This is a guest post by Krisca Te. Details about Krisca Te at the end of the article.
Blogging is one of the hottest and most profitable online enterprises you can do on your own. You can start working and earning money right away without being caught up in the usual problems of running a business solo. Very little capital and equipment are necessary for you to become a reputable blogger.
A web master’s dilemma
If you want to start your own money-making blog, you have to pick a topic or niche that you feel confident about and interested in. Running a blog means constantly producing fresh, useful, relevant and updated content about the things that interest your reader. You have to know what to write about before you even set up the site’s domain.
Once you know what your blog will be about, you have to tweak the content so it will rank well on search engine listings. No one will find your site unless they know the URL, so you have to make sure that your content is search engine optimized for better site traffic.
But your job as a webmaster doesn’t begin and end with generating search engine friendly articles. After all, you are writing for a human audience, not an algorithm. Search engines can only do so much to promote your website, and at the end of the day you have to put in extra effort to attract human readers and make them stay with you, post after post.
Looking for something else?
Being a blogger means balancing your content so that it is both search engine and user friendly. Search engines like Google will stop recommending your blog if readers don’t appreciate the content that you have on your site, and that will spell the end of your site traffic heydays.
Moreover, you should also be able to convince your reader that you have other interesting and useful stuff elsewhere on your site. When a user clicks through to your blog from Google or Bing and views one page, that’s one cookie point for your site traffic. However, that same reader may also bounce off your blog to another site if he doesn’t like what he sees on your post. He clicks through to the other websites that turned up in his search listing instead.
Leaving your site after viewing just one page thus gives you a high bounce rate, which can be an important indicator that there is something lacking in your content. In a nutshell, a blog’s bounce rate is equivalent to the number of one-page-view visits over the total number of visits. High site traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you blog is doing well overall-if you also have high bounce rate, that means that your readers don’t find your blog useful enough for their purposes.
Reduce your bounce rate today
You can’t control how your readers behave once they are in your website, but you can tweak your content so that they will want to spend more time viewing your other pages or even signing up for your RSS feeds or email newsletter. In short, you have to convince them to stick around for more of what you have to offer, be it more information or products or services.
The secret is in spicing up your content so that each and every article is informative, relevant, accurate and helpful. Apart from this, there are also a couple of other ways you can try to make sure that every visit to your website decreases the overall bounce rate and ensures that you get maximum exposure and readership for all your posts:
1. Create internal links. Ensuring that all your pages are sufficiently and properly interlinked can play a big role in how readers use your website. Include a list of relevant posts to every page so that they can explore other pages and topics further.
2. Have a clear and easy-to-use navigation scheme. An intuitive navigation allows your users to feel like they are following a well-organized train of thought. Make sure that all your buttons and tabs are working fine so that readers won’t be frustrated by not being able to view pages they’ve previously loaded.
3. Provide ample content on every page. Two sentences for every page is not enough to convince your reader that you actually have more to say about anything. On the flip side, large amounts of text on every page don’t automatically mean that you are an expert. Try having 300-500 words on every page so that your reader will not be discouraged by the length (or lack thereof) of the content.
4. Update your blog regularly. Readers don’t want to read stale, outdated content. They want fresh information and timely news. Get them to stay with you longer by offering new content on a regular basis, but don’t forget to link back to previous posts that may be relevant to the topic.
When not out building relationships with other bloggers, Krisca Te can be found reading blogs that tackle personal development. She is also a personal finance freak who is currently working with ACC, a personal finance blog. You can follow ACC on Twitter if you like to stay updated on their latest contents.
An awesome site for writers called Creative Writing Now honored me by asking me for an interview. In the interview I discuss how I became a freelance blogger and I provide my tips for experiencing success with blogging.
You can read it here.
This is a guest post by Alexis Bonari. Learn more about her by checking out the bio at the bottom of the post.
