Be Clear On How To Start, Build, Promote and Monetize Your Blog
Posted in Anatomy of a Blog by DB
Over the past two days on Website Hosting, I’ve been talking about blog monetization and why it is important that you identify your monetization strategy even before you begin blogging. Yesterday I talked about the first category of bloggers that make money indirectly, using their blogs as a means to gain exposure, build a name and even a brand for themselves.
If you haven’t read my previous post I would suggest you do so before going any further. Today let’s look at the other category of bloggers that make money directly from their blogs.
Making Money directly from your blog
Now in my first post I further divided this into two sub categories.
- People that make most of their money running affiliates ads and
- People that make most of their money running ads.
Just to be clear about it, I classify running affiliate links and Adsense together. To me, from a categorization perspective they both are pretty much the same. Why? Because the goal is the same. At the end of the day you are doing your best to get your website traffic to click on your affiliate links or Adsense links.
Let’s take a close look at the first category. Remember the goal here is to make money period!! We are not talking about folks that blog for the love of it or for any other reason. Money is the only priority, the only goal, no popularity contests to win, no bonding with your readers and fellow bloggers, absolutely no distractions.
Now obviously you need to have your niche picked out and selecting a niche is a process best explained in another series of posts. Assuming you have your niche picked out, what should your focus be? Is it Content? Traffic? Let’s answer these questions.
What should you focus on?
I’ve listed the most important points below. Oh, the list by the way is ordered based on priority.
SEO
Your entire focus right from selecting your niche, to picking out your domain name, hosting, blog design and content must be done with search engines in mind. This and only this will ensure you make money. Once you have your blog setup it is crucial that you rank high for the keywords that you target. Folks, search engine optimization is something all bloggers have to learn if you ever want to make serious money online.
Every single SEO out there (all shades, black, grey, white) that’s worth mentioning is now spending a bulk if not most of their time and their company’s time not in helping or consulting for big firms but in running their own affiliate and Adsense sites. There is simply too much money to be made. Why consult for a firm when you can apply all the SEO techniques you know into building Affiliate and Adsense sites and generate 10 times the income. Bloggers, this is your competition. Simply writing good content is not enough, hell you don’t even need good content, you need to rank high and you can do it with crappy content.
Spend your time learning SEO, spend your time building links, end of the day this is what you will be doing once your website is established.
Blog Design
Next in terms of priority is your Blog design. Why? Because if you have a good design then you will not get any clicks. This is a very subjective topic but the point is that the design should be optimized to get you more clicks. If that means a lousy design with 20 pt font sizes and red font color to boot all over the place then so be it. Ever wondered why so many of those high ranking sites on Google take you to a landing page that will seem like your 10 year old kid designed it blindfolded? Your first impulse would be to click on the nearest link and get the hell out of the site. Guess what? That is precisely the intent.
Many of the websites that are really focused on this model do not even look like a blog. They will appear to be a normal website. No RSS, no blog roll, no seemingly obvious categories. The links, the navigation will be structured to look like an everyday website.
Blog Content
Do I need good content? If you are running affiliate links then yes you do. You need to engage the audience enough to point him or her in the right direction. If you are running Adsense I would go so far to say you don’t need good content. Just enough to satisfy the search engine algorithms.
How much content would you need? This would depend on the niche you are targeting. You need to have enough content to rank highly for all the keywords and long tail keywords you plan on targeting. Remember you don’t plan to engage a reader beyond a certain point or churn out value driven content that people seek.
Blog Promotion
The only promotion you will do is to build links. Social media is to be used to build links. Networking is to done to build links. I hope you are starting to see the pattern. Everything you do with your blog is to be done with search engines in mind.
This category has tremendous potential but can and will work only if you are conscious of what is to be done and disciplined. If not you would end up with a mix of the two sub categories and your earnings will only amount to so much. There will always be an odd exception and aiming to be that exception is strangely the most common route that all bloggers choose.
Folks, I’m going to have to stop it here for today and pick up the other sub category under blogs that make money directly tomorrow. Enjoy your day.
Build And Promote Your Blog Based On Your Blog Monetization Strategy
Posted in Anatomy of a Blog by DB
Yesterday I wrote a post asking if you are clear about your monetization strategies for your blog. If you haven’t read it please do read it before proceeding with this post.
The reason for my asking you to introspect and be clear on how you plan to make money from your blog is because all your efforts to optimize, popularize and monetize your blog depends on the category your blog falls into.
Let’s look at the first category in detail today. I plan to cover the other two tomorrow.
