Coming soon…
I”m in the process of starting a master list of websites with blog directories, or that take blog submissions. If you have a site, know of a site or are even thinking of developing a site with a blog directory, or similar give me a shout!
What’s in it for you? Well, at the very least a link on this page to your site or blog from your comments. If you own a site, you’ll be receiving a link to your site of course on our main list.
This article by Simon Clarke really sums up what effective blogging is all about. Many of us do one or two of these, but when you follow all 10 steps, your blog begins to take authority and demands instant respect.
A weblog can be a powerful resource for a coach. Many coaches have achieved significant exposure over the web with their own Blogs, not to mention the extensive professional networking opportunities that the ‘Blogosphere’ can provide.
So if you want to Blog, what do you need to consider? Here are IQ’s top ten tips to assist you launch into the Blogosphere:
1. Niche It
When considering your Blog’s content, make sure you are considering what your niche will seek. If you are planning to develop a Blog to increase your profile, your content will reflect how you position yourself to your prospects. Therefore, write content that matters to them.
2. Search It
Enable search mechanisms in your Blog. Most Blog platforms provide these as easy-to-install widgets at no cost. This function will allow your readers to quickly find content they are after, thus improving the efficiency in which your message will be delivered.
3. Link It
Link your Blog to your personal profile and website (if you have one). Most platforms will provide a Bio page where you can include your qualifications, experience, personal interests and other relevant information. This is a good opportunity to introduce yourself from an up-close position, allowing your readers to identify themselves with their ‘prospective coach’ (include a professionally-looking photo in your bio).
4. Contact It
Make sure you allow your readers to contact you. Some Blog use email links, other use forms – either way, ensure your readers can get to you (and do so without having to spend several minutes looking for your email address or telephone number within your Blog pages).
5. Categorize It
Create meaningful and concise categories to organise your content. If you are serious about Blogging, soon you will have plenty of content which will need to be well-organised to attract readers. Good categories will likely generate a good first impression from your Blog’s potential readers.
6. Domain It
Register a domain name and direct it to your Blog. It is a low investment which can generate an excellent level of return, and also reinforce your brand. Furthermore, it adds a professional touch to your page.
7. Disseminate It
Register your Blog in as many directories and registries as you can. Get your blog out there so people can find your content. You can start by creating a Feedburner account to distribute your feeds (and also take advantage of their automated email notifications, amongst several other tools) and then claiming your Blog at Technorati. Then look for other registries such as Google Blog Search and Blog Top Sites to multiply your presence on the web.
8. Syndicate It
Publish your posts at news syndication sites such as Digg. These websites represent a large margin of the Internet’s web traffic and if your posts prove to be appealing, it could direct more traffic to your Blog than anything else.
9. Network It
Develop relationships with other Bloggers who have the same client profile as you have. Reciprocal links, cross-promotions, and many other web-marketing strategies can help you leverage your content and increase your exposure over the web.
10. IQ It
The most important aspect of all is the quality of your content. Writing superb content will get your Blog on top. Conversely, writing poor content will slowly kill your efforts to create a professional Blog and attract prospects to your business. And if your Blog has great content to offer, it could become one of Coach IQ Coaching Club’s recommended resources!
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Simon Clarke has over 15 years of experience as a writer, entrepreneur and business specialist. He is also the founder and Director of the Life Coaching Institute and the Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors: both industry leading training providers in Australia and overseas.
Just wrote a short blurb on my other blog that deals with online marketing.
An eyetracking study has been done that followed how people actually view your website. The images posted are more than just eyeopening. They show you how to layout a website and in what order for real, human, visitors.
Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is easily rectified.
Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be found within “The Robot Exclusion Protocol” which has now been adopted by all the major search engines. There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site.
1. The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and
2. The Robots Tag
The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)
This is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. Once created you must upload the file into the root directory of your website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Before a search engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content. The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots Tag.
Creating your robots.txt file
Example 1 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and make the entire site available for indexing. The robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. By leaving the “Disallow” blank all parts of the site are suitable for indexing.
Example 2 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and to stop the spiders from indexing the faq, cgi-bin the images directories and a specific page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will now not be indexed by any search engine spiders.
Example 3 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to the Google spider, googlebot and stop it from indexing the faq, cgi-bin, images directories and a specific html page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation
By naming the particular search spider in the “User-agent” you prevent it from indexing the content you specify. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by simply naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will not be indexed by Google.
