Here’s part 1 if you missed. It is normal to have a blogger’s block.Finding topics to blog can be quite confusing. As said in the earlier post we have tools that will give us suggestions on what the world is searching for and so search engine optimizers recommend you to select one of them and start blogging. Fair enough! But as (link) Michael Gray said, there are two schools of thought here - one is to blog for money and other is to blog for passion. As Michael rightly puts it - you need to strike a balance between both. The methods discussed in the earlier post(part 1) were mainly finding topics to blog for money. Those are the methods that will help you find keywords people are searching for, you may not have a liking to them though.

Today, let’s see if there are any interesting places to find things to blog about. Well, what came to my mind first is the statistics page. All of us like to check our statistics page. I do it when i have nothing to do online. Do you see a gold mine right there?

Yes, the referrals page is a gold mine. If you watch carefully there are those Google referrals links that bought new visitors to your page.(Can be seen in the referrals section). It may look something like -

http://www.google.com/search?q=podcasting%20blogger&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.google:en-US:official&client=firefox

Now, this tells us that somebody was searching for -”podcasting blogger”- and your blog showed up in the results page (not necessarily at the top).This may be because of two reasons.
1- Your blog contained the exact information what the visitor was looking for.
2 - Your blog contained parts of information what he was looking for but it showed up on the SERPs page.

Let’s look at scenario two. If the information the visitor was looking for is available partly on your site, it is more likely that the information he is looking for (now available to you from the url) is related to your blog.

Pick up these informations from the referral url. If he was looking for “Free mp3’s” don’t go ahead and dive in write a post on Free mp3s. Goto the tools mentioned in post 1 (where and how to find topics to blog) and research along the lines of this keyword. Find a match and write an article with the proper keyword density.Ensure that you make good titles that will be easily picked up by the search engines.

This way we can ensure that
- we deliver the articles people are searching for right now.
- we find topics that are related to your blog/articles.
- decrease the bounce rate of visitors.

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I hope this news will make some readers happy. At least that was what i was told.

On public demand, I‘ve decided to extend the deadline for the review competition to June 15th - 2007. I was all geared up to end the competition on May 31st but on the reminder, and this article, many readers told me by email and comments that they hadn’t known about this competition even and should be given chance.I was also told that the guidelines to participate and the parameters to judging were not transparent too.I thought it’s a fair comment.

You now have a chance to win the premium domain - bloggersense.com. So write up your reviews and nundge me. Keep in mind that -

The best review will be selected based on how good the review is. How deep and studied you are about the blog, how close you are to the blog and how honest the review is. Finally, how appealing it is to readers.

Your review will be quoted here and linked back to your blog as well.

All the best !

Here’s Part 1 if you missed it.There, we talked about your own domain name, traffic, related content and space.

Let’s go further deep.

5 - Do you network?
Are you the type who socializes at the blogosphere? If not, start doing it today. Cos, that’s the new mantra of blogging. Although you may have an excellent blog with exclusive articles, it’s no good if you are a loner and you don’t link to people around.By networking i mean linking to others, participating in other blogs, commenting and the like.In short, you have to interact with people around, accept them, review them, comment and make sure your posts are read.Without networking you are cut off from the loop and you stand no chance to win the game.

6 - Incoming links from neighbors?
Incoming links are not just page rank boosters. They are votes given by others. Only if they find you reliable will they ask someone else to visit your blog - else they are taking a risk. In order to make sure that you have a blog where people are ready to click on your ads, make sure you are linked from those blogs that are already playing well.You know the blogs that are doing well in monetization, so keeping a smooth flow from them to yours(by getting links through their articles) will ensure that the same kind of enthusiasm will be maintained by the visitors in clicking the ads on your site, just like the way they do it on their site(provided other factors are in place).

7 - Target?
Study your target inside out. Who they are, where they are from, what is their age group and what are the pages they visit most on your site and which are the ones they don’t.This will help you to identify the kind of ads that will be accepted by your visitors. Suppose the most visited page on your article is your about page, you might want to consider giving more ad-space there.If you have a target audience of the age group 16-22, you might want to select affiliate ads that cater to them.

8 - Credibility factor
This comes in as a result of many factors combined. You are responsible to create this on your own, there is very little that others can do.This counts right from the attitude you show in posts, language, contact details provided on blog, how you interact with others, replying to comments/emails, being consistent to an idea and the like. Viewers can easily make out any deviation from the above factors and will result in instant dying of your readership. While on the other hand, if you have readers who trust you and think you are reliable, they will click on the ads you show too.

