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.

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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In the spirit of helping others get the most out of their Wordpress blogs, I’m divulging the list of plugins I use on my blog in the hopes that it helps someone out there get more functionality out of their blog software. Feel free to try these plugins yourself and recommend any plugins you feel a blog shouldn’t be without. All of the Wordpress plugins that are listed are hyper-linked for your convenience so you can check out the some more information about these Wordpress plugins from their sites. I’m not affiliated with any of these plugins in any way and all of them are freely available on the Internet so enjoy the list.

AddInto – Allows you to make it easier for visitors of your website adding alink, article in several favorite systems, social networks. Instead ofhaving a link to each of them, you have a single link or button to all!

All In One SEO Pack – Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …

Disqus Comment System – Disqus is a powerful comment system that easily enhances the discussion on websites. In minutes, connect your community with those of over 45,000 other websites.

Google XML Sitemap – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of yourWordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages aswell as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemapis updated and all major search engines that support the sitemapprotocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notifiedabout the update.

Robots Meta – This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:

* Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
* Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
* Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
* Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
* Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
* Disable author and date-based archives.

Statpress – The first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statisticsabout blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders,search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.

Tagaroo -Tagaroo is designed to make your WordPress blog better for you,better for your readers and more accessible to search engines. As you’re writing, Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggestsintelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about. You can use these tags in your post – but even better – you can use these tags to automatically get great images from Flickr to include in your post. The Tagaroo website doesn’t seem to have the latest version of their own plugin but the good news is you can download the latest version of Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file. right here from New Blog Help and it’s fully compatible with Wordpress 2.7

Wordpress Download Monitor – Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. I use this plugin because sometimes I give away my own free graphics and they can be quite large to upload inside my posts. This plugin allows me to upload my graphics in archived format into my blog right from inside my post editor. Just think if you gave things away on your blog like ebooks or pdf files this plugin would be really, really handy.

WP-Note – This plugin allows you to create nice notes in your Wordpress posts or pages.You just should add note tags in your post.There are all five tags: note,important,tip,warning and help.

WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtuallyeliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam.Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-freecontact form feature as well.

That’s all the plugins I use and maybe they can help solve a Wordpress functionality issue for someone out there who might be new to Wordpress and it’s huge amount of plugins. If you need a larger list of Wordpress plugins then be sure to have a look at the repository which contains over 4,000 free Wordpress plugins. Until next time new bloggers, stay safe online and blog about it all…

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