The Internet presents an appealing forum to people who want to break into freelance writing. Readers and writers find a broad range of quality when it comes to the content of Internet articles. If you aspire to write for the web audience and sell your articles to web site owners, here are some tips for writing short, informative articles.

Writing for the web varies significantly from writing for magazines and other publications. For the web audience, you want to choose to focus your article in a way that is easy and quick to read. Here are some strategies to keep in mind.

1. GoogleBooks is a reliable source for books on many topics. Although you can’t read many books in their entirety, you can usually access enough pages to find the information you are looking for without visiting the library.

2. Avoid rewording existing articles that you find on the Internet. This is a very poor practice to get into if you are serious about freelance writing. You want to establish a reputation for finding quality information and delivering it to the customer in a usable format. Your writing should not reek of someone else’s ideas. On the other hand, if you use multiple quality sources as a starting point, you are on your way to creating a better article.

3. Short and Informative. The web audience primarily consists of people who are browsing Internet sites for quick, reliable information. You want to focus the purpose of your article in the very first sentence. Next, you want to lay out your main points and supporting facts as succinctly as possible. The short, well-written article should be edited extensively for wordiness, redundancy, and other useless information that detracts from readability. Keep your argument short and sweet so you do not lose the reader.

Writing for the web is an art form just like any other profession. The best writers develop a reputation for quality writing on just about any subject. Their secret is the ability to quickly access and summarize reliable information and provide it to the customer for a reasonable fee.

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Many Bloggers and Internet marketers use complex software to help them achieve high rankings in search engine results pages while others prefer to engage the services of search engine optimization professionals. However, these two options require large sums of money. If you are new to the field of Internet marketing and do not yet have a lot of resources to spare for search engine optimization, there are a number of things you can do to improve your search engine rankings. A few of them are listed below:

1) Make Use of a Keyword-Rich Domain Name

Determine what your main keyword is and make sure that it is what your target market uses to search for whatever it is that you offer. Including that keyword in your domain name will enhance the perceived relevance of your website for that search term, increase your quality score, and consequently allow you to rank highly in search engine results pages. Your website will also be more likely visited by your target audience especially if your competitors’ sites don’t have keywords in their domain names.

2) Make Use of Keywords in Different Parts of Your Website

Everything in your website should contain the keywords that you target. These include your header, description, navigation pane, footer, and main body as well as your metadata. Because most of your content will be placed in the main body, it is important to pay attention to details there. Try to reach a keyword density of about 3%. That means having your keyword appear three times for every one hundred words you publish. Just be sure that you integrate your keywords properly or your content will be considered low quality and your visitors will not enjoy going to your website for information. Proper use of keywords in your content will increase the relevance of your website to specific search terms and consequently increase your ranking in search engine results pages.

3) Make Use of Different Platforms to Create Back Links

Generating lots of back links is very important in achieving top rankings in the most popularly used search engines. Being active in forums, article directories, and similar sites will help you achieve this as long as you use your signature or by-line properly. Publishing guest posts in relevant blogs will also help. Other things you can do include listing your website in as many web directories as you can as well as posting it in classified ads sites. Doing all these will help you generate many back links as well as lead traffic to your website. Both of which increase your chances of ranking highly in search engine results pages.

Search engine optimization does not necessarily require huge sums of money as there are things you can easily do yourself to improve your rankings in search engine results pages. Implementing these three tips will ensure that you get to the first page of search engines easily, quickly, and inexpensively.

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Blogging is all the rave these days. There isn’t a day that goes by without the words blog, blogger or blogosphere appearing on the front-page of a widely-circulated newspaper, or in a mainstream article on your favourite media site.

But there’s a reason why this has happened.

Blogging has enabled ordinary Joe to write about his life, his passions and his business and makes his thoughts accessible to anyone surfing the web – which could potentially be millions of visitors. Such a marketing tool along with the rise of social media has not gone unnoticed and has resulted in a huge wave of new blogs being created daily, and with that has come a new generation of blogging superstars, experts and professional “bloggers”. You only need to read Darren Rowse’s brilliant Problogger to see what I mean.

Whilst creating a blog has become a lot easier over the past few years thanks to the rise of open-source content management systems such as Wordpress (and their famous 1-click-installs for those of us technically challenged), there are still many assumptions that the general public hold against the blogosphere. I wanted to go through a few of these and comment on them based on my own experience in the world of blogs, in part to warn new writers entering the ‘sphere but also to serve as lessons which can hopefully help you get a leg-up on your competitors.

