Bloggers know how valuable comments are. After all, blogging is not only about knowing how to blog or what to blog about. It’s also about handling those who actually read the blog and comments are the ultimate proof that people are reading their posts. It doesn’t matter whether or not the comment is in favor or against the ideas on the post. When a comment is left by a reader, that means the post has been read and is worthy enough of being given attention to. Comments are also some of the best things about blogs. They allow for authors to interact with the readers, thus, making their relationship more alive and dynamic.
However, not all posts get comments and sometimes, this becomes a cause for discouragement on the part of the blogger. The good news is, there are things that can be done by any blogger in order to encourage people to leave a note or two about the post they just read. Sometimes, it’s all a matter of letting readers know that the blogger actually appreciates their thoughts and opinions on the published posts and that their comments are, indeed, very much welcome.
Probably the first think you can do is invite your readers to comment on your post. You may think they know they can comment even without an invitation but it’s definitely different when you are actually inviting them. They may or may not like what you’ve written and they may have varied views about your post but that’s, of course, fine enough. The point is to get them to participate and maybe provide a point of discussion for other readers.
Of course, when they start commenting, you have to make them feel appreciated and usually, a simple response will do. You can thank them for taking the time to drop a note about your post. However, you don’t want to stop at thank yous but instead, try to be open-ended so that somehow, you leave the impression that you are willing to converse with them.
While a simple thank you may do for some, those that really standout may deserve something more. If you get some really nice and provocative comments, you can actually mention them in one of your future posts. This allows your readers to feel important as far as your blog is concerned. Even if the reference you made in your future post wasn’t theirs, they would feel important just knowing that you actually took the time give another reader’s comment all that attention. Plus, it shows that you don’t only read what they write but appreciate it as well.
And then, of course, if somebody tries to point out an error or mistake that you might have made in your post, be humble enough to admit it. There’s no point trying to fight with a reader, unless you want to risk being misinterpreted by other readers which may really do you good as a blogger. If you think you did make a mistake, acknowledge it. If you think you were right, make your point firm and simple and then thank the reader for his comment.
Proper handling of comments is one of the things you should master if you’re going to build your name as a blogger and especially if you want to %LINK!%. While blogging to make money may sound like an easy task for you, it can even actually get difficult if you don’t know how to handle your readers. Definitely, building a rapport with them is necessary if you want that traffic to be consistently growing.
A lot of bloggers out there dream of earning big bucks from their blogs. Of course, this sounds easy to do once you listen to blogging experts talking about writing the best content that people would always want to read.
But how to make money blogging is more than just a question of content. If there was a blogger who just couldn’t reach his million-dollar dream in spite of writing the best content in the world, there would only be two main factors – a lack of patience and a lack of technique.
Most of the time, bloggers are too impatient to wait for their blogs to accumulate traffic that they actually quit. This is for the reason that they can’t quite accept that to be known on the Internet , you have to be around for a long time. Of course, there are those that only came out a month ago and now they’re superstars. But most probably, these bloggers have celebrities for friends or probably they’re already quite known in society prior to their blogging. But for regular people, this can’t ever be possible. Rising to the top of the search engine rankings alone could take some time.
This means for one to have a solid base of readership, one has to prove himself over time and slowly build the name of his blog. Technique has something to do with getting people to read a blog so advertisers actually appreciate being on that page. Some bloggers spend too much time writing new posts that they hardly notice if anybody has been reading at all.
The problem is, while one may have the best content and writing skills to write the best blog post ever, it’s not going to make money unless people know about it. Technique would thus mean knowing and applying the right search engine optimization skills and backlinking. These are two surefire ways of getting a blog out in the open sea of the Internet for readers to fish.
If you want to make money out of your blog, you have to make people see it and read it. You need to have traffic because if you don’t, you won’t earn commissions from those pay-per-click and affiliate ads you have. In other words, the more traffic your blog gets, the more possibility there is that those ads are going to get clicked and you actually start earning you commissions.
To earn money blogging, one has to build the traffic because only traffic clicks ads and makes sales. In other words, making money blogging is not just about writing good blogs. It’s about getting these blogs out to readers because it’s the readers who’ll make money for you.
