7 Things That Will Increase Your Blog's Social Media Mileage

7 Things That Will Increase Your Blog's Social Media Mileage

When you are setting up your blog or deciding your blog posts, you need to ask a few crucial questions.

Is Your Blog Fetching You Social Media Mileage

What is your blog’s social media mileage?

No Life Outside Social Media – Is Your Blog Social Media Worthy?

What is your blog’s social media worthiness?

Generation Y is so social media conscious they resist to do anything that will bring them social media mileage. Yes, if you want them to attract to your blog you need to give them the social media worthy. What is social media worthiness? A blog, website or any information is said to be social media worthy when posted in the social media sites, they should fetch likes, shares and comments. In other words, posts that interest the audience in the social media sites is called social media worthy posts.

When your blog or blog post that you share in the social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., gets you excellent visibility through shares, likes and comments then it is said to have good social media mileage. Blogs with high social media mileage or blogs that are highly social media worthy are blogs that are destined to be successful. You should try to increase the social media mileage of your blog and blog posts. 

Here are 7 things that you can do to increase the social media mileage of your blog post.

#1 Include Images – Images are one of the baits for improving your blog’s social media mileage. People like to share images. If you include images in your blog, when you share them in the social media sites, those images act as the placeholder for the post that you shared. Of course, images grab our attention and your social media mileage will increase tremendously when you post a relevant image. If you can summarize the content of your post in the image, it will help further than just sharing a baby smiling.

#2 Include Lists – Lists have amazing social media mileage. People like to read top ten lists, create interesting lists and share them in the social media sites. One of the reasons why lists are popular is because they are very light and make an easy read.

#3 Create controversial topics but you do not get into the controversy – People love controversies. Identify controversies in your niche industry. Avoid moral policing when you create controversial topics. Avoid everything relating to religion, gender and ethnic background. Do not create topics that can hurt people’s feelings and sentiments. Even if you do not intend any such things anticipate discussions that can have such results. If it is within your blog, you can moderate the comments but when you share in the social media sites, you cannot possibly have complete control over the comments.

#4 Ask questions to your audience when you share your posts in the social media sites. It just needs someone to get started and once it starts comments will start flowing.

#5 Time your posts and shares with the peak social media activity time – Not all times are suitable for posting in the social media sites. You need to time your posts. Run a few test posts to see what is working for your niche because this will vary from one niche to the other so you will need to know what works for your niche to increase your blog’s social media mileage.

#6 Compile or share statistics that are relevant to your niche – Who doesn’t want to take a peek into how many babies are born every minutes, how many spouses cheat and how many hours people spend on Facebook.

#7 Write about topics that you are passionate about and see how you can give valuable information to your audience without and not waste their time. Everything boils down to your interests and your passions. You need to be passionate about what you write and it will be easily seen through in your posts. So do not just create random posts. You should blog only when you love the topic. When you find such topics you cannot but write and you cannot but share. Passion is the key to success.

3 Goals Of Blog Post Titles - How To Create Titles That Work

3 Goals Of Blog Post Titles - How To Create Titles That Work

Do you know that 90% of the blog readers click on your blog listed in the search results only if they find the title appealing to them?

Human minds have such a great weakness for titles and that is why successful authors spend a lot of time in creating exceptional titles for their blogs. Even if you are going to publish your blog post in a rush, I insist that you spend considerable amount of time in creating blog post titles that achieve the following three most important goals. By the way, do your blog titles have any goals to meet? Set goals for your blog titles, yes then you will see how your creativity in writing outstanding blog titles improves within a short time.

1^st Goal – SEO – Your first goal is to be found on the internet when people are searching for information relating to topics that are relevant to your blog. Don’t you think so?

What fun could there be if your blog post remains a secret that is yet to be found? Don’t you want your blog to be found and your blog articles become a great buzz in your niche market? Of course, you do and that is why you are reading this article right now. So what will make your blog to be found easily by your target audience? It is SEO, if you want your blog articles to be easily accessible to your target audience, you will need to make not only the blog articles search engine friendly but also the titles of the articles search engine friendly and in particular Google friendly. The next question is how do you make your blog article titles Google friendly? For this, you should first know Google’s goals. Yes, what are the goals of this search giant? What’s in it for Google to list your blog article in the top ten? Very often people including SEOs and search engine marketing experts fail to realize the importance of “What’s in it for me?” factor for Google. Every search engine including Google is a business organization with its own set of business goals. The whole SEO game is about helping the search engines meet these goals. One of the goals of Google is to serve the best and the most accurate results for its users. Here again the search engine is dependent on you. Only when you tell Google what your blog post is about, it will be able to serve its users. If your blog article is about selling flowers online but your blog article title is going to be “How to spray paint your car in 30 minutes” then you are going to confuse your readers as well as Google completely. So Google would not like to take chances with your blog article.

