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Here’s a popular but thorny problem I’ve had. How to remove the default blog header text when you want to place an image in your header instead of the default.

Great tips on getting more traffic to your hub pages. By hub pages we mean creating accounts on Squidoo and Hubpages

clipped from www.jackhumphrey.com Here are some links to some of the better Hubs on getting more traffic to your HubPages and just making better received, more popular HubPages. How I got my hub to be on Google’s first page by Mark Knowles How to Make a Link Worthy Hub by Paul Edmondson Beginners Guide to Successful HubPage Writing by Rik Ravado How to get a massive amount of traffic to your hub or website by retireyoung How to Make More Attractive HubPages by WordPlay How to use Google Analytics for your Hubpages by caspar Ultimate Hub Traffic Tips And Tools by stubbs

clipped from www.jackhumphrey.com I’m constantly asked how to make money blogging. So here’s my blogging advice. While there is a lot of detail involved in creating a profitable blog, you can boil down profitable blogging into four simple steps. Select A Profitable Niche Create A Blog Around That Niche Drive Traffic to Your Blog Monetize Your Blog Now, if it’s that simple, why aren’t more people successfully making money online? rom my research, questions I’ve received from my clients, and personal experience, I’ve been able to narrow it down to a few main obstacles why people are not successful online.

Guest Blogger Greg Gilles argues the reasons preventing this seemingly simple strategy from being implemented are:

1) Information Overload

2) No Step By Step Business Plan

3) Lack Of Research

4) Lack of Technical Expertise and finally

5) Going It Alone

We recommend signing up for Jack’s  Social Power Linking Club

The Internet’s first pay-per-page wiki site sells its thousandth page on the way to a million dollar goal. A virtual land grab is underway as customers seek to purchase best available keywords for development or resale.

clipped from www.prweb.com What’s being touted as the latest Internet land grab came virtually out of nowhere. Tempted by the potential resale value of highly searched words like “Music” or “Credit Cards,” some customers are buying up to fifteen pages at a time. As many as 50 pages have been sold in a single day as the rush to secure popular terms continues.

One of the few sites inspired by Alex Tew, that managed to get any traction

What is RSS Marketing ?

RSS marketing is a tool used by many on the Internet to deliver advertisements, emails, customer support responses, ezines to clients and potential clients without the concern of Spam filters hindering the receipt of the email. Spam filters have created serious problems for companies marketing through email and almost 65% of the emails you send are not even opened by the recipient. This really will hurt your business if you do not find a way to get your information to clients and potential clients. That is what RSS marketing is all about, getting your information directly to the client and potential client.

Another reason to consider RSS marketing is because currently web site visibility is very difficult and only getting worse as more and more web pages flood the web. Finding a way to get your web page to be returned as the number one result in such search engines as Google is almost impossible with traditional methods, but is easy with RSS marketing.

Not to mention the increase in advertising costs that make this option almost impossible for most home based internet businesses. If you have found your advertising and marketing methods are not returning the results you had hoped, then consider RSS marketing.

RSS marketing is free as well as user friendly. This internet tool allows even the smaller businesses to compete with the larger ones because getting information to potential customers is not based on money. RSS is a publishing tool for the Internet that handles companies internet marketing and publishing needs. Obviously, every company needs this and especially small companies that rely on business to survive day to day. By using this tool, your company will be able to reach more clients, potential clients, subscribers, and the like all the while increasing your status on the web. There are several things that RSS marketing will do for your home based internet business. First, it will increase your rankings on search engines as well as direct new traffic to your Web site through RSS search engines that target different markets. Traffic is what supports web pages, so increasing your traffic and receiving new traffic is certainly a priority of business owners.

RSS also has the ability to get your URL listed with all search engines fast and easy. No more waiting weeks for your URL to get listed with search engines, RSS marketing allows this to happen almost immediately. This is certainly a good choice for new web pages that are looking to increase web traffic. Another awesome aspect of RSS marketing is that it can get your web page returned as the number one result for your web pages’ most popular keywords.

