advocate just keeping to 2 blocks of adverts to prevent overloading with adverts). This puts relevant adverts onto your blog, but without huge traffic volumes there is probably not going to be a great income.

Along the same lines, if your blog has a half decent Page Rank there are various websites through which you can sell links from your blog. You can also sell links through SEO experts, but tracking them down can be a difficult task.

Affiliate Income
Probably the easiest way to earn an income is to promote affiliate schemes. However, this very much depends on whether your readers are from the same country as you as to whether it works well.

If there is a relevant major sporting event and a lot of your readers might be interested in attending, you can promote tickets through the affiliate scheme for the events. Or, sign up to an affiliate scheme that is offering ebooks to download (for example ClickBank) and push readers towards downloading and buying these ebooks, in return for a commission.

Donations
Of course, the last way and most simplest is that if you run a really useful blog is just to include a ‘donations’ button. Maybe offer to link back to people making donations. But if your readers find your site of value then they might be willing to make a donation via PayPal to help you fund your blog.

Therefore, the ideas we have for getting paid blogging about sports are general paid to post, PPC, affiliate schemes and just a kind hearted donations scheme.

Good luck!

Making a blog about news is a good way to generate plenty of fresh content daily. So, how do you go about it?

Creating a news blog is not much different really to creating a normal blog when you are setting it up. Buy a domain name, install your software (I recommend WordPress) and choose a theme. But that is when the differences can start.

A different layout to a discussion blog
With a news blog you might not always want to highlight the most recent posts on your home page. Although you will probably want to list them all there, if you are adding a lot of stories then there might be important entries that you want to lead with on your home page. For example, really newsworthy posts might deserve a feature at the top of the page but those ‘dead donkey’ items that you have decided to include might just need a listing further down.

So this gives us a clue as to the layout of the home page – there will be a featured item at the top of the page and then a list of all other recent pieces of news, along with teasers, further down the page.

Side navigation is vital
Also, being a news blog you might not predict which items your readers will find most interesting. Yet it is these that you want to make available to other readers. So in your side navigation add a most popular posts list. It is probably best to use one that calculates popularity based on page hits and looks back over the last day or so to work this out.

Now you have the look of your website sorted, you need to just add the content. And that can be the hard part. Where are you going to get a reliable source of regular news items from? You could try ‘auto blogging’, in which you basically steal content, but that is not good for your blog.

Sourcing quality news
Instead you need to find sources of news items and add them manually to your blog. Write up the news in your own words and include it in relevant categories to make the blog easy to use. Just taking all of your inspiration from one website and rewriting what you find their is in danger of being accused of plagiarism. To do the job properly you need to use several sources of information and to add your own opinion, statistics and value to each news item that you post.

Creating a news blog if done properly can be an interesting way to blog and also a way of gaining lots of followers. However, making sure that you can create a good stream of quality content that gives more than where you are getting it from is the secret to success,

Writing on your blog is fine, until you then regret your actions.What can be done to clean up your history if you want to get rid of something?

The big danger with the internet is that it is very easy to publish something, very easy for other sites to pick up what you have said and almost impossible to fully retract what you have previously said. If you have posted in anger and then later regretted it, what can you do to dig yourself out of trouble?

Editing your blog post is easy enough and within seconds you can have the offending remark removed, watered down or hidden. But, the problem with blogging is the amount of other sites that pick up on what you are saying.

If your blog is half popular with Google then it might only take seconds between posting your offensive remark and Google picking up the post and caching it. These days new posts can appear in search engine results in minutes of hitting the publish button. This is fine most of the time, but a nuisance if you want it removed.

And with a blog it is not just the post page. Your new post has probably appeared on its own page, the home page, relevant category and tag pages and archive pages. If the search engines have visited these pages then, apart from the home page, it might be days or weeks before the same search engine comes back and updates the blog post to your corrected version.

So how can you hide your tracks? Well the first thing is to go to Google and sign up for a webmasters’ account and then claim your blog within the account. You can then request Google to remove the post, archive, category and tag pages from their listings. However, this can be a permanent removal that will last some time, so you do not really want to use this tactic on your home page as your blog might drop from search engine listings for a while.

