1. Prepare Your Site/Landing Page

Obviously the number one reason behind guest posting is to ultimately get traffic to your site. Be it your blog, landing page, or whatever you are linking back to, it should be optimized to capture your new audience. What is the point of sending new visitors to your site, if there is nothing of value there? If they do not return or opt-in to your product, then your guest post was a complete waste.

If you are linking back to a blog, then make sure to have a couple of your best articles already displayed and a couple more ready to be posted in the next couple of days or whatever your normal posting scheme is. If you are linking back to a sales page, then make sure it is live with a visible call to action in place. Consider creating a special or sale if you are promoting a paid product or service.

2. Choose A Target Site And Research It

Commonly, people will create an article and then find a site to post it on; however, that does not always work out as well. Your particular article may not be best optimized for that particular site, or it just may not be related to topics the site covers. Instead I recommend that you research the site you plan to guest post on before and see what type of articles created the most interaction and/or is most popular.

3. Create The Guest Post

Once you have done your research, you should get a good idea of what type of article will work and how to format it. Keep in mind that any guest post is still linked to the reputation of the site you are posting on. So, if the site manager does not think it adds value to his or her site, then they will not post it.

I want to emphasize the “add value” part. For a truly effective guest post, your article should not promote any of your products or sites. If you are just trying to relate an idea to your product, then most readers will probably ignore the post in general. Just make sure your article adds some type of value, and the rewards will be greater.

Especially if you are posting on a site with a high page rank, make your article search engine friendly. Find keywords and go after them. Most people usually think about guest posting as getting instant traffic from the regular readers, but what about the search traffic? You are given a great platform, so you might as well use it.

4. Review Your Guest Post

The grammar and spelling part is obvious, but make sure the fundamentals of your post are intact. Are you adding value? Are the pages you are linking to optimized for new visitors? Does your article best represent your brand, and does it have the best intentions for both you and the site you are posting on?

5. Submit Your Guest Post

The key is to contact the site after your article is ready to be published. For one, it will expedite the whole process, but it will also be less work for the site manager. Why contact them saying you have an idea, when you could already have an article in place?

Your email should be personal and give a brief summary of your article, why you think it would be beneficial, and if there are any changes they think should be made. There is no need for a huge article summary because they can just read your attached post.

If your article gets denied, then there is not much you can do. Ask the site manager why they do not like it, and if you guys still cannot come to a solution, then find another site and tweak your post to fit it. Ultimately, the final decision is up to the site, and if they say no, they say no. Although you guys may not be direct competition, sometimes things just do not work out. How many times do you see Radio Shack selling their products in Best Buy?

6. Promote And Moderate Your Guest Post

If you are fortunate enough to get your site published, the work is not over yet. All your efforts should go into promoting that article and taking part in any comments that may be posted.

Post the article on social networks and link back to it from your site and any other site you can. Every link benefits the search rank of that article. The more traffic you get to that site the better. It will also help your chances with the site owner if you ever want to post again.

Remember, guest posting is an extension of your brand and also the site your are posting on. For a highly effective guest post, remember to do your due diligence.

Are they any other steps that can boost the effectiveness of your guest post?

In other words, if you write a testimonial for a product you have never used, you might get busted. This part is the one that makes sense. The controversial one is the “failure to disclose any conflict of interest” one. This could involve bloggers who earned a freebie from a company and ended up writing about it (without disclosing the freebie), for example. Furthermore, it could also mean that you can’t use any affiliate links inside your blog or website without disclosing that you stand to earn money if someone clicks on them.

I believe that trying to enforce strict guidelines and clean the web from spammers and scammers is a good thing. However, I am not sure if this proposed approach is the right one. It kind reminds me of the RIIA, and how they were trying to stop illegal music downloads by suing the heck out of a women who had shared a couple of songs via P2P….