If you have an online business, it sure pays to do extra work trying to get it out to more people to increase your sales. And what better way to do that now than blogging. Definitely, blogging is a great way to promote your products or services and to seek out sponsors. Of course, you don’t essentially promote what you sell directly through the posts you make. What you’ll want to write about are topics that are informational and relevant to your products or services. This is a proven way to make your blog make money online just by staying home and enjoying the best of family life.
With a blog, you can add those pay per click ads which give you a commission for every click made on ads on your blog. There are also affiliate marketing sites which allow you to post ads on your page and earn each time those ads are clicked and when there’s actually a sale. In other words, your blog should be more of an information hub rather than a marketing tool. Then people will want to visit your blog not necessarily because of what you sell. They read blogs for the reason that they like what they read about.
Your major focus should be to give your readers good content because it is the one and only thing that makes blog readers want to come back and even subscribe to your posts. This will then give you the kind of traffic you want for your blog to actually start making money. Readers are, of course, what you’re after because they’re the ones who’ll be appreciating your thoughts, ideas and knowledge. Without your readers, it’s useless to make a blog, unless you intend for it to be your personal journal. In that case, you can’t really expect your blog to be earning.
Once you’ve, in one way or another, established a level of quality for your content, you’ll now want to add in the functionalities that will enable you to make money from your posts. Usually, people begin by adding Google AdSense. It’s a very simple process. You simply sign up for an account, provide pre-set specifications and Google will do the job of finding the best ads that will be useful or related to the information you present on your blog. When people visit your page and actually click on any of those ads, you take home a commission.
If one person is going to click one ad, you will be paid for that. But that won’t be much which means you have to get as many people as you can to click as many ads on your blog as possible. That’s how you really make a good sum of money. This also means that traffic is the number one thing you should work on. And again, quality of your content is what drives people to your blog.
Google AdSense is just one of the ways to make money with your blog. You can also add banners that will promote your products and services or those you have linked up with through an affiliate program. When you make very good posts, there’s a better chance that readers would want to click on those banners. Now, that will be one more way of earning an income through your blog.
You can earn money blogging and a lot of pro bloggers have been very successful in this. But when making money blogs, you need to have a lot of patience because it could take time to develop readers’ trust before the formula begins to work.
There is probably not a tinge of doubt that making money with blogs is a real and feasible way of making money. Still, there are the pessimists who will always try to put this reality aside if only for the fact they can’t embrace what technology has actually created beyond their boxed ideas. Stepping out of that box, however, will be a very good way of responding to the things that have been revolutionizing crude mindsets. One of these ways is blogging.
While there are those who just aren’t sold to the idea, it’s great to be reminded why they’re making such a big mistake. First off, when you blog for money, you’re not just blogging for the sake of expressing yourself. You’re actually doing it with a lot more foresight and practicality. Besides, if you’re enjoying it so much, then why not do it and make money, too? What could be better than earning and enjoying at the same time?
Blogging is a rewarding way of helping the business community that promotes the very ideas that you believe in enough to blog about. There’s no room for guilt for putting those ads on your blog. Readers are adult human beings and they do not patronize a product that is advertised on your page because you led them to through your blog. If they do click on those ads and make purchases from those companies, it’s their personal decision and you definitely had nothing to do with it. All you did was inform them about something you know and it’s up to them what to make out of that information.
Blogging for money is a significant way to make money. With your blogs, you are able to inform people about the things they need to know, hence, they come to visit your page. You’re not only serving your personal need to express yourself. You’re also doing service to people who believe in what you know and what you can do to affect them in every little way that you, through your blogging, can. Again, why not earn at the same time?
Blogging is a totally justifiable way to earn an income. You are not taking anything from your readers, nor are they forced to surrender anything to you. You are there with the knowledge that you offer and they come to seek that knowledge knowing that when it comes from you, it must be helpful. That’s the basic thing that happens with blogs. When you earn money, that’s your reward for being a good blogger.
You’re not blogging for money for the reason that you want to make money from your blog. You’re blogging because you have something to share that people could make very good use of. And if you’re making money, it’s a well-deserved bonus for the hard work you put in what you do. Besides, people can tell if you’re fake and just actually after the money. And people will sense if information is what you came to blog and not the money that you’re hoping to get by imparting that information.
