Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

All blogs should have an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow for your blog posts to be easily syndicated. The syndication will result in links back to your blog from RSS directories or others who display the feed. Blog entries should be available via an RSS feed. Website visitors who subscribe to the feed will receive notification when new blog posts are added. If the title is of interest, they will click through to your website. This gives subscribers an easy way to know when a blog has been updated.

* The first thing to do to get high-quality links is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories.

Start by submitting your blog to all the directories listed on this page:

* Link exchanging with other similarly-themed blogs will help you to form richly interlinked networks or communities.
* If you find an interesting article on another blog, link to it generously. The trackback will become a link back to your blog.
* Lastly posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs will help you get backlinks. Regularly post legitimate comments in similarly-themed blogs with high traffic to get many backlinks.

Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for.

For example, if you want your blog to get found for the keyword “rss” get a domain with the keyword “rss”, or use the keyword in a subdomain as in

Getting a domain name with your own name might make for good branding, especially if yours is a personal blog.

But if you’re doing it for business and want the targeted traffic to flow your way, keywords in the domain or subdomain are a move in the right direction.

In the last three months or so, I’ve learned quite a bit about blogging in general from a few different sources. Whenever I’m not reading one of the dozens of RSS feeds, I’m usually researching the industry, or closely related topics. Of course, there are a few blogs in the niche I’m interested in that I consider “authority” blogs. A few big name bloggers have really “made it”, and I can never figure out if that makes me envious or inspires me to ascend to their level.

For all of those that think the big guys have it easy, then I’m here to tell you right now that they don’t! Running and maintaining a blog with such a high public popularity has to be one hell of a job. I know they make money even when they’re sleeping, but if they slow down, so will the several thousand dollars a month they make. They always have to be ahead of the game, and better than the rest. That’s why they are what they are. Props to them for accomplishing such a feat. I dream of the day I pull in a few hundred bucks while I’m sleeping. If it ever gets to that point, you can be damned sure that I won’t be stuck in a cubicle all day!

So since I’ve started blogging, I’ve seen a few things happen without fail. It may seem like common sense, but sometimes we need a little reminder.

If you want traffic, then you have to write great and helpful content.

If you stop writing great and helpful content, you stop getting traffic.

Duh, right? Well, sometimes writing great content is easier said than done. We all start off with super ambitious intentions, but then we soon realize that real life still has to be attended to, and time is usually a factor that we don’t have enough of. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you expect big numbers, then you need to give them (readers) a reason to come to your blog on a consistent basis. As a matter of fact, I wrote two articles (about automobiles) in May that have accounted for almost 50% of my total traffic since blog inception. When the buzz from those articles died down, I kind of just sat there with a stupid stare wondering where everyone went! The worst part of it was that those two articles had absolutely nothing to do with “making money online”. So once the readers read the article (which offered valuable advice), there was really nothing left for them to look at. That’s okay though, I’ve definitely learned from that, so no harm no foul.

This is more of a ramble than anything, so I’ll leave you with a list of some simple rookie tips and advice that you should consider taking seriously. I’ve seen a whole new crop of rookie “make money onliners”, and I don’t think they realize what kind of road they have ahead of them! Best of luck to them though.

1. Don’t put your Feedburner subscriber count button on your blog until you have at the very least, 100 subscribers. When I come to your blog (or anyone for that matter) and I see that you have 4 readers, I’m probably not going to be inclined to subscribe. It’s human nature. Humans like big numbers. So hold off until you have a respectable number to show off. Trust me on this one.

2. Being a blogger (especially in the make money online niche), you’re going to encounter several opportunities from other bloggers, website owners, and whoever, that want you to help them with a project. While this can potentially lead to great things, most of the time it will fizzle out and leave you with a lot of lost time. Pick your side projects VERY carefully. Don’t feel like you need to say “yes” to everyone that invites you to work on a project. Don’t worry, if you turn one down, you’ll have plenty more in the future. Please trust me on this one, as it’s a weakness of mine, and it has cost me plenty of my extra time.

