1. Blogs are all about content. Search engines love content. They don’t love Flash, and they’re still struggling with photos and video, but they absolutely get content.

2. Blogs have text-based navigation. Search engines have an easier time with text based (vs. image based) navigation because it’s more transparent. Search engines for a while now have told us that they want sites to serve up the same information/experience to a search engine bot as to a person.

3. Blogs offer lots of links. If search engines feast on words, they travel on links. Blogs are often a good place to find new content on the Web.

4. People are more likely to link to business blogs than business Web sites. At least, this has been my experience, and anecdotally what I’ve seen out there. I believe this is because of the interactive nature of blogs, and they’re traditionally more about communication than selling. And since getting incoming links is half the battle of search engine optimization, this is a key point.

5. Blogs make it easier to create more pages. Search engines don’t rank Web sites, they rank Web pages. In other words, every Web page is an opportunity to rank well at the search engines. Every time you put up a new post, you have another opportunity to be found at Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine. You don’t need to worry about how this is going to fit in your current Web site navigation, you can just assign it to one or more categories and be done with it.

6. Blogs put you in control. This doesn’t directly affect your search engine optimization, but with a blog you can publish when you feel like it. You don’t have to worry about how much your Web developer’s going to charge you for an update, or when he’s going to get to it. That makes it easier for you to target new keywords and go after the long tail of search that can bring ready-to-buy, qualified leads to your site.

If you are interested in better rankings but don’t yet have a blog, the good news is there’s a great opportunity for you to increase your search engine visibility.

Comments

While it may seem impressive to earn $1,000, $5,000 or even $35,000 a month from your blogging efforts, I feel that the raw number can be a crude way of judging the ???success??? of your blog and will not be as meaningful as using other metrics.

A more significant statistic is to determine your average revenue per unit (ARPU) or income earned per visitor.

For example, if you have 100,000 visitors and your blog earnings are $5,000 and you compare it against a smaller blog with 35,000 visitors and earnings of $4,000. Which is better?

Let???s skip the superficials $5,000 versus $4,000 for the moment and look at ARPU. For the large blog, ARPU is $5,000 divided by 100,000 or 5 cents per visitor, while the smaller blog???s ARPU is 11.4 cents.

The smaller blog is twice as effective at generating income as the large blog and though it trails the large blog in terms of total readership, I???ll go one step further to say that assuming you???re not a casual or hobby blogger and you???re blogging as a business, the end goal should be income generation, rather than the ???generating eyeballs/impressions??? game that was prevalent in year 2000 with dotcom mania.

If anything, sustainable blogs are going back-to-basics, focusing on a solid business foundation and continuous growth - all supported by a sensible business model and sustainable income generation.

If the pieces are in place, you have the makings of a profitable blog business.

Comments

I started a blog on search engines in 2002.

In those days, the idea of blogging about anything other than politics, or blogging, or what your cat had for breakfast, was new. In fact, the idea of blogs was new. Most people’s reaction to the word blog was “huh”?

I quickly built up an audience, and links, mostly because I had first mover advantage, and I threw in a few social media basics. It certainly wasn’t rocket science. But, at the time, I was doing something unique and “remarkable”, in the Seth Godin sense of the word.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is very different.

There are thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of blogs on search, and most of those go unread. A blog on search is no longer remarkable.

Unless you have first-class insider information, and can produce it on a regular basis, I wouldn’t advise anyone start a generalist search engine blog these days. The low hanging fruit is gone, but there are still easy pickings in other areas, it’s simply a matter of finding them, identifying your strengths, and exploiting them.

How Many Blogs Are Out There?

This years “State Of The Blogsphere” report indicates there are around 133 million blogs, and they are only the blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002.

Even if we assume that half of those are spam blogs, or cobweb blogs, that’s still a lot of “personal journals”. Are there 133 million readers?

ComScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
Total internet audience 188.9 million
eMarketer (May 2008)

94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
Universal McCann (March 2008)
184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
77% of active Internet users read blogs

Would a generalist blog do well in such a market? It could, but it’s highly unlikely. Such deep markets tend to favor a niche approach.