Aaron Wall wrote a really good post about this topic, titled FTC Going After Bloggers = Epic Fail. Here is a quote from it:

What is absurd (to me at least) is how inefficient this process is. What needs to happen is better enforcement on ad networks, search engines, and merchants. Follow the money downstream rather than hunting for nickels upstream.

The people who are making fake sites are doing so because they are paid to. And amoral ad networks that syndicate ads based on *maximizing yield efficiency* (like Google AdWords) are designed to syndicate fraud because it is easy for advertisers to pay a lot for ads when their profit margins are nearly 100% because they scam people.

I completely agree with him. Going after individual bloggers will not solve the problem. It will just make the money shift hands, but the system will remain intact. Either way it is important to keep an eye on the development of this issue, because it might affect all of us.

I’ve been blogging for around 4 years now and despite all the changes we see in technology and software, the ‘rules’ to a successful blog tend to have remained the same. Yet, while the rules haven’t changed much, a lot of our traffic generation methods have. Gone are the days where 50 votes would guarantee a Digg homepage or you could place some technorati tags in your post and get thousands of visitors.

Each niche is getting more competitive by the day but it still doesn’t mean you can’t stand out from the crowd. One of my favourite new sites for creating relationships (hugely important) and getting website traffic has actually turned out to be Twitter. For the last few months, the micro-blogging has been in my top 5 referring sites, sending thousands of visitors monthly.

In this post I want to look at six common rules which can help with your blogging and also benefit the Twitter users of you out there who want to drive more traffic back to your site. Please note that I use the term ‘rules’ loosely, everyone has their own way of doing things and there will always be exceptions but you’ll probably find that these work well for you.

1. Provide Value

Let me ask you all a quick question: Why do you read Daily Blog Tips? I can safely assume you’re a blogger, but what is different to the hundreds of other blogging blogs out there? While answers to this may differ, the underlying factor is that the site provides value to you in one way or another and you don’t want to miss it. That is the single most important reason anyone subscribes to a blog.

They get value, whether that value is in the form of humour or in the form of how to make money, that’s what people want. Instead of getting into blogging to think of how you can benefit (mindshare, income etc) look at how you can benefit your readers. How can you make someone laugh, how can you make someone more money or in the case of this site: how can you help somebody become a better blogger?

If you offer constant value to your readers, you’ll give them an important reason to stick around.

Twitter Tip: Instead of just linking to your website all the time, why not help people out. Ask people who you can help them or even just inspire people with some motivational quotes.

2. Don’t Flood Readers with Posts

I’ve ran a number of blogs, from ones that focus on internet marketing, one that covers self improvement and for a while I even ran a celebrity blog (which I quickly sold). What I’ve learned from this is that certain types of blogs have a different level of posting frequency. If I only wrote once per week on a celebrity gossip blog then readers of the site are going to miss out on all the news.

However, if I run a site about personal development and write a 3,000 word post everyday, that’s going to be far too much for people to digest, and I’ll probably end up repeating much of what I’ve already said. Unless you run a news blog that needs to be updated multiple times per day, try to find a nice posting schedule that you can keep to. I tend to post around 3-4 times per week on my main sites.

Twitter Tip: Overactive users tend to get unfollowed. This has been minimised by tools like Tweetdeck, but if you are tweeting 10 x per minute (some people really do this) then you are going to clog up the twitter ’stream’ and people will stop wanting your updates.

3. Take Part in the Conversation

This point is relatively obvious so I’ll get straight to the point. Blogging is not just about you and it’s actually not even just about your readers. It also includes the conversation that goes on between your blog and others in the same industry. Read the blogs of others and leave comments to let them know what you think of their sites.

Link out to others and you’ll find that people will start linking out to you; you can even go as far as connecting with other blog authors on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and stay connected that way. Do not think that your industry is confined to your blog; there’s a whole world out there.

Twitter Tip: Get to know the people that follow you and follow the leaders in your industry. I’ve made many friends this way that has led to Re-Tweets and even backlinks from their websites.

