Make Money Blogging

I have been using Fast Blog Finder to find high page rank blog posts to leave a comment on thus gaining valuable back links. There are really four basic ways (and many more creative but not so basic ways) to get links, which I talked about in the make money blogging series. The four basic and very popular methods are leaving comments on blogs, submitting your website to directories, article marketing and social bookmarking.

From these four ways to get links to your site I would have to say that commenting on blogs will get you the least amount of links. Having said that I would also like to add that I think there is no better way to score some real quality links. Almost all of your article submissions, directory submissions and social bookmarking tags will be gray bar links, meaning they are a page rank zero.

So blog commenting is a really practical way to grab some high page rank links from authority sites. Page rank isn’t everything but it is a factor in how Google ranks your site. It also reflects the authority of your site to some degree. We can all agree that a site with a page rank 8 is an authoritative site.

I used to use Blog Comment Demon by Edwin Soft but I switched to Fast Blog Finder for one particular reason. Fast Blog Finder parses the do follow from the no follow. I have checked and double checked just to make sure that it was accurate and indeed it was.

I would also say that Fast Blog Finder easily finds many more blogs than Comment Demon or the free program Real LInk Finder. Real Link Finder is a great free tool no doubt but it doesn’t really compare to Fast Blog Finder. I have lots of experience with both and Fast Blog Finder is my preferred tool for blog commenting nowadays.

With Fast Blog Finder you can refine your search for relevant blogs according to a variety of criteria. It will search for both do follow and no follow together or just do follow if you want. You just type in a broad search term related to your niche and press start. This software shows you the url of the blog post, the page rank of the domain, the page rank of the post page, the number of outbound links and whether the page is do follow or no follow.

Fast Blog Finder saves your results so you can go back later and do a comment run. I often get thousands of blogs in my results to comment on. There is just no way you can comment on that many blogs in one sitting so it’s great that it automatically saves your lists for you. You don’t have to save and store away any lists or anything. Nice and lazy!

The real key in knowing how to fully exploit this powerful tool is knowing how to search. Most people do exactly what I recommended above which was to enter a broad search term into Fast Blog Finder and let it bring in relevant results. That is just fine and dandy but you could get a little creative here and find some really high page rank pages to post on. I have found personally a ton of PR6 posts that are actually do follow and they had just a few comments on them.

I am not going to give away all my secrets but I will give you a tip. Think about what kind of pages get lots of trackbacks. It is already well known that pages that get lots of trackbacks end up with high PR. Can you think of any reasons why lots of folks would send a trackback to a post? Maybe someone was link baiting with a free download of some sort… Hmmm

Learn how to search for footprints. Footprints in this sense are phrases that are common to a certain type of blog or post. For instance “download free” is a footprint. This query will bring back results where there was a free download of some sort. If this was on a blog then there are sure to be some trackbacks. Do you see what I mean?

Bottom line is I highly recommend Fast Blog Finder as a one way link building tool. It is in my opinion the best program for blog commenting out there today. With a little creativity you should be able to score some awesome links in no time flat. In fact, I find this software addicting!

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| 2 Comments »

SEO Elite is a tool that every serious internet marketer should have. This is a very popular tool and for good reasons too. The main function of this software is to help expedite the process of analyzing your competition. I already mentioned this software in my make money blogging series but I want to discuss some of it’s features and it’s intended purpose a bit more indepth.

Analyzing your competition is an absolute must. You should never just blindly create a site and try to start ranking for all kinds of keywords. This is an important step that I think a lot of inexperienced internet marketers don’t fully take advantage of.

Aside from helping you decide if a certain niche is worth pursuing, analyzing your competition is also a great way to learn about what it takes to rank number one particularly in the Google serps. The sites taking position one in Google must be doing something right in Google’s eyes and this is important for us to understand. These sites sitting at the top of the serps have done a tremendous amount of successful research and work to attain their elevated ranking.

We can just simply copy the seo strategy of the top sites and then go a bit beyond to take position one for ourselves. Think about it. Some ambitious webmaster or seo has put in countless hours finding places and ways to get links from all sorts of relevant sites. A lot of time goes into that. Yet all we have to do is analyze their on page and off page (back links that is) seo strategy and presto! We have a winning plan.

