As an aide memoir to myself and for anyone out there struggling to make sense of how to make a clickable link for bio boxes in ezine articles for example, this is the code.

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain goes here”> write your text here</a>

the text is the clickable part but the click goes to your website (or another website if you want)

So if you wanted the text to say     how to train your dog   and the visitor to go to your website it would be

<a href=”http://www.blahblah.com”>how to train your dog</a>

Hope that helps.

til next time

Jane

This is something that you can outsource if you feel unable to do it or just dont have the time. However there are some things to look out for if you are outsourcing it  and I can say from my own experience that you have to be careful.

1 . Grammatical errors and mispellings. Check anything written for you very closely. Before you use anyone else check their “voice”, how do they write?Is their style one that you  feel comfortable with, that fits in with your own writing.

2.  Superficial Content I would put this in with having an article which has a foreign style,one that doesnt fit. You need to write what your market wants to read.Its better to get your outsourcer to write in depth on a narrow topic,than spread it too widely.

3. Make sure the headline will grab the readers attention. Headlines should grab the reader. Power words like buy,free,etc. Also lists are good. 7 tips, 3 easy steps etc.

More tips to follow. All from my own experience. I have been very badly bitten outsourcing article writing.  These tips are from bitter experience!

Til next time

Jane

1. keep it simple. Most of what I have seen suggests that the best are short and sweet and easy to understand. They are also better for search engines.
2. Get attention. You could use a variety of techniques here. using shock awe and downright revulsion normally works (joking).  Think of ways to grab attention without misleading
3. Give a description Its not a cryptic crossword though I have seen some titles that could fall into that category. Nearly everyone wants to know what they are getting before they read further.
4. Use keywords. I think this is a biggie and I have been ignoring its importance mainly because I find looking for keywords a bit of a chore although I have found  a fab tool for this recently which I am trying out and will report on in a later post. Keywords are important for SEO. It can be challenging to keep thinking of keywords to maximise the usefulness of your posts (unless you want to write like an automaton that is) but there is no doubt that using them can help you go up in the search engine favors!
5. Meet a need If you have n effective title then it can draw people in if they think you have got something to say that they want to hear.. “How to” posts are very popular. Many people are looking for information on the internet and if they think you can give it to them when they see your title they might be inclined to read further.

Anyway hope these musings help.

Til next time

jane

• use a proper domain name
• post at least once day in the early stages. Ok I know I havent done this over the last couple of weeks but I am on holiday!
• Comment on other blogs
• encourage comments on your own blog
• trackback and link to other blogs
• submit articles at least once a week to sites like ezine.com

Thats it for today. Just to get me thinking as well!

Til next time

jane

I have been reading a number of articles about blogging recently and I thought that I would reproduce a couple of them here so you can have a look as well.The first one is by Steve Pavlina who writes quite long blog posts but they are usually very interesting and give good  information. So have a look at this first one. I’m not sure when it was wriiten but I think the information in it holds true for anyone thinking of blogging, just starting out or having been at it for a  few months. The moral is , dont give up!

Darren Rowse of Problogger.net recently posted a case study of a blogger who decided to quit blogging after six months due to poor financial results: Blog Case Study – Is it time to Quit?

Darren’s post is a great read for anyone who runs an online business, not just for bloggers.

Interestingly, the points Darren raises in his post are similar to those from an article I wrote in 2002 called Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals.

The blogging “mistakes” Darren notes are common to other online businesses.

Three of the most frequent mistakes I’ve seen include:

1. Thinking too short-term

The blogger that Darren mentions gave up after only six months. Many shareware developers give up when their first product isn’t a hit. I’ll tell you that if you can achieve financial success with a one-person, shoestring budget business in only six months, you’re probably superhuman. My first four shareware games were all relative flops — it wasn’t until my fifth release that I was able to produce enough income to live off.

When I think about the personal development business I’m building, six months is nothing. I’ve been at it for 10 months full-time now, and while I’ve made a reasonable dent in my long-term goals, this business is clearly still an infant. But to me that’s perfectly fine and well within my expectations. This business may be an infant, but it’s a healthy infant who will grow up big and strong.

Building a business is a lot like raising a child. It takes time and patience. If you’re going to start a business and you’re only willing to give it six months to prove itself, don’t start a business. That probably isn’t even enough time for a franchise. Would you throw out your child because it can’t fend for itself six months out of the womb?

I make most of my business decisions within a working time frame of 2-5 years… and for the big decisions with far-ranging consequences, I’m thinking 10-20 years out. This is just like the parent who starts saving for their child’s college education before the child can even read and write. If you want to start a real business and not just a hobby, think long-term.