Among its other offerings, RSS marketing allows your company to market in different and new ways in order to attract more traffic to your site. This Internet marketing tool is dedicated to getting the most possible attention for your Web site as well as marketing your site in new and interesting ways. Consider using RSS today and see how it changes your marketing strategies and web site traffic.

Copyright 2005 Paul Jesse

Paul Jesse, retired government employee, private pilot, lifetime student of internet marketing and author of numerous home business articles. He created Sheamarketing.com to assist those wishing to start a home internet business. http://www.sheamarketing.com

Chris Garret dropped a post on Performancing. He talks about all the hats a pro blogger has to wear and asks the question “Time for Team Blogging?“

Chris mentions the following:

Entrepreneur – the ideas, the vision, motivation and drive
Salesperson – brings in the advertising, sponsorships, does the deals
Bookkeeper – keeps the numbers in check
Editor - controls the output, checks and amends for quality, final decision on topics
Researcher – investigates stories and information for articles, gathers facts
Writer – does the actual writing, possibly based on the researchers gathered materials
Designer – keeps the blog looking great, formats posts so they look their best
Organiser – admin, project management, to-do lists, calendars, diaries …
Tech Support – backups, fixes things when they go wrong, hosting, software upgrades, modules, ad serving …
Mentor – impartial wisdom and advice, been there got the t-shirt
Network Manager – for when the enterprise grows from one blog to many, someone needs to run the farm

He then goes on to say:

I think it would be fair to say that it is a rarity that one person encompasses all the qualities required to an excellent degree. I can get by in most areas but my designs will never win awards, I can sell but find it daunting and bookkeeping? Well maths has never been my strongest point …

In the “Beermat Entrepreneur“, Mike Southon and Chris West proposed that any business, as well as the Entrepreneur requires four “cornerstones”. These cornerstones have backgrounds in technical, delivery, finance and sales. If you see your blog(s) as a business (and you should if you want to be “pro”) then these roles do directly relate to hats a blogger needs to wear.

I could not agree more with Chris here, especially as someone who is building a network myself. So what options are open for a pro blogger? If team blogging is the way forward, what about joining a blog network?

I think it could be argued that one of the advantages for a blogger in joining a network is that most of these things are taken care of for the blogger, so if your talent is creating content, you are free to do so – the network should be working on creating the revenue side of things. Of course for any pro, you still need to have an eye on finances, but not to the same extent as running everything.
If you look at the guys who are Search Engine Optimizers, that’s all they do, they simply sign up with a company like Commission Junction who give them the products to promote and then get on with creating sites to drive sales to their partner companies, the only focus they have is on S.E.O.

For a blogger it should be the same. To my mind the blogger and the network are in a partnership: The network has a responsibilty to maximise the content the blogger provides, if he does so, then all parties should be happy with the deal. I think the only problem for blog networks at the moment (including my own) is they are all relatively new.

As I have said previously, upon creating a network, it was important for me to have this team together from the outset, though admittedly, at this point some people are wearing more than one hat from the list above.
But the 4 cornerstones that Chris mentions have been there from the start.

A Validation of Wordtracker – The Essential Tool

As I previously stated, Wordtracker (along with Search Engine News) is what you should get before you even start a website, put up a webpage, or even start marketing a business on the internet.

So why use Wordtracker when the Overture tool is free? Well, because the Overture keyword tool is not able to identify singular and plural words for example, ‘Blog’ and ‘Blogs’ will be treated as the same word and therefore the tool does not give an accurate guide as to what’s being searched for. You will consequently be given different results for these two words. Furthermore, because tools that search engine marketers use, actually query the Overture and other search engine bases, the keyword results are inflated by this process further reducing the credibilty of the results. Which leaves Overture’s tool, well, useless.

What Wordtracker Does
Wordtracker offers a database of 350 million search queries from which you can effectively build keyword lists for use in search engine optimization and pay per click advertising.