This is where SEO Elite comes in to play. With SEO Elite I can analyze both the on page and off page statistics of my top competitors. I can look at whether or not my competition is placing their keywords in the title and h1 tags. I can also look the keyword density of their content and if the keywords are in bold or h2 tags. This tells me a lot. For instance, right off the bat I know if my competitors know seo or not. If they have neglected to optimize their ‘easy to do’ on page factors then that is usually a good indication that their off page optimization is lacking as well.

It also gives you an idea as to whether or not you will have nagging long term competition or not. What I mean by that is sometimes, when you finally take position one away from your competitors they suddenly wake up and begin to try to out optimize you.

If however your top competition for a potential niche doesn’t even know how to optimize their on page factors then chances are they wont know how to fight back when you take position one from them. I like easy targets.

Next comes the critical off page optimization. This is basically about the back links. Did you ever wonder how many links it takes to get to the top of the serps? Well now you can know for sure. Just enter the url of the site you want to analyze into SEO Elite and I will show you ALL of your competitors back links. Not only that but it will show you what the anchor text being used in their back links. This is of huge importance. This will tell you how many links you need to take position one. Actually you will probably need about %30 more links than your top competitor.

SEO Elite will also give you the titles of the pages linking to your competitors. In this way you can get a feel for how relevant your competitors links are. Remember, links from relevant pages weigh more than links from non relevant pages. So say your top competitor has 100 links featuring the anchored keyword you want to rank for. Now let’s also say that these 100 links are mostly from non relevant pages. This is good news for you! This means that you could possible outrank your competitor with fewer links as long as your links are more relevant on the whole.

SEO Elite also provides the url of the page that is giving your competitor a link. For one thing if you discover a bunch of spammy links you can report them to Google as you approach the number one spot! Hey, it’s all part of the game. But perhaps more importantly you can find some great places to get links to your site.

I would say that one of the greatest benefits of using SEO Elite is being able to study some of the very creative methods that some webmasters use to achieve a top ranking. This can teach you a lot about how the search engines think. Once you analyze a hundred top ranking sites or so you will probably never read another ebook on how to rank in Google.

Personally, I’ve discovered many interesting strategies that I’ve not seen discussed anywhere online period…and I’m not about to discuss them either!

Brad Callen, the creator of SEO Elite takes pretty good care of his customers. My hard drive failed on me and I lost my software (I procrastinated backing up my files…bad, bad, bad!!). I email Brad and in no time flat I had another download link in my email with no bologna or anything. Great customer service all the way around in my experience.

I highly recommend SEO Elite to anyone who doesn’t have it yet is serious about making money online.

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| No Comments »

I use Keyword Elite for all of my keyword research. This is an extremely powerful tool created by Brad Callen that is actually much more than just another keyword tool. This was created by an seo for an seo’s.

What Keyword Elite does and how to use it properly is of course two different things. Let me start with what it does and why I recommend it and then I’ll get into how I use Keyword Elite to begin a very important part of analysis called keyword research.

Keyword Elite will, like all other keyword tools, will create a great list of related keywords based upon the main and generally more broad keyword you enter in. This is called ‘project one.’ In fact, it takes a while but Keyword Elite will actually create a list of up to ten thousand related keywords. That’s quite a bit! It will grab keywords from meta tags and titles and even misspelled keywords. It will search Ask.com, Google suggestion tool, Yahoo, Freekeywords WT and keyword Discover if you have an account with them.

Once you have created a keyword list you can select a number of keywords to send to ‘project two.’ This is where Keyword Elite will analyze the cost per click information, number of results, number of searches the previous month, R/S ratio, KEI, and the number of Google campaigns. Not only do you get the number of Google campaigns but you can also see the website urls of the folks buying the ads. Needless to say that can be yet another resource to mine for effective keywords.

This is what I consider the meat of the software. With just this information alone you can make a much more informed decision regarding your keyword selection. You could do this all manually too but Keyword Elite is such a great time saver that I consider it a must have tool in every webmasters bag of tricks.

Another great function of Keyword Elite is the ability to analyze your competition. You can see the page rank of your competitors as well as a host of other statistics. For instance you can see if the keywords you are analyzing are being used in the title and header tags as well as the alt image tags and links. This is great because now you don’t have to go to each site one by one. You can get a complete overview all in one place at one time. Very convenient.

