Those of us who are really serious bloggers, and wish to provide high quality content to our reader base, know that it is important to be well organized. For example, we do not want to look all evening just for an article idea, while our readers are waiting in anticipation for our next post. The best way to make sure that we really do our work on time is by setting deadlines. For this idea to work you should also tell another person when the deadline is, so that someone else will be able to check on you later. It can be a family member or a friend, however, it is important that it is someone you have contact with on a regular basis. Basically, the way it works is that you decide that you need to write, for example, two unique posts until tomorrow 6PM. You are not going to settle for anything else, and naturally, you will need to have time for choosing a topic, researching it, writing it, and at the end, making any possible changes. You can even implement deadlines for each step, such as looking for a topic to write about, or researching it. In the beginning it might be hard to work with deadlines; however, I ensure you that you will eventually learn to work a lot more efficiently. Do not worry if initially you are going to have some problems sticking to deadlines, because it might take some time to adjust.
If you are a blogger, you are probably very interested in attracting traffic to your site. One of the most interesting ways to attract visitors is through contests and giveaways. Here are some ideas that others have used in the past:
-Over a period of a week, Darren at ProBlogger organized a giveaway of over $54,000 in cash and prizes. He had fifty thousand in cash and prizes donated by generous sponsors to this event. Every cent of them was given to his readers. Prize values ranged from just a few dollars to thousands of dollars. It was definitely the biggest giveaway I have heard about. One of the rewards included services like new blog installation & customized template package, custom logo design, blog header design, custom WordPress theme, one hour blog consulting, entrepreneurial books, and blog analysis. As you see, there were a lot of interesting rewards given out.
-Garry Conn organized a traffic contest where he offered the winner a unique chance to get advertised on his site for one week. The winning blog received a special banner designed by Garry, and the ads of the winning blog were displayed on each single site of Garry�s blog. Garry asked participants to write a post about this event, and link to his site with specific keywords. There was a random drawing to determine the winner.
If you ever decide to organize a similar contest or giveaway, I hope that the above examples will prove to be useful to you.
Being a blogger requires many different talents. There has been a lot of talk lately about the fact that bloggers should also be engaged in social activities. If you start a brick and mortar business, then whoever drives by or walks by, will see your store. On the other hand, if you have a blog and do not advertise, then you are not going to be visible at all. One of the best ways to market your website is to get involved in networking. You need to know some influential webmasters that will help you in different ways, including linking to your site. The more people link to you, the higher your pages will appear in the search results. This way you will have more visitors coming to your site as well.
Networking is an important aspect of blogging, and one of the ways to have contact with other blogger is through social networks. One main problem with social networks is that they attract people with different interests. Fortunately, there are more and more social networks being created that cater to particular interest groups. Actually, there is an interesting social network that is targeted at Internet marketers and bloggers, namely socialauthority.ning.com. This is a good opportunity to get involved right now, and who knows who you might meet there. Maybe it will be someone who will share his knowledge with you, or you will get the support of the people who share your passion and will help you with their guidance.
I found a rather original website that offers some funny cartoons that you can post on your blog without paying anything. I think that using images is a good idea for bloggers, as some people are a lot more responsive to images than to text. Actually, I have seen a cartoon from this website on another blog, and I thought that it was quite funny. I just want to give an example how you can incorporate such cartoons in your posts:
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
I am sure that a lot of your readers will like the cartoons.
There are many services being offered that advertise that they are able to spot plagiarism, and some of them are even free. However, I would like to present you with a very simple method. First of all, the word.plagiarist is derived from the latin word ‘kidnapper’, and it basically means that a person takes credit for someone else�s work. If you do not want anyone else to take credit for your work, you can use the Google Search engine in order to find if any of your articles are on other people�s websites. To do this select some parts of your articles and copy/paste them to Google. Look carefully at the search results to see what websites are listed there. Remember do not make accusations before you make sure that someone indeed copied your articles.
Of course, searching for plagiarism using a search engine might take a lot of time. Nonetheless, it is an excellent solution for those who do not wish to pay for similar services. Those who do not wish to pay may also consider using Copyscape, as it allows a limited number of searches per day for free. Whatever you choose, make sure that no one is copying your content without permission.
Until very recently bloggers were relatively unknown and they did not have such a big influence. Times have changed though, and there are hundreds of thousands of active blogs and bloggers. There are some bloggers that are very well known and respected. Many of them can compete with major newspapers, and have thousands of subscribers. That is because blogs besides giving out valuable information can also achieve one other thing that newspapers cannot � provide a sense of belonging to a community.
