Tutorials/How To | Robb Sutton

How To Drastically Increase Your Blog's Page Load Speed and SEO

March 17, 2011 By Robb Sutton 14 Comments

In the world of websites, speed is essential. Not only does your page load speed directly affect how your readers interact with your site, but now it also directly affects your search engine performance as Google as integrated it into their algorithm.

The problem…

WordPress site are generally slow. However, it’s not their fault as the stock install performs incredibly well. Even if you do everything you can within your admin and on page content (tips for that here), you are going to end up with a slow loading site. With all of the designs, images and code we add to our installs via uploads and plugins, we end up clogging the system and slowing down the train. Even if you are running an extremely fast host (which most are not), you still run into the same problem…just on a lesser scale than those that are on slow, shared hosting.

The good news…

There is a solution for sites on inexpensive or expensive hosting that will drastically increase your blog’s page load speed that will ultimately help you on the SEO end as well.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN is a Content Delivery Network of highly-optimized servers all around the world working together to distribute your content (CSS and Javascript files, downloadable objects, applications, real-time media streams, and much more) through hundreds of servers instead of a single host. This “smart route” technology makes sure each visitor to your site gets their data from the city closest to them.

Long story short, a CDN service caches your files remotely on multiple servers around the world to makes sure your readers get the most efficient path insuring fast load times. The result is drastic and instant.

What have I been doing lately on my sites?

To test out the theory, I went live with a CDN service on my highest traffic site, Mountain.Bike198.com. Within two hours of taking the system live, we cut my page load speeds down to a 1/3 of what they were before. It was incredible.

To make sure I wasn’t just going insane, I sent out a quick Facebook update to some friends to see if they could tell a difference and all of them were amazed. The site did not load slowly before, but new, faster load speeds made for a better experience as you click around articles. I also used several tools around the web that test your page load speed to get a better metric, and it averaged out to a 1/3 to 1/2 the speed it was originally. That is a big change.

Based off of these results, I am now in the process of integrating my CDN service into all of my sites (only really takes about 10 minutes to setup…I just haven’t gotten around to it) to keep things as efficient as possible.

What’s the downside?

Nothing is without a downside…and in this case…it is cost.

Luckily, using a CDN service used to be extremely expensive and that was the main reason I have not used this solution up until this point. Now, you can find a CDN service that gives you 1 TB of usage for around 39 bucks like I did with MaxCDN. That 1 TB should last me almost a year given today’s traffic levels which really isn’t bad for under 40 dollars. In the past, it would have been a lot more than that, but thanks to companies like Amazon providing inexpensive, fast storage options…the playing field has been leveled for online storage.

Should you use a CDN service?

As with any paid service, there is always the question on whether it is a right fit for you. When I looked at what my sites needed…I looked at several key factors.

My sites are image heavy…both in the design and in the articles. My cycling sites have a lot of multiple image reviews and numerous plugin integrations, so the benefit of taking on a system like this has a huge impact.
SEO competition in my markets is really high. I need to efficiently run every aspect of my blogs to be competitive, so page load speed is just as important as any other factor.
Readers in my niche have complained about other sites loading slowly in the past, so they are sensitive to page load speed in site preferences.

If you are in the same boat I am, then a CDN service is worth the investment and will show a return. If you are just blogging for fun or to share information with family, simple changes like hosting and image optimization will probably be fine and there is no need to speed extra money on a service like this one.

As I mentioned before, the best pricing for a quality service I could find was MaxCDN and I have been incredibly happy with the results so far. There were easy step by step instructions to get you up and running in WordPress with W3 Total Cache (which you should be running anyway) and other blogging platforms. You can check them out by clicking here.

Filed Under: Blogging, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: cdn, content delivery network, improve rankings, maxcdn, page load speed, search engine rankings, seo

How To Tweak Google Analytics To Output Traffic Generating Article Ideas

March 9, 2011 By Robb Sutton 22 Comments

Do you wish you could tap into the minds of your readers and figure out exactly what they want to read on your blog? You can…let’s run through how.

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools as a blogger. Not only do you watch your traffic metrics and how you are performing, but you can get extreme insight into your visitors. Information about where they are from, what browser they are using and how they click through your site has a profound affect on how you tailor your content and lay out your design.

Today, I want to take a second to show you one of the coolest features of Google Analytics that most bloggers never even bother to setup…and it is information that will make you money over time…

How People Land On Your Pages Is Important

When a new reader searches for some string of terms in Google and lands on your pages, that is important information to have. You can find those keyword strings in Google Analytics to see how you are performing on a keyword basis.

But what happens after that?

If the reader likes your content, they are going to look for more quality content that fits their needs. While they might look at your most recent posts, click on a link in your related articles widget or start browsing through your categories…they are most likely going to do exactly what brought them to your site to begin with…SEARCH.

Within WordPress, there is a pretty robust search feature that every blogger puts on their site. Typically, it is a set and forget feature as you throw the search widget in your sidebar or header and forget about it. It is there and readers will use it…your job is done right? Wrong.

Just like the information you use to see how readers find your site is important, what they are searching for on your site is equally important.

If only there was a way to track this information to improve our blogs…oh wait…there is! And Google makes it incredibly easy to track this information for you within Analytics.

Using Site Search Metrics In Google Analytics

When you search for something on a website, the url of the results are different than any other structure on your site. Google uses this information to track those keyword strings and outputs them for you within your admin…you just have to set it up.

In the left sidebar of Analytics under the “Content” link, there is a link for “Site Search”. When you first click on it, you will get a screen that looks like this.

Since you do not have it setup (it isn’t by default), you have to go tweak some settings within your account profile. Click back to your account list by clicking on the Google Analytics logo and then click on the account you want to setup search tracking on. On this second screen that now shows only that domain, click “edit” to start setting this up.

That should bring you to a screen that looks like this.

When you click “edit” in the upper right corner below “Receiving Data”, you come to a new screen to setup your search analytics. When you get to the next screen, put an “s” in the “query parameter” field like you see below. This is how WordPress handles search, so if you are using another blogging platform, you will need to see what character they use for search in the url.

Great! You are all setup! Now what?

You wait for Analytics to do it its job and for readers to search on your site. As they do, you will start to see a screen that looks like this in your Analytics account.

Obviously, this is just the top half of the screenshot. There is some basic keyword information when you scroll down, but there is also a ton of in-depth information on how your users interacted with your search feature and what they searched for.

What Do I Do With This Site Search Info?