That’s all there is to it!
As mentioned earlier the robots.txt file can be difficult to implement in the case of dynamic sites and in this case it’s probably necessary to use a combination of the robots.txt and the robots tag.
The Robots Tag
This alternative way of telling the search engines what to do with site content appears in the section of a web page. A simple example would be as follows;
In this example we are telling all search engines not to index the page or to follow any of the links contained within the page. In this second example I don’t want Google to cache the page, because the site contains time sensitive information. This can be achieved simply by adding the “noarchive” directive.
What could be simpler!
Although there are other ways of preventing duplicate content from appearing in the Search Engines this is the simplest to implement and all websites should operate either a robots.txt file and or a Robot tag combination.
Source: ArticlesFactory.com
Should you require further information about our search engine marketing or optimization services please visit us at http://www.e-prominence.co.uk – The specialist search marketing company.
You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
Http://www.bloglet.com
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)
http://www.my.yahoo.com
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.
http://www.pingomatic.com
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.
To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm
13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).
16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com
Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com
10 Tips On Promoting Your New Blog
One great way of getting more traffic and more importantly, making the traffic come back to your site over and over again, is by having your own blog.
The term, ‘Blog‘, is becoming more and more popular, and these days most online companies have a blog.
How can you promote your blog? Once you get your blog known, if you have good enough content, then it will promote itself, thats the amazing thing with blogs.
Heres some quick tips to help promote your blog.
1. Allow your blog readers to subscribe to your own RSS feed. Subscribe with Feedburner. Feedburner allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers.
2. Always set your blog to ping ‘update services’. What is that? If you use the Wordpress software, here is a great explanation, http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services.
3. Take full advantage of Technorati. For a full explanation of what Technorati is and how it works, take a look here, http://www.technorati.com/about/tour.html.
4. Use the power of social netwroking sites, such as digg.com, reddit.com and del.icio.us . If you write a great article, submit it to these sites, if they get picked up by them, you will see a massive increase in traffic to your blog.
5. When writing a post, always make sure you link to as many related sites and blogs. Many blogs have a ‘trackback’ feature enabled which can see what other blogs, like yours, are sending visitors to their blogs. They then usually link back to your blog automatically for free.
6. Get your blogs web address in as many places as possible. Use forums, and put your blogs address in your signature.
7. Submit your blog to as many blog directories as possible, such as blogcatalog.com
8. Link to your blog from your websites homepage, and also in the footer of every other page on your website.
9. Get tips from 2 pro bloggers, such as problogger.net and shoemoney.com
10. Finally, and most important, write great content that is relevant to your website, and you will then find your readers will do your promoting for you.
Article Written By Phil From www.adquick.co.uk - Please check out AdQuick
Most of the “rules” about writing for ezines and newsletters apply to writing posts for your blog, but there are some important differences. Keep these 10 tips in mind and you’ll be publishing great blog content that attracts prospects and clients in your niche market.
1. Write with the reader in mind. Remember WIIFM? It’s marketing jargon for What’s In It For Me? That’s what you should be keeping in mind. Your reader will read your post looking for what’s in it for them.
2. Make it valuable and worthwhile. Don’t waste people’s time. If you don’t have anything to say, no problem, plenty other people do. So share their articles, do an interview, review a book.
3. Proof-read for typos and glaring grammatical errors. You wouldn’t go out of the house with dirty hair or missing a sock, so why would you publish spelling mistakes? Respect your readers by polishing up your stuff.
4. Keep it short and simple, sweetie. (KISS). Most people are scanners. You may have a lot to say and think it interesting, and it may be. But people are reading online and out of time. Get to the point quickly. Publishing short posts more frequently is a better format than publishing lengthy articles every few weeks.
5. Keep it lively, make it snappy and snazzy. Even if you aren’t a natural born writer, you can write for your blog. Just write like you’re speaking to your friend…or to yourself! Remember though, get to the point quickly. Keep in mind the journalist’s rule of 5 W’s in the first paragraph: who, what, why, when and where.
6. Link often. This builds credibility and positions you as an expert in your field. People don’t have time to know what others are doing, you should tell them. Linking to other blogs and websites also helps you build a network of associates who will in turn link to your blog.