So, instead of a blog on search, one strategy might be simply to go deep on one aspect of that market. How about a blog on the mathematics of search engine algorithms? Or search marketing for a specific region? Or search marketing in one industry vertical, such as travel?

How To Find And Test A Niche

First up, read these posts:

• Market Research Using Google Adwords
• Innovator, Imitator or Idiot
• Targeting Niche Markets

Once you’ve decided on a niche, you can further test the validity of your idea, and your approach, by asking questions.

One formalized way of doing this is called a SWOT analysis. It’s a high-brow marketing term, but the idea is simple in practice. Swot stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Make a list:

• Strengths - why do I do well?
• Weaknesses - What do I do poorly?
• Opportunities - What upcoming trends fit with my strengths? What am I doing now that could be leveraged?
• Threats - What internal problems do I face? What external problems do I face?

You then detail how you can use each strength, how you can improve each weakness, how you exploit each opportunity, and how you mitigate each risk.

Simply going through such exercises can open a world of possibilities. It is important to write it down. I find the simple act of writing something down seems to make an idea less abstract and more concrete.

One of the big threats in the blog world is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can start a blog within minutes.

Ask yourself how will you stay ahead of the person who starts in the next hour? The ten people who have started by tomorrow? The hundreds of people who have started by next week, not to mention the big, established names who already have a dedicated share of an audience that isn’t really growing.

Tough call. There are no easy answers to such a question, as it really depends on your individual strengths and weaknesses, which is why asking questions like these can provide valuable insight.

Philip Kotler, a renowned marketing guru, suggests asking the following questions of any new business plan or idea:

• Does this strategy contain exciting new opportunities?
• Is the plan clear at defining a target market?
• Will the customer in each target market see our offering as superior?
• Do the strategies see, coherent? Are the right tools being used?
• What is the probability that the plan will achieve its stated objectives?
• What would you eliminate from the plan if you only had 80% of your budget?
• What would you add to the plan if you only had 120% of your budget?

Those last two might seem a little odd in this context, but they certainly are applicable. What would you do if you had more of a budget to promote your blog? Would you spend it on advertising? If so, where, specifically, would you spend it?

Asking these questions can suggest all manner of options. By pretending you have more of a budget, you might identify great advertising partners, but because, in reality, you might not have this budget, you could instead suggest you write guest articles for them, and thus achieve much the same result.

SEO For Blogs

The latest shift in SEO, as Aaron details in Social Interaction & Advertising Are The Modern Day Search Engine Submission & Link Building, is towards relationship marketing, which is why SEOs are increasingly adopting marketing and PR strategies in order to operate more effectively.

Let’s face it - SEO for blogs is a cakewalk. Blog software, such as Wordpress, is already search friendly, right out of the box. If you want to tweak it further, there are a wealth of available tools and instruction. Anyone can do it, and that’s a problem.

But it’s not really about the tools. It’s how you use them. The key part to success in doing SEO on blogs is the way you interact.

Specific Strategies To Consider

Quote And Link To Popular Bloggers

Apart from the obvious potential that a blogger will follow inbound links back to their source (you!), meme aggregators, such as Techmeme and Google Blog News, are becoming more prevalent.

These sites aggregate similar conversations together. Simply by talking about what others are talking about, and adding to the conversation, you might get a link and/or attention.

Leave Valuable Useful Comments On Popular Related Blogs

Go where the crowd already is.

For example, I follow most comments in these blog posts back to the authors, and if they have left a site name, I check it out.

Most are then added to my RSS feed reader.

Write Articles For Other Popular Blogs

Think of this as advertising. Advertising costs, and in this case, that cost is your time. The benefits of contributing editorial can be fantastic, however, as you can reach a large, established market quickly.

Create Community Based Ideas, Ask For Feedback Before Launching

This is cheap and cheerful market research. You also give your audience an opportunity for buy-in on the outcome. If the audience feels they are part of the process, they are more likely to accept it, and even promote it.

