Best Blog Software Can Make You Or Break You

If you are interested in starting your own blog one of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing the best blog software. You have several choices, many of them are free, but before you choose just the right type of software you have to decide what you are going to use your blog for. That really will make a big difference in choosing the right software for your needs.

For example, if you are just blogging about your life and you have no real interest in making money from your blog, than virtually any free software will do, such as WordPress or Blogger. At this stage the most important thing for you to consider is the ease of use. You can use each type of blog for a while just to see which one you feel the most comfortable with.

If, on the other hand, you are using your blog to make money either as an affiliate marketer or with the use of Adsense, you will need to be a little more careful. The actual software can still be the same, for instance many internet marketers prefer the WordPress platforms. The difference is that you won’t want a free WordPress site. Instead you will want to buy your own domain name, so you own it, and have your blog hosted on another site such as Hostgator.com or HostMonster.com. That way your blog is your own personal piece of online real estate, you own it and you can control what you put on your site and what you do with it.

Going with the free version for a business blog is a very risky proposition Any of the free blogging sites have their own terms of service (TOS), which are always changing, if they find your blog to not be compliant with their TOS, the can delete your blog. Now think of what that would mean if you were making money with a particular blog and you’ve spent time building up traffic to that blog and one day it was just gone! Yikes.

Another thing to take into consideration when looking for the best software are the types of plugins available. Plugins are small software programs that you can literally ‘plugin’ to your blog by just a few clicks of the mouse, anyone can use them, and there are probably ten’s of thousands of them available for every imaginable need, and most are free. If this concept seems weird to you, just think of them like apps for a smart phone, it’s a similar concept. Some types of blogs will have a lot more plugins than others, so this could help you make up your mind which is best for you.

It’s always nice to have options, and when it comes to finding the best blog software you have quite a few. Just keep your overall goals in mind when trying to decide which is best for you. For the most part, if you are just a ‘personal blogger’ and not really in it to make money, the free versions are just fine for you and your needs.

Technorati Tags : software which money plugins

Article Marketing Blog – A Reason For Being

Article marketing blog posts can help you get a lot of very targeted traffic to your blog. When you use targeted keywords in your articles as well as your blog post you can greatly increase the number of visitors you get. When you add an autoresponder into the mix you’re really cooking with gas!

First things first, what is a ‘targeted keyword:? It simply means that the keyword that you are writing your blog around gets a high number of monthly searches but doesn’t have too many competitors all competing for a high rank in Google for the same keyword.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a blog where you promote dog training books. You find a great keyword: ‘easy to use dog training tips’. The keyword has a lot of monthly searches, at least over 1,500 but not a lot of competition, less than 20,000. When you write your articles and blog posts you will write about easy to use dog training tips. You will not only make that the subject of your articles and blog posts but you will also include that phrase a few times in each. That will make you stand out for the search engines and it will allow your article to appear on the first page of results in Google as well as drive traffic directly to your website because you’ve got that keyword in your blog post. Make sense?

So when you combine article marketing blog posts and optimize your keywords you can get a lot of traffic for free.

In my personal opinion anyone who is new to internet marketing should stay away from pay per click forms of advertising. Why? Because it costs a lot of money and it has a steep learning curve. In short, what that means is that you will spend a lot of money while you are learning how to do it but you will have very limited results. I just don’t think it’s worth it. For anyone with a limited budget or who is just starting out I think it makes sense for you to concentrate on the free methods first.

For one thing they are generally easier to master and for another they do not cost money. So if you make mistakes while you are learning how to do it, it will not cost you anything. You may not get optimum results but you won’t have wasted any money to not get optimal results.

One other thing, an autoresponder. This is a fully automated system where you can collect the email addresses of the people who visit your site. They can choose to opt in to your email list and by doing so they agree to allow you to contact them. So, no spam complaints against you. Using this will allow you to have a lot of contact with your site visitors which means you can continue to provide them with good information and build rapport with them over time.

so, to recap, use article marketing blog posts to set yourself up as an expert in your field, to build trust with your website visitors and to get a lot of traffic to your site. Add all this together and you’ll have a winning combination to make a lot of money online.

Technorati Tags : keyword money posts marketing

Blogging Advice – Personal Blogging Or Business Blog

Having your own blog is definitely a very popular thing to do now, probably because it’s just so easy to start a blog and there are even ways you can make money from your blog. If you’re just starting out and you need a little blogging advice, there are many online forums that you can join and ask questions of other more experienced members. If you want a very quick overview, keep reading…

One thing for you to realize, is that you can start a blog for free. Two of the most popular blog formats are WordPress.com and Blogger .com. You will have a wide variety of themes, the overall look of your site, to choose from with either format. You can have it hosted for free or you can buy your own domain name and set up a hosting account so that you actually own your blog site. This is the preferred method if you want to make money with your blog since you don’t actually own anything with the free methods.

The next thing you will need to consider is what are you going to blog about? Do you just want to set up a personal blog so you can share your travel or family stories with friends and family around the world, do you want to share gardening tips, etc? It can be whatever you want it to be you just have to decide.

Just remember that if you want to use your blog to start a business, you will need to spend a little more time and find a profitable niche market instead of just setting up a blog about something you love to do. In order to make money with your blog you have to make sure that there are enough other people who are willing to spend money on the niche you pick.

Whether your blog is a personal blog or a business blog, you can still make money by adding some ads to your blog. To do this simply sign up to Google Adsense, they will place ads on your blog related to the topic of your blog. Whenever someone clicks on one of the ads you’ll get paid a commission. The amount of money you make won’t be a lot, but what the heck, if you’re just blogging for fun anyway making a little extra money every month is just gravy!