For my blogging, this site search information is liquid gold. Here is how I use this information to grow my blogs and connect with my audience.

1. Self Generating Article Topic Bank

You have just created a self generating article idea bank. If you are ever stumped on what to write during a given week, this information is automatically spitting out article ideas…and more importantly…it is generating article ideas that your readers want to read. This is not a list that some other blogger told you to write…or a “hit list” of topics on the web…this is what your readers are searching for on your site, and if they are not finding it…you need to write it.

2. Reader Feedback For Product Reviews

If you know me at all, you already know I am a huge fan of product reviews as a way to generate income through blogs. This information has a lot of leverage when you are trying to get in product to review on your site. Think of it this way…

How much more powerful is this than just asking for free stuff. “We are currently tracking search trends on our website and noticed that your brand name is being searched for almost 30 times a month. Our readers want to see your product reviewed on our website. We also have over 13,000 regular subscribers and over 10,000 newsletter subscribers that have come to expect high quality product reviews that help them make purchasing decisions.”

Can you see how much weight site metrics and reader trends can give you when you are trying to line up products to review on your site? That is real-time information and feedback that companies love to see.

3. Expansion Ideas

What are your readers searching for that complements your content? If you started off blogging the right way, you chose a narrower niche that had expansion capabilities over time. By starting off with less competition, you are able to grow a following that can then compete on a larger level. By watching these search metrics, you can find the ares you need to expand into quickly.

Time To Get To Work

As you can see, what your readers are searching for on your blog is extremely useful information as you start to tailor your content and grow your business. This is also one of the most overlooked parts of blogging that most bloggers ignore or never bother to even setup. Get this setup on your blog today and start getting into the mind of your reader.

Have you setup Site Search yet?

Filed Under: Blogging, Content, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: article ideas, creating content, google analytics, How To Start A Blog, product reviews, site search

Rockstar Article Ideas That Generate Search Engine Traffic

February 15, 2011 By Robb Sutton 6 Comments

This article is really a follow up to last week’s SEO article on how to get your article on the first page of Google. While that tutorial went through the process I go through to rank well on search engines at a blog level, I felt there was a need to dive a little bit deeper into content generation and planning to show how this affect the routines you go through on a weekly basis with your blog.

Let me preface by saying something very important.

I write blog articles for my readers, not for search engines.

While I know this is a line that has been beat to death over the years, it is an important one to remember as I do not do this every time I hit the publish button. There are topics and conversations that I have written about on my blogs that generate a lot of social or direct traffic that have little to no search engine benefit.

I cover topics, reviews and editorials that my readers want to read first. If I am able to tie in some optimized SEO to compliment those articles to make them perform well in search engine results, that is a bonus not a requirement. Far too often, I see blogs that focus on SEO with every single article…and quite frankly…they are boring.

My SEO Blog Article Cycle

As I was sitting down enjoying a cup of coffee the other day, I started to actually map out my process on the iPad. Here are my notes…

Technology is awesome…I love my paperless life.

Anyways, above is the cycle I go through when looking to generate articles that rocket to the top of search engine results…so let’s take a deeper look at the process.

Step 1: Target Keywords For Your Article

I personally have a list of high traffic keywords I have generated over the years that are all article worthy. If you are starting from scratch, there are two ways you can go about this.

The Free Way – If you have a Google account, you have access to the Google Adwords keyword tool. This tool is actually used by Adwords advertisers to help them decide on which search keyword strings they want to target for the link ads. This is a huge asset for you as you can put in a keyword string (an example of mine would be “mountain biking”) and Google will pop out a list of related keywords and how often they are searched within a month. You then use the list of the higher volume searches as your article ideas.
The Paid Way – I used to use the Google Adwords keyword tool until I picked up Market Samurai. While the Adwords tool is great, it was missing some information that I felt was necessary to carry out a really planned attack. When I put “mountain biking” Market Samurai, I am able to really narrow things down and find the best solution for my blog by weighing more factors than just search (how many people are paying for links in monthly volume is great for Adsense revenue) and I am able to track specific url performance on a daily basis.

Step 2: Is The Keyword Relevant?

As I mentioned before, I write articles for readers, so while there may be a ton of traffic available for “Schwinn Mountain Bikes”, the reality is that Schwinn is a brand that is carried in Wal-Mart and that is not relevant content for my blog (maybe a humorous article someday).

Once you have your list of possibles, you really need to ask yourself how relevant those keywords are to your audience. A lot of search engine traffic is great…but you want targeted traffic that increases your bottom line. A bunch of Wal-Mart bike purchasers are going to have zero interest in a review of a suspension fork that costs 5 times more than they paid for their bike.

Step 3: No or No Go Point: Traffic vs. Competition

Especially if you have a new blog, you will want to target keywords strings that have viable traffic with low competition. Market Samurai makes that an easy process by actually showing you those stats side by side, but you can also search on Google and take a look at the first page of results. Are you competing against the biggest in your niche or is there room for improvement?

When competition is low and traffic is pretty high, it really is a no brainer…get to writing. When traffic is high and competition is high, it doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t cover that topic (could be really relevant and interesting for your readers) but you need to keep your expectations at a reasonable level until your site has established itself as a authority in your niche before you see high rankings.

At this point in the process, I make a decision whether to go with the article idea based off the previous data or to hit up something else.

Step 4: Article Composition and Writing

Now it is time to write the article. For this part of the process, I completely forget about SEO.

Your readers visit your blog to connect with your voice and style. They do not want another bland and boring rendition of popular keywords as you attempt to whore yourself out for search engine traffic. Write your article just as you normally would any other article on your blog. The uniqueness you bring to your content is the most important and you can always go back and adjust the content for search engines.

It is much harder to give life to a boring article than it is to give search engine optimization to an interesting one.

Step 5: The Tech Side Of SEO For Blog Articles

After you are completely happy with your blog article, it is time to go back and make sure everything is in line to perform its best on search engines.

Content SEO – I use Scribe on my blogs to make sure my content is properly optimized for search engines. It tells me exactly which keywords I am targeting, how many times I should mention them in the article, how many links I need to have in the article and the best performing tags for that article. It basically takes all of research out for me and makes things a quick and easy process (that has shown results). By keeping keyword density at around 5.5% and under for primary keywords and linking about every 120 words, you are on the right track.
Meta Titles and Descriptions – I custom write all of my meta titles and descriptions to insure search engines use my text instead of auto generated ones and to entice clicks on my links on the results list. It really is the only way to see success.