So pay attention to the three important SEO rules in creating your blog title:

The first SEO rule for creating your blog title

Create titles that are an accurate reflection of the article content.

The second SEO rule for creating your blog title

Include the most important keyword in your title. These keywords should be words, terms or phrases that your internet users will be using to make their searches.

The Third SEO rule for creating your blog title

Let your blog article title not exceed 60 characters. This is a safe character count when it comes to blog article titles. Why is this so? When your blog article is listed if the title is too long it will be truncated and the internet users will not get the complete picture, which will leave them guessing. It has been observed that the readers are more likely to click on titles that appear complete and meaningful in the search results when compared to titles that are not complete or titles that are not meaningful. Search engines have their own limits on the number of characters that they display as the listing title when they are listing your blog article or blogs. So titles that are contained within 60 characters make a safer bet.

2^nd Goal – Usefulness & Hence Clickable

The next important goal that your blog post title has is to tell your readers that the blog post will be useful to them. Here again, the what’s in it for me factor plays an important role. Only when the user sees clues or hints that your blog post will be useful to them, they will click on the listing. Unless your titles are going to convey this message loud and clear to your readers, it is not going to work. Here are some title ideas that will get you started:

“How to select your hosting company?”

“Wedding planning is easier than you think –Top Tips”

“3 things you should know while hiring your Houston plumber”

Each of the titles above is clearly conveying to the readers how the reader will benefit or what the reader will achieve after reading the article. The titles also meet the SEO rules. The titles are less than 60 characters, they include the top keywords in the above cases, hosting company, wedding planning and Houston plumber respectively. You just need to put in a little bit of thinking into your blog title creation. Titles that are catchy but with no SEO value will jeopardize your blog’s online visibility.

3^rd Goal – Shareable – The Social Media Generation Need

We are a social media generation. In particular, those who are born after 1990 exhibit very strong traits of the social media generation. One of the typical traits of this social media generation is that they do tailor their lifestyle based on what will bring them the highest likes and shares in social media sites like Facebook. So if you want your blog posts and blog in general to be popular among this generation, you will need to feed them with posts that will meet this goal. Are your blog posts shareable or if your readers share, will the posts fetch them likes and shares? If not, then you might want to rethink your titles. You will have to use your positioning skills too here because each product or service will be targeting people with specific needs or interests so the titles should cater to those needs and preferences of that specific target group and make them shareable. In other words, you are playing within very tight boundaries. However, it is good as long as you know your boundaries. It will be a problem when you do not know the boundaries within which you are supposed to be playing.

So go ahead and create winning titles for your blog articles based on the above principles and see your traffic rate increase gradually. Never forget the power of consistency when you are working on improving your blog traffic.

My Writing Skills Stink - How To Be A Blogger

My Writing Skills Stink - How To Be A Blogger?

6 Useful Tips That Will Save You!

One of the key skill sets required for blogging is some decent writing skills. Unfortunately, not all of us are blessed with good writing skills, so does that mean that blogging is only for award winning writers? What if my writing skills should stink? How to be a successful blogger even if your writing skills stink?

Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a Booker Prize winner of the year to be a good blogger. All that it needs is some decent capabilities to put together grammatically correct sentences. Is blogging that simple? Probably not, you need little more than the ability to construct grammatically correct sentences. You should be able to express your ideas and what you are thinking clearly through writing and not just make people understand what you are trying to say but to WOW people with what you are saying. Tough luck, hey! There should be some way around it and some way to get on to the blogging band wagon without needing to have exceptional writing skills.

Let us look at some of the ways to go round your limitations.

