Did you already add Google Analytics to your blog? If no, then check out my how to add Google Analytics to your blog article and add this powerful usertracking tool to your fresh blog.
Most of you already have and there is something really nice about Analytics. You can see what keywords people used in the searchengines to find your blog. Take a quick look at the keywords. You can find them in traffic sources -> keywords. If you already have some visitors coming through search engines then you can find a list of the keywords people used. Most of these keywords are rather long.
Example: If your site is in the Insurance niche you might expect the keyword Insurance at one of the top positions. However I doubt there is even one visitor to your fresh blog using that particular keyword. Instead you might find keywords like affordable sportscar insurance or maybe Which insurance should I buy? These keywords are rather long, yet they are your main source of new readers. Why? Let's have a look.
There are literally millions of websites or blogs competing for the keyword insurance. When a user searches for insurance then he doesn't want to see all results, he will most often just look at the first page of the google search. So only 10 websites are lucky enough to get the users attention. However not all people search for such a short keyword, also know as short tail keyword. Instead they search for more specific things, which are called long tail keywords.
People might look for a specific insurance or maybe insurances from a certain location. Here is your chance to grab some traffic. Because there are much less webmasters than people just surfing the net, there are always some keywords that is not used on any website so far. Or at least few websites use a certain long tail keyword. Still some people search this keyword. You have to get backlinks with this particular text to get on page one of google for this particular long tail keyword. However you don't need many backlinks for a specific long tail keyword, because competition is low normally. Soon you will get a constant inflow of users for this long tail keyword and it's easy to do.
Take a piece of paper. Write your main keyword in the middle of the paper. Now add other things related, add adjectives or form questions like "How to ..." related to your topic. These are your long tail keywords. Write articles on your blog focusing on one, two or three of these keywords in each article. Additional get some backlinks to your blog with these specific backlinks and enjoy new visitors to your niche blog.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Submit your blog to Baidu.com
We have previously talked about submitting your new blog to a search engine. I showed you how to add your blog to google. A pretty easy job which can help a lot. Today I want to help you to add your precious blog to another search engine called Baidu. The web adress is baidu.com
Baidu is a Chinese search engine, so you might wonder why you would do that. The answer is simple. You want to diversify the ways readers can find your blog. It's a question of not putting all eggs into one basket. When one reader source dries up you still want to have a dozen other sources to remain relaxed and keep enjoying your hard earned income. So let's jump right into it and add to the Chinese baidu search engine.
Submitting to the Chinese search engine baidu is easy. Just head over to http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html, enter your address into the big empty field, fill in the captcha into the small empty field and hit the submit button next to it. Done! Chinese people can now find your blog. And there are many Chinese people, more than 1.3 billion to be exact. Only few of them actually use English while browsing the net, but after a while you might get some hits from there as well. It takes a few weeks until your site is indexed, so don't worry if you don't see results within days. Furthermore the baidu is small for the English internet. Expect 1 baidu visitor for 2000 google visitors, but this depends on factors like what your blog is all about. If you write in Chinese, baidu will be great for you. By the way.... adding blogspot blogs to baidu won't be helpful. Blogspot is banned in China. If you have a blog outside of blogspot.com it's all right to add.
If you want to know more about how to get started making your blog popular, just dig around here on Blogginggems. I have some useful posts for any kind of problem you might encounter while blogging. Enjoy!
Baidu is a Chinese search engine, so you might wonder why you would do that. The answer is simple. You want to diversify the ways readers can find your blog. It's a question of not putting all eggs into one basket. When one reader source dries up you still want to have a dozen other sources to remain relaxed and keep enjoying your hard earned income. So let's jump right into it and add to the Chinese baidu search engine.
Submitting to the Chinese search engine baidu is easy. Just head over to http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html, enter your address into the big empty field, fill in the captcha into the small empty field and hit the submit button next to it. Done! Chinese people can now find your blog. And there are many Chinese people, more than 1.3 billion to be exact. Only few of them actually use English while browsing the net, but after a while you might get some hits from there as well. It takes a few weeks until your site is indexed, so don't worry if you don't see results within days. Furthermore the baidu is small for the English internet. Expect 1 baidu visitor for 2000 google visitors, but this depends on factors like what your blog is all about. If you write in Chinese, baidu will be great for you. By the way.... adding blogspot blogs to baidu won't be helpful. Blogspot is banned in China. If you have a blog outside of blogspot.com it's all right to add.
If you want to know more about how to get started making your blog popular, just dig around here on Blogginggems. I have some useful posts for any kind of problem you might encounter while blogging. Enjoy!
