We are reconstructing our website’s this month, and starting from now we are going to re-branding our subsidiaries site. The tasks are not easy since we got several sites with large posts. And we are planning to open several new site for marketing and to expanding our business.

Memulakan sebuah bisnes atau perniagaan secara online tidaklah begitu susah atau berat sebenarnya jika kita mahu memahirkan diri mengenai selok belok perniagaan internet tersebut. Masalah yang sering dihadapi oleh orang-orang baru yang ingin menceburkan diri dalam perniagaan internet ini adalah terlalu cepat inginkan pulangan, baru berjinak-jinak tak sampai sebulan dua, tapi bila tidak dapat hasil dan pulangan yang lumayan, mereka terus berputus asa.


Jika kita tahu kaedah sebenar bagaimana dengan mudah memulakan perniagaan internet. Sudah tentu kita tidak akan menoleh atau berfikir panjang untuk memulakannya. Selain itu, setelah menjalankan perniagaan internet anda dan perniagaan tersebut mula menghasilkan wang, tentu anda tidak akan mahu bekerja secara offline lagi.


Jadi, bagaimana? Saran saya, ikuti langkah-langkah mudah dalam urutan ini untuk mula membina perniagaan internet anda. Tapi anda harus ingat, langkah-langkah berikut adalah panduan asas untuk kita memulakan sesebuah perniagaan internet, dan saya hanya ingin memberikan gambaran jelas tentang bagaimana ianya dilakukan, dan saya tidak menjanjikan keuntungan puluhan ribu ringgit kepada anda.. ok? Tujuan saya adalah untuk membantu anda faham sahaja.


1. Tentukan Tujuan Perniagaan Internet dan Modal Anda.
Pertama, tanyakan kepada diri kita “apakah tujuan apabila anda memulakan perniagaan internet?” semestinya  “Membuat wang” bukan?. Maksud saya, apa tujuan perniagaan internet anda, untuk mendapatkan pelanggan baru atau untuk menyediakan perkhidmatan? Atau mungkin untuk memberikan pendidikan pada target pasaran anda? Atau untuk membuat komuniti online? Dalam tahap ini juga menentukan berapa banyak wang yang akan dilabur. Memiliki arah dan kewangan pelaburan yang jelas akan membuat anda mengambil langkah-langkah lebih berkesan.


2. Tentukan Target Pasaran Perniagaan AndaDalam perniagaan moden perlu ada segmentasi atau target pasaran bagi menentukan dengan jelas siapa yang akan menjadi target pasaran anda. Apakah semua lelaki dan wanita? Berapa umur mereka? Bagaimana keadaan sosial-ekonomi dilakukan dan bagaimana pendapatan mereka? Apa kata kunci yang digunakan didalam mesin carian biasa? Adakah perlu secara detail? Ya, lebih detail lebih baik! Semakin anda memahami target pasaran anda, semakin mudah bagi anda untuk menarik mereka.


3. Mengenali PesaingMengetahui dan memahami pasaran perniagaan internet anda. Berapa ramai pemain di sana? Bagaimana tentang produk mereka? Pasaran yang masih banyak peluang? sehingga anda dapat menentukan dimana kedudukan terbaik anda untuk berjaya dalam pasaran ini. Bagaimana mengetahui pesaing anda, cubalah untuk menyemak Alexa.


4. Selidiki Kaedah Pemasaran Anda
Orang-orang yang memiliki bisnis online yang berjaya biasanya memiliki strategi pemasaran yang baik, sekiranya kita mempunyai produk yang berkualiti tinggi sekalipon, tetapi kita gagal menukarkan prospek kepada pembeli, itu bermakna pemasaran yang dijalankan telah gagal.


5. Mengatasi MasalahSebab utama mengapa orang membeli atau menggunakan perkhidmatan anda untuk menyelesaikan masalah mereka. Ingat ini! Dan tanyakan pada diri sendiri apakah produk anda dapat menyelesaikan masalah mereka? Bagaimana produk anda dilakukan? Dan apakah penyelesaian yang perlu anda diambil dalam menawarkan nilai yang lebih dari pesaing anda?

6. Membuat Papan Tanda Internet Perniagaan AndaCara pertama adalah dari nama domain. Ini adalah perbezaan antara perniagaan internet anda dengan yang lain. memilih dot com. Kerana internet telah identik dengan dot com. Dalam memilih nama domain, ada tiga trend yang saya lihat. 

