6 Tips for Beginner Bloggers

Blogging is a growing trend that allows people to publish their writings on the internet for the world to see. Blogs can be full of information on types of products, people, or views of the people writing them.

There are over 200 million blogs on the internet and the numbers continue to grow every day. This is why it's important that your blog stands out from others and includes outstanding content that makes readers choose your blog over your competitors and come back for more.

Here are 7 tips that can help you have a successful blog and rise above the competition.

1.) Choose a Niche You Have a Passion For

You should choose a niche that you really know about or could easily learn about.

You will be writing a lot of content about your niche so you should really choose one that you like talking about.

The better you relate to your audience, the better your results will be.

2.) Decide the Purpose of Your Blog

Ask yourself.

"What's the purpose of my blog"?

If your blog doesn't have a purpose than it's more likely to fall apart. You should know why you want to start your blog and what you plan to get out of it. Do you plan to make money with your blog by providing information to others and help them solve a problem, or let out your creative side and have a blog about fashion tips or celebrity news and gossip?

3.) Make a List of Goals and Form a Plan for Your Blog

Before starting any kind of blogging endeavor, you want to write down a list of goals for your blog and a reasonable time-frame for accomplishing them. Writing your goals down helps keep you on track and makes the content building process easier and more focused.

You should also create a plan that reflects the goals of your blog. This should be strategic and outline the process for building your blog.

4.) Establish a Unique Personality for Your Blog

This really just comes down to being yourself.

Reflect your personality in your writings and really make them your own. This is what makes your content unique from your competition and up your chances for success if properly implemented.

You should write your blog posts as though you're actually talking to the reader. Your tone should be reflected in your writings and have a vibe that keeps readers coming back for more.

Connecting with your audience on a more personal level will make them trust you more and believe what you say.

The more you learn, the more you have to teach. Take what you have learned and inject your personality into it through your writings.

5.) Follow Leaders in Your Niche

Do some research in your niche to see what types of blogs are getting already getting visitors and do what they are doing. Their methods are obviously proven to work so just take what you learn and make it your own.

You can learn so many new things by visiting other blogs in your niche.

Every time you learn something new, write a blog post to reflect what you learned.

This is a great way to come up with new content for your blog.

6.) Attract Visitors to Your Blog

The number of visitors you receive can essentially determine the success of your blog. If you can't get visitors to come to your website, then you have probably wasted time producing content. If nobody can see it, then what's the point in writing it in the first place?

I had to remind myself of that so many times when I first got started blogging.

There are several ways to get traffic (visitors) to your blog. Three of my favorite ways are:

1.) Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the art of posting on other people's blogs as a guest.

This is a great way to attract visitors back to your blog, especially if the website you're posting on gets a lot of visitors.

2.) Social Media

After writing blog posts, you should post them to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. This is another great way to get traffic to your blog and even get feedback from your family and friends. Positive feedback can boost your confidence and make you feel good about writing future posts.

3.) Backlinking

Backlinks are posted on other websites and linked back to your website. You can manually post these in forums, guest blogs, your own blog posts, social media websites, blog comments, and in groups on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Think of backlinks as votes. The more you have, the better chance you have of ranking number one in the search engines.

What Are Blogs, Why It Is Important to Your Business, and How to Provide You With Backlinks

Blog Is a discussion or forum published on your website consisting of discrete posts typically displayed in descending time order so the most recent post appears first. Blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments on the blog posts, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. Since all business websites today need a business blog, it became a must to interact with your visitors. You not only can market it to all of the places you could any other website; you can also send it to all of the blog directories. This means you have the potential of reaching many more visitors than a standard HTML website. The post/page is only accessible and writable for the specified group. After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, not only producing content to post on the blogs but also build social relations with readers. Blogs used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes.

Common features of Blog:

Blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments. A private blog for business purposes. Guest blogging. Invite high-profile figures relevant to your brand to share a blog entry with your community. Create posts. Since the purpose of a blog is to be able to post new text or information to the site frequently. Configure the appearance and layout. Allows configuring your blog. Essentially a design template. Display posts and comments to visitors. A blogging platform makes it easy for readers to view your posts and to add their comments. Remove some of comments left by readers and you will eventually have to fight comment spam. Publish RSS feeds. RSS feeds allow more visitors to subscribe to your blog. Adding gadgets to enhance appearance and functionality. Track Your Popularity. Learn more about your readers, where they're from, and how they found you. Maps and graphs that beautifully present your stats. Keep track of all your favorite blogs. Share your work with the world. Share your blog to the most popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter. Your readers can choose to subscribe to your blog's feeds.