The online community moves fast. In order to capture the fickle attention spans of mouse-clicking generations, we online freelance writers must be on top of trends across the board. No one outside of niche blogs wants to read anything by a stilted writer who sounds like she’s from 2010.
Trendy writers come up with and reuse popular words or phrases like foodie, quick fix, and green. Everyone does it—and that’s fine—but I’m going to let my inner mom come out for a second to illustrate a point: If everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you?
Admittedly, inserting the word vacay isn’t going to bring down your writing career (probably). This might be a good time, however, to remember a few basic do’s and don’ts of freelance writing.
Use latecomers sparingly
The English language morphs to suit modern purposes. Although Shakespeare’s work wasn’t looked upon kindly by the contemporary upper classes, the now-acclaimed playwright added 1,700 words to the English language, including bedroom, dishearten, and majestic. Shakespeare’s experience demonstrates that some trends catch on for a reason.
If you know what you’re doing and the audience you’re writing for, go ahead and use gorgie or fab. If, however, you’re using trendy words simply because you’ve seen them before and you haven’t checked up its etymology, you may want to pass. Many media-generated words are redundant and classless, but because no one bothers to say so, they catch on. More importantly, they can suck the creativity from your own key-stroking fingers. Stop mimicking the cool kids and use your own words.
Don’t be afraid to pick up a dictionary
Since I often write about eco-friendly (there it is again) topics and skincare, I come across this one frequently: skincare regime orregiment.
Regime, regimen, and regiment have for some reason been lumped into one vague but militaristic definition. Many writers think the three words are interchangeable.
Typos and misunderstandings may be to blame, but let’s make it clear: a regime is a form of government, a regimen is a procedure or system, and a regiment is a military unit of ground troops.
Avoid redundancy
Are you going to send a few manuscripts out later this week? What are your future plans? Are you in the process of deciding whether or not to go to the party this weekend?
Of course you’re sending the assignments later this week. Your sentence is already referring to the future (as in, you’re going to send the manuscripts), so it has to be later. Future plans? A plan is already for the future. And why not nix the excess baggage and simply say, “Are you deciding whether to go to the party this weekend?”
If you look at good poetry, you’ll see that much is conveyed in as few words as possible. That’s a good principle in freelance writing, too, especially if you’re constricted by a word or letter count.
Take, for example, the word reiterate, which I heard on PBS the other day. Sticklers for the English language know that iterate suits the purpose just fine, sans two letters. Because we hear these words and phrases all the time, however, they’re surprisingly difficult to expunge from our vernacular.
Bio: Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching art scholarships as well as business scholarships. Whenever this WAHM gets some free time she enjoys doing yoga, cooking with the freshest organic in-season fare, and practicing the art of coupon clipping.
If you’re a blogger whose page is suffering from low readership, repetitive posts, or a general lack of innovation, chances are that it also lacks collaborative strategies. Some bloggers may be hesitant to even explore the idea of collaboration, foreseeing a loss of readership if they point out a better blog. However, experience shows the opposite: readers enjoy being introduced to new bloggers, so they’ll keep coming back for more.
There are many ways to start adding more collaborative writing and sharing to your blog, and most of them are painless – maybe even fun. The following are some of the strategies of successful blogs that can be translated to your writing for increased readership and rave reviews.
Set Collaborative Readership Goals
Communicate with other bloggers about your collaborative writing and let them hold you accountable for reaching a specific readership goal. When you know that someone expects something of you, it’s easier to actually do it.
A group of personal finance bloggers, inspired by a single challenge posted on Financial Samurai, agreed to increase their Alexa readership ratings within six months. Some aimed to join the ranks of the top 200,000; others challenged themselves to reach the top 50,000. But all 49 personal finance bloggers who answered the challenge observed significant increases in readership due to the collaborative nature of the goals they had set for themselves. One blog even managed to increase its rating from #1,432,262 to #215,606.
How did they manage this?
1. They started right away without procrastinating. They didn’t make excuses about needing to think it over or question the feasibility of the task. They just joined up.
