Today I wanted to talk about the important fact of growing a bond with your members. Now whether this may be for the members of your blog or for your emailing list, it all involves the same concepts. 

Why is creating a relationship with members so important? Well it goes back to the idea of marketing theory. If you have people that like you and what you have to offer they will keep coming back for more and more. The more good information and products you're dishing out to them, the more money you have! So let's get a little deeper into growing a nice bond with your membership for your blog or emailing list.

1.) This one in particular will probably go for the email marketing bloggers. A quick rule of thumb is to use a 3:1 ratio when delivering products. Always offer 3 free sources of information, then on that fourth email, give them something to buy. Let's say you had an e-book you were about to promote and you needed some buzz in order to get the sales you desire. Well take about 3 good facts that you mentioned in your e-book and make nice articles on them for your readers. Of course you have to expand your mind a little bit, but that's what Internet Marketing is all about. Isn't it?

2.) You'll notice on my blog how I now have user registration. This is something new I'm doing,but I do know some key factors that bloggers should definitely implement. When people register for your blog, that means they are highly interested in you and your site. Well, unless it's a forced registration.(Note: DON'T DO THAT!) Anyways, when they register they expect something out of you as being the publisher. The main thing they expect is quality content. If the blog you will be posting content to is your main blog and not just a niche site, then put out solutions for your readers. This will definitely help the bond between your members and you. Niche sites or blogs have to operate differently,but I will go over that at a different time.

3.) The third and final thing I wanted to discuss is commerciality. This goes for email marketing and your personal blog. It's a must that you don't sound too commercial. Let the reader know that it's a real live person who enjoys doing this behind the editor. I guarantee that your reader base,sign-ups, etc, will shoot the roof if you just be yourself in all cases. Unless yourself is just being really angry!

Hint) Building a good relationship with readers is where lots of Bloggers and Internet Marketers fail. That gives you an advantage to do the job right and take some of their potential members or buyers!

Feel free to share your thoughs,questions, concerns below!

To Your Success,

Jeffery Baxter

Often times I write about how to succeed with blogging, but I never really touched base on ways to fail with your business. The reason why most people who try to blog for money don’t last too long is because of distractions. I’m quite grateful that there are those people out there, because it keeps my businesses on top. I don’t mean to sound rude, but it’s an honor to present to you some ways to fail with your blog. Go on now, if you’re not so serious about business blogging, then keep these things in mind.

1. Don’t do your keyword research! Many marketers love to be in competition with blogs that don’t have their keywords in the title,h1,meta description and meta tags. This gives serious bloggers a chance to just crush these weak blogs with little work! I have been able to dominate hundreds of niches because bloggers weren’t doing their keyword research. This is a really easy way to make sure your blog stays a little fish in a big ocean!

2. Login to Facebook and see what’s on John’s mind. WHO GIVES A FLYIN ***** what John is doing at 3:45 p.m? I certainly don’t. Many bloggers face this major distraction and wonder why they’re not making any money. It was said that an average facebook user spends a total of 5 full days on facebook within a month. How much do you want to bet that some of those average users are Blog Marketers? Yes, I love it when my competition’s attention is swayed! Do you know what one can do with 5 days? I could create an Internet Marketing Video Series, an E-Book and build a website. Remember to waste that time reading other people’s status and updating yours.

3. Read in the forums all day about how others are making 243,456,876 a year. Yea that’s cool and all, but isn’t it time you log out and start applying what you’ve been learning?  This is a major thing that I had also dealt with in the past so I know. It even got so bad that I started to delete my forum accounts! If you want to fail I definitely recommend this path.

4.Last but not least, don’t be consistent. Consistency is what separates the smart blogger and the dumb one. Now, I don’t mean that it is a must to post every single day, but making a blog post every month is really not going to cut it. In all reality, you should have at least 30 solid well optimized articles before you even think about posting on a weekly basis. Oh, I’m sorry I got a little ahead of myself; this is to teach you how to fail. You also need to be inconsistent with learning more on your craft. Whatever you do,make sure that you don’t order a single e-book to learn other people’s blogging techniques.  Don’t ever get a cheap report that you know you can afford. All in all just cut your learning off!

