Wealth Alliance Blog Tools

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 31

A lot of online writers have an either/or mentality. In other words they get an idea and cannot decide whether to write a blog post (or article on a standard type website) on this idea or to submit an article to an online submission sites or article banks in order to drive traffic to that blog.

This confusion is built on the understanding that search engines will not pick up duplicate material. If Google, for example finds your article on ezinearticles, and then finds the same article on your blog, it will not create two separate hits for that article. This only makes sense because a person doing a Google search does not want to come across page after page of the same exact material.

So what should you do?

First, there only has to be about 20 to 30% difference between the two articles for search engines to pick them both up. This makes your job very easy and allows you to double your bang for your buck.

The same idea can become a blog post and be submitted to an article bank as long as they are both slightly different. Here are a few ways to make the two articles distinctly different:

1. Shuffle the order. If you?ve written a list article, just rearrange the bullet points in a different order.
2. Change the Title. This is an easy one. Just create a new title for the second article that still describes what it is about and contains the keywords you seek to attract.
3. Reword at least once sentence per paragraph. You don?t have to do a major rewrite, just use synonymous words to convey the same meaning.
4. Chop it up. If your blog article is long, consider cutting it in half to make two articles for the submission sites.
5. Create bullet points. Break whole paragraphs in one article into bullet points in the other article.
6. Search and change. Skim through the article and locate any words or phrases that can be changes slightly or reworded. Again you are looking for synonyms and similar phrases.
7. Create Subheadings. Where warranted, insert a subheading to designate when a new idea or topic is being introduced. Not only will the subheads alter the article, it is a great place to make use of your keywords to attract more search engine attention.

With just a little revision, you can recycle one idea into two articles. One of which can be used on you blog or website and the other to be submitted to an article bank to get a lot of exposure from other webmasters and newsletter publishers.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 29

Blogs are very useful for a writer - they showcase your writing skills to the world, and if you’re selling your work, you’ll find that they get commissions for you painlessly. A “hobby” blog may even get a publication offer for you.

You’re A Writer, But That Doesn’t Mean That Your Blog Needs To Be About Writing

I’ve noticed that writers tend to blog about writing, and while this is fine, it’s also very restrictive. You can choose whatever subject area you wish for your blog. I encourage you to choose an area about which you’re passionate, or in which you’re interested, or in any area in which you hope to be published.

For example, let’s say you’d like to become a travel writer. Travel writing is very difficult to break into. A blog provides an excellent showcase for your skills. Blog your own travels - even if they’re just day trips to tourist venues in your state. If you create this kind of blog, then you can point editors to whom you send article proposals to this blog - it will act as a sample portfolio of your travel writing skills.

Or perhaps you want to develop a copywriting career. This doesn’t mean that you need to create a copywriting blog. Blog about business, or finance, or technology - your copywriting skills are on display, and you’ll be read by people who can hire you.

You can create as many blogs as you wish, and I encourage you to do so. I’ve got lots of blogs, and so have many other writers who’ve found the blogging route to writing gigs. When you want to be published in an area, create a blog for the fast track to success.

You can set up a blog on a platform like Blogger, and the blog will keep generating writing gigs for you for years to come.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 28

I have been using this, The Blog Solution program, lately and it has really been paying off for me. My website has been getting more hits than it did when I put hours of work into it every day, and I am not doing anything but sitting back and collecting the money. If you are not familiar with how search engine optimization, or SEO, can make you money, let me explain. The most popular search engines don’t just look for lists of keywords anymore. You can not just list a bunch of related keywords and hope to rank on search engines.

To get good rankings on popular search engines, you need real content that is relevant to the keyword and has the keyword used throughout. So, as you might guess, getting good search rankings on a huge number of popular keywords can take a tremendous amount of work. Automatic blogging programs make it easy by posting content to your blog, or even creating new content. This allows your website or blog to constantly be growing and integrating new keywords. Having a lot of keyword related content and good search engine rankings can generate massive hits, and you can turn those hits into money by using ads. The ad service I use is Google Adsense, but there are others. You can also link to affiliates that pay you based on the amount of hits you general.