To make your blog make money online, it’s not even advisable to keep focused on the moneymaking part. You have to work to actually earn money blogging and that means being sincere in what you give to your readers by making your content the best that you can make it while promoting it.
Every type of blogging can give a way to make money from it. Below we decided to publish the list of different types of blogs so that you could see how many niches you can monetize with blogging.
Political blog – all types of political news, elections, political programs, debates and other issue based blogs.
Personal blog – or sometimes called as online diary which can include day-to-day experience, complaints, poems, thoughts, ideas and communications between friends.
Topical blog – this type of blog focuses either on a specific niche.
Health blog – can be devoted to specific health issues or health in general.
Literary blog – this type of blog is also called as litblog and can contain both the literary works of the publisher or reviews of the works of other people.
Travel blog – can have the information about personal journeys or reviews of the offers from this industry.
Research blog – any academic issues that are published in a way of textual, audio and video research notes.
Legal blog – also known as ‘blawgs’ – can be about legal experience, real cases, or juridical problems and views upon them.
Media blog – everything about mass media, including falsehoods or inconsistencies in mass media.
Religious blog – different religions and religious topics.
Educational blog – about education, educational applications, problems in the industry.
Collaborative or collective blog – blog which is written by a group of people, becomes very popular due to special plugins that allow multi user access to blog posting.
Directory blog – collection of numerous blogs and web sites, can be about one niche or multi niche.
Business blog – used by businesses and corporation to properly position the company, its products and services in the eyes of online audience.
No matter what type of blog you are running, you can use these money making opportunities to monetize your blog:
• Advertising programs
• Affiliate Programs
• RSS advertising
• Sponsorship
• Merchandising
• Digital assets
• Donations
• Flipping blogs
• Consulting and speaking
Every blogger should understand the meaning of these features:
Title – feature label your post
Body – the content of every post
Trackback – this feature tells your blog every time another blog "mentions" your blog
Permanent link (or permalink) – unique URL that every post is getting
Comments – feature which allows readers to post comments on your blog
Basically all of these features give you not only a possibility to publish materials, but also help you to get good positions in search engines.
For example, you want to see your blog on good positions in search engines for a specific keyword.
You must make sure that:
You use this keyword in the post title, because this title will be indexed by special robots of search engines and the keyword in post title will "tell" search engine that this post is about this very topic;
Using the keyword in the post title will also automatically create a permalink of your post. You can choose the settings of building permalink to be formed like this:
http://www.yourblogname.com/title-of-the-post
By doing this you will also get a keyword from the title into the URL of this post. This is extra advantage, because search engines pay attention to the keywords in URLs as well, and this will work as extra score for the post to have relevance to the topic that you are fighting for.
By allowing people to post comments on your blog, you open a possibility to grow each page of your blog with extra content. Comment – even if it is just about 2-3 sentences – is still a text and content. Plus it was noticed that usually people, when commenting to some issue, are using the words relevant to this topic. This means your posts can grow with unique and relevant content.
Just make sure that you have special plugins that kill spam comments, because today some people are using spam comments to promote their sites in a "black hat" way.
As you can see almost every feature in the blog gives you a chance to get extra scores in the eyes of search engines. Do that and very soon you will see your blog on good positions for your keywords and this will send targeted traffic to your sites.
More and more people see it from their personal experience that business blog is a great online marketing tool. Blogs are a user-friendly, flexible and very useful medium for proper positioning of products and services online.
Basically blogs help your business by giving the following advantages:
Word of mouth info spread about your blog with huge Internet audience.
Awareness and loyalty built through direct contact with the readers and potential clients.
Useful feedback.
If you think about starting your own business blog, please take these important issues into consideration.
1. Study your blog design. Blog platforms have pre-designed templates. But it is always better to create uniqueness for the blog’s looks. We have a post on this blog that shares simple tips to making your blog design unique for very small money.
2. Choose blog topic. Make a list of topics, this will help you to build the blog content logically – so that the readers from the first seconds on your blog understand what they will find here.
3. Right up to 20 posts and line them up for publishing before going to marketing.
4. Start marketing.
5. Monitor the coming ins and outs of readers on a regular basis.
6. Adjust your blog if needed.
7. Be consistent with your topic all the time.
For more tips please read other posts on the blog.