4. Make Your Blog unique

There are a lot of things you can do to make your blog stand out:

• Have a unique design
• Write long, detailed posts in a niche that writers short informative ones (or vica verca)
• Implement an idea nobody else uses like the bloggers face-off or a list of top blogs
• Bring in authority figures for interviews
• Offer content in different formats such as audio and video
• Give away a free eBook for more in-depth topics like this one I did on how to make friends

Despite new blogs being created every single day, it doesn’t mean you can’t stand out from the crowd. Make sure you offer pure value consistently with a splashing of the above and you can’t go far wrong.

Twitter Tip: Make your profile stand out by adding an image and a creatively designed profile. It looks far better than a generic offering and shows you really care about getting involved.

5. Make it Easy for Readers to Connect

Quickly think of some of your favourite blogs that you read regularly. DailyBlogTips? TechCruch? ProBlogger? Something that I find in common with people and their favourite blogs is that they know a lot about the author, and feel like they ‘know’ them a bit. For example I just know that the author of this site is Daniel and he lives in Brazil. I just know that the author of ProBlogger is Darren Rowse and he lives in Australia with his wife, V.

Do you make it easy for your readers to get to know you and connect? Some easy ways to do this include having an informative about page, using your name on posts and blog comments and even sharing your personal stories at times in your blog posts.

Twitter Tip: A good way to tell people about you on Twitter is to fill in your bio, but you can also include a link and use this as a specific ‘twitter landing page’ that quickly tells people about you and your website. This is usually far better than just sending them to your homepage.

6. Make Content Easy to Read

There is nothing worse in my opinion than content that is just split into huge chunks of text with no line breaks. Even a post like this which is well over 1,000 words, is easily scannable due to the ‘list’ format and the bold headings.

Some tips on making your content easy to read include:

• Spell-checking your posts before you publish them
• Use bullet points where necessary
• Create sub-headings for longer, in-depth posts
• If you are doing a list post, separate the points with bold headings for people who scan / skim
• Include paragraph breaks after every 3 or 4 sentences
• Read the post yourself to see that it all flows properly

Twitter Tip: Although nobody expects you to write perfectly with 140 characters. Try to make sense and don’t shorten every single word, use multiple tweets or direct messages where possible.

Q. How To Remove Or Hide the Navbar From the Blogger Header?

Answer is not difficult at all. i would tell you the steps. Its as easy as eating a sandwich. So here we go…

1. Log in to blogger
2. On your Dashboard, select Layout. This will take you to the Template tab. Click Edit HTML. Under the Edit Template section you will see you blog’s HTML.
3. Paste the Following CSS definition in the top of the template code:

          #navbar-iframe {   display: none !important;}

    4. Make Sure the upper code is just under this …

Example:

Updated by: Blogger Team
———————————————– */

#navbar-iframe {   display: none !important;}

       5. Save The Layout, & Thats It!

1. Know your viewers – Whatever way you write it would be considered as a way of communication. So before you actually communicate with anybody effective, you must know about them. Take some time to identify would be reading your piece. Whether they are men or women, employed or unemployed, young ones or eagerly? So do they carry any special requirements? What would make them read your copy and stay hooked to you? It is simple, the more used to you could go with your readers, the more successful your writing tend to be.

2. This is important; think mentally or may be on paper; just take some time to let your creativity flow. Consider what is that you are writing and for whom are you writing. Next you need to put down some good notes about what you desire to say via your copy. Know that for longer written pieces like e-books; make a beginning outline that you could develop on later.

3. Inspiration Matters – When you are stuck at time or don’t know how to proceed further then look for something that inspires you. There are lot of resource to this, may be you can achieve it in way of walk through an environmental trail, a recent magazine you read, ad flyer or any letter you might have got. Inspiration could come from lot number of sources!