As you can see, there is a lot of money to be had and it doesn’t require a lot of time or energy. The best way to make the most money is to use the best program, and right now I feel The Blog Solution is the cutting edge. The program creates a huge number of blog entries for your websites and bases them on your chosen keywords. This, in and of itself, can generate an amazing number of hits, but the program goes even further by using “spiders” to interlink all of your content to generate even more hits. To help make your content not raise any flags to search engines, all of the parameters can be randomized, such as pings and post times. This way, you don’t leave any footprints that make it obvious to search engines that you are using an automated Blogger.

I am not very good at learning new programs quickly, and I don’t have a lot of time to learn all of the ins and outs of a complicated program. Lucky for me, The Blog Solution is easy to use and has a video tutorial system to speed up the learning process. The company that sells the software has 24/7 customer support to answer any questions. Did I mention that it is also easy to install and totally plug and play? Generating an income with ad venue and affiliate programs has never been faster or easier. There are other SEO programs out there that you should consider, but I have found that this one works the best for me.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 27

So you have set up your blog with great content and graphs. Now how do you get people to read your blog?

First, you want to post, post, post to your blog. Writing and posting to your blog is like blood circulating in your veins. The more new content is circulated through your blog, the stronger it will be.

But you can’t write:

Of course you can. Just set aside time in your day to write and start putting anything down that comes to mind. That way, you are getting the juices started and soon more ideas will come. Then the article will be done.

If you have no time to write or simply don’t like writing, you can hire a ghostwriter. They can be found at Elance.com or Craigslist.com among others.

Second, social bookmark your blog. So, what is social bookmarking? Simply, it is people online sharing their opinions, insights, experiences and etc with each other. This sharing can take many form such as chat forums, blogs, podcasts, and message boards. It is anything that brings people together so that they can interact with each other.

There are many social bookmarks to be a part of. I will briefly discuss four of the most popular sites:

1. Digg (http://www.digg.com) started off as community-based website emphasising technology and science articles. It has now become so popular and large that it includes almost anything.

2. Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is a close second to Digg in the backlink community. Del.icio.us main focus is to store your bookmarks online. This encourages cross-linking among those who share similar interests. resulting in the creation of backlinks . All posts to del.icio.us are publicly viewable by default, although specific bookmarks can be marked as private. Imported bookmarks are private by default.

3. Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) is the award winning authority of weblogs. The primary purpose of Technorati is monitoring your online visibility by monitoring linking, other sites mentioning you, your site’s progress and competitor’s progress.

4. Furl (http://www.furl.net/) allows members to bookmark, annotate and share web pages. Users may view lists of other members who have made comments or furled a website. Members can subscribe to a user’s archive to get email notifications when a new item is added.

Third, you can write a press release to drive traffic.

There are many press release companies. One of which is PRWeb. They were one of the first companies to allow almost anyone to write and distribute a press release online. Earlier before the advent of the internet, mostly large companies and corporations distributed press releases. However, PRWeb charges for their service. There are many press release companies that are free. One advantage of press releases is that they do not have to be very long. A couple of hundred words in several paragraphs is enough.

With a little creativity and practice, you’ll soon see your traffic growing. These three simple steps will allow you to attract and retain your readers as your blog develops.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 26

So, do you have a blog? Why not? You want people to come to your website, right? If you don’t have one, is it because you’re scared that your writing stinks on ice? Or, maybe you don’t think you have the know-how to set one up. But, and this is the best excuse, you think you don’t have the time. Guess what? You’re dead wrong.

If you expect to build a list, you need people’s eyeballs on your squeeze page, and blogs will do that for you. Search engines love them because they’re mainly text based. All you need to do to rank high in the search engines is to make a daily entry. Try to stick to a theme, and make sure that keyword surrounding your niche are in every single post, it won’t take long for your blog to be ranked. One of mine got a PR5 in less than six months, and a PR5 is great!

Of course, page rank depends on a lot of factors that we don’t want to get into here, but let’s say that on a scale of 0 - 10, a PR5 is pretty solid. The higher your page rank, the higher your site will show up in the search engines, and the more traffic your page will receive. Of course, the first three pages are the desired real estate, with the first page being the highest goal. The number one spot on that page gets the most traffic of all. And here’s the great thing: It’s all free!

