Friday, March 13, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
What to Blog About
As a basic rule, your topic should be popular or rising in popularity. If you want to blog but do not know what to blog about, you may check out Google Zeitgeist for good blog topic ideas. Google Zeitgeist lists what's on top of mind of people searching thru google. It basically shows what terms or topics are being "googled" most frequently. It gives statistics on what's hot and what's not in terms of the queries being "googled".
If you already have a particular niche in mind, you can try http://www.google.com/trends to check for the inclination of your topic---if it is rising or declining in popularity. As an example, the trend of the niche wedding is consistently high though the trend may rise and fall from time to time.
Blog about high-earning topics in popular niches. High-earning topics are blog topics that generate good advertisers. As a general rule, there should be at least 20 advertisers for your niche. Spyfu.com shows some useful statistics per niche such as: number of advertisers, cost per click and clicks per day. Remember that there should always be a balance between cost per click and clicks per day. A high or expensive cost per click ad does not guarantee high earning if there are very few clicks made in a day. The screenshot below shows that there are many advertisers in the niche weddings. Also, the cost per click and clicks per day on this niche are relatively high, making it a "financially promising" topic. 
Now that you have a niche, it's time to name your blog. Google Suggest gives you an idea on what more specific topics in your chosen niche are frequently being searched. 
As much as possible, the name of your blog should be the same as the keyword obtained thru Google Suggest. Why? Because that is what "clients" look for in google. From the previous illustration, you might want to name your blog, http://weddings-and-beyond.blogspot.com/. Monday, December 29, 2008
Keywords and Traffic
Keywords are words that are relevant to the topic being discussed in a blog. If for example the topic is "Barack Obama", some of the keywords would be: White House, American President, African American, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, US Senate, Democrat. Can you think of other keywords for the topic "Barack Obama"? Keywords are basically any term that can closely be associated with your topic.
Why are keywords important? Because they drive traffic. Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Your guests will be your "customers"---the recipients of your "products" or "services". Just like a real business, the more customers you have, the higher the income potential is.
Referring to the previous example, if your blog is about Barack Obama, most probably Michelle Obama will be mentioned in some of your posts. When someone searches for Michelle Obama in Google, there is a chance that your blog gets into the search results. The more keywords you use in your posts, the more chances your blog gets into the search results.
Now that you have the above information, the next step would be to think of keywords for your topic. You could use some help from:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Why are keywords important? Because they drive traffic. Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Your guests will be your "customers"---the recipients of your "products" or "services". Just like a real business, the more customers you have, the higher the income potential is.
Referring to the previous example, if your blog is about Barack Obama, most probably Michelle Obama will be mentioned in some of your posts. When someone searches for Michelle Obama in Google, there is a chance that your blog gets into the search results. The more keywords you use in your posts, the more chances your blog gets into the search results.
Now that you have the above information, the next step would be to think of keywords for your topic. You could use some help from:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Blogger's Goal: High PageRank
PageRank is a ranking software that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents based on the relevance of the webpage to the search keywords entered. The weight assigned by PageRank is from 0 to 10 depending on the webpage's relevance (0 = low relevance; 10 = high-relevance). The software analyzes both the number of incoming links and the authority on the subject matter of the referring webpages to generate a relative measurement within the set. The name PageRank is a trademark of Google.
Now, what does this mean to you? Remember the last time you searched for a particular keyword in google, what appeared on top of the list? What dictates which webpage to be listed first? It is PageRank: webpages with higher PageRanks appears on top of the webpages with lower weights. To illustrate the importance of PageRank, the following screenshot shows that Wikipedia's webpage appears on top of the list when searching for the keyword "page rank".
Opening Wikipedia's webpage related to "page rank", the toolbar shows that its PageRank (or Google's view of the importance of that page) is 7/10. If you would check the other webpages after Wikipedia on the list from the previous screenshot, they would have importance of 7 or below. If you cannot view the PageRanks of the pages you are viewing, you may want to download the Google toolbar.
Being first on the list of search results would be any bloggers wish. Why? Because if not always, it is usually the first search result that is being viewed by people searching for a particular keyword. It is thus a blogger's goal to have his blog/website to get as high PageRank as possible.
Now, what does this mean to you? Remember the last time you searched for a particular keyword in google, what appeared on top of the list? What dictates which webpage to be listed first? It is PageRank: webpages with higher PageRanks appears on top of the webpages with lower weights. To illustrate the importance of PageRank, the following screenshot shows that Wikipedia's webpage appears on top of the list when searching for the keyword "page rank".
Opening Wikipedia's webpage related to "page rank", the toolbar shows that its PageRank (or Google's view of the importance of that page) is 7/10. If you would check the other webpages after Wikipedia on the list from the previous screenshot, they would have importance of 7 or below. If you cannot view the PageRanks of the pages you are viewing, you may want to download the Google toolbar. Being first on the list of search results would be any bloggers wish. Why? Because if not always, it is usually the first search result that is being viewed by people searching for a particular keyword. It is thus a blogger's goal to have his blog/website to get as high PageRank as possible.
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