Most bloggers are writing their own articles and quoting only small amount of text in their posts. On the other hand, some bloggers are posting large chunks of articles from newspapers. This in turn has encouraged subscriber newspapers to form The AP, which uses the Attributor to detect copied content from newspapers. If you write your own articles you do not have anything to worry about; however, if you are copying large amount of text from popular newspapers you may get caught. Writing your own articles is very rewarding, so I encourage you not to copy text from anywhere else, unless you want to quote some short paragraphs for various reasons. After all, we want bloggers to have good reputation and to be respected.
It seems that some websites are blocking search engines from spidering some parts of their sites. This includes website like Craiglist and Del.icio.us.
Last year, for example, many SEO websites were reporting that Yahoo has blocked other search engines from accessing certain links on Del.icio.us. What did it mean to an average Internet user? I do not think it really had such an impact, although it might have been a problem for webmasters who were receiving many backlinks from Del.icio.us in hopes to improve their site rankings. Those of us who had many incoming links from Del.icio.us might have noticed less links being indexed by Google. Since PageRank is determined by the number and quality of links, having less links might have even resulted in Page Rank dropping on some of the websites.
This situation only proved that our marketing and promotion strategy should be diversified. It should include many different websites from which we hope to receive links from. If you advertise using many different methods, then you reduce the chance of anything going wrong. After all, there is very small probability that all of your marketing methods will stop working at the same time.
There are a lot of blog directories worth submitting your blog to. Many of them are still accepting new websites, while some of them no longer exist. To save you some time, today I am going to present various directories and toplists that have worked and have accepted new members during the last few months. Here they are:
www.blogtoplist.com
www.blogratedirectory.com
www.topblogarea.com
www.blogging.blogranking.us
www.blogrankers.com
www.besthyip100.com
www.worldtopblogs.com
www.aliciadamita.ontoplist.com/join.php
www.topbloglists.com
Usually, the difference between directories and toplists is that to get most out of a particular toplist you are required to put its widget on your site. Fortunately, they do not take a lot of space. Once you put a widget on your site, every time a person visits your blog a particular toplist is going to register it. As a result of this, you are going to climb higher and higher in its rankings. When it comes to directories, you do not need to place any widgets. By simply submitting your site to them you will get a linkback and possibly a lot of unique visitors to your blog.
If some of the directories or toplists mentioned above do not work anymore please let me know by leaving a comment.
Social bookmarking is a very effective way to market a blog. It is also a way to make sure that your highest quality posts will get noticed. Participating in social bookmarking can bring you a lot of traffic to your site that you have always dreamed about, and as a result, make your blog more popular. Why not start from today submitting the best articles from your blog to a few bookmarking sites, so that they would be viewed by thousands of visitors? All of the bookmarking sites listed below should be working as of today, and registering there should not take you more than a few minutes. I did not provide links to them as there can be very easily found through any browser. Here goes the list: Backflip, Blinklist, Blogmemes, Delicious, Google, Linkagogo, Magnolia, Rawsugar, Simpy, Spurl, and Smarking. The important thing about social bookmarking is that you should only try to submit your most valuable articles. Make sure that they are interesting and that they include some useful information. If you are going to submit such articles, then I am sure that you will receive a lot of traffic from social bookmarking websites. You might even gain loyal visitors this way.
There are many reasons why a reader may want to contact a blogger. I think that most bloggers should allow their readers to contact them in some way. Webmasters can decide either to display their email publicly, or to have a contact form. Using a contact form will allow your visitors to contact you, but at the same time you will avoid spam by not giving away your email address.
There are also many blogs that can be contacted through email that is displayed when you enter their homepage. In such a case you just need to copy the address, and go to your email account to send them a message. On the other hand, you will not find an email address being displayed anywhere on many blogs. Many of them will be using a contact form plug-in. Here are only some reasons to have this plug-in installed:
-No one will see your email address, so no one will be able to send any spam. You will not be flooded with hundreds of email messages that you have no interest in. Spamming is a real problem these days so it is important to try to avoid giving away your email whenever possible.
-Contact form is an easier way for a reader to contact a blogger. He will not even have to go to his email account. Most readers will appreciate that they have such an convenient way of contacting you.
-Contact forms look more professional, and will make your blog more attractive to readers.