Benefits of Blog to Website:

Blog increase credibility and communicate between you and your visitors and fans. Your site can now benefit from visibility within blog directories and RSS search engines and also RSS directories visitors. Blog is friendly with Facebook, Twitter and other social media so increasing sharing your content there. Blog is an excellent place for the promotion of products and services. Blog well represent your business and your experience in business. Can be useful to share some services, announcement and other company news. Blogs are seen more than website because in blog posting there are attractive text, images and links of blogs which make ability to read blog more. It is a good tool to establish the authority of the business in online market. Blog is a wonderful way to share the information. Greatly instrumental in improving SEO rankings thereby enabling a website to get listed in some of the most popular search engines. People love to comment and tell their ideas. It creates new, fresh content for Google and other major search engines to read. It builds up content on your website and each post counts as another indexed page in the search engines.

You can easily create a blog on blogger like 2M blog or customize a WordPress website to have a complete Blog application and management with a lot of features to more expose your business to customers.

Tips On How To Simplify Blogging

Starting a blog is just as significant as getting into a long-term commitment. To show your best ability, a blogger must be psychologically set for its pressure. Certainly, blogging can be taken as one's diversion. However, when followers start to recognize your blog; you are obliged to make more and better articles. Not all are expecting to shine on their write-ups. But when your star shines instantly, you must be prepared to carry the extra load it will require. So below are tools that can support you achieve an easy life in blogging:

1. Routine it. You will only spend a couple of minutes in writing and posting your articles. But a good quality article must contain eye-catching photo and attention-grabbing remarks. To gather those information, you must always keep your blog in mind whenever you're up to something interesting. Practice daily blogging and include them in your everyday routine so that you can be able to come up with innovative write-up that can be admired by many.

2. Be fully equipped. Be sure to always equip yourself because you might need those items in capturing precious moments on a particular gathering, which you can use on your next article. Bring along a camera with you at all times so that you can capture any extraordinary event in your life. Other bloggers are only equipped with cellphone camera. Be sure of yourself and don't hesitate to seek approval if you want to take pictures of sensitive issues. Be sure to bring along items where you can also record things. iPads are friendly gadgets, but a simple pen and paper would be very helpful to write down the necessary things that you need to take note of.

3. Be flexible. A prospective blog story you had in mind may not always turn out as you pictured it to be. A food blogger's adversity takes place when he miscalculates the temperature in baking the cake and it got burnt; for a travel blogger, it's when a cancelled trip prevents him from having fun. These are possibilities that you might encounter.Instead of blaming yourself or others, why not think of remedies that you can make use of? The food blogger can make an article about 'Things to Remember in Baking' while the travel bloggers can write about 'How to Be Positive Despite Cancelled Trips '.

4. Share and Bond with others. Blogging may be a solitary activity, but you have the option to get out of your shell and mingle with the rest of the blogging community. Learn to socialize by getting to know other bloggers in the industry because it would do a lot of things for you and your blog as well. You will gain not only friends but knowledge as well when you start to interact with co-bloggers. You can exchange ideas with other bloggers who share your interests. The 'experts' can give suggestions that can enhance your learning. In due time, you will realize that you are not alone in your specialized craft, which is called 'blogging'.

Blogging tasks are huge to handle that is why it's good to have reminders like these tips in order to avoid difficulty in facing other challenges on your blog.

Copyright (c) 2012 HowToStartABlog.com

Pretty Up Your Blog Posts With Stock Images

You may be the best writer in the world, but if you post to block nothing but text, chances are it's not going to get read. When people see nothing but text they are scared off. You need to pepper your long blog posts with images. This not only makes your overall post more appealing to the eye, but if you choose your images wisely, can give someone an idea of what your post is about instantly, keeping them from moving on without reading.

But where do you get good images for your blog? Well, you could take the pictures yourself. If you're blogging about personal stuff this is pretty easy because you have first hand access to images that are a relevant. Writing a post bout how your dog knocked over the trash can spilling old coffee grounds all over the floor? Just take a picture of it!

However, when you're writing on topics that have a much larger scope, even an abstract scope, it can be hard to generate your own imagery that is of high quality and captures your post's theme. For example, a blog post on how to forecast ROI (return on investment) for ranking well on certain keywords in Google. Sure, you could just take a snapshot of your computer screen with your browser pointed to Google, but you'd better off with a high resolution photograph or illustration that represents your idea more clearly

Where do you get such imagery? From stock photography websites! Stock photography websites offer thousands of photographs and graphic illustrations on hundreds of themes. Professional photographers take these pictures and offer them up for sale so that website owners, bloggers, and people in print media can purchase them for use.

You can find quality stock images on a wide range of topics, such as animals, miscellaneous objects, stock photos of people, and even abstract concepts like success, love, and humor.