2. Failure to optimize

An online business will have processes that get executed over and over. Some of these are human processes, but many are executed by technology, and in my opinion, it’s the technological processes that are the most important for an online business. Whenever someone loads up your home page in their web browser, that’s a process being executed. Reading a blog entry is a process. Clicking an ad is a process. Finding the site is a process.

Due to the sheer volume of processes an online business executes every day as well as their incredible interconnectedness, it isn’t hard to achieve tremendous performance gains through process optimization. A 10% improvement here, 15% there, 8% there, and pretty soon it begins to add up. As I’m sure some people will recognize, this was the basis of W.E. Deming’s work with the Japanese after WWII. If you can measure it, you can improve it.

If you generate income from Google Adsense, for example, there are plenty of web sites that provide practical optimization tips. Just do a Google search on “adsense optimization” and similar search terms, and you’ll find plenty. By gradually applying Adsense optimization tips easily found on the web, I was able to permanently increase this site’s CPM (i.e. revenue per 1000 page views) by 68%. However, by performing other optimizations (search engine optimization, marketing improvements, posting changes, site tweaks, etc.), I was able to increase this site’s daily Adsense revenue by about 500% in five months. Most of these changes took only minutes to implement, like adding RSS subscription buttons to the sidebar or changing the ad colors. If I’d never made these optimizations, it would mean permanently lower revenue, which would mean much slower growth for this business and more problems for me.

Optimization is generally one of the easiest ways to increase revenue for an online business. Even just one hour spent on intelligent optimization can generate enormous payoffs down the road.

3. Failure to market effectively

How many blogs receive dismal traffic because all the owner does is write posts?

I think that if you dare to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn marketing or have someone in your business who’s skilled at marketing. While you can outsource a lot of different business tasks, I don’t think the core marketing of your business should be one of them.

I never had any formal marketing education (my college degrees are in computer science and mathematics), but when I started my shareware business, I discovered I needed to learn marketing. In addition to reading marketing books and learning from others, I bought audio recordings of several marketing seminars. It took me a full 18 months to get through them (it was about 100 audio tapes total), but by the time I was done, I had a strong understanding of marketing and plenty of ideas for promoting my business.

Marketing doesn’t mean buying advertising, which is arguably the most expensive and least effective form of marketing. I haven’t spent a dime marketing this site, but I have done a lot of marketing work for it. Marketing is really just getting the word out. Don’t keep your site a secret — let as many people know about it as possible. Post comments liberally on other blogs, write articles and allow other sites to use them, swap links with bloggers in the same field, make search-engine friendly pages, and so on. If the content you produce is valuable, then you’re providing even more value by sharing it.

I think the most important realization I had about marketing was this — if you have a product or service you truly believe in, then you’re actually doing people a disservice but not telling them about it. Think about that. By NOT marketing, you’re depriving people of value.

If you aren’t eager to tell people about your site, perhaps it means you’re not offering something you believe in strongly enough. This simple idea contributed to my decision to retire from active shareware development and start this personal development site. I have no qualms about promoting this site because I believe in its value. I don’t feel embarrassed or apologetic when I tell people about it. If you’re providing real value, then your marketing is doing people a favor as opposed to asking for a favor. I wrote more about this philosophy in the article Marketing From Your Conscience.

I think a failure to do marketing for an online business is a form of self-sabotage. If you learn about a fantastic new web site, do you tell other people about it? Of course. Is your web site worth telling people about? If you don’t believe it is, you’re likely to avoid marketing it. Somehow you’ll just never seem to get around to doing any significant marketing work.

If you want to build a sustainable online business, focus most of your energies on providing value and on communicating that value. If you get those two things right (and it’s going to take longer than six months to make a real dent), you’ll be more driven to do everything else right.

Before I left, I had been experimenting with PPC (pay per click) on one of my other blogs. Now, that is a steep learning curve but if you are sending money, it does tend to concentrate your mind. I wish I had tried it earlier, because I have learned a lot over the past few weeks.I havent made any money, in fact quite the reverse but I am confident that if i plug away at it, it will start to work. There are some many facets to it,and youhave to be really careful not to let it run away with itself or it can get very expensive. More on that in later posts.

I dont know if you are thinking of blogging and monetizing your blog long term but it seems that is where money can be made and I intend to find out. Will report back on this in later blogs. Off to the pool now!

til later

Jane

I am going to talk about Wordpress because its the only programme I have used and I wont pretend that I am using it to its full potential.

There are a couple of things I would mention.The first is the themes,ie the look of the blog.There are tons of themes available in wordpress and once you have taught yourself how to upload Wordpress,(more of that in a later blog) its easy to change the themes around instantly so you can decide what looks best for you.

The second is the use of catagories. I dont use many but I am going to increase them to make it easier to navigate around the blog both for me and you!

