What is this thing called a “blog?” What is it for? When did it first enter the human lexicon? How can you make it work for you in today’s competitive marketplace, especially when you have very little money to spend on your marketing?

The term “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, editor of RobotWisdom.com, one of the oldest blogs out there. The shortened term “blog” came about in 1999, offered up by one Peter Merholz, editor and author of Peterme.com, a very well-established blog about his life, the web in general, and about everything else under the sun. By July 2006, statistics show that there were 12 million bloggers in the US alone (we’d venture to say there are many times that amount now), and that more than 39% of the US population reads blogs. Again, chances are that now, with the unemployment rate rising and Internet costs getting less expensive, that number is much higher. From the perspective of someone who wants to advertise on blogs, this is a good sign. Statistics also show that by February of 2009 there were 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide.

At nearly 25 percent of the planet's population, that figure is most impressive. With only 80% of the world’s population being literate, you can figure that almost half of the world’s literate population is online. And more and more folks across the globe who use the Internet are choosing to read blogs. What does that mean for you, oh Person Who Wants to Advertise Their Business? It means that you can use this medium to promote your business.

For a minimal cost you can reach millions of people with your brand and your website. And why does it mean that? For as many bloggers as there are, there are that many blog readers.

Many people choose not to put their every thought and opinion onto a website, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to read the thoughts and opinions of the people who do. The cool thing about that is that many bloggers are quite influential. They are vocal about their opinions of companies and products. So how do you get into their sites to advertise your company? One way is to find blogs that fit your product’s image and go through the rigmarole of emailing them individually.

You’d need to offer them free product, send it to them and wait for them to write about you and link to your website. Or, in an easier and possibly more effective move, you can sign up with a service that makes your ads available to bloggers. Because of today’s economic climate, more and more bloggers are trying to make a profit from their blog.

Whether it’s to offset the cost of their domain name and website, or whether they are trying to put food on the table, more and more quality bloggers are putting advertising on their websites. The service they use can be the same service you use to take advantage of some prime internet real estate and reach an audience who may not be looking for your product otherwise.

Blog readers aren’t stupid, but they are partial to the blogs they read the most. And chances are, if the blog is established and has a decent readership, those readers are going to be interested in the ads posted on their favorite blogger’s website. Why not have that ad inventory occupied by you?

This article has been donated by Samson Harper, an esteemed agent at BloggingAds.com, a website that helps businesses purchase blog advertising and gives bloggers an opportunity to earn money blogging

1. Make sure that your permalinks are set up optimally for search engine optimization – whenever you publish a blog post it will have a permanent URL known as a “permalink”. By default, WordPress permalink setting is not optimal, but you can easily edit the settings on the WordPress Dashboard menu, click on this, and then use the custom settings.com/category/postname. This will mean that your blog post category and title will appear in the URL, rather than a number.

2. Install the All in One Search Engine Optimization SEO Pack (or a another similar plugin) – the All in One SEO services Pack plugin allows you to add a custom title, meta description and keyword tags for your home page and blog posts.

3. Social bookmarking service uses bookmarks for each blog post – when you post to your blog using the social bookmarking service E.g. Digg or StumbleUpon. There are also services such as OnlyWire and SocialMarker allows you to submit your site to multiple bookmarking service at the same time. Social bookmarking can give you additional traffic to your blog, and give you a back link to your blog posts.

4. Optimizing your blog home page – this is your blog home page to get more traffic then any other normal web page. You can increase the number of visitors, even more by optimizing your home page. Pick your home page using the 1-2 keyword phrases, such as the Google AdWords keyword tool keyword research tool, and select one or two phrases related to your niche. Ideally these phrases should get a few thousand searches per month and the competition shouldn’t be too tough. To ensure that you include in the title tag, meta description, and the entire contents of your blog home page a permanent reference to these keyword phrases.

5. Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin – this won’t increase your search engine rank, but having a sitemap will help to ensure that the search engines index all the posts and pages of your blog. You can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a sitemap for your blog map.

Auto-responders have more uses than you may think. They are sometimes used to manage contacts. They are sometimes used for blasting and managing emails. Plus, they can help build and store multiple lists and email sequences while taking away all the tedious busy work of doing it manually.

