Shaun Low

Is 2009 the year you finally dive into the world wide web of blogging? Or, is it the year you switch blogging platforms or services? It is for me. In fact, I’m exploring the near-term migration of PR 2.0 from Blogger to Wordpress (both self-hosted).

Make no mistake, even with the popularity of micro communities such as Twitter, aggregated streams/lifestreams such as Strands and FriendFeed, and tumblelogs (Tumblr), blogging is still one of the most effective and visible stages to spotlight your expertise, thoughts, advice, opinions, and insight (for you and your company.) It fuels discovery and it conveys adeptness and reinforces participation.

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Developing quality content has become the primary driver of success for many online businesses that rely on SEO.  Investing the time and energy to author a blog has become an extremely popular tactic when it comes to implementing a content strategy, but often a newly created blog fails to have an overriding purpose. Many online marketers view blogs as a strategy instead of as a tool that has a much more significant purpose.

Josh Klein a guest author at ProBlogger.net suggests:

Thinking tactically – writing a one-off post, promoting yourself, optimizing for search, building links – is all well and good, but won’t matter in the end unless it moves you towards the right goal.

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I’ve been trumpeting the benefits of blogging for search engine visibility for a while now, and here’s why:

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.

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The trend among some top bloggers is to publish monthly earning reports showing how much income they have generated the previous month.

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.

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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.

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This is a major concern for many people looking to transfer free blogs from platforms like Blogger and WP to another location. Users have two choices, and the best one for you depends on a number of factors, the most significant being how well you already rank in the search engines.

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:
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Keeping up with the daily routine of a blog is not the easiest task. A lot of companies want a blog, but don’t realize how hard it is to keep updated content - that is until they realize they haven’t posted anything in 3 months.

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.
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Whether you’re a new internet marketer or a SEO or PPC affiliate looking for sources to generate traffic and convert that into profit, chances are you’ve either explored or are harnessing the traffic and profit potential of blogging.

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.

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How do I blog if I’m not a writer?

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:
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The latest release of WordPress, version 2.6.1, came out a few days ago.

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.

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