1. There are different blog writing styles. You should look for writing styles that will hide your limitations. For example, people love statistical data. Rather than writing thousands of words, you can bank on your ability to source statistics and compile them meaningfully and impress your readers. Just make sure to present the statistics with the right references and never, never make up the statistics because if you do, you will lose your credibility.
2. Make use of screen shots to create your story. This way, you can minimize the number of words that you have to write. However, you will have to remember the big brother Google and Google’s requirements. Google is not going to be too happy with skimpy content. Of course, you can leverage from the images by optimizing the image titles for getting better visibility in Google’s image search.
3. Try using bulleted text whereby you keep the text length short. This will help you camouflage your stinking writing skills.
4. Hire a writer to take care of your handicap. You share your ideas with your writer and give the pointers to build upon, the writer that you hire can take care of your blog writing needs professionally and give you an irresistible post developed from your seed idea. As the idea is yours, you can post the article in your own name without feeling guilty. You can use this method not only when you have limited writing skills but also if you have limited time. If you need assistance in writing your blog posts, you can get in touch with me and I will be happy to assist.
5. Today people are recording their voice and uploading it online. They are better talkers than writers and such people prefer to bank on their talking skills. You can try it to create your blog, then you can just create the transcript of what you have spoken word for word to leverage the content benefit. You can even hire a transcriptionist to handle this task. This way, you will be able to become a popular blogger without really writing.
6. Another popular strategy is to make use of video blogs. You can take a video of the topic that you would like to discuss and post it in your blog along with the transcription of the video.

These are some of the ways to get around your limitations. It is also not a bad idea to work on improving your writing skills. It might not improve overnight but, if you keep reading online resources like Blogxical and other resources on building blogs, you will get a hang of it and you will be able to create stunning blog posts of your own without having to go around your ears to touch your nose. When you do improve your writing skills, you will be even more versatile blogger believe me because you will be now well versed in using other content formats and not just the written text. You will be able to use statistics, audio, video, image, etc to spice up your blogs. Your blogs will stand out from the rest of the blogs that just limit themselves to textual content. In the world of Google, textual content has a very important role to play but using multiple content platforms will certainly have a decisive impact on your blog.

Must Know Truth About The Power Of Consistency In Blogging

Must Know Truth About The Power Of Consistency In Blogging

We have been talking lately a lot about blogging success in this blog. As a new blogger, you should know something very important about the “Power of Consistency.” There is no secret plot to this post, you have probably already guessed how I am going to conclude this post, yes, you are right. If you want to be a successful blogger you need to be consistent. If you are that kind of a self starter, you can quit reading this post to go ahead and do what you are supposed to be doing to make your blog a great success rather than wasting time reading what you already can accomplish on your own without any assistance. On the other hand, if you think that you can do with a little motivation pill, here I am happy to serve you that.

Etymology Of The Word Consistency

The word consistency comes from the 16^th Century Latin Word “consistentia” which denoted “firmness of matter” or “permanence.” When we say that consistency is key to success in blogging what do we mean? When you start as a blogger, you will have all the enthusiasm that you need to succeed but as days pass by, you will not know where that enthusiasm went and your blog will die a natural death with dwindling to no traffic. This is the plight of hundreds of blogs, I have gone through these phases, I have started countless blogs based on ideas which I thought are very bright and that they will certainly succeed. However, my mistake of the past was that I did not seek shelter under the power of consistency so those blogs were shelved. The consolation is that they can be resurrected anytime though they are dormant now! Well, coming back to enthusiasm and consistency, the issue here is that your enthusiasm was not permanent, it was only temporary so you let it droop to nothing. I would like to emphasize here that, that is why I keep emphasizing about the importance of having to choose the right topic or theme for your blog. If you have selected an area that you are passionate about, despite all the challenges on lack of time, work pressure and other commitments you will always find a way to connect back to your passion because passions are irresistible. So do not follow a fancy idea but always follow your passion so that you can achieve that consistency and permanence that is required to make your blog into a success.

What exactly can consistency do to your blog?

When you are consistent in your blogging efforts it means that you are committed to making certain number of posts every week. If you were to write just one blog post per day leaving aside Sunday, the math will work out like this…

6 days a week … 1 post per day… end of week 1 = 1x6 = 6 blog posts

52 weeks per year…6 posts per week… end of year 1= 6x52 = 312 blog posts

In 3 years of blogging…312 blog posts per year… end of year 3 = 3X312 = 936 blog posts

In three years time you would have built close to thousand blog posts.

Let us say that if you are going to do the same thing as a full time job. You write three quality blog posts per day. You will have 2808 posts in your blog… this is a considerable number for a beginner. You can take this even up to 3500 posts within three years given that you make the best use of the days where your enthusiastic level is really high.

To start with, you work with a humble goal of one blog post per day and keep 1000 posts in a three years time. As time goes by, your expertise level will automatically improve and your ideas get will get sharper day by day, soon you will be considered an expert in your niche market. You will start getting invitations from other blogs to create guest posts for their blog and people will be ready to pay beefy prices to get your post on their blog.

All these will happen only when you commit yourself to a certain goal and be consistent in your efforts. If you are going to leave your efforts to temperamental mood swings then you cannot possibly achieve any of your blogging goals.