With that being said, let’s discuss those issues stopping you from putting up a blog:

You can’t write:

Hogwash. Anyone can write, if they put their mind to it, and you can, too. If you need to study a bit first, there are lots of great home study courses out there. Buy one and study it. Then, take one hour a day and just sit in front of your computer screen, staring at a blank page, if you have to. Eventually, your mind will come around to writing, even if it’s only planning something for the first couple of days. Train your mind to sit and write at a certain time of day, every day, and you’ll see results.

Or, find content from other places on the web. Go to one of the free article directories, and find content that’s pertinent to your niche. Be sure to use the whole article, if you do this. Add a paragraph of introduction at the beginning and a paragraph after the author’s bio box at the end, and wrap the article in your own words. If you use other people’s words any other way, be sure to use less than 10% or you’re plagiarizing. If you want to use any more than that, ask the author. And always give credit where credit is due.

But if you’re still not convinced that you can write even a paragraph, hire a ghostwriter. You can find people at Elance.com or Craigslist.com who will do the writing for you. When you buy their work, be sure you’re buying “all rights,” which means you can use the work any way you wish. You can rewrite it. You can put your name in the byline. You can alter the article to suit your purposes. All rights even means you can sell it and keep all the money. If you can afford a ghostwriter, it will save time. You don’t have the know-how to set up a blog: More baloney. You can do it! If you have cPanel hosting, you have a program called “Fantastico” installed there. So, log into cPanel and find it. When you open it, you’ll see something like “WordPress 2.0″ and install or something similar. Then, you’ll be asked to fill in some information and voila! You have a blog. Customization will be a problem, if you don’t know some HTML, so you may want to hire somebody to help you with that.

If you need a tech person to do these things, try RentaCoder.com to find one. It should be fairly inexpensive.

You think you don’t have the time:

You don’t have the time NOT to run a blog. They’re great for many reasons. We’ve already discussed how search engines love them. When you put a link to your main site on your blog, you’re getting a one-way link, if you don’t make the mistake of linking back to your blog from your website. One-way links are search engine optimization (SEO) gold. Each link back to your site counts as a vote. The more votes you have from other sites, especially if you didn’t vote for theirs in return, increase your page rank and your standing. But the best thing a blog will do is send traffic to your squeeze page Sign up for some Web 2.0 sites, like Technorati.com, StumbleUpon, and Digg, too. you’ll get a ton of traffic via your blog this way, too.

Remember, people have to find your squeeze page to make use of it. You need to take action to see that your site gets noticed, and blogs are a great way to do that. Get your blog rolling and you’ll see increased traffic, as soon as overnight.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 25

Blogging is fast becoming a popular pastime among thousands of would-be writers all around the globe. Some of these blogs tend to generate a lot of traffic, which means they can become money making AdSense blogs if their writers so choose.

Learning how to make an AdSense blog is a fairly easy process, too. All that?s necessary is a good blog with a focused subject matter and traffic. To get started with an AdSense blog a few things will need to be done:

?Pick a topic or focus for the blog. Some incredibly popular AdSense blog entries actually serve as collection sites for lots of interesting information on the web. Others, choose pretty narrow topics that their writers know well and they stick with them. Whatever the case, an AdSense blog needs a focus before it can be created.

?Choose an AdSense blog program. There are many free blogging programs out there that are designed to offer their users easy access to becoming AdSense blog entries. This means AdSense works with the blogs by putting ads directly on them with little or no work from the blog owners.

?Content. Before an AdSense blog can take off, it needs to have content. This means writing blog entries on a fairly regular basis. If the topic is one that?s near and dear to the writer?s heart, it?s fairly easy to keep an AdSense blog updated on a daily basis or close to it. Entries don?t have to be long, but they have to be interesting.

?Traffic. Getting traffic to an AdSense blog can take some time, but it can happen. There are some blogs out there that get thousands and thousands of visitors each day. They do this by joining news services, advertising, using keywords and tags and so on. If the content is solid and engaging, an AdSense blog will build up its daily viewers fairly easily over time.

