What is a Blog? And What About the Free Blogging Tools Out There?

By Noah Young

There isn't one single definition of blogging, as people are debating about what makes a blog a blog. But, for many years, the word blog has been associated with journals. A journal, with entries, dates, names, and would be something that one could look back at and read many posts at a time.

Different types of blogs have emerged as well. Photo blogs, where people post family photos, art photography, and portfolios are popular and videoblogs are up and coming. A video blog is a series of videos that are linked. The makers of such series are called vloggers. Another type of blog is the corporate blog. These are run by companies, and consist of product updates, company news, and other such company-related information. As you can see, it would be hard to give a blog an actually definition because of how unspecific the word is.

Free Blogging Tools

There are so many free blogging tools out there now that the urge to pack your blog chock full of them is near irresistible. With snazzy backgrounds, visitor counters, animations, and sound, free blogging tools are so abundant that they actually become annoying. The key to optimizing the benefits of free blogging tools is not to just pick everyone you can find, but to be selective and only pick ones that will work well and benefit your blog; any others shouldn't be used.

Before choosing a tool, be sure you know enough about it to make a good decision about whether it will work with your blog. Teach yourself about visitor counters, the kinds of backgrounds that actually do appeal to viewers, layouts that are proven to work, not ones that look flashy. If you do your homework, you'll know what you're doing, and you won't end up with a useless blog that looks like a badly made banner ad.

If you're realistic when designing your blog, then your blog itself will be. Just imagine, do successful magazines have looping animations, explosions of color behind their text, and automated sound or video players? No. So why should your blog?

Noah Young is the author of many blogs, including http://secretsofrss.blogspot.com/ as well as http://easycashwebsites.blogspot.com/

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Easy Blog Hosting - A Brief Guide For Beginning Bloggers

By Noah Young

These days, anyone can own a blog. Millions of writers, accomplished and aspiring, have created their own weblogs and claimed a some cyber-property in the huge universe that is the internet. Innovative blogging softwares have made this possible by creating an easy method for the technically challenged to create their very own blogs.

When they started out, blogs were mostly owned by people who used blogs to share their day to day happenings with the world. To this day, these types of personal, journal-like blogs do quite well traffic and feedback wise. They capture viewers' interests.

However, the blogs of today vary much more and our now being produced by novelists, photographers, tech-tutorialists, and really anyone who has any sort of information they want to share with others. Blogs have become a very common, interactive tool that people are quickly realizing will most likely revolutionize the entirety of world media.

Why a Blog?

· Blogs sometimes serve as a medium of communication between friends and family. They can post about daily happenings and keep people they know up to date about the news in one's social circle.

· Blogs are great for niches. Organizing articles into categories and forming blogs of them keeps the information neat and orderly for readers.

· Blogs also can be used commercially as a way for corporations or businesses to communicate with their customer base easily and inform them of upcoming products as well as company developments and news. Corporate blogs can also serve as a tool for mass communication to worldwide employees.

Hosted Services

If you don't have your own hosting, a good option would be to use other people's hosting. Some possibilities are Blogger, Live Journal, and Typepad.

These hosting services are made for individual bloggers, and are extremely user friendly. You don't have to worry about maintenance, and instead can just focus on posting content and the layout of your blog's widgets. Blogger is recommended as it is free; Typepad is still a good choice, yet it charges a small monthly fee.

Self-Hosted

If you have hosting services already, but you are interested in the next level of blogging software, you should try self-hosted services. Wordpress is by far the most popular, along with Movable Type and others. These companies provide great software to help you design and create a great blog, and all you need to start is hosting.

You've seen the different hosting services, and what we said about them. But the best thing you can do is literally look at blogging services and see what they offer. Find one that's right for you, and start Blogging!

Noah Young is the author of many blogs, including http://secretsofrss.blogspot.com/ as well as http://easycashwebsites.blogspot.com/

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Beginner Intro to Blog Traffic

By Roberto Gomes

So you have a brand new website or blog. Now how do you make people visit it? On this article I'll outline some of the ways you'll get your traffic count going.