The best part is that the momentum of your blog will increase significantly. The pressure exerted by thousand posts on your target audience will certainly be much higher when compared to just forty or fifty posts. You should know that it is totally within your control to achieve this goal, why leave it to uncertainty. One blog post is certainly a digestible goal for someone that wants to make thousands of dollars from his or her blog.

Are You A Breedelogger - Seven Things Common Between A Bird Breeder And A Blogger

Breeding Birds and Building Blogs - What is common between them?

Are You A Breedelogger -Seven Things Common Between a bird breeder and a blogger!

As an aviculturist in the making and as a blogger I see lot of commonalities between the two as much as I see the commonalities between the school of thought of Immanuel Kant an 18^th Century German Philosopher and the teachings of Mahabharata one of the most favored Indian epics. Well, coming back to breeding birds and building successful blogs, both of them have number of things in common.

What Is Common Between Breeding Birds And Building Successful Blogs?

The Urge – If you are fervent breeder, you cannot but breed birds, you need to be with birds, you are preoccupied with the thoughts of birds, and I know hundreds of people that share this sentiment. The same with blogging too, if you are a fervent blogger, you are also constantly thinking of coming up with interesting blog titles, how to present your information in a reader friendly way and how to keep things interesting and so on.

Knowledge – You need the knowledge about the bird that you are breeding and knowledge about the subject on which you are blogging.

Patience – You need a lot of these before you can see those chicks hatch and fledglings come out of the nest box! Those who have experience will know what I mean here. With blogging, you need to wait until traffic builds and your moneymaking strategies that you have deployed in your blog start actually working.

Perseverance – You cannot afford to give up if you want to be successful in both. Yes, there may be failures, depressing moments, frustrations along the way, you will need to persevere if you want to be successful.

The Desire To Improve – Every bird breeder has this desire, he or she is a person that is constantly looking for tips, secrets and healthy methods for breeding and raising healthy birds. The same with the enthusiastic blogger, he or she is constantly looking for ways to improve one’s writing skills, presentation skills and best ways to reach the target audience. The desire to improve is very strong in a breeder as well as a blogger that likes to take what they are doing to the next level.

Consistency – You need to be consistent with your effort, yes it is not enough that you be patient and that you persevere, but you will have to be consistent with your efforts doing the same thing over and over on daily basis, 24x7, 365 days a year continually perfecting your efforts each day.

Yield - Yes, this is the rewarding part! If you have the above qualities you are sure to see the results, you will become successful. It may be delayed a bit in some cases but you will certainly receive it!

One can draw the same commonalities between the other fields and areas of life too but having gone through both, I see these commonalities more evident than the other areas.

I know, I make it sound that breeding birds and building successful blogs are both challenging endeavors and that they are difficult, then why bother with the hassles? Why not simply turn away? For the sheer joy that these activities bring, the sense of satisfaction that you get when you start seeing signs of success with your efforts that is what makes you keep one getting back at it. There are also monetary rewards in both besides other factors such as reputation, fame and recognition in your own circles, things that matter too. So why don’t you too become a “breedelogger.” Don’t search the dictionary for the meaning of this word because I just coined it and who is a breedelogger – One who breeds birds, dogs or other pet animals and also fervent blogger is the whom I call a breedelogger, “Breeder + Blogger”.

How Hosting Services Gamble With Your Blog - 3 Important Tips To Keep Your Blog Guarded

How Hosting Services Gamble With Your Blog: 3 Tips To Keep Your Blog Guarded

You want to launch a successful blog, yes all of us want to do that, don’t we? Most of the bloggers think that they are in total control of the situation and that they can make their blog a top blog of the year by coming up with interesting topics, by posting regularly and by sharing their posts in the social media sites. Yes, true, all these things can make your blog into a successful one but there are things that are beyond your control that most bloggers are not even aware of and mainly because of the lack of technical knowledge on the intricacies of running a blog and keeping the blog online. What am I talking about? Blog Hosting!

Most blog owners are not aware of how hosting service gamble with their blogs. Are you hearing it loud and clear, “Hosting services gamble with your blog!” It is not just your blog that are gambled with. It is your favorite ideas that are being gambled upon, it is your hours of sleepless nights to come up with interesting topics that are being gambled with, your tireless efforts that are gambled.

Do you still want to take chances with your blog hosting? What exactly is the issue here?

If you are hosting your own blog, you will need to find a server to house your blog and the content that you are posting. The server in which your blog is hosted has lot to do with your blog’s success or failure. Do not run away from these facts just because you think that these factors go over your head. There are certain basics that you should be aware of so that you can keep your blog guarded.

