The BlogSmack Blog
How to Attract Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog
Posted on June 8, 2009
Category: traffic | Leave a Comment
Welcome back to the BlogSmack blog where we try to help out when you need to know thing about blogging that are not just for inane jotting downs, or goalless scribblings! There are plenty of bloggers who want to make some money from their efforts and this is where we come in.
When it comes to us bloggers successfully monetizing a blog and actually seeing some cash flowing into rather than out of our pockets, we know that we’re doing something right. So what is that magical formula to earning enough money from a blog to not just cover the cost of hosting, but to reimburse our time and effort in writing worthwhile content for our blogs and by such, enriching the overall quality of the written word available on the Internet in general?
It really boils down to one thing and one thing only and that’s traffic.
You need visitors coming to your blog to stand any chance of having your carefully laid out ads seen and clicked on, which will ultimately make money for you. Those visitors must also be targeted, which means that of you’re writing a blog about, say, dog collars, then you want people who are interested in knowing more about dog collars to find your blog. To do that, you need your blog to feature in the index of each of the search engines, but most importantly, Google as they attract the vast majority of web traffic.
To feature in the SERPs, which is another term for search engine results pages, you need to have a blog with plenty of good content that is relative to the topic of your blog so that you will get indexed in the first place for your relevant keywords, then you need to attract other bloggers to link to your blog from theirs.
A big part of SEO (search engine optimization) is based on getting links from other sites that are not just straight links to your domain, or the name of your blog, but keyword anchored links using relevant keywords that you wish to rank for. This is easier said than done, and often requires that you spend a lot of time contacting other bloggers that you can get to know socially through forums and social media. You can also write articles with an anchored link pointing back to your blog in the resource box and submit them to article directories. This has a double edge to it in that people do read articles in some of the better directories and this will also drive targeted traffic to your blog.
We’ll run some more articles like this one in future to help bloggers using BlogSmack as their host to rank their blogs more successfully in the SERPs so that they, too can enjoy some renumeration for all their hard work writing in their blogs.
Admin
Blog Smack
Making a Blog More Visible to Potential Visitors
Posted on May 12, 2009
Category: blogs | Leave a Comment
There’s plenty you can do with your blogs here at Blogsmack to make them more visible to potential visitors. Let’s look at some of the ways of getting your blog noticed.
The first and easiest way of getting your blog noticed by lots of people is to make full use of the social networking sites. Blogcatalog, mybloglog, fuelmyblog, there are tons of them around if you go searching. These are perfect for hooking up with other bloggers and making friends. Its also a great way of getting other bloggers to link to your blog, assuming you have lots of good content an d they like your blog.
Then you can further make use of the web 2.0 platform by submitting your new blog posts to social bookmarking sites such as stumbleupon, digg, mixx… etc. These will give you bursts of traffic depending upon the quality of the article you submit,. the catchiness of the title and other factors such as how well you are known as a blog author, past successes, the time of day etc.
You can also make use of pinging services to alert potential visitors that your blog has been updated. There are plenty around, the more popular being ping-o-matic and pingoat.
Another way is to submit your blog’s RSS feed to as many feed aggregators as you can. Try RSSmountain, RSSmicro, Feedbomb and MillionRSS for starters. These are all valid ways of getting the word out there that you have written a new post on your blog and you want people to come running to read what you have written.
Admin
Blog Smack
How Can I Make Money With My Blog?
Posted on March 30, 2009
Category: blogs | Leave a Comment
Here at Blog Smack I’ve heard plenty of people asking this one and I suppose if you’re not really all that knowledgeable about such things, then it can seem a difficult process in the beginning. So what is the answer to, “how can I make money with my blog?”
Well, if your blog is quite new, you should work on building it up with plenty of relevant and original content first as the blog ages, because if you try to monetize a new blog too quickly, the search engines and in particular Google will view your blog as potential spam. If that happens, you may find your blog carted off to the nether regions of the index, or merely not get indexed at all for a long time. That is their way of protecting their index from crappy sites.
Let’s face it, if you are a surfer and want to find out something you go to Google or one of the other rmain search engines and expect to see good relevant sites listed in the results. If the first page just came up with a bunch of worthless spam sites that were just full of ads and little else, you’d be disappointed with the search engine for bringing you all that. So they do everything they can to make sure that when you do a search, you get relevant and generally good sites at the top of their search results.
So now, “how can I make money with my blog?” is more like “when can I make money with my blog?”
If your blog is over say 3 months old and has a reasonable number of original posts on it, you could consider monetizing with Google Adsense. There is a pretty good beginner’s primer on that at this site: how to make money online with Adsense that outlines how you can use Adsense to make money. It also tells you exactly now not to do it so you don’t put a lot of the wrong kind of effort into it and end up with pennies when you could be raking in the dollars!