Wordtracker Features Include
Database of 350 million real search engine queries compiled from top Metacrawlers:
*Simple, exact/precise, compressed, comprehensive, misspelling, lateral, and Thesaurus search.
*Returns singular, plural, uppercase, lowercase, and capitalized versions of a search query
*Returns a list of similar keywords that bear any relation to your search query.
*Displays the search count for each keyword. Shopping basket to store your keywords.
*Competition search finds keywords that have few competing web pages in major search engines.
*Set up to 7 projects, where you can add, swap, and delete keywords.
*Allows you to export or email the saved keywords. Top 1,000 long and short term search reports.

Why and How is Wordtracker Useful for Your Blog ?
When creating web pages for Search Engines you need to focus your attention on what people want. In reality, the only way to find this out is by finding out what people are searching for when using the major search engines.
Lets take, as an example: “Blogging about the XBoX”. If we put xbox in as a keyword, first we get a list of related keywords, which can be clicked on individually. If we click ‘xbox’ we get totals for each search term. What we actually see is that the top search is actually for xbox360 with over 38,000 searches on an average day, next is xbox cheats with over 9000. Further down the list, the search term ‘buy xbox 360′ gets over 1500 searches.
Now, if you blog about the xbox, wordtracker can help you target the content for you blog: Are you going to write about xbox cheats, or a review of the xbox 360 and where to buy it? If you want to make money from your blog, its important that the articles you write have the relevant words in them; words that people withh actively search out. Wordtracker can make the difference between your content been found in the search engines or not.

Don’t start blogging without it. get Wordtracker now

Hosting is rather like the importance of location for a business on the high street or in the mall. If you take the wrong position your business will suffer, and most likely fail. Just like Location Location Location is important for a bricks and mortar business, then choosing the right host is the same for your blog. It’s no good if you do lots of hard work on your site only to find it’s down every day when the server gets busy. You need confidence in a network you need a reliable web hosting service, to me I would rather pay a few bucks more per month (actually right now I am paying nothing at all but more on that later) and have peace of mind that I am in good hands, than go cheap and lose out on revenues because my site is down.

You would think picking a domain name for your blog is straightforward enough. Just use my name or the name of my company/business, OK?

It’s never as simple as that. You need to take a little time over chosing a domain name, some serious thought should be given to ensuring the domain name you select will enhance your business.

I feel that it would be a valid exercise and possibly of some use to others if I write about my own experiences and views on buying domain names.

So what do we look for?
The key factors in choosing a domain name concerns the nature of the site and search engine optimization. If you are trying for a particular keyword phrase, you may be better off using that keyword phrase in your domain name. For example the keyword ‘VOIP’. For example VOIP info blog.

Google, for instance, looks at the domain name when evaluating a site. If the words in your domain name are spaced with dashes, many believe it will help in the ranking process which may(or may not) be the case.

This is why you see so many ‘my-domain-name.com’ style domain names on the net.

They are not easy to remember and they don’t always feel they hold as much relevance as proper keyword optimization on the content itself.

If your business focuses on a very specific area, strong consideration should be given to the utilzation of relevant keywords in your domain name.

What about the use of the word ‘Blog’ in the Domain Name.
Many bloggers find that with Google Adense they get a lot of blog ads coming up because the word is there. I, on the other hand, have found that unless you are writing about blogging, however these tend to go away quite quickly once the content of the site becomes clear and tend to get more relevant as time goes on.
A more valid reason for not putting ‘Blog’ in the titles is because the average user does not know what a blog is. At the end of the day, to the average surfer, a blog is still a website pure and simple. I don’t feel that this is an insurmountable problem and indeed I have quite a few sites ending in the term ‘Blog’. I can only speak from my own experience but I don’t see it makes a tremendous difference.

Why ‘.com’?
Finally, for an international domain your domain name should end in “.com”. IN my opinion, this is an extremely important point and I can find no evidence to the contrary. In plain English, the fact of the matter remains that when people think of sites, they always type in ‘.com’. Of course there are other extensions and .us, .net, .biz, etc., may seem unique, but the addend will kill your traffic. People have been mentally conditioned to type in .com, so don’t select any other ending if you can help it. If you do, a smart competitor will register the .com version of your name to get some free traffic at your expense. I’ve learnt this painful lesson from personal experience.

Where should you buy domain names?
We suggest Weycrest. Their prices are reasonable and they have never yet let us down.

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