Search Engine Prejudice - Blog Issues That Come From Shared Hosting

Most of the bloggers today go for shared hosting because it is cheap and affordable for their blogs. Well, though it might be good enough to go for shared hosting services for your blog, you should know that your blog is hosted on a clean server. If websites belonging to certain restricted niches such as pornography, gambling, etc., are hosted in the same server as yours, search engines will look at your blog too with a certain amount of prejudice. Your blog may not have anything to do with those restricted niches but despite that you could be inviting trouble without even knowing that you are investing in trouble. Hosting service providers treat all domains equally as long as they make money. They will not have even the slightest bit of hesitation to park your domain on the same sector as the restricted niche.

How to protect your blog from search engine prejudice that comes from shared hosting issues?

Tip 1 To Guard Your Blog

Try to spend a considerable amount of time trying to screen as many hosting services as possible. Yes, today thankfully we have number of online resources like MouthShut that you can use to check whether your hosting company is a reputed hosting agency. As much as possible try to deal with local vendors this way, you will be able to establish the credibility of the service provider. Screen the reputation of your hosting company thoroughly. No shortcuts or no exceptions what so ever. Make mistakes here, be ready to be doomed!

Epileptic Hosting Services – Blog Issues That Result From Poor Server Time

Yes, I am coining this term “Epileptic Hosting Service” because I find it to be apt because you will not know when your server will be thrown offline with some of the hosting service providers. If the hosting hardware or hosting resources of substandard quality or inadequately supported then you could possibly be suffering from Epileptic Hosting Services. There are two adverse effects from Epileptic Hosting:

#1 Your blog visitors are not going to be happy to hit page cannot be found error frequently when they come to your blog. If they should be faced with such issues, they will stay away from your blog.

#2 Secondly, search engines are going to earmark your blog for being a blog that offers poor user experience. Sleazy is the word to be used here, search engines will consider your blog to be shady and sleazy if not unreliable. All these are sure to render poor user experience. Search engines like Google are certainly after good user experience and anything that is against good user experience is likely to cost your ranking in Google and other search engines.

Tip 2 To Guard Your Blog

When you are searching for your blog hosting services, do not search for cheap hosting solutions. Cheap can be expensive! It is not just what you pay out of your pocket that costs you but even what you don’t get into your pocket costs you too. So be mindful of such factors and look for decent blog hosting solutions that will provide good hosting hardware for your blogs. Here again try to read reviews from customers. When you are reading reviews online, try to find as many reviews as possible, because most of the hosting services try to get paid reviews or hire a writer to create fictitious reviews or testimonials. Fictitious reviews and testimonials are sold at 50 cents per entry so it costs hosting companies lot lesser to get fictitious reviews than provide dependable hosting solutions.

Snail Servers – Blog Issues That Emerge From Slow Servers

Today internet users want to get everything done fast. With the high-speed internet, 3G and 4G networks, they want their web pages loaded yesterday! Yes, if your blog is going to be hosted on a Snail server then you are blog pages are going to take ages or at least it will feel like it to load. Your users are not going to appreciate it. They will leave your blog even before the post loads and not only that they will not come back to your blog. There is yet another far-reaching repercussion here. Search engines like Google are constantly watching your server data too. We have already mentioned about, Google is after providing their users with best surfing experience. Slow loading pages certainly impede good user experience. In addition, search engines interpret such data little differently. If a visitor quits a page too quickly then it could be because the page is not the right match for the search that is made, the visitor is probably not finding what he or she is looking for in the blog that they have visited which makes them quit instantly. The search engine program learns the next time not to list your blog for the similar or same keywords if the number of visitors that leave your blog is going to be high.

Tip 3 To Guard Your Blog

Try to look for dedicated hosting. If you think it is too expensive to go for dedicated hosting, check out cloud hosting options. Cloud hosting services or virtual private servers give you the benefits of a dedicated servers almost at the cost of shared hosting. Do check out the options. You will have to do all the screening, checking and reviews before you launch your blog. Once you launch your blog, you will need stability. Changing servers frequently will not only be an expensive affair but it could also become a dirty business as anything could go wrong.