7. Use keywords often. This will help you stay on purpose, and the search engines will love your blog. Your rankings will go up. This is one of the reasons we have you write out your purpose statements before beginning your blog. The clearer you are about your purpose, the more consistently you will deliver messages that are on target. And the more often your keywords show up, the better your search engine results.
8. Write clearly (short sentences, only one concept per sentence). No double speak or jargon; no more than one idea in one sentence- don’t make your readers have to think about your meaning. Spoon feed them. Use commas and dashes liberally.
9. Write like you talk. It’s okay to use common expressions from speech.
Examples:
Go figure.
Don’t even go there…
Now, I ask you…
Gotta love it…
(And, remember the age group of your readers…)
10. Use a clear headline, and don’t be afraid to make bold statements (but don’t mislead people either). Make it snazzy and use key words. Example: Ex-Techno-Weenie Masters HTML Code
BONUS: After you write a post and BEFORE you hit the save button
Use this checklist to ask yourself a few questions as you are reading through for typos and grammar:
Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, and Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.coachezines.com, http://www.bizbooknuggets.com and http://www.biztipsblog.com
If You Have A Blog But Not A Lot Of Time, Here Are 5 Tips To Help
by: Lynette Chandler
1. Start a Community Blog. A community blog is just that, a community of like-minded people who contribute to a blog. One of the obvious advantages to this type of blog is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time posting yourself to be part of an active blog. If you have a community of three or more people and you each post at least twice a week then you will have a pretty active blog. Be sure to use an RSS feed and have all contributors post the feed on their sites to get the benefit of each sites visitors.
2. Hire a team of bloggers. Newspapers have contributors, blogs can too. If you’ve ever used writers to do articles and content for you , they can do the same type of thing with a blog. Many of the most successful blogs are already doing this. The combination of group promotion effort, regular updates and pinging can help bring in traffic quickly. One thing to note here is blogs are a somewhat social tool. Some very popular niche blogs are not all that visible in the search engines, yet they get a lot of traffic because people recommend them and they become a sort of buzz hub. Search engines do not always pick up on this but they do eventually. This is why group blogging can be very powerful because you’re leveraging the power of not one (your) influence group but several people’s influence group. If you do pay your bloggers, you can always offset this cost by displaying Adsense ads. Many popular blogs earn a good amount in Adsense, that they make a nice profit even after paying their bloggers team. After a while it becomes a passive income stream.
3. Recycle Content. By taking previously published articles, interviews or even audio and breaking it up into blog sized pieces you can recycle old content and make it new again! You can break up long pieces into a bunch of segments and have a series going for, say, a week or so. Then you won’t have to worry about coming up with new content for a week!
4. Include audio. For some of us, it’s much easier to speak than to write. So, mix up your blog. Carry a small portable MP3 recorder or blog by phone. What a convenient way for moms who are running around all day , busing the kids where they need to go , doing errands , and whatever else needs to be done. Maybe you’re stuck in traffic, or waiting for the kids to get out piano class or school. An idea or thought strikes and you think “Oh I need to share that on my blog” so, pick up your phone (assuming you have a cell phone - and many of us do), dial a number, say what’s on your mind, save it and you’re done. Your blog is published. If you’re using Blogger, you can do this for free through AudioBlog. It involves calling a long distance number, but most cell phone plans don’t charge extra for long distance anyway so you’re not incurring any extra cost.
If you’re using another blog publishing tool like WordPress, Movable Type or TypePad, then you’ll need a service like AudioBlogger.com. This one is a paid service but it’s only $4.95 a month and it gives you more options like a nice flash player, statistics and even video that make it worth while.
5. Automating Your Blog. One of the things I love about using Wordpress as a publishing tool is that it offers a forward blog entry option that saves me tons of time. By using this tool you can blog ahead of time and have your entries posted on the day and time you choose. So let’s say you have a week’s worth of posts ready to go. You don’t have to come back each day and post, instead you write everything up in one day and schedule a new post out 24 hrs after the next. This will save you time!
Let’s face it. There will be times we have a ton to say and times we have little or nothing to share. Instead of having multiple entries one day and nothing over the next few days, by using forward entry you can blog everyday of the week. Or rather you blog once and the blog publishing tool does the job automatically the rest of the week. You can even forward blog for weeks and months ahead of time.
Note: Blogger users unfortunately cannot do this because Blogger publishes all entries regardless what you date it immediately.