Make money indirectly from your blog
As a blogger your main aim is to use your blog to attract clients to the services and or products you offer. What should you focus on if you run this category of blog? Two main things really, Content and Search Engines. Let’s look at content first. Content is the backbone of your blog. You are building a flagship blog, a blog that is primarily meant to build your image. If you are to profit indirectly by landing related assignments you would need to have good solid domain related content on your blog. So if for example you are branding yourself to be a SEO expert you will need to come across as an expert in the field of Search Engine Optimization in your writing. Keep your thoughts and opinions focused and be on topic. The only acceptable reason to stray is if you working on some keyword and would like to include it in your content.
If you are starting a blog in this category, simply focus on writing good solid search engine optimized content right from the beginning. Once you have decent content in place your next step would be to popularize your blog. This is where most people make mistakes.
Think carefully, what is the user profile for your blog category? Obviously people with a need for the service you offer. Where do you find them? Why search engines ofcourse. The best kind of traffic is from pure organic visitors. An user searching on Google has a need and if your blog is optimized enough your blog will rank high enough to land targeted visitors to your website. Now it’s left to your blog’s tone, authority and content to convince him to sign up.
Your next source of targeted traffic would be from forums that are directly related to your domain. Obviously you will need to spend time on these forums and use your insightful posts to convert traffic into customers.
Your entire focus on building your blog traffic should be primarily towards these two avenues. Anything else is a bonus. What usually happens is bloggers get all caught up with social media, blog communities and what not and spend a significant amount of time in trying to get their post Dugg, StumbledUpon or sign up to every single blog community available. Do you really believe that bloggers (unless yours is a “How to Blog” blog) StumbleUpon and Digg users will ever sign up for your service. C’mon, what are the chances?
The other mistake most bloggers do is spending quite a bit of time commenting on other blogs. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against commenting. The only reason I would comment on a blog is to build link juice and network with a fellow blogger in the same domain. This would mean I have to pick the blog’s that I plan to comment on carefully. To get any kind of link juice I will have to find blog that have the “Do Follow” plugin installed and to network I will only look at related blog’s. The icing would be finding a related blog that has a “Do follow” comment policy.
As a blogger you main aim is to further your service or product offering. You will in all likelihood have quite a challenge finding time to juggle the two. This is why it is important that you remain focused and concentrate on what is required to build your business and blog. Optimize your blog for search engines and learn how to write search engine optimized content. (I must write a few articles on optimizing)
In the end optimizing your blog will only take you so far. To convert you need great content and you must be prepared to put in the time and the effort to do that. Once you have both, you brand will grow, so will your traffic, your subscribers and yes your bank balance too.
Are You Clear About Your Blog Monetization Strategy?
Posted in Anatomy of a Blog, Getting Your Feet Wet by DB
Why are you starting a blog? What is the goal for your Blog? Be honest, this is really important. If you are blogging to make money or even make a living from blogging then you have to decide on your blog monetization strategy right from the start. Most of the 100,000 thousand odd blogs that start everyday plan to make money, all but a few succeed and it is the odd blogger or two that blog for the love of it.
Now making money is perfectly fine but as a blogger you should be clear on the path that you and your blog will take. This is very important as this will tell you what to focus on, define your blog audience and the means of optimizing and increasing your blog audience.
To keep things really simple I’m going to categorize them into two main blog monetization strategies.
Making Money indirectly from your blog
This category of blogger blogs extensively about their domain, be it writing, designing, hosting, SEO… you get the picture. The primary goal is to build authority in their chosen field and use that authority to land services and related projects.
Advertisements and affiliate earnings are a small component and not the primary focus. Some might choose not run any ads at all. Just because you don’t see any ads does not mean that the author is not making money from the blog.This by far is the best category to fall into or reason to start a blog. Not only are you building your brand, you are selling yourself everyday to more and more potential clients and as a bonus you also get to make money by selling Ads and pull in affiliate earnings from your blog.
Making money directly from your blog
If you are not promoting a service or skill then you fall into the second category of bloggers. The monetization strategy in this category can be mostly split into the following. Both the following categories are not mutually exclusive. I’m only categorizing them based on the biggest revenue generator
Making money from affiliate earnings
The main goal here is to earn an income from affiliate earnings. Now you could be blogging about lots of things like gadgets, books or even about being a super affiliate
but the main income is from affiliate earnings. Yes, you do make some money selling ads but is a small portion when compared to your earnings from your affiliate commissions.
If you fall in this category be sure to pick your niche wisely. Read more about picking a niche.Making money from Ads
Blogging and making money by selling advertisements on your blog. This is by far the most difficult and the most misunderstood. This is the category that nearly 90% of bloggers out there fall into. Trust me folks selling ads is very very difficult because building an audience for this category of blogs is very difficult.
