There are certain skills that a blogger needs to posses in order to be considered by others a successful blogger. While this might not concern people who create a blog only to attract a few visitors, more ambitious bloggers should try to focus on such aspects. Here is a short list of traits that you may need:
A domain name represents a website. Some domain names might be hard to remember for various reasons. Very often, an easy to remember domain name is going to receive more traffic than a long domain name. Long domain names that consist of random letters and not words, are going to be very hard to remember. That is why having a short domain name is a great idea. You should also preferably choose a domain name that reflects the topic of the website. Many webmasters are willing to pay a lot of money for an easy to remember domain name, because a domain name represents their business. To earn money from this observation, you can be a contributor to sites like pickydomains.com that help find domain names for customers who are willing to pay $50 for such a service. You can also offer your services on your website and forums so that there will not be any middleman involved. If that is what you decide, you might be even able to earn more money this way. When it comes to your own domain, remember to choose it wisely. If you are able to register some attractive domain names then you might make some money by reselling them. One of the most important things is that domain names should be easy to remember. Short domain names are usually easy to remember; however, sometimes that is not the case. If you have a short domain name that is composed of random numbers and letters, then it might be easier for visitors to remember a longer domain name that is composed of words.
Affiliate Marketing can be the biggest source of income for any webmaster who is interested in marketing in general. This way of making money is quite popular the Internet. Under this system a merchant is letting affiliates sell his own product and services, in exchange for a commission. A situation where a customer buys a product or service thought an affiliate link is often called a lead. This type of advertising is also often called �cost per lead� based. There are different ways an affiliate can direct traffic to a certain product, including links, banners, or even product reviews. Commission Junction and ClickBank are considered to be one of the most popular websites for affiliate marketers, but there are many others which you will find by searching in Google. Overall, Affiliate Marketing is a quite interesting business opportunity for those who know how to attract traffic. That is because in order to make money with affiliate marketing you will need to have a lot of visitors to your site. Another aspect which is important is that the traffic should be targeted. The visitors coming to your site and reading about various affiliate products should have a genuine interest in the niche.
What is a dictionary? It is simply a reference book containing an alphabetical list of words with information about them. Almost everyone knows that, but I am sure that most of us from time to time need to look into a dictionary to find the meaning of a rarely used word. If you are one of those people, you can save a lot of money by using online dictionaries, instead buying traditional ones.
OneLook is a website that allows you to look for definition of words in dozens of high-quality dictionaries like Oxford English Dictionary or Encarta World English Dictionary. The search for the word �dictionary� gave results from 50 different dictionaries. You would have to spend a fortune to own that many dictionaries, and it would take you a long time to browse through all of them. Apart from saving time and money, OneLook offers technical dictionaries including computing, science, and technology. All of them are for free. I think that those who spend a lot of time surfing the Web might be able to notice an emerging trend. I am talking about the fact that many resources are being offered for free. Do you think that eventually all resources on the Web will be for free?
Sometimes it is impossible to access some websites, because there is restricted access to them. The tips I am about to present to you will be especially helpful to you if you want to access some of the pages from your workplace and the administrator banned them or restricted access to them. Another possible situation that comes to my mind is that maybe the government of your country banned some of the sites so that its citizens do not have access to certain �politically incorrect� sites. Such situations occur in China and in some other Asian countries. There are at least two methods to access your desired websites:
1. Search the banned website through Google or other search engine. After finding it, enter its cache copy. This is a very popular method and it is very easy to do. However, this may not work for websites or pages that were never cached. That should not be the case with popular websites. Most websites have many of their pages cached so you should not have problems accessing pages this way.
2. In Google or any other search engine type this keyword: ‘cache:URL name’. This will take you straight to the cache copy of that website. This method is very similar to the previous one. You should use this method only if you know exactly the URL you plan to visit. If you make even a small mistake while typing the URL, then Google is not going to list any results.
3. Try to connect using a proxy. This may not work for all websites, but it may trick many servers into thinking that you are from a different country. There are some free proxies out there that you may use and one of them is YourFreedom. It might help you access some websites that otherwise you would not be able to visit.
There are millions upon millions of existing websites, and sometimes it is not easy to find the sites that are the most useful. In my opinion, the best way to do it is to visit the most popular websites in the world. That is because those sites that are very popular, also have to be useful. Probably the most popular are search engines and emails services; however, I would like to list other type of sites this time. Here is a short list of such sites:
-Facebook is an awesome site that allows users to interact with other people. You can create your profile, interact with other users etc. Internet is a great place to meet other people, and to hang out with those whom you already know. Facebook has a lot of neat features, which make visiting this site worthwhile.
-Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia and what makes it so great is that anyone can edit its contents. This way there can be a lot of useful information accumulated very easily. While it certainly is not perfect, it is the largest encyclopedia of this type that allows users to meet new friends. It has some similarities with Facebook, but it is slightly different.
There are thousands of interesting websites on the Internet, and I am sure you will not have problems finding one that will be useful to you.
Page Rank is the most popular way of ranking websites. There is a similar tool to the popular Page Rank that offers to rate your site in a different manner. In this case its name is Real Ranker, and you can visit its website to check out your rank. What is interesting is that each site is rated from 0 to 100 points, so each site is rated in a more precise way compared to the traditional PR scale from 0 to 10. I do not think that this tool will become very popular, because it was not released by any major company. It is not even backed up by any popular company. Nonetheless, it is an appealing tool that in my opinion has a lot of potential. Visit its website to check your Real Ranker score and see for yourself.
There are many ways to monetize your blog. One of them is to implement monetization widgets. What is a monetization widget, one might ask? It is simply a script that gets displayed on your site as a widget. There are a few companies that offer such kind of widgets. I am going to list two of them, namely WidgetBucks and ScratchBack.
What is attractive about them is that they are similar to other widgets in a sense that they are easy to implement. This is especially true if you have a blogging platform like WordPress that supports plugins. Some of them work like pay-per-click ads, text lick ads, or even like affiliate links. They all might work in a different way, yet all of them provide you with an opportunity to monetize your site.
It is important to remember that while monetizing a website is a good idea, you should always keep your visitors in mind. This means that whatever ads you place on your website should be non-intrusive. Visitors will keep coming to your blog is they appreciate the content being posted there and you have to be careul not to have too many ads or widgets.
Virtual environments are an interesting concept; and recently the number of games that offer such environments has increased. Second Life is an example of such an online game. Second Life�s currency is the Linden Dollar, and it is exchangeable for US dollars in a marketplace consisting of residents, Linden Lab, and real life companies. The exchange rate fluctuates, but generally L$ 265 are exchangeable for 1 USD. Records indicate that a small percentage of players derive net incomes from this economy, ranging from a few hundred to several thousand USD per month. On the other hand, a larger percentage derive a gross income large enough to offset most of their expenditures in L$. While this game might attract people to earn money, there is also a large group of players that spend a lot of money playing this game. The truth is that they do not earn enough money to offset the expenses and because of that they will lose real money.
The popularity of virtual worlds like Second Life is growing, and some universities like San Jose State University have even built a virtual campus in Second Life. This campus spans 16 virtual acres, and is being visited by students who are on a quest for knowledge. The staff is trying to simulate real world experiences, and they hope that this will allow students to have an interesting experience. Among other things, Second Life is used to face the terror of public speaking. It will be interesting to observe whether more institutions will build their virtual property in such worlds.
You might be wondering whether I recommend playing Second Life in order to earn some additional income. I think that it might be worth a try, especially for people who have interest in playing online games. It might also be appealing for those who spend a lot of time chatting online. Do you think that Virtual environments will become more and more popular in the upcoming years?
Have you been recently focusing on attracting more readers to your blog? Were you looking for bloggers who would interested in link exchanges? Perhaps what is the most effective way of achieving your goal is to subscribe to Technorati. Once you are a Technorati member you can participate in various link exchanges, or even organize your own. Usually, anyone having a Technorati account that has a blog that is not loaded with spam or copyrighted material can participate in such programs. Let me give you an example of how such a link exchange can work. Basically, there are two ways a person can participate:
1.Through Technorati favorite exchange. In such a case you would simply need to favorite other participants by clicking on their link. Next, you should post a comment with a link that would allow others to favorite you. The organizers of such contests usually promise that they will favorite participants as soon as possible. If for some reason they would forget, simply remind them by posting a comment on their blog.
2. Another way to participate is to follow some additional steps. Those steps include publishing a post on your blog with a link to the post of the contest organizer, as well as links to other participants. In your post you should explain the rules of the link exchange. Other bloggers will in exchange link to your own post. The best part about it is that everyone involved will benefit in some way.
There are many bloggers who participate in such programs. If you would like to exchange links with them simply visit their websites. You can find their websites by doing a search for link exchanges on Google. I would also like to encourage you to organize such link exchanges on your own.