Do not let the hosting services gamble with your blog. You need to do your part to protect your blog. If you don’t care enough about your blog then who will, you cannot blame the hosting services because they are out there to make money. There are number of good hosting service providers online, but it is your responsibility to find the best hosting company for your blog. Building and running a successful blog is always not limited to creating interesting posts, you need to have a certain amount of technical knowhow too. It does not mean that you should know how to configure a server but at least you should know what to look for and what questions that you should ask your hosting service provider when you want to launch a blog which you envision to become one of the most successful blog of 2015. You get what you pay for is true not only in term of the $$ that you spend but also in terms of the time that you spend on finding your blog hosting company. There are certain hosting companies that specialize in blog hosting by providing good blogging tools and the best support for blogs, look out for such companies, you are sure to find dependable vendors. While there are gamblers in the hosting industry there are also dedicated hosting companies whose commitment to customer satisfaction we cannot deny. If it were not to be the case, we will not be finding all those successful blogs that we have online today.

Host your blog on  a healthy server and fast track your blog’s success.

How To Attract More Traffic To A Blog

Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog – Most Common To The Most Innovative Ideas

1. Talk to your friends about your blog.

Many people don’t know the impact this simple effort can have on their blog. We think of promoting our web only in digital ways and not in organic ways. If you don’t feel comfortable or enthusiastic talking about your blog then how can you expect others to show interest in your blog? If you can talk to at least ten of your friends, it will soon grow in to 100 new visitors. Just try it and you have nothing to lose.

2. Send your latest blog post links to your contacts that wouldn't mind receiving the link.

You are likely to have friends in your contacts list that would actually like you sending them the links to your new blog posts if it is a matter of interest to them. Identify such friends from your contacts list and start sending your links to blog posts that will interest them. Success often starts in a small way!

3. Add your blog URL to your email signature.

If you are a person that sends numerous emails per day then here is your way to capitalize on your email signature. Add a cool email signature that will give quick access to your blog. Even if 10% of the recipients should visit your blog, it will still be of your benefit. This is not going to cost you anything extra but it is certainly worth the effort.

4. Put a sticker in your car.

If you are so proud of your blog then you will certainly do this. You should have that kind of drive to take your blog to the next level of success. Try this and you will notice your traffic rate growing gradually over a period of time. This might start new visitors trickle into your blog even if it doesn’t make them flood your blog. This should not take more than a few minutes to get this done but you have lasting advertising solution sitting right on your driveway.

5. Share your blog in Facebook.

Oh yes! Social media marketing! What can we do without Facebook. Today all things bright and Facebook! If you do not share your blog and your blog posts in Facebook, you are doomed. Facebook has got such a great potential to send loads of traffic to your blog. This of course will work only when you have a network of friends or followers in your Facebook account.

6. Tweet about your blog.

Keep sending periodic tweets about your blog to regularly refresh your traffic rate.

7. Pin images from your blog in Pinterest.

This is something you have got to get in to the discipline of doing it, if not you will miss a potential platform. The idea here is to keep as many doors open as possible for your blogs to catch fire. Once the ball starts rolling the momentum will increase and you cannot keep up to the rising momentum!

8. List your blog in blog directories.

Look for blog directories that will list you for free. Don’t go to Technorati because it is no more a blog directory. Hundreds of resources out there will tell you to go to Technorati to gain blog visibility but that information is outdated. There are other blog directories that you can try. Just make sure to get your blogs listed in some reputed blog directories.

9. Bookmark your blog posts in social bookmarking sites.

Think of Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc., when you make a blog post. All these have their role to play in bringing new traffic to your blog.

10. Take part in forum discussions that are relevant to your blog and include your blog address in your signature.

I am not talking about some cheap forum discussions but, you should contribute positively to the forum more than, I agree to Mr. X kind of posts. If you have something valuable to say, people will want to see what you have to say in your blogs.

11. If you are selling a product or service through your blog, then list your blog in free classifieds site.

Why not? Free classified sites are meant to tell people about various products and services that are available in a given area. Do list your blog in free classifieds sites only if you are selling a product or service but not otherwise because such listings will be classified as spam otherwise.

12. Keyword targeting the content will help you get better visibility in the search results. Target long tail keywords in your blog articles.

Write for human visitors but be mindful that human visitors can come to your website only through search engines at least a great percentage of them do. Carefully target your top keywords in your blog posts. Let those top keywords reflect in the blog titles, sub-headings, tags or labels.

13. Try PPC campaigns initially to kick-start the traffic rate.

You can keep this as a last resource though. There is nothing wrong in setting aside a meager budget to promote your blog if this means some commercial value to you.

14. Find other blogs in your niche industry and take part in the discussion in those blogs. Contribute positively and include your blog’s link.

This is another underutilized avenue. You think the other blogs in your niche industry have grown too big and that they will not notice you. Surprise yourself and you will certainly not regret. Bloggers that share genuine interest in a topic will look at partnerships positively.

15. Create an article on the same topic as your blog and post the article in the article directories along with your blog’s link.

