Work at Home Based Business

Back in my last post here that I entitled Link to Your Success, I talked about some extra ways of obtaining good, strong keyword anchored backlinks for your sites. Well in this instalment, I’m going to follow that on with another useful way of obtaining links directly for your blogs as well as helping their SERPs ranking at the same time.

Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as “pligg” sites. I’ll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?

Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!

But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?

Build your own social pligg site!

Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don’t like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.

The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious - you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.

A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.

As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse’s mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.

TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB

TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?

And much to gain!

Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum

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There are many people who like to use free blogs not just for the enjoyment and personal satisfaction of writing down their thoughts and publishing them on the web, but also for Internet Marketing purposes in the pursuit of making money. Likewise, there are many people who prefer to buy their own domains and host them on a professional server, for much the same purpose.

So is one really better than the other?

As this is an Internet Marketing flavoured blog, we’ll leave the bloggers who blog for enjoyments sake to their own and take a look at the avantages and disadvantages of the two options open to those that want to use these different outlets as vehicles for making money.

First up, lets take initial startup and running costs of the two sides of this debate.

A free blog will cost you zero dollars to acquire, zero dollars to set up and zero dollars to run. Ok, that’s pretty convincing for anyone without much cash to start their own online enterprise.

A hosted domain will cost you the price of buying and registering the domain, currently you can buy and register a .com for less than $10. Then there’s the cost of hosting, although currently you can get good hosting for as little as $4.95 a month, although you might want to pay a little more and get a package with more features. Either way, you can find very good professional hosting for less than $10 a month. The other running cost is the annual registration of the domain, which is currently less than $10. So for an outlay in your first year of around $130 you can have all the benefits and control that a hosted account will give you. Even if you are short of cash, that is one expense that is easy enough to cover as the hosting part isn’t paid all in one go, but spread over 12 monthly payments.

So far so good. Now lets look at the fringe benefits.

Free blogs have great, easy to use templates and are the simplest things set up and start writing. Ads are easy to include with Blogger blogs, although some platforms, notably Wordpress won’t let you put any ads up at all.

A self hosted blog is also fairly straightforward to set up, with a huge selection of free templates. There is no problem over displaying ads, its your site so you can put up whatever you want.

Now lets look at the stickier point of control and ownership.

I’ve heard using free blogs as opposed to self hosted domains likened to the difference between renting an apartment and owning your own home. Nice comparison and it fits very well.

With a free blog, you’re only renting the space. If the owner (Blogger, for instance) decides they don’t like your face, they can at their discretion, suspend or even delete your blog. The content on that free blog may be yours in principle, but when it comes to what the search engines see, that content belongs to Blogger.

With a self hosted domain, you own that piece of cyberspace like its a piece of real estate. No one can take it away from you and the content is yours. If you’ve worked real hard on your site and gained a lot of authority, just like a home that you own you can sell that site with the domain for a hefty profit down the line.

With a free blog, as with a rented apartment, no matter how hard you work on it and how much authority and value it gets, you can never sell it.

There are other advantages and disadvantages to both, such as guaranteed uptime, storage space and bandwidth limits that self hosted beats free hosted hands down, but the main advantage of self hosted over free hosted has to be the real estate value, which, just as with the argument for renting or buying a property, you have to ask yourself this question. Do you want to have the option to sell it down the line and profit from it?

I prefer to own my own home rather than rent. Likewise, I prefer to own my own cyber real estate too.

Terry Didcott

Author of The Honest Way

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Starting in a home business fills most of us with apprehension, but once the money is handed over, we want to see some return on our investment. Most of us jump in and then say, “OK, what now?”

Blogging is the answer and it can all be done for free. The first thing to do is to start an account on blogger.com or wordpress.com They offer a series of templates to help you design your blog. Give yourself an hour or two and experiment. Play with all the templates and see what the versions look like. It’s actually fun to do and will help take away the stress that comes with working with the unfamiliar. 

Now you need to think of a great title for your blog. Try to think of something creative that will give the readers (and the search engines) an idea of what you essentially are trying to promote. If your title has great key words that you will use in many of your posts, the more it will be recognized. Do not stress about that though, just think of something that suits you and your personality and your product or business.

