The Philosophy Of Why Blogging And Publishing Content Online Is So Important And Profitable

The blogging experience is about not only putting your thoughts on the web, but hearing back from and connecting with other like-minded folks.

Most people surfing the Internet are looking for information. In other words, most people are not actively seeking to buy a product and nearly everyone expects to get the information for free.

Speaking specifically about the market place of people who are "interested" in having an online home business and/or generating income from the web, most of these people want to find good information about the subject first.

Therefore, by becoming a provider of trustworthy information about online home businesses, legitimate work at home opportunities and ways to generate income online, positions you as the source for what people are actually looking for in the first place.

Then, when people find your information and get engaged in the articles, they will naturally find the links that point to your sales page and visit them. Now, they have already been pre-sold and have more trust in the link to your sales page because they have already benefited by reading the free information provided in the article on your blog!

Also, blogs are the most search engine friendly Internet publishing tool in existence. This means that the pages of your blog can start being indexed by the search engines almost immediately and some of your blog content pages will start showing up in the free listings of the search engines when people search for various keywords. Therefore, adding quality content to your blog on a regular basis can generate free targeted traffic to your website potentially forever.

Publishing a blog allows you to instantly create new content-rich web pages. These new pages can be linked to from the home page of your current website and/or promoted separately. By creating additional content-rich website pages and promoting them from your home page or through other means, you will be accomplishing two important things:

1) You will provide more value for your website visitors. This increases the "stickiness" of your website making people stick around longer and ultimately trust you more. On the Internet, trust translates to profits!

2) Search engines love fresh content created through blogs. By publishing your own blog and adding fresh content to it on a regular basis, you will attract the attention of the major search engines who will list your website in their directories for free. As soon as you have pages of your blog in the search engines, you will start attracting free qualified traffic to your site without paying a dime for it. Imagine running a large and comprehensive Google Adwords campaign without paying anything for it. That is exactly what you can accomplish by publishing your own blog!

Anytime you have some news to share about your business, it is a great idea to use your autoresponder to let your subscribers know about it. You could even link your autoresponder to your blog, so that each time you post information on your blog your subscribers are notified by email. This type of active relationship building can make a huge impact on your business. The more you interact with your subscribers, the more they will trust you and want to do business with you!

With a blog, the publishing possibilities are only limited by your own imagination. The point to realize is that, as a blog publisher, you have just unlocked a huge window of opportunity for yourself!

About the Author:
Cynthia Minnaar works from home online and invites you to visit http://www.cyns-home-biz.com for ways to generate income online. Visit http://www.cyns-home-biz.com/pips.html to start your own web income generating website complete with 400 day pre-written email autoresponder campaign.
Added: 02 Nov 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/41258.html

How to Find a Niche For Your Blog

It is important to realize that your choice of a niche can have a significant influence on the success or failure of your new blog.

Deciding on a theme can be a daunting task. What exactly are you going to write about? Your niche needs to be a popular topic that many people are interested in.

If you are going to blog about yourself, then you better have a very interesting life, or you will have difficulty keeping your readers coming back for more. You should choose a topic that will make it comparatively easy to grow your readership and build a strong following.

Since many bloggers write about their favorite subjects, it’s not a bad idea to start brainstorming by writing down a list of your hobbies, interests, and any areas of professional expertise. Now try to determine a niche you can target within one of those areas.

Should you blog about automobiles in general, or the latest sports cars? If you choose too narrow a theme then you may struggle to come up with regular, fresh content. And if you choose a topic that’s too general your readers may be confused by a jumble of seemingly unrelated posts.

You might consider niches within the following general topic areas which have proven to be popular for blogging:

• Automobiles

• Computers & Information Technology

• Digital Cameras

• Gadgets

• Music

• News

• Photography

• Politics

• Shopping

If you plan to use Pay-Per-Click advertising to get traffic to your blog, then remember also that the hottest topics might have the highest pay-per-click fees.

You can sometimes get great niche ideas by browsing at Blog directories and sites like Google Blog Search: http://blogsearch.google.com

Since it is so time-consuming trying to com up with the ‘perfect’ niche idea, many bloggers and webmasters have turned to specialized niche discovery tools. I particularly recommend Online Gold Finder and NicheTopics.

