Blog

The internet hasn’t been around all that long, but it has quickly become a part of our daily lives. Even if we don’t go online every day, you can bet that the people and businesses we deal with do go online every day. But regardless of who is going online or why, it all comes down to one thing: communication. One of the most popular forms of this is the blog. But what is blogging? That’s a straightforward question, so let’s take a look at the answer.

The word ‘blog’ derives it name from a combination of the words ‘web log’. When they first started, that’s exactly what they were. Most people would use them as a form of an online journal of their daily lives, and many of them would only share their blogs with family and friends. Then came what are commonly called mommy blogs. These were blogs typically started by stay at home moms to communicate with other moms, but they also added some elements of making money to their blogs. Next were the flat-out money making blogs which tend to be more contrived; with each post being designed to maximize the revenue of the blog.

So, when someone asks “what is blogging?”, the best answer is “it depends”. That’s because each type of blog requires a different approach. However, there are several similarities between all blogs. Updating your blog on a regular basis, making it look good, and driving traffic to it are a few of the things most blogs have in common.

One of the best things about blogs is that you can start blogging for free. The WordPress and Blogger platforms are just two of the services that allow you to easily set up a blog and to do so for no cost at all. However, you will have to host your blog on their servers, and your domain name will contain “blogger” or “wordpress” as part of it. If you have a blog that’s meant for family and friends, then this should be okay. However, if you plan on making money with your blog, then you need to buy your own domain name and hosting.

To get started, figure out what you want your blog to be about. Once that’s done, you can think of a name for your blog. The next step is to go to whichever blogging site you want to try (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) and sign up for an account. If someone else already has used the same name for their blog (when using the free option), you will have to come up with a different name.

Now you’re ready to start posting to your blog. This is usually done by logging into your blogging account and then clicking on “new post”. Write your post, then click “submit”. There you go! You have just made your first post. Now if some asks you what is blogging, you can say it’s an easy way to have your own site online.

You hear a lot about niche marketing online. All that means is to find a little sub section in a market, one that has decent amount of interest but not much competition and fly under the radar. To do that, you will need to find niche keywords for that niche market.

There are many great markets you can make money in online. But you will save yourself a lot of time and effort if you don’t try to go toe to toe with the ‘big boys’.

For example, lets say you want to make money in the weight loss market, which is an extremely competitive market. Why make your life harder than it needs to be by trying to go straight on against millions of competitors? That’s just silly.

Instead, why not find a ‘little’ sub section of that market where there will be much less competition but still enough interest for you to make a very nice living (and remember, this is just one website. You can repeat this method as many times as you want and have dozens of niche websites all making you money).

So, instead of focusing on such a broad term as weight loss, why not find a niche that targets “middle aged women and weight loss”? Or how about “teenage boys weight loss”? See what I mean, you are still in the weight loss market but you are targeting a more precise sub section of the market instead of trying to throw a net over the whole ocean.

Doing this will make it so much easier to make money online. It will just make your life so much simpler and you can find a great list of highly targeted keywords that you can rank for a lot more easily than you would if you went with the broad weight loss terms.

To find highly targeted keywords for your niche all you have to do is to use the free Google Keyword Tool online. Start by entering a broad search term related to your niche, say weight loss for moms. The tool will give you a list of up to two hundred variations of that keyword.

Some of the variations will work, some won’t. But it will give you a great place to start. From there you can drill down even further until you have a nice big keyword list to work from.

You also want to make sure that the keywords you choose are highly relevant to your website. Don’t choose a bunch of keywords that have a high monthly search volume if they are not highly relevant to what your website is all about. The traffic that you get won’t be very targeted and your conversions will suffer.

Finding great niche keywords is one of the most important tasks you can master to have a successful online business. Good keywords may take some time to find but when you do they are like money in the bank. Use the free tools online or invest in some down loadable software, it’s up to you. Just make sure you know what you need to look for and the difference between a good keyword and a not so good keyword.

Getting the most out of the free, organic, search results should be the goal of any online business owner. Hey, the traffic is free and ultra targeted, what more could you ask for? Finding and implementing the best seo strategies will depend mostly on your existing knowledge, if any, and your budget.

You know the saying: those that can’t do… hire. Well, maybe that’s not really the way it goes, but it works. If you don’t know much about seo and /or don’t have the time or inclination to learn, you can hire a company to do the work for you.

There are a lot of companies that specialize in this and many of them are quite reasonable in their pricing structure.

If you can’t afford to hire a company at this stage in the game, don’t worry, with a little knowledge and a few simple tweaks you can easily benefit from some basic seo and at least get your foot in the door.

Once you are making more money online you can invest in the knowledge, or hire someone, to take your seo efforts to the next level. For now, though, you can start here:

1. It all starts with your keyword list. Choosing the right keywords for your onsite seo has to be the first step, everything revolves around these keywords.

Make sure that you choose words, or phrases, that get at least one thousand searches a month and less than 20,000 competitors. They must also be closely targeted and highly relevant to the content of your website.

Search engines will either reward or penalize you on the relevance of your keywords, you don’t want to be penalized.

Once you’ve got your keywords focus on placing them in your meta tags, your headers and footers to start. This will grab the attention of the search engine spiders and they will move your site to the top of the rankings if they think it is highly relevant.

2. You can use a similar method to drive traffic to your website by writing and submitting quality, keyword focused articles. Now, this is the point when a lot of people make a mistake; they don’t write a quality informative article, instead they try to stuff as many keywords as possible into it until is is virtually all gibberish.

You won’t be rewarded for that, the search engines are too smart. Write your article around a keyword, but don’t write for the search engines, write for people.

If you supply your readers with genuinely helpful information, and optimize it with keywords, your article can get a top rating in the search engines and subsequently drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Don’t drive yourself into the poor house when you’re just starting out online by hiring an seo company that you can’t really afford. First, start making some money and then you can outsource much of your daily work. In the meantime, use these tips and utilize these seo strategies

to keep the traffic flowing and the cash register (virtual, of course) ringing.