Personal Blog of Forest Marie

WordPress is a popular blogging platform. Many online marketers are using these blogs to promote their business. However, I have seen many of the blogs are not optimized for search engines. Some of these marketers do not realize that having a blog is one thing and making it visible to search engines is another. I will give 5 ways of becoming friends with search engines.

1. Permalinks setting: Permalink is the permanent URL for each of your blog post. WordPress gives a default setting which is not optimal. You need to edit this for better search engine optimization. Click on the “settings > permalinks” menu from the WordPress dashboard. Use your custom link here like yourdomain.com/category/blogname. What this will do is that it will display the category and name of the blog post in the URL itself which it otherwise displays as a number. This will make it easy for the search engines to locate your blog.

2. Use SEO software: Go for a commercially available SEO pluggin like All in One SEO pack. This will allow you to create your own custom title and add in the Meta and keyword tags for the home page and each of the blog posts. Setting the right tags is one of the most popular ways to get noticed by search engines.

3. Optimize keywords: This is a standard technique. In fact, you must do some keyword research even before you start writing your blog. Keywords that are highly competitive are best avoided. Choose long tail keyword phrases which have relatively less competition and write your blog for this. Include the exact phrase in the title once and about 2-3 times in the body of the blog. Keyword research can be done with Google Adwords Keyword Tool or SEO Book Keyword Tool.

4. Bookmark your blog: Bookmarking is a great way to build traffic for your blog. Simply use sites like delicious.com or stumbleupon.com and post your blog url under your category. Even better, use onlywire.com or socialmarker.com to post your url to multiple social bookmarking sites at one go.

5. Update your community: If you have a presence of social networking sites like Twitter, you can send a small tweet to your community about your latest blog post. When you update your Facebook profile with this, it will automatically send a mini feed to your entire network about your blog post.

These are all great viral ways to promote your site and create backlinks. Moreover, all these go a long way in making your WordPress blog search engine friendly.

Blogging Blogging, wordpress

You can make money blogging.

If you have yet to jump on the blogging train no worries it’s not too late to grab your ticket to blogging profits. Social media is just really starting to boom in 2009 and I doubt we will see the cap on its growth any time soon and possibly ever. Some of the top social sites out of the 1000’s are MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media has not killed the blog, there is no reason you cannot leverage off the two and combine these two powerful methods.

Follow these 12 blogging tips consistently and you will be on your way to making blogging profits in 2009.

12 Blogging Basics for Profits:

1. Create a writing and posting schedule. If you do not enjoy writing there are many ways to outsource this task. Regardless you want a schedule so you are consistent with how much content you put out. You also want to schedule when you will post your writings on your blog. Decide what time you will post to your blog, how many times a week and what days. By being consistent your readers will know what to expect from you and will gain you more loyal readers.

2. Pick a niche. Do some research, know whether your niche is profitable, create a keyword list to help you know what your readers/customer are looking for and pay attention to the gurus in your niche. By targeting a niche you will be able to target your market and have better conversions from readers to buyers. This will also help you pick what products to promote and what to write about. It’s okay to have more than one niche, just have a separate site for those other niches.

3. Have a clean blog design. With templates abound it is not hard to find a professional, clean, easy to navigate blog template. Most are super simple to get up and running. However, if you find it to be more challenging then you want just like writing you can easily outsource the setup of your blog. Keep it clean and professional and you will have a winning blog design.

4. Choose your plugins. There are a ton of plugins. Some things to consider when deciding what plugins to have on your blog are: SEO, time savers, interaction with readers and anything to make the reader’s experience more enjoyable. A few of my must have plugins are: What Would Seth Godin Do? And the All-in-One SEO Pack.

5. Write from experience. What experience do you have with this niche, products you are promoting, things you are reviewing, etc.? When you write from the first person perspective readers will feel like they are getting to know you and as you build trust and get raving fans they will look forward to reading your posts, trust your reviews, recommendations and view point on the niche.

6. Use proper grammar and spell check. This does not mean to write bland or take away from your personality… However, the more proper your grammar the more attractive your writing will be. Spell check, spell check and spell check again. Do not just rely on your word processors spell check, proofread it yourself and have another set of eyes you trust check your work as well.

7. Remember SEO. Keep your keywords and keyword phrases in mind when writing your titles, writing your post, adding keywords related to your post and writing your descriptions. This will help you rank in the search engines faster and make it easier for your target market to find you.