Step 6: Rescan – Writing for Readers and Sharing

As a general rule, search engine topics can be rather bland. To overcome this and create articles my existing readers want to read as well, I inject as much personal opinion on the subject matter as I can to keep things interesting. At this part in the process, I read back over my article to make sure it is still interesting and that I have a defined opinion on the subject. If I do not have an opinion, I usually start over or pick another topic to write on.

If all looks good, I hit the publish button and we are off to the races. At that point, I make sure it hits Twitter, Facebook and my newsletter list to get as many eyes on the article as possible. If I have made it interesting enough, it is shared through social media outlets and linked to in other articles further increasing its weight in search engines.

Step 7: Tracking Progress Over Time

After the dust has settled, I load that specific URL into Market Samurai‘s Rank Tracking Tool to see how progress goes over the coming months. I use this information to tweak the process to get the best results I can for the next article that follows the cycle. If you do not track your results over time, how do you even know you are doing the right thing? You don’t…and you are just flying blind.

Step 8: Repeat The Process

The last thing you really need to do in the process is use the information from the last article to build on the next. Repeat the process by building on the success that you can measure through your tools and feedback from your readers. Comments, emails and other reader interaction is the best litmus test on how your article was received by your audience. You can combine that with the metrics you are gathering on the articles progress in search engines to refine and tune your process for the best success rate.

Above all…remember that you are writing your articles to connect with readers. If you are not accomplishing that…the rest of the process is worthless.

Tools Mentioned In This Article: Market Samurai and Scribe.

Filed Under: Blogging, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: adsense, adwords, article, articles, blog, computing, creating blog, generate, google, ideas, internet marketing, internet search engines, keyword density, marketing, search, search engine optimization, search engine result, search engine traffic, search engines, seo article, seo blog, web 2.0, web search engine, world wide web, write article

How To Get A New Article On The 1st Page Of Google In 20 Minutes

February 7, 2011 By Robb Sutton 24 Comments

Ranking well in search engines and getting indexed is not rocket science…even though many seem to think blog SEO is a black art.

This week, I published a review on Bike198 that got indexed in Google and ranked on the 1st page within 20 minutes of hitting the publish button. Do I have your attention now? Let’s get started…

A Common Misconception In Blog SEO

There is a common misconception within the SEO community. Everyone seems to think that if you just to the technical side of SEO (titles, meta descriptions, etc.)…you will rank well and that’s the end of it. Ever wonder why the same people that spew this crap can’t seem to even get their own sites to rank well?

It’s because they have ignored the biggest contributing factor to SEO.

The greatest asset you have against your competition in regards to ranking well in Google and other search engines is amazing content. I know…you are sick of hearing the crap about “content is king” and how many times you should be posting a week…so let’s break it down into terms that actually make sense and does not have a bunch of tag lines attached that cheapen up the process. Then…we can take a look at the technical side of SEO to make sure you have everything setup correctly to insure greatest possible success…

Let’s Get Your Articles On The 1st Page Of Google

All SEO starts and ends with incredible content. The ultimate goal of Google and other search engines is to have the best content up front for their audience. They are not looking for the best optimized pages or the article that has the most keywords stuffed in it. Their algorithms search out content that is the most valuable to their customers…people like you and me. Think about it this way…if you were to search for “Audi R8 Review” in Bing and the first 5 results were nothing but keyword stuffed pages and then you headed over to Google and the first 5 results were Car and Driver, Auto Weekly and other industry rags…which search engine would you use the next time?

In the search engine world…usage is king. They need their results to be the most valuable to get repeat users. This does not equal subpar content that just seems to have all of the technical stuff in place.

To this day…there are certain things that ultimately decide your fate in search engines that has not changed in years. Most importantly…quality links back to your content. Now, how do you get people to link to what you have to say? You publish articles that are worth linking to! It really is that simple.

So…as you can see…all of the weight is on the content and the value it provides to the reader. As you publish quality content, you get links and clicks that increase your worth to search engines so your content continues to climb.

The Second Part of the Search Engine Equation

Now, all of this is great, but at the end of the day your content has to get spidered. How often your content gets spidered and indexed is a direct result of your publishing schedule. Google and other search engines spider and cache pages on a regular basis, but to save on processing time (which equals money), the search engines keep track of how regularly your site is publishing new content. By doing this, they are able to save money on their end while still picking up your articles.

There really is no secret number to how often you should be publishing articles. On Bike198, I publish four to five articles a week. Due to the consistency of my articles over the course of time, search engines visit my site several times a day, so when a new article goes live…it is picked up quickly.

The key here is to publish articles as regularly as you can while still keeping quality up.

If you have a relitively new site (under a year), be prepared to not rank incredibly well for at least a year. It takes time to build up links and search engines tend to hold you down for awhile until they figure out if you are credible or not. There are exceptions to that rule, but generally it is pretty accurate.

So you have great content…it is getting published consistently…you are starting to get links…let’s take a look at the tech side of the equation…

The Technical Side Of SEO For Blogs

There are a couple of tools that I mention here that I personally use (and many that I paid for). While these free and paid options are my picks that I have personally tested, there are other options out there that probably work pretty well.

First, if you are not using Firebug and Yoast’s Firefox plugin that turns off personalized search…you need to start to immediately. Firebug will allow you to see your webpage code and Yoast’s Firefox plugin allows you to see how you are ranking in Google with the personalized search turned off. In case you didn’t already know…you will probably rank really well when signed into GMail or any other Google app due to the fact that it pays attention to where you visit the most. You need to see where you rank with those options turned off.

General Good Practice Article SEO

There are several things you should be doing with the publish of every article on your blog.