For every Darren Rowse or a Micheal Arrington there is a Alan Johnson. The last I checked none of the ads on his blog were sold. Now Alan could very well sell all his ad inventory and make a lot of money but how many people out there would put in the time that Alan Johnson has in promoting his blog.
There are a million blogs that try for months and give up. You could be a fantastic writer and you could be adding great “value” to your readers
Lastly, if you are starting a blog in those super competitive “How to Blog”, “Make Money” and “Internet Marketing” niches then your job got just a little bit tougher.
Why is it important to categorize yourself? Because each category targets a separate audience/demographic and how you pull in your visitors depends largely on your monetization category. Once you are clear about your blog monetization category you can then work out various strategies to target and increase your blog earnings.
Should you be trying to increase your blog’s readership or page views? Yes, each one is different. Is my blog design appropriate enough for my monetization category? Should I be worried about my RSS subscribers? Should I concentrate on content? I plan to answer some of these questions in my next post.
Common SEO Myths You Need To Be Aware Of
Posted in SEO by DB
I come across quite a few SEO myths especially while browsing through forums and blogs While I’m sure all of us understand the most common SEO myths regarding Meta Tags, Page Rank, Search Engine Submissions, I’ve listed 5 that I’ve seen being discussed quite often.
By the way all of the following myths are false.
Avoid more than one hyphen in your domain name.
The general perception is that Google will brand your site as a spam site if you have too many hyphens in your domain name. In reality, while having too many hyphens will certainly flag your website for a manual inspection, as long as your site content passes visual inspection you have nothing to worry about.
Traffic affects your website ranking.
While increasing number of webmasters use Google Analytics to track visitors and Google certainly will keep tabs and give you some brownie points based on popularity and the follow on perceived authority, the fact of the matter is Google simply cannot afford to rank websites based on traffic. Google primary aim is to display the best and the most relevant content to its users. Lot of traffic does not mean the latest and the most relevant content.
Link out to Quality sites and your ranking will rise.
Linking out to quality sites will set the tone and the relevancy of your content but it will never bring about an increase in page rank or authority. But what is for certain is linking out to poor and spammy neighborhoods will most certainly destroy any ranking you might have had.
Hosting on a Shared IP is a negative factor.
While being hosted on a dedicated IP is a definite plus, Google will not penalize you for being hosted on a shared IP Address. Now if you start linking out to other websites hosted on the same IP Address then you will have bigger problems to worry about. Being classified as a link farm is the last thing you want to happen to you.
Incoming Links from Link farms and Bad neighborhoods will affect your rankings.
Again not true. There are many such scenarios and you can simply apply the same rule to them all. Unless Google can categorically prove that you and only you, the website owner was responsible for the actions, Google simply cannot penalize you. If the above were true just imagine how easy it would be to manipulate the SERP’s. All I would need to do is get a dozen link farms to link to my closest competitor.
Read and educating yourself about the right facts of SEO is important to say the least. The direct way to learn is to implement the ideas and thoughts that you feel are right on a website that you can afford to lose. An easier and quicker option would be to bounce these ideas against many of the top ranked sites. You can learn a lot from your competitor, there is no greater source of free information for you to learn from than the first 10 sites listed on Google for your target keyword.
Elastic IP’s and Availability Zones – Amazon’s Two New Offerings For EC2
Posted in News, Web Master by DB
Great news from Amazon today. According to the email I received today, Amazon has just launched Elastic IP’s and Availability Zones for all application instances running on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 Background
Some of the biggest critics of Amazon’s EC2 framework have always pointed out that a lack of Static IP Address on your production system was a cause for concern and until now you had to work with a Dynamic DNS provider to keep your application up and running. With the launch of Elastic IP’s, Amazon, it seems has clearly been listening to all the disgruntled voices.
Elastic IP Address
Elastic IP’s give you the flexibility of associating a Static IP Address to your AWS account. Actually you have a choice of using 5 Static IP Addresses. Once you are assigned an IP Address, all you need to do is associate it with an already running instance or start up a new instance with the Static IP Address. Previously restarting your EC2 production instance would mean a new IP address. Now using the bundled API tools, all you need to do is bring up the instance and associate it with your previously assigned static IP Address. No more changing your DNS setup, no more running Dynamic DNS tools on your server and the best part is no more waiting for your DNS to propagate.
Availability Zones
The other major announcement today was the launch of availability zones. An availability zone is a distinct zone within a particular region. Remember housing your mission critical application within a single datacenter is at the end of the day a definite single point of failure no matter how thoroughly redundant the datacenter is. While Amazon has only opened up a single region (US) so far for use, by launching and making available multiple availability zones within the same region ensures complete and total redundancy for your application.