• Pertama, kebiasaanya para pengusaha menggunakan nama pemilik perniagaan. 
• Kedua, menggunakan nama perniagaan. 
• Dan ketiga, dengan menggunakan kata kunci yang paling sering digunakan oleh pengguna internet.   

Proses penyediaan perniagaan Internet juga harus mengambil kira pembinaan sesebuah laman web perniagaan secara online, ini dapat dilihat dan dinilai dari segi penjenamaan dan paparan sesebuah laman web (template atau rekabentu laman web, font, warna), kandungan (Copywriting, rencana, podcast, video), dan perkhidmatan. 


Tidak sulit bukan? Ya, sekiranya anda mahu memahirkan diri dan mengambil tahu kaedah dan langkah-langkah untuk membina sesebuah laman web perniagaan internet, sudah tentu anda dapat menjimatkan kos pembikinan perniagaan tersebut. 


Dengan menerapkan keenam langkah ini, saya yakin tidak akan ada lagi yang boleh dikatakan sukar untuk mulai melakukan perniagaan dan berusaha menghasilkan pendapatan.


7. Lupakan KesempurnaanJangan mengharapkan semuanya berjalan dengan sempurna, apabila anda merintis perniagaan baru. Akan selalu ada masalah dan halangan, ini adalah lumrah dan asam garam bagi mereka yang menceburkan diri dalam apa juga perniagaan baik secara internet mahupun secara konvensional. Pada saat seperti ini, sikap realistik dan kesabaran anda diperlukan. Saya yakin tidak ada sesiapa yang berjaya tanpa melalui kegagalan terlebih dahulu. Oleh itu dalam menjalankan perniagaan internet, fokus dan konsisten pada sesuatu perniagaan itu sangat diperlukan.


Selamat mencuba..

Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start?
You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn’t become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”. Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to…but only when you need to!

2) Niche
A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family…you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.

3) Update Daily (nothing less)
This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don’t come to work for days or weeks…you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here…if you don’t update your blog for days or weeks you’ll lose visitors.

4) Traffic
It’s no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the “About the Author” passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the “About the Author” passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your site in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Blog
How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what “you” have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to Your Audience
When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.

7) Multiple blogs
Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, tBlogs.com, etc. The more blog accounts the better. You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.

Short & Concise
Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic.

9) Digital Art
Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.

10) Keep it Personal
A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.

11) Interact With Your Visitors
You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: “Monday Money Tip” or “Picture of the Week” which entices your readers to look forward to each week.

Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you “will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated”.

Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about “Paris Hilton Getting Married” then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.

12) Make Money
Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You’re a Professional
You’re a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a “move” announcement. The title should be “Moved” and the blog entry should state something like “Old Blog has been moved to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com”. This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain.
At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying “two heads is better than one”, more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.

Source : http://blogsource.portbis.co.cc/13-steps-to-successful-blogging.php

Lemmings are cute, but dumb. If you tell them to jump off a cliff, they will. Just like the people who start blogs because everyone is doing it. Guess what happens after a little while? The blogs die.

In managing a list of many Web sites, most of which are blogs, I deleted countless sites from the list because the sites and blogs no longer existed. The people ran out of steam or had no reason to start them in the first place.

How do you know when a blog is right for your business? Learn why people start blogs, how they find their niche and how blogging tools can be used for more than blogs.
Some people like to read blogs, others like to read newsletters, still others like to rely on feeds and some read a few or all of them. No matter the method the information is distributed, each medium has one thing in common: content. Having a blog connects your newsletter and your business with all of these readers and delivers important content in a particular style.

I’ve been blogging since June 2000. If you review my early blog entries in meryl’s notes, you’ll notice they’re more personal. When blogs first hit the scene in the late ’90s, they were personal diaries and journals. Like the blog business, my blog has transformed from personal to business speak, although I still add personal notes here and there.

A few bloggers tend to talk about their work, their products and their little world. That might work for celebrities where fans want to know everything about them, but it doesn’t work for the average business person. Other business people want information on how to succeed and when a blog spends time hawking products offering information of no value, few people will return. The people whose products sell well are the ones who provide valuable information. Readers already know what kind of information they’re getting, so they trust that when they buy something, it will be of the same or better quality. This value must be reflected in their blog. It’s much like people who only sign up for a newsletter after first seeing an example.