Other ways to make money from a blog involve promoting affiliate products as either banner ads, which I have to say do not convert very well these days, or actual online store pages that some of the bigger affiliates provide you with, such as Amazon or eBay.
If your blog is already at the top of the search engines for its targeted keywords and attracting a lot of organic traffic, you might find that if there are commercial websites below you, you could contact them and offer to send them some of your traffic in a no-follow link that they could pay you for. Making the link no-follow is important as that way you are only selling traffic and not your site’s authority (which is frowned upon by Google).
There are many free resources online with knowledge on how to make money online with a blog so you should never have to pay for anything like so-called get rich quick ebooks and other scams that abound online. If you keep your credit card in your pocket when you go surfing for information, you will avoid the scams that put so many people off from trying to make money online.
Good luck,
Admin
Beat The Winter Blues
Posted on February 15, 2009
Category: blogs | Leave a Comment
Beat the winter blues here at Blog Smack by creating a new blog for the spring! Choose a theme and a topic that brings warmth into your life and chases the doldrums of winter away!
Blogging is more than just writing stuff in a journal. Its also a way of expressing yourself by writing about subjects that you have a passion for! You can write about almost anything in your BlogSmackblog as long as its interesting and provides your readers with something they’ll want to come back a read time and time again.
What better way than to write about a hobby or pastime that you really love and enjoy and know a load about.
Say, for instance you are a keen photographer and know all about taking certain kinds of photos. Just think of all the grateful readers you could attract if you shared some of your knowledge with them through your blog. Or maybe you build dollhouses and have specialist knowledge that you could share with others and even put some of your work up for sale online!
The possibilities are as limited as your own imagination, which is pretty infinite, so come along, create a new blog for the Spring and rekindle your interest in a certain subject that is close to your heart, or make a little extra cash on the side by selling things you make yourself online!
Good luck and happy blogging!
Admin
Why Can’t I Create a New User?
Posted on January 12, 2009
Category: blogs | Leave a Comment
The host here at Blog Smack is closed to user registrations for the time being as the only sure-fire way of deterring spammers from signing up and creating a ton of crap blogs that are just for linking to their bad neighbourhood sites.
I know this inconveniences genuine bloggers, but admin simply does not have the time to police this host and waste time every day clearing out spam signups.
The decision was made to keep this free blog host open only to members of the forum community to ensure that we know exactly who is creating blogs. So unless you are a member of the forum, you can’t create a user or any blogs, its as simple as that.
If you have to ask what the forum is, then again, you’re not a member and we can’t allow anyone we don’t know to have access. There are much better served free blog hosts that you can sign up to such as:
Please accept our apologies on this, but we must keep within the guidelines set out by the major search engines, and allowing spammers to create blogs will cause more problems than anything.
For members, if you already have a user set up, simply log in as your user and then you can create new blogs using the “Create a New Blog” button, or links in the footer of your own blogs. If you don’t yet have a user id, please PM me (tel) in the forum.
Thanks
Welcome to BlogSmack!
Posted on September 30, 2008
Category: blogs | 1 Comment
Welcome to BlogSmack, a great free blogging resource!
BlogSmack is a special kind of blog that is powered by the popular Wordpress MU (Multi User). This special version allows anyone to create their own user name and then create their own free WP blogs.
By making use of the Wordpress platform, all users can set up fantastic looking blogs by using the large selection of great looking Wordpress themes which are available. Not only that, but there is also a full set of plugins which you can use to further personalize your blog.
Here at BlogSmack, we allow you do do just about whatever you want with your blog. This is of course as long as you don’t use it for anything anti-social, such as race or religious hate, p0rnography, sp6m, anything illegal, terrorism, or anything else that may be construed as being contrary to good taste.
How Do I Create a Free Blog?
First you’ll need to create a user name. You do this yourself simply by clicking the “Create a New Blog” button on the main page the first time you visit. You’ll be asked to type in the user name you want, so make it one that you can remember. Please make it a real word or name.
Note: If we spot any usernames with a nonsensical jumble of letters and/or numbers, they will be deleted along with any blogs associated with them as this looks like sp6m.
You also need to provide a valid email address. That’s because this is where your login password will be sent. So please make sure you have access to the email address you enter and your email filters won’t block anything coming from blogsmack.com.
Once you get your password, you can log in.
From the BlogSmack homepage, click the “Create a New Blog” button to create your new blog. You’ll be asked for a URL and blog name you’d like to use. Type in a name that is relevant to the blog you are setting up, so if you want a blog about cookery classes, call it “cookeryclasses”, or something similar if that name has already been taken by someone else. You can also give the blog a title, so in this example it would be “Cookery Classes”. Your finished URL will look like this:
cookeryclasses.blogsmack.com
If you want to create another blog, no problem. Make sure you’re logged in and repeat the process. It’s that simple!
Admin
BlogSmack