In conclusion, there are tons of ways that you can fail with your blog,but listed here are just a few. I understand that turning your blog into a business might be a little too much for you. That’s where you turn to some of the things I listed above. There are always social bookmarking places that offer free registration and allow you to have a grand time! Now go out and fail your blogging business! ]]> http://teachmeblogging.com/teaching-you-to-fail-with-your-blog/feed/ 0 http://teachmeblogging.com/keyword-research-with-your-blog-the-basics/ http://teachmeblogging.com/keyword-research-with-your-blog-the-basics/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:04:13 +0000 admin http://teachmeblogging.com/keyword-research-with-your-blog-the-basics/

Where is your blog without keyword research? I will tell you. Nowhere! Well, that’s if you are blogging as a business or for money that is. It is an important element in Blog Marketing to do your keyword research so that your blog performs better in the search engines.

What does keyword research do for me? You ask. Let’s say ol John boy was blogging about “How To Make Money Blogging”, but he never did any keyword research inside of that microniche. Of course he will see traffic from odd places, but whether or not people were specifically seeking that information is another story. You see, keyword research is a main ingredient in Internet Marketing.

Now, on this personal blog of mine, you’ll find me just blogging for the sake of teaching. Therefore, no keyword research is involved. On the other hand when I’m niche blogging, I wouldn’t dare post an article that hasn’t been researced properly.

What do I look for when keyword researching? I simply like to target long-tail keywords or in other words, keywords that are 3 words or longer. This is an old trick to standing a better chance amongst competition with shorter keywords or targeted markets. Another important factor is seeing if the keyword is actually anything of value. When I’m typing my keyword phrase into the Google Search, I would look to see if ads are showing on the side.

If there are about 2 or more advertisers, then that tells me people are spending money for this phrase and that it will do me some good to have products on my blog. If you happen to be doing your keyword research and you find that there are no advertisers, then that’s a warning to not even bother writing an article targeting that keyword phrase.

My basic procedure of keyword research goes as follows.

Go to the Google Adwords Keywords Tool -

Type in one to two words that are about my niche-

I then look to make sure the “advertiser competition” or green bar is no more than half-way full.

I tend to look for keywords that generate more than 1,000 local searches per month.

I next look to see if it’s a long-tail keyword. Which means 3 words or longer.

If everything seems to fit “my” criteria I will click “Add”.

You will notice that the keyword phrase goes to the right of your screen into a sidebar.

These are the basics to keyword research. If you rinse and repeat these steps for your Business Blog, then you will begin to see a drastic and positive change in your blog’s seo performance!

Advanced Keyword Research will be discussed in a later post.

Keyword Research ]]> http://teachmeblogging.com/keyword-research-with-your-blog-the-basics/feed/ 0 http://teachmeblogging.com/increase-blog-traffic-7-tips-plus-my-mega-tactic/ http://teachmeblogging.com/increase-blog-traffic-7-tips-plus-my-mega-tactic/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000 admin http://teachmeblogging.com/increase-blog-traffic-7-tips-plus-my-mega-tactic/

In this article I will be sharing 7 ways that you can use to increase blog traffic. As we know, more traffic equals more sales and who doesn’t want that?! If you’re not getting good quality traffic to your blog, then you’re blogging in vain!

Tip#1-

This is probably the oldest trick in the book,but it still works until this day. It’s simply and naturally leaving comments on blogs and forums related to your niche. Now the rule of thumb for this is to make sure  you leave your blog’s link on a blog or forum that is “do-follow”. An easy way to check for do follow or no follow sections is just by using Firefox as your browser. Please keep in mind to only use Firefox for checking purposes because if you just regularly browse with it, you can be banned from Google for too many search queries

Purpose-

When we leave our links on do follow sites, it’s simply telling the search engines to follow that link and actually give us some link juice from that site. Also, if you’re simply posting or commenting on these sites strictly for SEO reasons then don’t bother with sites that zero  to any PR as you won’t gain that much link juice. I tend to go for sites that are PR2 or better! I have managed to get my link on some nice Pr 6 or higher websites and it really helps me increase my blog traffic and knock out competition with keywords!

Tip#2

Your next step will be to sign up to SocialPoster.Com and fill in the details for your site. The great thing about social poster is they submit your site to over 150 different social bookmarking sites. What this does is gives you more backlinks and of course visitors.

Tip#3

Next we need to head on over to Technorati and sign-up.Getting your blog in technorati is probably one of the first things you should have done when you created your blog, but if you didn’t it’s ok! That’s what you’re reading this for! Anyways, you need to fill in the details after signing up. Be sure to add some good tags for your blog as this will carry out far down the road in increasing your blog traffic. As you can easily check technorati’s authority, you will see how important it is to get your blog listed on there.Imagine getting a post on the first page of there one day! Do you know how much traffic you can get?!

