Making money with blogs

Making money with blogs is one of the oldest ways people have been making some money on the Internet. It is also one of the hardest ways to make money. This is because it requires constant work and is a never ending process. Creating a blog is easy but making it generate money is another story. Here are 5 tips in starting up your blog to make sure it is a success.

1. Write about something you enjoy. You'll be writing a lot of content so it's best that you write about something you. 
2. Content Content Content - Content is key to making any site a success. Whether you are trying to make site for your business or a blog to make money off AdSense. Content is crucial in improving your search engine results. With more people finding your site your more likely to get clicks from AdSense.
3. Create Multiple Blogs - Some blogs have higher competition because there are already a lot of people in that particular market. Instead make multiple blogs and you'll be more likely to find results within a particular market, or even within several markets. It is all a number game. If you have have 20 blogs each making a dollar a day. Than its 20(blogs)*1(dollar a day)*30(days in a month) = $600/month.
4. Post content regularly - Post content on a daily basis. You might think this is a hassle but its the only way to succeed. If you thought making money through blogs was going to be easy you were very confused.  Blogs involve a lot of work, but it is completely doable with proper discipline.  Maintaining 20 blogs is going to be hard, but if all it takes is writing 20 articles that you already know stuff about then it isn't that hard. You already like the topic so it isn't a chore at all. Its something you enjoy. 
5. Google Forecast - This a is a new tool I have been running into that I think is also a key to making a blog a success. The forecaster or ad competition tool (don't remember what exactly its called) is found when using Google AdWords. It tells you how many people search for a particular phrase a day, in addition to the advertiser competition. You want to find something that gets a high search value and a lower competition. This means that people will be paying less to click on your ads. But it also means it will be easier to compete with other people. If you do this effectively, you'll be making less per click but be getting a lot more clicks.

These 5 tips to blog success are a start to making money with your blogs. Making money with blogs takes practice and time. If you keep to it on a daily basis and continue to grow your blog content you will be sure to make money eventually with your blogs. At the end make sure you enjoy it. If you don't enjoy writing content and maintaining your blog, then don't do it. There are millions of ways to make money but at the end you have to enjoy what you are doing.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are becoming more and more popular day by day. It is now becoming a norm to log onto these sites on a daily basis and read up on what your friends are doing.  With this in mind, websites are now becoming to use these sames sites as well. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are some of these social networking sites these businesses are starting to use.

But why would you use social networking sites?

• Keep customers informed with new products
• Quickly put out updates, whether it is a sale, or site construction etc.
• Collaborate with customers and find new ideas, by using their feedback from comments
• Promote new products and ideas
• Advertising

As you can see, there are already several reasons why web site developers should now use these important social networking sites. Even though you might not want to be involved with some of these tactics, other sites are doing it, which frankly means you have to be doing it. Website SEO you have to go with the norm and more, no more of not giving into peer pressure. There is a trick though to using Social Networking Sites, better and more efficiently than others. Here is one trick that your sure to succeed with. 

I have only came across this idea only once in the past and I thought it was a great idea, and it appeared to be working for the business tremendously.  A representative from the Snuggy company creating several fan pages for almost every college in the United States. They than invited a few people for each fan page and this soon started a swarm of people to help support the school. The titles were called things like, support your vikings, support your ducks, support your beavers etc. There was actually a ranking involved with each fan page that said how your school was competing with other schools in the number of fans were following thus causing people to want to invite more people.

Your probably wondering why these fan pages matters and it is really the key to the entire process. The snuggy representative than sent a message to each of the fan pages he created, hundreds of them, and told people to buy their college snuggy in order to support the school. Coincidentally, their is a snuggy for almost every school so this representative knew exactly what they were doing. He was able to create a market that was demographically perfect for his product in a particular city. 

As you can see, this might not work perfectly for what your trying to market but it is a great idea which isn't being done that much. With some modifications and other ideas, you can easily turn Social Networking sites into a marketing alternative you cant leave without. Not only will you be following the norm than, but you'll also be doing it better than your competition which will quickly lead into better success.

More Complex Security in Webpages

Websites are getting much more complex and the way people are attacking sites are both complex and simple. Some of the most basic things can lead into very complex attacks.

SQL Injection
This is one of the simplest to prevent but can easily be overlooked and lead to extensive damage in your website. An SQL Injection is when a user types into a form things they are not suppose to and instead submit SQL queries. For instance if you have an form that accepts a persons name and inserts it into a table of names, a user might instead type in something like "; DELETE * FROM names". If your input isn't validated and escaped, this might run on your database and delete all the names.  This can easily be fixed by validating your input and escaping your variables in your SQL query.