1. Blogging is not a make money overnight solution. I am yet to find an example of a blogger “making it big” overnight without having put in hours of work beforehand for little or no compensation. The truth is, bloggers can and must spend a lot of time tweaking their designs, writing pages of content, contacting other sites hoping for a link-out or marketing their site in order to try and create a revenue stream, especially if they are a newbie starting from scratch. Perseverance is vital, and the efforts you put in today will hopefully pay off tomorrow.

2. It’s lonely at the bottom. Whilst the famous saying quotes the opposite, it can be very lonely trying to raise the profile of your site whilst starting out as the billionth blog in the blogosphere. When I started Blogtrepreneur I rarely got comments, traffic was in the 10’s not the 1000’s and others around me felt that I was wasting time building something which had no present value. Believe in yourself and what you are doing and you will have something to show for it in the near future.

3. At the beginning, having good content is not the only thing you should be worrying about. I once heard a very good analogy about sites; a new website is like owning a shop in the middle of the desert. The internet is a vast place but unless you tell people about your creation, you can’t expect to have any customers. Sure we’ve all heard the mantra “Content is King” but without a decent marketing plan, you have failed to prepare and thus are preparing yourself to fail.

4. Blogging can have significant start-up costs attached. Everyone knows that a blog can be built for free on platforms such as Blogger, or close to free with a cheap domain and hosting, but many fail to factor in our most valuable resource; time. Every hour that you spend working on your new blog could be spent on an income stream or working in a coffee shop, all of which could be putting more money in your pocket. Calculating your opportunity cost of starting a blog is important and could save you from running into a financial hazard early on in your blogging career.

5. Blogging is difficult. That is a bit of a downer of a statement but nevertheless a true one. By owning a blog you must stay on top of the latest news in your niche, you must brush up on your HTML and Photoshop skills in order to hack away at your theme, you must manage authors and pay-outs and above all, you will be responsible for your blog and everything that comes with it. A lot of people out there don’t mind this responsibility but in the 2 years I have been blogging, I’ve seen writers come and go as they find the blogosphere a hard place to keep up with – make sure you can stick it out and success will seek you out.

All in all, you may think that this has been a pretty pessimistic outlook on the ‘sphere and the financial, emotional, psychological and physical strain that comes with owning and starting a blog. However my goal is not to discourage you from starting your website, as I believe owning one is vital if you want to keep up with the technological progress that is being made every day.

When you do decide to open the doors to your weblog though, remember what I have written above as it will surely make you a better blogger and hopefully, one of the bigger winners.

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For example, a quick niche blog based around a few keyword phrases doesn’t need as much planning as a flagship blog that you aim to devote at least one blog post a day towards.

Planning a new blog can be divided into two parts; the building of the blog and the launch of the blog in terms of marketing (and longer term marketing plans if necessary). This post will cover the planning of building a new blog.

Photography by Ben Pollard

What Do I Need To Think About When Planning A New Blog?

• Purpose of the blog. Why are you building it? This means choosing the weighting in terms of business blogging/labor of love.
• Domain name, Brand Name, slogan/tag line. Will you use .com or something else? Will you include the “Dot Com” in the brand name? Could people easily misspell your domain name? Does the name capture what your blog is all about?
• Blogging Platform and hosting WordPress, typepad or something different? I recommend WordPress hosted with BlueHost, which is what I have used cost effectively for well over a year without any serious problems.
• Layout and colour scheme (design). Will you use a free template and modify it yourself, pay a designer to do it all, or something in between? A great way to have an affordable custom header graphic/logo designed for you is by starting a design contest in the contests section of the Digital Point forums. This gives you options to choose from for very little money (we are talking $10-$50!).
• Content topic(s). This requires the most thought. It can be difficult to decide exactly what counts as “off-topic” at first, it can take time for content topics to slot into place. However, it’s best to plan ahead as far as possible so good decisions can be made about the names of blog post categories and the writing style. Make sure the issue of being yourself online is solved. Also check out my post about Pillar content.
• Day to Day running of the blog. Will you be doing it all yourself? Setting a posting frequency and sticking to it is vital in the early stages of a blogs life. Make sure you have enough time to write a post when needed, moderate comments, sort out the advertising, networking, building links etc. Setting the bar too high results in running out of steam, bloggers block and and all round bad time.
• Monetization. When (if at all) will you monetize and how? Check out my free Blog Monetization Strategies e-book for in depth information about this.
• Budgeting. Do you have money to invest? If so where? Personally I prefer investing more financially in the design of the blog than the marketing. Overall I invest far more time than money, which is what’s so great about blogs - anyone can do it without a big financial investment!
• Future expansion options. These commonly include adding a forum/ning network/job board/affiliate store.
• Search Engine Optimization. Choosing basic keywords to aim to rank for in Google, page titles, internal linking structure and linkbaits, all in as much detail as you choose. For more info about this read my guide to SEO.

