5 Ways To Handle Search Engine Rankings Drops
Are you a Google junkie? I know I was a few years ago when one of my first blogs was doing so great on Google. It’s quite addictive when you think about it. If you are pulling in 3000+ visitors a day just from Google, you know your content is getting some decent exposure without it costing you any money. Of course, nobody’s satisfied with any level of traffic. The more of it you have, the more of it you want. But those who live by Google, die by Google. In 2004, my top blog was pulling in 90K visitors a month just from Google. Sure. It wasn’t as popular as a super blog, but the blog was paying for itself, and it was making me a good amount of change for my efforts. Then came Google algorithm changes. The site suddenly disappeared from the SERPs without me making any changes to the code or the content on my blog. It took me months to get my blog back up to where it was. But I learned my lesson. You should never rely on one traffic source to drive traffic to a blog, especially one as volatile as Google.
A lot of people can’t handle the thought of losing their search engine rankings overnight, but it could happen. A lot of blogs get flagged for duplicate content and some even become victims of hack attacks or serve downtime. It doesn’t take much to lose your position in the search engine results pages. You can handle a drop in your search engine rankings two ways. You can panic and start going berserk, changing your code, web host, and even your domain, or you can think logically about it. While there are no guarantees that you can get back your original search engine rankings, there are things you should and shouldn’t do when faced with such a dilemma. Read more »
5 Tactics To Fight Back Against Copycat Bloggers
Credit: twvogel
There are three types of bloggers out there. In one group, we have a bunch of people who know how to come up with original blog posts on a consistent basis. These bloggers have mastered the art of grabbing an idea and looking at it from a unique angle. In the second group, we have a group of bloggers that come up with original ideas once in a while but mostly rely on other bloggers to do the job for them. The third group, which I happen to dislike a lot, are copycat bloggers. These bloggers not only steal your ideas but sometimes don’t even bother changing your posts enough to differentiate themselves.
There is nothing more frustrating than working so hard to come up with an original blog post, only to see someone else still your idea and run with it. To be frank, you can’t really complain about someone grabbing the idea behind your blog post and coming up with a unique post on the very same topic. But it is frustrating when someone copies you and your points and only changes the words around (we are not even going to talk about blog thieves). Read more »
5 Ways To Save On Your Taxes As a Blogger
There are a few things that are certain in life and tax is one of them. Whether you are a small time blogger or a superstar, you are going to have to pay taxes on the money you make from blogging. Your tax rate can be actually pretty high if you are making a decent amount of money from your blog. As a blogger, you need to take time to treat your business professionally. That means you should invest in your business and do what other businesses do to reduce their taxes. Now I am not suggesting that you should write off things that have nothing to do with your business. But you can always buy a better computer or pick up premium software solutions that are necessary for you to enhance your blog and take your business to the next level.
Small businesses are often very likely to get audited. There is a reason for that. There are some people who write every single thing off and always come up with zero or negative income. There is nothing wrong with that as long as you can prove that things you have bought are necessary for you to conduct your business. So don’t go on a world trip or buy a boat for tax purposes and expect the authorities to ignore your write off. That being said, there are simple things you can do to lower your tax and add to your blog. Here are 5 ideas to get you started: Read more »
5 Places To Dig Up Questions For Your Blog
One of the best ways to get more popular in the blogging world is by giving people what they are asking for. In fact, that’s the recipe to success in any business. If you can identify what people need and give them exactly what they are looking for, there is no reason you can’t make it big in blogging. Now, I am not suggesting that you can become a super-blogger by answering questions on your blog all day. At the same time, there are plenty of blogging ideas that you can dig up by doing your homework online.
Regardless of what niche you are involved in, you can always find people who are asking questions online that are probably being asked by many others. By identifying those questions and the needs of those people, you can write blog posts that people eat up and want to share with others. Not complicated on the paper but it does take some work. If you are looking to take advantage of this tactic to develop more ideas for your blog, here are 5 places you should look at:
Yahoo! Answers: still the best place to dig up ideas for blogs. There are plenty of questions in the database, which means you are going to have plenty of opportunities to develop ideas for your blog. You can also become an authority by participating and answering questions here.
Askville: a community by Amazon that doesn’t get the recognition that it deserves. If you are running a technology blog or have an audience that is hooked on Amazon products, Askville is a great place for your research. Read more »
Add Retweet Function To Your Blog with Topsy
When someone talks about adding retweet functionality to blogs, many bloggers jump to the conclusion and assume the best service out there for such a function is the one offered by Tweetmeme. Don’t get me wrong. Tweetmeme is a wonderful service that makes it easier for people to not only find your posts but also help spread the words around them. But it’s not the only game in town. Topsy is another top Twitter aggregator that can help your content go viral fast. It’s easy to implement as well.