8. Interact with your readers. Ask questions, reply to comments, answer questions, post polls and have a way for them to opt-in to a newsletter, tutorial, etc. Stay connected and in-touch to keep your readers and grow your readership.

9. Interact with popular gurus’ blogs in your niche. Comment on their posts regularly, while adding value whether you are agreeing or not. Write follow up posts and trackback to their original as well as comment about your post inspired by their post and why you were inspired. This will increase your readers, get gurus to comment on your blog which will give you more authority and will again increase your readership.

10. Market your blog. There are many ways to market your blog. Here are a few to get you started. Use social bookmarking, let all your friends and groups on your social networks know about your new post, ping your blog, email your list and create a video about your post and link it to your blog.

11. Be you. Personalize your blog with pictures, write with personality. Do not try and write like someone else. Be you and you will attract like-minded people that will love your work. Be fake and everyone will know and your numbers will show it.

12. Keep trucking. Building a blog empire will not happen over night. Be consistent, constantly learn about the make money blogging industry and make time for your blog in your daily schedule.

If you want to make money blogging in 2009, then keep these 12 blogging tips in mind every time you blog. You will be sure to reap the benefits and so will your readers.

Blogging blogging profits, blogging tips, make money blogging

So you’ve launched your blog.

You know what to write about.

You’re applying 5 great tips that master bloggers apply.

You’re definitely on your way, so let’s go a little further and talk about newsletters and how they will enhance yourself and your blog.

So what the heck is a newsletter anyway?

A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication generally about one main topic that is of interest to its subscribers. In the context of this blog, I’ll be talking about E-Mail newsletters.

So you already know what you’re going to blog about. Creating an E-Mail newsletter that people sign up for on your blog will enhance your blog and your brand by keeping your readers up to date with information about your topic (and more importantly, the topic they are interested in learning about).

4 Key Advantages Of A Newsletter

1. They promote YOU and YOUR business.

E-Mail newsletters are product of your copywriting skills. When you deliver a newsletter to a reader via E-Mail, you need to always deliver value (I call it A.D.V.) on the topic you’re writing about.

When you always deliver value and build great relationships with your readers, your readers will trust you and be more responsive to partnering with, buying your product or service, and recommending other people to you.

2. They educate your business partners, prospects and customers

You already know that we like to be educated on particular topics. As a society, we are in a constant state of always wanting to improve (well, at least the people I surround myself with).

Your newsletter can constantly deliver valuable information to educate your business partners, prospects and customers, thus establishing yourself as an expert on a subject and building trust with them.

3. They allow you to reach many people at once

Your newsletter can reach many people at once. How many? Well, as many people that sign up to receive your newsletter. If you have 100k people on your newsletter (aka your “list”), then you are in a position to be delivering great value to 100k people.

4. They produce income for you 24/7

You can use your newsletter to advertise your products and services. Or a tool or resource you use that you highly recommend.

For example, tomorrow, I’m going to send out a mailing to my newsletter about Traffic Secrets 2.0 and why anyone who has ANY interest in learning how to market on the Internet NEEDS this product. Period.

So do you have anything of value you’d like to send out to thousands of people at once? If you do, it’s time to blog about and start an E-Mail newsletter.

So How Do You Create A Newsletter

It’s really not THAT difficult, so here goes a quick two step process.

1. Plan out what you want your newsletter to be about

This one is pretty obvious. You know what you’re going to write about, so just think of a newsletter that’s related to your topic. If your blogging about travel, for example, perhaps your may want your newsletter to be about destinations and deals.

2. Sign up for an autoresponder (I recommend Aweber and nothing else)

By the way, Aweber will give the code to put on your blog page. Call it a “mini-capture page”.

How’s that for rocket science?

In the next tip, you’ll learn more about autoresponders, their advantages, how to set them up on your blog, and why you NEED one if you want to dominate online.

But I’m a pretty nice guy, so I’ll quickly tell you what they are in case you don’t know…

An autoresponder is simply a mechanism to deliver your newsletter to thousands or even millions of people.

Do you see any potential with that?

