I recently wrote a post called Are You Playing Hide and Seek With Your Market which really applies to bloggers. When I ask them what their primary goals are, what pages they are promoting that make them the most money and what the best keyword phrases for those pages are so that I can give them the strongest possible anchor text almost none of them have the answers.

If you don't know and aren't focusing on what is most important to you, how will your visitors and buyers find you? Here is the pertinent excerpt from that post:

The key questions you must answer when building traffic for your Web site are:

1. WHO is YOUR target audience
2. What exact words and phrases are they using when looking for what you offer

Exactly how to figure this out and free tools to use are in the post. Every Web site owner should make figuring this out their highest priority because those are the keywords and posts they should be promoting in all they do.

Make use of the Bookmarks. I have several for many of my different niches, such as Genealogy, with the sub-catagories of states I reseach, The surnames of the main lines in my tree. I have two blogs with the genealogy theme http://familytree4sargent.blogspot.com/ and http://thehembreehombre.blogspot.com/ . When coming across a website or blog dealing just with those,names I place it into the bookmark of choice.

I use several tool bar searches, Google, Yahoo, SIDEWIKI from google http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html This allows you to write a review about a site you have been on, also lets you comment on your own blog as well as twitter.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/ this also allows social media sharing.

debbie @linnea4591 on twitter


I use the Stumble Upon

My tip is simple - don't give up ! It is a slow process so don't expect instant results - but don't give up.

David thanks for the opportunity to share what a great idea for a post.

Looking at the list of things that 1st came to my head when I started to comment. I think the best advise I would give is to find a couple bloggers each month and developer a realationship with them till you have a nice little group of like minded people that are willing to help and support each other as their blogs and business grow.

It seems almost every day I now I connect with someone new. If you can learn to build quality relationships with the right set of people anything is possible.

I like Grant's tip about the work required for blogging. Before starting a new blog, decide what the GOAL of publishing the blog will be. What measurable outcome do you want to achieve? And is that goal possible through blogging? If so, focus all your efforts on that goal.

One common mistake in the beginning I see far to often. Provide a way to contact you besides leaving a comment. An E-mail or IM contact info should be easily found. Being able to contact someone is a must for any business or money making venture. Online is no different, provide the way to contact you that will get the quickest response. Offer multiple if you can.

Just wrote a article about things every blog must have. Aimed at newer bloggers. Article addresses this way to contact info more in depth and provides some free options and alternatives.
http://writinghood.com/online-writing/how-to-bl...

Wow, I have absorb so much from this post alone :)

My tip for bloggers is to spend time to come up with the best headlines.
It is, of course, what people come in contact with first and also what stands a post out from the crowd.

My one piece of advice would be to go to my blog everyday and get involved in the community!
Just kidding... though it would be nice :)

Actually my advice is somewhere along those lines though. I think you should continually visit blogs that are in your niche and get involved in the conversations and make new friends each day. Blogging is a community activity and the more you get involved... the more chance you have of becoming successful, and hopefully along the way you make a lot of new life long friends.

Great idea for a post by the way David!

On the technical side; if you really mean business and want to gradually expand your blog, get a decent server. Shared-platform hosting (Where you're sharing a server with others.) is OK to start with, and if it's just a tiny blog, or a set of sales pages etc on its own separate domain, then that may suffice in that instance. However, if you're planning to have thousands of posts and pages, added to over time, on a large blog that keeps growing, then a dedicated server is really the only option in the long run.

Some, maybe all, web-hosts can get arsey about a partciular domain hogging resources on a shared-platform server, and may even take draconian punitive action again such offenders.

The more plugins you run in WordPress, the more server resources are used up. Similarly a vast number of hypertext links, while maybe helpful as far as SEO ratings go, can utilise resources also, causing in some instances slow page-load times. Whilst certain WordPress plugins can be added to combat slow-loading, these again utilise further server resources, adding to the load.

In my recent experience, having been forced to move my domain(s) onto a dedicated server this summer after only just over a year, I've just had to shell out for an engineer's analysis, resulting in my instigating a further memory upgrade on my server - to both combat the requirements of extra memory requests as a result of attempted hacking, (Hence my recent unplanned short periods of downtime.) as well as to prepare for the future additions I plan to make.

Think ahead in this area; or you may well find yourself caught short as I recently did.