With Online Gold Finder you can uncover profitable, undiscovered online markets with just a couple of clicks. Read more about Online Gold Finder at: http://www.moneyforblogging.com/goldfinder.htm

NicheTopics is quite handy in a different way. You get to use some great research that’s already been completed by an expert. It is a ready-to-use report on 109 unique, untapped niches. Read more about NicheTopics: http://www.moneyforblogging.com/nichetopics.htm

The tools above are not free but consider for a moment. If you are planning – or would even like - to make some money from your blog, then it will be worthwhile to start off with a well-researched niche.

If a particular tool uncovers a good niche that pays an additional $5 a day, it will pay for itself inside the first month!

Don’t forget, it will be very difficult to change the theme and niche of your blog later. So invest some time wisely during your planning stage.

You will be off to a strong start in building a successful blog.

About the Author:
Mike Seddon is a writer, entrepreneur, and webmaster. He is the author of the popular e-book, ‘How to Build a Money Making Blog’, available from www.MoneyForBlogging.com
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

6 Things You Must Do If You Want To Have An Effectively Branded Blog

The term blogging has recently found its way into the standard Internet terminology. While most people don't have a blog, or don't even know the first thing about blogging, they have heard of the term and have at least a vague idea of what it means. If you decide to venture into the world of blogging, there are some things you must do to increase your chances of making your blog more successful. Most of these things are common sense, but some of them may be new to a first-time blogger.

1. Identify the Target Market for Your Blog You should focus on one topic area, or related topic areas for your blog. If your blog wanders too much in many different directions, it becomes a general discussion blog, and you risk losing the more motivated readers. For example, if your target market of interest is travel, then you would want to focus your blog on topics related to travel. You could broaden your topics to include adventure travel, cruises, all-inclusives, hotels, etc., however the more focused you are in your topics (if you just stick with cruises), the more effective your blog will be in terms of branding you as an expert about cruises, and the more responsive your readers will be to your cruise related posts.

2. Give the Readers to Your Blog What They Want Unless your blog is set up to just display your random streams of consciousness, the readers to your blog are going to want valuable and timely information that is accurate. If you are making statements about policies or current events, you should back them up with links to the sources you used to make those statements. It is also important to keep the reader interested by giving your own personal insights, or giving a new way to look at current events. Putting your own personality into your blog is essential and will keep your readers interested in what you have to say.

3. The More Creative Your Blog, The Better Be creative within reason of course. However with so many blogs out there today, it's now more difficult to have your blog stand out from the rest. Your blog must have personality and depth to keep people's interest. Also realize that your blog will not appeal to everyone, and that is OK. Your blog is not meant to appeal to everyone, that is why you first went through the step of determining your target market and targeting your blog to those readers.

Read full article at thewebmarketingblog.com

About the Author:
B Hopkins
For more information visit thewebmarketingblog.com
Added: 01 Nov 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/41163.html

3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog

Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?

No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.

The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.

Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it.

In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.

Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it’s

definitely a plus.

What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to

cycle traffic between you.

Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online – you’d be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can

find through this method.

(If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)

This tip has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.

These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.

You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.

The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.

In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other

bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written.

Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you

see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.

Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is

a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed.

So why don't more people use Trackback?

One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn’t have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service – it’s

a cut and paste away.

Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use

Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.

It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to

your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade

with an unrelated site.

The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submit them to ezines or directories.

Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog.

Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.

It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.

These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article, so some anchor text linking does occur - enough, in fact, to make this worth your while.

To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.

That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published.

There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you’ll soon find, that’s part of the reason they are so effective.

About the Author:
Tinu AbayomiPaul writes the Free Traffic Tips blog. If you're still not blogging or don't quite get RSS, she invites you to take the free course on RSS and blogging at www.lauriemeade.com/free-traffic.html
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

The Etiquette of Blogging

Blogging has become a major pastime in the USA and worldwide. The Blogosphere is a mix of personal and business websites with various raisons d'etre. But there has emerged a set of rules - a system of etiquette in blogging.

Newcomers to blogging may not know or understand these rules - so try not to damage their youthful exuberance if they mistakenly break one of these rules.

When you communicate with a blogger do not waste their time on anything that is not relevant to their content.

Don't use lowbrow language or four-letter words - whether it be comment or advertising proposition.

Everything you say to a blogger may be published and/or syndicated as well as read by top level journalists covering a topic shared by the blog.