Tip#4

Head on over to MyBlogLog and sign-up. This is a pretty neat place for getting your blog listed and making some friends as well! I really like the environment of this place!

Tip#5-

This happens to be one of those favorites of mine. If you haven’t stumbled one of your post on StumbleUpon then go ahead and do so. Once again, the sign-up is free and easy!

Tip#6

Another new and popular way of getting some good traffic is adding a Squidoo lens. Now, the thing to keep in mind here is to make sure we do our keyword research. When creating a lens, it needs to be as optimized as possible and that’s basically with any type of article writing you do. When you’re creating your lens,be sure to add a link back to your site to gain some link juice from this as well. I have found Squidoo Lens’ to increase blog traffic greatly!

Tip#7- Mega Megatip!!

Syndicate your articles or “blog posts” to the top article submission. What I mean by syndicating is, just sending out your articles to article submissions and getting it possible included to their site. The number one place to submit your article will be EzineArticles.Com! I have found that they give me great results from the search engines and definitely are responsible for drastic increase in my blog’s traffic and sales! Remember what I mentioned up-top about keyword research within article marketing too? Well make sure you know your stuff before even trying to write and article and submit it. For an ezinearticle article to be placed in the top 10 results of Google, it really doesn’t take that much if the keyword you’re targeting is not so competitive. Although I have experienced some articles to be in goog placements for millions and millions of competing pages! That’s just how good EzineArticles is! So in a nuthsell. Pick a longtail or 3 keyword phrase to write your article and blog post over. Look for less than 60,000,000 competing pages (only go this high for ezinearticles!!). Next type your keyword into Google from your Firefox browser and look at the top 10 pages. What you want to be looking for is if 5 out of 10 of the sites have less than a “5″ pr. Nothing else matters when submitting ezine articles. If anyone has told you otherwise then they don’t know their stuff correctly and they probably are missing out on opportunity! We continue by writing our article,posting it to the blog, submitting it to ezinearticles with good keywords,putting linke back to our site and then your good to go! They usually approve articles withing 7 days and after it’s approved you can see your article ranked pretty darn good if optimized correctly!

Conclusion

I hope to have shared with you some great tips that I have been using since forever to increase my blog traffic! With the things I shared with you, in no time will you be seeing over 100 visitors per day. All you have to do is rinse and repeat, especially the megatip I told you! This blast of targeted traffic will definitely increase your sales and your interest to keep moving forward in your blog!

]]> http://teachmeblogging.com/increase-blog-traffic-7-tips-plus-my-mega-tactic/feed/ 0 http://teachmeblogging.com/make-blog-money-blogging/ http://teachmeblogging.com/make-blog-money-blogging/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:01:52 +0000 admin http://teachmeblogging.com/?p=943 So you’ve been hearing all the buzz lately about how people are making money with their blogs and how it’s their main source of income. Now you too want to make blog money. In this article I will be sharing my thoughts on making blog money.

Cuts the Need of a Boss-

When you make blog money it either can be huge or small depending on what you know. I personally make over 6 figures a year with my blogs due to the great information I have been able to get my hands on over the last couple of years. I’m very fortunate to be making this amount of money because I’m my own boss and I never have to clock in to some stupid job again! Imagine if you had a series of blogs earning anywhere from fifty to one hundred bucks per day? That’s a serious amount of cash and you too won’t have to have a snobby boss in your grill!

How it Recycles

When you too start to  make blog money, then you might not know what to do with all the money you’ll have at hand. The most important factor when earning money online is to invest in more advanced things as you go. I’m assuming that your approach to make blog money for now is to write quality articles and syndicate them yourself. This can be a tedious task, but in just one month of work with a plan, then you can start making a descent amount of income to outsource. What do I mean by outsourcing? It’s just simply getting other people to do the work for you. So remember, when you start to make blog money, then use your earnings and invest to make your job easier.

So Stress Free-

I mentioned up above on when you make blog money it cuts the need of a boss. I didn’t go into depth on how making this your my job career can be so stress free. Do you know what I do in the morning? I wake up, thank the man upstairs and go right back to sleep. Until it’s about 10 o clock i wake up,eat breakfast, watch my favorite television shows and check my earnings online. Most of my blogs are straight auto-pilot money making machines so I don’t have to worry about too much. Do you see how stress free that is? I’m not having to worry about a boss and for the most part “debt”.  I strongly encourage you to take blogging serious and make money with it!

Conclusion-

This article wasn’t to brag or boast, but just to simply give you my insight why you should definitely consider to make blog money. Thousands and thousands of people are getting into Blog/Internet Marketing everyday and now it’s your turn!