The layout and design of a blog is one of the key elements for its success. No one says that without fancy design blog will not have big traffic. But at least the simplicity of navigation is a must for a blog to be successful.
Using these simple tips you can make your blog stand out from the millions of other blogs with standard designs.
Customize the header
Header is the top graphics, you see it at the top of a blog. Usually header is the biggest picture and, by the way, the first thing that visitor sees when coming to you blog.
Now you understand that this is a very important element in the design. It must quickly explain what the site is about and tell the readers that they came to the site they’ve been looking for.
A good header (without Flash) can cost up to $25. But you can bargain a better price.
Add a favicon
Favicon is the tiny icon that you see to the left of the URLs in the browser. No big deal, but adds extra feeling of the blog being unique.
Choose the best blog templates, layouts, backgrounds, textures and skins
There any many sites who are giving away all this stuff for free, just for the sake of becoming popular. Yes, it is likely that someone might choose the same blog theme that you’ve chosen, but the chances a smaller, if we compare with the chances to see the same design with ‘by deafult’ blog templates.
Include RSS feeds
Make sure to give the RSS button nice visibility on your blog. This will increase the number of people who will subscribe to your feed and become your loyal readers. Of course, a lot will depend upon the quality of your content. If the button is nice and shiny and content is junk – no one will subscribe. But in any case you need to make it easy to find where to subscribe for those readers who took this decision.
And the final tip – be creative and your blog will stay out of the line.
At the beginning of blogging many web designers and programmers might laugh at the very idea of using the software 3rd parties for a blog. But now the times have changed.
There is so much special tech stuff in the professional blogging software or blogging platform. It has dozens of modules that support special type of actions on the blog. Plus most of these modules need to be updated from time to time, as the Internet is changing rapidly.
Due to this it is really wiser to use 3rd party professional blogging solution than doing all this job yourself, even if you are a professional programmer.
There are 2 types of blogging platforms when we are talking about the hosting structure.
Hosted Services
You can save money on the payment for hosting and domain name and choose a blogging platform with free hosted service included. This can be Blogger, TypePad, Live Journal, WordPress (it’s WordPress.com section) and other services.
These services update all modules and you can focus on the looks and content of the blog.
But this has one disadvantage. The service is the owner of this blog, they kind of "lend" you the hosting and domain name for a while. And they have the right to take it back and even close your blog. Usually they do this only in case you break some rules of the service. Still, many bloggers regret not buying a domain and hosting – because instead of helping to raise the blog for a service, you do that for your own blog.
Self-Hosted Blogs
You buy a domain and pay for the hosting. Then upload the necessary blogging software or platform to the hosting, install it and start blogging. On many hostings today you will see WordPress already pre-installed.
This type of blogging takes more time – you need to install and setup the blog. This is not difficult and there are many videos that explain how to do that. But in my personal opinion it’s worth the efforts, because you are investing them in YOUR OWN BLOG!
The difference between simple audio file downloading and audio streaming is that streaming does not allow download of the music files. In this way those who do the radio blogging do not have problems with the copyrights of the artists and record label owners.
There are several ways to stream audio from your blog.
You can stream a radio program from your blog. All you need to do is find free programs that allow you to stream their radio content. This content is being updated by these programs and you don’t have to spend much time on creating it yourself – you just have the link embedded on your blog and the rest is done automatically.
Another way is to stream mp3 files. Basically you upload mp3 files on blog server and add the files links to the page. But mp3 format can be downloaded, and downloading music files without the authorization of the copyright owner is illegal. You need to get a permission, then you will not have any problems.
One more way is to add audio to the blog through organizing playlists. If playlists (m3u files) are downloaded they will not play music offline. This is a short instruction on how to do it.
Save your mp3 or wma file on the server.
Open text editor and type the path to the file into it. Do that for all files you want to play on the blog.
Now save the playlist with a.m3u extension.
Upload m3u file or files to the directory on the server where you store the music files.
Then embed the link to the m3u file.
By the way, you can set if you want to have this playlist work in autoplay mode (when someone visits your site – it starts to play automatically). Plus you can set the necessary volume level.
Ok, the code is embedded on the html file. Any time your blog is visited, the songs from the playlist will be buffered, streamed and played one after another.
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