Traffic is the number one thing on the online marketing business. Once you have traffic, you can think about monetizing that traffic and start making money. Until you reach a steady traffic flow, you shouldn't even try to place ads or anything on your site because if you don't have traffic, then you can't generate clicks and therefore placing ads on such a new site is superfluous.

First and most important of all, is organic search engine traffic. This is the traffic that comes from people doing searches on a search engine, and of course that the most important one of all is of course Google. If you can get your sites pages to rank highly on a Google search, then you are practically guaranteed to get traffic. Now this is not as easy as it looks since Google uses a complex algorithm that defines how your page should be indexed and how high or low it appears on the search engine results. You will be found on Google's search results for keywords that appear on your site. Keyword optimization is key here, and when your adding content to your site or blog always keep in mind that in order for people to find it, they will need to search for a specific set of keywords and therefore you should use those keywords on your content and titles, that means that if your posting about, let's say, a software product then you shouldn't make the posts title something like "Great software" but instead, use the software's name, and title it something like: "Photoshop - great image software". That way it's more specific and that insures that you get higher quality traffic, high quality traffic are visitors that actually finds your site useful, in this case people that were actually looking for posts about Photoshop and not people that were searching for some other software.

Even without keyword optimization your site will eventually be indexed on Google and people will find it for a whole set of different keywords, some that you didn't even plan for, but in the long run you will probably want people to find it when they are searching for a specific set of keywords, and that is when you should start thinking about writing with search engines in mind. This doesn't mean you should write robotic language or repeat the keywords 50 times, it just means that you should be conscious about it and repeat the keywords a few times and ideally use them on the title. Just don't over do it. Always write for people. But always keep the search engines in mind.

Just writing keyword optimized content and hoping for the best won't get you much success since there is almost no use in being on the search engine results if you're on page 56 of the results. One very important factor that the Google algorithm takes into account are backlinks. This is the most influential factor for getting listed highly on search engine results. Why is this you ask? Well if you think about it, it makes sense that a page that has a lot of other websites linking to it has a higher content value than a page without any other sites linking to it. And the bigger the site that links to you is, the better. So if there's a site that has 20 other smallish sites linking to it, that is not bad, but if you have a site that has only 2 or 3 sites linking to it, but those sites are very popular and authority sites, then that is even better. The size and authority of the site that links to your pages makes a big difference.

So now, how do you use this knowledge to bring your site more visitors? Well first of all there is one thing you need to have and that is patience. You won't get ranked highly on the search engines in a day or a week. You'll need to build backlinks for your site, and you can't stop building them anytime soon. How do you build backlinks? Well, there are a huge range of options here, you could post your site on social bookmarking sites, register and post on forums related to your site and put your site's address on your signature, submit articles to article directories and link to your site in the end, submit to link directories, add your best posts to social news sites like digg and reddit, ask other webpage owners to link to your site, post on classified sites, etc etc. There are numerous amounts of ways to build backlinks but we won't get too deep into that for now because we'll go into it in greater detail on a future post.

What you should try your best to do is to make your site worthy of spontaneous linking. What's that you ask? Well, if you have good content, nice articles, funny stuff on your site, then people will eventually just naturally link to your site. Those are usually the best links because they give you no work at all to get them and many times you'll have some big sites linking to yours and that will certainly give your site a boost on the search engine rankings. In the beginning it's hard to have people spontaneous linking to you unless you have some great idea or a great article about something interesting. Even then it's hard if your just starting out because you haven't got too many visitors and therefore not many people with sites to link to you. But fear not, with time you will.

So that's it for now, just a quick intro on how to prepare your site for traffic. Just start adding good content to your site and take a few minutes or an hour everyday to build some backlinks. Add your site to a few link directories per day, make some forum posts with your link on the signature, make worthy comments on other peoples blogs, etc.

You should never stop promoting your site, and taking a little time everyday to do it it will bring you good results after a while.