2. They tracked something tangible. Whether it’s page rankings, readership, number of Tweets, or any other popularity indicator, this is an important factor in goal-oriented blogger collaboration.
3. A concrete and desirable goal was set. Without focus, collaboration loses some of its efficacy.
4. Keeping it casual enabled these bloggers to just “let the magic happen” as members of the challenge group created blog badges and set up tracking pages for collaborative commentary.
5. They promoted each other. Small increases in readership added up for everyone and created a more synergistic partnership among bloggers.
Start Blogging Collaboratively
There are many ways to incorporate collaborative writing into your blog, and there are also many reasons for doing so. It can help you realize something about your niche that inspires you to expand the scope of your blog; it can help you get past writer’s block; it can increase readership; it can diversify your content; and it can do so much more. Examples of collaborative blogging include guest blogging, blog swaps, joint posts, interviews, joint blogs, joining a blog network, chatting on IM or e-mail, and participating in discussion forums. Trying a blog swap (switching blogs for a day with another blogger) or joining up with another blogger to write interview posts about each other can liven up a boring blog.
There’s no way to lose with these helpful strategies, so show your savvy by making some immediate improvements to your blog with win-win collaboration.
This is a guest post by Lisa Shoreland. Lisa is currently a resident blogger at Go College, where recently she’s been researching merit based college grants as well as how to apply for scholarships. In her spare time, she enjoys creative writing, practicing martial arts, and taking weekend trips.
This is a guest post by Modi.
- How many times have we all come across a browser that isn’t responding no matter how long we’ve been patiently waiting?
- How many times how most of us lost our precious work, whether a great post to be published in a blog or just an ordinary pretty long email?
- How many times have we all felt helpless, looking at our screen after all those tabs and browsers were gone and all those hours of research have been wiped away?
There’s nothing more frustrating than coping with your work being lost just because of your browser’s malfunction.
Having tried several browsers during the past 15 years, from Mosaic and Lynx to IE9 and Chrome I decided to write a post on an issue that has been annoying me since I started browsing the web. And the questions always remained the same: Why isn’t there a browser that can deal with all (or at least) most of these issues?
Efficiency
An efficient browser isn’t the one that offers hundreds of configuration options so you can go back in your history and retrieve any page you’ve lost. This is pointless for people like me who browse hundreds of pages daily. But the worst aspect is when you actually lose what you’ve been so patiently writing in a web editor and boom… it’s all gone! Sometimes, if the crash is really fatal it can lead to the whole operating system hang, making a reboot mandatory which means that you can lose unsaved data in other open applications…And what is in the clipboard too. Microsoft definitely has some merit of responsibility in this case but this is not a topic to be discussed right now.
Speed
When it comes down to speed the real issue isn’t how long it takes a browser to run or get terminated. The real issue is: How Quickly Can You Recover if things go terribly wrong. I’ve read numerous tests with benchmarks comparing browsers’ response times in nanoseconds but what of a difference is that going to make in my life if I lose that piece of text which I have been typing for hours during some moment of great inspiration?
The Source of the Problem
The main reason why we all lose our data, tabs and pages from time to time has to do with the way the O/S treats our browser application. Traditionally, browser applications run as one process, no matter how many tabs or windows are open at the same time. So, if something goes wrong in one tab or page then usually the whole process needs to be terminated and this is why we end up losing everything – including our faith to technology.
Crash Protection
Obviously, the solution to the problem was in the browser’s architecture. Allowing for more than one process for each browser page or tab would offer crash protection. Apparently, this is a very simple idea but for some reason most browsers still don’t offer! If something goes wrong in Chrome we can terminate only the process responsible for the non-responding tab. Internet Explorer and Firefox only run as one process so terminating the process will result in all the tabs disappearing.