If you are serious about Search Engine Optimization, you should be knowing this already. But for the blogging enthusiast readers, this might come in as a news - useful and handy.

Finding your measureables in Search Engine Optimization is a hurdle. It’s difficult to find out what gave you the results.
Many a times, people just go on adding links, exchanging them, commenting, link buying and so on randomly. And the time frame involved(mostly 2-3 months or less) in getting a significant result makes it even more harder to find out what is that one particular thing that you did - that pushed you through the ranks.

As, I’ve always told, it’s always a good idea to keep track of what you are doing, your statistics that is. Well, I’m not talking about the web statistics, but the SEO ones. There are Search Engine Optimization softwares that help you do this, but if you can’t afford one, or want to do it the manual way - cheers to you, i prefer that way too.This way you can know what factor helped you most to increase your rank or what combination of factors helped you through the SERPs. Because in many cases, it’s not just one factor that will help you earn your rank, but a combination of factors like backlinking, indexing and landing page optimization.

Keeping a track of these factors will not only help you in finding the measureables but also help you to predict your rank even.

Here are a few things that you have to constantly keep track of. Also listed is how to get them done easily.

1 - Number of backlinks

As everybody knows, quality backlinks matters most when google ranks you on the SERPs.So keep a spread sheet with the tabs updated daily/weekly.Check your statistics o Google and Yahoo.

To check your backlinks on google type, link:www.yourdomain.com on the Google search and this will give you the list of websites that’s linked back to you, in particular order.

2 - Number of pages indexed on Google

This factor has less importance in judging your rank but, if you have optimized all the pages that’s on the index, then it sure helps. It won’t hurt you anyway.

To find out the number of pages indexed on Google type, site:www.yourdomain.com , on the Google search and it will show you all the pages from your site that is on Google’s index.

3 - Number of .edu backlinks

Edu backlinks are a crucial factor that will help you to cut the competition on Google SERPS.These backlinks are considered as authoritative by Google as they are difficult to get. Well, to check the number of edu backlinks, use yahoo search. Type this i the search bar - linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com site:.edu

This will give you all the links from .edu domains to your site.Remember Yahoo also counts the NOFOLLOW links unlike Google.

4 - Rank for a particular keyword

This is rather obvious, keep a track of where your site ranks for a particular keyword when searching for it on Google. It is better to do the search on various regions like Google US, Google UK etc so that you can get an idea of the rankings there too. Trust me there are major changes in the ranks depending on various regions.

5 - Number of .gov backlinks

Just like the number of edu backlinks, gov backlinks are very difficult to get and for this reason, Google values them very much.If you can manage to get a couple of them, nothing like it.To check the number of .gov backlinks to your site, type the following in Yahoo search bar.
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com site:.gov

There are some pretty cool free online tools and third party softwares that help you with all or part of these 5 SEO factors. I’ll be reviewing them soon as well.

Podcasts are quite a craze these days. Every Tom, Dick , Harry and Mani seems to be podcasting their own shows these days. There are indeed a couple of cool ones out there that are free podcasts and really help you in gathering knowledge. I’ve always wanted to create free podcasts for my blog but all the tools i tried came at a price. (Kindly let me know if you know another free podcast generator program.)

Anyhow, today i found the real one i was looking for, actually it delighted me rather than surprising. It gave me all that i was looking for and with quickness and ease that i hadn’t imagined.This is honestly the best one I’ve come across in quite some time. This is a free online tool that will help you create free audio podcasts of your posts on blog.

All you have to do is - register, copy down the html code and add it to the posts. Simple and straight forward. The code shows up a link that will download the corresponding posts mp3 file to the reader.A lady(US accent) recites the entire article srarting with the blog title, post date and author’s name. Quite amazing.

The tool is talkr and you can register here to get this tool.

This one is highly recommended - If you have any trouble setting it up let me know and i’ll be happy to help you with it.

This is the story of another failure. You know, sometimes, despite your attempts, some things don’t go the way we see it.

This is about the review competition that was opened this month on Daily dose. The competition was that if you write a review about this blog, you stand a chance to win a premium domain.

As you might have guessed, the purpose of the competition to get as many back links as possible.But unfortunately, this competition was an utter failure! Such a failure that it gave me no backlinks or reviews except one from Rishi Raj.Clearly this is not what i had expected.
I had expected at least a couple of reviews and links.