Roberto Gomes writes for TheMillionDollarDomain.com - a blog aimed at beginners in the make money online business, internet marketing and all subtopics that revolve around it like traffic generation, search engine optimization, contextual advertising, affiliate marketing and much more.

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10 Effective Ways To Succeed With Your Blogs

By Uzoma Eze

Having a blog can be very challenging when you are competing with millions of blogs out there. Whether hosted as a word press blog or blogger, what is important is that you should have quality, superior content on your blog. My own experience on having a blog online can be summarized in 10 ways. If you follow these 10 secrets you're sure going to going to get to the top and have a better page rank for your blogs.

Here we go:

1. Create quality content for your blog.

Having content for your blog matters a great lot - content, they say, is king. In placing value for your blog, you must have articles that should be appealing for people to read. People like reading blogs - they can go back to and make reference to it. You should make your blog seen as a newspaper article or magazine that can drive that target audience.

2. Create A Niche For Your Blog.

Now this seems to be a very important aspect most bloggers leave out. Imagine having a blog you put up articles that have to do with several niches. What do I mean? Lets take this e.g you have a blog that talks about forex trading, the same blog is talking about weddings that same blog is posting updates on sports. Yak! That's not organized; and if you ask me that's confusing, what you should do is to have a blog site that speaks on one topic, and if you have a thousand and one ideas why not create a thousand and one blogs - it makes more sense.

3. Have keywords on your Topic.

To make your blog succeed you need to make your blog compete and stand out from other blogs You should have every topic keyword sensitive that way the search engines can crawl your blogs specific keywords here's an example, this topic is on a particular niche which is on making your blog succeed notice how many times the word blog pops up and I bet on my money so many people would visit my article and appreciate what I'm talking about, don't even get worried on how long the article will be what matters is quality.

4. Make your blog search engine optimized (SEO)

Getting your blog on search engines and making those search engines algorithms feel your website is important, something similar to creating content for your website or blog. Try to make certain features available like meta tags and the likes available its important for you to have this all important tool on your blog site, a lot of people have treated this topic in better perspective and I would encourage you to look up the search engines and get an expert to help you.

5. Sell products and promote Affiliate programs

Now for me this may be optional it all depends on you, but I've come to appreciate the fact that monetizing your blog is important. You can sell ebooks on your blog, promote affiliate programs or better still place Google Adsense or Yahoo adverts on your site, cool isn't it? I've seen people make thousands on their blog and I expect every one to do the same but haha! This important don't just sell anything on your blog site, sell content on your site, what I'm trying to say here is sell a product that talks about your blog if you have a blog that is all organizing weddings then sell wedding planners, write a book on "How to succeed in your marriage" all that stuff you get my drift don't you?

6. Create Activity On your blog.

Now this may sound funny - I've seen some blogs that have not been touched for like years and that may not sound too good for a blog. Now if you want your blog to stand out from the crowd, try to write articles at least once a week, if you have the time write like everyday, that way you bring attention to your blog.

7. Set up an autoresponder.

Now, this is a must have for any blogger, especially if you are promoting products on your blog, my advice would be give something to them for free. Let your visitor leave something behind and get something in return from you, your visitors email and first names are assets to you and make the best from it.

8. Organize events and Promos.

This sounds cool - imagine starting a group on a social network like Facebook and you organize events or promos on your blog. This would make a lot of difference for your blog, won't speak much on this but would allow you to create something out of the box for you here.

9. Participate In Online Discussions.

Join forums and discuss or take part in topics that may be of use to the community, a good example of a forum would be egusiland.com. You can hover around and discuss topics that may suit your need.

10. Post Articles and leave Comments.

Final key - post articles on article sites become a household name in your niche area visit sites like ezinearticles.com or articlevista.com. Visit other blogs within your niche and post comments on your articles that may be of interest to you.

There are so many other ways in making your blog succeed but if you follow these 10, your bound to be at the top.

Uzoma Eze is an Infopreneur and content manager, He has to his credit several websites and blogs talking about niche topics including the world famous blogs http://www.internetblogsecrets.com - forexfixedodds and his hosting company http://www.hostkonsult.com and a forum.

