Slowly and insidiously, we begin to spend more time hard at work blogging, sometimes working well into the night to finish our daily posts and implement our backlinking strategies and linkwheels.

It’s not long before the success of our blogs become our main obsession and we eat, sleep and breathe our online business. The desire to make money online keeps us afloat above the stress and anxiety, but once worry and doubt  appear in our online lives it can be very hard to stop this kind of thinking. We start to worry about whether or not we’ve chosen the right affiliate products and networks, we worry about our customer satisfaction if we market directly to them, we worry about how much we are spending on ppc campaigns and how they are performing, and the biggest worry is whether we will get paid and of course when. We also have something in the back of our blogging minds that makes us wonder whether we are doing the most we can with this idea of doing business online. It’s easy to start wondering if everything we are doing is proper procedure or if we are breaking any advertiser rules.

What he have done essentially is unknowingly developed the paranoia of small business owners and we expect something terrible to happen to us while we wait for success online. Anyone going through these thoughts and worries needs to take a step back and relax a little. Starting a blog can be fraught with problems and situations that you were not prepared for but anything that comes up can be worked out in the end. Changing the way you look at things and keeping a positive attitude can keep you steadily blogging amid the stress and feelings of failure. Why? Because every online failure or problem is nothing more than a lesson learned. Many new bloggers put so much pressure on themselves to do everything perfectly that they give it up in disgust because it was just to hard on them physically and emotionally. It doesn’t have to be that way though, if you take the time to put everything to do with your online business into perspective. Life truly is what you make it and so is your online life. So what if you didn’t know you needed backlinks to find online success? Now you do. So what if you aren’t able to post every single day? Post when you can, there is no law that says you have to do otherwise. The bottom line is, don’t be so hard on yourself as a new blogger this is a learning process and you will get there in your own time and preferably stress free.

As a new blogger, you may be wondering to yourself about just how much traffic you blog gets and why. It’s important for any blogger who wants to be commercially successful to take a look at their web stats and measure their performance once in a while. If you’ve never even heard of web stats or how to measure them, then you do have your work cut out for you but hopefully this post will help get you through the worst of it. Every time you as a blogger publish a post, it affects who comes to your blog and the reasons why. Certain post keywords and tags have the ability to draw in readers like a magnet while others don’t do anything to improve your blog’s performance at all.

So how do you know which keywords and phrases are drawing your readers in to your blog? That’s where analyzing your website statistics comes in. It may not be the most enjoyable task you will have as a blogger, but it will show you exactly what people are searching for online before they end up at your blog. Analyzing your web stats can show you:

• Who has been to your blog in the past?
• Which pages and posts drew them to your blog specifically?
• Which of your backlinks are sending you traffic?
• Which sites have linked to your blog?
• What sort of traffic are these sites sending to you?
• What kinds of keywords are being used to find your posts?
• What type of browser your visitors use to view your blog?

There are plenty of other statistics that you can learn about your site’s traffic if you have good tracking software installed. Here is a list of some of the best hosted statistics software online today:

Google Analytics – This is a free online stats system hosted by Google that has many options for customizing and viewing your blog’s stats. It even allows webmasters to set traffic goals and obtain keyword search information.

Stat Counter – A free statistics tracker that even allows you to view maps of where in the world your traffic is originating from.

Site Meter – They offer free basic stats tracking, as well as very sophisticated advanced tracking through paid subscription.

Search Traffic: A micro-niche doesn’t have millions of search traffic per month due to the fact that it is a small niche. A good bench mark for keeping in mind is that your micro niche search volume estimates shouldn’t go below 800 searches per month.  Less than 800 people searching for your keywords per month means poor sales for you even if you dominate the serp’s.

Competition: There must be a small enough number of other websites competing for the traffic you will receive to your micro niche. A targeted and well focused keyword can ensure that you will have fewer competitors to have to outrank in the search engines. A broad one word keyword will have you competing with literally millions of other websites to get to the front page of the search engines. Finding a targeted two, three, four, and even five word keyword phrase will considerably lower the number of websites competing with you for search engine traffic. You really shouldn’t go after keywords with millions of competing pages, it’s best to bring that number of competition down to a workable number within the hundred thousand range.

Strength of Competition: You must always assess the seo or search engine optimization strength of the pages that are competing for your keywords. This assessment must include on page as well as off page seo factors. Off page factors are things like well aged domains in your topic area which you will not be able to control if you have a brand new website. So then it becomes extremely important to analyze the strength of the sites you will be competing with for a first page search engine ranking. The weaker the competition is in on page seo factors, the better it is for you.