There are other valuable functions that Keyword Elite can perform but these are the ones I use most often.

I use Keyword Elite to generate a huge keyword list from which I select the most choice phrases. I then create a keyword list from each of these choice phrases and come up with even more keywords. Once I have a giant, massive keyword list I choose a few targeted phrases to send to project two where I will analyze the CPC, KEI and number of searches etc…

I only select the top buying phrases for further research but that doesn’t mean I just dump the rest of that massive list! I often use that leftover list to base my content and titles off of.

Now, in project I determine which keywords would be both profitable and easy to exploit. I look for keywords that have a high cost per click. I want ads on my site that pay well so CPC is important. I don’t want to do a lot of work only to find that I will get paid .02 per click. Once I find a decent paying keyword from among my top targeted list I then check out the KEI and number of searches.

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. It is basically a ratio between the number of searches and the number of results showing for that query. The higher the KEI the less competition. However, I use the KEI more as general guidance than the ultimate determining factor. I always analyze the back links of the competition to help make my final determination but the KEI points me in the right direction.

The bottom line is that Keyword Elite is much more than just another keyword research tool. It has many features that help you save lots of time in doing your keyword research. Everything from generating great keyword lists (check out those misspelled keywords!) to analyzing to competition in very sneaky ways.

This is just a brief overview of what Keyword Elite can do and is in no way meant to be a comprehensive review. That would simply take too long as this is an incredibly versatile tool. I highly recommend it. Using Keyword Elite in conjunction with SEO Elite is a real powerhouse combination. This gives you such an enormous advantage over your competitors who only use the free tools.

If you haven’t done so already check out my ten part series on how to make money blogging.

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews| No Comments »

Keep a set of guidelines for your corporate blog. Visitors have strong expectations for each post they read, so you need strong, uncompromising expectations for each post you write.

1. Demand that each post you write REALLY be useful to your market. Think. Bring a new twist to an old subject. Connect 2 very different ideas and then write about how they relate to each other. The more unique and insightful you are, the more reason you give readers to keep coming back.

2. Respond to comments as soon as possible. Show appreciation for the comment and then get right to the point. Always take care to be polite, confident, and helpful in answering comments. This is a great opportunity for relationship-building. Don’t let communication with your market slide. If you don’t show up, they will stop showing up.

3. It may sound harsh, but some readers will actually downgrade you in their minds if they see bad grammar or misspellings. Edit & spell-check every time. Especially in a corporate blog, some readers consider minor errors to be a sign of incompetence. Your blog needs to be darned close to perfect in spelling and grammar.

4. Readers will email you with questions. You will hear some questions over and over. Write a great answer once, then use that same answer every time. Save your own time. Also, as you get an idea which questions many people are going to have, you can create a corporate blog FAQ page to feature the most common questions.

5. Crack the whip on yourself. Set up a feed reader that churns out a steady stream of fresh ideas from other bloggers every day. Set a writing schedule and stick that forces you to be cranking out new, unique, valuable material every day. Maybe it will help to imagine a bad, bad, evil-eyed boss standing over you.

Your corporate blog readers have high expectations. It’s important that you come through for them.

Tags: comments, corporate blog, FAQ, feed reader
Posted in Corporate Blogging| No Comments »

Who reads your corporate blog?

• Customers
• Prospects
• Vendors
• Employees
• Bosses

1. Look at your stats. What urls is your corporate blog traffic coming from? Take a look at those urls. Now … who exactly is reading your blog?

2. Keep a constantly-updated list of who reads your blog (by url), and check out their websites. Find THEIR blogs. Look for posts that would be really useful to your readers. Now … in your blog, link to THEIR post. Talk about the value of the information. Tell what you learned from it. Do a review. Write about it in your blog.

3. They will find out. They will notice when they start getting traffic from your blog. Chances are, they will pay more attention to you and will write about you. It can be the start of a great relationship … and when you write a really hot column after you’ve featured several other bloggers in your posts, it could be the start of a viral explosion for you.

4. Include a button on your post to “Email a friend.” The easier you make it for people to share your content, the more they will do it, when they really like your content.