Well, soon after the competition was rolled out, the response was very cold. There were no comments or emails that enquired about the competition.Somebody suggested on the comments that i added a few bucks as the prize - in the comments which showed that the prize(domain) was clearly not one that many wanted.

Well, the competition is scheduled to end this month end, so I’m guessing that there wont be any entries further and the price as declared would be given to Rishi(who is the only reviewer.) Despite the fact that this was a failure, it taught me a lesson. What are the things that counts when opening a competiton like this.What eill grab readers attention and what will not.

I’d like to share my experience with you. Here goes-

Reason why i think this competition was a failure.

1- Zero motivation
The prize failed to attract readers. It was a premium domain name - bloggersense.com. I was under that impression that it’s a very sought after one. True may be, but since all the visitors had a domain name already, or had settled with their blogspot domain transfers, this was not at all attractive to them.

So in cases like this, it may be useful to have a little survey done on your readers to check what they look for in a competition and what prizes they would like to have.

2 - Wrong target
This prize should have been announced in a domain selling/related website.Where the target are people who are looking for domains.In this case the target already had their domain names - why should they look for another one? Again a clear case of wrong communication.

3 - Short time frame
Honestly, i think this is not a big factor, but there is a possibility that there would have been more entries, had the dead line was longer.

There are more reasons but these probably are the most important ones that fuelled the failure of this strategy.
Meanwhile, any ideas on what else would have been a better competition?

I’ll turn to writing bed-time stories for kids, if i’ll ever meet a blogger who does not want to make money from his blog.
Everybody wants to make money, even if your online-income is only a few cents daily, a blog is surely a source of extra income.
One among every three bloggers you find,is an online-money making guru too. Don’t you think it’s a bit over-done these days?

I’m wondering if one jumping into the bandwagon and embedding all those affiliate codes into his blog is actually making money or not.Seriously, if all bloggers were millionaires, then what’s the fun?

Well, it’s a fact that all of us can’t be millionaires through blogging but we all want to make that extra few bucks. Let’s see if there are any measurables available that will tell us exactly how ready your blog is for money making. These are pre-requisites before you sign up for all those affiliates, that will ensure that you are all geared up for the party!

- Your own domain name

Darren insists it, John insists it. Getting your domain name is cheap these days - then why should you stay away with a blogger/wordpress account? Many affiliates require you to have your own domain name and does not allow the free ones to be included in their publisher list.
Why a domain name for me?
- Your neighbor has it, your cubicle mate has it.
- It’s damn cheap.
- You can migrate from your blogger to new domain with ease.
- It’s your address, would you want to stay in a rented house or your own? (remember you are a money making guru)
- Other’s are not Einstein progeny, to remember your blogger address.
- It shows you are serious about blogging.
- You don’t want to be a loser in front of your kid who is likely to have his own domain name.

So, a domain name is one factor you need to have before you start monetizing your blog.(Well, you may argue that there are still blogspot urls that win 5 figure cheques from Google, I’m talking about new starters here, not exceptions.)

- Traffic

Only a blog with decent amount of traffic will be able to get you that cheque. The more the better. Personally, I prefer visitors from organic search(Google or Yahoo) who stays on my site for little time than ardent readers.Simply because they are likely to click on ads - while looking for an info. It’s important that a blogger ensures that he receives a decent amount of traffic before he adds the affiliate codes in his template.

- Related content

When you have all those electronic gadget affiliates code on your blog, your articles can’t be on paintings. Make sure that you have a blog that’s got enough content (related) that will interest readers who are likely to click on the affiliate ads.This can be done by researching on what are the affiliates available, and tweaking your content to relate to it. Don’t over do it as it may simply turn down your loyal readers who might have loved your earlier contents.So get a grab on this right from the start.

- Space

Ensure that you have a template that will fit affiliates and ads with ease.That it doesn’t stick out as an ad.Many bloggers starts blogging with a fancy template and later when they add the ads - they don’t gel together with the content. This is yet another point that should be taken care of right from the first day of posting.

Yes, there are more points to be listed out here - but to keep it clear and crisp I’m cutting it short into parts and this is the first part.If you have points to contribute, write them on the comments please.

So before you jump into the monetization bandwagon, plan ahead and think about what lies ahead and leave space for development.More things to check before monetizing your blog to follow.

Dear Blogger,

Your blog is great. I really liked the posts, particularly the latest one.

Keep up the good work.

Can we do a link exchange?

