Niche Blogging Tip
While surfing on Digital Point forum, i fell on another useful tip on niche blogging, so i thought i would share with you. In my previous post i talked about using tools such as Keyword Country or Google Keyword Tool. I have just found another way to find your niche.
Its a very simple and effective method which can be used in a complementary way with the tools mentioned above and in my previous article. So what you have to do is simply use the Google Suggest Lab search page and not the usual Google search page. The Suggest Lab page will give keyword ideas. Below i have put a screenshot of it, entering “color contacts“.
On this screenshot you can see that a list of keywords appear. The first good point with this is that it gives you good ideas for keywords. The second good point is that the results are apparentely classified by amount of searches! This is actually extremely good, as they show you the number of results but also tell you those which ones have the most searches! This simplifies everything as it allows you to know which keywords have a potential and not a lot of competition!
This tool confirms why my Color Contacts blog is working. Very little competition (results) and i talk about the keywords mentionned above (color contacts acuvue, freshlook and guide)! Also i wanted to tell you that based on my experience, for a niche you need to have less than 800,000 results under Google. I would recommend around 500,000 results is ok, there will not be too much competition! So have fun with this tip and keep me informed of any nice niches found or blogs launched!
Technorati Tags: niche blogging, niche, keywords, google suggest lab
Creating a buzz around your blog
Many of you probably know the meaning of the expression “creating a buzz“. The buzz is in fact a viral marketing technique which has often been used in the past. The buzz marketing technique attempts to create a special relationship with users where the latter considers he is getting unique precious information. The method is in most cases based on word to mouth, where more and more people start talking about the product/subject. Users, considering that the information is unique will share it with friends and colleagues. As the amount of people aware of the subject/product is increasing, the buzz is created. The main aim of a buzz marketing is to create this effect where people feel they have a unique up to date information or product and want to share it with others. Nowadays, an important part in creating a buzz is to be interactive with users aware of it. This is one of the reasons why blogs are often used to create a buzz. The reason of creating a buzz can be for example trying to increase traffic in order to make money online.
You are probably wondering how to create a buzz around your blog? Well in fact it is not very difficult, but it requires working hard especially at the beginning. The first step to be successful is to find a subject, topic, rumor or product which you think is unique and will catch people’s eye. Once you have this idea you need to create it. So with a blog it would probably be a post, with a long quality article with unique information in it. Nevertheless, it is important before writting this unique article to already have a blog which has quality information. For example if you create a unique article on a new blog, people might come and read your article, but will see you have an empty blog, and wont come back to read it again. If you already have a good blog with quality information which is updated on a daily or weekly basis, then people will have a look at others articles and will say “this blog is really cool and intersting, i will come back and see it tomorrow as i may find interesting information or because i want to have more information on a particular topic and hope the blog will be updated”.
Now lets have a look at the most difficult part when willing to create a buzz around your blog. As you probably all know, even if you have unique information on your blog, it is really difficult to get traffic to read your article. Several techniques exist here in order to help quickly promote your blog and article. The first method is to go on blogs with similar topics and write a nice comment at the end that will motivate readers of the article to come and read your post as they could find some interesting information. You must not simply spam with a link to your blog, you must show you are responding in an interactive way to the author of the post, or to a comment which has been posted. There depending on what you think is the most adapted, you can be aggressive by creating a rumor, or be straight forward with your own words. This method requires a good deal of work, as you need to leave comments on many blogs. Once this is done, i would recommend submitting your article to websites such as digg.com and pinging blog services such as pingomatic or pingoat.com if someone else has not done it yet.
The second method i would recommend to use after the first one, is to be interactive on your blog. If a user posts a comment, then give a reply. Show that you are interested in creating a debate around your article. If you reply, the user will come back to read your reply and will surely look at a few other new articles you have written on your blog. New visitors will also then see that it is a hot topic as people are leaving comments and talking about it. They will then read the article and post a comment too. Once this part happens, the buzz has started, and word of mouth will start. This oftens goes very quickly and the number of visitors on your website will increase substantially. If you use services such as google analytics you will see that you have new incoming sources as people will talk about your article on their blog, or on forums. After this, just continue being interactive, and posting quality and regular articles and the buzz around your blog will continue! A good example of buzz marketing with blogs, was JohnCow.com, who created his blog by using similar domain name and wordpress template than JohnChow.com, one of the most successful blogs online. JohnCow.com spread his blog around the net using the buzz method and is now very well known!