Why limit article marketing to just promoting your products and services? In a way, your blog is a product that you are promoting. So go ahead and start writing some good articles and you should be really good at it if you are a blogger. Try your hands on article marketing and it is a free blog promotion strategy. This of course will cost your time though.

16. Create headings or blog titles that exactly match popular internet searches.

Remember we talked of keyword targeting. This point is an extension of keyword targeting, you will be able to find what search terms are being used by your visitors or the internet users in general. Try to incorporate such keywords and such terms in your article titles.

17. Increase the number of posts per week.

Blog harder! One post per week will certainly not create the impact that you would like. I recommend a minimum of one blog post a day.

18. Provide useful statistics in your blog.

Make your blog resourceful. Try to provide useful statistics to your blog visitors so that they have a reason to come to your blog.

19. Promote your blog in YouTube. This is one of the most underutilized methods for blog promotions.

You can attract hundreds of visitors to your blog through YouTube. People spend several minutes every day watching videos online. Create interesting videos about your blog posts and use them as teasers to get the attention of your target audience so that they can come to your blog to consume more.

20. Try answering questions in Yahoo Answers and include your link.

This is another important way of getting blog to the forefront. If you have something valuable to contribute, people will start noticing you and will also start searching for you.

21. Try also to focus on traffic outside Google.

We have become pretty much “Googlish” yes we cannot think outside Google when it comes to attracting traffic to our blogs and websites. Google has in fact succeeded in achieving its own goals but you can still think outside Google to attract more traffic to your website. This is not to mean that you should not focus on Google traffic. If Google is sending you 89% of the traffic, the remaining 11% traffic is untapped, I am saying that you start tapping on the remaining 11% as well to get the best bang out of your blogging efforts.s

Why It Is A Good Idea To Integrate Live Chat To Your Blog?

Why It Is A Good Idea To Integrate Live Chat To Your Blog?

Live Chat is one of the most popular contact options businesses give their website visitors. You can integrate Live Chat feature not only to your website but also to your blog. Adding live chat to your blog can be an excellent way to interact with your blog visitors. If you are promoting your products or service through your blog then Live Chat in blog will be one of the most efficient ways to provide customer support to your target audience.

There are number of free live chat plugins available for your WordPress blogs and for your Blogger blogs. You will just need top copy and paste the HTML code of the respective chat software in your blog and presto, the chat window will appear instantly on your blog.

Initially when your blog traffic is low, you may not have to hire any chat support representatives to chat with your visitors. You should be able to handle the visitors yourself as long as you login to the chat interface.

Top Benefits Of Adding Live Chat To Your Blog

• Helps you provide highly reliable customer support to your blog visitors.
• Cheaper way to support your visitors.
• Your visitors get instant assistance which will increase the customer satisfaction level.
• Your visitors will be able to find all the information they need quickly from your chat representative which will help them in making their buying decision.
• Your blog’s traffic rate will increase when you provide customer support through live chat in your blog.
• You can increase the conversion rates if you sell any products or services online.
• You will be able to gather a lot of useful information about your visitors when you integrate live chat to your blog.
• You will be able to understand your blog visitor’s navigation trends within your blog and thereby better customize your blog for optimum performance.
• Setting up your online support is instant.
• Your visitors will find it rather easier to get in touch with your when compared to calling you.

Live chat software tools come with excellent support features these days. You will be able to efficiently handle the support chats for your blog with minimal efforts. You can even store template based responses in your chat interface. The learning curve for using the chat software interface is also very short. Anyone with the knowledge about your products or services can use the live chat software without any need for technical skills or knowledge.

First to try whether it is worth the efforts, checkout some of the free live chat tools. Even the paid live chat software tools offer certain period of free trial to help their customers try the features of the chat software. For your trial purposes, a basic live chat software should do. Once you gauge the potential of including the live chat feature in your blog, you can think of investing money towards this value add feature.

108 Questions That You Have When You Create A Blog

108 Questions That You Have When You Create A Blog

When you want to start a blog, you are likely to have numerous questions and it is very normal. You should be worried only if you do not have any such questions especially when you are new to blogging. When you are new to blogging, every little factor will turnout to be an issue to be resolved. This blog posts just lists the possible questions that you are likely to have when you are starting your blog. Before creating your blog, you should have answers to all these questions so that you don’t get halfway. In this post, I have not answered any of the questions, I have just listed them and I hope to link each question to a new post which will provide you with the possible answers or at least point to the best resources available on the respective topic as the case may demand. Those who are trying to create a blog about blogging will also benefit from this post in the sense that you should know the list of questions that your target group is likely to have. You will impress them by having answers ready for your readers. This post will act as a springboard to get things started.