Interlinking Your Articles – On every article you publish, you should be linking up past articles within your content when it is relevant. This is a great way to get search engines to follow those links and keep old articles fresh. It also exposes your readership to articles they may have not seen in the past that they can then share and link to. M
Manually Entering In Meta Information – Did you know that the automatic meta description function of SEO plugins like All In One SEO basically just pick up the first 160 characters of your article? Knowing that…how many times have you started your articles with that in mind? How boring would the beginning of all of your articles be if you did it on all of them? For this reason…you should be manually writing all of your titles and meta descriptions regardless of which SEO plugin you use for WordPress. I have had the best luck recently with Yoast’s new SEO plugin for WordPress. It actually lets me see how my article will look in Google on the draft page before I hit publish. It also does a lot of other things that are just good practice.
Create Attention Grabbing Headlines – There is a natural want to make bland titles that have the specific keywords for good rankings. However, if your title is so boring that no one clicks on it, you will start to move down the rankings. You need to write relevant, attention grabbing headlines that invite clicks. As you get more clicks…you will move up.
Create Easy To Read Articles – To appeal to the widest audience, you should be writing about at a middle school to lower high school level. You should also be using your H1, H2, H3 tags to create headlines that have relevant keywords and break up the article into understandable chunks. Search engines weight these lines heavier to get an idea of what it is you are talking about and it helps your readers digest the content.
Keyword Density – In the old days, you could stuff a bunch of keywords in the footer of a site the same color of the background and rank well. The days have changed and the search engines are much smarter. Remember…they are looking for quality content. Personally, I use Scribe to tell me how I am doing on keyword density and general SEO on my articles. It has served me well so far and most of my Bike198 articles hit the first page pretty quickly. I am sure there are other free options out there…but the consistency and quality has shown results for me as I do not want to read through articles and start counting words and links.
Encourage Social Media Sharing – Find out what your users are sharing with and encourage it by placing share buttons at the top and bottom of your articles. No matter what…have at least Facebook and Twitter (if your audience actually uses it). Search engines are starting to look at how many times you are linked up in social media outlets to find out what people are reading. By encouraging this behavior, you are not only getting more eyes in front of your content…but you are going to rank well.
Research Long Tail Keywords - Unless you are already the leader in your niche, you are not going to rank well for your one or two keyword combinations. To rank well in the early going, you need to research long tail keyword combos (3 to 6 word strings) that you can have better success with. As you build up credible results in those strings, you will naturally start ranking better for the higher competing keywords. I use Market Samurai to do all of my research for content based long tail keywords. It has been a fantastic tool that gives me solid results.
Watch Your Searches – Within Google Analytics, you should be watching two things that will give you article ideas that you can rank well for. The first, the keywords your readers are using that are making them land on your pages and…the second, what they are searching for on your site through the site search box (you can set this up easily in analytics and they even tell you how). If you are not have not written anything on these terms…you should be.

Good Practice Blog SEO

While those are great things to do in your articles…what should you be doing on your blog?

Speed Things Up – Recently, Google introduced page load speed into their search algorithm. The downside to that…most blogger’s websites are incredibly slow. Install W3 Total Cache and use it. It will help your pages load faster by caching your site on your server. The #1 main reason that a lot of blogs load slowly outside of caching is images. Your images on your blog should be no bigger than 1024 pixels on the long end and no more than 130k at the highest. There are blogs I visit on a daily basis that are loading several MB of images on a single article. If it takes more than 10 seconds to load that article…it will get pushed down to the bottom. Check the sizes of your images before posting.
Clean Up Your Sidebar and Plugins – I have said this about a million times, but only put things in your sidebar that 75% of your users actually need. Your floating tag cloud (while you think it looks cool) only distracts from your content, causes your pages to load slower and messes up your code. You have to resist the urge to install every single plugin you find as it drastically alters your blog negatively and you ultimately do not need it.
Double Check Your Blog’s Code – There has been a recent trend of including SEO within themes and theme frameworks. I hate this idea. If you want to change themes in the future all of the work you did to make sure your meta information was correct goes out the window. With some themes, if you use a plugin for SEO, you get duplicate meta tags in your code. This is a bad thing. Use Firebug to make sure you do not have duplicated meta descriptions and meta tags. If you do…remove them from your theme or find someone who can.
General Search Engine Maintenance – Make sure you have a sitemap plugin installed (like XML Sitepmaps) and submit those sitemaps to the search engines. You also need to need to sign up for a Google Webmaster account and watch your page load speed and errors. Any of those concerns should be fixed immediately.
“NoFollow” Any Irrelevant Pages – Do you really want your admin links or date archives to carry pagerank or would you rather have that filtered to the homepage? That’s what I thought…so why are you letting search engines follow these links and…worst yet…index these pages? Date based archives are nothing but duplicate content of the homepage and you are discounting yourself if you are letting them be archived. How many times have you search for content that was published in June of 2009? I use the Yoast SEO plugin to accomplish this task as well…
Avoid Duplicate Content Between Tags and Categories – Do not use the same terms in your tags as your categories. You end up duplicating archives that way. Think of your categories as top level terms and tags secondary terms.
Have A Memorable Brand and Logo – By having a unique and memorable brand, you are able to stay at the forefront of readers minds and increase the likelihood that they will come back to your content. If you have a boring, keyword stuffed, bland brand name and an even worse logo, all of the work you do to separate yourself from the spammers. While it is nice to have keywords within your domain name, the fact that it is interesting and memorable is far more important.
Get Reliable, Fast Hosting – While the attractive prices of some of the shared hosting services out there is attractive, if your site is slow loading or down…search engines aren’t going to have much to do with you. About the best deal I have found out there is HostGator for beginning bloggers. I use a much more expensive option…but it is faster and more reliable with extreme backups. Use what is in your budget but make sure they are credible.

Set, Forget and Test Your Search Engine Optimization

Much of the technical side of blog SEO is a set and forget process…or at least just a maintenance checklist before you publish an article. The hard part of SEO is the actual work…the content. Without content that people actually want to read and spread…you are just applying technical SEO to junk…and junk will not perform well.

When I consult companies on their SEO, the first thing we look at is content and how we can attract new customers while increasing their relevant indexed pages in search engines. In the blogging world…you should not treat your blog any differently than that. SEO is not a black art…it is just one that many people don’t understand because they get stuck on the technical side of things instead of focusing on creating content that people actually want to read.

When you do this…over time…over and over again…results come. There is no secret key or black magic trick. Just solid foundations with quality content and that will never change.

Products Mentioned In This Article:

Filed Under: Blogging, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: blog seo, google rankings, how to rank in search engines, search engine optimization, wordpress seo

How I Use Flickr To Grow Community On My Blogs

January 31, 2011 By Robb Sutton 10 Comments

Flickr is the #1 photo sharing website on the planet and if you are in a niche that is really into taking pictures…you are missing out on a HUGE community building tool if you are not taping into this valuable resource. When done correctly, a Flickr group for your blog can do the following:

Create a larger community atmosphere around your blog.
Increase traffic and new visitors to your content.
Create new, engaging content for your readers automatically.

In the mountain biking world, pictures are used as a way to share our experiences on the trail with riders all over the world. With the group function on Flickr, we can tap into the community aspect of biking through images outside of your conventional online forums. Building community on your blog is not an easy thing to get started, so it is up to you to find outlets like Flickr that you can bring into your content that your readers can contribute to easily and efficiently. Luckily for bloggers, there are some tools we can use to tap into this community and grow our blogs while making our readers feel like they are actually apart of something bigger instead of a site that they just read articles on from time to time.