Technorati Tags: buzz, buzz marketing, create a buzz, blog buzz, traffic, viral marketing, word of mouth
John Chow on TV
Many of you know John Chow, one of the most well known bloggers online. He earns about $30000 a month by blogging about how he makes money online! Well he was actually on CityTV (on Breakfast Television live show) on wednesday morning.
He was interviewed by the show host, Simi Sara who as mainy people didnot know a lot about blogging and how to make money online. For example i am not too sure she knew a great deal about online advertising networks such as Google Adsense. But she did a great job and asked the questions that were need for people who are not aware of the blogging world and how to make money with it. John Chow gave us the usual information on how to be successful, he talks about quality content, but mainly that the difference with other bloggers is that he did not at first make his blog to make money, it was more of a passion. But then as he saw it develop and earning money he then started getting money out of it. So here is the video of his interview:
Technorati Tags: John Chow, make money online, interview, john chow tv, earning money citytv
Blogging and women…
Blogging is probably the largest phenomenon which has happened on the internet in the last few years. Many men now have blogging as their main activity when coming back after work! As a consequence, women are becoming more curious about blogging with sometimes some very awkward reactions!
After a couple of days, weeks or months, wives obviously discover the secret activity of their husbands and become really angry at them which is in fact very understandable… You then have to explain to your wife all about blogging and why you like it so much! After debating with her for several hours, she will finally accept your hobby but damn all your daily home tasks will now have to be done…!
Once your wife is aware of your blogging activity, she will be fine for the first few months but then she will become awkwardly jealous… Jealous of seeing you passing so much time managing your blog rather than spending your time with her… She will argue with you that blogging is not worth it, that it is a virtual world and that you should therefore spend more time with her… Every evening she will be angry at you when you spend too much time blogging! Your life can become a nightmare! Basically she will try and make you you’re your blogging activity! Unfortunately for men this often happens…
The only solution to this issue is actually making money from your blog! Once your blog is optimized and that you have huge traffic you might start earning money! If ever your wife starts discussing about your blogging activity and how she thinks it is useless, you will simply reply that it earns money and that she should be thankful towards you as it paid her last dress!
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, blogging and women, make money
Back from holidays
Dear readers, as you may have seen, i have not been posting regularly, this is because i was away on holiday for a week in september, then because i had a lot of work as it was one of the most busiest week of the year for me at work! yes for those who dont know i am working for 6 month in a bank before going back to my business school. Position i have is really interesting as i have good responsabilities and am directly in contact with managers and high leveled people in the company!
Should be posting regularly again now!
SEO Tips
While surfing on the net i fell on John Chow’s competitor (not sure if i can say that or not!), John Cow! Yes John Chow but without the “h” to make cow. Basically John Cow’s website is rather interesting as he offers the possibility to guests to post messages on his blog but keeping a high quality content moderation. This is how i fell on an article which is related to seo and gives a smal tip which i did not know and use.
This SEO tip is rather simple but seems logical to use. I checked on well known blogs like John Chow, and they all seem to be using this trick, so i have added it to this blog! So you might ask what is it? Well its a tip that allows your blog posts to be seen in a better way in google. When i read about it, i really said to myself that i should have thought about it by i did not! Sometimes simple things are easily forgotten!
The first step for this SEO Tip is to have a wordpress blog and go to options, then Permalinks. Once in permalinks choose custom structure and insert “/%postname%”. Basically this will allow your article link to be your postname, instead of a number or date, which is apparantly better for google but also for remembering a link address.
The second step to take is to download and install the wordpress plugin All in One SEO Plugin which allows you to create your own description for your blog article. Therefore when doing a search under google a visitor will fall on a nice description which can contain important keywords! Very nice simpe SEO trick.
This trick is very simple and takes only a few minutes to put on your blog, so if you are a novice blogger such as i, or do not use it yet well i would recommend you to do so!
Business Project Update
Its quite a time since i have talked to you about my business project. Slowly but surely we have been developing it and we are getting close to an end with the development of the website. Our programmers have done a very nice job, and our website has now many features to attract our target.