You can now launch instances within a particular availability zone and by simply having multiple instances running in multiple zones your end users will experience reduced latency and a system/application that in theory should be available at all times, in other words you achieve the ultimate goal of 100% uptime.
Conclusion and Amazon Wish List
Amazon has continuously strived to make their web services the option of choice for web hosting and related tasks. By addressing these lingering issues in EC2, Amazon has once again set the benchmark in cloud computing. What would be absolutely fantastic is if they now open up multiple regions as well. Just imagine being able to run specific application instances targeted for specific country and location based users.
How Do I Select A Dedicated Server Management Company?
Posted in Web Master by DB
The next step in the hosting ladder after a reseller account is running a dedicated server. As a reseller you can only do and offer so much to your customers. An increasing customer base or increase in resource demand from existing customers will push you to start shopping around for a dedicated server.
Now assuming you/your company are not completely hands on at dedicated server administration and management, a managed dedicated server would seem the ideal next step. Well actually you have two options. You can either buy a fully managed server from your dedicated server provider or you can only lease the dedicated server and outsource your server management to a third party. From my experience the latter option will save you a few bucks every month and more importantly will give you the flexibility of changing your server support team if you find them lacking for any reason.
If you have quite a few servers I would urge you to think of using more than one server management companies. Again it’s all about spreading your risks. Having a single company manage all your servers is putting all your eggs in one basket. By having separate companies manage your hardware you can always get two different perspectives for any unforeseen problem that may arise and you will always have the option of bringing in the SWAT team if you, God forbid!! have a disaster on your hands.
Irrespective of the path you choose, what is important is that you check and select your third party server management company or your managed dedicated server provider only if they provide the following services.
- Server Migration
- Ongoing Operating System hardening and updates
- Ongoing Application updates
- Ongoing Server and Hardware monitoring
- Ongoing Application monitoring
- Ongoing Antivirus updates
- Ongoing Security audits with full report every month.
- 24/7 Technical support via phone.
- Disaster recovery
- Backups and restoration
- Intrusion detection
- Database administration
- Performance tuning
Again if I were you I would go for a unmanaged dedicated server, completely outsource my server management and sign up or a monthly plan both for the server and for the server management. Yes it will cost me a few dollars more but folks it’s all about risk and mitigation.
What Is KVM And Why Do You Need It?
Posted in Web Master by DB
What is KVM? Do I need to it? Simply put, KVM stands for Keyboard, Video and Mouse. A KVM (switch) is primarily used to control multiple computers from the same keyboard, video monitor and mouse. At some point in your hosting career you will increasingly become concerned with remote administration access. As you graduate from shared hosting to a reseller account to leasing a dedicated server to finally co locating your own server with a datacenter of choice, one of the deciding factors in either leasing a server or co locating will be the availability of a KVM switch for remote administration.
Foremost among the necessaties of a webmaster is to have complete access to his/her remote server at all times. Using a remote KVM device (KVM over IP) you can do just that. You get complete access to your remote dedicated server over a secure internet connection.
The advantage KVM has over conventional methods of remote administration is that KVM does not depend on any software running on the remote server. KVM allows you to monitor your server right from the its booting up and even interact with the base level BIOS setting. Most KVM over IP devices support the web browser as the user interface so no client software is required.
Many hosting providers provide you with access to a Remote Console. But while having access to your remote server via a Remote Console is great keep in mind that a Remote Console uses an out-of-band management switch to redirect the computers serial console input and output over a secure internet connection to the remote user and this service requires that the server OS is up and running. This is where KVM scores over Remote Console as KVM does not depend on the OS and even offers BIOS level control.
Remember if you manage a dedicated server for your business or for your clients it is very important to plan for any kind of eventuality. Being completely dependent on your hosting providers support staff is obviously not the smartest situation to be in. This is where being with a dedicated server provider that gives you access to your server via KVM over IP is really important. Using KVM, you can pretty much access your remote server in almost any kind of state except of course when it is completely powered down.
Trust me, when your remote server does a blue screen on you, it will be your KVM switch that will save the day and keep those incredibly long minutes of downtime down.
Single Most Important Factor For Choosing a Website Hosting Company
Posted in Hosting by DB
The most important thing you really need from a hosting company has nothing to do with the amount of bells and whistles they offer, no matter how shiny and pretty they may be. At the end of the day, the amount of space, bandwidth and all the free stuff don’t really matter when you are caught in the middle of a perplexing issue and have no clue on how to get yourself out of it.
