SevenToTen - Blogging About Everything

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I saw this rant on 5xmom. She complains of decreasing blog income… actually she earns more than $500 and that is already a lot of money for me. I understand her frustrations as I am also feeling the crunch with paid writing jobs becoming scarce and the remuneration getting lesser.

Adsense earnings have dropped for many bloggers too. Although I don’t use Adsense here (because of my low trafffic), I have read a lot of blog posts commenting that their clicks are earning less. Not surprising considering Google’s share price has tumbled to less than 50% of its peak. Google now has to source for more advertising money as well as cut costs to achieve good quarterly report.

To sustain a blog, it is not easy, what with lots of research, forum/social networks/blog hopping, and editing to do. It is almost like having a full time job except that you are not answerable to anyone but yourself.

If bloggers cannot at least cover the basic cost like domain and web hosting, then the blogosphere is as good as dead.

Define Your Goals for the Newsletter

This is perhaps the most important thing that I’ll say in this post because virtually everything else flows from this.

What do you want to achieve with this email newsletter? Is it about:

• driving traffic to your blog?
• developing community among your readers?
• building a list to ’sell’ to?
• reinforcing your brand?
• making money from advertising sold in the newsletter?
• Something else?

When you subscribe to a few different bloggers newsletters it becomes quite evident that different bloggers are taking quite different approaches. For example Chris Brogan’s newsletter is much more about providing his subscribers with lots of new original content (it is well worth subscribing to if you’re into social media and building online communities). He explores a theme each week. On the other hand my photography newsletter is more about highlighting key articles and discussions on my blog and forums from the last week.

The reason our newsletters are so different is that we have different goals.

My main goal is simply to drive traffic back to my blog. I find that many of my readers are not using RSS (quite a few do but there is a sizable proportion of them that have never heard of it) and so my newsletter is a way of hooking these readers into ’subscribing’ and reminding them to check out fresh content each week.

Chris on the other hand seems to be using his newsletter to give his most committed readers something extra. This builds and reinforces his brand, builds community and gives those of us who subscribe a feeling of being on the inside of what he’s thinking (scary as that might sound).

So work hard on defining what you want to achieve with your newsletter. It can have numerous goals (for example I use mine to drive affiliate sales from time to time and to build a sense of community) but keep your primary goal as the main focus.

Problogger explains how to write a successful newsletter. Read his full article here.

I did not score that well during my school days - the research papers were the killers. I know of many people who have little time to write their custom essay, term papers and dissertations. It could be due to job pressures, family reasons, or boy-girl relationships.

This problem can now be overcome easily with Premium-paper. They are a professional writing, editing and proofreading service which cater to students of all levels. This is important as you do not want college papers for a university submission. Of course, there are some ethical issues involved when the custom written essay did not originate from you, even if it complies with copyright and plagiarism issues.

The writers from Premium-paper start from scratch, and the essay is not sold but belong exclusively to you. Nobody will know you are using this service. Even if you want to write your own essay, you can still use their written assignments as a sample or research guide. You can gauge the standard required for an A+ paper.

The good news for a website owner or blogger is that custom essays can also be professionally written by the company. If you are busy, you can use their service but for now, I prefer to write my own content.

As a blogger, we need to conduct research frequently for our articles. Among my favorite research tools are google and of course, Wikipedia (the net’s encyclopedia).

Lately, I notice a lot of sites wanting to emulate the success of Wikipedia. The technical competency needed to create such a professional site is daunting but thankfully, Wetpaint allows you to circumvent your lack of knowledge. What you need is only your passion and some hard work in promotion.

Just in case you have never heard of a wiki, it is any website where users can edit/contribute text, polls, photos, and videos. Content can build up very fast if your site is popular. You can also control members’ access and privileges using the permission settings. Every modification on a wiki page is tracked (for accountability) and objectionable material removed easily, otherwise the quality will deteriorate and become a hotbed for spam.

The beauty of wikis is they are always work-in-progress. The more coats you add, the richer the story. To start your little wiki adventure at Wetpaint, just decide upon your topic of interest and then pick the appropriate site style. Then determine if you want to operate your wiki within a closed group or open it to the public, and choose your contributors wisely - is it a free for all to increase quantity or only to selected parties who can make insightful editions?