Add Value To Ideas So People Reference You When Talking About Them

Besides the obvious link benefit involved, it is also great for your brand. Your name becomes your brand, and the more people mention your name, the further your brand spreads. Seth Godin is a master at this, and if you aren’t reading his blog already, you should be.

See! It just happened. Twice, in this post, in fact.

Actively Solicit Comments And Reply To Them

One over-looked value of comments is that people are providing crawlable, unique content. Usually I find the more contentious the post, the more comments you receive. So don’t be afraid to stir the hornets nest every one in a while

Encouraging Contribution From Others And Highlighting Their Contribution Builds Community

The best situation is win-win. Are you giving your readers and community members a chance to do so?

This is one of the reasons I think black hole SEO is short-sighted, especially for community sites and blogs. It doesn’t allow others to win, too.

Network Offline At Industry Trade Shows

I once worked with a guy who had been a very successful investment banker on Wall Street. He says he ignores the University qualifications and information in the public domain, as the real business world works on inside information and who you know. There’s no doubt that the best place to get insider search information, and great contacts, is in the bars between conferences.

Every community has an epicenter - a group of people who most others take a lead from - and that epicenter might be as small as three or four highly influential people. Those are the people you need to talk to.

Don???t Be Afraid Of Controversy

If you gain mindshare and authority, some people will hate you for it.

This is related to my “stir-the-hornets-nest” point above. Once you start getting attention, you also become a target. You have little choice but to go with the flow, and keep in mind you cannot please all the people, all the time. Sometimes, it even pays not to please them. People are more likely to engage if they feel passionate, and especially if they passionately believe you are wrong!

Reminds me of a great quote by Oscar Wilde: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about!”

Further Reading

• The Blogger’s Guide to SEO
• How To Do SEO for Blogs, Members Area
• Wordpress SEO, Yoast
• 30 Tips for Marketing Your Blog, Toprank
• Blog Marketing Strategies (and How to Measure Them), Clickz
• Blogs and self promotion, Seth Godin
• Purple Cow, Seth Godin

Subscribe to our blog via email or RSS to get more great posts like this one.

Comments

For example, lets say you have a free blog at thisfreeblog.blogspot.com or thisfreeblog.wordpress.com and you want to 1) point it to thisismynewsite.com and 2) transfer all the content over.

You have two options:

1) You can leave your content on the free blog for the moment and start over fresh on thisismynewsite.com to avoid any duplicate content penalties. Remember that Google penalizes the site whom it identifies as having ???taken??? the content. Thus, it usually penalizes new blogs over old ones and this is why you don???t want to just do something like import all the text from one blog to another without deleting all the pages, cached and otherwise, for it.

Simply add a post and/or a graphic saying you???ve moved to a new site (you can???t do a 301 redirect on sites whose backend you don???t have access to). This is good for several reasons: one, you don???t confuse your readers and it makes an easier transition, two, you keep the rankings you already have and three, you avoid any duplicate content penalties.

After the new site starts to rank better than the old one, you can import all the information from the old site to the new site and delete the old blog completely.

2) If you don???t have any rankings, its safe to import all the old content into the new blog, then delete the old blog entirely and all its components.

However, this is still hard on readers, so you might just want to delete all the content associated with it and still have a call to action telling them to visit the new blog/site.

Comments

Blogging gets even harder when it???s not your full time job and for a lot of people, it isn???t. I personally write for four different blogs and as much as I would like to post something every day on all of them, I just can???t.

Being surrounded by SEO, design, and development all day long between my 9-5 job and freelancing, you would think that I would have a slew of topics to write about, but everyone gets writers??? block occasionally.

A lot of times I think we put too much pressure on ourselves to come up with something fantastic, which doesn???t always have to be the case. Take this post for example???it???s not earth-shattering information, but it will be useful to someone.
The Easiest Way to Generate Ideas

Listen, listen, listen.

A few months ago I wrote how to get blog post ideas which talked about places you can search to find interesting blog posts, but what if you???re too lazy to do that?

A simple strategy is to talk with people about your subject and they???re bound to give you some topic insight that you can write about. A lot of times it won???t be a completely new topic, but if you can write about the same topic with a different perspective, then that???s good enough.