But we still have some large amount of work, especially on the legal side with the writing of the terms and conditions but also for the creation of our comapny. With my partner, for legal reasons we have decided to create a UK LTD company to protect ourselves. Indeed with an LTD, our belongings are not in danger, if ever something goes wrong like a user taking legal action against us for photo copyright reasons (which should not happen, but you never know!) well we need to protect ourselves. The LTD seem adapted to our needs for this reason. Furthermore for new small companies they are rather good in terms of taxes, this also pushed us towards this type of company.
Once all is completed with the website, we are thinking of offering to people to buy some shares that we would give them once the company is created. This could be a good opportunity for small investors as you never know we might become very big one day :)! But i must admit our idea is brilliant so we will see. I will keep you tuned!
Affiliates, a complement to adsense
After reading an article on John Chow where he describes his revenues, i have decided to start joining affiliate programs such as Text Link Ads affiliate program in order to get some extra revenue. The only issue is that i have far less visitors that John Chow so i am not sure i will earn money with this program, but we will give it a try. I will aslo talk about other text ads competitors which i am thinking of using.
Basically Text Link Ads affiliate program pays you $25 when you refer a new publisher or advertiser to them. What is good is that apparently you receive directly $25 once the publisher has been approved. So for example, if you click on my Text Link Ads affiliate banner on the left, join the program, and get approved as publisher (your website needs to be approved), well i will receive $25, this looks good no? Furthermore there publisher text ads seem to be as good as competitors so Text Link Ads seems to be overal a real winner from what i have heard and read. So i would recommend you subscribing to Text Link Ads as you have a good possibility of getting extra earnings for your website.
The second program i wanted to talk about and which is also used on John Chow is Kontera Content Link, which is can be used (as Text Link Ads) in addition to Google Adsense, if ads from Google can be clearly recognisable and that therefore users do not get confused between ads. I am waiting to be approved in order to add it to my blog.
I will keep you updated every month with my revenues for these affiliates/text ads programs!
My blog in Paula’s List of Blogger Salaries
I am proud to announce that even though my blogs are still rather new and unknow, i am present in Paula’s list of blogger salaries. I am ranked 60, even though you must consider that my earnings are low and many bloggers earn a lot more than i do, so 60 is not representative of my earnings, but the ranking is nice as it allows you to have an idea how much some types of blog/bloggers can earn. To be true i earn more than what is written, but this is because Paula’s list cannot be updated all the time. My revenues should be $600 instead of $479!
The second part of this article will be about an article from notsoboringlife.com which compares blog earnings to alexa ranking. The conclusion from his article is that blog earnings are closely related to traffic (visitors) and therefore to alexa ranking. Yet again my blog is named on this website and am very prowd of it 
How Top Bloggers Earn Money
Everyone would like to know how to make money while blogging. Is it easy? how much can i make? What do i have to do? So many questions … and so many answers! … but no revenues come in! What the hell is happening? Why cant you make money?
Well i think there is no perfect solution on how to make money while blogging. I mean it is not only using pre-made google adsense blogs, doing seo, finding good keywords or even writting interesting posts! It is also about being there at the right moment with the right idea so that people will come and read your blog! Think about all the factors that need to be taken into consideration? Readers from the US will surely read your blog either at lunch if they have time or in the evening, so maybe posting in the evening in order to be in the latest blog post of websites such as digg.com is a good idea ? well probably, but it wont be enough! Being successful is an accumulation of bright ideas and techniques that allow your blog to become successful!
In order to help you with creating your blog, i thought i would show you a link where they talk about top bloggers and how they earn money: How Top Bloggers Earn Money.
It is really interesting to see how some stupid ideas such as the cat picture “I can has cheezburger?” can allow you to become successful! Blogs such as boingboing.net, shows that being creative and writing about your passion can also be a key element to success. You can also note from the link i gave you that most of the bloggers did not expect to earn money from their blog at first, which shows that they were either doing their blog for personal reasons, such as passion for a topic, or simply writing for fun! For me the solution, if there is one, is to write a blog on what interests you but where you feel there might be a potential. If you are totaly into what you are writing then people will come! A must is sense of humor which is much appreciated! I really hope all of this information will help you having new ideas for blogs! Good luck!
