BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Blog promotion is a never-ending job. We list our blogs on various sites. We tweet our posts. But ultimately getting the word out about a blog depends on ranking well in Google and other search engines.

How do you make sure your blog ranks well enough in search results to be found by plenty of people? Search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. It is hard to keep up, but most of us have to make the effort. It simply is too expensive for many of us to hire a really good SEO expert—and the bad ones are worse than useless.

Besides, knowing how to judge an SEO expert often requires knowing so much about SEO that you might as well do it yourself. If you know what you are doing, you can hire others to some of the work for you. But how do you know where to find them?

SEOClerks is a site where SEO workers of various kinds offer their services. The prices range from just $3 on up to about $1000, depending on the complexity or difficulty of the task and the skill of the service provider. Some of the SEO workers on the site offer subscriptions or give discounts for multiple orders.

This is a great site for buying SEO services. You can try out workers by purchasing small, cheap tasks and see how they do at those before signing up for more expensive packages of services. There is no need to risk much time or money finding out how well the services work for you.

If you use social media sites to get visitors to your blogs, you can, for example, Buy Tweets. You pay a small fee to get someone to tweet your sponsored messages to their Twitter list. Then you can easily see if the tweets resulted in traffic to your blog. If you sell goods or services on your blog, you can quickly see if the traffic resulted in actual purchases.

If you have a FaceBook fan page, you can, for example, have someone get 200 people to Like your page for only $5. From there you can send them to your blog. Pretty much any SEO work you could imagine is available for a reasonable price—or downright cheap.

For a few dollars, you can have an SEO-enhanced article written, get your blog listed on dozens of directory sites, or have comments posted on high-ranking blogs that link back to your blog. You can even buy links on specific blogs to permanently link back to yours.

If you’re anything like me, when I first set up my blog about a year ago, I had NO CLUE where to start.  Should I use Blogger, Blog spot, WordPress, or any of the 100′s of other blog platforms that are out there?

I assumed a blog was just a blog.  Boy, did I learn otherwise!

After a lot of research, recommendations, and help from others (that’s the “Network” part of network marketing) I realized that I better go with installing WordPress for my blog.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with WordPress, it’s a blog platform that gives you a pre-built blog site for free.  But if you REALLY want to boost up your blog marketing – you really need to get a self-hosted WordPress blog and your own personal domain.  And I’m going to go into more details why here in the list. Read the rest of this entry →

Some people use blogs just for fun or simply because it’s their hobby and don’t know yet the financial benefits that can be achieved by doing it. Blogging is one of the most effective and efficient techniques to make money online.

If you love to write, and love to express your ideas or thoughts or just anything you want to share through writing then, this means making money online might be good for you. But wait, blogging is not as easy as you are thinking. Just like any other methods used to make money online, it requires skills, patience, enthusiasm, and hard work.

How to make money from blogs business? Blogs are one of the powerful tools in advertising industry. Therefore, it’s not impossible for your blogs to feature any kind of ads for any of your purpose. So, if you are good in making blogs, then, making money online with your blogs is never really far from reality. Read the rest of this entry →

Image via Wikipedia

Ever wondered where travel bloggers get their money to sustain their travels?

They get the money from writing about and taking pictures of their travels. Basically, they get rich from traveling the world and enjoying their lives. They just document it so that others can read about and enjoy the adventure.

Travel bloggers have taken advantage of some of the most lucrative and easiest business models today, getting rich via Internet blogging.

You have to have at least basic Internet skills, decent writing skills, and a bit of marketing flair. Although, let me stress that all of these can be learned as you go along with your blogging. And the further you blog, the better you become and the more traffic your site will get. Read the rest of this entry →