Archive for August, 2007

Kevin from Blogging tips has written an article about using forums to promote your blog, there is also an interesting article on Pro Bloggers Matrix about the same topic with a slightly more extreme title. I think this is a very interesting topic to discuss. A lot of readers will probably have used forums on the Internet. I have been using them for years. Although you can come across the odd ugly incident, most of the time forums are an interesting place to discuss topics.

So how can you use a forum to promote your blog?

What forums provide you with is an opportunity make connections with other bloggers and readers. Be friendly, help people out, sell yourself and you may find that some of the people who you talk with on forums end up following your blog.

Also you can put the address of your blog in your signature on forums where this is allowed. This may…

Reading through some of the posts on Pro Blogger about 31 days to building a better Blog I am stumbling on some very interesting content. Salman Siddiqui writes about: Earn “6 Times” More With Your AdSense Very Easily. This articles raises a key point to success using Adsense.

The article explains some of the process involved with Adsense:

The publishers bid in Google AdWords to get to the top in your blog pages where Ad Units are displayed. The theory is simple. The one who pays out more has more chances to be displayed at the top in the pages running ads. So the first Ad unit in your blog page will display the advertisers which pay the highest for clicks, the second Ad unit pays out lesser than the first and so on.

Salman suggests that using some logic based on the information above, the first ad displayed on your page will have the ads that…

Often during busy times I find it difficult to set aside time to work on my blog. For example the last four days I have been away on a road trip around England. Even when I am not on holiday, there are times when I just can’t make it to the computer. This got me thinking on what time is best spent on if you only have a little each day. 

If you only had 1/2 an hour a day to blog what would you time be best spent on? The two key aspects are:

One - Writing Content

If you are limited to only half and hour a day, you are not going to be able to write seriously good, well researched  articles each day, half an hour just isn’t long enough. So you are going to have to start using drafts. I think drafts are a great idea even if…

David Airey has written an article called Top 7 blog mistakes to avoid. I think there are some key points here that are very important for beginning blogger’s.

Not using a self-hosted blog

Sure if the point of your blog is to communicate to your friends and family what you have been doing while over seas, or to show photos of your pet dog Oswald then a Wordpress.com or blogger hosted blogs will do the trick nicely. But if you are serious about your blog and are more interested in developing a publishing platform or brand you need your own domain. The typical start up costs involve: $10 - $14 US for a domain, $6.95 - $10 a month for a basic web host, Blue host or Dream host are both good options for starting out.

Expecting people to visit

I guess I never really just expected people to visit my blog when I started…

Tadeusz Szewczyk has written a good article on Blogscoped called 10 steps to success without SEO.

The main points covered are:

Discover your niche
Use Wordpress
Create a killer CSS design and submit it to CSS galleries
Allow trackbacks, use dofollow
Socialize, write comments and link other blogs
Include social media on your site, use social media yourself
Write your own content, say something new, express yourself
Compile what you know or what others said and publish it
Contribute to your favorite online publications
Add new content at least every second day

With each point more detail about specifically how the point helps is discussed. While I agree with all the points, as a blogger with a full time job I have found the last point the most difficult to follow. I often have a spare day or two, and I will write 2-3 posts, read a lot, leave comments etc. But then I…