It takes a lot of preparation to launch a new flagship blog and often the first month of a blogs life is the hardest as there are very few readers, who make the whole experience worthwhile. Getting though the first months takes patience and discipline, but is very rewarding. If you are starting a new blog I wish you the very best of luck!

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Your network of contacts can be a powerful thing in a blogosphere full of ordinary blogs which stand alone waiting for people to read information which is often out-dated and over-reported.

Whilst a picture can say 1000 words, a contact can help spread those 1000’s of words all over the place through free publicity and can often support your blog by buying ads on your site.

But how do you meet these people and find the contacts that will help your blog?

There are a couple of methods I’ve used successfully to build up a base of reliable and friendly people who share similar traits and characteristics but who have like-minded goals.

1) Comment on similar sites: As mentioned, the blogosphere is a big place – we’re approaching 100 million of the things now! So there’s bound to be a few sites sharing the same niche or writing about similar themes. Search on Google or follow Blogroll links and then make useful comments on posts which appeal to you. The owners of the blog will be bound to check your site out to see who you are and what you write about. First impressions are everything, so make sure your site is looking spick and span!

2) Follow up with an email: Once you’ve established contact through a comment, shoot the blog owner an email through the contact page or form (which the site owner should have). Explain who you are briefly and link to your blog. Throw in links to a couple of your best posts and even ask to exchange links to help SEO and traffic.

3) Have a conversation: Talking to other bloggers via Instant Messenger can be a great way to show your enthusiasm for your subject and to connect with another person one-on-one. But be warned – don’t go around willy nilly asking for IM addresses as this will throw up caution flags. In the conversation, be yourself, be humorous and don’t plug your site every other sentence!

4) Social networking: Believe it or not, social networking sites aren’t only about flaming George Bush or loving up the iPhone. Sites like MyBlogLog are particularly useful – try commenting on their wall or adding yourself to their Communities. This will again get your name out.

I’ve only mentioned a few methods here, but the list really is up to you in terms of how much you want to seek out other bloggers and what other sites you can dig up in order to help you find those similar people. Try a few of these out for yourself today – like commenting on a new blog, or emailing someone that you’ve never spoken to before.

You never know, they might end up becoming your best online buddy!

Technorati Tags: network, contacts, blogosphere, Social networking

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The small handful of blogspot blogs I actually read cannot be used as much of a judge of the millions out there, but perhaps blogspot bloggers need a reminder about how important RSS feeds and feed readers really are.

It is far to easy to think that it’s not worth building RSS subscriber numbers when you would make more from CPC ads if they actually visited the blog itself. Although there is some truth in this, the Typical RSS subscriber is completely different to your average Joe AdSense clicker and brings different benefits.

The Value of RSS subscribers

An important point to make before diving into how RSS subscribers make you money, is that if a potential RSS subscriber cannot easily click a Feedburer subscription button there is a higher chance they will not return at all. It is simply not a case of, “would I rather my readers were RSS subscribers or visited the blog”. It is that if you don’t have an easily subscribe-able feed, those who wanted to subscribe may be lost for good.

RSS users are at least partially web savvy and so probably know what Google AdSense is and wont click on them. However their web-savvyness brings greater rewards:

For some the reward of blogging is from comments, (which are important to me) or from what another blogger says about them (also important to me) but the most important thing is the feed subscribers.

Conclusion

All of those points apply to Blogspot Bloggers as well. If you are a blogspot blogger looking to increase your readership and earnings then I highly recommended heading over to Feedburner. If your not sure where to start there is a guide on the hompage where it says, “Learn how to burn your Blogger feed”.

Learn how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog with the SEO book.

Technorati Tags: FeedBurner, blogspot bloggers, RSS subscriber

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How do I use RSS?

A Feed reader is similar to an email inbox. You subscribe to the feed of your favourite blogs with a few clicks, and the new posts from that blog are sent straight to you.

Really Simple Steps to get Started with RSS

I use a Google Reader, which I recommended (all this is free by the way).

1. Create a Google Account and sign-in.
2. Click on ‘Google Reader’
3. Start adding subscriptions! This can be done by visiting the blog you want to subscribe to and clicking on their RSS button, or by manually adding the feed address.
4. Subscribe to Blogging Fingers (of course)

Below: A screenshot of my Google Reader Inbox, you can see I’m having a read of Dosh Dosh’s RSS feed.

Why should all bloggers use an RSS reader?

Creating a Subscribe-able feed for your own blog using FeedBurner

This has never been easier than it is now. Simply visit Feedburner.com and enter the URL of your blog in the big box and click “next”. Be sure to read through all the sections such as “optimize” and “publiscize” and carefully chose the options you want.