No one wants to be a lemming (I would hope). How do you decide whether or not to set up a blog? The answer isn’t black or white (what did you expect?). Ask these questions:

• Can you regularly update it – at least five times a week?
• Do you have something to say other than just linking to others?
• Do you read other blogs or feeds?
• Can you provide information of value to others not just to yourself?
• How large is your newsletter subscriber list?
• How many unique visitors do you get on an average day, week or month?

The big decider is whether or not you can write in the blog almost daily. The people behind the high traffic blogs post multiple times a day. Though resourceful, merely linking to other sites doesn’t give visitors much reason to make the effort to come to yours. Reading other blogs or feeds is a great way to learn how to carry a discussion. Find other blogs covering topics similar to yours and check them out. Disagree with their opinions? Write about it and explain your reasons. Cross-blog discussions are common, and that’s where trackback comes in handy.

Trackback is a blog feature. If you decide to comment on another blog posting in your blog instead of in that blog’s comments page, then you link to the conversation through the trackback link. Trackback is similar to the permalink, the permanent URL for the blog entry, but it has a different URL for copying and pasting in your blog’s trackback box.

Aside from the technical aspects of operating a blog on a daily basis, subscriber list size and Web site traffic are good indicators of what kind of reaction you’ll get when opening a blog. Starting from scratch with little traffic means you have a long road ahead and lots of work to do. There is no magic formula anyone can sell you for $97 to make your blog an overnight success. But with some perseverance and ingenuity, your blog can engage many prospects and clients.

Considering there are numerous blogs out there, pick a niche topic when starting a blog for a better shot at attracting and keeping an audience. meryl’s notes focuses on three areas: webby, geeky and wordy. In reality, this is too much. What I need to do for my readers is create three separate blog entry points, so those interested in writing, newsletters and Internet marketing get nothing but the wordy entries. Those interested in Web design get the webby stuff and the technophiles receive the geeky content.
I also manage a personal blog separate from meryl’s notes. It’s about cochlear implants and deafness. This could fall under the geeky category, but it’s a personal blog and doesn’t belong in meryl’s notes. This blog is written for a different audience.

The blogging tools for both of my blogs come with syndication capabilities so those using feed readers or aggregators can read the content through the software. When sending a new issue of a newsletter, comment on it or link to it in the blog, that way the blog and feed readers will get the goods, so all three bases are covered.

Blogging tools aren’t just for, well, blogging. Such tools are an excellent way to help you update your Web site more often than you otherwise would. I use it to manage the list of tableless Web sites. Using blogging tools is much easier than the way I managed it before, updating the HTML files by hand. Though using a blog tool, it isn’t a blog. In this case, the blog tool has become a content management system (CMS).

Small business owners don’t have a need for the fancy and pricey CMSes out there. They find it easier to use blogging software to manage their sites or hire someone to adapt the tool for their site.

Blogs have found a place in businesses and people are finding creative ways to use them. Some companies have a blog on the intranet for communicating project status, jeopardies and metrics. They’re used for knowledge management. With information pouring in, blog tools provide a way to share, organize and process the information.

Being a follower can be good or bad. No one wants to walk off a cliff with the lemmings, but everyone wants to succeed. Best practices won’t help, since the decision to blog is based on the organization’s mission, needs and goals along with its target market’s desires and needs. A blog about lemmings? There is one, sort of. Or maybe you’d like to start your own and talk about dumb business moves.
Source : http://blogsource.portbis.co.cc/is-a-blog-right-for-your-business.php

As much as this might surprise most bloggers, the #1 mistake most blogs are doing is not publishing their content via e-mail, as a supplement to their RSS feeds.

Just think about it: while RSS is growing strong, it still only penetrates about 5-6% of the American online population. Furthermore, according to a recent BlogAds survey, “only 12 percent of the blog reading audience said it used RSS always or often”.

If you’re delivering your blog content only via RSS, you’re missing out on about 80% or more of potential regular readership/followship.

THE KEY BLOG PROBLEM
There are millions of blogs already, but really few people have the time to watch more than a few daily. But if they come back just once a week, they can be quickly overwhelmed with the amount of new content.