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Promoting with Stumbleupon
Yesterday we talked about promoting a blog with direcotries. Luckily these directories are not the only way to promote Your blog. Today we will dive into the waters of Social Bookmarking sites. Stumbleupon will be todays point of focus and I'll help to get the basics of this powerful promoting tool.
First of all, let's take a short look at Social Bookmarking in general, to understand why Stumbleupon is a good start. Every Social Bookmarking site works in a different way, and the chances for success can be quite high in one of those sites, will with another You really work Your ass of and hardly get anything back. Stumbleupon is pretty easy to use. You can get a nice boost of traffic even if other people do not vote for Your bookmarks. That's totally different compared to Digg, where other people need to vote for Your bookmarks to have success. However if other people vote for You, Your success will be increased even further.
How do I use Stumbleupon?
First of all get an Account with Stumbleupon.com. You have to go through the sign up process, which takes a few minutes, then You are ready to go. Stumbleupon requires an Email address, don't worry about that, so far I haven't received spam from Stumbleupon. At the end of the registration You are asked to install the Stumbleupon plugin into Your browser, which You simply accept. Once installed You will see small Stumbleupon toolbar at the top of Your browser window. Don't worry, You can hide this toolbar quite easily through the settings of Your browser.
Now You can navigate to any site of Your choice and give a thumbs up or down for the selected page. If You are the first to discover a new page, then You can enter some text to describe Your discovery. If voted positive other people will have a look at this page as well and might also vote positive which will generate even more views.
The usefulness of Stumbleupon increases over time. If You rate more sites a single vote from You can generate more views. So just stumble around for a while and have a look what other people have added to Stumbleupon. You even might get some interesting ideas to add to Your own site.
A final word of warning. Don't stumble Your own pages excessively, You might get banned which in the end hurts You. The best strategy is to only promote Your quality content through Stumbleupon, as this is the content other people will also vote positively. Stumbleupon is a good way to promote a blog and You should make it an integral part of Your promotion efforts.
First of all, let's take a short look at Social Bookmarking in general, to understand why Stumbleupon is a good start. Every Social Bookmarking site works in a different way, and the chances for success can be quite high in one of those sites, will with another You really work Your ass of and hardly get anything back. Stumbleupon is pretty easy to use. You can get a nice boost of traffic even if other people do not vote for Your bookmarks. That's totally different compared to Digg, where other people need to vote for Your bookmarks to have success. However if other people vote for You, Your success will be increased even further.
How do I use Stumbleupon?
First of all get an Account with Stumbleupon.com. You have to go through the sign up process, which takes a few minutes, then You are ready to go. Stumbleupon requires an Email address, don't worry about that, so far I haven't received spam from Stumbleupon. At the end of the registration You are asked to install the Stumbleupon plugin into Your browser, which You simply accept. Once installed You will see small Stumbleupon toolbar at the top of Your browser window. Don't worry, You can hide this toolbar quite easily through the settings of Your browser.
Now You can navigate to any site of Your choice and give a thumbs up or down for the selected page. If You are the first to discover a new page, then You can enter some text to describe Your discovery. If voted positive other people will have a look at this page as well and might also vote positive which will generate even more views.
The usefulness of Stumbleupon increases over time. If You rate more sites a single vote from You can generate more views. So just stumble around for a while and have a look what other people have added to Stumbleupon. You even might get some interesting ideas to add to Your own site.
A final word of warning. Don't stumble Your own pages excessively, You might get banned which in the end hurts You. The best strategy is to only promote Your quality content through Stumbleupon, as this is the content other people will also vote positively. Stumbleupon is a good way to promote a blog and You should make it an integral part of Your promotion efforts.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Directories: Getting the word out
I'm kind of proud of my blog BloggingGems already. Google has indexed my sites. I had added this earn-money-with-blogging-blog into the Google searchengine before. The next day it appeared in Google, however only Google only found 3 pages. This went on for several days, when I applied a standard trick: Reduce the number of blog posts visible per standard page. You can change this setting in Your adminpanel->Settings->Formatting. Ich chose to display 5 posts on the main page (and all other following pages).
Now that we are indexed in Google, we need to get a higher ranking for our posts, so they will be found in Google. The way to do just that is BACKLINKS. A backlink is any link from another site to Your site. Not all links are equal, some are worth a lot, others are worthless. For now use the basic rule, getting more backlinks is always better. It's impossible to get hurt by backlinks, so let's get some backlinks for Your blog.