How I Use Flickr Groups To Grow My Blog

If you are in a community that already shares a lot of images on Facebook or Flickr, this is a pretty easy way to get people more involved with your site. If your niche market is not big into taking pictures, it can be harder to get involvement…but it is not impossible.

When your readers share their images on Flickr, they are looking to share their experiences online. The #1 problem most Flickr users face is getting image views. They do not have a blog to draw traffic to their images and…at best…they have some Facebook friends they might be interested in what they have posted. Ideally, they would like to share their images with other people in their passion…and that is where you step in as the blogger and provide that audience.

Step 1: Setup Your Flickr Group

As I mentioned before, Flickr groups are a way for Flickr users to share their images with other Flickr users. There are groups for everything from the city you live in to the camera you use. Flickr makes it incredibly easy to add your uploaded images to groups within your profile page and it is probably one of the most used features on the site.

The first step for the blogger in this process is to create a Flickr group for your niche site. In my case, I created the Bike198 Flickr group so my readers could add their images to the group. As you can see on the page, I added a little note about how these images show up on the website so you can gain more exposure to your images. While that gives new users an idea on where they will see their images displayed, it also covers your ass by being up front and honest about how you will be using their images which will be copyrighted in many cases. By submitting their images to the group, they are agreeing to let you link and preview them on your site.

Also, I like to limit the amount of images the members can submit a day to 2 or 3 to keep variety in the stream (done within your group admin). I do not want readers thinking it is a waste of time to include their pictures because of a couple of users completely flooding the pipeline.

Once you have setup your Flickr group, you will want to add your own images that relate to your niche to get it populated a little bit.

Step 2: Get The Images Live On Your Site

The next step in the process is to get your group’s images live on your site. I do this by installing the FlickrRSS plugin for WordPress. It makes displaying your images in the sidebar like you see below incredibly easy and it has some other options as well. All you have to do is enter in your Flickr group number (which the plugin helps you find) and then put the widget in your sidebar. I even edited the CSS within the plugin to make it match the site a little bit better.

Step 3: Get Your Readers Using The Flickr Group

Like with most things in blogging, just setting up the tools is not enough. Now you must promote your new feature to get your readers to actually use it. Just as you would promote your Facebook fan page, email your newsletter to let them know it is live (don’t forget to include links to the Flickr group), write an article on your blog, tell the fans of your Facebook fan page, Tweet it out on Twitter, hold contests for the editors choice submitted photo, etc.

You can also invite images to your group through Flickr from users that have zero clue about your blog. This is a very powerful feature that can populate your group in the early stages and bring more visitors to your content. Again, you are providing an audience to photographers that want more targeted eyes. By providing that value, you are filling that need.

Once you have users submitting their photographs to your group, it will start to grow and the images should come in on autopilot.

Step 4: Create Content Around Images

Your readers are going to be very visual by nature. They like bold headlines, descriptive pictures and bullet points to engage with content. Your Flickr group is creating content that your readers will like to see.

If you have done this right, an interesting thing will start to happen. You will attract some incredible photography from your niche that you are going to want to feature. Every now and then (about every 2 weeks), I put together an article of some of my favorite new images submitted to the group. I resize them to fit the page (decreases page load speed and makes it so you are not sharing their high res images) and link their Flickr profile page below each image.

Doing this not only creates engaging content on my blog, but it also provides additional exposure for the photographers while promoting my Flickr group.

After that…rinse and repeat. The Bike198 Flickr group has become a nice asset to my blog by creating more user interaction with high quality content that is done automatically. In the blogging world…that is the trifecta.

Balloon Image by luvi

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: community building, engaging content, flickr groups, how to increase blog community, how to increase blog traffic

10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress

January 27, 2011 By Robb Sutton 7 Comments

The following article is a guest post from Matthew Polo (his details at the end of this article). To submit a guest post to Blogging Labs, hit us up and we’ll get the ball rolling.

If you are ready to launch a WordPress blog and join millions around the world, there are some things you should know while your getting started.

1. Your WordPress Blog Does Not Have To Be On Hosted WordPress

You can use WordPress anywhere. This means that you don’t have to have a .WordPress.com blog, ie your blog doesn’t have to be your-blog.WordPress.com but can be your-blog.com. WordPress can host your blog for you or you can get your own hosting at a different company. Another useful feature is the ability to import or export blog contents to and from WordPress. This will allow you to keep a personal archive off line.

2. There Are No Contracts

Because its free you don’t have to commit to anything. You can leave anytime and WordPress will give you a complete xml download of all your posts and comments, so you can pack up and move your blog if you want

3. You Need A Plan…. And A Name

It is always a good idea to plan something before you do it. Develop a blog plan about why you are creating a blog, including the purpose, the target audience and the level of commitment to maintenance you envision. Try to conduct some market research on blogs that are similar and not similar to your vision and don’t limit yourself to only looking at WordPress blogs. Research some names for your blog that are consistent with your vision. Investigate the “About” sections of other blogs to see why they started as well as how well they are going after how long. This research could tell you roughly how your blog is going to go, but in no way is it a guarantee that your blog will succeed.

You should also decide whether you want to use an existing email account or specifically create one for blogging. I like to create new emails for each site and manage them all through GMail rather than use my personal one. It helps to stop people spamming me personally as well as separates my work and personal life and if I ever want to sell the blog I can give away the email address and be sure that I don’t keep getting blog related emails after I sold it.

4. Knowledge is Key and Keep an Open Mind

It is always a good idea to keep an open mind when it comes to your blogs development. Try to explore each WordPress feature fully before initiating full scale blog development. Getting to know each of the features and how to use them effectively will help your blog run smoothly. For instance, you can blog through email and mobile texting, and allow people to subscribe to your blog with alerts for blog activity. You can also create a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed to allow subscribers to view a summary and updates of your blog content anywhere on the web. These are simple things to set up, but if you don’t get in there and learn how to set them up your blog won’t work as well as it could.

5. WordPress Is Free. But There Is Some Stuff You Have To Pay For

The great thing about WordPress is that it is absolutely free, which is great if you want to give blogging a go because it won’t cost you a penny. However, there are some features that WordPress offer that will cost you a bit of dough. You can check out the paid features at http://en.WordPress.com/products/ but before you go “gun ho” on all the paid features I suggest giving the free version a good thorough go. There are plenty of plugins that you can download that will let your WordPress blog do anything, so I suggest giving them a go first.