?Patience. This goes along with the traffic for an AdSense blog. It takes time and patience to build up a blog and its visitors. If these two things are employed, a blog will generally see a steady growth of visitors and will even become a daily stop for some.

?Images. It?s hard to believe, but many AdSense blog sites generate their traffic by including images with the posts. Some blogs might have trouble getting listed with search engine news services, but their images show up, driving traffic to the sites.

One of the biggest keys to making money using an AdSense blog is to create a topic that?s interesting and fun. If the writers behind the site enjoy writing about the stated topic, the traffic generally will come. Make the content interest and useful, and an AdSense blog can pay off very well.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 24

Every marketer wishes their online business to become the best out there. There are a lot of tactics marketers can use these days to sell their product. But the best marketer is the one that doesn?t even have to talk to their costumers ?face-to-face?, in other words the best marketer is the one who pre-sells all his products. Blogging is a good tactic to pre-sell your products, and it is a real business-growing opportunity

Blogs are really simple to create and even easier to maintain. So from the start this is a real advantage. The key to being successful, at blogging, is quantity and quality. You will need somewhat equal amount of both these things. In order to create your ?home base?, your starting point, begin by writing several blogs on a topic that somehow relates to your main website. It doesn?t really matter what?s the product you?re selling if your goal is to get traffic.

Now you will have to create your links in such a way as to make your visitors go from one blog to the other. The blog?s goal is to generate pre sold traffic to your main site and sales. So make sure that the link to your site sticks out and makes people want to come and visit you website.

Let?s say I own a membership site, people have to pay for to get into, and I want to get more people to join. Well for one I will need a very content rich website and I would also need a few subscribers every month for several months at which point a viral campaign can be started.

To achieve this I believe the best way is to use the strategy and build several blogs. Keep in mind that the topics of the blogs have to remain similar but with a twist in each of them. The visitors must be able to travel from one blog to the other and absorb unique information from each one of them. Also the key for this strategy would be to have a link to the main site always on display as if saying to your visitor ?click me and join this website?there are tons of more information about the things you read in the 3 or 4 blogs you have seen this link on?.

There is a lot of hard work to blogging. If you don?t outsource some of the writing, and if you don?t have a plan from the beginning you will get discouraged. You might try to write as many blogs posts as possible for each of your blogs before you even start one.

If you attend to your blogs and post every day pretty soon you will get many loyal readers that would more than happily join your membership site, buy whatever you are selling, in other words you will soon enough gain their trust and you will be able to make them do what you need them to.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 23

One of the main benefits of creating a blog is that you can use it to drive traffic to your home business web site or your offline home business. And the key to doing this is to make sure that your target audience can find your blog as easily as possible.

This means you need to do whatever you can to get your blog ranked as high in the search engines as possible, and make sure that the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN know when you have updated your blog so they can visit it and “index” your latest blog post–ensuring it appears in their search results.

Since Google is the largest and most powerful search engine for generating traffic to your home business blog, you will probably want to focus a great deal of your attention here.

Fortunately, there is one particular strategy you can use to make sure Google knows exactly when you have added new content, so that it can visit your home business blog and index your latest post… which enables people searching the internet to find your blog.

Only when Google has visited and indexed your new blog content will that content show up in Google’s search engine. Any by telling Google to come and visit your blog, you will get your latest content into the search engine much faster– potentially by weeks or even months–than if you wait for them to find it.

We’ll use our home business site (http://homebusinessnow.blogspot.com) to illustrate the step-by-step process you need to follow to use this strategy effectively.

Your first step is to submit your blog to Google. Your home business blot must be submitted to a search engine to speed up the process of getting listed in Google’s search results. To do this, go to Goolge and when the URL shows up, add the following without the quotes to Google’s address “addurl”. Hit “enter” and on the next page enter the URL of your blog and a brief description and submit and you are done!

Now wait a few days (you can add more than one URL if you have several blogs running) to check if your blog has been visited by Google. To verify if your home business blog has been added go to Google’s search engine just type Google (dot) com into your browser window. When that page opens enter “cache: followed by the URL of your blog site. If your blog has been visited by Google, you will see the date of the visit at the top of your blog page plus a “cached” (saved) version of the page on that particular date.