The company I work for has roughly 100 people from account executives to creative copy writers, and I constantly get asked questions about website optimization, promotion and marketing. When I???m feeling particularly smart, I write down the questions so I can post about it later, sadly that doesn???t always happen. But that doesn???t mean the content isn???t there for the taking.

So listen to your peers and they can be a great source of ideas and inspiration.

Comments

In the last 2 years, since I???ve been growing my internet business, two key steps:

1) posting quality content and

2) achieving authority status in the niches I operate

have played a key part of my success.

Successful, long-term blogging goes beyond just harvesting the most popular and/or profitable tools from keyword tools and bashing out keyword-dense content.

It should also encompass planning skills and management skills to be able to publish original, quality content a year, two years or longer down the road.

What most marketers may not realize is that following a step-by-step system can greatly reduce the amount of effort needed to blog prodictively and effectively.

The Secret Blog Weapon coaching program I???m launching today is a result of more than a year???s worth of research into the most relevant topics and techniques new and experienced bloggers need to have at their fingertips, together with a system designed to either kickstart your blogging efforts or bring them to a new level.

What I???ve done my best to achieve has been to:

• Identify critical skills that bloggers need to possess (and develop them if they don???t already have them)
• Organize your blog effort around a proven system to maxmimize your results
• Create a system to build a brand and effectively use this brand to build your business

You can find more details about this comprehensive 6-month program at: SecretBlogWeapon.com

Comments

This is the number one question asked by people when they???re thinking about getting a blog, or advised to get one to help them create a valuable presence on the web. And it should be. If your natural inclination isn???t to write or if you just don???t have the time, there are a number of options available to you, which I???ll cover later in this article. First, lets address the problem of ???non??? writers trying to write.

One, you don???t know how you???ll do if you don???t try. Who knows, you may turn out to be a natural. Two, if you stick to some simple rules, it makes everything easier:

1) Write about what you know. You talk to to colleagues, clients and people around you all day, giving advice, telling them what you need done and much more. Pretend you???re writing an email to someone (better yet, look at those emails you???ve written. Often they contain a lot of good info you can turn into posts), a an op-ed or anything else that makes it easier.

2) Posts can be any length you want. As a rule of thumb, they should be at least two paragraphs, but if its been a long day, do something like a one paragraph post on some bit of news in your industry. Nothing major, and probably something you???re already thinking about.

3) Don???t get bogged down in the details or making a perfect piece of art. You can always go back and change it later, the most important thing to do is get it down on paper.

4) If you use a content management system like Wordpress, use the post-date function. Sit down on a Sunday, take a few hours and write out your posts for that week. Then submit them and post-date them. This puts them in a queue that is published automatically on the date you specify.

If you have tried repeatedly and just feel overwhlemed, there are other options available to you as well:

1) Hire a writer. There are lots of good freelance sites like Elance.com where you can find decent writers to help you out. Use them once or a number of times, but always be sure to check their references and their previous work. Cragslist and other classified sites are also valuable for finding writers, again, just make sure you check for quality.

2) Delegate the writing to an assistant, then edit the content. They often know a lot about the industry and can write articles for you to review, which you can then edit and/or add your own spin to.

3) Get others in your company involved. Partner, colleagues, assistants???everyone can be valuable to you in generating content.

Comments

About the author:
Aurora Brown is the Social Media Manager and Editor-in-Chief for Authority Domains online marketing
company. She currently authors the Authority Domains Search Engine Marketing Blog and is working on her first novel.

I upgraded this blog yesterday in a process that was painless as it happened literally with one mouse click and didn???t involve the manual upgrade process that???s usual with self-hosted WordPress, and which can be quite daunting for some users.

My hosting service, DreamHost, offers a simple 1-click install and upgrade service that makes the process of upgrading your blog as simple as, well, one click.