There are two different types of auto-responders:

• Subscription based auto-responders
This is the type that you don’t have to your own server. This could be the least difficult path to take for someone new. You will have a monthly fee to pay while using this one.

The subscription based auto-responder has its drawbacks too. The number of contacts you acquire may be restricted. With the monthly service, you might be on the same IP address as other subscribers. Certain email providers may block the IP address that your service provider uses, causing your emails not to be delivered. In the end, you could pay way more over time with the subscription than just buying the server based auto-responder.

• Auto responders that you buy once and host on your own server
There are more positives than negatives with this kind of auto-responder. First, you can have as many contacts as you can possibly add without paying a penalty. In addition, an individual IP address can save you from dealing with the headache of getting blocked by email providers because of irresponsible spammers. And, you will have absolute control of your lists with this type, unlike the subscription based.

Configuring options on this type include being able to set how many emails get sent per minute among others. Email providers may flag and block your IP address if you try to send out too many emails at a time.

Knowing the right type of auto-responder for your individual situation can save you time, money, and even keep your stress lower. Pick carefully as this amazing tool can help you reap great rewards.

If they understood how easy it was to SEO optimize their blog post, they just might get the free organic traffic they need to be successful. All it takes is just 3 easy steps. By doing these three steps all the time, you can increase visitors and make the difference between a blog that builds the blogger very little income or one that a blogger can quit their day job and make a full time living with.

Follow this advice to search engine optimize every blog article you write and start taking advantage of free Internet search engine traffic.

To begin with, you should make sure your article addresses are search engine compatible. With a blog platform like Google’s Blogger blogs, this is automatically done for you. If you’re a WordPress user, then you’ll want to change your permalinks so that WordPress will produce search engine optimized url’s when you write a post.

To do this in WordPress is find the the Permalinks tab, and click the radio button next to the Custom field. Next you’ll put a percentage sign followed by the words Postname. {Immediately after the words postname, Now} put another percent symbol. You’ve now ensured that all your post will have search engine optimized urls.

The best tip to optimizing your blog is to put your main keyword in the Title. If you’re blogging about ways to earn extra cash, then you’ll want these keywords in your Blog’s title. Don’t put something like Johns Blog. Using the keywords in the Title, then you’ll rank higher than if you name your blog something that does not relate to your main keyword.

Your next move is to use your keywords in your Post’s title. If you want blog readers to click on your post about ebay to to make extra money, then put the keywords in the post title. Not irrelevant keywords like How I Make Money With Auctions. The search engines won’t know what your post is about and the search engine traffic you need won’t appear. This is especially important if you’re trying to make money with Adsense.

These three tips will be helping the Search Engines know what subject your blog post is about. When you make it easy for them to understand what your post is about, the search engines will rank your post higher in their listings.

Now to fully take advantage of all this optimizing, you’ll need to build links to each post. Ahh, but link building is a whole nother article that has to be saved for later. But you need to learn how to optimize your blog before tackling link building.

Woo Themes is the impressed brainchild of Adii, Mark Forrester, and Magnus Jepson, credible designers who are keen about WordPress.  You can explore other platforms low and high for CMS solutions, but you can never discover anything like the unique themes you’re guaranteed to find on Woo Themes. 

Woo Themes has got overreaching purchaser service and support, which are parallel only to their fine quality theme releases.  Woo Themes tries for excellence on many levels, but the final objective is the creation of a fellowship of impassioned Woo Themes users who will evoke possible themes.  Adii, Mark, and Magnus are silly about WordPress, and that love is evident in all available Woo themes.  Use any of them, and you’ll love Woo Themes and WordPress, too. 

There are a surplus of seemingly “custom” WordPress themes, and I could confess that I was skeptical.  How could Woo Themes be any different?  Not to mention that I’d already got a theme designed by custom WordPress theme pioneer, Brian Gardner. 

Syntax blunder : Please check that all spins are closed In a minimal amount of time, you will get maximum proceeds with the aid of a new backend that permits the straightforward application of options and multiple styles to each available theme on Woo Themes.  You could have an extended knowledge base, assistive tutorials, and detailed Woo themes paperwork readily available.  You may also have access to a unsurpassed support forum.  If you need direction or tech support on basic customization issues, look no further than the Woo Themes Ninjas.  Woo Themes knows that client contentment is critical.  There are must be met, and they know you need to keep your blog on the sharp edge.  This is the reason why Woo Themes swears to pass along at least two fresh themes each month.  All of these resources are open to you with a subscription to any of the impressive Woo Themes bundles. 

