Money Blogger

You post a message, fine. It will be crawled by Google and be searchable, fine. But have you checked that the title of the page (that is, the title displayed on the title bar of the browser) reflects the title of your post? Because this is very important… let’s find out why:

• search engines like Google use the title of the page to rank the page better: in other words, the words contained in the title of the page will have more weight than if they were only inside the page
• when a user searches on Google and finds one of your posts, the title displayed would be more indicative. For instance, a user searches for "title your posts" on Google and finds this post. Would it be better that it is displayed: "MoneyBlogger" or "MoneyBlogger - Use title of your posts as title of the page"?

So, be sure to check if your blogging platforms allows to reflect the title of your posts in the title of the pages!

Ever thought of how many articles you should put in a page? The less, the better.

Actually, one article per page is the best thing you can do. In fact, this would help you in at least two ways:

• search engines will index separate content of your blog, and therefore searches will give users more possibility of finding your pages, since the pages will be uniform in content
• Adsense will work better, since the advertising provided will be targeted exactly on the topic of the page, and readers will be more prone to clicking on those ads

Accordingly to this post, having a minimalist blog layout let you maximize your Adsense performances.

Does it really work? Probably it does. In fact, when visitors have very few things to click and read on a single page, they will tend to "understand" better the page, and they will tend to click on more links. If these links are ads, it’s done.

The more pages you furnish to your readers, the more likely it will be that you will maximize your gains through advertising or referrals. Moreover, the more pages you have the more likely it will be that you will be found through different search queries on search engines.

Aside from writing a lot, what does that mean? Well, you can think to refer to related posts inside your posts, so that your readers can dig into more detail when reading your articles. And, if somebody is new, he/she can also understand what you are talking about.

Inviting guests is always a trouble: you’ve got to clean the house, prepare good food, tell your family that there will be guests on Sunday noon. You will also have to talk with them on various topics, entertain them, and be polite: they’re guests.

Guest blogging does not differ too much from this: if you invite somebody to write for a short (or even a long) period of time on your site, there are several things you have to check.

• prepare your visitors (your "family") to the fact that also somebody else will write on the blog, forever or for a short period of time
• introduce your guests in the best way, telling the world who they are, what they will do, why they will write on your blog
• then, and only then, let them post: to start with, a couple of short messages will be better; after all, they are probably strangers to your visitors
• always continue writing you, too: guest blogging does not mean letting somebody else run your blog. Otherwise, your style will be lost
• give your guests enough liberty, but always check what they post

Guest blogging is always useful, but in particular it becomes vital when you go on holiday and you can’t post messages from the beach. In that case, prepare also several generic messages, like those of the secret vault, and have them published periodically in your absence: you will be present on your blog even when on holiday, and this is a great sign of somebody who cares what he/she does.

I’ve already dealt in the recent past with the problem of not having good ideas or time to write. Let’s say you don’t have that secret vault I told you about: what could you do?

Well, if you don’t have too much to say, don’t say too much: also a short post, a review of another blog, a short comment on a newspaper article could be enough for a day or two: your readers will know you’re there and you’re not abandoning your blog.

It may sound foolish and obvious, but being on Google with a good ranking really makes some difference. People that doesn’t know you will search on Google for topics you may be dealing with: therefore, making sure that all your pages are searchable from Google is a good place to start.

As you know, Google among the other algorithms relies on PageRank, which is a system used to rank sites accordingly to the in-links they have: the more links you got from other sites to yours, the better you will be placed in the search results.
Therefore exchanging links with others and promoting yourself through blog directories will help you not only in being reached through this links, but will also help in being found through Google, since you will gather more and more importance.

Cooperation with others becomes a must.

Today you don’t have time posting, or have no ideas, or are too tired or too angry: it just happens. Should you leave your users without a single message from you? Of course, as explained here, you shouldn’t!

Every good blogger in fact has a secret vault with some messages prepared in the past: these messages are generic and not-related to any specific time. They become useful when you can’t for some reasons write, but you want to publish something.

Every day you write, consider if you have time and energy to write another generic article: if you do so, keep that precious article in your vault and use it "in emergency cases".

A little curiosity: this post - dealing with what to do when you can’t post - was written well before the date it was posted, and was posted because I had nothing else to say :)

According to Technorati, 80,000 new blogs are created every day. Despite the fact that I don’t know how many of these fall in disuse in a few weeks, I am pretty sure that among these blogs only 1% of them survives for more than a year.

You can easily see this reading blogs somewhere on the net: blogs tend to be abandoned, since there is lack of time or creativity of their authors, and a dream of an enterprise becomes suddenly a nightmare.

Blogging takes time, a lot of time: you can’t think of writing a blog in 10 minutes once a week. You have to read, and to read a lot, to make sure you’re updated with news. Then you have to think, to elaborate your thoughts and then write something. This process takes no more than 1-2 hours per day if you’re fast and are writing no more than 2 articles per day.
Do you want to earn blogging? Do it, but don’t think it’s easy-money.

If you can’t afford this time, every single day, weekends included, it will be tough for you to be a professional blogger.

I’ve already talked in this post about newsletters. Assuming that you got one, when should you send out emails?
If you followed my advices (you didn’t? Argh! :) you are sending it once a week. The worst days to send them happen to be the weekend.

In fact many users do not connect to the Internet during the weekend: okay, it depends, if you’re targeting nerds they do, but generally speaking there are less users connected to the Internet on Saturday and Sunday.
Since in the weekend people accumulates mail, do not try to send it on Monday or Tuesday: it won’t be noticed! Wednesday is the climax of the week: better to avoid job peaks.
So, the best time to send a weekly newsletter happens to be the closing of the week, Thursday or Friday (early) morning, since in these days people tend to work less and be more prone to distractions.

A very stupid tip, that may save you some newsletter unsubscriptions.