You can double-check your listing status in Google by searching for a unique string of words in one your blog posts as if you were an internet surfer looking for information. As an example, enter the following words with the quotes, “make money with a home business” and you’ll see our main site come up. At the time of this writing, our site was ranked #2.

Your blog will appear in the search results if Google has visited and indexed it.

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 22

You know you want to start a blog, but how does this whole blogging thing work? It’s not nearly as difficult as you might imagine. Here are 7 quick and easy tips to get you started.

1. Even if you don’t have your own domain and hosting account you can get a free WordPress blog at the WordPress site. See ‘References’ at the end of the article to access the WordPress site. It won’t be quite as professional as a WordPress blog hosted on your own site, but the point is – just do it. Don’t worry about hosting – it isn’t critical. When you arrive at the WordPress site just click on the big blue button that says, ‘Start Your WordPress Blog”.

2. Create a user name. This will become part of the name of your blog so put some real thought into this name. Make it relevant to the subject of your blog. Fill in your e- mail address (a primary address where you will receive your login instructions, password and other important information). Agree to the legal stuff and…

3. Click on ‘Gimme A Blog!’ Wordpress will do everything that is necessary to create your blog for you. You don’t have to do a thing except continue to the next page.

4. On the next page you will see your domain name. It will consist of yourblogname.wordpress.com. Take a few minutes to admire it! This might be your very first domain and your first home on the Web.

5. Now you must think about the title of your blog. This is as important as the name because it will appear in the header on every page of your blog. The search engines will know it’s the name and will decide on your ranking depending on how relevant the title is to your content. Choose well.

6. Sit back, have a cup of coffee, and wait for your activation e-mail. You will receive detailed instructions from the folks at WP on what to do next.

7. Start Blogging!

Answer these questions and you’ll be on your way to getting your own WordPress blog:

1. Do you have a domain? If not, what’s holding you back from getting a WordPress hosted blog?
2. What have you chosen as the name for your blog?
3. What title have you chosen for your WordPress blog?
4. Do you have a plan for implementing your first WordPress blog today?

References: WordPress Site - http://www.wordpress.com

posted by W A Blog Tools on Dec 21

Blog or Website? There are many arguments over which are better blogs or websites? This articles look at what both are an their individual advantages and disadvantages.

A Blog functions like an online diary. It can be updated as often as the creator likes by simply adding a new post. One of the main advantages is that most blogs are free. The potential domain name can be limited in that is normally must in the URL address the blog provider. For example blogger includes .blogspot.com on the end of any other domain name you choose for the blog. This can result in some very long domain names. The other advantage of a blog is the way in which it generates traffic. Because they can and often are updated on a regular basis, search engines spiders ‘know’ they are a good place to find constantly fresh content - something spiders hunger for. They also can ‘ping’ the net but I’ll leave that for another article. Also at the moment blogs are very much the ‘in thing’ spoken about much online and also in mainstream media.

Blogs now have numerous templates available and there are millions of varieties on the internet. MyBlogLog is a great place to see the many blogs that are out there if your looking for design ideas. One of the disadvantages of blogs it that they are a single page, therefore are not always the best place to display information. It can also be difficult to display advertising in the way you would like as you are limited by the templates. If you put it in the main posting area it can going over the boundaries - particularly banners and if you are adding new posts on a regular basis the ad will eventually be lost to the archives. This brings us to another problem with blogs, if you regularly add new posts which you need to do to take advantage of the constantly fresh content option you will keep losing material to the archives. This can be found by opening up the archives but experience shows not many visitors will actually do this.

Websites on the other hand have the ability to display many pages and are a much better format to display information. Particularly long term displays. Displaying advertising, banners, special features and links are easy to achieve with good effect. However as the website is not constantly updated you don’t get the ‘fresh content’ bonus of the blog. Websites are also better for presenting a serious business image and creating business. (Thats not to say blogs don’t earn money, they can, but a website is a better option).

How do you can the best of both worlds? The traffic generation of a blog and the business of a website? Link the two. A lot of internet businesses now have a main website and have a blog with links to the website. The blog is the place they can constantly update material and information and the website is the place they conduct the majority of their business.