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.

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.

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…

Anyone new to blogging eventually ponders whether or not to monetize their blog with products and services closely related to their chosen topic. While I can’t tell you whether or not you should or shouldn’t make some money from your blogging, I will say that there is no shortage of products out there for you to try your hand at selling. The products and services you could sell on your blog are usually referred to as affiliate products, this means that you are selling something on behalf of another company and you share in the commission revenue. But how do you find products to sell on your website? Here’s a list of the top ways to find and promote products and services to sell on your blog.

Google It – Do a search in Google for specific keyword terms that are related to your blog’s topic. For instance, if you have a blog about parakeet care you could try googling “parakeet care affiliate” and see what sort of results are returned. If you find that parakeets are too specific then you could try something like “pet care affiliate” which would have more options as it has a much broader reach with customers than just parakeets.

Affiliate Networks – Another way to find affiliate products to sell on your blog is to go through an affiliate network and there are some big players out there with huge amounts of products in their network. Here’s a quick list of the biggest players out there right now:

Commission Junction – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers approve readily if your site is functional and relevant to the products.

LinkShare – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers are picky about sites that do not have loads of traffic,expect to be turned down by most advertisers if you’re just starting out.

ShareASale – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers approve readily if your site is functional and relevant to the products.

Sign Up for Pepperjam Network and Get a $10 Sign On Bonus – Easy to apply and be approved. Individual product advertisers approve readily if your site is functional and relevant to the products.

Affiliate Product Marketplaces (Non-Network) -The benefits of using a product marketplace over an affiliate network are that once your affiliate account is approved you can start building your products links from thousands of product advertisers right away. Affiliate networks can be a little snobbish to new websites who don’t quite have traffic numbers a product advertiser expects. Often, an affiliate networks product advertiser will turn down your application based solely on your traffic numbers , but if you go through an affiliate marketplace you will more than likely be able to find that company’s products to sell on your blog anyways. An example of this is selling Disney products online. Disney is huge and has an agreement with the Linkshare network that pretty much denies new bloggers with low traffic from being accepted into their program. Alternatively, you can find tons of Disney products to promote and sell on your blog if you go set up an Amazon Associates account instead. The commissions may be smaller but if you can’t get in through the front door, affiliate marketplaces are your next best bet. Here are a few affiliate marketplaces you can try:

Clickbank – The biggest and best marketplace online to sell digital downloads like ebooks and online courses. The beauty of Clickbank is that you can get started right away once you’re a Clickbank affiliate as you’re already pre-approved to promote and sell any of the thousands of products they have available.

Amazon Associates – Scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the link marked “Join Associates” once you’re approved as a publisher, you’ll be able to start making links to promote literally hundreds of thousands of products on your blog.

Online Auctions – If you have a Wordpress blog there is an amazing way to make money online as well as give your blog fresh content automagically! How do you do it? By adding other people’s Ebay auctions to your blogs pages and posts. All you need are two things, an Ebay Partner Network account and the Free Ebay Wordpress Plugin. Once you’re approved with Ebay, you need to install and configure the plugin. Ebay auctions will then be listed wherever you decide to display them, and you will earn commissions on sales as well as always having fresh content for your blog as you can see by my auction list below.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the list and until next time…stay cool people…

[AffomaticEbay]wordpress[/AffomaticEbay]

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As a new blogger you’ve probably gotten Wordpress all loaded up to your server by now and even though you might not be too familiar with the Wordpress Admin dashboard you can’t wait to get your blog on and write your first post. While you could by all means get straight to blogging your heart out, one thing you should be aware of is that there are a few Wordpress settings that you will need to configure inside the Wordpress dashboard prior to publishing your first post. Let’s go through them together and once we’re through you can get down to the serious business of blogging about it all. So when you’re ready, log into your Wordpress Admin and let’s have a look around.

As of the writing of this post the current version of Wordpress is version 2.7 Coltrane and it is quite different from other versions of the software and requires some getting used to even for seasoned users, so here’s the nitty gritty:

Once you’ve logged into your account you will be in the default dashboard which is like your blog’s command center. You will be able to see lots of valuable information here like your blogs status in regards to number of posts, comments waiting to be moderated, who links to your blog, your recent drafts, latest news from the Wordpress development blog, and many other pieces of useful and interesting information about your blog.