6. One Account..More Than One Blog

Another good feature of WordPress is that you can manage more than one blog from the one account. This means that you won’t have to login to each one as you work on them.

7. You Should Subscribe To Other Blogs

You can subscribe to other blogs on WordPress easily. Reviewing other blogs to discover what others are blogging about, how they blog, blog layout, naming, content categories and tags not only will help you get a sense of what you can do with WordPress but will also get you out into the blogging community. Some good places to check out other blogs, topics and titles is through Technorati, Mashable and blog directories as well as check out other blogs blog rolls. You should activate social media buttons on your blog as well as follow other blogs through social media sites. This will keep you in the loop as well as help you get followers on your own social media pages.

8. Pingbacks Are Helpful

Pingbacks will alert others if you link to their website or blog, and will in turn alert you if another blog has linked to you. You can also allow their citations to show on your blog. An easy way to get back-links to your blog is to post articles with links to your blog in one of the free article directories, like top ranked ones Articlesbase and Ezinearticles. Although it won’t impact your blog massively. It is still a good idea to do it as it will start getting your blog out there as well as let the search engines see your blog.

9. Check Your Default Settings

WordPress has default settings that although help you avoid a long and boring set up process isn’t always what you want. For example comments are allowed for each post without prior approval by default, this means that people can write anything they want. You can pre screen all blog post comments before they post or you can turn off comments but I wouldn’t suggest it. The default for blog postings is public viewing. You can create a top level private view or create private viewing by post, allowing just yourself, friends or people with a code that you create. You can also create viewership ratings for content per each blog.

10. Submitting Your Blog To Directories Will Help Get Your Blog Out There

Although blog directories like Blogexplosion, Technorati, OnTopList, Blogdirectory, Blog Web Directory, and others found via Wikipedia and Alexa.com won’t make a massive impact on how many people will see your blog it will still help it get out there, which isn’t a bad thing.

Maintaining your own blog can be a very rewarding thing, so get in there and have a go. After all its free, whats the worst that could happen?

Matthew writes about personal finances for an impartial Australian credit card comparison website where people can find balance transfer credit card offers that reduce interest payments and help them get out of debt faster.

Filed Under: Blogging, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: blog, Blogging, blogging tutorial, how to blog, how to setup wordpress, wordpress

How To Use Shortcodes To Draw More Attention To Your Blog Content

January 24, 2011 By Robb Sutton 6 Comments

Like it or not, your readers have ADD. In a world where instant gratification and the complete lack of in depth attention to details plagues the general public, it is our job as the blogger to capture attention and keep it long enough to get our point across with our content. I bet right now you are looking for ways to scan this article to see if you can get the relevant information quickly to see if it will help your blogging. By using attention grabbing elements in your content like bold headlines, catchy titles and other style elements, you are able to keep your readers on your pages longer by interacting not only with words…but visually.

What Are Shortcodes?

Shortcodes have come about in recent WordPress themes to help bloggers style their content in an easy to digest manner without having to know any coding. Before, the designer would have to build in certain styling aspects into the CSS of the theme and then the blogger would have to know how to call that css within an article without calling out any complex code (typcially RSS feeds break on some code and WordPress won’t actually recognize it within an article).

A [highlight color="yellow"]shortcode[/highlight] is a WordPress-specific code that lets you do nifty things with very little effort. Shortcodes can embed files or create objects that would normally require lots of complicated, ugly code in just one line. Shortcode = shortcut.

So what do you end up with? When you type something that looks like this (note the brackets around the text)…

[onehalf] Testing out shortcodes with 1/2 columns. [/onehalf] [onehalf last="last"] Hey look! Another 1/2 column! [/onehalf]

That ends up looking like this on your article. (Note: The following code was generated via a plugin you are about to see below and is not apart of the stock WordPress install or with my current theme.)

[one_half] Testing out shortcodes with 1/2 columns. [/one_half] [one_half last="last"] Hey look! Another 1/2 column! [/one_half]

By using brackets that call CSS elements in your code, you are able to simplify the process and use a predetermined library of functions to call out whatever you want to in your article. Basically, you are drastically simplifying the process of making your content easier to read while being able to grab more attention to elements that you deem important.

The Problem For The Blogger (You)

While shortcodes are an incredible way to create more engaging content, up until this point…most themes did not come with a library of shortcodes for you to choose from. Recently, themes from WooThemes and Theme Forest have started integrating shortcodes into their themes to give bloggers more options within their content. While this is great, it also runs into a unique problem for the blogger down the road. What if you want to change your theme to a different brand or custom option? All of the shortcodes that you setup within your content will become obsolete and your readers will see the brackets instead of the styling on all old articles!

One of the reasons I push WordPress so much for bloggers is the extensive ability to install plugins to enhance the WordPress experience. When you go to change how your site looks on the screen, your plugins go with your site as you update the look. The guys over at WPSwitch came up with an awesome plugin that makes your life much easier with shortcodes. With over 100 of different options, looks and tables, you are able to make columns, insert alerts, make picture slideshows and a whole host of other options to make your content more engaging. The best part…it operates independent of your theme via a plugin so you do not have to worry about transferring your shortcode styling when you change themes in the future. It is all integrated and ready to go once you hit the activate link.

To show you how easy this plugin is to use, I have put together this short screencast to show you how The Shortcode Kid plugin for WordPress operates.

If you are looking for an easy way to create more engaging content on your blog, I highly recommend the use of The Shortcode Kid plugin. It makes life much easier to create and manage shortcodes within your content and by using a plugin…you insure that the shortcodes will be compatible across future design needs. At $40.00 for the plugin, it is a premium option, but it adds a lot of value to your blog (future updates and additions to the plugin are free when you purchase).

Check out the rest of the shortcode options and pricing by clicking here.

Filed Under: Plugins, Reviews, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: plugin review, shortcode kid plugin, shortcodes, wordpress plugin review, wordpress shortcodes

Successful, Profitable Blogging Is Not Rocket Science [mapped]

January 17, 2011 By Robb Sutton 5 Comments

So I was just sitting back the other day thinking about what actually makes a blog successful from a monetary standpoint. There are a lot of blogs that have traffic, subscribers and plenty of Facebook fans, but they barely make enough to cover the bills because they are expecting the money to come from non-monetized resources (or at least ones that do not monetize well).