Start writing and introduce yourself. The best way to create a following is to give them a reason to want to read your blog. It is not only about the information you will offer them. That is a major part of it indeed, but it is not the only reason that people will want to come back. 

The internet is so anonymous and there are millions of people doing exactly what you are doing. Add a personal touch and let people begin to see who you really are. Show your personality, vulnerability, creativity, intelligence, knowledge, flaws and whatever you can in your writing.  Intersperse your posts on your product and the business in general with a post on how excited you are about your business. Tell a humorous story that teaches a life lesson. Write about your progress. Let the reader see your successes and sometimes failures and they will begin to trust you.

In between those articles start researching SEO and take it a little at a time. Obviously you want your blog to be read and indexed by the search engines. It takes time. 

Take baby steps and enjoy the entire process because it is truly a blast!

Written by: Laura Licata 
Money Making Math Teacher 
www.moneymakingmathteacher.com/blog

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We’ll continue on from my last post concerning the promotion of your blog to boost visitor numbers. In order to escalate the exposure and ultimately the popularity of your own blog, you need to use all the free promotional techniques at your disposal to spread the word as widely as possible around the internet. Here is another great, zero cost method of exposing your blog to a greater number of readers.

Do exactly what I’m doing right now!

Yep, writing as a guest blogger in other people’s blogs is a sure-fire way to get yourself and your blog(s) known to a much wider circle of blog readers and fellow bloggers. It works beautifully because the concept is so simple.

Simply write in your usual style and standard so that your guest blogging posts are every bit as good as you would write in your own blogs. The readers of the blog you are guest blogging in will naturally see and read your posts. Assuming they like what they see then natural human curiosity takes over and they’ll most likely click on your link at the end of your post and visit your own blog to see what else you’re writing about.

If you author several blogs of your own, you can make this great method work for you by doing this intelligently. Simply by changing the links in your sign-off paragraph to point to a different blog for every post you make and you’ll spread the word around about all of your blogs.

Of course you need to be sensible about this and don’t go spamming lots of links in a single post as that will likely get you banned from further posting in someone else’s blog.

Perhaps you don’t want to keep changing links for every guest post you make, especially if you have a lot of other blogs. The simple solution to getting all of your blogs seen is to only link to your main blog and from your guest posts, then make sure you have prominent links to all your other blogs from there.

You don’t need to go crazy, but it’s a good idea to do one or two guest blogging spots per week in different blogs. That way you spread yourself around enough so that lots of different people will see your posts.

Try it. You’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Terry Didcott

Author of The Honest Way Blog amongst many others!

Writing for Work at Home Based Business

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Following on from my last post about using comments in other people’s blogs to raise awareness and the profile of your own blog as well as to attract a large number of targeted visitors right to your own door, here is another powerful method of attracting visitors.

Using social networking sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog to name probably the top two of many such sites, you can make a name for yourself while promoting your blog or blogs to a high number of potential visitors.

The great value of belonging to social networking sites is that all of your potential new reader base are other bloggers who are in the main as passionate about blogging as you are. This boils down to the fact that once they get to know you, they’ll be beating a path to your door as long as what you’ve got to offer is what they want.

And what do most bloggers want?

They want to know how to make money with their blogs of course. Even the ones who vehemently shake their heads when you mention earning a few bucks for their trouble won’t turn down some free money if you tell them how to get it. So for internet marketers who run their own “make money” blogs, this is an excellent way to attract a large number of curious blogger to your own information stockpile.

But you better be ready to give away some juicy secrets and money making techniques that really work, or they’ll soon get bored and go someplace else. The trick is to have some really top quality articles ready and waiting for their inquisitive eyes to soak up. If they like what you’ve got and you show them that you’re following up regularly with quality posts, then they’ll keep coming back for more and hey presto – your site visitor stats go way up.

I’ll bring you some more inspiring insights into the fascinating world of social networking and the eternal quest for more quality traffic in future posts.

Terry Didcott

Author of The Honest Way Blog amongst many others!

Writing for Work at Home Based Business

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