Here’s the breakdown for extra money that I made, paid through Paypal, in August 2009.

Moreniche – $233.05

TrialPay – $120.10

Text Link Ads – $89.98

Chitika – $43.88

Adgitize July 09 – $38.84

Native Remedies – $37.44

Page Peel Ads – $22.17

Backlinks – $22.00

Buzzlogic – $20.63

Blogrolled – $17.00

Here’s the breakdown for extra money that I made, paid through Paypal, in July 2009.

Text Link Ads – $81.64

Page Peel Ads – $73.90

Chitika – $46.55

Adgitize June 09 – $20.89

Blogrolled – $17.00

Backlinks – $14.00

Viral Ebook – $10.00

GomezPEER – $5.59

HDR Painter – $4.50

For those who are new to blogging, the following guidelines will introduce you to the fundamental principles of this field.

Interacting with readers

Many bloggers are yearning to interact with their readers, and some newbies are even pondering on adding an interactive comment section in their blogs. While the number of visitors largely determines how much comments or feedbacks you’ll get, there are other ways to elicit more comments. When it comes to interactive blogging, my main advice is to start with your existing readership. Work on what you have first rather than complain about what you don’t yet have.

Copyright

Copyright issues warrant serious attention of bloggers. To prevent legal troubles, always acknowledge your sources and use quotation marks when citing excerpts and statements made by others. The use of quotation mark is particularly important when you are citing paragraph-long texts. Also, don’t forget to ask permissions for original sources when posting excerpts.

Titles, domain names and search engine optimization

Names (i.e. product names, company names, etc.) constitute more than 40% of search engine queries. So if you want to draw more traffic from search engine queries, you better use keywords in titles and domain name.

Quality and quantity of content

Good content is one of the major determinants of a blog’s success, and it is apparent that the quantity of posts also plays a role in attracting traffic. I’m not suggesting that you load your blog with tons of meaningless and unhelpful posts, but if you want to take your blog to the next level, consider increasing the content of your blog.

Relevancy

I know a blogger who regularly updates his news-related blog by allocating one day for writing the posts to be uploaded throughout the week. The problem with this practice is that by the time the posts are loaded, they are no longer relevant. Frequent posting is one thing; relevancy and freshness of content is another. If you will be writing your posts in advance, choose a blog theme or topic that is non time specific. Non time specific posts are those that are still relevant even though they are written long before the posting.

Setting boundaries

Establishing boundaries is important not only for your own sake but for your readers as well.  Boundaries can cover the do’s and don’ts of participating in blogs and the things readers should expect from your blog in terms of topic.

Sources and backlinks

A common mistake among bloggers is to link to the same blog or news source in most if not all of their posts. These bloggers (perhaps they are tired or in a rush) cite the same external sources of information without considering the implications of such practice for their own readership. Though the bloggers they are linking to may not mind the frequent citations, readers will notice this trend and may end up reading the other blogs rather than yours.

The emotional side of marketing

Connect with your readers by capitalizing on sensuality, mystery and emotions. As the book “Lovemarks” shows, many marketers are becoming more “emotional” in exploring ways to connect with consumers. I think this approach to marketing can be effective in blogging.

Title affects blog traffic and Internet visibility through the following ways:

1. Posts stand out from search engine results

Results of search engine queries can be as many as millions. Readers decide which link to click mainly by looking at short excerpts that accompany the search engine results and the title of sites and web pages. Thus, having a web page title that describes the topic or theme of a blog will increase the chance of your post to get visitors from SE.

2. Grabbing the attention of RSS readers

Title has the same attention-grabbing effect in RSS feeds as it has in SE. Even though feeds contain the full posts rather than excerpts, readers are still likely to get overwhelmed by hundreds of feeds to the point that they merely rely on titles to sort which blog is relevant to their interests. This behavior is also seen in the readership of other indexes and directories like Technorati, del.icio.us and digg.

3. Building loyal readership

By using creative titles, you are increasing the chance of your posts to get noticed by web-surfers. Remember that web-surfers often just scan a web page, often bypassing even the contents that they would read otherwise. Using attention-grabbing titles will make it easy for readers to sort out posts that interest them.

4. Search engine optimization

One of the factors used by search engines in indexing web pages is the keyword density in the page title. If the keywords sought by readers are encoded within the HTML title tags of a web page, that page will have SE ranking higher than those with the same keyword density but no such keyword-title combination.

Tips for Choosing Smart Titles

Keep it short and simple

There are many studies that confirmed the effectiveness of short, simple and easy-to-understand titles. If you go for lengthy and verbose titles to grab attention, you may frustrate readers by making it difficult for them to guess whether the content is what they are looking for.  Limit the length of your title to 40 characters to ensure that it will appear in search engine results.

Grab attention

Though titles that shock, make big claims and draw from controversy may get your blog atop the cluttered world of blogsphere, doing so may cause more damage than good to your site if you fail to fulfill the claims made by the titles.

Describe the needs addressed by the content

People looking for specific information are ready to click any titles that they think will satisfy their needs.  Make it easy for prospective readers to figure out what your post is all about by using a title that hints about its purpose.

Use key words

As discussed previously, web pages with titles containing the keywords sent to search engines are ranked higher than it would otherwise without the keywords. Working on keyword-title combination can be challenging as it clashes with the above principle on simplicity, though combining these two guidelines can be done. For SEO purposes, pay attention to the words at the start of titles rather than words at the end.

Don’t use old titles for new posts

This is one of the common mistakes of many bloggers. More often than not, new posts that use the titles of old blogs would never be read.

There is disagreement among the blogging community on the issue of post length. As you’ll see, there are pros and cons in writing short and long posts.

Attention Span of Readers

Many believe that web-surfers have short attention span. Several studies showed that blog readers can spend as little as 96 seconds per blog. As a result, many blogs are intentionally kept in short length so their meat can be scanned easily.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Many SEO experts believe that very short and very long web pages are not ranked by search engines as highly as contents with median length. An average length for web content is 250 words, and many set the maximum length at 1,000 words.

Number of Posts

Unlike the popular SEO theory on post length, the “short is better” theory claims that the more posts are there in a blog, the better will be the flow of traffic via  RSS and Search Engines. It is believed that Engadget and Gizmodo grew their readership by setting their post lengths at minimum length so as to write as many posts as possible.

Topic or Genre

Oftentimes the length of the post is determined by its topic. For instance, it is often that you come across product reviews that are longer than a news brief that points to an external link for more in-depth coverage.

Comprehensiveness

Usually bloggers just allow the topic of their post to determine how long it should be. However, it doesn’t mean that you can go as long as a thesis. The rule of thumb is to write just enough to comprehensively cover your topic. It is unsound to observe either short or long post without considering its comprehensiveness.

I advise you to try various post lengths and see which works better. Moreover, by dividing your content into short, long and medium-length posts, you’ll be able to give the right amount of coverage for certain topics while catering to the needs of several groups of readers.