Here the DIRECTORIES come into the picture. Directories are collections of links to different websites and blogs categorized by topic. Often there are descriptions as well. Many directories let You enter Your blog for free. My main source for fresh directories is the Sitepoint directories forum, where directory owners post their announcements. Some entries are directories where You have to pay to be accepted, most of them are free however, so go and grab the free ones to get backlinks. Backlinks will help You get a higher ranking in Google, which will finally result in more visitors to Your precious blog.
We will look into other forms of promoting Your blog later, however directories are a first start. Submit Your blog to a good bunch of directories now and after that regularly keep posting Your site to new directories. Let's get started, there is a lot of work to do now. To track Your increase of visitor-influx You could use Adsense, which is a user tracking tool. Enjoy the backlink :)
Now that we are indexed in Google, we need to get a higher ranking for our posts, so they will be found in Google. The way to do just that is BACKLINKS. A backlink is any link from another site to Your site. Not all links are equal, some are worth a lot, others are worthless. For now use the basic rule, getting more backlinks is always better. It's impossible to get hurt by backlinks, so let's get some backlinks for Your blog.
Here the DIRECTORIES come into the picture. Directories are collections of links to different websites and blogs categorized by topic. Often there are descriptions as well. Many directories let You enter Your blog for free. My main source for fresh directories is the Sitepoint directories forum, where directory owners post their announcements. Some entries are directories where You have to pay to be accepted, most of them are free however, so go and grab the free ones to get backlinks. Backlinks will help You get a higher ranking in Google, which will finally result in more visitors to Your precious blog.
We will look into other forms of promoting Your blog later, however directories are a first start. Submit Your blog to a good bunch of directories now and after that regularly keep posting Your site to new directories. Let's get started, there is a lot of work to do now. To track Your increase of visitor-influx You could use Adsense, which is a user tracking tool. Enjoy the backlink :)
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Get a Digital Camera
Now You are starting out with writing Your posts, however there is more than just text. People get happy when they can use different kinds of media on Your blog. You could add pictures, videos, podcasts or interactive programs written in Flash or Java. Today I want to recommend You to use photos on Your blog. From my previous experience I can say that photos really can make a good post look excellent. On the other hand a poor blog post with a picture is not an okay post. Getting pictures is easy, there are countless of them on the web, however I feel that we should accept the laws of copyright, which prevents us to just grab any picture we want. An easy way to get cheap pictures is to take them with Your own digital camera.
A nice picture can bring a positive vibe into Your blog post
Technical requirements for Your digital camera
You can either use a real digital camera, or the one integrated in Your mobile phone or smartphone. If You use a mobile devices camera You really want at least 3 megapixels. I took my first blog pictures with a Sony Ericsson K800i, which has exactly 3 megapixels. People couldn't tell if it was from a mobile phone or a real camera. With 3 megapixels You get an smooth image which looks really fine after cropping and resizing. Todays mobile phones with 5 megapixels and more should easily do.
If You decide to use a real digital camera then things are easy for You. You can buy almost any camera. 5 mexgapixel devices cost less than $US 100, so just head to Your local electronics store and grab one. Zoom is nice, but ignore the digital zoom. Digital zoom on the camera makes Your pictures look ugly and You can still digitally zoom them on You computer if the need arises. You will crop Your pictures anyways, so don't care about the digital zoom.
Take better pictures
Here some basic tips for taking pictures:
- Let Your camera rest on something solid while taking the picture. This way the picture will be much crisper. A table, a rock or a tree will mostly do. If there is no horizontal place to rest Your camera on, consider pushing it against something solid from the side.
- If You photograph something badly lit against a bright background, force the camera to use the lightning. Let's say You want to take a picture of a person who is in the shaddow and no further than a few meters from the camera, but the background is all well sunlit, the camera will decide the picture is fine without lightning. Here You have to forc the lightning on.
- Taking a picture at night can create an exciting image. However the lightning can destroy the mood. Take additional pictures without lightning using the night mode of Your camera. Make sure the camera firmly rests on something solid.
- Putting You object of interest into the middle of the picture is a standard way of taking pictures. Make Your pictures more exciting by putting the interesting object to the side of the picture, while the other half of the picture is filled with background. Try unusual angles by photographing from a high or low position. Experiment!
Lastly I want to pint You to some free picture editing software. First there is Irfanview which I use for basic cropping and simple resizing. And second there is the free GIMP for advanced picture editing. That's enough for today, take Your camera now and take some pictures. Take pictures whenever You see something interesting. You might want to use these beautiful pictures on Your precious blog someday.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