I noted on my tech blog last month what my WordPress upgrade path has been since I???ve been with DreamHost :

1. Backup the database: this is where everything in your blog resides - posts, comments, user settings, etc - so always have a recent backup (the WordPress Database Backup plug-in is very good).
2. Disable all plug-ins.
3. Run DreamHost 1-Click Upgrade and wait for email confirmation that the upgrade has been done.
4. Log in to the blog and re-enable all plug-ins (which I do one by one, checking the site each time to be sure there are no compatibility issues).

From step 3 to receiving the confirmation email usually takes less than 15 minutes. For all the steps 1-4, the total time, typically, is less than an hour.

As DreamHost makes a backup copy of my entire site before doing an upgrade, which I can revert to in case of any disaster, I usually don???t do the additional step of making sure there is a copy of the entire blog - everything that???s installed on the server - on a local computer before doing an upgrade, unless I???ve made changes to any core files or theme templates. I tend to do a full backup myself anyway from time to time.

As with all blog upgrades whether WordPress or any other self-hosted platform, there is a bit of preparation work to do before that one click where the absolutely essential steps are numbers 1 and 2 above (and see the full upgrade guide on the WordPress Codex which I always check even with a one-click upgrade procedure).

In thinking about how easy an upgrade is (and a fresh installation, too) using the type of service offered to its customers by DreamHost, I started wondering when installing or upgrading a blog platform like WordPress might universally become a sort of one-click process, with reliable and trusted functionality built-in to the platform itself.

Imagine how easy it would then be for literally anyone to manage their blog platform without being any kind of IT person, or turning to someone with tech knowledge for help. And the easier it becomes, the more likely it would be that more people will set up a self-hosted blog (check some pros and cons of self-hosting).

There is a plug-in for WordPress called WordPress Automatic Upgrade that many people swear by. If I wasn???t using DreamHost, I???d consider using that although I???m a bit put off by some of the horror stories in the WordPress support forum.

Yesterday, WordCamp took place in San Francisco. This is the grand-daddy of WordPress conferences, gathering together a great deal of talent in developers and bloggers to talk about the future of WordPress.

In reading much of the commentary about the event - notably ZDNet???s coverage and TechCrunch - I paid particular attention to commentary from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg on what the developer priorities are in the coming year.

In reporting on Mullenweg???s presentation at WordCamp San Francisco, TechCrunch notes:

[...] The focus for 2009? Easier upgrades. Their growth, Mullenweg says, is not dissimilar from other popular products (he mentioned Microsoft, OSX, iPhone, Facebook platform as examples), and believes that good platforms need good self-updating systems. Automattic has a three-prong strategy for better updates: better community awareness, working with webhosts, and adding automatic upgrades functionality to WordPress. Mullenweg envisions the upgrade process to work just like Firefox: one-click, with a list of plugin and theme incompatibilities generated. WordPress.org???s plugin directory (and a recently-launched theme directory) will help make this possible. Many new features are also in the pipeline, including the much anticipated BuddyPress, but that a clean update system will remove one of the biggest thorns for WP users.

(The bold is my emphasis.)

This is very good news.

Until then, there???s DreamHost and 1-click.

See also this thought-provoking post by Sarah Perez writing in ReadWriteWeb - The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type.

Comments

These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.

Step 1: Download and install Wordpress (also requires setting up a MySQL database).

Step 2: Make Wordpress URL configurations.

Step 3: Cloned my mom’s old blogger theme design using Themepress (cost $10), and then had to hack the CSS by hand for about 10 minutes.

After verifying the layout was fairly decent I deleted the blogroll links and the opening post.

Step 4: publish my mom’s old blog onto blogspot.com so I could import it to Wordpress using the one click import located at domainname.com/wp-admin/import.php

After importing it I used Blogger to republish the blog back to her domain instead of leaving a copy on Blogspot, such that she does not have a stray cloned version of her site floating around.

Once import was complete I looked it over and verified it generally looked good. If you still have your old site up you can view the Wordpress blog version by going to yoursite.com/index.php (presuming you installed Wordpress in the root of your site).