4. Draft – So you are set to write, to start with just write down what ever you feel like. Do not worry about the creative flow or spelling and grammar mistakes. Simply keep your brain alert on the readers and the reason they would be interested in what you write. This draft could be modified at later stage of conclusion.

5. Research is a must – If in case you are stuck because of the no information or require gathering some facts so as to make your point clear, all you need to do is research. Believe me, this could be just the ideal part to get your writing to the point it desires to be and also to assist you fill in any covering that needs.

6. Revision – This you may know, anybody even the school going kid would do a revision of his learning before he step on to the examination hall. In web world, it is necessary to refine your own work, making your sentences briefer, to make the point more obvious.

7. Share – Once you are done with the revision part, share it with any of the neutral party may be your friend or family members. This could be really helpful and will also serve many purposes like ensuring your explanations are obvious, significant missing basics, and making sure your message is being conventional.

8. Revise – This is a main part of your writing. Add in the changes you have made in the draft and make any wanted revisions.

9. Take a help – When you are satisfied with the written copy, send it to any of the professional proofreader. This is because most of the writers get tired before it is done. So some times it becomes obvious that they overlook mistakes and skipped any the word that needs to be typed. The final touch by skilled proofreader is necessary.

10. Ready to go – As you are all now done! It is time to send your copy of writing to the intended readers. So do it will full confidence that would reap you the desired fruit! Happy Writing!

{Source : Minterest.com – Writer : Nikita Porwal }

1. Selling Advertisement: This is probably the most widespread ways of influencing a blog to make money online. If yours blog happens to be a famous one, or one that is well established in an exacting field, it’s forever probable to sell ad space by own. For less renowned blogs, services link as Google’s AdSense enable bloggers to set up amazing ad programs. AdSense is a program that allows you choose lot of relevant ads to your blog and pays on number of click you gets on those ads.

2. Affiliate Marketing: This is one more way of click-through benefits. Affiliate Marketing otherwise known as affiliate program allow the blog to appear as a means of expression among readers and the online blog that provides different goods and services. One of the widely accepted ways is Amazon. For example, you provide book reviews or also just talk about a book in your blog; an affiliate program could offer a link to your reader that navigates directly to your blog to Amazon to get further details about the book. If they make purchase then you are sure to make some commission.

3. Ask for Contributions: Not each blog-associated revenue chance carries hawking goods or services. Solicit contributions. If, in case, your great business blog supports a reason or subject in some fashion style – for instance you frequently talk about tax change, health care insurance or few other topics – you could usually ask for reader help or support. Yet if you’ve involved in a group of usual followers that merely take pleasure in reading what you speak about, then they might be eager to guarantee their reliability with a little monetary help. PayPal is one such program that makes it simple to set up a simple on-site contribution collection.

4. Market the Offered Services via Blog: Most of the blogger link blogs completely with the cyberspace-based soapbox – it is a place to brag your opinions or little more on that side. Approved, blogs are a perfect place to share your opinions with others, but on the other hand does not even ignore their capability to make fresh trade as well. When suitable, work in orientations your blog does and, in order, what you might be capable to provide any potential client or customer that might be visitor of your blog. This could spread your thoughts and your trade moxie simultaneously. “Don’t go with the same boring short commentaries, which start a chat with viewers, as several blogger do, instead write the equal of magazine articles that show your capabilities, plans and viewpoints on particular issues,” Barnett says. “When it resonates, it means money. Since starting this approach, I have generated three new paying clients and brought in about $10,000 on revenue – directly attributable to specific blogs.”

5. Use Existing Blog: You can use a blog to usually converse with existing clients and also with other readers; you could take benefit of the occasion to totally inform them about all your business blog does. This might further expand your viewer and readers’ knowledge of the complete scope of the products or services of your blog.” My blog has helped existing clients determine the range of my skills and services,” says Ted Demopoulos of Demopoulos Associates, a Durham, N.H. consulting and training concern. “One client who had only used me for training in the past was surprised at my range of expertise and is now using me for a consulting project. Another who only used me on technical projects is now considering me for a more business-oriented project.”