Don't criticize a blogger for not accepting comments at their blog. Contact them by email if they offer one.

Minor mistakes like typos are often not corrected by bloggers because a corrected post would go out into the RSS feed again.

So don't point these out.

If you want to offer the blogger a proposition - such as link or banner exchanfe, or writing an article on your merchandise/services don't put it in the comments of a blog post. Send a personal email.

Target any propositions you might offer only to the interests and niche covered by the blogger. Bloggers want nothing to do with content that is unrelated to theirs.

Do not send a mass mailing press release. Any such announcement must be personalized and cordial.

Do not ask directly for links - just invite the blogger to review your material. They will respond if your ideas are right for their readers.

Try to develop a relationship with bloggers by reading and commenting on their blogs before you start making proposals.

See who is talking about your blog. Search your area of expertise with the blog searches on Technorati.com, Blogsearch.google.com, and Google alerts.

Write your own blog to show other bloggers you "get it." Use trackbacks so they know you're commenting about them at your own blog before you make overtures. (Trackbacks are an automated blogging feature that notifies a blog when another blog talks about them.)

Offer good content. Don't use sensational announcements about your product/service as if it was the greatest thing ever created. Instead explain how you can solve a problem for the blogs readers. Then mention your product/service.

About the Author:
Brad Humphries is an Internet Marketing researcher at Template Monster
Added: 06 Dec 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/45084.html

Using RSS Data To Make More Money

You nay have heard the term RSS, however didn't know exactly what it was or how to use it. Now you will learn how to use this technology to keep your websites "fresh."

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site

Summary. It also has been referred to as a "pull" technology rather than a "push" technology. And, in fact, this feature is what makes RSS so popular in terms of today's Internet usage.

It's probably hard to argue that anyone who uses the Internet today hasn't heard of spam. If they have an email inbox it is probably full of it.

Spam, for the uninitiated, is the receipt of unwanted emails from people whom you did not request to receive information. Spam represents the "push" technology. That is, people "push" their email message at your inbox, whether you have asked to receive the email or not.

And that aspect of "push" technology is what many have come to believe is the death of email. It's arguable that email will still be around for quite a long time, even though there are still people who continue the illegal spam process. In fact, companies are making millions now just providing everyday users as well as huge corporations, solutions claiming to solve their spam problem.

RSS, on the other hand, can be said to be the exact opposite of the email "push" technology. Because you cannot "push" your message to subscribers. In fact, the only way that people can subscribe to an RSS feed is to do so voluntarily. And, at the same time, they can unsubscribe whenever they want.

That's why it's called a "pull" technology. Because subscribers "pull" information into their readers and, if the content isn't what they expect, they can unsubscribe whenever they'd like. So, unlike the email "push" technology, there is no one using RSS that is experiencing an inbox full of spam. All they have to do is to unsubscribe and they will never receive another message from the person who provided the feed.

RSS has become a popular way to make money on line too. And that is due in part to the popularity of the RSS "pull" technology. Here's one way of monetizing a website using RSS feeds.

Imagine setting up a static one page web site - a minisite if you will. Now, add either Google Adsense code or the new Yahoo version of the Google Adsense style ads that, when clicked by a visitor - you earn cash.

This gives you a nice starting point and, if you optimize your web page properly, there is a good chance you will get a high ranking in the search engines. And, the more people who see your page, the more likelihood they will click on one of the links on your web page and you'll earn revenue from the click.

But RSS provides an even greater potential. Because by adding an RSS feed to that same web page, you turn a static web page that only contains the information you placed on it, into a dynamic ever changing web page that others will likely come back more than once to read.

After all, once someone has read a one page web site, what incentive is there for them to come back? Plenty, if you use RSS feeds on your web page. It is possible to add 5, 10 or 15 feeds on your once static web page and now, you've got a page that automatically updates itself and provides something that people will want to come back to read time and time again.

You can easily convert any web page into a dynamic web page using free RSS creator software. One of the most popular free versions is called Carp and you can download it at this web link: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/.

Once you've set this program up on your website and added the proper code to your website, then you will need to collect RSS feeds that relate to the topic of your web page.

