Seven To Ten

Who Is George Lindemann Jr? This guy seems to be an expert on websites and social network marketing.

George Lindemann Jr’b blog recommends several niche social networking sites for your target audience and a number of fabulous free blogging platforms and plugins to enhance your blog. If you are just venturing out as a blogger, some of his advice can be very useful and can help you establish a web presence quickly.

To judge if he can help out intermediate users, I read some of his articles and I am not fully impressed because most of the content are already common knowledge and not pioneering work. His style of writing is good though but not spectacular ideas.

Just as an example, he highlighted in an article the difference between a blog and website. In his words, a blog is a website, using a content management system, and the layout arranged in chronological order. I am sure most intermediate users already know this. He also gives blog promotion tips like using major social networking sites (like myspace) to made known your expertise to a large user-base.

His strategy of creating multiple pages or “profiles” is good though. The idea is that different social networks have different user groups and penetrating each of the networks can definitely help you establish yourself.

I will implement some of his ideas in my blog and if you want to know more about his methods, visit his site today.

I do not usually pay attention to domain names. I know it is a lucrative business given that some names attract substantial amount of traffic which can be monetized. But I never believed that I have the knack or resources to engage in the domain name business.

For my own blogs, I choose any name which sounds good and from traffic indications (meaning zero hits), it seems to be special to me alone. There are of course certain techniques involved in choosing a proper domain name, whether you want to park it and milk the residual advertisement income or start a personal/business blog.

The question on how to choose a domain name for your blog is best answered by Problogger. In that very detailed post, he mentioned about the goals, target audience, keywords, branding, future trends, name length, memorability, legal issues, similar domains, hypens, dot coms, etc.

If you master what all the pointers, you are now ready to hunt for diamonds in the rough. I know that the prices some domain marketers or owners are willing to pay is incredibly high, once you have been to domain name auctions.

So if you secure a domain name which can generate traffic on its own, you are on to something good. Like real estate, it is a prime asset for you.

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.

I do not like clutter and the first impression I get from a site must be its cleanliness and user-friendliness. Loud, colorful banners and oft-centered pages really get on my nerves.

My sidebar is still pretty empty and it will be staying like that for a while. It may make the blog look empty and uninteresting but I always believe less is more. Unless your blog is really popular, you can get away with a lot of things, like John Chow.

The advertisements there have taken up all his available prime space but I doubt he is maxxed out yet. He will certainly be coming up with ever more creative ways to increase advertising revenue from his blog. Take a leaf from him if you want to know how to monetize your site. Earning over $30,000 per month is simply amazing.

Yes, the ads make for slow loading but his content is fresh and useful, so I don’t mind visiting his blog every few days. For smaller blogs, the amount of ads

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.