If you need to write content for your blog or a site that promotes your affiliate products, it can be frustrating when you are faced with writer’s block. Don’t despair, help is here! There are a lot of things you can do to free yourself of a block so you can keep fresh content on your sites and get people visiting as well as search engines too!

Stumble Around Cyberspace

Cyberspace has a lot to see and do and visiting websites can inspire you. Stumbleupon.com is not just a great tool for self-promotion but it can offer you great inspiration as well. It presents you with sites based on categories you’re interested in so be sure you’re signed up to stumble through sites in your own niche.

Visit Your Mentors

Hopefully you are inspired by a successful online entrepreneur (hint, hint) and if so, stop by their blogs and read their material. Chances are, you could feel inspired to write your own stuff.

Good Ole Google

Google News, Google Trends, Google Blogs, etc, etc, etc…Surf Google’s many areas until you feel inspired so you can write. If all else fails, watch TV or take a walk and clear your head and chances are that when you come back, you’ll have ideas.

Have a most outstanding day.

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

When you create a new website or blog, you’re anxious to see some results and if you don’t do anything to get noticed it could take time for the search engine spiders to find you and index you. Optimising for search engines will help you get indexed faster. Here are a few tips to help you get noticed quickly.

Submit Your URLS to Search Engines

Here are places where you can manually submit:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

Social Bookmarking

Go to sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us and bookmark your site. These sites will bring traffic to your site as well. You can also get traffic and attention by trying to get noticed on places like Technorati, Twitter and Plurk. Be sure if you have other sites, you link from them to your new site thorugh blogrolls or link pages. Blog about your new site as well on your other online homes and write a few articles for article sites with links to your new site in the resource box. Spending a bit of time getting search engines to notice your website could shave days or even weeks off the process of getting organic search engine results.

Have a most outstanding day.

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

If you operate a blog or website either as your primary earnings method or as an addition to your money making ventures you might consider trading links with someone in your niche that has a complimentary product or service.  You can trade links and help one another with SEO. It’s a great idea to trade blog comments and even write guest posts for each other.

Why Trade Links?

Getting links on other related blogs in cyberspace and related blog links on your blog as well can help you with your SEO and can contribute to increased page rank with search engines. The more you’re plugged into topics and linked, the the more relevant search engines will view your site as being.

Places to Find Other Bloggers in Your Niche

Blog Catalog is a great place to find bloggers in your niche. Search on a tag (category) related to your own niche and you’ll find others in that category that you can visit. You can also send private messages to others to suggest that you trade blog links with them in your blogroll.

Consider visiting forums and putting up requests for trading links as well. Webmaster forums or forums in your particular niche can be a great place to get ideas and find bloggers to do blog carnivals and niches with.

Have a most outstanding day.

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

Spam on your blog means a few things. On a positive note, people are finding you and that’s a good thing. It doesn’t sound like such a good thing when it becomes a pain to manage but one thing is for sure, your blog is valuable enough to make spammers want to utilise your site. They’ll post trackback spam and bogus comments filled with hyperlinks to their adult websites. You can’t let it go on but there are things you can do.

But what is an internet marketer to do?

If you are using Wordpress for your blog, consider using the Askimet plug-in.  This will catch a big portion of your spam and save you considerably on moderating time.  You can also set your your comments as moderated only which will stop the spam before it’s published. You can quickly view the comments and manually approve the ones you want to let through. You can set up some blogs so that commenters are approved automatically after they have one approved comment but be careful about this because some crafty spammers can take advantage of this loophole and post one useful comment only to come back later and try to post spam on your site. You might need to de-approve some commenters.

All in all, you want to be choosy about who is allowed to link to your site because association with certain kinds of sites can bring your own search engine ranking down. The good news is that search engines seem to be finding your site and people think it’s valuable enough to try and capitalise on your success!

(Image courtesy of sxc.hu)

Have a most outstanding day.

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

There are loads of reasons to blog and plenty of free blog options out there. Whether you choose to do a free blog or host your own or do a combination of the two is up to you. Today’s post explores the pros and cons of each option. I choose to do a combination of these things for my own purposes mostly because in my early online days, I didn’t realise the benefits of having my own blog on my own domain and didn’t realise just how inexpensive it could be to do it on my own and be able to have just what I wanted.

The pros of free blogs include that there are no costs and that they usually have an easy interface or template for you to use so you don’t have to be at all technical to figure out how to use them.

On the con side, you have no control and they can be very simple so they may not have all the functionality you’re looking for.

With a free blog, there may be some advertising that you cannot control. With a blog on your own domain, you have much more earning potential and power over the layout of the site.

How Much Does Having Your Own blog cost?

You can typically get a domain registered for $10 or less for a one year period and hosting is often less than $10 a month when you want a basic package that hosts a blog. Wordpress is the most popular and most versatile option and you can install it for free. Your own host might even have Wordpress built into your hosting control panel making it that much easier to get up and running quickly.

Benefits of Blogging

In terms of money making potential, blogs can definitely help you. Not only do they do great in search engines because of being continuously updated but they create viral marketing for you because people will link to you in their blogroll and on their site as well. Whether you’re planning to blog for profit or add a blog to your existing site to enhance search engine optimization, you can definitely benefit. If you’re not yet blogging or not yet using this to your full advantage, it’s definitely worth looking into.

Have a most outstanding day.

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