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Killer Content - How to Make Your Blog Stand Out From the Crowd

By Steven Chappell

As of February 2008, Technorati was tracking somewhere in the region of 113 million blogs, and that number no doubt does not include the 72.82 million Chinese blogs which are tracked by the China Internet network information center. These enormous figures indicate that the blogosphere is expanding at an exponential rate, and becoming more and more popular in all levels of society.

With the blogging community being so huge, it naturally prompts a sobering question: How do I make my blog presence stand out from the crowd?

That is the million dollar question isn't it, and unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to achieving this goal. However, there are techniques, methods and strategies that you can implement and develop, that can elevate your blog to new heights, and get the recognition your looking for.

The one thing that can have an amazing effect on your blog presence is killer content, content that is so good that people are drawn to it, like bees are to nectar. So If you want your blog to stand out from the crowd, then it is crucial to have content that will attract people who are looking for an authoritative resource, answers to particular questions on a given subject that are both accurate and valuable.

For example, where do most people go online when they want a quick reference for a particular subject or term? Wikipedia perhaps? Attracting almost 684 million visitors a year, Wikipedia has become the authority reference for a large portion of the planet. Imagine having that kind of influence with your blog. Imagine that when people are looking for information on a specific topic, they think of your blog and become loyal visitors to it.

Some may think that is the stuff that dreams are made of, but many have made it a reality. There are many authority bloggers who have gained world-wide recognition for their knowledge and expertise.

It stands to reason, that to gain the kind of reputation that will put you in the league of top bloggers, your going to have to put a lot of work hard into it, however, the benefits make it well worth it as it will brand you as an expert and an authority on your given subject matter.

So, how do you find killer content? Well, people respond to information that answers a real need, so you will have to give some thought as to what problems and issues people face and provide practical solutions that will cause your readers to keep coming back for more.

For example, it could be that you are already an expert in a particular area, such as troubleshooting PC's, you might even have a degree in IT. Now, if that is not a need, I don't know what is! People are always looking for simple solutions to complicated problems on their PC, but without having to pay through the nose for tech support. So that may be an area to consider, although there are hundreds of resources on the net in this area, so you would have to give some thought as to how you could approach it in a way that would brand you as an authority.

If you blog daily or on a very regular basis, then that will help keep you sharp as to new ideas and resources you can look to for killer content that will turn heads. Keep your eyes open for what people are talking about, their concerns, how you can make their life easier and more productive.

Some other areas to think about are:

Providing tips: People love reading tips that can improve their life, their work, even their relationships. Tips showing how they can save money on a daily basis could prove invaluable.

How-to guides: Nothing can prove to be more beneficial than teaching someone a new skill, something they can use for years to come, and perhaps make money in the process.

FAQ's: This one can be a real boon for your blog or website for that matter. Having the "ultimate" FAQ for questions that have been frequently asked on a particular topic will no doubt bring in a torrent of traffic, and enhance your reputation as a trusted source.

Just remember, that for your blog to stand out from the crowd and be outstanding, you have to write outstanding content, and as I mentioned at the outset, there are no shortcuts.

Steven Chappell is an Expert author and Internet marketer. You are welcome to visit his blog here.

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Blog - Get Fresh Ideas and Inspiration

By Angela Booth

Running out of ideas for blog posts? I've just been scanning my feed reader, and some of my favorite blogs haven't been updated in months, so getting content ideas is obviously a challenge.

That's always a danger when you're writing a blog; you lose interest in the blog because you run out of ideas.

Here's how to get fresh ideas and inspiration: learn something new.

What would YOU like to learn?

On one of my writing blogs I've started to offer podcasts and videos. This opens up whole new blog topic areas for me as I learn new applications, and put my learning into practice. Learning new things helps me to see old topics in a new way; it's also rekindled my enthusiasm for that blog, and for blogging in general.

Almost any topic you're blogging about will lend itself to the "learn something new" strategy.