5. Moderate other blogs and forums. What questions are asked? What are the hottest subjects in YOUR market? Compile some of your blog posts together into an ebook targetting that topic. (Be sure to put your url at the bottom of each page & on the cover.) Come up with a title that would have strong appeal for the audience of the other bloggers who connect to you. It’s worth the effort to spend time choosing a really hot title. Publicize the ebook on your blog, and email your contact list to offer the free ebook to their readers.

6. What could you put in a video that would be funny and/or controversial and relevant to your market? Humor or controversy give your video the chance to get passed around a lot.

These ideas are not difficult or costly or time-consuming to implement. A consistent program of 1-6 above will get your corporate blog viral exposure over time.

Tags: controversial, corporate blog, traffic, viral
Posted in Corporate Blogging| No Comments »

1. Focus first on community-building.

The way to get great value from your corporate blog is to publish information of great value to your target markets. The more value you give, the easier it’ll be to gather together a big group of like-minded people and build and then deepen your relationship with them.

2. Encourage & solicit comments on your corporate blog - use them as a self-improvement tool.

A big measure of your success will be how well you create a dialogue with your readers. A good way to get comments is to ask questions. Ask if your readers have experience with a particular issue. Ask what solutions they’ve come up with. Ask what bloggers they really value. Ask, ask, ask. Make a point of asking a question at the end of every post, and you will get feedback and you’ll start building relationships with certain readers.

3. Sign up for feeds from bloggers you really admire.

We all need good models. You can learn a lot by watching what others in your profession do. What do they do that you don’t like? OK - be sure to not do that in your own blog. What do they do that you LOVE? OK - be sure to add that to your own blog. Make a list of the best things and the worst things you see in other blogs. Keep it in view. Add to it when you see something new.

4. Target one post every day.

Now that you have those feeds, what do you do with them? First, make note of the blog post titles that really attract you. Re-write that title to make it your own, and then write a post of at least 300 words about your new title. Now you have your own take on a subject that some other blogger believes is important, with a title you really like. Could be a winner.

5. Get (and STAY!) at least 4 weeks ahead on corporate blog content.

You can pretty easily write 2 of these 300-word posts in an hour or less … maybe even 20 minutes. Stockpile posts until you get several weeks ahead.

Tags: comments, Corporate Blogging, feeds, strategies
Posted in Corporate Blogging| No Comments »

How do you get the buying mechanism cranked up in your corporate blog readers?

First, they have to trust you. Suspicious people don’t buy - they find excuses not to. But once they like you, that changes everything. People buy from people they like and trust.

So you have to give your readers every reason to like and trust you. If your blog content is insightful, that is a great start. They’ll respect your knowledge and/or experience. And if your content is actually useful to them, they see you as valuable. At that point, they’ll like you or be very close to it.

Your job will definitely be easier if you have a testimonials section about what you are selling. People like to know that someone else has gone first. They love to read stories about how someone in their shoes has used a product and benefitted from it. When they see that other people like you and trust you, that makes the buying decision easier for them.

And, ironically enough, it helps if you don’t try to sell them. In fact, you cannot sell them. A corporate blog is part of the social media parade. Your focus is doing everything in your power to build “know, like and trust” with your readers. Build the relationship. Get close to them. Understand them. Show that YOU like THEM. Once they see that you are like them and that you actually do like them, your persuasiveness will increase considerably.

Let them see how much you care about what you’re doing. Let them hear in the words you write the passion you have for your niche. Tell stories. Tell why.

One more thing. It helps to know who your market does NOT like, and to write about that common enemy. The easiest, safest target will usually be some government agency (unless you are blogging for a government agency!) Learn all you can about that enemy and its history and its current shenanigans. Your intimate knowledge of the bad guy will go a long way toward making you much more credible with your target market … and much more persuasive.

Tags: Corporate Blogging, passion, persuasiveness, social media
Posted in Corporate Blogging| No Comments »

Blogging is the fundamental building block of Web 2.0. And Web 2.0 is all about … building relationships. There are many, many aspects of Web 2.0, but every last one of them getting to know new people better, finding people to connect with, and bringing value into the lives of others.

Why?

Because that is what THEY expect.

