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I’ve been trumpeting the benefits of blogging for search engine visibility for a while now, and here’s why:
1. Blogs are all about content. Search engines love content. They don’t love Flash, and they’re still struggling with photos and video, but they absolutely get content.
The trend among some top bloggers is to publish monthly earning reports showing how much income they have generated the previous month.
While it may seem impressive to earn $1,000, $5,000 or even $35,000 a month from your blogging efforts, I feel that the raw number can be a crude way of judging the “success” of your blog and will not be as meaningful as using other metrics.
A more significant statistic is to determine your average revenue per unit (ARPU) or income earned per visitor.
I started a blog on search engines in 2002.
In those days, the idea of blogging about anything other than politics, or blogging, or what your cat had for breakfast, was new. In fact, the idea of blogs was new. Most people’s reaction to the word blog was “huh”?
I quickly built up an audience, and links, mostly because I had first mover advantage, and I threw in a few social media basics. It certainly wasn’t rocket science. But, at the time, I was doing something unique and “remarkable”, in the Seth Godin sense of the word.
Fast forward to today, and the landscape is very different.
This is a major concern for many people looking to transfer free blogs from platforms like Blogger and WP to another location. Users have two choices, and the best one for you depends on a number of factors, the most significant being how well you already rank in the search engines.
For example, lets say you have a free blog at thisfreeblog.blogspot.com or thisfreeblog.wordpress.com and you want to 1) point it to thisismynewsite.com and 2) transfer all the content over.
You have two options:
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Keeping up with the daily routine of a blog is not the easiest task. A lot of companies want a blog, but don’t realize how hard it is to keep updated content - that is until they realize they haven’t posted anything in 3 months.
Blogging gets even harder when it’s not your full time job and for a lot of people, it isn’t. I personally write for four different blogs and as much as I would like to post something every day on all of them, I just can’t.
Being surrounded by SEO, design, and development all day long between my 9-5 job and freelancing, you would think that I would have a slew of topics to write about, but everyone gets writers’ block occasionally.
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Whether you’re a new internet marketer or a SEO or PPC affiliate looking for sources to generate traffic and convert that into profit, chances are you’ve either explored or are harnessing the traffic and profit potential of blogging.
In the last 2 years, since I’ve been growing my internet business, two key steps:
1) posting quality content and
2) achieving authority status in the niches I operate
have played a key part of my success.
Successful, long-term blogging goes beyond just harvesting the most popular and/or profitable tools from keyword tools and bashing out keyword-dense content.
How do I blog if I’m not a writer?
This is the number one question asked by people when they’re thinking about getting a blog, or advised to get one to help them create a valuable presence on the web. And it should be. If your natural inclination isn’t to write or if you just don’t have the time, there are a number of options available to you, which I’ll cover later in this article. First, lets address the problem of “non” writers trying to write.
One, you don’t know how you’ll do if you don’t try. Who knows, you may turn out to be a natural. Two, if you stick to some simple rules, it makes everything easier:
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The latest release of WordPress, version 2.6.1, came out a few days ago.
I upgraded this blog yesterday in a process that was painless as it happened literally with one mouse click and didn’t involve the manual upgrade process that’s usual with self-hosted WordPress, and which can be quite daunting for some users.
I gave my mom my old weight loss blog a few years back. In spite of publishing it on its own domain (smart) I was still using Blogger (dumb) when I gave it to her. It is not that Blogger is bad, but that Wordpress offers so many customization options that allow you to effectively rank for a wider array of keywords, and thus earn more per word.
These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.
Step 1: Download and install Wordpress (also requires setting up a MySQL database).
Step 2: Make Wordpress URL configurations.
Step 3: Cloned my mom’s old blogger theme design using Themepress (cost $10), and then had to hack the CSS by hand for about 10 minutes.
After verifying the layout was fairly decent I deleted the blogroll links and the opening post.
Step 4: publish my mom’s old blog onto blogspot.com so I could import it to Wordpress using the one click import located at domainname.com/wp-admin/import.php
After importing it I used Blogger to republish the blog back to her domain instead of leaving a copy on Blogspot, such that she does not have a stray cloned version of her site floating around.
Once import was complete I looked it over and verified it generally looked good. If you still have your old site up you can view the Wordpress blog version by going to yoursite.com/index.php (presuming you installed Wordpress in the root of your site).
Step 5: rewrite the .htaccess file to include both the Wordpress specific functions and rewrite rules needed to lose the dates from the URLs. The exact .htaccess file you need to write depends on your old URL structure and file extensions (the below one redirects html and shtml files). Our .htaccess file looked like this (note there were a few dozen lines like the first line, but I limited it to one in this example for brevity)
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (\d{4})/(\d+)/(.*)\.shtml$ $3/ [L,R=301]
RewriteRule (\d{4})/(\d+)/(.*)\.html$ $3/ [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Please note that when Wordpress imports your blog some of the stop words are removed from the URLs, which can end up creating some mean 404 errors until you line up the new URLs with the old ones (which we deal with in step 7). Also, if you used Blogger tag pages then you might need to make your .htaccess file a bit more complex than the above one, adding entries to redirect the tag pages.
Step 6: Delete my mom’s old static file archives.
If you are afraid that something might get hosed up with the move you can rename the old archive files and folders. For example:
I’ve been reading Blogging Heroes by Michael Banks and I’ve noticed that throughout the 30 interviews (I’ve read 28 of them so far.) that there are a couple of common themes that all of these professional bloggers tend to come back to. Some of the folks that are interviewed include Mary Jo Foley, Gina Trapani, Chris Anderson, Philipp Lenssen, Frank Warren, Steve Rubel, Gary Lee, Robert Scoble, Peter Rojas, Rebecca Lieb, John Neff and Brad Hill.
