All Entries Tagged With: "blogs"

Can You Make Money Blogging – With Search Up 46%, Of Course You Can

With reports that Global Search Grew By 46% In 2009 you know people are looking for something. If you are wanting to make money blogging then the trick of course is to tap into the topics that people are searching for. Easier said than done but there are ways to succeed.

First, making money through a blog requires a commitment. I won’t say it’s hard work, but it does take that daily commitment to develop your blog and to work at ways of delivering traffic. How do you find what people are searching for? If you’re a first time blogger then let me suggest you start by looking at yourself. What do you have a passion for? What do can you write about right at this very minute with very little in the way of research? That should be your starting point.

If you have a passion for clothing, and you are a plus size, then think about what you can write about that area. Clothing covers such a wide range from pants to tops to dresses and that’s just the outer layer. Do you like capris? Can you write a post such as – Plus Size Capris are Hot. More importantly, can you monetize it? You can even if it is through ads such as Adsense or similar.

Adsense is just one method of monetizing a blog. Other sources of income include affiliate earnings and selling your own products. Can you teach others how to do something? Could you teach something like – How to Excel in Medical Transcription? If you can, take the time to create a first class ebook – they are becoming popular again.

There are many different ways to monetize a blog. Start with areas that you have a passion for. Do a search for affiliate programs that match that niche or settle for straight out pay-per-click advertising. the choice is yours. Write to your blog everyday using keywords that you want to target. Use social media to promote your blog together with article marketing to gain inbound links. You can make money blogging - just read through some of the posts on this blog for more in-depth information on each area.

10 Places To Find Blogs In Your Niche

Carl Ocab, a popular blogger in the Make Money Online niche, wrote a great blog post recommending how to find blogs in your niche. His 7 suggestions were:

1. WhosTalkin
2. Google Blog Search
3. Technorati
4. StumbleUpon
5. Delicious
6. Ask Blog Search
7. Google Reader

I’ll let you read Carl’s blog for the descriptions. Some of these are at the top of my list as well, but I think Carl’s list is a bit incomplete. Here are three other resources you can use to find blogs in your niche:

• Twitter – Twitter is included in the search at WhosTalkin, but if you can go right to the source then I think you can get better information. Use Twitter’s search feature at search.twitter.com and search by keyword. Also, Twellow, a yellow pages for Twitter, is a good source.
• Alltop – Lists the best blogs in every niche under the sun. About as close to an online magazine rack as you can get.
• BlogCatalog – BlogCatalog is the premier blog community. If there is a niche with a blog then you can bet it’s listed here. If not then it’s probably not worth following.

BrowseRank Would Discriminate Against Blogs

Chris McElroy made a plug for BrowseRank on yesterday’s SEO Service Provider blog. Like many people in the search business, I believe that search is ready for a major innovation, but I’m not altogether sure that BrowseRank is the answer. At least, not the complete answer.

In the early days, before the Web went commercial, web pages were ranked according to how many academics thought the page was important. It made sense to do it this way because the Internet was largely a research tool for universities and the military-industrial complex. Since the majority of users were academics, more weight was placed on what academics considered weighty or important.

The second wave of what search engines considered trustworthy came when Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented BackRub, a tool that analyzed backlinks and use that information to rank web pages. This was a huge innovation. It was based on the previous incarnation mentioned above, but expanded on that to include links from non-academic websites. Shortly after, the Web was Google-ized and that algorithmic innovation became the norm for most search engines. New innovations that have been tried since then have tried to counter the importance of backlinks, but those innovations – every one of them – have failed to catch on popularly.

The State Of Search Today
The problem today is that many webmasters have learned to manipulate search results through uncanny backlink practices. Plus, the more-than-10-year-old algorithmic interpretation of results has made the Web a bit of a wild west due to an unprecedented increase in the number of web pages to be ranked, and a huge volume of link data to analyze, as well as a wide variety of types of websites and intent with regard to user interaction. Google’s algorithms tend to favor older sites with a lot of backlinks. That’s a problem because many newer sites are worthy of trust and recognition, but there is something to be said for longevity. So where is the balance?

The answer is, there isn’t any. Blogs and other temporal information can achieve high rankings on a short-term basis, but to achieve long-term success you’ll need to optimize your blog completely, not just each individual post. Still, there is a huge difference between the nature of a blog and the nature of a static website. So too there are huge differences between the nature of social sites like Facebook and MySpace and sites like Amazon and eBay where users may just show up, make a purchase, and leave.

Why BrowseRank Will Hurt Blogs
On the surface, BrowseRank seems like a good idea. The problem is it will tilt the weight of trust and reliability to sites where users are encouraged to remain for a long time. That doesn’t include blogs.