Of course, the crux of the concern is whether or not Woo Themes is as valued as it appears. 

It is my modest view that the solution to that inquiry is a resounding, “Absolutely.” Woo Themes is worth it’s weight in gold, and this belief is coming from somebody who is no amateur when it comes to WordPress.  I’ve tried many free and premium themes, and none compare to Woo Themes. 

In the admin section of Woo Themes, you will notice a unique “Theme Option Tab”, which lets you do an assortment of good things,eg :

* Simply tweak your logo – show off your artistry! 

* make use of FeedBurner URL – ready-made RSS feed administration at your disposal! 

* utilize Google Analytics – see and inspect your website’s traffic information! 

* Use pictures from Flickr – feature your retrospections! 

* Upload Twitter amendments – keep the world apprised, minute by minute! 

* And more!  The possibilities are infinite, limited only by your vision. 

Adding any one of these advantages to your site is splendidly fast and easy, and it’s one of the improved things about Woo Themes.  All of the tiring work is done for you.  You do not have to trouble yourself with code or section placement.  You are set to go. 

Woo Themes and esteemed designers,eg Elliot Jay Stocks, have put their heads together to make their designs real and wholly without equal.  Woo Themes pledges to deliver to you an original, new theme on a once per month basis.  So far, they’ve systematically kept that guarantee. 

Still not convinced?  Go check it out yourself.  Tour their site, try some themes, and discover what’s being announced on their blog.  I will assure that you won’t be disappointed

do you want to be ready to get 2 woo themes for the cost of one?  Well you can at IM Cash Saver.  All you want to do is visit IM Cash Saver and see how it’s possible for you to get your hands on two woo themes for the cost of one.

Internet Marketing Success Video

Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

Before we start talking about what you should or shouldn’t do with Blogs, let’s take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have heaps of people reading each post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and hopefully linking to your blog from their website, if they have one.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.

Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, some of your interests, things you have found of interest or help on the Internet, etc.

When considering finding out more about search engine optimization; it pays to visit professionals to help you achieve the best and most rapid results.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may view your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines very much prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorize correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.

WordPress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power or flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do as well.

Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.

Get More Twitter Followers

Hi Fellow Twitter Addicts

My name is Paul Jones and I’ve had my fair share of Twitter accounts suspended.

If you’re like me, then you have fallen for a Twitter website advertising to give you loads of followers in a week.

Okay, so I lost a little bit of money trying various schemes to increase my twitter followers. However, it was money well spent because I learned loads of useful tips and tricks to help avoid the pitfalls going forward.

The first tip is to always act like a human. That means tweet on a daily basis about various stuff. Try to only have an affiliate  link in 10% of your tweets, the rest must be good content about related stuff or yourself.

Second, try to avoid hitting the daily limits on the number of people you can follow and unfollow. It’s currently around 1000 per day, so ensure you follow less than 950 per day.

Third, try to keep your follower to following ratio to a respectable number. For example, if you are following three Twitterers and you have one follower, your ratio is 3:1. Try to build you followers at a consistent rate and avoid hitting say 300:1

Forth, try using a proxy from www.proxyserverfinder.com

Fifth, do not set up more than one account from the same computer without a IP Address cloaker.

If you’re smart, then you can build a list of thousands of followers like I have done. In fact, I attracted more than 16,000 followers within a week by setting up several accounts and following various people.

If you like these tips, then you can buy my Twitter Tips DVD giving over 1 hour of content and twitter secrets plus you get a free Twitter profile with thousands of follows to get you started.

I even go into detail on how you can make money with Twitter.

USA click here

UK click here

Thanks

Paul Jones

Another big phenomenon currently sweeping the Internet is the advent of paid memberships to specific websites.  This system allows for the easy access to and dissemination of valuable content and provides not only the benefit of specialized knowledge to the subscribers, but also a handy income source for the producer.The integration of these two models can often be difficult.  You have to deal with plug-ins, member directories, instituting recurring payment structures, and a whole bunch of other hassles.  That’s where the MemberLock plug-in from Nanacast comes into play.