1. How to get started with blogging?
2. How to select the name of my blog?
3. Who will register the name of my blog?
4. Do I need credit card to start a blog?
5. Do I need hosting for my blog?
6. How much will it cost me to create a blog?
7. Are there free blogging solutions?
8. Do I need to buy any software to create a blog?
9. How many people are reading blogs?
10. What is WordPress?
11. What is BlogSpot?
12. What is Blogger?
13. Are Blogger and BlogSpot different?
14. How will people know about my blog?
15. How will my blog attract visitors?
16. Do I need to hire a company to create my blog?
17. Who will write for my blog?
18. Do I need to create the articles for my blog?
19. Is it too difficult to create a blog?
20. Do I need any technical knowledge to create blog?
21. Do I need to know any programming to create blog?
22. Do I need a web designer to create blog?
23. How long will it take to create a blog?
24. What should be length of each blog article?
25. How long will the blog article that I post in my blog remain in the blog?
26. Can other people delete my blog posts?
27. Can other people comment on my blog posts or share their opinions on my blog post?
28. What is comments moderation?
29. Is it safe for me to allow other people to comment on my blog posts?
30. Can I share my blog posts in Facebook?
31. Can I Tweet about my blog?
32. Can I include my blog address in my resume?
33. Is it good to include my blog address in my email signature?
34. I am not a good writer and how can I start a blog?
35. Will the other people be able to see my contact details?
36. How to upload my pictures in my blog?
37. How to include a PPT in my blog?
38. How to include a video in my blog post?
39. Do I need to advertise about my blog?
40. What is permalink in blog?
41. What is label in blogger blog?
42. What are tags in WordPress?
43. Which is the better blogging platform WordPress or Blogger?
44. Which is the best platform for to include Adsense?
45. Will Google allow free blog in the Adsense program?
46. Is using blog a Google friendly approach?
47. Should I have a standalone blog or should I create a blog with my website?
48. Do I need a website to create a blog?
49. Is there a free blog?
50. Can I make money creating a blog?
51. Who will pay me for blogging?
52. Can I write in other people’s blog?
53. Do I need any certificates to create a blog?
54. Is it legal to create a blog?
55. Do I need to go for some course to start a blog?
56. Do I need HTML knowledge to create a blog?
57. How to make my blog page look like my website?
58. What are blog templates?
59. Can I blog on any topic?
60. Are there any topics that I cannot blog about?
61. Can I sell my products through a blog?
62. Is it possible to integrate a payment gateway to my blog?
63. How to update my blog?
64. What are pages in blogs?
65. What is a sticky page in blog?
66. How many posts can I list on the blog home page?
67. How to include Adsense to my blog?
68. How to optimize my blog?
69. How to create the right titles for my blog posts?
70. Does my blog need SEO?
71. Is Facebook a blogging platform?
72. Can I use Facebook as a blogging platform?
73. Can I target visitors through blogging?
74. How will the search engines know about my blog?
75. Will the Google automatically index and list my blog?
76. How to get my blog listed in the top ten positions of the search results?
77. Can social media replace blogging?
78. Do I need to spend more time on social media or blogging?
79. Is blogging dying after social media rush?
80. For what do people use blogs?
81. What is the use of creating blogs?
82. Can I start a personal blog?
83. How to block my blog from being listed publicly in the search results?
84. What are plugins for blogs?
85. How to increase traffic to my blog?
86. How to check whether anyone is reading my blogs?
87. Can I use my own design for my blog?
88. How to create a description for a blog?
89. How to link to different blog articles that I have earlier posted in my blog?
90. Can I link to other websites or blogs from my blog?
91. Can I sell links from my blogs?
92. What kinds of topics are best for blogging?
93. What is the best content structure for blogging?
94. What are the most popular blogging title formats?
95. How to make my blog mobile friendly?
96. Will people be able to access my blog through their mobile phones?
97. Do I need to know SEO to start a blog?
98. Are there any recurring expenses in creating a blog?
99. Can I make enough money through blogging?
100. What are the different marketing strategies to promote my blog?
101. How to know whether my blog is indexed by Google?
102. Is there any special time during the day for posting the blog articles for best performance?
103. How to integrate my blogging efforts with social media marketing?
104. Can I give customer support for my products through blogs?
105. How to transfer my blog from free platform to self-hosting?
106. How long will it take for Google to index my blog?
107. How soon does Google index my new blog articles?
108. Can I integrate live chat feature to my blog?