However, if you want to change the default behaviour you are free do to so. A popular choice is to set one process-per-site so all open tabs that belong to the same site will be treated by one process only. So, if you have 10 different Amazon product pages open, they will run as one process, rather than 10, saving resources especially if your system is not very powerful. Nevertheless, if you want all your tabs to be dealt by a single process (e.g. like Firefox and IE) this is another possibility.
Google Chrome Protection
Using the built-in task manager we can view and manage any process. By pressing ‘SHIFT+Esc’ and the browser’s task manager will appear. It contains useful information such as memory and CPU usage as well as the network bandwidth of each tab and page.
Modi is an SEO and web design consultant who works for a cruises company which specialise in oceania cruises and silversea cruises. If you’d like to connect with him, follow him on Twitter at @macmodi.
There are no hard and fast rules about how to blog. Yes, there are guides. There are six-figure bloggers who provide tips and ideas about being a successful blogger. There are general etiquette practices that bloggers tend to follow. But the truth of it is that the most successful bloggers are the ones who find the way of blogging that works for them regardless of what they’ve been told works in general.
And as blogging as grown to such huge proportions, bloggers have found that there are some common beliefs about blogging that they just don’t agree with other bloggers about. In fact, Problogger had a great post recently listing 29 Debates Bloggers Have. This simple x vs. y list shows that there are not only no clear cut rules for blogging but actually totally opposing beliefs about a lot of blogging methods.
One example given in the article is whether you should have descriptive titles or keyword-focused titles for your blog. Either way can work depending on what you’re seeking to do, who your audience is and what type of blogger you are. This isn’t the only title debate either; bloggers even debate whether you should have short titles or lengthy titles.
This is what makes blogging great … it’s very personal, very individual. You can blog in the way that is right for you and find an audience of like-minded people who like your style. You get to be yourself. And really, there’s no debate that that’s the best way to be a good blogger.
I received an email last week letting me know that this blog had been included in a list of the 30 Finest Creative Writing Blogs of 2009 that was published by the Online Colleges and Universities website. (Scroll down past the featured schools list on that page to see the list.) I enjoy their site, which often features terrific writing tips an resources, so it made me happy to see that this blog was included there.
I was also happy to see myself in some great company. Here’s a look at the other 29 blogs that were included on their list (in alphabetical order):
- · Advanced Fiction Writing Blog
- · Apostrophe Abuse
- · Becoming a Fiction Writer
- · Becoming a Writer – Seriously
- · Blue Pencil Editing
- · Cheryl Rainfield
- · Fiction Writers Review
- · Future Perfect Publishing
- · Gareth Powell
- · Inkygirl
- · Internet Writing Workshop
- · Jeremiah Tolbert
- · John Baker
- · Men with Pens
- · Mike’s Writing Workshop
- · Neil Gaiman
- · Paperback Writer
- · Renegade Writer
- · SF Signal
- · The Orwell Prize
- · The Poetry Blog
- · The Urban Muse
- · Thursdaybram
- · Tom Conoboy
- · Working Girl
- · Write Anything
- · Write to Done
- · Writing for the Web
- · Writing Words
I make my living as a full-time professional blogger. Because of this, I obviously have tried a lot of different methods of getting blogging jobs. Each method has its own pros and cons. Here’s what those are based on my own experience.
1. Apply for advertised jobs. The most common way to get blogging jobs is to apply for the jobs that are being advertised. You can check out the Problogger Job Board or Deb Ng’s daily blogging leads to find these jobs.
Pros: These companies are definitely looking for bloggers, the work is available, you can find a lot of leads at once.
Cons: Everyone else is applying this way, too, so you are facing stiff competition. Your application can easily get lost in the crowd.
2. Attend classes for people interested in blogging. There are many classes given for people who want to learn more about blogging to help their businesses. Attend these and bring your business cards along to get new jobs.
Pros: These people are certainly interested in having a blog and they don’t really know how to do it on their own.