Blog Should Be Search Engine Friendly

Make your blog a search engine friendly one, as search engines like Google and Yahoo are probable to deliver at least 40% of your website traffic. You can make use of blog-software such as WordPress or Expression engine to get search engine friendly standards. Even working with such software is pretty much fun and simple.

RSS Feeds Are Must

RSS feeds are must to any blog be it fresh or old and yes they are the easiest way to build repeat traffic. With RSS feeds user would be reminded on a regular basis about your existence of site. As once people subscribe to your blog they would keep receiving messages from blog. Each of your blog entry you do is a great chance to get those readers back to your blog, so it becomes very important to maintain your RSS feeds in a top-notch level.

Directory Submission Is Required

Whatever you may feel about directory submission, they can yet be valuable. You may not get tons of traffic but can act good for backlinks, the received links would certainly make you rank in popular search engine such as Google, yahoo and MSN. You can submit your site to popular directory such as DMOZ and Yahoo, may be you have lesser chance to get listed but they are very effective. Getting listed in directory would surely bring traffic to your blog.

Make Use Of Social Networks

There are plenty of Social Networking and Bookmarking Websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Faves, Diggo, Furl, My Web, Fark and Simpy. All that you need to do is to write an interesting article, submit it to the social media sites and ask some of your surrounded people to vote for your stuff. If your article remains at the front pages it would no doubt bring you tons of traffic. If not, try writing a better article and submit it again.

Keep Replying To Other Blogs In Your Niche

There could be thousands of other blog about your related topic, which could be hunted through Technorati. Make replies to their post and let them know your blog exist. Here you need to write a little big and meaningful comment, so that at least some of the reader clicks on your link. If not now, the author might add you in near future if your postings are really good.

E-Mail Subscriptions

Blogs and RSS are comparatively new terms and the huge masses of internet users are yet not entirely well-known to them. So to capitalize on your readership, you require giving people a chance to subscribe to your articles and contents using a technology they’re actually well-known with and that technology is e-mail. Still when feed readers and other aggregators are universal for tech knowledge webmasters and blog authors, 3/4 of readers are commonly subscribed via e-mail and not via RSS feeds.

Article Submission

Submitting your blog related content to article directories is a thing you have to try at least once in a week. Each time your article gets selected by any webmaster is a fresh chance to arrive at potentially thousands of brand new readers. Additionally, every time one of your content gets published on the article submission sites, it means you have a link back to your site, which in turn increase search engine ranking. Few of the well known article submission sites are GoArticles, ArticleCity and EzineArticles.

Follow these steps to ensure you are targeting the right keywords for your blog.

List Your Blog’s Appropriate Keywords

First off, you need to decide what keywords do fit. This can be a nice master list to consult when you’re writing a blog post. Do a little keyword research, either through a keyword research program or Web sites.

I like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which includes the ability to scan your blog and suggest keywords. You can also see which terms on your site have the most Adwords competition and search volume.

Examine Current Inappropriate Keywords

You should look at your site’s statistics to examine the keyword phrases people are using to get there.

If you see phrases that have nothing to do with your site’s topics, figure out which article is pulling people and revise the title and the targeted keyword phrase. If you find keywords that are a good fit, look for alternative keyword phrases or similar subjects that fit for future posts.

If you see a particular keyword phrase is driving a lot of traffic to your site or a particular post, edit that post to include more internal links. If this is a popular landing page, you want to give people a reason to stay.

Look for Indirect Keyword Phrases

This can be a little trickier, but it isn’t always bad to get traffic from a keyword phrase that isn’t the precise topic you cover. You may want to leave it alone if it’s working.