Let’s say the topic of your site is pay per click tips. You could create a Category for Adwords one for keyword hints and one for optimising click through rates for example.

Now when you add posts to your blog, you can choose which of your categories your post belongs to. Now your blog will archive your past posts not only by their month and date,  but also by category. These are apparently very serach engine friendly and by using the Category feature, you will eventually have hundreds of pages on your site with links to those categories .All those backlinks to those keywords can result in much higher search rankings.

You can also set up  Wordpress to ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. I will be posting about this too later but it  is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get traffic . On top of that, you’ll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.

Anyway have a look at wordpress. I think its a great way to get up and running pretty quick with a blog.You dont need a domain name or hosting but I would suggest that you do get those, the days of doing it all free are well gone I think and there is evidence that Google doesnt really consider those blogs without a domain name.

I will be posting more about wordpress and I am working on a free e book that subscribers to my list will get in the next couple of months.This wll give you a step by step guide on getting a blog up, getting domain names, hosting, uploading files (which has given me headaches until I got to grips with it) In the meantime there is a short e course that you will find useful if you are starting out. Just get on my list and I will send it to you. This will give you some useful pointers that I wish I had had a few months ago.

Til next time

Jane

What is Blogging? It is relatively new but the statistics are mind boggling. There are millions of blogs on the Internet on every conceivable topic.

In its simplest form, its an online journal with the entries seen in reverse chronological order. The posts or entries in a blog are usually related to the overall theme of the blog but can be about anything the blogger wants to write about.

Posting or writing the entries is done as often as the author or blogger wants. This can be several times a day, daily, weekly or at less frequent intervals.They can be started for anyone of a number of reasons and can be private or public.

The private blog is one in which only the blogger and those they invite to view can see the blog. The public blog is available for all to see.

So why make it a private blog? This can be for a number of reasons.It may be that the blog is for family and friends only,or it may be that the blogger wishes to express some private thoughts and is not comfortable about others reading the blog.

For those bloggers wishing to publicise a cause or to make contact with others of similar views or to make money for example, the blog will be public.The aim will be to get to as many people as possible to visit the blog.

Professional Blogging

Blogging can be a source of income for some people. There are some networks of bloggers who post regularly to blogs and are paid to do so. It can be hard work and requires dedication to keep the posts fresh and interesting and updated regularly. The professional blogger can be paid by the number of posts or page view or a combination.

Whatever your reasons for considering a blog, you have to be sure that you have the dedication and stamina to post regularly, and to simple keep going. You may get a visitor to your site but they are unlikely to return unless there is something there of interest and one that is regularly updated. Blogs are relatively easy to create but require constant maintenance and it you do not have the interest or inclination to keep at it, it may not be worth starting one in the first place!

If you are thinking of blogging, what should you be thinking of before you set off? I suppose you need to think why you are blogging? If like me you are learning the ropes of internet marketing, writing posts regularly is a great discipline and also useful as an aide memoir. I had to reset my computer recently (or rather a nice computer man did ) and I lost all my email addresses? Could I remember how to set them up again, er no, but i did remember a post I had done some time ago giving easy to follow directions. I followed them and you know what, they worked!

You might also be thinking just using a blog as a diary and thats fine as well. I dont think there are any hard and fast rules on this but I guess youhave to decide what it is, why you are doing it and how often you want to post before you  start.

I will be posting a bit over the next few days to show you how to start a blog and what to do with it once you have one. I have learnt by trial and error, learn from my mistakes!

Anyway am off tomorrow to a wine and food fair. Sounds like my idea of heaven.

til next time

Jane

The first thing has to be research. This is time consuming but necessary. Put in the legwork in the earliest stages and you will see results longer term.That has been my experience. I wasted months buying programmes that where way too advanced for me and the expense has been considerable so I went back to basics, did some research and it is now paying dividends.

Look through my recent posts on this topic, that should give you a head start. There are a couple of other free tools to look at and they belong to everyones friend, Google!

The first is called Google Alerts. You can set this up for free within Google, give it the terms, the sort of things you want it to search for and how often you want it to alert you and it will! You could see if your formative thoughts about a potential niche market are in line with what is happening out there. Anytime someone mentions it, you will be alerted to it. You could leave it with a search term, a potential competitors name, a product or whatever you think you might want to keep an eye on for future reference and it will alert you every time that term comes up.

Another tool to look at is Google Trends. Type in your keywords,, search trends and you will get the search volume.Sometimes you will see the trend is up, sometimes down, sometimes seasonal factors come into play. Its a great way of finding out whether there is any interest in your potential market (assuming you have got some ideas by now) and whether the interest and trend is down or up.

Til next time

Jane