Technorati Tags: Really Simple Syndication, Feed reader, Google Reader, RSS feed, FeedBurner

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Understanding and implementing the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for all bloggers looking to gain traffic. This information can be found at numerous sources but I have written this post especially for the readers of Blogging Fingers.

1. On-Site Optimisation

Keywords

This involves making your blog ’search engine friendly’. Keywords and keyword phrases play a very important part in this. A keyword phrase for your site is what someone types into a search engine (usually Google) to find your site. I.e. It is a phrase that you rank highly in the SERPS for (search engine results pages) and have content that is highly relevant to that phrase.

How do I chose Keywords?

Ultimately choosing a keyword phrase is about finding a keyword that has high numbers of people searching for it (per month) and little competition in Google, and is relevant to the content on your site.

There are lots of different tools available for this, I use the free SEO book keyword suggestion tool combined with a Google search. The trick is to start broad and work down until you have a suitable keyword phrase.

Example:

Imagine I were trying to find keywords for my Web hosting site. I would type in to the SEO Book tool “web hosting”.

“web hosting” is a highly searched for keyword (over 3million per month). A Google search for “web hosting” reveals there are already over 261 million competitors indexed for that phrase, which means it is not attainable.

If you are searching for the primary keyword, which will be in the URL and the Title of the page, having a few million competitors is acceptable, but if the phrase is only partially in the URL/Title and will be largely down to the content then 1 - 2 million competitors is pushing it.

*note this is from my experience only and may differ with other phrases, also the Seo Book tools is an imperfect estimation so don’t base a whole business plan on what it says, but it’s perfectly suitable for blogging.

Looking down the SEO Book tools results, there is no point in Googleing the other top terms because they will almost definitely have far to many competitors.

Further down the results, is “inexpensive web hosting”, which receives approximately 9,000 searches per month. Googleing that phrase reveals 1.3 million competitors. Bingo, that is a good keyword phrase for Web Hosting. Web hosting is a somewhat saturated niche and so it is very difficult to find a fantastic keyword phrase to go for, but this is not the case in all niches.

Below: Google reveals 1.3 million results for “inexpensive web hosting”

How to Rank Highly for a Keyword

Once you have found a suitable collection of keyword phrases it’s time to optimise the site for them. This involves the use of that keyword in every different part of the site. The two most important parts which are given the most weight in Google is the URL, which hopefully matches or partially matches a keyword phrase and the Title of the page (both of which are “Blogging Fingers” for this site.

If your homepage URL does not match a phrase it is not the end of the world. This is especially true because with WordPress, you can custom set the permalinks. This sounds scary but it really is very simply and is very important for SEO.

Customising Permalinks
In the WordPress Dashboard, you go to options-permalinks and select “custom”. Then enter this:

/%category%/%postname%/

To save the changes select “update permalink structure”.

What that does is change the makeup of the URL for each individual post so that it’s category and postname are included. Hopefully the category includes the keyword phrase and the postname (title of the post) does too. If you already have blog posts published you can use this permalink migration plugin which creates 301 redirects so you don’t end up with a whole load of broken links.

Content
Other than having the keyword phrase in the URL and title tags the keywords should be used in the content. They are given more weight by Google at the beginning and ends of a post or if they are in bold or using an heading tag. One of the lessons I have learnt from blogging is that it is always best to write for the readers and only for the search engines if it fits. Find out why below…

Internal Linking Structure
The Anchor text (see below) of links to your own posts is also important and should be descriptive, ideally containing some keywords.

2. Off-site Optimisation

The other important factor in SEO is attaining inbound links. This is why it is so important to write for the reader, because they may have a blog of their own and so if they like what they read may link to you. If they see your content is badly written with keyword phrases awkwardly shoved in you are unlikely to get any link-lovin’.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the part of the text in a hyperlink that is visible to both humans and web-crawling bots. This is important for all links, those that are inbound to your site, the internal linking structure as well as outbound links, which should be relevant to the topic of your site. Google has been cracking down on attempts to ‘game the system’ or by sponsored links with a certain anchor text and so it is important to vary the anchor text slightly, so that it still contains the keywords but perhaps in a different order.

Penalisation

This should not be something to be worried about. All of the above points should be done in moderation i.e. no keyword stuffing in any part of on-site optimisation. The most important thing is to not fully rely on traffic from the search engines because you never know when they will change their algorithm. This backs up the fact that with blogging is is best to write for the reader, and not for Google because eventually the ranking algorithm will be so good, attempts to game the system will fail more frequently.

Extras

I use the all in one SEO Plugin, which allows each post to be optimised for the search engines.

This Seo Book will teach you the rest of the ever evolving subject of search engine optimisation.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Keywords, keyword phrase, SEO Book tools

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