What you should consider first is whether the people seeking that information would also be interested in your information. If you run a blog that appeals to teens but is about MTV, you could be introducing readers to your blog even if they found you while searching for information on MySpace.

Why Keywords are Important

You want your blog read by people who are interested. You want people who will visit again, and who will comment and link to it. You might get a quick hit out of a popular phrase that isn’t related, but those won’t be quality visits.

In general terms, social bookmarking is a practice of saving bookmarks on the sites that provide this facility, and “tagging” them with relevant keywords. A simple bookmark allows you to store the address of Web Sites you desire to visit in future on your computer. Bookmarking sites in fact carries a very high value with search engines. Hence, when your Web Site’s link keeps popping up on the usual social networks in everyone’s list, it is just like a nod from a higher Page Rank domain that your website is relevant.

So, how is social bookmarking done? It is simple, to make a set of social bookmarks, you require registering with any social bookmarking sites. It will permit you to save and store your desired bookmarks, add up preferred tags, and allocate individual bookmarks as public or private. Surfer to these sites could search for sources by keyword, or as well by popularity and view the whole community bookmarks, tags and other categorized schemes, which is been registered and saved by other users.

For unlimited linkbacks and traffic

Social bookmarking opens the doors to new ways of classifying information and identification. As it has been around for quite some time and was initially designed to assist the users categorize and save their preferred web site link online, Search engine optimizers’ experts soon found the potential for utilizing this to get their sites more linkbacks and traffic, in turn high page rank. It is also experienced that if you do not submit your web site to social bookmarking sites, your sales and traffic goes for a toss.

Search engines rank sites based on the robotic crawlers or by spiders, whereas social bookmarking sites are hand-made by the people. Each link submission it done by individual, not by any computer-generated algorithm, so it holds even more value for customer. In fact bookmarking becomes vital the moment you register your web sites for others to access. Because, when you bookmark and share them, the results grow as the group of people sees your sites on list after list.

Further your web site link gets bookmarked by other people and you get unlimited linkbacks and traffic also increase. The purpose is simple; this interlinking is done to create more traffic to your content, your domains and to your affiliate links. The best ways is you can have a system in place before you start up with social bookmarking so when some body falls into your channel of links, either directly through your bookmark list or some body else’s, you are just ready to convert them into a lifetime customer to your business.

1. Outline before you start writing – a few points will do

Jot down a few points before you start writing.

Many articles follow this simple format: an introduction, a few points (around four, in an article of 500 words), and a conclusion.

Writing a short outline before you begin the article will help you to stick to the point.

Every article you write should include a “takeaway” for your readers: at least one nugget of information that’s not available elsewhere.

2. Know your audience – who’s reading your blog? Why?

Before you begin writing, think about your reader. Who’s your typical blog reader?

For example, if you’re writing a blog about digital photography, ask yourself whether your current article is aimed at beginning photographers, or at experts. If your typical reader is a beginner, you’ll need to add explanatory material (or links) to your article.

Knowing who your typical reader is will help you to write content that’s appropriate for your blog. Staying with our digital photography example, you could write several series of articles for beginners; these articles would become “evergreen” content on your blog; they’ll always be popular.

3. Create an inviting title: make it a “must read”

When you’re creating article titles, there are two audiences you need to remember. The first audience is your readers. Make your titles intriguing, so that when a reader sees the article in his newsfeed, he’ll read it.

Your articles’ second audience is the search engines. Use keywords in your article title so that they can be found.

4. Use short sentences and short paragraphs – make your articles easy to read

On the Web, you don’t read. You scan. So make your articles scannable: use short sentences, short paragraphs and lists. The easier your articles are to read, the more readers you’ll get.

5. Add links to your articles

Links are important for every article you write. If you’re creating a blog on WordPress, there are several “Related articles” plug-ins you can use on the blog, but especially for longer articles, you’ll want to add your own links too.

So there you have it: five tips which will help you to write a steady stream of informative and entertaining articles for your blog.