To summarize, Wetpaint combines the best of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks. That is why they are so attractive and have already powered more than 850,000 sites and counting. I have signed up already and once my wiki is up and running, I will announce it on this blog. Check out the site today and see if you can catapult your wiki into the next big thing.

There is a fine line between email marketing and spam. You have to be careful when you are using this strategy to promote your products or services, else you get on the wrong side of the law. The main thing is to tie up with a reputable email marketing agency.

I have browsed through this website, iContact, and it looks impressive with a cliente boasting Fortune 500 companies (like Bank of America, Ford, Nissan, Super 8 Motel) and 183,865 users.

iContact has a user-friendly interface, over 300 professionally designed email templates, and also include, at no additional cost, surveying, autoresponder, and blogging tools to allow businesses to interact with prospects, customers, and subscribers.

Sending out email newsletters is effective since they provide a near perfect inbox deliverability. You can also add a sign-up form to your web site, segment your list, and manage your subscribers. The application allows you to track email performances (opens and clickthroughs) in real time with their charts.

Basic monthly prices start at $9.95, increasing proportionally with your list size. For corporations, they offer an Enterprise product that starts at $660/month.

As a blogger, I think this service is useful in pushing my product to a wide audience. Since emarketing is such a sensitive issue, I prefer to leave it to the pros, put it on autopilot and get great deliverability.

The monthly fee may put some people off especially when there is no revenue in the early days but you can try it out for a few months, once the traffic starts coming in, you can decide to continue with the service or not. By the way, there is a 15 day free trial of iContact. Check out the site today!

What is a blog carnival? Think of an event where a lot of people gather for the fun and entertainment. A blog carnival is not too far away from that.

As a blogger, you need links and in a blog carnival, you will find an array links pointing to blog posts about a niche topic. Usually, there are many editions of a blog carnival, and every week, different blogs will host it. It is easy to participate, as an example, go to the Blog Carnival website, browse around for relevant topics and submit your entries.

This is a simple yet effective method to promote your blog when you are starting out. The carnivals will give you exposure in the form of high quality relevant traffic and back links. Additionally it will also give you the possibility to interact with fellow bloggers.

Kodak has appointed a chief blogger. Great news that blogging is now recognized as an official position in an organization, not just any part time or surreptitious activity. And the pay must be lucrative too.

But for blogging enthusiasts, this does not mean all the big corporations will be offering such a vacancy and and we can all go apply. Jennifer Cisney, their first “Chief Blogger” has been an employee with Kodak for well over a decade before she was recently promoted.

This is still a great start, so just hone your skills, you never know when your boss need such a talent and if you have in your resume a few reputable blogs, the job is as good as yours.

The optimal keyword density for SEO optimization is believed to be 2 - 10%. Overdoing it and the search engines will regard an article as spam. Article spam will cause your site to become sandboxed and getting out is not easy.

Below is a basic checklist for SEO optimization. Meaning places where the keywords used in writing our blog article should appear. They will not guarantee a top ten position in Google but it will help.

Title
Sub-header
Meta Tags ==> Keywords and Description

Some other tactics adopted by other SEO experts include using bold, highlighting, underlining and colored fonts in the text to improve readability. Inserting pictures to liven up the post is also a common characteristic for the popular blogs.

Sentences should be short and sharp. Most importantly, the content should be useful to the readers. After all, it is people who are reading and not search engines. Good content will have readers who link back on their own and with increased backlinks, you are sure to have more readers.

This week, I hope to research more on the steps involved in making money online. I am interested on what all the experts describe as Passive Income. I am on a binge right now and gobbling up everything on this topic, hopefully, I can throw up something worthwhile to engage in.

Check this blog for more updates from my passive income research later on.

I have so much to learn and I want to do everything at once, but my instinct tells me that is a big mistake.

A lot of people fail to succeed because they jump from program to program and never give anything a real chance. Nothing is going to make us rich overnight so get over the idea. A business plan can help us to prepare for every step of progress.

I am not ambitious nor a marketing genius, I can only do my best and focus on dealing with one thing at a time.