ALL ABOUT BLOGGING
I've often spoken about the value of blogging. Whether you're an individual who wants to make a few extra bucks while providing a commentary on the things that interest you or a company who wants to instill their values and brand in their existing staff, blogging is one of the most influential "non‐media" platforms in use today. In the mid‐90s, most of us wondered who in their right mind would keep an "online journal", as it was known before its evolution. These frequently updated web logs (see, "web logs" became "weblogs", which in turn evolved into just "blogs") quickly became popular among online junkies who wanted their information fast and less biased by big media.
A blog is traditionally maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, and supporting material such as images or video. Entries are most typically found in reverse‐chronological order and support comments by readers in an interactive format. The word "blog" can also be used as a verb. Although blogging was the staple of '90s geeks with angst, it quickly grew into a powerful marketing tool, news platform, and communications medium. Further popularized by hosted blogging tools, usage spread quickly in the late nineties, with the initial online journaling platforms being replaced by content management systems and professional blogging tools. Blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in communicating news and providing a platform for outreach, marketing, and collaborative information. Not to mention, if you do it right, you can make some good money. Herein, we'll review what it takes to maintain a successful blog and review money‐making options related to blogging.
RELATED CONTENT
Before we start, let’s look at a very important idea – related content. Related content is all material that is related to the topic of your website. If you have a content site, then ‘related content’ for you could be images, definitions on the subject, interesting facts / news (to be used as side-notes or as ‘notes’ within articles), etc. For example, suppose that an article has the topic “learn guitar”. If you were asked to find 3 different things you can add to your site apart from articles on this niche, what would you add?
WHERE DO YOU FIND CONTENT?
Should you copy other people’s material? Absolutely not. You should respect copyright law, and in this case that means understanding what is fair use and what requires permission. For example, fair use is basically a principle under which you can, within reasonable limits, use snippets of content from other websites provided that you cite your sources. You have to denote that the selected content is from another site (one way of doing it is to put it inside double-quotes) and you absolutely must mention your sources. When we say reasonable limits it means that you should not copy an article sentence by sentence. If you are using a small portion of an article (say, a few lines), that’s fine. Use it, and cite it, and you’ll be fine. This applies to definitions, FAQs (short answers), and small tips. In effect, as long as you are mentioning your sources properly (and denoting the cited content), you can pretty much build your sites without much trouble.
PROMOTING YOUR SITE
There are two ways to get ranked with a search engine. The first is referred to as SEO (search engine optimization). This is by far the most competitive (and profitable) route. Google, for instance, places a great amount of emphasis on your website's links. The more links you have going out and coming into your website from other “like” websites, the more “relative” your site becomes. Consequently, the more relative your site is, the higher your page rank. There are numerous other ways to optimize your site for SEs. You can use a Freelance SEO Consultant to help you with this task as its a little tricky to say the least
The second method by which a website can get ranked with a search engine is using a pay-perclick (PPC) campaign. Above, you can see the PPCs on the right side of the google page. Instead of competing for page rank, these listings pay to get listed here. PPCs are beneficial, because the owner of the ad ONLY pays when someone clicks on their listing. So you're only paying for surfers to come to your site who's interests were sparked by your ad. Most PPCs allow you to write your ad and bid on different keywords of your choice. For example, if you are running a penis enlargement review site, you might choose keywords like “longer penis” or “penis extension”. You could then bid on the keywords, specifying that you'd be willing to pay $0.20 per click.
Copyright Sansara Smith