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7 Blogs on Blogging to Pay Attention to

Aug 152012

Blogging is really big these days. There are hundreds of people launching new blogging websites every day. Of course, they all have slightly different reasons. Some just want to write personal entries as a journal, or share thoughts and stories from their lives with friends and family. Some, on the other hand, want to create full-blown blogging businesses and aim at replacing their current jobs.

Anyway, I’m not here to tell you which path is the right one and which isn’t. I just want to give you some inspiration by pointing out blogs that made it by writing about … wait for it … blogging itself.

Now, you probably know of ProBlogger – the main blog in this niche. However, there’s also a number of other blogs that provide interesting articles on a regular basis. So here’s my set of 7 of those blogs:

Blog Tyrant

The guy who called himself the Blog Tyrant was kind of a mystery just until recently. No one actually knew what his name was. Yet, he was able to provide great content on blogging and build a significant readership. In June 2012 he finally decided to introduce himself to the public and reveal his name… And he still provides great content. Check it out for yourself.

Bloggers Passion

Bloggers Passion trails back to January 2010. This doesn’t make it the oldest blog online, but over 2 years of providing great blogging advice is still impressive. The blog was started by Anil Agarwal from India. Over the years he learnt how to turn his passion into business and make a full-time income from it.

Blogging Tips

Blogging Tips is a blogging project by Zac Johnson, one of the top affiliate marketers online. But this blog is actually a collaborative work of a number of writers, not just Zac. Because of this, you’ll find a nice package of diverse content and advice there. Surely worth checking out.

Aliventures

Aliventures is a blog by Ali Luke, a writer, blogger, and coach. Ali isn’t only into blogging, but also fiction writing and publishing her work in the traditional media. On this blog, she provides advice on writing, blogging, freelancing, finding motivation, and other related topics.

Basic Blog Tips

Just like the name says, this blog provides blog tips to beginner bloggers and writers. The author of the blog, Ileane, also shares info on social media, and how to use it to help you with your blogging. You can find a new post on Basic Blog Tips around every other day.

Blogcast FM

The site was created in 2010. It provides advice for online businesses and entrepreneurs on how they can use blogging to help their efforts. Blogcast FM also features a number of guest posts from other bloggers, authors, or entrepreneurs. On top of that, there’s the Blogcast FM podcast, averaging more than 70,000 downloads each month.

BloggingPro

BloggingPro is a lot more than just a blog about blogging. For instance, there’s a job board, reviews of WordPress themes, and some blogging books you can buy through Amazon. On top of that, BloggingPro also provides various advice for blog owners (everything from writing, to blog management, to security and other related topics).

This concludes my list, but feel free to share if you know of any other blogs that would look good here.

About the Author

Karol K. (@carlosinho) is a freelance writer, blogger and online business owner. You can find him at newInternetOrder.com where you can tune in to various articles on how to launch an online business.

Why You Need Photos in Your Blog Posts

Blogging No Responses »

Dec 272011

Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

In the world of blogging, it most certainly is. Adding photos to your blog posts make your posts more memorable. Photos attract new readers, and keep your current readers interested in what you have to say.

In this article we will look at the advantages of using photos to liven up your blogging.

Breaking up Text

Reading text on a computer screen is much different than reading text from a book. A computer screen is difficult on the eyes, causing them to tire easily. And the reality is most people will find your blog post while actively cruising the internet. The very act of net cruising is conducive to a short attention span.

We tell new bloggers to keep their paragraphs short – generally 5 lines or less. We also tell them to insert photos to break up the text, making it more readable.

Eye catching photos not only break up the text, they also add interest to your article and make your page more visually appealing. For instance if you are writing on article on aging issues, you would want to include high quality photos of elderly people to better illustrate your message and keep your article visually attractive.

Which Photos?

The two most important points to remember when choosing which photos to use in your blog post are:

Pay Attention to Copyright Law. If you don’t know if the photo needs to be licensed, don’t use it on your page.
Keep the quality high. Use photos from good photographers only. If you use a low quality free photo, the poor quality will rub off on your blog post and discourage readers from returning to your website.

The most commonly used source of photos for bloggers are affordable stock photos. A royalty free stock photo taken by a professional photographer will give your blog the quality image it needs to be taken seriously by your readers. It will also include a license which allows you to use it. Downloading any old image found on the web will not, and could land you in hot water.

Image Size

As a blogger, you don’t need very high resolutions. So don’t pay more than you have to. Your image size can’t be any larger than the width of your blog’s content block. In practice, 450 pixels on the long side is plenty large enough for most blog posts.

Sticking to smaller size images will save you money if you purchase from a reputable stock photo agency. Most agencies charge less than $2 for a photo at a resolution appropriate for most blogs.