3. Easy on the advertising. The first thing any blogger in this niche wants to do is implement every type of advertising possible to try and earn the big money. Guess what? Even with 14 different types of revenue sources on the front page, chances are you’ll make less than what you would with just a couple of select ones. People in general hate advertising, so don’t fill up your page with affiliate ads and other types of clunky advertising. Stick with Adsense and one or two others at most. You won’t make any real money anyway until you have a decent amount of traffic, so all it’s doing is taking up space and looking bad. Again, you should be in this for the long haul, so time is your friend. You will not be John Chow in a week, I guarantee you that.

4. Promote the hell out of your blog. You’re going to need a jump start when you come out of the gate, and the best way to promote for free these days is to leverage the power of social bookmarking and networking sites (digg, mybloglog, blogcatalog, stumbleupon, technorati, etc…) Sign up for all of these, and make good use of them, it will definitely pay off, and it really is necessary if you want any kind of long term traffic stability. Also, start surfing every blog in your niche and related niches, and get to know them. Leave conversation sparking comments and be generous on the link love when you write. The good karma will follow you around for the rest of your blogging career. Make friends fast, as they’ll be the ones to help you along the way. Remember, without promoting your blog, your not going to get the traffic levels that you should be getting, so do this until you’re sick of it, and then do it some more.

5. Don’t give up! This sounds pretty cliche, but you will inevitably come to a point where you are sitting on your thumb wondering what you need to do to succeed. The answer is simple - keep writing! Any good writer can make it, but it takes time. Success isn’t overnight, it’s built up over time and if you provide great and valuable content, then the success and money will flow eventually. I promise you that. Give your readers something to think about, and they’ll keep coming back. That will be the key to your success. Remember, readers come first, then all the rest can follow.

I hope these tips help you in some way. I know they are pretty obvious, but again, they are easily forgotten and sometimes all it takes is someone to remind you. Good luck to all out there, and let’s make it a good month!

While setting up a site to display a news RSS feed and I found that Tables don’t handle extra long URLs very well. They stretch the TD cell and break your design. So much for doing markup with tables.

Links pointing to your blog or posts are essential to build pagerank and make your blog rank higher in the search engine listings.

I’ve seen many people recommend Blogrolling as one method of building links to your blog.

BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal. But all this service actually does is give you a bit of javascript code that “calls” the links.

As far as search engine rankings go, this method of linking is of little use, because spiders can’t read external javascript code.

Instead I recommend that you focus your linking efforts on the methods here.

Submitting to Blog Search Engines and Directories:

Submitting your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories is essential for getting high-quality links back to your blog.

Here is the best list I’ve found of places to submit your feed or blog.

Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

Link Exchanges:

Many similarly-themed blogs are often willing to exchange links with other blogs and form richly interlinked networks or communities. Link exchanges with other blogs are easy to implement with most blogging software.

Trackbacks:

You can also get links back to your blog using trackbacks. One of the disadvantages of using Blogger is that it does not automatically create trackback urls that others can use to link back to your posts.

Haloscan is a free service that will automatically add comments and trackbacks to your Blogger blog.

But if trackbacks are an important component of your linking strategy, I would advise using another software or system that adds this feature automatically.

Comments:

You can also get back links to your blog by posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs.

Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for.

For example, if you want your blog to get found for the keyword “rss” get a domain with the keyword “rss”, or use the keyword in a subdomain as in

http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/rssnews

Getting a domain name with your own name might make for good branding, especially if yours is a personal blog.

But if you’re doing it for business and want the targeted traffic to flow your way, keywords in the domain or subdomain are a move in the right direction.

When you’re writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who’ve come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don’t ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That’s not to say you can’t take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It’s not fair, but it’s the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don’t get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I’m a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the “register” link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.

There’s something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there’s an easy solution - don’t offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you’re upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.