Step 5: rewrite the .htaccess file to include both the Wordpress specific functions and rewrite rules needed to lose the dates from the URLs. The exact .htaccess file you need to write depends on your old URL structure and file extensions (the below one redirects html and shtml files). Our .htaccess file looked like this (note there were a few dozen lines like the first line, but I limited it to one in this example for brevity)

Please note that when Wordpress imports your blog some of the stop words are removed from the URLs, which can end up creating some mean 404 errors until you line up the new URLs with the old ones (which we deal with in step 7). Also, if you used Blogger tag pages then you might need to make your .htaccess file a bit more complex than the above one, adding entries to redirect the tag pages.

Step 6: Delete my mom’s old static file archives.

If you are afraid that something might get hosed up with the move you can rename the old archive files and folders. For example:

After these are renamed or deleted click around the site and verify it generally works.

Step 7: Installed a couple SEO related plug ins.

Akismet - comment anti-spam tool installed by default, but I had to get an API key and enable it.

SEO Title Tag - allows you to make the page title and H1 post heading different…great for on page optimization.

Redirection plug in - keeps track of 404 errors and allows you to redirect URLs.

What I did, rather than redirecting URLs, was find the URL slugs that did not align with the old URLs and rewrite the URL slugs to add the stop words into it (I believe the most common ones were and and the).

I monitored 404 errors logged by the redirection plug in for ~ 4 days and fixed everything I came across. I figure all the important, well linked to, and/or high traffic posts should have got traffic within the first 4 days.

After 8 weeks I will flush the 404 error log and look for any stray link equity that I am not capturing, and redirect those URLs to their new location.

WASABI Related Entries - this plug in automatically creates a list of related entries wherever you like in your theme (you can install it in the sidebar or possibly after your comments). The beauty of such a plug in is that it allows you to keep more of your PageRank flowing internally, and it allows you to put a bunch more keyword rich content within a page without it looking spammy. For instance, given the following image you know what the related post is about without even seeing it.

Lorell reviewed a variety of other related post plug ins.

Step 8: While I was fixing up my mom’s URLs I helped offset the revenue shortfall from the short term traffic decline by using IE conditional comments to place an extra AdSense block on her 404 page when Internet Explorer viewers accessed the error page.

Step 9: Final window dressings

Use Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl the site to look for any broken links you need to fix. Please note that you may need to change the number of threads running or Xenu might get blocked by your server. I had no luck with 30 threads, but 4 worked ok.

Set up your robots.txt file to prevent Googlebot from trying to create search pages (?s=). Also prevent them from trying to index admin pages, feeds, trackback URLs, and the p= post URLs (presuming you are using post slugs as mentioned above).

Matt Cutts offers some tips to protect your Wordpress blog from getting hacked. Patrick Altoft offers tips on how to use a Google Alert to check if your blog gets hacked.

Map out keyword strategy and assign old posts to related categories. Set your default category to something that is useful rather than leaving it as uncategorized. While editing particularly high traffic posts it might make sense to see if the page title or page contents could be further improved to make the post even more successful. In some cases a post can rank for a wide array of related keywords.

While ensuring that are category pages are linked to sitewide, I used conditional PHP statements in the sidebar.php file for monthly archives such that they were linked to from the homepage, but not from the individual post pages. This drives more link equity toward the category level pages, while driving less to the date based archives (as we would rather rank for low fat recipes than for August 2007).

As a bonus, one could also add a plug in for editing default category pages, but we have not done that yet as we still have a long way to go with categorizing the current contents first. Anyone know of a good plug-in to edit category pages?

Comments

This book is worth reading! If you???ve ever felt alone as a blogger, ever felt that no one comments, or that the only ones who do are hurtful, this is the next book you must read. If you???re thinking of starting a blog, the first step is reading here (or my book, of course. ). If you???ve ever wondered what sort of person it takes to build a successful blog, this group provides an excellent measure.

The themese are:

Probably the biggest theme that everybody mentions is being passionate about your topic, and you have to be passionate or it???s going to chew you up and spit you out. If you are not passionate about a topic you, will run out of energy very quickly. To me this is fairly obvious, although I suspect many people getting into this for the first time struggle due to the newness of blogging. Its something that overcomes any forward thinking on the idea of ???Do I have the stamina to actually carry this out????. The real challenge is that every day you have to think of something to talk about, to continually put it out there to build an audience. As readership grows, the demand seems to get greater and greater, and how do you manage that?

