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?

Got a doubt on SEO? Post it to me HERE. I'll try and answer it asap. :) -- Mani

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.

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.

Blogging is a phenomena today. No doubt about that. User generated quality content, networking and folksonomy has become the essence of blogging. And this is what makes it a phenomena. There are no juniors and seniors in the game as many believe. According to me, everyone who manages to generate quality content is a star - irrespective of whether he started his blog one month back or 3 years.

It’s disappointing when there are categories and lists in blogging. There are bloggers who are categorized as A-List and “Pro - bloggers”, while others are “Z-List” and newbies. According to me this is rubbish, because somebody categorized them on the basis of
- who’s making more money
- who’s got the biggest network
- and who started the first.

None of them is a genuine scale to measure the quality of a blogger.

If it’s making money, then only the ones who managed to initiate an affiliate network, or only the one who managed to make 1000 MFA articles(by employing 5 copy writers), will manage to be the top bloggers. Or if it’s about “starting it first” then those who started blogging in the last 2-3 years are losers.Right?

These days every second blog you come across is a “How to make money online” blog or a technology blog. It’s anyone’s guess that if everybody blogger get’s a 5 digit check from Google, then there’s definitely something wrong in the system. Either there are fraudulent clicks or even if they were genuine, the advertisers should be suffering in their ROI figures(more clicks-no buys).

Okay, let’s ignore the money part - it’s a boring game. I saw this interesting comment on bloggingtips, in my article. It was from a gentleman called Dollar Bear who was frustrated that every other blog he came across was a “Tips to money making one” and clearly he was not interested. He says - I’m not in that group. I must appreciate his statement. It is the voice of a thousand plus bloggers who are sick of the money making blogging thing.

They want to blog because they need to tell the world a different story about something we all have turned a blind eye to, or they want to think differently about an axiom - or they simply have a new business idea. Shouldn’t such kind of talen be recognised and appreciated? What if he too jumped into the bandwagon and wasted his time trying to monetise his site, thinking about the ad-sizes, referrals, links and stuff? That would corrupt his mind - would it not?

The blogging community is a network - the “blogosphere” as it’s called. There are many think-tanks out there who want to make a point.
Any sort of classification and labelling, be it based on the money, or the popularity only corrupts the idea, and should not be entertained. I’d be happy to listen to your thoughts on this..

As if i was tired of writing articles here! LOL

Anyway, i found this interesting post the other day on John Chows blog that took me to Kevin’s blog which was even more interesting. Because of the domain, the mascot the posts and Kevin. I found his writing style very friendly and addictive, i almost loved it the very first visit and what more, I’ll be writing exclusive articles at Bloggingtips - to help you take your blog to the next level.

I’m happy that I’ll be sharing my readers with Kevin, also because i can make it a channel there at BT, concentrating on blogging related posts while the SEO related ones will be posted here. you guys should also take a look at his blog, it’s one of those best ones around.

Writing comments on other blogs is an age-old technique to increase your blog traffic. Everyone knows it - right? You knew it.

Let’s have a deeper look at this phenomena. Firstly, is it just a “technique”? Well, i think otherwise.

I think it’s a cool and natural way to express your love and admiration to other blogs - and of course, contribute to the thinking process.

But unfortunately, many a times people see it as a technique - i must admit during my initial blogging days, i thought it’s a technique. And i used it where ever possible, but i was always worried about the ROI. I write 10 comments a day and i wait for my traffic. And you would’ve already guessed what happened. - Nothing much!

So i quit commenting. But later one day i found some cool “commentators” like Ashish Mohta - who is a ferocious “commentator” and comments on many popular and unpopular blogs. I see him on the top commentators list on many blogs. And i thought I’m missing something and went back to commenting - but this time with a difference.

I didn’t see it as a technique - but a way to express my love and appreciation to fellow bloggers. This helped me in four ways.

• I didn’t get tired commenting.
• I started to read more blogs.
• I got noticed in the blogsphere by fellow bloggers.
• And finally, some traffic too.

I wouldn’t actually recommend commenting as a technique to increase your traffic, and don’t be tempted seeing my fourth point. It’s only a negligible amount of traffic I received. But, I’m glad that these are loyal or like-minded visitors - these negligible amount of traffic sure is different from the rest of massive organic traffic i receive. And there are great sites like Kevin’s Bloggingtips.com which does not have the “nofollow” tag attached to the links in the comments - which is a novel way to go about encouraging commenting. (I’m sure Kevin will spent a good amount of time deleting spam from his comments.)

• Traffic from comments will bring you loyal visitors who tend to develop a liking with you. So though negligible, they are precious.
• Choose the sites that you comment carefully. You don’t want to use a “big-shot” bloggers blog, who wouldn’t even bother to reply or read your comment. But choose bloggers who have a similar mindset as your’s - they’ll make good friends.
• Don’t annoy people with your comments. You may be tempted to disagree with an article in an A-List blogger’s blog. But disagree in style - so that, even if you don’t get the writer’s attention, you may lure the other commenters to visit your site.

Bottom line - enjoy commenting, love it, taste it and chew it down - comment to your friends, join the thought process, disagree in style - and you’ll be in the loop.

I’ve done it - succeeded(No I’m not a super-star but in my own ways), believe me.