Brute-force-attack
A brute force attack isn't very complicated at all, its fairly simple. In this attack an attacker will repeatdly attempt to get onto your sites with a computer alogrithm until they can do something on your site. For instance, if they know johndoe@noreply.com is the username, they might try a database of passwords over and over until they are successful. This can be repeated with several different things. This can be fixed by checking how often the user submits.

The CMS issue
This is a new issue I am starting to run into more and more often with newer websites using widely used content management sites, such as Drupal. Attackers are starting to notice it is easy to find sites like this and attack them because they are all the same and consistent. I have found that attackers search for things like "node" when using Drupal. Once they have a list of sites, assuming the user has the default install, they might be able to post several comments because there is no captcha or any other interface to catch this. This same procedure can be used across the board for several different CMS.

DoS Attack - Denial of Service
A denial of service attack is when an attacker repeatdly does a procedure that caues your server to lock up. For instance this might be as simple as submitting a form repeatdly for ever, thus causing no one else to be able to use your site. There are several reasons why people will do this, from grudges to stopping your site from running because of competition issues. This can be stopped by monitoring how often a user submits forms or other services on your site.

Of course this is not an exhaustive list of security attacks but hopefully it will get your started on some complex security issues that you may encounter. Be careful and make sure you think what an attacker may do. Make sure you create backups of your data, in addition to hashing all important information so it is more difficult for an attacker to use.

Simple Security Things

There are several simple things that one can do on their site to stop a lot of headaces down the road. For simple sites, the majority of it is around email addresses.

Even though I hate to admit it, back in the day I would find target email addresses by doing things search engine searches like reservations@ and inquiries@. This would than pop up hundreds of emails that were specifically targeted to my target market of tourism. This allowed me to quickly find email addressees. Even though you cant do this on Google anymore, you can still do this on several other search engines. There are three simple ways to fix this which each have their own benefit.

Image
Instead of posting a link, post an image that shows your email address. Don't make the link a link to your email address because this will make it easy to find using a search engine. Make sure when you view the source you cant view the email address at all.

Change the text
This is a simple an easy quick fix that can be looked at as a temporary fix.  Instead of writing support@noreply.com write, support (at) noreply (dot) com. Any human who reads this, understands that you have to replace the (at) with an @ and a (dot) with a . . Any search engine won't distinguish this from other text since these are normal symbols that are used.


Create an email form
Even though this involves the most work, it is also the most beneficial. A form allows you to hide your contact information, but it also allows you to ask for additional information, like the customers name and phone number. This key information, will allow you to cut off some communication time later on during your communication with them. The only problem you'll run into this way is bots automatically spamming your form. This can easily be stopped by adding a captcha into your email form. A captcha is an validation that the user has to type into the form in order to prove they are a human. If you think you won't run into this issue, your mistaken. You will most definitely get attacked by these bots eventually.

Search Engine Submission

Search engine submission doesn't matter that much if you have a lot of quality incoming links. The reason why most sites need it, is because there site doesn't exist yet. In addition, they want the search engine spiders to find there site faster. This way they don't have to wait as long for their site to get indexed to get started on maintaining their site. The truth is, if you have quality incoming links, your site will get found very quickly.

I keep mentioning "quality incoming links" and this might not be clear to everyone. What I mean by quality is that the links not only are relevant to your site, but also come from highly ranked pages. If both are true, the spiders will index the incoming site on a regular basis and therefore will find your links on a regular basis and come to your site.

There are several sites that exist that allow you to submit to over a hundred search engines at once. Obviously, they submit to all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Alta Vista, but they also submit to scrub the web and several other smaller search engines.  You might be asking, why would I care if I submit to small search engines. The truth is everything helps, if you can get ten hits to your site a day, this could be the difference between a sale or not. It's also a lot easier to fill out one form and it does all the work for you.

A simple trick that I use is http://10minutemail.com/. For those of you not familiar with this, it allows you to create a email address temporarily for ten minutes. This allows you enough time to receive validation email links as well as other stupid emails. This cuts out tremendously on the amount of spam email you might of received otherwise. Another good idea is to create a new email address, such as marketing@mydomain.com, just for the SEO process. I made the mistake of not doing this on my first site, and now my main email address webmaster@mydomain.com gets tons of spam email. This could have easily of been avoided by creating another email or using the 10 minute mail site. You can always shut off your temporary email, and stop the spam email you may run into.

Link Exchange

Link exchange is an important concept in improving your page rank level in addition to improving your search engine position. For those of you who don't know what page rank is, it is the numeric value of 0-10 that google gives to website in how important it views them. Link exchange is a way for search engines to tell how important other website view your site.


Trade with ranked sites
This is one of the most important things. When trading with a site, make sure you view the rank of link page of the site your trading with. The website might be high ranked but they might be purposely causing there reciprocal link page to not be ranked. For example they might be telling the robots to not got there via the no-follow html tag.