Helps the Reader Understand Better

If you’re anything like me, when I’m viewing a pdf of something instructional; I always wish that there is a nice video that goes right along with it to help me understand better. Adding video to your blog for certain posts can be very beneficial to the reader that is either blind or just simply understands better by watching.

Less Work On You

If you’re reading this, then I’m sure you have at least once in your lifetime headed over to YouTube. Now, have you noticed something about 90% of these videos? Most of them are relatively short. The reason why videos provide less work on a blogger is because one can easily get through to the reader, the problem and solution within less than 3 minutes. Try writing  a good quality article in 3 minutes! Trust me, it won’t happen!

Strictly Entertainment

Along with taking the work load off, when adding a video to your blog,it is also great entertainment for you and your audience. For some reason when it comes up in my head to add video to my blog I get merely excited! Besides that, some people just really pleasure hearing different people’s voices and actually seeing the author’s face.

Conclusion

Adding video to a blog in order to get a point through is often times good. Now, the only downside I see in video blogging is not getting content for the search engines, but other than that it’s definitely a popular approach nowadays! So the next time you think you have to write a long article to give your readers a lesson, just simply remember what I said and add a  video instead!

You’re Reading It Now Take It!

-So you happen to be on a particular blog that is in the same niche as you. So you’re reading his or her post and at the same time thinking about how you haven’t updated your blog lately! Well, if that article you are reading is intriguing to thine eyes, then “reread” it and soak it in. The reason I say soak it in, is so that you can have the ability to  take that article and put it into your own words with a breeze. Now don’t get too frantic about the time this can take. All in all you can have a nice article to your blog in less than an hour for free! You see how quickly blogging ideas generate?

Could Be Right In Front of You!

You might be surprised how a blogging idea right in front of you. Yes, that’s true, a full and complete article can be in the midst of where you are! Let’s say that you blog about “Deep Sea Fishing” and one weekend your family decided to go do exactly that. Well on that trip you catch a “Big Mouthed Bass”, but it got loose from your line by the time it hit shore! Believe it or not that could be a 400 to 500 word article just in itself! You could write a complete article about that event just telling things such as the fish’s strength and the conditions which may have caused him to break loose. Whoever said blogging ideas had to be so “difficult”?

Ask A Friend!

Last but definitely not least, for blogging ideas to come quickly just simply ask a friend with the same interest in your niche! Having a couple of friends who blog about the same thing is very useful to the success of your blog. So let’s say that you just really couldn’t think of a blogging idea for that day, “even with the great information I posted above” and you have John Doe as a friend who blogs in the ” hair cutting” niche with you. You simply just sit down with John and try to gather some ideas. This is what I tend to do with a couple of my students when it gets down to the ruts of writing as I have experienced some road blocks in my blogging as well.

Conclusion

As far as being a good blogger goes, you have to constantly keep your mind open for blogging ideas. With the things I have mentioned above you should be able to write an article in no time! Not only are these some good methods, but as you probably noticed, they are all free as well!

]]> http://teachmeblogging.com/blogging-blog-idea-let-your-thoughts-take-control/feed/ 0 http://teachmeblogging.com/blog-community-bonding-overrated/ http://teachmeblogging.com/blog-community-bonding-overrated/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:32:56 +0000 admin http://teachmeblogging.com/?p=345 On this week I ventured out to do a 5 day experiment into the “Blog Community” like I’ve been preaching for you guys to do. It has been awhile since I’ve actually done that and let me tell ya, things have changed. I started out posting topics about informational blogging. Things were going good at first until the “Creator of all Evil” started reading my post. She quickly began to bash on me about how she already knew everything there was to blogging.

I kept my cools and tried to befriend her. I admit in some of the posts that I posted she was helpful, but when it came to blogging she didn’t want to hear it! She apparantly was way too advanced to read my post. The worst part is, this lady wasn’t just any old member, she had a hold of the blog community I was in. Well at least most for the most part. She apparently used the forums to gain all the traffic she could to her site.

So I stopped waisting time posting information immediately. It would have done no good for people to click on my discussions and see her bashfulness towards my post. I began just creating topic after topic after topic on random things. Anything from “What’s Your Favorite Restaurant” to “Who’s Your Favorite Celebrity”. I had a reason behind this. I wanted to see how far I could get before this lady began to grow in outrage with the “newcomer”(me).