If you get on your blog and write a 600-word piece about how your company’s fizzgrabber fandoogles the exterior whatzitstam, then you are going to have serious difficulty building a following for your blog. A blog is not a sales device. Let’s rephrase that - a blog is NEVER a sales device. It can be the precursor to the precursor to a sales device. But that is as close as you should ever get to the sales function.

A corporate blog exists to put a human face on some vast, unknowable corporate entity. Your company will be much more successful financially if prospects and customers can relate to you and bond with you through shared experiences. A blog gives you the opportunity to do that.

The biggest complaint people in corporations make about blogs is, “The darn thing can’t sell anything!” Which is 100% true. You cannot sell from a blog, and you should not be trying. However … you can bring value to the lives of your prospects and customers. You can find out what they want and help them find it, whether it’s your own solution or someone else’s. You can build a community - over time - of people who value your regard for them and your knowledge about their industry and your dedication to helping them solve their problems.

What’s the payoff in that?

More of those people will become customers. And more of those customers will stick with your company. All because they see you as different from all the others, someone who values THEM rather than their wallet. That is how a corporate blog can produce for you, and that is the attitude you can take that will ultimately be successful.

Tags: blogging, customers, relationships, web 2.0
Posted in Corporate Blogging| No Comments »

A long, long time ago, back in the early days of TV, one of the most popular shows was “Dragnet”, starring Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday. It seemed like just about every show, the police would be interviewing a lady witness, who would get into a long-winded explanation of what she saw. And Sgt. Friday would cut her off with, “Just the facts, ma’am!”

It’s a good line to remember when you’re writing your blog post headline. There is a strong temptation to be funny, or to be clever, or to be really innovative. It’s a good idea to resist this impulse. “Funny” is very difficult to execute well in a headline. Often it appears offensive to the reader. “Clever”, more often than not, totally falls flat. The reader doesn’t get the cleverness, and so there is no reason for them to read the article. And “innovative” tends to just lose people.

Time is so precious these days. People will only stop to read an article that really promises to deliver a result that is really valuable to them. So use your headline to get that message across to them directly. Just tell them exactly what benefit they will get from reading your article.

Examples:

• SEO Tools That Save Bloggers a Lot of Time
• How To Become The Center of Your Target Market’s Attention
• 5 Ways To Turn a Casual Reader Into a Raving Fan
• How To Squeeze a Great Blog Article Out of an Old TV Show

For many of us who like to write, it’s natural to try to be clever. That’s OK. Just recognize that you need to edit out that cleverness, especially in your headlines. In fact, my first headline for this article was, “Just The Facts, Ma’am!” And that would have meant nothing to anyone younger than 50. Benefits may not be clever, but they are very safe. Better - they are what your readers are looking for.

Tags: benefits, blogging, blogs, fans, headlines
Posted in Writing Your Blog| No Comments »

You can get a lot of benefit from properly tagging your blog posts.

Tagging has developed as a means of partially taming the randomity of the internet. Obviously, the web has an endless stream of information about everything under the sun. So the question becomes, if you want information on oranges, how do you find that stuff specifically, without having to wade through apples, pears, grapes, peaches, pomegranates, etc., etc., etc?

Search engines are part of the solution. When you search for “oranges”, you get thousands or millions of pages of websites that include the word “oranges”. Most searchers never read past the Top Ten listings on the first page. And those listings usually got there by virtue of being really good at Search Engine Optimization or by spending money for an SEO expert to get them that result. The search engines are doing other things now to try to get you more relevant results, but it’s still a struggle to find good information with many searches.

“Tagging” resulted from this frustration. The idea is to label any web content with a handful of simple words - “oranges”, for example. This tag makes the content more easily discovered by search.

And here is the biggest benefit to a blogger: if you post valuable, useful articles, and if you consistently tag every post you make with maybe 4-8 keywords reflecting post content in some way, then over time, YOUR blog will become a very valuable resource to people interested in those keywords. They can actually come to your blog and get better, more reliable, less spammy, more focused search results than by doing a Google search.

In other words, if you are publishing good stuff on your blog, then over time the act of tagging can add great value to your blog and attract more visitors and keep the fans you have, because you have given them such a valuable and easy-to-search resource. So it’s to your benefit to use that “tag” box every time you make a blog post.

Tags: blog, search, seo, tag, tagging
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