• What are on page seo factors to take into consideration?
• Do the other sites in your chosen micro niche use your chosen keyword set in their url?
• Do they use the keyword in their site’s title tag?
• Do they use the keyword when making backlinks to their site?
• Do they use the keyword in the header tag or H1 tag?
• Do they use the keyword in their site’s description?

The more you come to find that competing web sites in your chosen micro niche are not optimized for your particular keywords, the better chance you have of getting to the front page of the search engine listings if you take the time to optimize your site with the suggestions I’ve listed above.

The bottom line is that a micro niche embraces the concepts of seo to the fullest extent and if you as a blogger or website owner can do that in your chosen niche, then success is yours to do with as you please.

More and more people are turning to the Internet in their quest to earn extra money from home. Why? Because the promise of Internet success is possible for those who work hard and with the instability often seen with job security in today’s economy, many people who have ventured into the area of work from home businesses have been extremely motivated to find success and quite often do. So what can you do to start the making money ideas flowing?

Take a look at this list of Internet work from home ideas and see where you might be able to find your own opportunities for success.

Online Auctions

This idea may be an old one but it’s still a good one. Ebay is a powerhouse online auction marketplace with millions of sellers that makes those who leverage the power of auctioning quality goods online a very profitable business opportunity indeed. The way to gain a competitive edge in the Ebay marketplace is to look at ways to provide your customers with your very own unique selling proposition. Do you have a product or service that you hand make or provide yourself that is unique and at the same time fills a need in the marketplace? Then your chances of success are quite high if you auction them online. Perhaps you don’t have your own products or services to sell at auction? Not to worry, that’s what drop shippers are for. Do your homework and find a top quality drop shipper that sells quality products in the market you’ve been researching, and it’s a no-brainer that you will make sales giving your customers what they want.

Online Directories

You could open your own work at home directory site where you offer your visitors valuable information on how to start a home based business online themselves. People who are looking for legitimate home business opportunity information will flock to your website or blog to read what you have to say on the subject. If you offer your site visitors quality information around the topics of home based franchises, home based small business, home business startup, and how to start a home based business, your readers will be thrilled with getting the information they need to be successful and in turn your site or blog will become a success as well. You will be able to make money and monetize your traffic with advertising as well as partnering with home business companies that you can receive income from providing customer referrals to those companies.

Work At Home Reviews

Thoroughly reviewing work at home business opportunities for your readers is a very lucrative field to get into. People want to know which work at home Internet business schemes work and which ones they should avoid like the plague. If you have integrity and are honest with your readers about which work at home opportunities work for them, you will be rewarded with a loyal readership of your blog and steady traffic to your site. Your valuable advice will help your readers steer clear of bad business decisions and get them on the right track with profitable business ideas that you’ve reviewed for them.

This is just a partial list of how to earn extra money from home online but its great starting place for your work at home Internet business ideas to grow into a website or blog you’d be proud to call your own.

Today’s post is all about the mysterious business of SEO.  If you’re new to blogging then you’ve probably seen the term floating around the Internet and wondered what the heck the fuss is all about and whether or not you need it in order to survive online as a blogger.

Let me start by saying that the term SEO stands for search engine optimization.  What this means is every time you search for something for example “red tennis shoes” on Google, any webmasters who run sites that match your search words “red tennis shoes” want to be as close to the top of the first page of results that Google or any other search engine comes back with.

Have you ever had a look when you’re searching in Google at just how many sites are returned for your keywords? It can be an enormous amount of websites that often number in the millions. Since the Internet has been around since the early 90’s, there are literally millions of websites out there that span all kinds of topics and interests but they can’t all be the number one search result right at the top of Google’s results page.

So how do webmasters get to the top of Google?  That’s where the optimization part of SEO comes in.  Webmasters who run sites or blogs that match the keywords you type in to search engines will optimize their sites to ensure that they are right there at number one.  Why do webmasters use SEO techniques?  The bottom line: money and sales.  If you’re a webmaster with a product to sell, then you will be extremely motivated to optimize your website or blog to fit somewhere on the first page of search engine results.  But what if you’re a blogger who just writes for yourself or your friends?  Or even just a hobby blogger not interested in money?  Then learning search engine optimization techniques is probably not a huge concern for you as the financial aspect of blogging most likely doesn’t concern you. However, if you are looking to supplement your income through your website, then you should really know the basics of search engine optimization even before you put up your first site or blog.

The topic of SEO is a very broad one and encompasses more than just a few tips and tricks.  There are even folks who have written whole books on the subject of search engine optimization and courses available online.  If you’re serious about getting to the top of Google, it’s worth investing in a good seo book or online course to help your site reach the top of Google and stay there.