My advice would be to befriend your competition. They are not the enemy. There is plenty of real estate on the internet for everyone.

Wishing you and all the readers of David Risley dot com a scent-sational day!
Patty

Hey I just came across this site and it looks awesome man, keep up the good work!

For me that's easy. Because I'm a writer first, and a tech-guy a distant last. Which means the software (Wordpress, Clickbank, FTP, etc.) and blogging protocol were all new to me when I fired up my blog last June.

My invaluable tip: find a mentor who will help you, teach you and do the things you don't understand (which is part of teaching you) to get your blog up and running and then point it in the right direction. Spend the money for this, it's a great investment. Your mentor will lead you toward a great visual design, a steep learning curve, software hand-holding and quick answers to those gotta-know-now questions that keep you up at night.

All I had to do was write my ass off for the benefit of my readers.

It's worked for me. I have well over 600 subscribers and nearly 1000 daily visits after less than four months, and am growing quickly, including a finalist nod on a cool "Top Ten Blogs for Writers" list, a new ebook and another right around the corner. Sky's the limit.

You can do this. Do what you do well... and outsource the rest. Then pay attention, pretty soon you''ll be doing the scary stuff, too.

Larry
www.storyfix.com (because I'm not showing as a live link here)

Establish a consistent post schedule.

Your readers should never have to wonder when you may post again, there should be a pattern established. When staring out, if you can only post 3 times weekly, do that every week.

I'm really liking PLR material this month instead of eLance which has been my main source of content over the past 12 months. I have to rewrite the material slightly so it's unique but there's a lot of words and the topics are interesting.

Don't sweat it on the writing part of it. Don't over think what you are going to write, just write. Avoid "analysis paralysis."

Pick something that you love to blog about. I've started dozens and dozens of blogs, but none really stuck until I started one related to one of my hobbies - coffee. It's also turning into a profitable niche for me, but I don't think I would've stuck around long enough to get to this point, if it wasn't for my love, I mean addiction to coffee.

Keyword research is the most vital part of "making money online".

Longer tail, more specific keywords will result in more affiliate commissions, while going for the highest traffic amount and non-competitive keywords can make money with ppc like adsense and chitika.

#1 Tip - GET ANCHORED LINKS!

My one tip would be to find out what your readers want......then give it to them!

View other bloggers as your colleagues, not your competitors. Work with others and all of you will be more successful.

Join or form a blogging alliance or master mind group where you share ideas and help promote and support one another as well as share resources.

If you don't know what to write, write what you know.

One piece of advice, you know how hard it is to just come up with one piece of advice. Well, here it is.

Do you really want to blog? Seriously, before someone should even start a blog, they need to really think about whether they should be blogging or even want to. Blogging takes work and it takes commitment if you want to do it write. It is not easy and it is not going to be quick.

My one piece of advice would be to communicate with your audience. Build relationships with them, understand and connect with them.

You cannot successfully blog alone - it's impossible. Your audience is apart of your blog.

If you don't interact with them or give them what they want your blog is meaningless. It will just be a bunch of words that no-one cares about.

Don't be too stressed about selecting the right and final topic / niche for your blog from the day one. Many successful bloggers have started several blogs, before they have established the blog(s) they have now. Write about things you are passionate and interested in, test the waters with multiple blogs if needed and see what sticks.

Hi David,

Something that I've been doing for a while now is being consistent in putting new posts in my blogs and then using a free service like http://www.onlywire.com/ or http://pingoat.com/ to send the new posts out to all the social networking sites and bookmarking sites with the push of a button.

Being consistent in doing this seems to be getting more traffic to my blogs.

Thanks for all the tips you give to all of us trying to figure out this Internet and Blogging stuff.

Have a great day!

Robert Garcia

use simple words,sometimes someone like me who doesn't know much about IT or coding need it,and i can find that great stuff that really "understandable" on this 2 of my favorite blogs http://chethstudios.blogspot.com/ and http://www.bloggodown.com/

thanks (^_^)

Hi David,

My tip for people reading your blog is very simple...

Put an opt in form on your blog and offer a great freebie.This way your visitors have to opt in to get the freebie and you build a list...

When you have an offer you just send out a message to your list, of course you also have to give free high quality information.

Thanks!
^PV Reymond