Don't trade links with link farms
Only trade links with sites that have less then 50 outgoing links. Also make sure you don't link to over 50 sites. Search engines don't like to see sites with lots of outgoing links.


Change Title
When trading links, don't use the same title in all of your link exchange. A better way to describe the importance of this is to show you what search engines are looking for.  If people were to just normally link to your site because they like it and find it a good source they wouldn't all use the same tag for the link.  Each person would use something unique. The search engines know this, which is why they weed out things that have the same link.


Change Description
The description is not as important in changing as the title is, but the same philosophy follows.  Search engines don't want to see the same thing over and over so don't do this.

Link with similar sites
Although it is easy to get Viagra, and prescription sites to link to your site don't do it unless your in that business.  Links from similar sites are some of the most important sites out there. If you get irrelevant links your ranking will drop. Don't do it as your just wasting your time.

Don't go after the big dog
This is one of the first mistakes I made in my first attempts for link exchange. I was trying to trade links with my vacation rental site. http://www.fastvacationrentals.com but I was trying to trade links with very highly ranked websites. To my surprise, not really, I didn't get one response from this. I had a little bit more luck trying to trade links with less popular sites that weren't as important. What I found out that worked best was trading links with sites that are related in the tourist business or personal sites from individual people. Even though these sites aren't as popular, they are still ranked very high in there niche. This is a vital and very important link exchange.

Check links afterwards
Unfortunately, there are still people that cheat there way in link exchange.   They don't keep your link up, or they use the tag no-follow. This causes a lot of problems and doesn't benefit you at all. Usually I keep an excel sheet that I keep track of when I last checked to make sure it existed.

Post in blogs and Forums
This is still a good easy way to get links back to your site but you have to be careful.  An example of doing this is posting in a travel related forum. Eventually those forums get higher ranked and you in return will have a link back to your site. The thing is, you have to be careful to make sure there isn't a no-follow tag on your link


Write articles
Articles are another quick an easy way to get links back to your site. There are several sites that keep track of content. This content is than free to use if you keep a link back to the owner. In addition to making this an easy link exchange it also allows you to create content which is also vital in the SEO process.

As you can see, there are a lot of things that go into SEO. I can't possibly cover everything because it is changing on an everyday process, and by the time you read this it will probably be outdated. A smart thing to keep in mind is to act like a search engine. They are scripting the spiders to be smarter and smarter and to act like a human to find relevant material. When working on your site keep this in mind. If you do your sure to keep your site ideal for SEO.

The Web Design Process

Creating an effective an attractive website is an acquired skill over years of practice. Even someone who thinks they are know everything about search engine optimization truly doesn't know everything. 

The Web Design Process

This is because the Internet is always changing and the way search engines find content is consistently changing.  Because of this, no one is truly an expert.

Content

There are several things that web designers take into account to create effective websites. One of the first and most important things is content. In order to get high rankings, you have to have a lot of content that is relevant to your information. This doesn't mean to go out and pack keywords into your current sites content but to effectively use it within your content. If you do go out and pack in the keywords, your ranking will most definitely go down. This is known as keyword stuffing.  

Title

Rather than putting "home page" or "my site name" for the title, create a descriptive title that sums up the pages information.  Make sure to use the meta tag, title to your advantage.

Description

The description meta tag isn't used much, but it is still very important that you use it. The reason being, some search engines still specifically use it.  Especially if you don't have any content.

Keywords

Now I know your probably thinking that the keywords tag is pretty much useless and for the most part you are correct.  The reason why I still use it, is because I believe that everything together matters. Making sure you include this might not make much of a difference, but it doesn't really hurt you to have it. Make sure you don't stuff keywords in this tag, try to keep it under 25 words.

HTML Validation

Make sure you have coded your site to use the most up to date standards for the HTML type you are using.  There are several tools online you can use to do this.  Make sure you don't use deprecated tags or anything else that isn't a standard.

Source Files

Take advantage of being able to link to a cascade style sheet file, JavaScript file, or any other scripting file. The smaller you can make your source code the better. Get rid of extra white space and remove anything that can be linked with a simple file. When viewing the source file, it is better to see more content than coding. Don't confuse the search engines with extra coding.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are a simple and effective way to make sure search engines find your site. Make sure you use descriptive tags that describe the link or image. 

Don't try to write content for search engines!

 If you try to write your content and meta tags for the search engines your site is sure to fail in website optimization.  Rather than thinking about what you want the search engines to find, instead try to describe your site to effectively communicate to your customers who you are and what you want to do. Just write whats going on, use captions, use alt tags, use effective titles. Keep what the search engines are looking for in the back of your head, while you create your sites content that describes your websites goal.