What the heck are dofollow links anyways? Basically, you can leave a link at any site you like on the Internet, but some webmasters choose to use “nofollow” link structures on their pages. This means that they would like to keep the search engines on their site only, not let the search engines pass to your blog through the link you have posted on their site. A website that uses “dofollow” link structure allows the links you post on their sites to be found by Google and the other search engines every time these search engines come around to their sites. So think of sites that have ton of constantly  updated content and you will start to see how easily you can find places to put links to your blog on their site. Here is a list of the best sites that offer dofollow backlinks to your blog:

Squidoo – Create a page on Squidoo about your blog topic or something you’re interested in, and link to your blog from within the page
Ezine Articles – Write an article for Ezine Articles in the topic of your choice and add a link to your blog in your signature box
Go Articles – Same as Ezine Articles
Propeller – Submit a blog post to propeller and it automatically links to your blog
Slashdot – Same as Propeller

Other things you can do to get backlinks to your blog that will be seen by lots of Internet searchers even if they aren’t dofollow, is to Tweet your posts on Twitter as that will go around the Twitter universe and bring you some traffic. You could also leave a comment on a blog you find matches the interest of your blog and that will send traffic to your blog as well. Agree to trade links with other bloggers you like but be wary of link farms or placing your link on sites that are irrelevant to your site’s topics.

Most if not all of these dofollow websites expect you to earn your backlink by adding valuable and original content to their sites. So simply pasting your blog’s url all over the place without contributing content will put you in the doghouse with most of these sites and could get you banned for being a spammer.

Shopperpress is a full featured storefront shopping cart solution for Wordpress that is packed with amazing features that turn a standard wordpress blog into a feature rich shopping cart website in just a few easy steps. The ease of installation of Shopperpress will have your online store up in running in 5 minutes or less. You have the ability to use the built-in Amazon product importer, CSV product import, and datafeed imports as well. It’s a snap to quickly and easily import thousands of targeted products and merchandise to your blog without headaches or frustration working with complicated software. Your products will practically sell themselves as Shopperpress includes lots of extra product data like product photos, product descriptions, and customer reviews.

Payment processing can be a real fear and concern for new bloggers as the thought of integrating their own Wordpress shopping cart solution can be quite complicated and advanced. The good news is that Shopperpress integrates all of the major payment gateways right there in your Wordpress admin so you don’t have to get your hands dirty messing with code or uploading tricky software solutions that require lots of technical assistance. Once you’ve uploaded the plugin files to your blog, it’s a simple matter of activating it and then selecting your personal preference for payment with a click of a button.

Are you concerned about what your blog might look like if you want to feature products on it? Don’t worry, there are lots of beautiful shopping cart themes to choose from within the plugin that are simply amazing to look at and best of all no coding experience is needed to implement them. It’s a simple click to remake your blog into a product showcase that will have make your products, services, and digital downloads more attractive to your intended audience: your customers.

If you’re worried about operating system or browser conflicts, this Wordpress shopping cart has been fully tested and works with Windows, Linux and Mac OSX operating systems as well as all major browsers like Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari.

For this tutorial you will need:

-          A Google Adsense account

-          The All in One Adsense and YPN! Plugin by linewbie

This tutorial assumes that the All in One Adsense and YPN! Plugin is already activated on your blog and that you have your adsense ad already built.

For the first half of this tutorial we will go over to your Google Adsense account and get a channel number so we can start tracking your ads.

Step 1 – Log into your Google Adsense account

Step 2 – Click on the “Adsense Setup” tab at the top of the page

Step 3 – Now look just below the tabs for a link marked “Channels” and click on it

Step 4 – On the next screen you need to find the “Add new custom channels” link and click on it

Step 5 – Enter a name for the channel – it can be named anything you want, but I would name it the same as your blog’s name so you know which channel is which in adsense

Step 6 – Make sure the “Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement” box is unticked

Step 7 – Click the “Add Channel” button

Step 8 – The next screen will show you the channel you just made and it will have an id number associated with it. This is the number that will let us track your blog’s ads so grab a piece of paper and write it down

Step 9 – There is no Step 9 in your Google Adsense account – we’re done here so let’s head over to your blog’s admin

For this last half of the tutorial we will go over to your blogs Wordpress Admin – Specifically the All in One Adsense YPN! Plugin.

Step 1 – Locate the plugin inside your Wordpress admin – if you use Wordpress version 2.7.1 you will find it under the “Settings” tab marked simply with “Adsense”

Step 2 – Add that tracking id number that you wrote down into the field marked “Adsense Channel”

Step 3 – Save your changes and you’re done!