Support, by far, is the only thing that you should focus on when choosing a website hosting company especially if you are looking for shared hosting. It can be a little tough to figure out ahead of time whether or not a company’s claims about support are true, but there are a few ways that you can check this out.
First, you can test out their customer support team by sending in a message to their help desk. Try to be as obtuse as you possibly can. Ok, you may want to use an alternative name if you are really going to be annoying. See what kind of response you get. If the answer is helpful and informative, you’ve got a winner. If the answer is go pound sand, you may want to keep looking.
Second, it’s important to really get a feel for their tech support during the free trial period (assuming they offer one). You will be setting up your site and chances are you will run into a few issues along the way. Notice and record the kind of responses you get. How long did it take to hear back from your hosting provider and how friendly was the answer? Remember, a nasty or a short response is not the done thing or what you are looking for. No matter how annoying or thick headed you may be, the bottom line is, you are paying them for their support and they need to have the patience to walk you through everything. If they don’t, it’s definitely time to move on.
Support is crucial especially if you are in the early stages of your hosting career. Almost everyone starts off with shared hosting and in shared hosting your single point of contact for any kind of issue resolution will be the hosting company support staff. You do not have the luxury of outsourcing your server management to a third party.
Choosing a host because of the unlimited bandwidth and free space on offer will only have you smiling while signing up. It is the support that your chosen hosting provider provides that will keep that smile on for the rest of your hosting term because there will be a day in the not so distant future when your website comes back with a “Page Not found” response. Trust me !!
Do You Buy Hosting Based On Uptime Guarantees?
Posted in Hosting by DB
99.999% uptime guarantee, sounds impressive huh!! Before you take out your credit card and buy that perfect plan from that impressive sounding hosting company, keep this in mind. Many people simply do not realize that this much vaunted guarantee does not take into account scheduled maintenance time. This usually is the kicker for many people. Since it is not included, the hosting company can take your website down for hours at a time while they update their software or hardware. To sound cruel they can stop to take out the trash and even pet the dog before finally getting your site back online.
So while a hosting company could have the perfect uptime record for the past “x” number of days, the same hosting company could have had 10 hours of scheduled downtime each month. While this may not be a problem for the average site owner, it is totally unacceptable if you are running a business site or if you have a very popular site. Every minute of downtime can mean lost business and since it is not covered by an uptime guarantee, you have no recourse either. Granted every company has to do maintenance but you often find hosting companies taking the scheduled maintenance route all too often and to the very extreme.
Remember folks you simply cannot monitor your own site 24 hours a day. Unless you have some form of tracking software setup chances are you will never even realize that your hosting company dropped the ball on you. Many website hosting companies bet on this fact and rarely even bother informing you that your site went down. Unless you bring it up and raise a ticket you can forget getting that reimbursement.
An uptime guarantee is like the icing on the cake. It gives you a warm fuzzy feeling but it’s completely frivolous. Focus on other selling points that really mean something to you instead of these guarantees. Every hosting company, big or small, shared, dedicated, grid or cloud computing, all have had and will have downtimes. Its how efficiently your host can recover from a downtime and how forthcoming and communicative your host is during a downtime that matters.
How Do I Select An Affordable Hosting Plan?
Posted in Hosting, Starting Out by DB
Stare too long at a comparison chart for a budget website hosting plan from a few of the million or so hosting companies out there and pretty soon you might just start to despair. Every company out there seem to be advertising the same features, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth ( data transfer ) and to top it all even the freebies start to sound alike. While website hosting is a competitive business, it can get more than a little confusing for a newbie trying to find an affordable plan to get started.
What can you do different? Instead of looking at the usual features and promises take the unconventional route and start comparing Hosting providers by the amount of support and service they offer. This is what is really important anyway for a newbie, not the gazillion bytes they’re giving in storage. Chances are, you’ll never come close to needing that much space anyway, unless you have a huge collection of rich media files and non-stop and or viral traffic.
Start by weeding out all of the companies that don’t offer round the clock support. This should give you a much more watered down list of hosting companies. Look at who is left standing. Narrow it even further by weeding out the companies that only offer email support. You should now be able to make a much more informed decision at this point.
The usual mistake is to make a decision based on the price when buying a website hosting plan. If price is really such an over riding factor then at the very least make sure you read through the company’s TOS carefully and always sign up for a monthly plan. A monthly plan though slightly more expensive will give the option of cutting your loses if the going starts to get tough. Do be aware that many budget hosts have all sorts of nasty little fees that they in all probability will spring on you and what started out as a cheap plan can and will turn into an expensive one really really fast.
