Adding a Google Gadget to your blog

5 Blogging Plugins You Must Use

Plugins for the Wordpress platform are tons of fun and incredibly useful. You’ll find everything you need to turn your blog into something amazing that is every bit as great as you would have imagined. While there are many plugins out there that are worth your while, the five that follow are the cream of the crop.

Akismet

This plugin actually comes standard with your Wordpress installation. You will have to get a Wordpress.com API key to make it work, but after you do it’s pure bliss. This will help keep spam comments away automatically! Akismet is smart enough to put suspected spam into a separate folder, and it even learns from you as you go. You should always activate this plugin for the best results with your blog. It saves you a ton of time too!

Related Posts

Linking to different pages in your blog from every page is a great search engine optimization tactic. The problem with blogs is that it can be so hard to dig through old posts that are related and manually link them in your new post. Related posts solves that problem! This will automatically insert some relevant posts for your blog. It’s very hands-off and very effective. Both visitors and search engines love this plugin.

All in One SEO Pack

Once again, optimizing your site for the search engines is going to be one of the best ways you can make money with your blog. The higher you rank, the more traffic you recieve. The more traffic you receive, the more money you make! The All In One SEO pack makes your life easier because it allows you to specify the title, description (that will show up in the search engines), and keywords.

Wordpress Database Backup

Backing up your blog is crucial if you value your business. You never know what could happen to your server, and it would be awfully devastating to lose everything. You can easily back everything up by pressing a few simple buttons with this effective and very useful plugin.

Top Commentators

This plugin is greatly effective and it encourages a lot of interaction on your blog. It lists the people who have the most comments within your blog. They love this because they get the extra exposure. You love it because people really get into posting to try and be at the top. It also gives social proof. When people visit a blog for the first time they are more likely to stick around if there are clearly other people there who value your content. The fact that they can see others participating is a great thing.

There are an incredible number of different plugins out there that are ready for you to use. Install these essentials and you’ll be well-prepared to become the great blogger you’re going to become.

About the Author

www.turnblogstocash.com

How to Blog and Earn Blogging Money

An Introduction to Blogging for Money

Blogging for money is quickly becoming one of the best ways to earn a profit on the Internet. Thousands of writers turned bloggers have turned to the Web to earn money, writing blogs as journals or for serious cash through different mediums like contextual ads and affiliate marketing. From its early beginnings through xanga and livejournal, many new blogging sites have opened up with an emphasis on the best blog to make money. Now, the best extra money blogs are run by companies with great content to offer. Jossip.com, perezhilton.com and x17online.com are all examples of tabloids looking like blogs that generate millions of dollars worth of income each year in sponsorships and ad revenue.

Discovering income from home blogs also involves joining under affiliate programs. Bona fide sites like Commission Junction and Clickbank pair you up with marketers who want you to sell products for them in exchange for commissions. Money blogs can easily ad one of their banners. Products range across the whole spectrum, from soap to computer products. Bloggers have full control over the kinds of advertisements showing up on their sites. Another way of making money online blogging is through sponsorships. Popular blogs with tens of thousands of visitors every month are hunted down by companies looking to make a name for themselves through advertising space.

Making money through blogs also means creating products of your own to contribute to the income stream. Many blogs complement e-products like e-books or e-courses that webmasters might start up to make money. In addition, your blog might have a message board with ads to keep clients coming back again and again. Overall, blogs can have multiple income streams. Making money online blogging is in such high demand that freelance writers are being hired left and right to come up with content for their entries. Making money blogs are supposed to pitch themselves while adding the right content to spawn clicks for ads.

To start making money off blogs, conduct a Google search and find one of the free blog sites out there to start an account with. If companies are paying you to blog, feel free to do that as well. However, the best results can come from setting up your own blog and having it done through a developer to avoid sites that look like templates. With a little leg work, you might reach the pinnacle alongside the likes of perezhilton.com and other widely renowned dream sites.

About the Author

Matt is the currently the owner of a Work at Home Review website including articles, forum, free eBooks and more. He is 32 years old and currently living in San Diego, California.

How To Do Keyword Research

Keyword Research ~ What is Good Keyword Research?

Keyword research should be a cornerstone of your online business. Unfortunately many online business people have no idea what keyword research is, how to do it, and how to use it to their advantage. Once you figure out what good keyword research is, you will easily see its importance in your marketing strategy.

The first step in keyword research is to understand how keywords work. When someone comes online looking for information they usually go to a search engine and enter a word or phrase related to what they are looking for. Once entered, this query will produce a list of sites related to the word or phrase they have entered.

Generally the first listing will get about 40% of the people who do the search to click on it. The goal of keyword research is to have your site come up number one in the search engine for words related to your site that people are actually using to search for information.

Finding Relevant Keywords

When choosing keywords you want to make sure you are finding words that are related and relevant to your content. If you keywords have nothing to do with your site you will never rank in the search engines. For example, if your site is about dogs you do not want to go after keywords like credit card, or internet marketing. They are both very profitable keywords, but have no relevance to your site. You want to find keywords that are directly relevant to the content on your pages.

To come up with good keyword ideas think about what you want your site to be known for. Are you the best place to find organic dog food? If so, you may want to do some research around the term dog food, and organic dog food. You also can think about what your site offers. If you offer information about a certain kind of jewelry or bracelet, you would want to do some research to find good keywords related to jewelry and more specifically the type of bracelet you offer. Try to find keywords as closely related to what your site offers. If you find those they will be more likely to convert to sales.

What makes a good keyword.

Internet marketers throw around the term good keywords all the time. It can be very frustrating for a new online business person, who just doesn’t really know what that means. A good keyword is a word or phrase that is relevant to your site, that actually has people looking for it, and is not too competitive so you can actually rank for it in the search engines.

How do you know people are searching?

This is where many people fall down in keyword research. They come up with relevant terms to use for keywords but fail to see if anyone else is actually looking for that specific term. You want to make sure any keywords you choose have people searching for that exact term. You can use a number of tools to get this information. You can use wordtracker, and now even Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool will show you search volume. Using Google’s tool is smart because it’s information straight from the largest search engine there is. You may ask, how many searches do I need? This is a good question and will certainly depend on your site, but you should definitely look for keywords with at least 50 “hits” a day.

How do I choose appropriately competitive keywords?

People used to just enter their keywords in Google and see how many competing pages there were. This is not a very effective way to check for competition. Anyone can put up a website, and when you just enter your keyword you are getting results from every site that mentions any and all of the words in your kewyord. You can start by entering your keyword in Google with quotes around it. This will give you the results for all the sites that have that exact phrase on their site. Even better just enter your keyword and check out the first page of sites. What kind of page rank do they have? How many links do they have coming to the site? These are the things you are going to be competing against them for, so it’s wise to make sure you can beat the top sites.

As you can see keyword research can be a little intimidating, just because there’s so much to it. However, once you get the basics of keyword research you can easily find profitable keywords for your site. Once ranked for profitable keywords your site will be getting targeted free traffic, which is what every online marketer wants.

About the Author

Read this step by step keyword research book to learn how to do profitable keyword research like the professionals.