Another thing to keep in mind, again this advice will pertain to any type of blog whether it’s a personal or business blog, is to make sure that you stay on topic with your blog readers. If your blog is about gardening you don’t want to start writing about sewing for example. While it is ok to write the occasional post on something a little off topic, don’t make it a habit. Remember, people will come back to your blog over and over again because they are interested in the topic of your blog. If they are reading a blog about gardening then they want to read about gardening. Give your readers what they want.

By following this simple blogging advice you can be be up and ready to blog in no time. It’s a fun way to express your opinion, make some money, share your knowledge, or just have fun.

Technorati Tags : money about blogging topic

Before I get into the details I want to make sure you realize this is not a free blog service.

This is an established blog already getting thousands of visitors per month and making an income.

It is on it’s own domain name and it’s own hosting.

Here is a screen shot of the traffic that I took today:

Visitors For The Month Of June

You can see that it averages over 100 visitors per day and all that traffic is coming from the search engines or social bookmarking sites as seen in this screenshot:

Sources of the traffic

If you do the math you will see that the total from the search engines almost matches the total visitors exactly.  These are not people I am sending to the site from my list.

Don’t worry if you are the lucky one to get the site you will be able to look at the full stats from your control panel.

Now comes the big question, “Why am I giving away a profitable site?”

There are a couple of reasons the first reason is that this is in a niche that I don’t have a true affinity for  and the site could be doing so much better if some one that enjoys this niche or is willing to learn this niche was working the site.

The second reason is that I am using it as promotion for my Blogging Beginners site.

At Blogging Beginners we teach the exact methods I used to create this site in under a week and then not do anything to it for months and still get traffic and income.  Again the income and traffic would be much higher if this was a niche I enjoyed working in.  I even have ideas and suggestions that would raise the income level on this site that I will share with the new owner when we give it away.

Now a little more about the giveaway.

This won’t be a random giveaway, we are looking for someone that will take the existing blog and use the techniques we teach at Blogging Beginners (yes, we will be giving away a Free Platinum Membership too)  to make this blog even more profitable.

You have to be a member of Blogging Beginners to be eligible for the giveaway but this isn’t a problem since you can sign up for free.

We will be giving away the blog on July 31, 2009

If you are interested just click anywhere you see the link to Blogging Beginners to sign up and get the case study for the site.  More information will follow after you sign up.

If you have been online for any period of time you know that all you have to do is put up a blog and you will be making six figures a month.

At least that’s what the ads tell you!

Well, I am here to cry, “shenanigans!”

It isn’t quite that simple.  Yes, you can go to sites like Blogger and have a blog up and running in minutes but that doesn’t mean that you will make money. It just means that you will have a blog and that is all it means.

I don’t care how many affiliate links you put on the blog or how many products you sell from it.  You aren’t going to make a dime from it unless you put some effort into it and have it constructed the right way.

What do I mean by constructed the right way?

It is actually simple to do as long as you know what you are doing.  Just putting up a blog on Blogger won’t get you visitors to your blog.  I don’t care what that $47 course you purchased on how to make millions on Blogger told you, you won’t get any visitors unless you did your research.

I know the idea of doing some work to earn an income is scaring a lot of you away right now.  That is because you are constantly barraged with hype that tells you, “Make $10,000 Per Month Blogging! Guaranteed!” If you are like me you have probably purchased a number of these products and found out they didn’t tell you anything that would help you.

That is because the copywriters knew what they were doing and they pushed your emotional triggers to get you to believe that you will make $10,000 per month simply by purchasing the product.  We all know that is total BS!

If you want to earn money online it is exactly the same as earning money offline.

OK, I can see a bunch of you disagreeing with the previous statement saying no way you have to know how to FTP and upload and download and all those other things.

But give me a chance to explain.

To earn money offline you need to have something other people want.  You either need to have knowledge, skill or products that people will pay for.

This is exactly the same with online income.

You need to have something other people want and are willing to pay for and it is the same basic items, knowledge, skill or products.

I defy you to find something online or offline that people pay for that doesn’t fit into one of these categories.

Some of you might point out tabloid blogs that make a lot of money.  Yes, there are a few of them that make a good chunk of change every month but for every one that is profiting there are 10 making no money.  The difference is the profitable ones have the skill they need to get people to their site which is why they can sell advertising for big bucks on their blogs.

This brings us back to blogging for profits the topic of this post.

I truly believe that everyone can make money blogging.  BUT I don’t believe everybody will make money blogging.

The reason for this is there are too many people looking for that magic button that will bring them instant income without putting in any effort.  They believe this because the hype they read on sales pages is designed to make them believe this.  The end result is usually a crushing blow to their morale and they think everything is a scam and just give up.

The magic button does not exist! You are not going to make money for doing nothing!

Even winning the lottery requires putting in the effort to buy the ticket.

If you are planning to blog for profit you need to do some (here’s that dirty four letter word again) work.

• You need to know what niche you are going into.
• You need to know what keywords to target.
• You need to know how to optimize your blog.
• You need to know what blogging platform to use.
• You need to know how to monetize your blog.
• You need to know how to get traffic to your blog.
• You need to know what content to add to your blog.

This is just the beginning of the list but as I said earlier, I firmly believe that anyone can make money with a blog. It is just a matter of knowing the right things to do and then doing them or getting someone else to do them for you.

But this brings us back to you putting in the effort.

First you need to cut through the hype and figure out what you truly need to do, figure out what you don’t know that you need to know.  Then learn what you need to know and do it.

There are a lot of courses out there that will show you how to blog but I only know of one that will cover everything you need to know.  Blogging Beginners, I am a little prejudiced since this is mine and Wizzer’s course but that doesn’t diminish the value of the course.

Tags: blogging, Blogging for Profit, Online Income