Friday, June 15, 2012

4 Health Tips for Professional Bloggers

gym. Or spandex. Exercise is just movement, and it’s up to you how to move. I think group fitness classes are really fun and motivational.

You might not. How about a peaceful walk through the park? Or riding a bike to pick up a few groceries? Exercise doesn’t need to feel like exercise. Pick something that you enjoy doing and do it as often as you can. Aim to do a movement activity at least 30 minutes a day for at least four days a week. You’ll end up feeling happier, sleeping better and writing with more enthusiasm.

4. Practice breathing and relaxation

Sounds silly, right? When we get stressed, we sometimes actually forget to breathe. Our breaths become short and shallow, just stressing out our bodies even more. Stress then contributes to weight gain or more of a struggle in weight loss.

When you feel yourself tense up at a project or client, just sit up straight in your chair, close your eyes, and breathe. Count to five on your inhale, then count to five on your exhale. Breathe like this for at least 10 breaths, or until you feel more calm.

There you have it. The healthier you are, the better you can conduct your daily blogging chores with confidence and less stress. How about you? Do you have any practical tips you can add to the list?

8 Cool Tips for New Bloggers

New Bloggers in 2011 have got their job cut out for them! The Internet is a crazy place and there are people out there saying crazy things. How do you know who to believe? All the scams, schemes, and push button software that have promised to make you a millionaire.

Luckily most people are now coming to the conclusion that the only true way to make money blogging is through hard work and dedication.

Here are some important tips that I have gathered on my journey.

Tips for New Bloggers

Limit your learning

New Webmasters often get caught up in learning how to build websites and how to make money blogging. The best learning experience that I can recommend to you is to get in there and do it! Do not try learning how to blog in theory when you can simply start a blog or a website today!

The first thing I would do is create a free blog and write about my learning experiences for the day.

Do not buy Internet marketing course after IM course. If you failed at the first course then go back and finish it.

Scrap that attitude

If you want to be successful at blogging you will need to get rid of a few built-in attitudes that might be hindering your performance.

  • I will do it tomorrow
  • I don’t know how to do it
  • I am not smart like you
  • I do not have time
  • I have a degree, I am better than you
  • I am an expert on every subject
  • No one is making money online

A bloggers attitude is sharing, caring, networking, and cool. Be that person.


Create a schedule

Working on a computer on the Internet can be very distracting as there are e-mails coming in, comments to answer, and interesting articles posted every second. These distractions can delay your success and productivity time by possibly years. This is why I recommend that you create a timetable or schedule when participating in this business.

I have a timetable for each day. It starts with opening emails and answering comments and moves on to other particular tasks. If I have committed my self to working I need to accomplish my set tasks for the day.

Use a paid WordPress theme

You can build a website on practically zero dollars but buying a paid WordPress theme is something that I do recommend for new bloggers. The reason I say this is because you can get free support with your purchase.

It can be hard choosing the best WordPress theme for your website but if your theme comes with backup support this will save you hours of frustration. Most new bloggers can spend weeks and weeks customizing their blog theme. However if you purchase a WordPress theme you can simply go and ask a question in their forum and they will help you.

I have experience in HTML, PHP, and CSS, but why would I rack my brain when I can get the solution to any problem using my WordPress theme support.

Do not wait for the traffic

Website traffic does not simply appear on your blog. You have to get out there and work very hard to get website traffic. I could narrow the two main traffic sources down:

  1. Hard slog promotions to get traffic
  2. Search engine optimization to get traffic

The both these ways a great, but in essence, you will need both to succeed. For example when you have a new blog you will need to go build back links to your content via guest posting, article marketing, commenting, forums, and so on.

Some back linking brings traffic, but most back linking does count the search engine optimization. Therefore while you were generating traffic, you are also performing search engine optimization.

Never stop promoting

There will come a time when you have done so much promotion; you will see traffic coming for free from the search engines. People see this as a sign to relax, however you need to keep going and build the momentum. You need to keep the ball rolling when your website is in the growing stages.

Do not neglect SEO

Webmasters often get onto a new promotion method and run with it. This could be guest posting or article submission, which all eventually leads to search engine optimization. However you need to finish the job, by performing onpage search engine optimization at your website.

A simple explanation of Onpage SEO is:

  1. Target a keyword for each page or post
  2. Make a list of related keywords (LSI keywords)
  3. Find some good longtail keywords
  4. Create a killer title using your main keyword
  5. Use the keyword and LSI keywords in the tags, description
  6. Use the main keyword in the first and last line of your article
  7. Use H1,H2,H3 tags using the keyword and some LSI mixed in
  8. Have the main keyword density around 2% (some say more)
  9. Use LSI keywords throughout the article
  10. Add longtail phrases scattered in only in appropriate places

If you follow all of these instructions above, I guarantee that you will have a post that is full of information and really covers your subject. This will also make your posts longer an easy to read.

Never pretend

Never pretend that you are successful and making money when you in fact are not! Don’t be a know it all when you actually know nothing at all.

How will you ever become successful if you are already pretending to be successful?

New bloggers have 100% more to learn, 100% more distractions, but still have a 100% chance to succeed. It’s all up to YOU!

Important Tips To Select Domain Name For New Bloggers

It is a great task to select a new domain name for your business niche. The importance of a domain name is realized by entrepreneurs because of its significance in SEO, among other things. To achieve success in business you should utilize all the possible means. And it all starts with an address – the domain name.