I created this mind map to show you exactly how I look at my blogs from a monetary and business view. It basically starts from the bottom and works up, so let’s run through it.

As with any business, your leads are your most valuable asset. When you funnel quality, qualified leads into your blog, you are creating an asset that has the ability make money on a higher percentage than the shotgun affect of trying to get as many as you can at once. This is done by utilizing several sources, and it is up to your testing to see which one works out best for you. By creating quality, relevant content on and off your blog, you attract readers (leads) to your site. You also bring them in from various social media outlets as you continue to try to grow your blog.

The biggest problem I see with most blogs looking to make a dime online is they stop there. They expect this traffic to make money on its own and continue to spin their wheels trying to make ends meet.

It is up to you, as the blogger to capture these quality leads in a format that is conducive to generating income. As you can see from the green area of the mindmap, there are several ways to capture these quality leads that come onto your blog. A lot of bloggers try to strictly rely on rss through feed reader and email to satisfy their lead capture needs, but from personal experience in multiple niches, I can tell you that the #1 converter for quality leads is a newsletter (I use Aweber) and a lightbox hover like PopUp Domination to capture those leads.

Captured My Quality Leads…Now What?

Again, you are not done once you hit this stage in the process. A large number of quality leads is great, but if you do nothing with them…they are just costing you money and you are still spinning your wheels.

By providing quality products, recommending quality products and implementing other monetization techniques…you can keep the quality high on your blog and generate revenue off of it at the same time.

There is no right or wrong answer to this part of the equation, but I can tell you from experience that the monetization methods that the most effort typically yeild the biggest returns. When you take the time to create a product or membership site that your readers actually need to solve their problem, you are going to see higher revenues off of lower quantities. If you create an in-depth product review with pictures, video and text and post it on your blog and email it to your newsletter subscribers, you will get higher sales conversions. If you plan on throwing up Google Adsense and affiliate banners, you can guess which way that is going to go….pennies…

As you can see, this is not rocket science. It is up to you as the blogger to provide quality that attracts leads to your blog, capture those leads and then convert them to dollars.

You can click on the image above and share it with whoever you would like, just don’t edit the image at all. We are all in this together!

Filed Under: Blogging, Generating Cash, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: content, get more subsribers, guest posting, how to make money blogging, make money blogging, monetization, profitable blogging, Social Media

How To Easily Create High Converting Squeeze and Sales Pages For Your eBooks and Products

January 12, 2011 By Robb Sutton 8 Comments

The #1 way to make money online is to sell your own products. Every single top blogger in the world has their own product of some kind, whether it be physical or digital. For most bloggers, the jump into their own product is normally in the form of an eBook or other digital product that your readers can purchase and download instantly, and I highly recommend you look into this form of monetization if you have not already.

However, there is one HUGE mistake that most bloggers make when looking to sell their own products online.

#1 Blogger Mistake: Bloggers often rely on their blog to be the sales page for their products.

If you are doing this right now, I already know what you are thinking. Why? Because I have been there.

You don’t want the reader to leave your site or your content.
You don’t know how to design a sales page or at least how to do one easily and cheaply.
You don’t have the time to set one up right now and the quickest way was to create a page on your blog.

Where is the flaw in using a page on your blog as the sales page for your eBook?

There are far too many distractions on your blog to keep high conversion rates on your products.

Think about it…the same reasons you want to keep the sales page on your blog are the same reasons it will not sell well. When your potential customer lands on your page, they need to have only one thing in mind…”what is this product, how will it benefit me and am I going to buy it for that price.” If that same potential customer also sees a list of your recent articles, navigation or worse…ads like Adsense, you are inviting them to find something else to do other than buy your product.

Sales Pages vs. Squeeze Pages

What is the difference between a sales page and squeeze page? At the end of the day…not much really. Each one is setup basically the same way, but they have a different end goal for the visitor of that page.

Squeeze Pages: Dedicated page to getting the opt-in to your newsletter. (ex: Problogging Is Dead)
Sales Pages: Dedicated page to converting sales of your product or service. (ex. Ramped Reviews)

So whether you are going for an opt-in to your newsletter or a sale of your product, sales and squeeze pages are going to convert at higher rates due to their design.

How To Create Sales & Squeeze Pages

Ideally, we would like to not have to hire a designer or operate outside of WordPress for our squeeze and sales pages, so when I went looking around for themes to accomplish this goal for me…I ran across OptimizePress. Not only did it promise to make my sales and squeeze page process much easier, but it also has some drip marketing, video and membership site features that I plan on using in the future.

Stats on OptimizePress:

Squeeze Page Building System – Create high impact squeeze page designs from a range of 10 templates, all tested and proven to convert – so you get more people on your mailing list fast!
Sales Letter & Offer Page Building System – Easily create sales letters, offer pages, bonus pages and more, with our unique point and click system. Now you can have pages that look like a pro-designer has created them, for a fraction of the price!
Launch Builder System – Use our unique launch page development system to create pre-launch and launch pages that boost response, with advanced features like integrated facebook comments, twitter sharing and more! Add your videos, headlines and call to action buttons with one-click! These pages will get your market buzzing about your product launch fast (this means more money for you when you go live!)
Add video to your pages with one click – just paste in your video URL (from Amazon S3 or similar) or use video from Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler or any other video hosting site. Using video is proven to boost response and conversions!
Unique iPad & iPhone Video compatibility – OptimizePress has been developed with a unique system to ensure your videos will also work on iPads and iPhones, which are fast becoming popular browsing platforms. Simply enter the URL of your video encoded in the correct format, and OptimizePress will do the rest!
Shortcodes Sales Letter Elements – Easily add extra headlines, subheadlines, bullet blocks, content boxes, order boxes and more to your sales letters and offer pages with our point and click shortcodes – no more messy HTML and CSS!
Cross Browser Compatible – All our designs are coded with the latest HTML and CSS standards, and have been tested on all the latest browsers (and some older ones too!). This means more people will be able to access your pages and see them as you desired!
Built in SEO features – We know SEO is important to you, so we’ve integrated some of the most popular SEO features such as setting the title tags, descriptions, keywords and more for each of your pages individually, without the need for plugins (of course you can use your favourite plugins too if you wish!)

Basically, you install the theme and start the process of creating your page through the use of short codes. It also perfectly integrates with all of the major newsletter service providers (I use Aweber) if you are looking to create a squeeze page or easily capture the contact information of your customers.

Just to show you how easy this theme is to use, I have put together this quick video that gives you a look at the backend in the page creation screen. Now…keep in mind…this is a very simplistic look as you can really expand on the features of OptimizePress to make it your own.