Regards,
Mani

————–

I’m sure all of you would’ve come across one of these(at least similar) letters. If you have accepted it, it’s probably because you are not serious about blogging and thinks that link-exchanges benefit you. If you’ve not - you are normal.

Let me start clearing some common mis-conceptions about Link Exchanges.
- Link Exchanges are not good at all.
- Asking for Link Exchange to a professional(i hate that word though!) blogger has only 5% chance of him accepting it.
- Link exchanges are not to be begged.

Yes, a bit of irony here - the title is how to make a sure-shot link exchange request, while I’m explaining here that they aren’t good.

Here’s why i think Link Exchanges are not good.

When you ask someone a link exchange, it automatically shows up that you are a loser, you have a stupid blog and you are trying to get some thing from the other guy. It’s pretty much like begging.

But, this post is for beginner bloggers who have just started blogging and is looking for acceptance from other bloggers. It’s fair to ask for link exchanges if you have a pretty young blog.Because, when i was a starter, no pro-blogger would link to me, I sent a hundred mails to “professional bloggers” asking for links or link exchanges but none of them said Yes, and it wasn’t surprising to me because they could easily sell that link slot(which they may link to me) to another buyer who is ready to pay them.And i got a link from a gentleman called Lysazel, who had a not-so great blog, but i salute his courage to link to me. Today I’ve reciprocated my love to hime by linking back.

I’m always open to linking to young quality bloggers.Let’s get to the point.

So you know you are begging, now beg in style, beg smart so that you know whom to ask and how to. So that you get what you want - always!

(1) Whom to ask for Link Exchanges

Don’t ask for link exchanges to a popular blogger(Yeah the A-List ones as you call). From my experience, they will never even respond to you, or if they will, they will send you their Quotation for buying links from them.

But, you can use them in another way. Read their blog comments, look for their readers, who are consistent and writes friendly comments on their blogs. Reading their comments you can make out if the guy is open to new relations, friendly is social etc.

(2) Make a list of these frequent commenters and their blogs.

I’d prefer making a spreadsheet of the following details.

Blogger’s Name(Not their Nick names, their real names)
Blog name
Blog url
Page rank
Subject that he often blogs about

(3) Now, study their blog, read a few posts and find out more about him.

This can be done by sorting out the blogger’s list by Page rank.
You may want to start with the blogger with highest page rank and then work down. Get details like his profession, what’s his interests, his location and the like.

(4) Draft a smart mail

By smart i mean a personalized one. Personalization is the best way to attract someone’s attention.Keep in mind all the details you have collected and draft the mail. I’ve done a dummy one for you.

Hi (Name goes here),

Hope you are keeping well. My name’s (your name here) and I’m writing from (your place).

You may recognize me as a frequent commenter on your blog. I’m an ardent reader of your blog and I’ve enjoyed a few posts like the one you posted recently on (the subjects). Hope you read my comments on it.

Well, I’m a blogger too, I write on my blog (your blog) on (your topics).

OPTION 1 - One thing i noticed on your blog is that you blog very regularly. I had grabbed your feed the day i visited your blog, and i’ts nice to see it updated every time. Can you please advice me on how to find such interesting topics to blog on? It would really help me improve my blog.

OPTION 2 - I’m quite amazed to see how you manage to write such interesting articles, can you please give me some advice on this? It will really help me improve my blog.

I’m also looking for link exchanges from bloggers like you, if you think that my blog has got some good articles, please feel free to link to one of it in your posts.

I look forward to your tips and advice on how to blog regularly/find interesting topics to blog about.

Many thanks for your time.

Best,
You
(Your blog url)

This is only a suggestion, I’d suggest that you draft one along these lines.
As you might have noticed, there are certain things that you need to pre- equip with.

1 - Write some valid articles on your blog.
2 - Comment on his blog atleast a few times.
3 - Grab his feed prior to sending this email.

Also, note that I’ve not asked him just for another link. I’ve asked him to check your site and if…if he finds an interesting article, link

to it. That’s more genuine than asking for a link. Isn’t it?

Make sure that the subjects on his blogs are studied properly and you make no mistake in it. A blogger can get harassed if you are talking rubbish - complimenting his articles on science when he’s actually blogging about technology.

I hope I’ve listed out everything i can regarding getting a sure-shot link-exchange.

It did most of the times for me, no guarantee though.

Now the most important part.

If the blogger denies your request the first time, don’t let it go there. Develop a relationship with the blogger, keep commenting on his blog.

And i can GUARANTEE you that one day he’ll fall for you - probably with a one-way link!