Blogging, Internet Marketing Blogging, Internet Marketing

So now you’re ready to write your first blog post, but before you do, let’s cover 5 key points great bloggers apply so your blog (you’re a blogger now) can be extremely effective. But first a little review…

If you remember the first blog (Learn What A Blog Is) in this series, we talked about how your blog can assist you in getting an unlimited supply of leads, business partners and income 24/7. Now it won’t happen overnight, but as long as you keep providing good, fresh and valuable content, it will happen.

Your blog readers, however, are coming to your blog to get educated or entertained in the the topics you write about. So here’s 5 points great bloggers apply to provide an awesome user experience for their readers.

Point 1: Great Bloggers Engage Their Readers

Great bloggers always engage their readers after they write a blog post. For example, great bloggers can ask their readers to:

• Sign up for their newsletter to stay in the know
• Post a question and/or comment about the blog entry to create a community aspect
• Clicking on an advertisement you recommend
• Subscribing to the blogs RSS feed
• Linking them to a video you made
• Plus much, much more.

Point 2: Great Bloggers Write With Personality

Great bloggers always let their personality shine when they write blogs. They write a blog like they’re having a conversation (hint) with someone. Your personality is uniquely yours and it’s what’s going to set you apart from the other bloggers out there and get more readers to come back to your blog over and over again.

Point 3: Great Bloggers Know How To Write Great Copy

Ah, copywriting. A million dollar skill (literally, this is NOT a figure of speech) that is perhaps the most important skill an Internet Marketer can have. Read that last sentence again. And once more.

Great bloggers apply great copy. They know how to write to engage, to entertain and to persuade their readers to action all at once. To significantly improve your copywriting skills, visit Recruit with Words right now.

Point 4: Great Bloggers Deliver Good, Fresh and Valuable Content

Good. Fresh. Valuable.

Imprint those 3 words in your brain and understand that if you’re going to be a great blogger, you must deliver good, fresh and valuable content. Period.

If your copy is good, your readers love you.

If your copy is fresh, the search engines love you.

If your copy is valuable, your readers trust you.

Point 5: Great Bloggers Do Not Use Their Blog As An Advertising Billboard

Before we get started on this point (and before I make the peddlers send me hate mail), let me say great bloggers do advertise on their blog. They do it in a very subtle way.

When I mention “advertising billboard,” I’m talking about the individuals out there who create a blog and copy and paste their company information (isn’t that super?) into their blog and put their phone number on the end of it.

Wow! There’s no real value there. They don’t update it with fresh content. It’s just an advertising billboard. But they have a blog, right? No. What they have is this:

An advertising billboard on a blogging platform.

So how are you suppose to advertise on your blog?

Well, understand great bloggers:

• go to seminars on their topic
• listen to lots of CDs on their topic (my car is my MLU-Mobile Learning Unit)
• read books on their topic
• read other blogs on their topic
• mastermind with other individuals who are passionate about their topic

If it sounds like I’m telling you to become a total student of the game, I am. Worry about providing value first and the money second. It will come in time!

Great bloggers can share their knowledge with the world on their blog and discuss it. When you provide that type of value to the community, readers will trust you and buy your recommendations and align themselves with you! And that’s when the game gets really fun and you attract great people.

Now start blogging away and learning about about the blogging platform you’ve selected! In the next tip, I’m going to give you some blogging advice on how to set up a newsletter for your blog.

Blogging, Internet Marketing Blogging, Internet Marketing

So we’ve been talking a lot about blogs, but we have not talked about launching YOUR blog yet. That sounds good, eh? Or maybe it sounds a little intimidating.

Let’s demystify the process right now so you can start dominating online!

Now if you decided to choose Blogger for your blogging platform instead of Wordpress, then all you need to do is go to www.blogger.com and follow the instructions to get you an account set up.

As I have stated before, I strongly urge you to use Wordpress and the rest of this blog will be dedicated to launching a Wordpress blog.

If you are still not sure which blogging platform is right for you, then read my blog on Wordpress versus Blogger.

Installing your Wordpress Blog

Step 1: Invest in your domain name:

A domain name is essential for a Wordpress blog. In a previous blog, I advised you to use a domain name for your blog. You can head over to GoDaddy and purchase your domain name for under $10. Their domain name registration process is easy and their user interface is extremely easy to use.

Step 2: Get a web hosting account:

You can get hosting from a lot of places, and there is no one best place. However, I will recommend GoDaddy again. You can get all the hosting you need for under $5 a month. I recommend you start with the “Economy Plan.”