To view the stats on how your ad is performing, simply log into your Google Adsense account, scroll down to Quick Reports and click on “This Month by Channel and Day”  and when the next screen loads, if you scroll down you will see your different ad channels and how many ad impressions there are, clickthroughs, and how much you’ve earned – assuming that you have traffic to your site and folks have gone to your blog.

Some posting schedules are too frequent and a waste of good quality posts, while others are more efficient at getting your articles out there in force. What your personal posting schedule relies on are two crucial factors, one being the size of your readership and two being the quality of your posted messages.

If your blog attracts several hundred visitors per day, over posting made be detrimental to your success as great posts travel through the blogosphere by word of mouth and social circles, so it’s best not to post several times a day in order for your best posts to gain a certain amount of exposure. Replacing a post that hasn’t received enough exposure with an inferior quality post just for the sake of publishing regularly will only lead to your best posts not making its as far as they can go. Provided you have enough time for quality content that is ideally suited to a small number of blog readers, then posting could be scheduled every two days until your readership picks up.

What sort of numbers are we looking at for a more frequent posting schedule? While there’s no hard and fast rule a good guideline to follow is to wait until you have more than 1000 visitors per day, and then publishing good quality posts and content once per day is no longer wasteful and reaches your intended audience. In this way, you ensure that you have enough posts that will be seen by real visitors to your blog instead of posting frequently in the early days of your blog when few readers are watching or reading your blog. A schedule like this keeps your good quality content from going to waste.

One thing to remember when starting a new blog is that your content and your posts will take some time to draw in your readers, but steady writing and a regular posting schedule will build up your readership and gets your posts were booked at sooner and more frequently than when you first began your blog. The main thing to remember with blogging is that it’s easy to be over enthusiastic about getting your writing out there to the rest of the world but too much too soon may not be seen by actual readers and you risk burning out before you even get started. It also goes without saying that producing quality content and posts for your blog takes time and diligence and posting three or four times per day probably isn’t going to be your best work but more of a rush job or short little posts that are more like notes and than real posts.

So the bottom line on posting frequency is, start slowly while honing your writing skills and build up your posting schedule frequency as your readership and traffic builds.

Most new bloggers fail to spend enough time in their organizational skills. It’s just not enough to have most of your best ideas on post-it notes all over your computer desk and no idea how you’re going to manage your blog. It’s also extremely important that you have a clear and focused plan for your blog overall, but also for the time you spend working on your blog as well. If you don’t have a set schedule for working on your blog or online business, then your failure rate increases. Even more detrimental to your new blog besides the lack of a clear schedule for working on it, is not having a plan laid out for the time you do spend on your business or blog.

Does this sound familiar? You’ve made yourself a nice two hour slot to sit down and work on your blog but you haven’t decided what it is you’re going to do with that time before you sit down to use it. So you open up your email and there are six new emails from friends and family wishing you well with your new venture and so you feel obligated to write them back. Then as you’re replying to those emails, the phone rings and it’s your mother wanting to see how you’re doing so you indulge her for a little while but then after fifteen or twenty minutes you cut the call short only to find you’ve gotten three new emails. One is from someone’s blog you subscribed to and the article they’ve sent you looks fantastic, the headline is a real attention-grabber so you can’t help but to read that article and head over to their blog to read the rest. While you’re there you see a nice free eBook you might like to read so you subscribe to their list and head back to your email to finish going through the two emails you haven’t read yet.

One email announces you’ve got a new follower on Twitter and so you have to head over to there to check them out and make that crucial decision whether or not to follow them back…it’s a real plot twist in the middle of the time you should have been working on your blog and growing your online business. Now an hour has passed and you’ve got 60 precious minutes left to get your arse in gear and get focused on the tasks at hand. But then you start to wonder just what tasks you want to accomplish with your blog today. Maybe you wanted to write a post but then you tell yourself that might take more than an hour and you don’t want to have to stop in the middle of your inspiration so you point form a few notes and move to the next thing on your non-existent list. Suddenly you’re thirsty so it’s time to go and grab a nice drink and flip through the mail you left on the kitchen counter. So now you’re back at your desk, you’ve quenched your thirst, sifted through your mail, and now there’s a new email waiting for you. It’s a joke email from a co-worker and you know clicking on it will distract and you only have 35 minutes left, you but you just can’t help yourself and once you’ve opened it and chuckled at its contents, you’ve lost your train of thought completely so you pack it in telling yourself the next time you have to work on your blog will be “real time” and nothing will distract you. But will it? There just might be 6 or 7 emails waiting for you in your inbox…