If you blog to make money online, here are three tools you need to use straight away. If you’re not already using these tools, they can make a difference to your traffic and your earnings.  If you’re using them already and have some other tools that you find indispensable, we’d love to hear what they are!

RSS

A lot of blog templates have RSS built in. If not, you should add it. Really Simple Syndication can help you feed your blog to other places and have people subscribe to you.  In a future post, we’ll talk about some of the things you can do with your feeds!

MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog or BOTH

I’ve talked a lot about these tools here on SeanSEO and it’s because they add a level of interactivity to your blog. Using these interactive tools puts you in a directory and provides you with colourful widgets for your blog that allow you to see who’s visiting.  When you click on a widget you can be taken to blog communities, ratings pages, tag clouds and individual member lists which can help you find more followers to network with and is a great tool to use for finding places in your niche to comment and trade links with.  There are many benefits to using these services  as they’re a combination of a blog directory and social marketing tool.

Magic Traffic Formula

Now you should go ahead and follow your own magic blog traffic formula to get people to that blog post.  Do you have one yet? This kind of formula will include a handful of actions that you do after each blog post that will bring traffic to your website.  The tools mentioned above will start you off but your little formula for getting extra traffic will help you significantly.  Do you have a formula yet?  If not, stop back tomorrow and I’ll give you a few tips to help you brew up a formula for getting maximum mileage out of each blog post you write.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

If you’re using a niche blog to make income through various revenue streams like affiliate marketing and Google Adsense,  make sure your blog is friendly to humans and to search engine spiderbots.  Here are a few tips for making it both search engine friendly and reader-friendly.

SEO Tips For Your Blog

On your blog you’ll want to do on-page and off-page search engine optimising. This means that on the blog you do things that make search engines want to crawl you such as having blog tags, categories, using links inside your blog to other blogs posts as well as links to outside sites through your blogroll and your blog entries.

In terms of off-page SEO, you might consider visiting other blogs in your niche and linking back to your blog through blog comments.  Also use sites to catalog your blog such as Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog which can draw visitors in from other pages. Being friendly to search engines with SEO will get you more rankings and more visitors.

Visitor Tips

Once the visitors arrive, give them a warm welcome! Talk to your visitors in a friendly tone in your posts and stop by and visit their blogs to return the favour when they’ve been kind enough to comment or to link to you on their blog.  When someone leaves a comment that asks a question or compliments your site answer them and consider leaving a comment on their site as well.

Don’t overdo it on the advertisements. You may be in the blogging business for the ad revenue but if your blog doesn’t provide any value, you won’t have many visitors and you definitely won’t get any subscribers. Carefully managing your blog to appeal to the people and the search engines will help increase your chances of online success.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

A blog is only as good as the traffic it gets. Trading links with other bloggers in your niche is a good idea. Even those in competition with one another will often share one another’s links, especially in the blogosphere. Many people blogroll others as well as do guest posts, post blog comments or create a links page. This can be great as it can help you build your search engine rankings because it is like getting into a clique where every one involved gets to be a bit popular.

Finding Blogs in Your Niche

If you want to find people to trade links with and you’re a blogger, check out other blogs in your niche. Have a look at tools such as MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog which can help you find blogs to check out. You can find plenty of blogs with similar tags and join their neighbourhood. By doing so, you’re also increasing your own profile. Comment on other blogs and link back to your own blog (without spamming, of course) and join blog neighborhoods through the Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog tools. By doing this, you’ll also get interest from other people interested in your subject matter

Link Love

If you give other some link love on your blog by posting a link to their blog, they will often return the favour. They might write a post featuring something you wrote and they might put you on their blogroll. The blogosphere is a vast place but within specific niches is actually quite a tight knit group and when people like what they see and think they’ll get something out of your blog (whether it’s link love reciprocation or valuable information) they’ll probably visit often.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Should you do social bookmarking on your blog? Today’s post covers the how and the why? Having a blog of your own is fabulous and can build your SEO on your site as well as sell your wares as a marketer but only if people find it and read it.

Why Use Social Bookmarking?

Today, the web is all about Web 2.0 and the social side of the Internet and that’s one of the reasons blogs can be so effective and profitable. Not only does the way the web works with social bookmarking give you the ability to get more exposure for your blog but it helps you find more relevant websites to link to and to gain knowledge from as well. Web 2.0 tools can be integrated into your site and you can also use them yourself after you’ve created a new blog entry. Here are a few tools you can use and a few tips:

Technorati

Technorati is a blog directory. Once you list your blog, people can find you. The more popular you are, the more potential new visitors you get. Technorati is a robust tool worthy of a full post about it which we’ll explore another day but for today, let’s just say that by using technorati tags in your blog, you can increase your blog visitors based on people who want the information you’re sharing. This is also a great tool for keeping up with blogs you are interested in reading.

Blog Catalog or MyBlogLog

Joining Blog Catalog or MyBlogLog gives you access to another directory of blogs and people can find you in those directories. There are also some great widgets you can display to dress up your blog and by visiting other blogs in your niche, you can display your face on other blogs and entice new visitors.

Digg

Digg is a great tool for getting traffic to specific articles. By logging into the tool and submitting specific articles, you can bring traffic to your site. When you put a digg button on your post, you also get the bonus of letting your blog subscribers or visitors show their appreciation by giving you some social love.

There are dozens and dozens of social tools out there to help you maximize your blog and website’s potential which can help you make more money online.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008