Additional Blog Exposure

That stock photo you just added to your blog can drive traffic to your website! Up until now your main source of search engine traffic has likely been Google, or Google Blog search. When we add stock photos, we open up our website to Google Images for additional search placement.

The first task you need to accomplish is to name the photo appropriately, and fill in the image title and alt image fields.

Your stock photo file name probably isn’t very search engine friendly. If you think “IMG231568_photo.jpg” looks convoluted to you, how do you expect a search engine to interpret it.

Take that stock photo for your article on the elderly and rename it. Use the important tags from your blog post if possible. For instance “elderly-woman-mooning-policeman.jpg” is easy for a search engine to interpret.

Fill out those image titles and alt image fields too. Search engines use them, so make sure search engines have as many ways to find media on your site as possible.

Conclusion

The inclusion of photos in your posts will raise the overall quality and visual appeal of your blog. Stick to high quality stock photos so you aren’t risking copyright infringement. Take advantage of search engine optimization techniques by renaming your photo file names, and tagging the photos so search engines have a new way to find your blog.

Website Design: Image SEO

Blogging, Design No Responses »

Dec 062011

Last week we began discussing Website Design from an SEO perspective, and demonstrated the importance of Page Titles. Today we will show you how to properly include images into your design to ensure the search engines find your website and rank you for your target content.

Aesthetic Appeal of Imagery

Whether you are using raster drawings, stock photos, or your own photography, there is no question that the inclusion of high quality images vastly increases the aesthetic appeal of any website or blog design.

african-american-student-laptop Provided the images used in your design relate to your content, they will increase the appeal of your design to your readers.

Studies show web designs which utilize images have a higher visitor return rate. Studies also show that visitors spend more time on pages which utilize images in their design. The same websites have a lower bounce rate too.

Image inclusion in articles breaks up the article in a way which makes it more digestible for the reader. Besides adding emphasis to your article or blog content, the use of images increases the chance that a reader will continue reading your article, rather than abandon it.

Images and SEO

A search engine can only see words. It doesn’t know that the image on your website is a Monet painting or a Lisa FX construction worker. No matter how artistic and aesthetically pleasing the image is, the search engines will ignore it completely unless we tell them about our image.

The first thing we need to do is name our image appropriately. If you downloaded a stock photo with a generic file name, you need to rename that photo before uploading it to your blog or website.

The photo name should follow good SEO practice. It should be simple and relevant to the content on your website. If your website focuses on growing flowers, a good file name for an image might be “growing-dahlia-flowers.jpg”.

Notice our use of dashes? We use them because search engines struggle with underscores and tend to concatenate the words together when underscores or other characters are used. Google will recognize three separate words in this example, all of which can be found through their main search engine as well as Google Images.

Image metadata needs to be included. Make sure to use the image Title and Alt tags. Don’t leave them blank. These tags also tell the search engines about our images. Make them simple and concise, but absolutely relevant. Do not consider spamming.

I like to make the Title and Alt tags similar to, or the same as, the file name. Except there is no need for dashes. Using our example above, our image title and alt tag could be “Growing Dahlia Flowers.”

One more thing. Don’t include words like and, or, the, with, and so on if you can help it. Those words slightly decrease the relevancy of your true key words that you want search engines to focus on.

Image Placement

Image placement within our design or article comes down to both artistic reasoning and SEO importance. If the target key words used in our image tags are very relevant to our content, then the higher we place the image toward the top of the webpage, the more important the search engines will deem the image to be.

This makes sense. We tend to put the most important items near the top of our websites and blogs. Less important items are generally in the footer. Search engine algorithms are programmed to use this logic when determining which content is most important on a page.

Don’t sacrifice your design by placing an image near the top of your webpage if the correct artistic placement is much lower. Just be aware of how search engines will use your choice of placement to weight the importance of the tags used in the image.

We hope we gave you some good ideas you can use in your web and blog designs. Next week we will focus on some more techniques for improving our ranking and visibility within search engines.

Blogging for Advertising

Blogging No Responses »

Nov 302011

Most of us desire to monetize our websites in some form. If your blog is not funneling visitors toward a store, e-book, or personal product, you will almost certainly want to open up your blog to outside advertising. In this article we will discuss five ways to improve your ability to fill advertising space on your blog or website.

Advertise Your Site

Someone has to place that first ad. Let it be you.

You want advertisers to see how their ad will be placed on your site. Take your time with this. Make a slick graphic design in the exact dimensions you will be accepting ads for. Use it to promote something of your own. You want the ad to be appealing and have a good call to action. Demonstrate that your blog can handle professional looking advertising.