Let's say that the topic of your web page is flower gardens. You could go to Google News and get their RSS feed code, place it into the appropriate position in your Carp coding you put on your web page and then adjust the code as follows:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=flower+gardens&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

You can also get a similar feed from Topix.net and you'd adjust the code like this:

http://rss.topix.net/search/?q=flower+gardens&xml=1

Now, once you have uploaded your web page, your site will automatically pull in fresh information from Google and Topix about flower gardens. Simply follow this illustration for any web page you'd like to monetize and watch your search engine ranking soar and also your bank account!

About the Author:
Mr. Boettger’s consulting firm helps business market effectively without spending more money on advertising through a growth performance guaranteed system. An extensive DIY small business action plan is available free on their website at www.7StepConsulting.com
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

Five Common Blogging Mistakes

It happens so often it's almost like clockwork. Business blogs are started with high hopes and then disillusion sets in when the results aren't what they hoped for. A lot of it has to do with these simple but common mistakes.

Not Asking For Comments

Bloggers always agonize over the lack of comments. But the problem is not that people don't read the blog or don't want to comment but the blogger hasn't given the opportunity for readers to comment. Just like asking for people to order a product, you've got to coax people to spend their 3 or 4 precious minutes to comment on your blog. Ask for opinions. People love giving it. Ask for reader's experiences, input or help to accomplish something. Ask people to suggest something to you e.g. You're getting incorporated, ask people for suggestions, tips and recommendations. Asking is a way of telling people it's ok to speak their mind and that you're open to alternatives.

Not Hosting On Their Own Domain

Too many businesses jump on the blogging bandwagon without thinking through how exactly it will fit into their overall marketing strategy. Blogs are started on other people's sub-domains just to test the waters. Before they know it, the blog has taken a life of it's own and it's too late to get their own domain.

Start it off right. Domains aren't expensive. Even starting the blog on an existing domain is better than someone else's sub-domain because you can control it. Hosting your blog on a blog service's sub-domain is also unprofessional. It's a lot like putting your business site on a Geocities domain. Not pretty.

This way you control where you want to publish the blog to. Tomorrow, if you outgrow these services, you can easily export your blog to another tool, another host without losing too much established traffic. A domain is also easier for people to remember and easier for you to publicize.

Not Maximizing Their Blog Content

Many businesses quit blogging because they feel it's too much work. True, like everything else, you gotta work on a blog but you don't have to break your back over it. Sometimes you may have a paragraph here and there about a topic that just isn't big enough for an article. You know what? You're going to have many more of these impromptu thoughts and ideas publish it to your blog. Later, you can come back and gather these paragraphs, compile them into a complete article or even a book.

That's only one way of maximizing your work. Have you written articles in the past? How about e-courses, audio transcripts or books that aren't in publication anymore? Recycle. Break them up and post them on your blog. In fact, if you have lot's of this type of content, you can even get your assistant to post them for you.

Publishing Too Often

I know what you're thinking. This sounds like complete the opposite of everything you've ever learnt about blogging. Truth is, the blogging world changes. What works yesterday may not today. This is one of them. There are countless blogs already jostling with you for your reader's time. More are being started by the day.

Who has the time to read so many blogs? It's come to a point people are forced to cherry pick the blogs they read. Even when they do read yours, you're not safe yet. If they can't keep up with your blogging pace, they'll drop you no matter how good your information is. Keep a balance. Feed information to your readers not dump a truckload on them. Every market is different. Some can tolerate higher number of posts a week, some can't. You should know your market and test accordingly.

Falling For Short Term Methods

Ah, this is my favorite. If you can have a favorite pet peeve that is. Every week, you hear about people dishing out the newest, coolest blogging tactic, best blogging tool that's sure to sky rocket your business to success or bull doze your way to the top search engine listings. Consider how any offer will help you advance your business two, five or tens years from now. Is it really in line with your marketing direction? If it isn't drop it. It also helps a lot if you can have a reliable source whom you can consult and help put things into perspective for you. One of the most powerful qualities of a blog has nothing to do with search engines, tagging or pinging. These things do have a place, but they aren't as powerful as the relationship opportunities between you and your customers.

Although these mistakes are common, they are also very easily rectified and don't cost much money. All of these suggestions are born out of my own trial and error and they've worked out nicely.

Try it yourself.

