Pro Blogging Tips

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.

When it comes down to the hosting for a blog you should better be sure that it gets the best hosting, as the hosting server is a home of your blog. You would not like your readers to be unable to read the info which you have published just because the blog is down due to hosting problems.

A lot depends on the purpose of the blog.

For example, free blog hosting services are popular, however they are most suitable for individual online journals.

Paid blog hosting services give you unlimited packages.

You can also contact the blog owners (blogs that you like) and ask for the recommendation about the hosting.

When choosing the hosting of a blog keep in mind that there’s a typical catch. Sales support and tech support are two different teams. Sales support people usually answer your questions very quickly, in real time. They often have online chats and react to your questions with super sonic speed. This is because they need to SELL the service to you.

But don’t think that the same speed will be when tech support. Having tested lots of hosts personally I can say that they can ignore your support tickets and problems for weeks.

Surely there are good hosts where the tech support is helpful. But many times it was like descried: sales support is very quick - you are happy - then it comes to problems and tech support sucks - you need to do a refund and find another hosting.

That is why asking for recommendations is a good suggestion.

This is the list of reasons why blogging is an effective Internet marketing tool. 

It is simple.

No special skills needed - just to know how to read, write and type the texts. That is why if you have a PC and access to Internet connection, you have everything necessary to blog.

It is authentic.

We live in a highly promoted medium. But in blogs real people share true experiences or useful info. That is why psychologically a reader is more likely to accept your ad which can be a review, recommendation or advice.

It builds credibility.

With more posts that are useful and helpful you become an expert yourself and expert in the eyes of readers. Needless to say that you also "grow" in the eyes of advertisers, because they understand that a good blog has many readers - people whom they’d like to target.

You can use these methods to make more people know about your blog and read it.

Use e-mail.

Try using a short e-mail message as teaser to your blog site. And if the e-mail is on an entirely different subject, you can use e-mail signature.

Use subscription.

Give your readers an opportunity to subscribe to your blog. And, of course, keep some exclusive information for your subscribers to entice readers to subscribe and give their e-mail address.

Learn and understand your readers.

A simple survey can help you to understand better your readers. You can ask readers to give you feedback on a post, an ad link, or a trial that you shared. This is very valuable info that will help your blog to be more successful.

Join blog network.

Network of blogs that share the same industry, interest, readership base, payment mode can shortcut you to the readers in your niche. Most often you will need to promote other blogs in this niche in return for them promoting you, this means you will share the traffic with them. But if, in return, you get more traffic - then it’s worth the efforts.

Use RSS.

RSS (really simple syndication) helps to generate awareness for your readership base. Plus you can submit your feeds to RSS catalogs and keep them updated about new info published on the blog.

Writing is an art - beyond any doubts. Blogging is a lot more simple, if this is not some refined blog about the literature or writing.
 
With the onset of blogging, personal online journaling - or blogging in other way - is a common ground for people who wish to be known all over the world or who simply want to share their ideas with the rest of the world.

Generally, blogs are created for personal use. At least it was so at the beginning. But now we can talk about business blogging, experiment blogging, publicity blogging, political blogging. You name it!

A simple syndication of your blog via RSS technology automatically makes the rest of the world know about the info on your blog.

These tips will help you to succeed with a blog created for business or pleasure.

Consider your audience

Think about the minds of your readers and things that would interest them. If you want to heard and read, then you need to take your potential listeners and readers into account.

Sometimes pictures speak a thousand words

Visual stuff makes its magic. It would be great to place your photo, because a good photo can make people think about you the way you want - mysterious, professional, funny, etc. Plus any types of photos and screenshots and videos make your blog more "alive."

Avoid making multifaceted and complicated blogs

Try to be simple in the structure of your blog. When a person comes to the blog for the first time he or she has up to 5 seconds to close the page or start reading it. That is why if it looks too complicated - this can cut you from part of the readers.

Make it interactive

A good way to do that is allow commenting and feedback on the blog. But please make sure to use specific spam comment protection plugins, because your blog can end up with thousands of lousy comments that give no value and are nothing but a blame promo of other sites.

Today blogs are created by people of all possible ages. There are no detailed and exhaustive stats numbers of how many blogs are created by the people of this or that age. But teen bloggers are on the cutting edge of the movement.

There is nothing strange about it. Teenagers of today are the first generation of people to have grown up using the internet at every stage of their development, and they have the innate sense of how to use web technology to express their thoughts and ideas.

Another reason for blogs to be super popular with teenage publishers is that blogging provides a unique combination of visibility and anonymity. Just think about it - a teenager can invite friends and peers to read his or her blog with a simple email or positions in search engines or other ways. A teenager gets attention and appraisal - which is really good for the people of that age.

At the same time it is possible to blog anonymously with an invented nickname. This does not mean that most of the teenagers prefer to do blogging anonymously, but with that option being available - teenagers get even more happy about it.

Outside the world of blogging teenagers most often have very limited opportunities to be published. There are exceptions, but these are just exception. In a way this is discouraging adolescents from writing or from seeking chances to publish their work. With blogging this type of problem simply does not exist.

And one more positive factor. Blogging is a social endeavor which helps to meet people with similar interests from all over the world. Having contact with the people who share the same ideas is a true value for the people of all ages, teen age especially.

As you can see - there is no wonder that so many teenagers adore blogging and run their blogs, even packs of blogs. But even if you are over 100 years old - don’t worry, blogging can do wonders for you as well