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

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

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.

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.

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.

What Is a Good Content?

Each one will define a good content differently as he will for a movie or a book, so this post is likely to elicit divergent responses. Whether a content is perceived as good or bad by readers or bloggers themselves depends on their personality, needs, the topic at hand and perhaps even ethical norms.

The following principles on creating a good content do not purport to be universal, but I do hope that as you mix and match these guidelines you’ll eventually identify what suits your unique circumstances.

Usefulness and Uniqueness

To define what is useful and unique, you need to consider the needs of your market. This is one of the fundamental principles of marketing that is as applicable to blogging as it is to selling a car or computer. Understand what your customers are looking for, and then create a blog aimed at fulfilling those needs.

Though it is equally important to consider your own interests, experience and knowledge as a blogger, it is essential that you know what your readers want so you can create a content that adds something to their lives.

The usefulness of a blog could be categorized as follows:

• Entertainment – The web-surfing population is increasingly turning to blogs for entertainment. There are blogs aimed at those looking for laughs, gossip and fun conversation.
• Education – Blogs are good sources of educational contents.
• Information – Many successful blogs are aimed at certain groups who seek specific information.
• Debate - Some blogs are frequented by people who want to engage in a debate or in an old fashioned dialogue.
• News – Blogs are used by some to keep abreast of the latest news in a particular field.
• Community – There are also blogs that primarily function as a virtual community. In this type of blog, content is only secondary to socialization.

There are more ways by which blogs can be useful. Though many blogs fulfill more than one of the above needs, it would be unwise to satisfy all of them at once.

Readership Survey

Know what sort of information is in demand by researching your blog’s readership or potential readership. If you are already running a blog, provide online questionnaire for your readers or just ask them to post their feedbacks. Doing so will help you identify what information is needed by your market. If you don’t have a blog yet, you can research your potential readership by reading feedbacks posted in other blogs or electronic forums that discuss your prospective blog topic.

How to Create a Unique Content

With almost all topics being covered by blogs and contents growing every second, surviving the competition entails uniqueness. Usefulness of content is itself not enough to attract traffic. The more unique the blog is, the more likely it will attract visitors since they’ll see something in your content that is lacking in other sites.

Being unique means presenting a content in a different tone or voice, or perhaps expounding on a sub-topic.  If everyone is into a newsy style of blogging, distinguish yourself with an opinionated content. Variety of contents could also do the trick, by building sub-niches.

Originality of content – That original content is always best is disputable. In the strictest sense, an original content presents information in a unique way, that is, without quoted excerpts from other blogs. Though quotations may be few, a blog with such elements cannot purport to be totally original.

I recommend that you aim for originality. But it is also worth considering to include quotations if doing so is useful to your readers.

• Direct advertising on my blogs – $135.00
• Review on ReviewMe – $25.00
• Ceramic Biz (Malaysian only) – $1,188.40
• Page Peel Ads – $27.00
• TLA – $62.33
• Chitika – $16.81
• Backlinks – $12.00
• Entrecard – $14.00
• Adgitize – 29.12
• DB Hoodia Affiliate – $49.97
• UH Hoodia Affiliate – $213.60
• Squidoo – $5.90

I’m offering text link from within the articles of my health sites, if anyone’s interested. Links will be no-follow free.

The sites are:

1. Healthy Lifestyle Blogzine ($2 per month per link)
2. Natural Health ($1 per month per link)
3. Essential Aromatherapy Oils ($1 per month per link)
4. Healthy Cooking Recipes ($1 per month per link)
5. Blood Pressure ($1 per month per link)

If you are interested, please provide these info:

1. URL of the article.
   For example: http://natural-health.most-effective-solution.com/2009/05/natural-remedies-for-fibromyalgia/
2. The keyword.
   For example: muscle pain (First paragraph, second sentence.)
3. Your website/blog URL.
   For example: http://all-about-muscle-pain.com

Please use the contact page with the subject HEALTH BACKLINKS with the info above. I will contact you with the payment info (Paypal only!)

Happy linking!

What did I do differently in April? Nothing!

Ken Brown of Adgitize announced changes in Adgitize earnings calculation last March. And it was a very good move indeed!

Basically, publishers who scores 300 to 500 points daily will get around $15 to $35 per month. Publishers who scores 100 to 299 will get around $1 to $10 per month. Publishers who scores less than 100 will get less than $1 per month. And it’s easy to score 300 to 500 daily!

If you’re not an Adgitize member yet, I urge you to join Adgitize now. Adgitize has the best ‘advertising +traffic generating + reward’ concept ever. Better than Entrecard!

By the way, here’s a breakdown of my April 2009 earnings.

Total Earned For April 2009: $28.12

Factors to consider in domain name selection

Choosing the right domain name could be as complicated as choosing the name of your first-born child. What I will discuss are the things to keep in mind when selecting a domain name. Since personal tastes also influence name selection, don’t expect that there is a gold standard for this procedure. You may see successful web sites that more or less consider these factors.

Goals and objectives

What is your long-term vision for your blog? Depending on the goals and objectives that you want to accomplish, your URL should have certain attributes that not only appeal to prospective web visitors but to search engine crawlers as well.

• What is the blog all about? It helps if the domain name of your blog is suggestive of its topic.
• What do you want to accomplish with your blog? Is it for hobby or business-oriented purposes (like marketing a professional service or generating advertising revenue)?
• What should it look like? Will your blog be written by one or many authors? How long are the posts?
• What’s the tone of the blog? Is it conversational, serious or humorous?
• Who are your target audience? Are they young, old or professional?

As you can see, naming a blog is like naming a business. Things that relate to product, target customer and brand image have to be considered.

How do you want prospective visitors to know your blog?