While these bloggers (in one case I believe one of the people in this book actually comes from professional journalism background) came into blogging from different angles and with different back grounds, the real meat of their message is that you have to continually stay on top of whatever your unique topic is. This point is really critical, as well selecting the right topic. Again we???re back to being passionate about it. This is absolutely critical in order to be successful.

So one of the biggest things I???m noticing in relation to this the book is that I think as a search marketer and as an online marketing professional. I take for granted, for example, the notion of monetizing a blog or website.
To me the idea of not monetizing a blog or website is foreign. Too many of those interviewed for this book, completely the opposite is true. Many started with blogs simply for the sake of spreading a common word or the own point of view. Many have started blogs and grown blogs to the point where readership exceeds hundreds of thousands of people per month. When I see such growth I cannot help but see dollar signs! Though, I do completely understand their point of view, and having to deal with the question ???Is this a moral issue????

So my personal opinion on this obviously is monetize, monetize, monetize! I come from a background of online marketing and I understand the inherent value of unique content and the traffic it can bring. I also understand the idea of having a return on this ??? the time invested. This isn???t simply a hobby. This is something where you do get to share knowledge and expertise as well as developing a return on the time you???re putting in. The time you???re putting into this hobby, you???re not getting back. So you need to be very careful that the time you put into blogging as a return of some in some form for you.

Overall I am a bit lukewarm with some of what???s talked about in Blogging Heroes as regards the perception of SEO. Many of those being interviewed see SEO as an adjunct, maybe something to be avoided. In a few cases, some of those being interviewed in this book actually feel SEO is meritorious and that it is worth pursuing; that there is a return on this approach. One of the common themes on the topic of SEO is the idea that it???s very simplistic and that you needn???t put a lot of time and effort into it. I actually agree with this wholeheartedly. The core of SEO is built around usability and that in and of itself leads you straight back to the content you???re producing and the format in which you are showcasing it to your users. Many blogging platforms, such as Wordpress, make this very simple to manage.

Blogging is the ideal platform for actually showcasing content in a manageable way. Being a writer (good or bad) or being a subject matter expert, or even simply someone who is keenly a interested in a topic, the blogging world and the platforms themselves enable you to quickly showcase your information. By managing very basic SEO points such as having correct titles, by ensuring that unique descriptions exist on pages, by managing your trackbacks properly, by using images and ALT tags properly you can help a blog to really become much more search friendly. Probably the one of the biggest pieces of advice that leads to a search friendly layout is that of managing your URLs effectively. By actually going in and selecting your URLs be shown as postnames in the platform, you???ve taken a big step forward in ensuring that the search engines can very quickly and effectively understand what the post is about. By managing this one item, you will change your URLs from a series of numbers to the actual words used in the title that you wrote for the post.

The title of this post is ???Are Bloggers Unaware? ??? I believe for the most part they are aware. They are aware of their reader???s responses. They are aware of their own subject matter knowledge. There are aware of their own passion for the subject.

I???m not sure that beyond that -passion- a lot more is needed, for most blogs. In fact, if you are passionate about a topic, it will show through in your writing and in your presentation. That passion alone will draw readers to your space. So whether you are blogging for business, pleasure, a hobby or any other reason, bring your passion for the topic to the forefront. Do not enter into blogging if it???s on a whim, for a quick win, or if you simply feel like trying to make some money quickly.

The bottom line is making money online does not happen quickly.

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About the author:
In-House SEM
SEMPO BoD member
SES speaker

In addition to volunteering time on the BoD at SEMPO and co-chairing the in-house SEM committee, I also moderate at www.searchengineforums.com and I write in-house focused articles for www.searchenginewatch.com.

Sometimes I offer consulting for clients and I’m currently writing a book due out this fall on blogging and making money (McGraw-Hill publishing).