The biggest selling point of Nanacast’s MemberLock is the first feature you’ll notice:  it works directly “out-of-the-box.”  No fiddling with databases, no modifying your painstakingly designed theme, nothing.  The next big selling point is that the MemberLock plug-in works with your Nanacast account to completely automate the recurring payments to your subscribers. 

If a subscriber decides to stop paying, then their account in the MemberLock plug-in is automatically disabled.Such a level of systems integration means the supply of new content is the only thing left to get the dollars rolling in.And on the subject of recurring payments, it is easy to establish the payment structure and schedule in the way that suits you.  Want to set up free trial membership for customers who buy one of your other products?  Nanacast can do it, and set specific date ranges for that trial as well as special pricing points should those users decide to fully enrol.

Last, but certainly not least, is the use of “teasers” in the MemberLock system.  This system allows you to create little teaser sections of your WordPress posts, like the introductory paragraph, and have them accessible to the public.  Then, if the viewer clicks on the “Read More” link, they will be automatically forwarded to your sales letter (with a section for your registered members to log in, of course).  And what shopping cart system will be powering that sales letter?  Nanacast, of course, because this product is one of the first fully integrated delivery and business automation systems ever created.  Whatever you want to do in e-commerce, odds are Nanacast can handle it.

However, as you spend more time writing your blog and subscribing to server space, you realize that it’s taking up too much of your time without generating income. Well, you don’t have to worry about that since there is a way for you to make money out of your blog. You can generate income from what you write every day. There are several ways that you can do this.

You need to acquaint yourself with the world of net marketing, if you want to make a profit. After all, people are interested in what you have to say. Maybe now’s the time to consider the leap to your own online business. With good management strategies, you could quit your ‘day job’ and do just fine!

Here’s how it goes, you have a popular blog site with a regular stream of people commenting and visiting it. First thing to ask, do you have any ads posted? Any links to direct your readers to additional material? Does it have any streaming audio or RSS feeds? If you said “no,” to most of these, then it’s time for an upgrade. Knowing about these things can help you turn your regular blog into something more profitable. The best way to do this is to learn from blogging guides.

Blogging guides do not generally teach you how to write. You’ve got that down. What blogging guides do teach you is how to market your blog. While you may have an indestructible rapport with your readers, that won’t make you any money. You need targeted ads for products and services your readers are looking for, to enhance their knowledge or skill sets.

Let’s say, you’re writing about greenhouse gardening. Most of your readers would want further information about how to build and maintain them. They would want books that teach them more information or a company where they can order materials from. Just about any further information would be appreciated by your readers.

You know how to find what your readers want. You need to know how to form affiliate agreements, whereby your link to greenhouse garden products results in a commission for you, when your reader clicks through and buys that product.

If you’re not currently integrating relevant graphics, submitting to directories and social networking sites, you’re missing out on lots of traffic. If you’re not conversant in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you need to get on the ball!

There are free blogging tutorials to get you started. Once you’ve got a handle on how to make money, invest in a good blogging guide. You’ll make money!

Traffic comes from organic search engine lists and from my personal experience, this traffic is the most targeted and therefore valuable. Conversion rate from the current way better than any similar organic flow of the AdWords ads. These days net is flooded with swindlers and cons, that is why paid advertisements are getting less and less trusted…

This is the reason why I consider search engine optimization as the sole trustworthy way to go for a long term online business. First off, you want to select one of all of these strategies and methods ways to do SEO. It’s actually easy to get lost in the start but then you may get more assured with each right step you make.

Decision-making-page optimization is the most reasonable first step you can. Page optimization means to clean up your Word density in the 2-4% of all the content, the establishment of appropriate meta tags (not essential these days, because the former) and tittles page.

If you have any pictures on your site, do not forget to set up your most important keyword as an optional text of these pictures. Having your keyword in the web site name is an excellent concept to raise your rankings too.

These steps are the best from the entire SEO process and not making them likelihood is that you are wasting your rankings instantly. When you’re fine with on-page SEO it’s time to get on off-page SEO optimization. Many marketers hate this process outlining it as boring one. Well, I can say that it’s all about how you are approaching it. When you understand how to do SEO and are assured about the future results of your work, it is not tedious or uninteresting in the slightest.