About the Author:
Lynette Chandler, the Tech Diva, regularly dispenses RSS and blogging info to business owners. To learn more about how you can get blogging, and do it well, visit http://www.bloggingstarterpack.com/.
Added: 07 Dec 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/45249.html

RSS Provides Multiple Opportunities to Share Your Information

RSS content syndication is a relatively new member of the internet marketing family of campaign options. And, it seems as though new uses for RSS content are coming about very quickly. This is possibly due to recent changes in the way that major search engines like Yahoo! and Google want web site owners to advertise.

It seems like it shouldn’t matter to the search engines – the way you choose to market your website. But, it does when your link popularity begins to fall due to too many links on irrelevant web directories, etc. With RSS content syndication, you will not face that problem. And the better your content, the better the chances of increasing your standing with the search engines (not to mention your site visitors).

RSS feeds are no longer just appearing on the large news sites in order to show the latest headlines. They are appearing on internet-enabled cell phones, PDA and other mobile devices. The reason this is possible is the simple XML format used to produce the RSS feed. By using RSS syndication to spread the word about your site, you are now using one of the best advertising methods for reaching the “non-traditional” web browsers installed on these mobile devices.

Anyone familiar with web directory will understand the approach recommended for RSS syndication that I will term “many doors.” The many doors approach means that you are providing several different headlines for the SAME article! If you have done directory submissions, or worked with a directory submission service this is what you provided for anchor text and site descriptions.

So, you can see that while some level of time investment will be required… you will no longer need to generate huge numbers of SEO content in order to “trick” the search engines. As a matter of fact, you will probably want to concentrate your efforts on providing a few high-quality relevant articles that will gain and keep the attention of your site visitors.

You will need to generate content an update your website frequently if you want your RSS content syndication technique to be an effective form of marketing. Why?

The answer is simple, but often overlooked by those publishing RSS content for syndication. When site visitors become accustomed to looking at an RSS feed for teasers about new information they can use, and they notice that there have not been any new additions for a while they stop looking. If you decide that RSS content syndication is a good marketing tool for your site, understand that you are committing a small amount of time in order to draw and keep your web site traffic.

How often will I need to update? That is a question frequently asked by those new to the world of RSS marketing. It really depends on a few things. If you are publishing content about developments in the stock market, your readers may expect hourly updates. However, if you are publishing content on the week’s hottest new movies you could probably publish once a week and keep your readers happy. Of course, if you are syndicating RSS content about new books written on the topic of antique shoe stretches you may only need to publish content annually. This also points out another thought to consider.

If your content is so specific that it applies only to a limited group of people, then either RSS content syndication is not the right marketing technique for your web site or you need to expand your content offerings. If you find your website traffic lacking, why not try expanding your content to include a broader audience?

When you publish content on your website that you want your visitors to see, but you also want to make that same content available to others interested in the same subject area, RSS feed services provide a great and inexpensive way to expand your readership!

There are actually new search engines (Example, Feedster) that are in place with the purpose of allowing people to search for syndicated content that can be placed on their RSS feeds in order to provide a service to their web site visitors. Because there is such a service, there must be a need for this type of content! Therefore, listing your syndicated content with sites like Feedster will enable other web site owners seeking your information to find it.

Here is a short overview of what you need to do in order to get your content out there for RSS syndication:

First, you will need to compile a list of the content articles provided on your website with their headlines, URL and description. From this list, you will need to create a simple XML file (RSS format).

Second, you submit the XML file to services that make RSS syndicated content available for other users.

Third, you wait for approval of your RSS feed from each of the services.

Fourth, after you are accepted by a site you need to find out how often they will update their system with your latest XML RSS feed. You then need to ensure that you are updating your information at the appropriate time!

Finally, you need to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor! This is when you will begin to see increased traffic and sales to your site.

Michelle McClory is an online marketing expert with 5 years of experience who is proud to be a member of the eByro team. If you would like to explore more Internet Marketing techniques visit eByro - the Vertical Portal for Internet Entrepreneurs

About the Author:
Michelle McClory is an online marketing expert with 5 years of experience who is proud to be a member of the eByro team. If you would like to explore more Internet Marketing techniques visit eByro - the Vertical Portal for Internet Entrepreneurs
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

Brainstorming content for your blog

For those who have a retail business which are on the web which he or she need to boost more traffic, the blog is where you can start easily.