It is a statistical conclusion that blog readers typically read one post then they are gone. The bounce rate for blogs is very high. Many social bookmarking sites have the same problem as many bookmarkers will show up just to submit a story then leave. That this wasn’t the original purpose for bookmarking sites is irrelevant. The point is, that’s what users do. Should the sites be penalized because users don’t stick around long enough to make them more credible and “trustworthy”?

This phenomenon, of course, wouldn’t apply to Facebook or MySpace since users of those sites tend to stick around longer and use the tools available – creating applications, making friends, approving friends requests, etc. But what about auction sites and consumer sites where users just show up and buy something then leave? With BrowseRank, those sites might penalized and consumer review sites could end up ranking higher than consumer purchase sites for the same search term. Consumer blog sites would fall to the bottom.

While PageRank has its problems, I can see that BrowseRank will also have its issues. Those issues include, but are not limited to, favoritism of one type of site over another, the ease of gaming the results, and lack of human analysis since algorithms will do most of the work. Those are the same issues we have now with PageRank, but the difference will be that the problems will tilt the balance of favor from one type of site to another. Instead of older sites being favored as with PageRank, sites with lower bounce rates would be favored, but a low bounce rate is not always a bad thing.

Is There A Middle Ground Between
PageRank And BrowseRank?
I favor a combination of backlink analysis with on-site user behavior analysis. I do not necessarily mean the length of time that users remain on a site. There are other factors that are important for judging user behavior. For instance, do users tend to click internal site links or site exit links such as AdSense and display ads? If an algorithm favored the former then that might kill all those Made For AdSense sites that showcase useless keyword-stuffed content. On the other hand, it would also kill legitimate sites where the owners did a poor job of optimizing the content to encourage users to stick around longer instead of clicking the sidebar AdSense ads. That might be a good way to encourage better content.

What it necessary, I think, is a way to analyze the intended nature of a site and give weight to factors that are important to that nature. For instance, what is important for a successful blog is completely different than what is important for a successful static website. Perhaps one could be judged by the number of backlinks while the other is judged by the length of time users remain on the site. But if that static website is a consumer site where users are likely to show up and buy something then leave then perhaps it would be judged by another set of criteria entirely. This is somewhat what Google already does. Since Google analyzes over 150 search factors for any website on any given day, there is always a chance that a particular site is judged by what it does successfully AND by what it does half-heartedly or not successfully at all. It is the aggregate of the algorithmic analysis that is important, not the specific criteria.

I think we can all give kudos to MSN for attempting to take search in a new direction. MSN is certainly in a better position to challenge Google’s dominance than a new startup. The problem is that BrowseRank, in it’s current form, is incomplete. MSN could be on the right track, but before they commit to BrowseRank, they’ll need to put more thought into the nature of websites and the purpose for interaction in the first place.

Do You Read Other Blogs In Your Niche?

Do you read other blogs within your niche? You should. Here are 10 reasons why you should read other blogs within your niche:

1. Ideas for content – You don’t have to steal someone else’s content to benefit from it. In fact, reading other blogs within your niche will show you what your competitors are doing and help you to come up with ideas for your own blog.
2. Keep up with the competition – Your competition is doing things that you should be doing. And likely doing things you shouldn’t. By reading other blogs within your niche you can gauge what works and what doesn’t.
3. Get a better understanding of your customers – Since your customers and potential customers are reading those blogs and commenting on them, you can get a better understanding of their needs by reading their comments.
4. You can tap into their traffic – By reading other blogs within your niche and commenting on them, you can drive some of the traffic on those blogs to your blog and website.
5. Better optimization of your own blog – When you see something that a competitor is doing right, you can implement that into your own blog optimization strategy.
6. Keep up with industry developments – Let’s face it. Your competitors know people that you don’t. While you might think you are well connected, sometimes you can learn about changes in your industry from your competition because they will write about it on their blogs.
7. Reputation management – Are your competitors talking about you? If you don’t read their blogs then you’ll never know.
8. Know what they’re not talking about – In the same way that reading competitor blogs can give you new ideas about content for your own blog, you can see what your competitors are not doing and beat them to the punch.
9. Networking – Sometimes, your competition can be your best ally. If you have a common interest that has yet to be developed, you can partner to better benefit both of your customers.
10. Join the conversation – There is a conversation going on in your industry about what is important to you, your competitors, and your customers. By monitoring other blogs within your niche, you can be better positioned to join that conversation and to create a solution for problems that are pointed out.

I bet you can come up with reasons of your own for monitoring other blogs within your niche. Why not start today?