What you choose to promote is up to you. It could be another area of your blog or website. It could be another website you own. Or another website which you have a financial interest in, such as an affiliate program. Keep the ad on topic with the rest of your blog. If your blog is about travel, don’t advertise your affiliate program for buying red worms for fishing.

Promote your Advertising Space

This is a no-brainer. Create a banner which calls advertisers to action. Put the banner near the top of your site, almost always above your blog posts.

This is one of your most important graphic designs. If you can’t get it right, outsource it to someone who can. It should be professional looking and eye catching.

Clicking on it should bring the potential advertiser to another professional looking page. Here you will lay out prices, discuss the benefits of advertising with your blog, and promote visitor demographics.

Promote Site Statistics

Once the advertiser clicks your banner to find out more about advertising, be prepared to show them the statistics they need to make their decision. Be 100% truthful, but don’t be shy about your successes.

Page impressions are very important to advertisers. The longer someone clicks around your blog, the more opportunities they will have to click on advertising banners. If you have a strong time spent on site statistic, be sure to quote it.

Total and unique visitor statistics should be listed. You might consider Page Rank and Alexa data too. Most advertisers won’t recognize Moz Rank, but it will probably be well received by those familiar with search engine optimization.

Stay Focused

Don’t jump around from topic to topic. This rarely works.

The same rules you use for attracting your audience apply to attracting advertising. If your blog is supposedly about NFL football, and you are writing about your latest vacation or other unrelated subjects in a lot of posts, advertisers won’t have much confidence in your ability to keep an audience engaged.

Advertisers need you to be dependable with your content, so you can provide them with a dependable audience.

Always be Professional

You can be controversial and be successful, but it rare that you can rant and rave without scaring away advertisers.

Being professional also means quality control. Use a spell checker. Proof read your articles multiple times before releasing them to the public. Enlist friends and family to look them over too.

Use quality photos in your blog posts. Unless you are a professional photographer, consider utilizing stock photos. Creative commons are another option, but stock photos are so inexpensive these days that it seems silly not to pay a few dollars for images which will impress your readers and potential advertisers. If I can pay a few dollars to attract a $50 ad, you bet I am going to do it.

Never take images from the internet without first getting permission to use them. Not only is this a good way to scare away advertisers who have little faith in your character, but it could land you in hot water with the copyright police.

Follow these simple tips and you should improve your success in attracting advertising to your blog.

Day 1 Blogging

Blogging No Responses »

Nov 292011

Whether you are blogging for profit or fun, promoting an e-book or referring visitors to your store, or simply looking to grab some net notoriety, it is crucial to get your blog off to a good start from day one.

For the sake of argument, we will assume you are not a famous blogger who can spin up a new blog overnight by taking advantage of a loyal following.

Most of us are literally beginning from scratch even if we have written our share of posts and run modestly successful blogs.

Whatever your goals for your blog, you will only achieve them once you begin to engage your audience. But where do you start when there is no audience yet to engage?

Identify Needs and Solve Problems

So what will you write about? Is the blog pointing visitors toward a store or e-book? What are the daily needs and problems which your store’s target audience faces?

We are an artist-run stock photo agency. Designers and bloggers are big consumers of stock photos. I begin every day thinking of new ways I can solve problems for designers and bloggers and help them become successful.

Whether I am offering a graphic design tip, teaching others how to blog successfully, helping others with web design, or offering some effective and simple to integrate SEO advice, I want to genuinely engage readers and help them build their businesses.

Establish Your Own Voice

Who are you? If I am going to read your blog for the long term, I want to get a feel for your personality. Are you funny, or a straight shooter? Are you controversial?

Be unique. Establish your own voice. Don’t emulate the way someone else writes. It won’t come natural to you, and it will show in the quality of your writing.

Build the Article Database First

Before you begin promoting your blog, build a database of several articles. First impressions are big. You don’t want your first visitors to arrive and see just one or two posts to read.

How many times have you arrived at a blog which had only one or two posts, then returned a few weeks later and found no new material? I have many times. If we are jaded and doubtful of a blogger’s long term commitment, it is because we have witnessed the same early failures repeatedly.

Ensure you have several articles online when your first visitors arrive, and you will be taken seriously.

Enlist a few friends to comment on your initial articles to get the conversation flowing. Few people like to be the first commenter. You will increase your retention rate if there is already conversation taking place.

Guest Post Your Best Content

Building your initial audience can be painfully slow. Guest posting is integral, especially in the early days of your blog. Don’t save your best articles for your own blog. Give them away as guest posts instead. You want people’s first impression of your writing to be a great one.