In addition to the existing readership base, traffic to a blog comes from two other sources: search engines and links from other sites.

The source of web traffic is a crucial factor in domain name selection. The relevance of the factors to be discussed next varies depending on which source of traffic you choose. Each has distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Keyword-based domains

These domains contain keywords suggestive of the content of a blog. A keyword-rich domain has several advantages. First, it makes it easy for blog visitors to judge whether the information they need is covered by the blog. Second, search engines index and rank web sites with reference to its domain name. Therefore, keyword-based domain will benefit blogs that heavily rely on SE-generated traffic. Examples of keyword-based domain names are Mobilephone7, Digital Photography Lab, the Movie Blog and Sims Gamer.

Brandable domains

Brandable names are mainly intended to facilitate name recall and emphasize brand image, though such domains more or less connote the topic or theme of blogs. If you want to create a loyal readership base, use brandable domain names. Brandable names should also be able to deliver good SE ranking, since keywords are not the only metrics used in web site indexing. As a matter of fact, many blogs cited in Technorati’s Top 100 use brandable names and not keyword-based ones.  Examples of brandable domains are Boing Boing and Gizmodo.

You can also combine keyword-based and brandable domains. For instance, “Engadget” not only suggests the blog topic (gadget) but creates a memorable domain name as well.

Which of the two naming strategies is better is a highly debatable topic.  Supporters and critics of each strategy raise good points, making it difficult for a novice blogger to decide between the two options.

Future scope of a blog

When choosing a domain name, you should consider how likely you are to broaden the topic of your blog. You may find yourself in a situation in which your keyword-based domain is too narrow to describe the overall content of your blog. If your blog is likely to develop into numerous sub-niches, consider a keyword-based or brandable domain that is more flexible to suit the expanded scope of your blog in the future.

The second thing to consider is whether you’ll run a single site with multiple blogs like About.com. The site runs numerous blogs with distinct domain names.

And finally, don’t use a domain name that is time specific. Usually, the popularity of such names is short-lived.

Name length

Both short and long domain names have advantages. Technically, a domain can go as long as 67 characters. However, many prefer shorter ones for a number of reasons. The shorter the domain names are, the less would be the room for errors when typing the URL. Shorter ones are also easy to remember and more suited to word-of-mouth marketing.

On the other hand, longer domain names have a lot of rooms for keywords. More keywords in domain names means higher search engine ranking.

Top level domains (TLD)

The most popular TLDs are .com, .net and .org. Which TLD is better is subject to debates, as each has distinct advantages. Generally, TLD falls into either of the two categories: country code TLD and generic TLD (i.e., .com, .org and .net).

Here are the factors to consider when choosing TLD:

• Internet law – Legal provisions pertaining to TLD vary from country to country.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – Many debates over TLD choice center on the issue of SEO. Many think that .com is the best choice as far as SEO is concerned, followed by .net and .org. On the other hand, the use of country code TLD improves local search engine ranking. If your target audience is not bound in a specific country, I recommend that you use either .com or .net.
• Memorability – .com is the most popular TLD. If your domain name ends with other TLDs, you may drive away prospective visitors who always use .com in their browser’s address bar.

Use of hyphens

This is another debatable issue in domain name selection. There are two main reasons why you might want to use hyphenated URL. The first is the desire to use a name that is already taken by other sites. Though most of the good names are already used, they can still be adopted by adding minor variations like a hyphen. Another good reason for using a hyphen is SEO. URLs with domain names parsed by hyphens are recognized by search engine crawlers more easily.

But before you hyphenate your URL, take a look first at its disadvantages:

• Hyphenated domain names are more difficult to remember.
• It’s inconvenient to recite a URL with hyphens, thus impeding with word-of-mouth marketing.
• Hyphenated domain names are more likely to be misspelled.
• Many webmasters treat heavily-hyphenated URLs as spams.

Alphanumeric address

Another way to adopt a popularly used domain name is to modify it by adding numbers at the beginning or end of it. This technique increases the chance of your site to land into a higher search rank, but doing so may damage its professional image.

Easy-to-remember names

It is a general rule to choose a domain name that is easy to spell, pronounce, remember and type. While considering the aforementioned factors, make your domain name as simple as possible, or else you may turn off prospective visitors.

Observe trademark and Internet laws

Check if your desired domain name is trademarked to avoid costly lawsuits. Legal threats have plagued a number of bloggers, forcing them to change their domain names.

Adding the ‘blog’ word

The main advantage of using the word “blog” in the domain name is that it opens up new naming options. However, this may prevent new bloggers from modifying the name of their sites when shifting from a blog into a different format. Another disadvantage is the reduced capacity of serving blog-related advertisements sponsored by Google’s AdSense. If the word “blog” is mentioned frequently in a site, ad relevancy may be affected.

Creating multiple domains

Many professional webmasters recommend this practice in order to protect niche in certain circumstances. If you have a domain name ending with .com, you may also try to simultaneously run the same blog under similar domain names, but this time ending with .org or .net.

Ask the opinions of others

Being too preoccupied with domain name selection may cloud your judgment. Make sure to include the opinions of your friends and prospective visitors before buying a domain. Also keep in mind that people from cultures other than yours may respond differently to a particular domain name.

Black-listed domain names

Google bans defunct domain names that were purchased and then abandoned by spammers. If your blog uses such domain name, it will be mistaken as a spam and be bypassed by search engines.

Again, let me emphasize that the above guidelines do not purport to guarantee a high-traffic site nor a SE-topnotcher.  As a matter of fact, many successful sites deviate from the above rules. The bottomline is that there are ways to increase the chance of getting web visitors. It’s up to you to decide how “smart” you want your domain name to be.