Having realized the importance of keywords in SEO listings, you cannot be ignorant of the selection of the most appropriate domain name for your niche. With that said, here are a few tips which will be definitely useful for those who would like to pick up a new domain name.

To select a unique name

The domain name is the starting point where your web journey begins. Domain name is the foundation for the very existence of your online presence.

The domain name selected should be as catchy as possible. It should be closer to your business niche. The domain name should set expectations for visitors about the type of content that will be presented on your site. In this way, people can fittingly recollect your site and refer to others as well.

The time you spend in the selection of an artistic domain name will fetch you many times by returning benefits in the years to come. Hence, you should pick a domain name which qualifies the following characteristics:

  • Easy to remember
  • Easy to type
  • Related to your business niche
  • Search engine friendly
  • KISS (Keep It Short and Simple)
  • Relative to the content on your site

You should avoid names with the following characteristics:

  • Names similar to existing popular sites (although I totally understand the urge to do so)
  • Domain names with hyphen
  • Misspelled domain names

For branding

If you are very serious about branding and want to establish your business on a long-term perspective and would like to cover customers catered throughout the world, .com is a viable option.

Even though top level domains such as .net, .info, .org, etc. can be leveraged to imbibe all kinds of SEO benefits, .com gives a professional appearance. Most of the people try .Com as it was very popular since the advent of the internet. It is useful to get global image.

Growing businesses will also buy domain names with .net, .org, .info so that even if customers try to visit your site by typing other top level domain names, they will be redirected to your .com site.

For instance, if my blog is myname.com, I could also purchase myname.net, myname.org and other TLDs and redirect them to myname.com. This way I won’t miss those visitors who type the TLDs as well.

Keyword popularity

You can check the popularity of a keyword. There are various online tools to check the value of a keyword in various aspects. The free and the most convenient tool is the Google Keyword Tool.

But if you want to go the extra mile, you’d want to use a tool like Market Samurai.

You will be able to find the worth of keyword in SEO aspect, the competition for the keyword, unique keyword, etc. Market Samurai is a great tool that will definitely help you in this aspect.

You can include keyword in your domain name that will have less competition. In this way, you will be able to promote your site very well in the coming days.

Check the availability

After having clarity about the domain that you would like to choose, you should check the availability of the same on sites that offer domain registration facility. You can try sites like hostgator.com or godaddy.com to register your domain names.

If the desired domain name is not available you should be flexible enough to choose the one closer to your expectations. As you type a domain name of your choice, if it is not available, you will be provided with a list of available alternative site names.

Used domain names

Domain names that are already used by others and set for sale are not as attractive as used cars. In case of used cars, you will be able to check the performance of the car. The same will not hold good for purchasing used domain names.

You may need to pay a hefty price for good and popular niche sites if they are available for sale. You can take advantage of back links and Google PR in such cases.

On the other hand, if domains were involved in spamming activities and completely banned by Google and other search engines, you cannot invite furthermore trouble by purchasing such kind of domain names.

Hence, you should be very cautious in the purchase of used domain names. And, it is advisable to go for brand new domain names rather than for a used name unless you have specific justifying reasons of business interest (unless you are a savvy to drill deep and analyze the history of the old domain name; especially, given the recent Google changes).

Name registration plus hosting

There are very many sites which will help you register your domain name as well as help you with web hosting. As you opt for both of these services from the same service provider, it will be easy for you to renew the registration and to get extended help from them.

It is always advisable to select services from a reputed service provider which has presence in the market for a considerable period of time. You should be able to reach them through various means including chat, email and voice channels.


Takeaway

Even though selection of a domain name is not the ultimate factor that decides the success of your business, you should be cautious and can take advantage of the name by following the above mentioned tips. You are invited to share your views.

SEO Myths, Yahoo Axis, Microsoft Socl, Facebook IPO, Speedlink 21:2012

Hello everyone. Hope you all had a great week. This week, there has been some interesting stuff going on in the search industry and on the social web. Yahoo has launched Yahoo Axis, their new search engine/browser, which as they say is aimed to redefine what it means to search and browse the web. Pretty bold statement but at first glance, they just might be up to something. I installed the “desktop” addon on my FireFox browser and started to play a bit with the interface. Let’s see how it goes. Have you tried Axis yet? How about DuckDuckGo? Looks like they are attracting more users…

Another interesting stuff that happened this week is the launch of Microsoft’s new social network Socl, pronounced “social”. As with Axis, I also jumped in to see what it has to offer, and first impressions reminds me of certain features (named differently), available on another network. At first, it may look complicated, but once you get the hand of using Socl’s interface, it is actually not that difficult to use. Danny Sullivan wrote a great coverage about Socl, so if you are interested, read what he has to say. Will Microsoft be a major player in the social arena? Remains to be seen. Too early to make any judgements.

On another forefront, I really wanted to skip the whole hulabahlooh related to FaceBook’s IPO. Share price has dropped roughly 17.5% from its original IPO offer price. Scary, if you ask me, and still not sure where all this will end. We’ll see.

Finally, this week’s WhiteBoard Friday of Rand from SEOMoz, is really worth watching. In case you missed it, he explains in detail, why you should not worry about certain “SEO advices” popping up here and there, due to the latest updates from Google. All in all, just apply the most ethical search engine optimization practices, and you should be fine.