Affectionately nicknamed Tech Diva by her peers, Lynette Chandler regularly dispenses blogging and RSS help to countless business owners. Visit http://www.BloggingStarterPack.com to learn more about blogging and get a copy of her video free.
This is an interesting article I came across on the net that I think some of the newbies in the blogging world can really gain from. This is only a starting point, and not the be all solution. If you want to get into blogging but aren’t ready to spend much time on it. There is some value information herein. If you are serious, the first step is to setup your own blog, on your own site. Do not waste your time with a free blogging service unless you just want to learn and play.
If you’re a newbie with a burning desire of learning more about making money with your blog, pay close attention.
NOTE: believe it or not, making money with your blog is free. Yes, making money with your blog does not require you to buy domain names nor order web hosting to host web sites.
While making money with your blog is not easy, it’s free and requires you take into consideration some suggestions and apply a few quick tips.
This article reveals little-known secrets about making money with your blog, secrets that just a few people know.
Want to join the elite of top blog earners?
Here are the nitty-gritty tips on how to make money with blogs.
First of all, you need to visit www.blogger.com and set-up your free account. The steps are easy:
1. You create a blogger account
2. You name your blog
3. You chose a blog template
Secondly, you are going to decide on how you want to monetize your blog. If you don’t have your own product (I highly recommend you create one as soon as possible), you should go about picking one, two or three top affiliate products (or services).
These affiliate products or services need to be 100% related to your blog theme (niche audience) if you want to get maximum results from your promotions.
HINT: you get to genereate more affiliate sales if the affiliate product you recommend is highly targeted to a specific audience. In fact, the success rate of closing the sale depends on how precise you can target your market.
One of the best affiliate program directories can be found at www.associateprograms.com.
Here you get free access to thousands of pages of affiliate programs, useful tips, money-making articles, researched recommendations, and a helpful affiliate forum.
Besides affiliate programs you can also monetize your blog by applying for Google AdSense Program.
You can get full info about this service here:
https://www.google.com/adsense
The beauty of this program is that you get paid a percentage every time someone clicks on an AdSense ad from your blog.
Making money with affiliate programs require you to actively promote the affiliate product and you only get paid when you generate a real sale, and not just a click.
AdSense is the lazy way to making money with your blog.
After you decide which income stream you want to go after (I suggest you go with both affiliate products and Google AdSense) you need to take into consideration this…
Final tip - regardless your blog theme, if you want to make real money with blogs, you should copycat top blog experts into your field.
You need to spy on your competitors and find out how and why they are successful.
Try to contact them and ask them to share with you some tips about building a successful money-making blog. Most will gladly help you with some quick tips.
You’ll never know when that secret tip will make you a top blog earner and well known expert into your field.
It’s not that hard to find blog expert or spy on your competition. In fact, here’s how you can quickly and easily find blog competitors:
1. go at www.google.com
2. type into the search bar “your niche topic” + “blog”
e.g. “dog training” + “blog” or “acne treatment” + “blog”
I’m sure you get the picture. Once you find some listings go and browse the related Web Sites that fits your blog theme.
Make a list with top 10 blogs that you’d want to model.
3. Contact each owner of those 10 blogs and ask for help.
You don’t have to be shy. Ask any question that comes into your mind. Ask your most burning questions. I highly suggest that you do not ask more than 3 quick questions.
Most people don’t have time to write long e-mails. You’d want to keep your first e-mail quick and to the point.
In conclusion, if you put these quick blog money-making tips into practice, you too can become a top blog earner. That’s the only way to do it. Take action now!
Codrut Turcanu is a full-time Top Marketer from Romania. Sign-Up for his 6-part FREE eCourse (A $29.95 VALUE) and discover “How To Make Real Money With Blogs”
Blog submission used to be as simple as providing a URL, sometimes an email address, and being done with it.
Now, spammers are trying to take advantage of a good thing, and causing some real issues. To give you an idea, to acheive 1500 entries on our site, we’ve had to sift through 48000+ spam submissions. It doesn’t take much to realize that some entries we just delete and don’t even give a second chance to. Are we just being mean? Not if you can follow a few basic rules.
Some tips for submitting your blog (or websites) to any online directory.
Its really as simple as 1, 2, 3
Thats all folks!
Comments? Got beef? Post them below.
- Ed