by Tricia on September 8, 2009
Wahm Blogs
Blogs are here to stay, and many Wahms are taking advantage of the trend. Many work at home moms choose blogs to make money. It is easy to set up a blog, they are also relatively easy to update. This is especially true when you compare blogs to other types of websites. Within just a few minutes, you can set up a professional looking blog for free and start your Wahm blogging business.
A blog is an easy to update website that looks sort of like a journal. The newest entries appear at the top, entries are made at a minimum of each week. There are normally 200 to 500 words in an entry article. Readers visit the blog or read the new blog entries through a blog reading program. Readers can also comment on entries and provide links between their own blogs and your blog.
With blogs, the opportunities are wide open. Choosing a blog topic is as easy as looking at your own life for inspiration. There are blogs about every topic, from gardering to make-up to celebrity news. Do some research on the Internet to investigate if people are interested in the blog topic you have in mind, before you actually start it. Your topic doesn’t have to be popular, but it does have to have a dedicated group of people who are interested in the topic.
Make sure to stay within a fairly small “niche when picking a topic.” The term niche is used to describe a group of people who have a similar interest. There are big niches – like working at home – and small niches – like tips for training your cat to sit on the toilet. A happy medium between a populair topic and a niche interest will help your blog get plenty of readers. There are some topics that are too broad, like working at home or parenting. They have too much competition for readers.
You can set up your blog through a free blogging platform, like www.blogger.www or com.wordpress.com. There are also a half dozen others to choose from. To make your first entry into your blog, the blogging platform will walk you through it.
It’s time to monetize your blog when you’ve made a few entries into your blog. This means you’ll be making specific changes to your blog in order to make money. Using a contextual advertising program, like Google Adsense or Chitika to gain income from a blog is one of the most populair ways. Contextual advertising pays you for each time a reader clicks on one of the advertising links on your page. The advertising program will scan your blog entries for keywords, and then place advertising on your page that relates to your page content.
For example, if you have a blog on children’s television and write an article about Sesame Street, the ads appearing next to that article will have to do with that program. They might be links to shopping for Sesame Street items, or an ad for vintage Sesame Street collectables selling on ebay.
by Tricia on July 22, 2009
Installing a blog on your domain is probably the quickest and easiest way to set up your website and get it to start earning you money.
If you web hosting company is one of the many that give you the option of a “one click” installation of Wordpress then this is far and away the easiest way to get a basic Wordpress installation on your website. It will take care of the database that your Wordpress blog will use and will unzip all the files into the right place.
The only snag is that Wordpress updates itself regularly, so you may have a slightly out of date version. You may or may not be worried about this, although I would strongly suggest that you do keep your version of Wordpress as up to date as possible because the updates they released often deal with new security bugs.
Once you’ve got the latest version of Wordpress installed, you’ll need to make some changes to make it as friendly as possible for the search engines.
This involves modifying some of the default Wordpress settings and also uploading what are known as “plugins” to improve the functionality of Wordpress.
Don’t go mad adding lots of plugins. Keep to a short list like this:
- Akismet, a useful plugin that helps cut down comment spam on your blog
- All in one SEO pack, which will help you optimize your blog for the best search engine results
- Sociable, so that your blog readers can easily add your blog to a selection of social bookmarking sites
- Wordpress stats, which make your stats just a click away from your main Wordpress dashboard
The other thing to change is the “permalink” structure. Go to the Settings tab on Wordpress, click Permalinks, go down to the custom structure box and type in:
/%postname%/
making sure to save your changes.
This will alter the way your blog posts are named and makes them friendlier for the search engines to index.
Get more free information with my series of free videos that show you how to earn money with blogs. You’ll soon be up and earning more money from your blog.
by Tricia on July 22, 2009
At Last there is a way to know up front what are the best converting keywords
Search engines can drive a lot of traffic to your website, but you have to use them actively. For potential visitors to find your website, it must show up when they do a search. Create “signs” (keywords) that point a roadmap to your website. Quality keywords must be selected for your site and by this, I mean the actual content on your website should include the same words that people would be typing in to a search engine. When the page contains the same words that people are searching for it becomes more relevant.
Find out which words people are searching for and be very specific in the use of those words. Page relevance is determined by having more specific keywords when people perform a search. The keywords would be the starting point of your whole marketing strategy. Your target audience may never find you if you choose them incorrectly.
It can be complex to find keywords that people are searching for about your product. The words that you may use may not be the same words that they are typing in to find you because, unlike them, you know a lot about product. Finding keywords relevant to your niche is important and using online tools can help with this. A good service is Word Tracker but when you go to set up your pay per click campaign with Google ad words or Yahoo, they have keyword tools available as well and you should use them. The current searches being done by the people looking for your product or service are recorded, making these tools valid.
Once you have your keywords list is important to evaluate the potential effectiveness of them. A quick search for the keyword will show the number of results that appear so you can assess its popularity. The aforesaid services will also aid you at this. Search terms that are more popular are more likely to be entered into the search engines so you want to become relevant for those. Primarily, you should put yourself in the place of the consumer and set up your website so that someone who doesn’t know anything about you will be able to find you.
PPC Bully is an advanced keyword research tool developed by a highly experienced R&D team from Israel. It allows you to see exactly what your competitiors are doing, so you can “cash in” on their “test” and launch with the most lucrative combinations possible