After about 13 new posts, this lady had it! She began taking shots at me. She began offering block links for people to block me. It was outrageous! I had to cut the 5 day experiment short. The guilt of me preaching to people about venturing into the blog community began to weigh on me. Don’t get me wrong, there are some blog communities that are worth joining, but some are just like spammed chat rooms.

My point is, if you do decide to join a blog community be sure there’s no one person in there that acts as the God of the Forums. The community I was in had some great people, but that lady had a hold of most of these people. If she did’nt like what you had to say, then nobody else did.

To my fellow Blog Enthusiasts, you have to stay away from places like these. Be sure to join good communities. Once you find out which ones have the Gods, then delete your account. Now on the other hand, if you’re not so serious about blogging, then stay there and waist your time. Great Experiment!

Pro-Blogger

Jeffery Baxter

What is SEO? (SEO or Search Engine Optimization) is the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users.

Linking

Inbound Links… An important factor in better optimizing your blog is to get ” inbound links”. Now, when I’m saying that, keep in mind to try and obtain good inbound links. It’s okay to get inbound links from anywhere,but for SEO reasoning the inbound links or links pointing to your blog-site need to be highly relevant to your site.

Outbound Links…The definition of outbound links is just the opposite from what I discussed for “inbound” links in the previous paragraph. In my own experienced opinion, having outbound links have little to do with your site’s efficiency within the search engines. Out-bounding links from your site in the wrong places can send good traffic away. Be very careful where you place them!

Link Relevancy…The main purpose for linking up is to better our site’s (pr) or page-rank, and it’s popularity in the search engines. The only way for the link algorithm to work positively for is by link relevancy. You’ll have a better chance getting an inbound link from a “shoe blog”  to your “shoe blog”,than from a “horse racer’s blog”to yours. That’s just the way it works!

Buying Links…It is often debated by bloggers whether to buy links or not. I personally set up a $50-$100 budget a year on these type of “link buy” objections.I would rather buy a link from an individual rather than a corporation which offer auto links. Buying auto links can definitely take the work load off of you,but the more natural and respected way is through agreed parties. You never know who those companies are linking you up with!

Content Quality

Writing quality content is going to be your most effective pull-through to the search engines. Of course linking up is important, but the content factor outweighs it just a little. Be sure to whatever you are posting about to stay on topic as much as possible. The way that Google’s spiders crawl content is amazing.

-What if my post is lengthy? Well the quality content factor has to be
incorporated with a lengthy post if you think about it. It would be hard to write a “first page Google worthy post” without having some quality and quantity in hand. A lengthy post that is going in and out of topic will be recognized as “not that worthy” by the Google spiders.

Keywords

While you have in mind to write good quality and quantity posts, be sure to not forget about keywords.

Sometimes for better search engine optimization I’ll tend to bold certain keywords that are relevant to the post. Bolding keywords is one of those things from the past but it’s worth giving it a try every now and again.

Add keywords in posts,titles,outbound links,heading tags,etc.

Register Your Domain

While it is common for bloggers to keep the free .blogspot or .wordpress to the end of their domain, it can hinder you in the search engines.

Now I’m not meaning that the engines neglect the free domains, but the better the domain, the more attractive, and the more people are liking your blog. This is where the hindering comes from. I’ve found it more achieving to just go ahead and buy a domain for my blogs rather to let people think of me as not serious with that long domain name attached.

Domain For Long Run

When I mentioned just above to go ahead and register a domain for the attraction and credibility of your site, it’s also important to auto-renew your domain. When you buy this particular domain, whether from Go-Daddy,Google,Enom, or any other domain registration company, an option will be there for you to auto-renew after that year is up.

Auto-renewing your domain gives you more credibility from Google. The factor of this being that spammers buy sites and never auto-renew.

One other thing to keep in mind is the hurt that can be felt from an expired domain on a well established site. When the expiration is up and you don’t have auto-renew, get ready for lots of red tape and a time clock in order to get your domain back!

Design/Themes

It is better recognition for search engines to get through to well managed or coded designs. Be sure that there are no inactive codes within your site. This could be meaning inactive google codes or verifications for multiple purposes. If they are no longer active or are broken,then take them out.

When choosing a template do some research on it’s capabilites as well. If you are working with Wordpress in particular, there are many search engine optimized themes that are available for download.Also,the better search engine optimizer lessens the display of Flash and Iframes. It is often referred to as a set-back in the optimizing world.

Summary

There are many different areas that can be discussed upon when it comes to search engine optimization. I’ve chosen the main and most important few to analyze on today. I hope this has given you a better understanding of how you can search enine optimize your blog!

Pro-Blogger

Jeffery Baxter