Lets discuss how to write attractively and firstly, we are going to discuss what we are going to write on. The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate and interested in. You've chosen to make blogging your career because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about something that you're not interested in is as torturous as your mundane job!

And face the fact – your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Hence, you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we're going to discuss how to do just that in this article.

The other reason I ask you to write about something you're passionate about is because your feelings and emotion shows through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it's only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally reach your full speed. Then, it'll take a lot of effort to stop you instead!

However, no matter how well you know your topic, your brain is bound to get exhausted over some time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

Once you've established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you'll have quite an unexhaustible "conversation" ongoing, so you'll not need to actively search for content to write about. However, if you're still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.

You can also have conversations with people with the same interest as you in the particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don't join every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day (or more if you have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you extra traffic.

Don't worry about the paragraph above about generating traffic and search engines, because we're going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like that of a locomotive!

About the Author:
Jeffrey Tan is an entreprenur, he has many business dealings with online marketing and is now sharing his wisdom in his articles. visit his website for more details at http://www.retailwithsuccess.com
Added: 07 Nov 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/41915.html

Blog And Ping Does It Work?

I have been doing an experiment with blogging and pinging, one of the ways which supposedly gets your site listed and ranked higher quicker.

Firstly I'll explain what blogging and pinging is. Blog and ping is a technique you can use to get your site listed in search engines. The idea is that search engines like blogs because of the ever updating content, so they keep going back. By writing a blog and placing some site links in the posts, the search engines will spider the links, and pages shortly after you blog.

Pinging is when you send a "ping" to let the directories, which keep lists of blogs, and when those blogs are updated, know that you have added content to your blog. These are allegedly closely watched by the search engine spiders, so they can spider any new content and add it to the search engine which controls them.

Anyway, back to my experiment, does blogging and pinging really get your site noticed?

Well my results have been encouraging. I have tested by only using a blog as the front page of a new information site I started. http://www.informationpagesonline.com has only been advertised by way of the blog to announce new content, and then pinged through http://www.pingoat.com which distributes the blog entries to several large ping sites.

Following a week of adding content, and then posting an announcement of the new content to the blog on the front page and pinging with pingoat, the site seems to be getting visitors to most of the sections, which I can see from the log files. I can also see some of the traffic is coming from search engines, and also a lot of spider activity can be seen on the site, where the search engines are crawling the content.

So I have to conclude that blogging and pinging is a way of getting listed on search engines, or at least of getting noticed by them quickly.

Should you be blogging and pinging?

Of course that's up to you, but for the time it takes, it maybe worth trying blog and ping for yourself and tracking the results. A quick blog post (use http://www.blogger.com if you don't already have a blog) and then ping with pingoat takes only a few minutes, and may help a site into all the search engines quickly.

About the Author:
Douglas Titchmarsh writes several blogs including www.informationpagesonline.com and www.thediscountebookstore.com/blog
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

Podcasting For Beginners

Podcasting is the latest technological revolution that happened in the World Wide Web. It is the latest innovation in broadcasting and a new medium in publishing shows. Podcasting show is termed as podcast. If you are familiar with blog, then you may want to think podcast as audio blog where you express your thoughts or ideas by talking instead of writing. In other words, podcast is just like a home-made radio program. And since it can be created at home, it only means that anybody can do podcasting.

Podcasting uses the very same concept that is used in blogging. They both use a tool called RSS feed in uploading contents. It is also designed in such a way that people with Internet connection can subscribe to your show. Through RSS feeds, subscribers will receive an automatic notification every time you release new episodes on your show. But the best thing about podcasting is, it can be downloaded and listened not only in computers but also in any portable MP3 players. And because podcast shows can be transferred in any portable media player, it gives more convenience to people as they do not need to be confined in a single place just to listen for their subscribed show.

There are three general requirements to start podcasting: show format, equipment and software. Show format is the style and contents of your podcast show. You need to identify what topics you wanted to talk about, whom do you want to address your show, what is the duration of your show and what would be the title of your show. You need to create a plan or a script just like in a real radio or TV programs. Also consider if you want to create a daily, every other day, weekly or bi-monthly shows and if you will have somebody or other people to host your show.