Let's see how you could put this strategy to work for you:

* If your blog was about cooking, for example, why not take a cooking class? You could also interview cooks, write restaurant interviews, or add "wine" to your blog's categories and start writing about wine.

* If your blog is about a business topic, think about other business areas you could cover. Business is a huge topic. It involves finance, customer service, managing staff, time management - the list of topics you could potentially cover is endless.

* If you're blogging for a specific business (your own or someone else's), the "learn something new" strategy applies here, too. Take your video camera to a convention, or talk to members of your staff and ask them to explain their areas of expertise to you.

So learn something new today. Blogging will be fun again and you'll create fresh new content and will get new readers too.

You can make money blogging. Discover how with pro blogger and copywriter Angela Booth. She'll teach you how to blog the right way, so your blog is profitable from the start, with her bestseller, "Blogging for Dollars" at http://www.abmagic.com/Blog/blogging.html Angela's blogging ebook package has a companion blog, the Blogging for Dollars Blog at http://www.dollars2blog.com/blog/ which keeps you up to date with what's happening in the world of professional blogging.

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Blogging For The Affiliate Marketer

By Lynda Mekalick

As an affiliate marketer you need to implement all and any tools which will increase your exposure on the internet and on the search engines, particularly Google - the big daddy of them all.

Today I want to deal with my second favourite method of doing that. ( Anyone and everyone who knows me is/are already aware that my first favourite method is article writing and distribution).

Blogs are a powerful way of achieving massive traffic for your product or program. Why is that? At present at least, the search engines are having a rampant love affair with blogs. So let's take full advantage of that.

You can put up multiple blogs for free. If you are promoting various products or programs as an affiliate then you can - and should - set up a blog for each product or program. I recommend Wordpress and Blogger - they're free to use and relatively easy to set up. Use Pingoat and Pingomatic to "ping" your blog. This lets the search engines know that you exist and they'll come looking for you. Don't forget to reping whenever you add new content.

So how do you use your blog to advertise your product or program as an affiliate marketer? The first thing you should do is write a review about your affiliate product or program, using good keywords throughout ( you've already done the research necessary to find good keywords). You should use several words as links through to your product's sales page or sign up page so that your reader's curiosity is aroused and he will want to click the links for more information.

Your review text should pay compliment to your product without too much "rarara" and hype, and you should also instruct your reader as to what you want him to do next - click through to the sales page for more information. If you're a really good convincing writer you should also be able to instruct him to sign up on the sales page once he has read it.

In affiliate marketing this is known as subtle yet powerful subliminal suggestion. By the time your reader reaches your sales page he's already presold and will purchase.

You should always reprint in your blog all of the articles you have submitted to publishers. This will act as yet another link which will be searched and found by the search engines when they're out doing their "crawls" - all good for you in your affiliate marketing endeavours.

Allow for other readers to add comments to your blog. In this way they will give of their opinion, and you have a back link to their site. Guess what that means? If they give you a blog address as a back link then you can go make a comment on their blog and add your link in their blog. And all this is extra advertising for free. It's a great thing to do in affiliate marketing, in fact absolutely necessary, plus it can be lots of fun and quite entertaining. Let's not forget that we should also be having lots of fun as an affiliate marketer, as well as making the bucks.

Each day you should add new content to your blog - doesn't necessarily have to be much, just something enticing enough to make your readers want to come back and see what you have to say today. An active blog with new added relevant content is much more likely to be indexed quicker with the search engines.

Visit other blogs that are reasonably closely related to your area of interest as an affiliate marketer and add your comments - plus your link in your signature. Don't blatantly advertise your product - it's very frowned upon - but add some valuable comment which will entice readers to want to know what you're about, and therefore click on your link.

Blogs are websites, and as such they are a very valuable - and free - tool which you must implement in your affiliate marketing career.

Lynda Mekalick is an Internet Marketer from New Zealand. Her success has resulted from implementing educational programs which are available online. She writes articles based on her ten years experience as an internet marketer. Visit at http://www.newbielynsaffiliatesecrets.com

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