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

Yesterday we talked about the value in your website stats and how they can be keyword goldmines to help you with your SEO. If you’re not already using your stats, here are some ways to tap into that knowledge.

• Google Analytics
• MyBlogLog
• Wordpress Stats
• AWStats

Google Analytics

Google’s free tool is quick and easy to join and provides you with valuable infromation. If you want to do a PPC (pay per click) campaign, you can do it right from Analytics.

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is great for blogs because it’ll tell you for free how people are getting to your site and what they’re clicking on when they get there. There’s a free service that gives you limited info or you can upgrade to get more information for a fee. This site is great for social networking as well!

WordPress

If your blog is a Wordpress blog, you need to just go to your global dashboard to get more information to help you learn about your statistics.

Knowledge is power so getting as much knowledge as you can about your site or blog’s visitors can help you come up with an internet marketing strategy that can bring about great results.

Have a most outstanding day.

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

Are you using widgets on your blog? Remember the plain old WordPress themes like Kubrick? Today blogs can be much fancier.  WordPress is the industry standard in blogs and can be great for monetization and SEO and it’s quite widget-friendly.

What do widgets do?

Widgets can simply dress up your blog or they can provide function as well. They’re simple to insert and generally you can just paste the code into a text widget and place it where you like.  Many sites offer widgets for you to grab and use.  They can help you put advertising on the site as well as direct your traffic elsewhere. Here are some examples of blog widgets you might consider using:

Twitter or Plurk

These widgets can sit on your site and tell people what you’re doing. You can get the widget from your user settings and it’ll allow your website visitors to read your statuses, click to subscribe or follow your updates as well as let them see others on your friends list.

EzineArticles

Ezinearticles.com has a widget that feeds your articles to your site which can be great for your marketing efforts.

My Favourite Widgets

I’m a bit of a self-professed widget junkie.MyBlogLog has one of my favourite widgets. There are a few to choose from that look great and can show people your various blogs or your activities in social marketing so people can see the sites you Digg or Stumble as well as links for new posts in cyberspace. Wink offers my other favourite options as it also lets people check out a lot of different aspects of your online activity and is customisable so it’ll blend well into just about any template.

Social profile sites often have widgets you can use that can help you with social bookmarking and networking as well as dress your blog for success. There are also functional ones that feed internet marketing ads and other blogs for advertising and link exchanges. What widgets do you use and why?

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