While the dashboard is a helpful information center, the real heart and soul of managing your blog is found in the list of links in the left sidebar of your dashboard and they are labelled Posts, Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings.
The first thing you should do to set up your blog is to change the password that was generated for you when you first installed Wordpress and that can be done by clicking on the Users link. You should see your profile and an option to edit the settings there. You will be able to change your email address, the color scheme of your dashboard, your user nickname and of course your password so make sure it’s something you can remember and note it down somewhere just in case. If you are setting up a multi-user blog this is also the area where you would add users and set their access levels.

The very next place you should go to is the Settings link and more specifically the General tab. You will need to add your blog title and tagline if you didn’t already do so when you installed Wordpress. Setting your time zone is also crucial to do as your blog posts and comments will always be off otherwise. It will also wreak havoc on your scheduled posts if your time zone is set incorrectly.

The next important area in the Settings link is the Reading tab. This is the area where you will choose if you want your blog to have a static front page such as a Home or Welcome page or if you’d rather have your blog posts running down your page instead. You will be able to set any page you’ve created as the front page of your blog so make sure to set it up before selecting this option. You also have the choice of how many posts to display on your blog’s front page and whether they display the full post or a small expert if you decide not to go with the static front page.

Next in the Settings link you should access the Media tab. This lets you adjust the default sizes for your thumbnails, medium and full-size post images.

The next option in the Settings link is the Privacy tab. You probably already said yes to have your blog visible to search engines when you set it up, but just in case you didn’t just double-check that your settings are set to being visible to everyone including search engines and such.

The last but probably most important setting you should set appropriately in your Wordpress blog is what sort of permalink structure you plan on using for your posts. This step may be last on the list here but it is crucial that you set this correctly so your post urls are defined the way you want them right away before you start posting…once you’ve set up your permalink structure you never have to do it again so take the time to decide your permalink structure now. If you’re having trouble deciding which permalink structure is for you I’ve written a post about choosing the structure that’s right for you as well as instructions to make changes to your permalinks here.

Now you’re all set, go on and write your first post…send me a link to it I’d love to read it.

Until next time new bloggers…have fun on the Internet and get those blogs up and running!

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In the Wordpress Admin there is a Settings tab and within that tab is the Permalinks tab. Setting up this area of your blog administration is crucial to having your blog post urls (or links) be the way you want them. The default setting for your posts is p=”whatever the post id number is” but it’s not such a nice url to have. Here’s an example: You’ve written a post on your dog care blog about how to choose the best breeds. With Wordpress’s default permalink strucutre your post would look like this:

“http://dogcare.com/p=123/” – What the heck does that even mean to anyone? Not much and if anything were to ever happen to your blog and you didn’t have a backup of your post database, would you be able to remember all of your post id numbers? Probably not, and then all those people finding your posts in the search engines would click and receive an error message because the link they followed would be invalid.

Next option is day and name and again this option is not so great either…why? Because time moves on and again if anything ever happened to your blog and you had no backup of your post database, you would have to re-post to your blog and the date from the re-post wouldn’t match the previous date. You would end up having to implement a redirection plugin to have your old post structure match up to your new post structure. Here’s an example of the original post link using this structure:

“http://dogcare.com/january/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and if you had to repost it months later your new post would look like “http://dogcare.com/december/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and you can see how the new link structure could never match up to the old link structure without a redirection plugin from the old link to the new one.

The same issues would arise with the month and name option so make sure to keep track of which posts were posted in which month.

Same thing goes for the numeric option but again you will have to keep track of which posts go with which number.

The best option by far is the custom permalink option and one of the best custom permalink structures to use is to have your post url structured by category and post name. The value you would need to enter for this field looks like:

%category%/%postname%

This will have your posts looking like this example: “http://dogcare.com/breeds/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/”and if anything ever happens to your post database it would be easy to remember your categories and post names and they wouldn’t be dependent on variables that change like the date or post id numbers.

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