How much does stock photography cost? Surprisingly, not much, but it does depend on how you plan to use the images. In most cases you can get a small image perfectly fine for publishing on the web for just a few cents. Typically you will purchase an image under a royalty free license, which means that you pay for it once, but can use it as many times as you like. However, you can't resell the image. For instance, while you can use an image to pretty up your blog post, you can't put that image on a t-shirt and sell it as your own work. When you purchase a royalty free image, the copyright ownership does not transfer to you.

You can pay for an extended license that grants you more rights, such as re-sell rights or copyright ownership, but this will come at a higher price. Sometimes a much higher price. Typically this is not a something you would want to worry about just for adding a picture to a blog post.

So the next time you're thinking about writing an epic blog post full of text, consider adding a few stock images to it. It is a very cost effective way capture a reader's attention and keep them reading!

How to Get Your Blog Comments Approved

Awhile back I talked about how to make your own auto approve blog list. I don't recommend spending a lot of time commenting on auto approve blogs even using software because the links aren't worth much unless you're trying to get something indexed or build links to something on the bottom tier of your link structure.

It's much better to focus on leaving high quality/valuable comments manually on high PR relevant blogs. I talked the other day on how to make sure you leave the first blog comment so you can get your comment in before anyone else; now today let's talk about how to get those comments to stick.

Read the Post and Leave a Good Comment - This is job one. Read the post and make sure your comment is not only relevant but adds something to the discussion which other readers can get substantial value out of. If you don't do this you're wasting your time because no one is going to click through to your site and the blog owner likely won't approve it.

Use a Normal Name - While you may be tempted to use your keyword as your name, there is no faster way to get your comment shut down than having some awkward keyword as your name, particularly if it's not even related to the topic of the blog. This also makes it look like you're not just groping for a link and link juice.

Link Use/Placement - Also, pay attention to what kind of blog it is in terms of format. Some blogs allow for links within the comment itself. If this is the case, then think about leaving the website field blank altogether and focusing on (naturally) putting your link in the comment. When I say natural I mean so that it flows and you're not calling attention to your link. For example, you could say midway through your comment "I disagree with the bit that dog food (dog food is the anchor text for the link here) is best for your dog out of a can".

Comment Often - Finally, the best way to get approved is to comment often with good comments and build a rapport with that webmaster. Contacting them about a guest blogging post opportunity is another great way to get on their radar and while it seems like a lot of work, some relevant blogs are more than worth it.

I've heard some people say that when all else fails you can also get away with a bit of sneakiness with some blogs in the form of stealthily sneaking your link in via the punctuation like the period. You probably won't get much traffic from it as if the blog owner doesn't see it then what are the odds that anyone else will, but you could get a bit of curiosity traffic if anyone does see it and plus it's still a (generic) link.

Reasons on Why People Choose to Make Money Online

Not everyone gets the privilege of finishing a college degree. There are also those who are unhappy with their jobs. Some have difficult situations wherein they have to stay at home thus not being able to take jobs away from home. But these situations are not hindrances anymore. Even those people who are not experiencing situations such as those mentioned also make money online. There are also different ways on how to make money online. But what are the reasons why people choose to do online jobs and earn money from it?

Time - There are people who are not fond of following schedules. Most jobs offered online gives you the freedom to the job whenever you want as long as you meet the deadline required by the clients. If you do blogging and forum posting, you get to do it at your own free will. This is also helpful for those who are having part time jobs online or home based jobs. You get to multitask, doing your household chores and earning from your online job right at the comforts of your home.

Deductions and taxes - Clients from online jobs such as writing articles pay you per article. For example, you get to be paid $3 per article and if you do 30 a day, you will have $90 full. No deductions from the employer, no withholding tax either which is applicable to some countries. Taxes come when you process it from an online payment method such as Paypal to your bank account.

Number of jobs - You can do as many online jobs as you can manage. You can even create a network of workers for you to do the job and you profit from them. This is one of the common strategies that people employ to gain more profit.

No necessary requirements - Most clients would only ask for a sample of your work and determine whether they would employ your services. They won't ask for credentials, although it can be helpful at times. But a competent undergraduate can also manage to gain more clients as long as the jobs done are of high quality.

Short termed contracts - There are people who cannot stay at the same job or client for long. There are differences that arise along the way wherein the only option is to quit working for the client. Some people actually abuse this freedom that is why there are clients who cannot trust easily job seekers. Even so, when doing an online job, you are free to provide limited information about yourself which creates minimal risk.

There are advantages and disadvantages in order to make money online. However, it is up you to determine whether these kinds of jobs are suitable to your needs and preferences. In the end, what matters is that you enjoy doing your job.