What Have Been My Results?

Over the past month, I have converted all of my sales and squeeze pages on Blogging Labs and Bike198 over to OptimizePress. Overall, my conversion rates have increased about 20% just by having better looking, easier to setup sales pages for my eBooks. I am going to start split testing different content to see how I can get my conversions even higher, but so far I am incredibly happy with the result and ease of setup with this theme. Everything you need, from graphics packages to all of the icons and buttons, are included with the theme and the settings are easy to understand. If you have installed a WordPress theme in the past…you should have zero problem getting this setup.

At $97.00, it is on the high end of WordPress themes these days, but I do believe it is worth it as I have barely even scratched the surface of what it is capable of. Also, the increase in sales has more than offset the price of the theme which makes it worth it on its own. If you are looking for a high-quality, easy to setup option for your sales and squeeze pages, OptimizePress is an incredible option. Through my entire testing period, I only had one glitch and that was fixed with the latest update (the add to cart buttons were not working in Chrome…but that is fixed now) and the support has been incredible. Anyone can setup high converting pages with OptimizePress.

Click here to see the rest of OptimizePress’s features or purchase.

Filed Under: Reviews, Tutorials/How To, Wordpress Theme Tagged With: landing page, optimizepress, premium wordpress theme, sales page, sales page wordpress theme, squeeze page, wordpress theme review

7 Things NOT To Do Before You Have A Lot Of Blog Traffic

December 8, 2010 By Robb Sutton 38 Comments

Everyone reads the articles about what you need to do to grow your blog. From “pillar content” to list posts to holding contests, there are a ton of ways you can increase your subscribers and pageviews on your blog as you strive to take your show full time. However, there are not as many articles that explain what you should not do on your blog before you have the traffic to support it.

Sometimes…there are certain aspects of your blog that can actually be detrimental to your success if you jump on the bandwagon too early in an attempt to jump the gun.

Top 7 Things NOT To Do

So here they are…the top 7 things not to do before you have a significant amount of traffic on your blog.

1. Run A Poll

Polls are a great way to interact with your audience and get feedback related to subjects in your niche. However, as much as you wish your readers were holding on to every article you publish, that just isn’t reality. Not all of your readers are going to see the poll and…on top of that…even the ones that do see it aren’t guaranteed to participate. Do you really want a week old poll on your blog only showing 12 votes?

Social proof is a large part of blogging so you have to be careful about what you display on your pages. It is normally best to hold off on polls until you have at least 1,000 unique visitors a day in my opinion. Do you really think you are getting a great sampling in your niche if you are only getting 100 entries anyway? Probably not…

2. Start A Forum

Forums are incredibly hard to start even when you have a lot of traffic. When you do not have the traffic to support the launch, you will have to work that much harder to get an active community (contests are typically the best way). There is nothing more detrimental to a forum’s growth than silence. If you do have a plan for a forum in the future, look towards large traffic numbers and serious marketing planning to get it off the ground and running.

Bike198‘s forum is running on IP.Board.

3. Display Your Subscriber Count

Displaying your RSS subscriber count is a debate in which there are two sides. Personally, I display my subscriber count in certain circumstances where I see fit (you’ll notice it is not displayed on this blog), but if you are planning on displaying your count…I would wait until you have at least 500 subscribers. You are not doing yourself any favors by displaying your 47 loyal subscribers.

There will be some cases (like with this blog) where you might want to hold off on showing your subscriber count even if you have a lot more than that. It is up to you on whether or not that fits inot your plan, but displaying a number that is too low will actually hurt you in the beginning stages.

4. Spend A Large Amount of Time On Blog Design

Until you have a lot of traffic on your blog, you do not really know how your readers are going to interact with your content. While you can guess and predict how your readers will interact and click through pages, spending a lot of time on design when you are trying to grow your audience is a waste of time. There are certain fundamental design elements that you need to have, but the most important aspect of your blog when you are trying to grow traffic is content and promotion.

9 times out of 10…you are going to find that your favorite design element that you are so proud of is worthless. I remember spending a lot of time on a newsletter opt-in form on my homepage only to find that the pop up hover was the source of 98% of my newsletter sign-ups. Spend your time where it counts the most and have a clean design that you can tweak over time as traffic increases and more readers interact with your content.

Need a good looking design? For out of the box themes we recommend Woothemes and WPZoom and this blog runs off of the Pagelines Platform Pro framework.

5. Go Full Time

Blogging is not a “get rich quick” method of making a living. It takes a lot of work over time to build enough of an audience to support a full time income. Most full time bloggers started their online empire while working a regular 9-5 at the same time. If you plan on walking in your boss’s office and quitting today because you found blogging, be prepared to be standing in the unemployment line. Only take your business full time when it can support the full time income.

Ideally, you want to bring in as much income for your household as possible, so you can do like I did and work both jobs as long as you possibly can. Two incomes are better than one right?!

6. Solicit Direct Advertising From Large Companies

I am one of those bloggers that fully supports and encourages monetizing your blog from day 1. However, it is also very important to remember where you stand in the blogosphere and adjust your money making methods accordingly. If you do not have a lot to offer in the form of traffic at this point in time, it is not a great idea to go after larger companies in your niche soliciting direct advertising spots…even if they are cheap. Larger companies have to show direct return for their investment and you are not prepared to deliver the results that requires.

On the flip side of that argument, partnering up with smaller companies in your niche is a great way to make a little bit of income and warm up your readers to the idea of direct ads on your site. It is all about knowing how your traffic levels affect success rates in direct advertising promotions.

When you are ready, check out OIOPublisher to auto rotate and handle direct advertising payments.

7. Ignore The Need To Start Building A Newsletter

If there was one thing I would do over again in my blogging, it would be starting my email newsletter from day 1 instead of down the road when I felt like I had enough traffic to justify the cost. My newsletters on my blogs is the #1 revenue and traffic generator and they also happen to be my readers most valuable option on my blogs. If you want to capture your readers and keep them for the long haul, an email newsletter is essential to success.

I use Aweber for my newsletters and I would recommend going that route as their start-up plans are wicked cheap (can you afford $1?).

Ready To Rock It Out?

Sometimes the strongest asset we can have is knowing what not to do. It is up to you to spend your time wisely and create assets that grow your business instead of constricting it.

Filed Under: Interviews, Tutorials/How To Tagged With: email newsletters, forums, how not to blog, how to blog, newsletters, rss subscribers, successful blogging