Also, GoDaddy makes installing Wordpress very easy. More on this later.

Step 3: Point your domain name to your hosting provider:

This step will not be all that important to you if you buy both your domain name and blog from GoDaddy. However, when you purchase domain hosting, you will be provided with a “name server” to point your domain to.

If you purchase your domain name from GoDaddy (wise choice) and your hosting from another provider, you will have to contact that provider and ask them for the “name servers”. After you get the name servers, you’ll have to log in to your GoDaddy account and forward your domain name to those name servers.

If you need help with this, you can simply call GoDaddy’s customer support and they can walk you through the process. All one minute of it.

If you buy both your hosting and domain name from GoDaddy, life will be easier for you.

NOTE: Sometimes it takes up to 24 hours for your domain to “propagate.” Don’t worry too much about what “propagation” really means. It’s not that important. What you need to know is you will not be able to launch your blog until this “propagation” takes place.

However, in most cases, it takes much less time and perhaps even a few minutes. You will know when it’s working when you can log into your hosting account under your domain name. Make sure you call up your hosting company and have them provide with some step-by-step instructions on how to log into your host manager. It’s easier than it sounds!

Step 4: Install your blog:

If you recall earlier, I said using GoDaddy’s Web hosting would be really easy to set up a Wordpress blog. Here’s the step-by-step instructions:

Install Wordpress on a GoDaddy Hosting Account.

That’s not so bad after all, right? It really isn’t

But what about the other web hosts?

Well, simply call up their customer service departments and see what their process is for installing a Wordpress blog. I feel you’ll like the GoDaddy approach a lot and go with that.

Congratulations! Take a bow. Break out the champagne. You’ve just launched your blog and are closer to dominating online!

Step 5: Personalize your blog:

So now that your blog is launched, you may want to personalize the look and feel of your blog and add some extensions (”plugins”) to improve the user experience of your blog. As I have already said in a my blog comparing Wordpress versus Blogger, Wordpress is open-source so you can find thousands of themes and plug-ins online.

Or you can simply hire some to create a totally custom look and feel for pennies on the dollar at sites such as www.guru.com, www.topcoder.com, or www.elance.com.

Plug-Ins You Should Install To Get Started

Social Marker:

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a blog. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming. That’s where SocialMarker comes in — the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark your blog!

Learn more at SocialMarker.

Protect Web Form:

One of the great advantages of having a blog is your blog readers can post comments on your blog. This creates a very nice community aspect!

However, the are some malicious spammers out there with automated software that can find your blog posts and post spam comments. One great way to stop them is to use a CAPTCHA, which is just a box that makes them type in a random series of letters. If you’ve been on the Internet, you’ve no doubt seen CAPTCHAs in action.

Now, you can get one for your own blog really easily. Simply visit Protect Web Form and follow the step-by-step instructions to protect yourself and your blog.

Google XML Site-Map:

Sitemaps are an easy way for your blog to inform search engines about your blogs that are available for crawling. If you want to get a more technical understanding, visit www.sitemaps.org.

I highly recommend you use a Sitemap for your Wordpress blog as it will help you out tremendously in the search engines and get you a lot of traffic as long as you keep writing good, fresh and valuable content!

To get a Sitemap for your Wordpress blog, simply visit and follow the step-by-step instructions at:

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

And that’s it for now! There are plenty more plug-ins you can check out later on, but this is enough to get you started.

What to do if you’re lost:

We covered a lot of material in this blog, and if you’re lost, do not despair, as you have some options.

First of all, don’t just read this blog and say “I’m lost.” You must actually do it and it will make a lot more sense.

Secondly, you can always hire someone to set up your blog for you. I’ve given you some resources in this blog already!

And if you hire me for one hour of Internet Marketing Coaching, I’ll install your blog for you with the plug-ins recommended in this plug.

You’ll also get me pinned down working for you for one hour discussing Internet Marketing traffic techniques for your blog and a business plan that makes sense for you and your business. My rate is $125/hr and you can contact me directly at my office at (985) 249-2270 for a free consultation.

Wait!

Now that your blog is launched and you know what you’re going to write about (review how to choose a topic to blog about), you may be tempted to start blogging. I know I was!

Before you do, read the next tip in this series: 5 Points Great Bloggers Apply.

Blogging, Internet Marketing Blogging, Internet Marketing