Cons: Not many – I’ve actually found this to be the best method of getting new jobs as a blogger. The biggest difficulties are probably scheduling your time to fit in these classes and making sure that you’re talkative enough there so that people know what you do. Additionally, you’ll find all different types of businesses represented at these classes so you might not succeed if you’re looking to blog in a certain niche.
3. Attend networking events in your niche. If you do want to blog in a certain niche then attending networking events, trade shows and Meetups around that niche is a great way to meet people who may want you to blog for them.
Pros: You’ll meet people who don’t necessarily already have a blogger and could use your services in a writing niche that interests you.
Cons: These people may or may not want blogging help. It can take time for these connections to lead to real blogging jobs. You have to really promote yourself at these events to get the work.
4. Email or cold call businesses you’d like to blog for. Identify businesses that you want to blog for. These may have existing blogs that you believe you could develop or they may not yet have blogs. Contact them via phone or email with information about your services.
Pros: You’re tapping into jobs where there is a lot less competition. You’ll get to work with businesses that really interest you since you’ve identified them.
Cons: These people aren’t necessarily seeking a blogger so you’ll face a lot of rejection while you’re looking for work. It can take a lot of time and follow-up to make these leads work.
5. Create a great blog of your own and let people know you’d like to blog for them. If you have a terrific blog that you promote around the web then people will eventually seek out your services. Let them know on the blog how to reach you as a blogger-for-hire.
Pros: These people already know your style and want to hire you for the work that you do.
Cons: It takes awhile to build up the kind of reputation that will have people knocking at your door. This requires patience.
How do you get blogging jobs? What are the pros and cons of your method?
I recently started working as a blogger for a company that I really like. The company is Edgi Clothing, a Bay Area tshirt company that has really cool clothing designs and a great philosophy behind their business. I’m writing blog posts about tshirts, fashion, and indie creativity for the blog. And I’m loving it – not only because the work is fun but because this is a client that I can really support.
I’m lucky to be in a position right now where I’m able to work with clients who are doing things that I find interesting. I get to collaborate with cool creative people who are making and promoting interesting products, products I’d want to buy or share with others. I get to be a part of teams that have strong beliefs that I can align myself with. It’s a great place to be in as a writer / professional blogger.
It was not always this way. When I was a new freelancer, or when money has gotten tight, I’ve done writing jobs that weren’t so in line with my passions. I’ve written for companies that didn’t interest me. I’ve done jobs that were more like sales for products that I would not have bought myself. I’ve worked as an independent contractor with businesses that I didn’t care to become more team-like with.
I won’t deny that those jobs sometimes pay the bills but I will insist that it’s a lot better to work with clients that you care about whenever you get the opportunity to do so. Working for companies that you enjoy and believe in leads to many benefits including:
- The work is more interesting to you.
- Your work day flies by because you’re really into it.
- You get to meet and work with people who like the things that you do.
- You spend time researching things that interest you and end up learning more about the stuff that you like to know about.
- Your work ends up being of better quality because your passion shines through.
- You can be a lot more proud of the work that you’re doing.
There is a really terrific post over at Problogger about blogging rules and how a real blogger might want to break them. There are all of these different rules that bloggers know that they’re supposed to follow to write a “good” post. You know the ones – write a catchy headline, do a lot of lists, use bullets, use proper spacing, keep it short and sweet …
There are some really good reasons that a blogger wants to do all of these things. It has to do with the likelihood of having your posts read and shared by other people around the web. However, as Problogger points out, it takes a lot out of the creativity of blogging. That, in turn, takes a lot of the fun out of blogging.
Remember back to the days when blogs were still called weblogs and they read like personal journal entries? The reason that we loved this medium when it first emerged was because it leveled the playing field for all writers and let readers into their inside worlds. You lose that when you start writing just to get links.
So take a tip from Problogger. Throw out the rules now and then. Write lengthy titles. Ramble on instead of making short sweet lists. Share your own thoughts without linking to other people. Use flowery language. Dare to be creative in your blogging!!
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