The next step therefore is, after removing what you want to hide, posting another new post about anything that you like. Hopefully the effect of this pinging Google will make the search engine come visiting and it will refresh the cache of the home page, problem sorted!

However, even once you have repeated the above for any other search engines that picked up the post you are not finished. You now need to search for any blog aggregator websites that have also already been on your website. The best way to find these is to search for sites where the problem post and a couple of other recent posts are shown, You then need to contact the owners of these sites and ask them to remove your post.

But there is no reason to say that they will oblige, which means you could still end up with the post displayed on other websites. Ultimately, the best thing to do is to think before you publish. If you are having a rant, write today and publish tomorrow. Give yourself the time to change your mind before your comments spread.

Is it worth you time and money running paid blog advertising? Can it help you blog, or is it money down the drain?

For many blog owners the desire for more traffic is always there. From the first handful of visitors to the jump to a regular 100 visitors a day, to 500 daily visitors and so on, always building the traffic. With traffic comes the pride of running a successful blog and the growing reputation. And if you are so inclined, the opportunity to earn more money through PPC, sponsored posts, banner advertising and many other schemes.

Advertising for websites is one way of getting more visitors directly to your site and if your blog is prepared and ready for these visitors, then there is a good chance that some will become regular subscribers.

When are there benefits of blog marketing?
So, is it ever worth paying for advertising to increase your blog’s exposure? A lot depends on your outlook. Are you making money from your blog? Are you just blogging for the fun of it? Would more followers increase the chance of you raising your income?

It also depends on your niche. If you are in a highly competitive niche then there is more chance of adverts returning you some cash, however advertising is going to cost more. Likewise in a hobby based blog advertising your blog might be cheap, but you have to be very imaginative as to how to get a return for your investment.

For the new blogger
For the new blogger, then especially if you can find some cheap advertising (or get hold of a voucher for free adwords advertising, for example), then you might be able to get your first solid visitors. You should only do this once you know for certain that your blog is running fully – your visitors will have a reason to want to come back and a method to do so. Without such preparation any advertising is certainly a waste of time.

But as a new blogger, seeing those first few visitors, especially regular visitors, can be important. More than just a way of increasing your return they can give you an audience to actually talk to, people that can reply back to your comments and a reason to keep writing your best possible work.

A few visitors through cheap paid schemes, especially if they become regular visitors, can be the inspiration to a bigger and better blog that a new blogger needs.

For the established blogger
For the existing blog, it very much depends on you, your budget and your desires. It might be that advertising can return a good profit, else it might be a waste of time. The only way to find out is to prepare your blog and give it a go with a small budget. Only then can you decide if advertising for your blog will be a benefit.

You are blogging daily and hoping to see plenty of traffic. However, what should you be doing every day to make sure that you are achieving the traffic levels you desire? Here are 4 invaluable steps.

Step 1 – writing a day’s post
Yes, the first step of each day’s blogging is to write a day’s post. But not today’s! To get the best possible writing for each post write your posts in advance. Write them, save them and file them away. Maybe something will come up that means that you have a sudden urge to post quickly and that is great, but for planned posting, prepare the post in advance.

Then, come back to that post another day and read over it once more. Does it still make sense? Does it say everything you wanted it to say? By writing and posting on the same day you can miss errors and omissions when you proof read. By writing the day before you post and reviewing just before you post you are likely to catch those mistakes.

And if you are really up for it, write another post or two. Just in case you don’t have the time to write one day soon. It is always worth having a few posts ready written!

Step 2 – review your comments
No comment anti spam is perfect, so review your comments. Go through those in the spam folder and mark as not-spam any that shouldn’t be there. Mark as spam any in the pending queue that should be marked as spam. Then carefully read all new comments and approve them (or delete them). It is also a good idea to reply to the people who left comments so that they feel appreciated for commenting. It also builds a community feel to your blog and encourages others to leave you some comments.

Step 3 – check your traffic
No need to become obsessive, but is your traffic within its normal ranges today? Is it high or low? If it is low, is there an obvious reason? Has it been low for a while? If so, it could mean something is wrong somewhere on the blog and it is worth looking at the pages that people are arriving at. I did this once to discover that a plugin had destroyed the sidebar (including navigation) on older post pages.