Though i strongly believe that one should blog only on the topics that he is passionate about, you might have already learned that if you are looking for traffic and popularity, you just cant hold on to your favorite topics all the time.

You need to keep track of what people around the world are searching on google and other search engines. It’s impossible to blog on all the topics that are being searched, instead it would be a better idea to pick your topics of interest from the whole lot.

Suppose on Google, the top searches for this week are for Paris Hilton, Search Engine Optimisation, Sipderman 3 movie and George Bush - You can probably select Spiderman 3, because you’ve seen it the other day, and writing a review on it would be a cakewalk, right?

Now, the important factor is to find out the “hot spots” where you can actually find what people are searching for. Here are some tools that i use.

1 - AdWords keyword tool
This one comes from the Google stable - so you can rely on it very much. It is a neat tool that gives you suggestions on searches made on google relating to a keyword you suggest.
Example - you suggest the word mp3, it would give you - mp3 downloads, mp3 streaming, mp3 cd burning etc based on what people have searched on google.

How to
- Go to this page and type in the keyword that you are interested in.
- Then select the “Choose data to display” pull down menu. In the menu there are four choices -
Sort by “keyword Search Volume”, “Cost and Ad Position Estimates”, “Search Volume Trends” and “Possible negative keywords”.
- Select the third option “Search Volume Trends” and click on “Get more keywords”.

A list of keywords will be generated that will be related to your original term.

You can sort the keywords by two parameters - Search volume(current month) and Advertiser competition.
When you click on “Search volume” the keywords will be arranged in descending order of number of searches made on it. So the top keyword is the one that was searched most and the last one the least. This can be visually made out from the page rank like green bar seen next to the keyword.

The second parameter by which you can sort the keywords is the advertiser competition. This shows how many advertisers are currently competing for the keyword on google.
Example - For the keyword “Free mp3″, the advertiser competition is full or maximum - meaning that the number of advertisers bidding for that keyword is high.

Thought the figures can be tempting, one can easily go by the first keyword (maximum searches and maximum advertisers bid), I wouldn’t actually recommend it. Because, those are the keywords that have the highest competition, there are many other bloggers and website that may have already optimized their content on it (probably MFA’s for a keyword like Free Mp3), so it’s meaning less to enter that arena with your little starter blog(unless if you are sure you can cut the competition).

The idea is to find a niche keyword. So, you may want to select a keyword with lesser advertiser bid but a pretty good search volume. It’s up to you to select which one, i’m hoping that these can be found within the first Top 10 keywords. In this example probably “Mp3 converter”.

Before you zero in on the keyword, goto Google.com and search for the keyword, see how many results it brings up, would your blog be in a position to cut the first 10 sites? If yes, please go ahead otherwise try tweaking the keyword to fit another niche. Example - Mp3 converter review, Mp3 converter download etc.

Google allows you to save the keywords list in a CSV file ot TXT file, so that you can do your research on them.

2 - Now the second method of finding keywords is using a tiny program called “Good keywords“.
You can download it here.
This program helps you get an idea of the number of keywords searched on Yahoo (Not Google) related to a particular keyword you suggest, and it’s volume. For example if you suggest the word “cheap hotels” - It would show you the related keywords searched for the last month on Yahoo and the search volume in numbers.Pretty much the same way as it worked with the AdWords tool. One difference here to be noted is that - the figures are ONLY relating to Yahoo! So, in order to get an idea of the same keywords on Google, you can simply multiply the search number by 4 or 5, because considering the traffic on Google, Yahoo comes only upto 1/4th of the total search volume on google.

More information on where and how to find topics for blogging will follow in the next days.

There’s a new widget in town - Line buzzzzzzzzzzz !!!

Honestly, i think this is a cool one. Basically it’s a commenting tool, but with a difference. You can highlight any text on any blog and paste a comment near it. It stays there like a pin-up(when clicked) and others can reply to you as well.

All you need to do is add a tiny javascript to the blogger code.

Okay, now the negatives!
I wish if it was more light than it’s now. Well, it is light but may be it’s the color(which you can’t change) and the heavy box that appears where you add the code. I think they could’ve avoided it.

My suggestions for change would be -

- Take off the comments box that appears on the blog, you don’t need it.
- Text underline should be a bit more prominent with customizable colors.
- Instead of the comment box that appears where you paste the code, it could’ve been a simple credit line or so - the current one simply sticks out.

Otherwise, it’s a great tool.