To record your own podcast show, you need to have equipment and podcasting software. Equipment in podcasting is very basic: computer with Internet access, a good microphone and speakers. The podcasting software that you need in creating podcast shows is the MP3 encoder, audio recording/editing software and a program that will create and maintain your podcast RSS feeds. You will also need a website where you will upload and publish your recorded show so that people can download and listen to them.

All software that you need in recording podcast can be downloaded in the Internet for free. For free audio recording/editing software, you may want to try Audacity. ListGarden RSS Feed Generator is a free program that you can use in creating and maintaining RSS feeds to your show. There are also numerous podcasting websites like Our Media wherein you can upload and publish your podcast for free. And if you want easier and all in one podcasting services that provide both podcasting software and web space to record and upload your podcasts, you can try Wild Voice.

If you want to incorporate music or if you require some piece of music to your show, there is also some music companies like Magnatune that offer their music for free for podcasting purposes. These are the quickest and cheapest way to create and publish your own podcast show. But there are still many valuable stuff that you can find about podcasting when you started doing it.

About the Author:
Merry Jazz recommends that you visit http://www.podcastfresh.com for Podcast Fresh.
Added: 08 Dec 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/45442.html

How To Make Money Using RSS Data Transfer

RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) has become so popular today and is being referred to by internet users as "Pull" Technology rather than "Push" Technology.

It's difficult to imagine that anyone who logs on to the Internet has not heard of "Spam." Most, If not all Internet users are inundated with these advertisements, that we did not ask for or request.

For those of you that may not be familiar with the term, rest assured we're not talking about canned meat here. LOL! Rather, it is unwanted advertising from people that we neither asked for or requested to recieve. Spam is "Push" technology. "Pushed" in your face and inbox, wanted or not.

Many believe this brand of "Push" technology is or will be, the death of email. Yet, as long as there are individuals and companies that continue to use the illegal spam process, email will be around for a long long time. The irony being, companies are raking in millions, selling spam solutions, to people and big corporations, that are Not Working!

RSS, is the Total Opposite of the above "Push" technology. When subscribing to an RSS Feed, subscribers "Pull" information into their RSS Readers and can only be done so if someone voluntarily subscribes to a particular RSS Feed. If they find it's not the information they want, they can simply unsubscribe and never have to recieve

another message from the owner of that particular feed. Hence the term "Pull" Technology.

Utilizing RSS "Pull" technology has become a popular source of income for webmasters that use RSS Feeds on their websites. Here's How:

Let's say, you set up a one page mini-site or you could even set up a Blog. A Blog would be a quick and easy

alternative.

You can then host ads from either Google Adsense or the New Yahoo look alike Google Ads. When someone visits

your page and clicks one of your ads, You Get Paid.

If you've followed along and done the steps above, you've created a good starting place. You're going to need to make sure your pages are optimized properly. This will ensure you get your page ranked high in the search engines.

Like any site or page, the more targeted traffic you get, greater are the chances that someone will click your ads.

Which increases your Income.

Now, by using the power of RSS you increase your pages earning potential. When you add an RSS Feed to your page, you convert it into an ever changing, dynamic web page. Bringing you an abundance of visitors who, in all probability will return to read it.

Especially if you add 10 or 15 RSS Feeds to your page. You will create a dynamic, ever changing, self updating page. Providing valuable content that readers will want to read, over and over again.

Any web page can be turned into a dynamic web page. Just use the free RSS creator software called "Carp" This is one of the most popular free versions and can be downloaded here:

http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

After you set the program up on your website and added the proper code to your website, then you will need to collect RSS feeds that relate to the topic of your web page.

You've got your web page, It's topic is about writing articles. Go to Google News, Get their RSS Feed

Code, Insert it into the designated Carp Coding, then make the necessary changes found below:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=writing+articles&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

Same with Topix.net, adjust the code like this:

http://rss.topix.net/search/?q=writing+articles&xml=1

Once you've got your web page uploaded, It will automatically pull in fresh content from Google and Topix about writing articles.

Do these things for any web page and watch your search engine ranking soar and also your Income!

About the Author:
P.S. Art Luff is Not a Marketing Genius or Guru. He's Just an Ordinary Guy Trying To Make a Go Of It In this World. Jump on Over to best-resale-deal-ever.com/ and Subscribe to his Informative Affilate Marketing Newsletter. His approach to Marketing affiliate programs will awaken your imagination and keep you coming back for more!
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com