Topsy provides you with numerous ways to add its service to your blog. You can easily grab a piece of code from Topsy.com and post it to your blog to let your visitors retweet your posts and find out which one of your posts are popular.If you happen to run your blog on Wordpress, you can just download the plugin offered by Topsy. Read more »
Manage Your Gmail More Effectively with Mailbrowser
Gmail is one of the best hosted e-mail services on the market. It not only comes with an intuitive interface, but it makes managing e-mails much easier no matter what type of device you are using or how many e-mails you are getting. Of course, as a blogger you want to spend more time creating content and promoting your blog and less time organizing your e-mails, contacts, and attachments. That’s where Mailbrowser can help. It’s a cool add-on for Gmail that lets you manage your contacts much easier. The plugin will connect to your Gmail account and grabs and displays all your contact information in a more organized fashion. It even manages your attachments as well.
6 Ways To Create Your Avatar Fast
Whether you are on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking website, chances are you have the option to add your own avatar to your profile. Many don’t even take the time to change the default picture on their profile, but those who have come to appreciate what the social media is all about never forget to do that. One way to express yourself and your fun side is by creating an online likeness for yourself. I am not a big fan of cartoonish avatars myself, but there are plenty of marketers who have used their avatars to brand themselves. Some prefer using their real pictures. I am not going to argue which choice is better. However, if you plan on creating your own avatar and have no idea where to start, here are 6 services you should try:
urfooz: a cool service that lets you create your own online portable profile. You have a lot of options to choose from when designing your avatars. Once you are done, you can post your avatar to pop social media sites.
Face Your Manga: another avatar creation tool that lets you use your creativity to develop highly sophisticated avatars. You can then grab and share it on top social networking sites out there.
Avatar Creator: one killer iPhone app that lets you create your own avatar on your iPhone fast. It actually a decent number of customization options, which is pretty neat considering this is a mobile application. Read more »
Jotabl: Add a Twitter Shoutbox To Your Blog
Bring Twitter to your website is one of the best ways to get more traffic. One way to do that is by adding your content to Twitter from time to time. Of course, if you can get people to re-tweet your posts, your traffic is only going to grow. But there is more to Twitter than just sharing your posts on it. You can also use it to solidify your existing community and build new relationships. Jotabl is one example of a service that lets you do just that. It’s designed to help you integrate a shout-box on your website. Your visitors can use the box to give you instant feedback or share their thoughts about your posts on Twitter.
The process is pretty simple. You’ll have to have a Twitter account to take advantage of this service, but you won’t have to post to Twitter when you post an update to the shoutbox. When you are creating your shoutbox, you can filter swear words just to keep the trolls at bay.
How I Organize My Feeds
Whether you are a part-time blogger or a pro-blogger who makes a full-time living online from your blog, you want to take time on a daily basis to keep up with the latest developments in your niche and other industries. You certainly don’t want to talk about things without being on the top of things in your market. Not knowing what you are talking about is the best way to lose your credibility and damage your blog’s reputation. Finding blogs to read in your niche is not that difficult. There are plenty of lists out there that show you what the top blogs are in each niche. There are plenty of bloggers that create posts about top blogs in different niches. So there is no excuse in finding a handful of blogs to read on a daily basis. Things get a bit more dicey when you are greedy like me. There was a time that I had over 1000 feeds in my “must read” folder. I was never able to catch up with everything in that folder, but it was a nice way to challenge myself.
I realized after a while that one just can’t keep up with that many feeds. Not without sacrificing some other things. As a business owner, I owed it to myself to organize my feeds in a way that would help me get the information I need on a daily basis without forgetting about my core business processes. If you suffer from information and feed overload, you may want to consider switching your feed reader and use one that lets you organize your feeds and get more out of them. Bloglines and Google Reader are both very powerful and worth using if you are a feed junkie. I personally stopped using Bloglines a while ago as Google Reader provided me with more social features, but either solutions works great. How you organize your feeds is going to be the most important part of the process. Read more »
How To: Evolve Your Blog with a Wiki
In the past few weeks, I have listed ways that you can enhance your blog and build a more solid community around it. Adding a job board, forum, and a Twitter shoutbox can always help you provide more value to your readers and get them more engaged. Of course, you don’t want to do any of these things without having a plan. But if you have a strategy, those moves can help you take your blog to the next level. Adding a Wiki to your blog is yet another way you can enhance your blog, get more traffic to it, and bring more visitors on board.
Anyone who has been online for the past few years has used or heard of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an open community that has become a major source of information for a lot of people. Why do people love Wikipedia? Because it’s by the community for the community. And let’s not forget that it’s the most comprehensive encyclopedia around. While Wikipedia is great, niche wikis are very popular as well. People don’t like searching for information more than they have to. So having a wiki about your niche can not only help your visitors get all the information they need faster, it could help you get more traffic from the search engines as well (needless to say, search engines love search engines). Read more »