If you are receiving more traffic than normal also investigate why. Are you getting direct referrals or search engine visitors? Have a look at where the extra traffic is coming from and see if there is anything you can do to encourage more. If it is direct traffic from another blog it could be that the blogger has given you a mention. A quick thank you comment can go down very well. If it is search engine visitors then looking at what search terms and pages are suddenly driving the traffic can give you pointers for future writing.

Step 4 – share the word
A bit of self promotion can go a long way. Whether this is by popping over to another blogger’s blog and leaving useful comments or publishing an article to a directory you are helping to tell more people that you exist and hoping to drive more visitors your way.

Follow these 4 simple steps and you should see your traffic really increasing. And do leave me a comment if you find it works for you!

You might want lots of traffic to on your blog and be working hard, but have you done the job correctly? Have you missed the one step that can be the difference between success and total failure?

If you are working on your blog to increase its traffic volumes, then researching the keywords to work on is the singularly most important step. Get it wrong, or don’t do it at all, and you could be without traffic totally!

And this is not just when you are building links. If you are hoping that search engine visitors will find your blog then you also need to do your research so that your posts can at least cover popular research and hopefully some of your categories and pages can be aimed at high performing keywords as well.

Why can it go wrong?
It is very easy to fall for the trick of thinking that people are searching for the terms you think that they are. I have had customers ask me to help them optimise their websites for search terms that I have then done research on, only to find that there is no search engine traffic.

If you spend a lot of time and effort preparing your blog and are working on the incorrect search keywords, then you are likely to see absolutely no change in the traffic levels. What do you do?

Researching the correct terms
The first thing to do with any blog is to think of a few basic search engine keywords and then use one of the traffic estimator tools to check that these terms do actually get visitors. These tools will not only confirm whether the terms are seeing any traffic, but they will also suggest longer search terms that include your keywords. And some of these will be easier to work on than the shorter terms.

Checking the strength of the competition
Next, with your candidates of possible keywords to use, you then have to try some of these searches for yourself and decide whether you think there is too much competition. This can be very difficult for the beginner and you might end up spending a lot of time on trial and error, but with patience you should get there.

An indicator of whether a lot of people are competing for the same keywords is whether the sites on the first page of Google look optimised for the terms. If they are, there will be the keywords in the header title and description and headings on the page. If these are absent, then the sites are getting to the top of the listings by accident. This means that with some work you should be able to see good results.

And that is basically it. Research your keywords, check them out and then work on them. With the proper keyword research you should see plenty of new traffic.

Writing daily is a good way to blogging success. So why should part of your daily routine involve writing your next post?

The purpose of blogging is to build a blog and by writing every day, you are certainly doing that. Daily blogging must be the ultimate aim, but why?

Is the effort worth while?
Well you could write many times a day and with a news blog, you probably would. But with other blogs daily is enough, without going to too much. However, writing daily is a lot of commitment, especially if you have multiple blogs each in need of some daily posts. Why is it worth the effort?

There are many reasons for writing daily, but ultimately they all boil down to one factor – lots more hits for your blog. By writing every day you are building a library of content, interest for your readers and search engine bait.

The benefits of writing daily
Let’s look at that in detail! If you are writing interesting content every day then subscribers through your RSS feed and newsletter will be receiving plenty of updates. Others will see that new material is arriving constantly and will be more eager to subscribe. Building your subscribers list is an excellent way of generating plenty of future hits and exactly what you want as they keep coming back for more!

But writing daily will also be seen by the search engines, who will determine that you have plenty of fresh content and will rate you more highly. Plus, because you are writing daily you will quickly build up a huge stock of posts on your blog and the more posts there are the more chances there are that one of your posts will match someone’s search query.

Does daily have to mean every day?
Does daily mean seven days per week though? Do you have to spend your Sunday evenings diligently writing a new post? Probably not! Most visitors will have a pattern of when they will visit your website and you may find that the bulk of your visitors only visit on certain days, maybe even at certain times of the day. I have had sites that get virtually no traffic at the weekend, but loads in the week.

Write as often as your reader want to read
So to target these sorts of traffic levels you can actually just be writing on those days that traffic usually arrives, say Monday to Friday, It certainly makes life much easier for yourself than writing 7 days a week, unless you are able to!

There are many benefits to blogging every day, but that only needs to be every day that your visitors are coming frequently to your website!