Guest posting introduces an established audience to you and provides valuable potential referrals. You also build a brand new link to your blog, which will increase your domain authority.

Get Social

Guest posting will get you important exposure. But it is important you build a social following too. I prefer Twitter for spinning up new connections in a hurry, but you have plenty of other good choices with Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

Even if you use a combination of social networks, I think it is important to be active on Twitter. Find new Twitter connections and see what they are writing about. When you see something which is cool, retweet it. This is an easy way to show a social connection that you appreciate their tweets, and helps build a relationship.

If you are lucky, a few will make an effort to retweet your messages, exposing you to an even wider audience. Over time you will build strong relationships with a small percentage of these connections. These relationships will be very important for lead generation to your blog.

Building an audience in the early days of a blog is difficult. We can make it less difficult by planning our release ahead of time, and by guest posting strong material. We can use social networking to generate additional leads, and build upon our existing ones.

We hope you found some useful tips for getting a blog off to a good start. Please share this post with your friends through our social networking buttons.

How do you build an audience in the early days of a blog?

Website Design: Page Titles

Blogging, Design 5 Responses »

Nov 232011

Whether you consider yourself a blogger or a website designer, it is vital that you pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO). We know you have a great website filled with valuable content and articles. Let’s make sure search engines understand what your page is about, and help people find you.

We Don’t Mean to Preach but…

SEO is integral to great web design

SEO gets a bad rap. Some practitioners put on a black hat and try to game the results of search engines. That’s not what we do, and that’s not what you do either.

Search engine technology is amazingly adaptable. It is fascinating how good a job they do at crawling a website and determining exactly what it is all about. I’m not even talking about keyword meta tags, which of course we should have.

I’m talking about the actual content on your webpage, which in some cases could be thousands of words. It’s impressive that a search engine can parse this data and make an informed judgement of what your website or blog is all about.

As good a job as the crawlers do, we need to help them understand our content. We need to tell the crawlers what content is important, and what it should be focusing on. That’s where SEO comes in.

Start with Page Titles

Page titles are one of the most important portions of our blogs and websites when it comes to how search engines categorize our content. Depending on what SEO expert you talk to, they may be more important than our keywords.

We want our page titles to be descriptive of our content. This often times means sacrificing some artistic writing for a bland style which the search engines will understand.

Say for instance you have a website about Growing Flowers. On this website you have a blog post about growing blue Morning Glory flowers, which you planted on the first Monday of the growing season.

An artistic page title for this blog post might be “Blue Monday.” It’s catchy. But the search engines won’t understand what your content is about, unless of course you want to attract people who are interested in how depressing Mondays are.

You want to create a page title which is descriptive and contains keywords, without being spammy. Try writing your page title as “Planting Morning Glory Flowers.” Simple? Yes. Boring? A little. Jazz it up if you like, but stick to relevant keywords. Think like someone using Google. What keywords would they search for to find your page?

This simple suggestion is easy to implement. Yet we constantly see web pages with strange page titles that search engines don’t understand. A little change like this can skyrocket you upward in relevance rankings.

Page Titles Should Be Unique

Be unique with all your content

Another important tip to remember is every page on your website or blog should have its own, unique title. Search engines consider page titles which are the same to be duplicate content. Duplicate content reduces the relevancy of each page in the eyes of search engines.

Going back to our example blog post on Morning Glory Flowers, let’s assume we have a lot to say about planting these beauties. Maybe we have so much to say that it goes on for three pages.

Should we have a unique page title for each page of this blog post? Yes. But it need not be complicated. All we need to do is amend our page titles to read “Page 1 of 3 | Planting Morning Glory Flowers”. The “|” will be ignored by the search engines, but it will provide separation for human eyes and improve your website’s navigation.

Avoid Underscores

Never use underscores in a page title, or in any description or file name. In a page title there is absolutely no reason for an underscore, yet for some reason people use them.

Besides being hard on the eyes, underscores are not read properly by search engines. Google skips them completely and does not consider them as a separator. Google reads “Blue_Morning_Glory” as “BlueMorningGlory,” which isn’t a word obviously.

If you must use a separator, choose a dash. Google understands the dash as a word separator, and will evaluate each word instead of concatenating them.

Conclusion

Proper page titling is a simple method for ensuring search engines understand what our content is about. Page titles have a large effect on what the search engine considers most relevant in our pages, arguably more so than our keywords do. It is important to keep our page titles unique, and to avoid characters which search engines struggle to understand.

No programming skills are required to make these important changes to our websites. It’s a method anyone can learn, and it will positively affect our search ranking position.

Next week we will look at more ways to help search engines understand our content, and show how we tag images in our blogs and website design.

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