That’s why it’s crucial to provide a “best of”, a helping hand to guide your readers to the “must-read” content you publish ? and delivering this content either as a standalone “blog-zine” or as part of your regular e-mail newsletter.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
Deliver your blog posts as they are written via RSS, but then also publish a regular (weekly or monthly) e-mail e-zine with your “top blog posts” for those that are still not in to RSS.
Don’t do just one channel, do both.

E-mail is still the #1 end-user content delivery channel … whether we like it or not. Using e-mail (as a supplement to RSS) to deliver our content is just good business practice, at least for now.

THE CHRIS PIRILLO EXAMPLE
Chris Pirillo is the publisher of one of the most popular sites on the net, Lockergnome.com. He was actually the first to proclaim e-mail as being dead.
But still, while he preferrs for his subscribers to use RSS instead of e-mail, that isn’t stopping him from using or promoting either RSS or e-mail.

COMPARING BLOGS, E-ZINES, E-MAIL AND RSS
If you’re reading this article and thinking that blogs are actually “beyond e-mail”, just consider the following reality.

RSS and e-mail are content delivery channels; the tools that enable us to deliver our content to end-users. Blogs and e-zines on the other hand are two different internet media content formats, differing in how/what content is provided and presented through them.

RSS/e-mail and blogs/e-zines cannot be directly compared. Blog content and e-zine content can both be delivered via RSS and e-mail, and there is no direct business/logical relation between, for example, blogs and RSS.

Blogs are “personal” conversations, opinions and news, delivered in a linear structure, usually written in a more personal style, and confined to a limited number of content types.
E-zines on the other hand are more similar to magazines or newspapers, carrying content presented in a complex non-linear content structure, and having the ability to carry many different content types that do not mix well together if provided through a linear content structure.

A typical e-zine might include:
- an editorial;
- a leading article, representing the prevailing topic of a specific e-zine issue;
- supporting articles, clearly structured to show they are secondary to the leading article;
- links to “best of” blog posts in the given timeframe;
- links to the most relevant forum topics and posts;
- a news section;
- a featured client case study;
- different advertisements (banner ads, textual ads, advertorials etc.);
- a featured consultant;
- a Q&A section;
- a featured whitepaper;
- etc.

Providing all of this content demands a complex content structure and a strong and experienced editor. The blog format simply does not provide the level of structure needed to effectively present such a complex content mix.

But that’s not to say that blogs are in any way inferior to e-zines, they’re just different. And businesses need both, and they need to deliver both via RSS and e-mail.
Personal preferences towards content delivery channels and internet content media formats have no place in business. What matters is what our audiences want and how they want it.

The question “How to make money blogging” sits high on every blogger’s mind. In fact I received many questions on “How to make money blogging” when I conducted my first webcast to answer my subscribers’ most pressing questions on Blogs and Rss.

You can make money Blogging in a number of ways, and in this article I share with you up to nine strategies in which you can make money blogging.

1. Make Money Blogging by Selling Advertising Space
Before the advent of Blogs, we have e-zines and selling advertising space on ezines was a popular way to earn extra money. If you run your own Blog, you can let others advertise in your Blogs with banner ads, solo ads, sponsor ads, classifieds and so on.

Now that we have Blogs, you can repeat the same business model that e-zine publishers do, that of selling advertising space.

One popular advertising company that helps Bloggers look for advertisers is Blogads (www.Blogads.com).

Besides placing advertisers ads on your Blog, you can also make money Blogging by placing Google Adsense into your Blog.
In my “Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS” Videos, I show you how you can customize your Blog template to include the Google Adsense into your Blog template so that you can make money blogging.

2. Make Money Blogging by providing technical services such as Blog hosting or setting up Blog
You can also earn money blogging by providing technical services such as helping people to set up their Blogs or providing your own Blog hosting service.

One example of this is www.typepad.com . This is a Blog hosting service provider that charges a monthly fee. Typepad lets you create your Blog and they will host your Blog for you, and provide you with a number of Blog features.

3. Make Money Blogging by setttin up joint venture marketing
Joint Venture marketing is a powerful marketing strategy employed by many top online marketers.
Basically how joint venture works is this: You promote person B’s products to your subscriber and customer list, and you get a cut from whatever sale that follows from this promotion.
You can apply the principle of joint venture marketing to Blogs as well. If you have a substantial readership to your Blog, you can also promote or endorse certain products to your Blog readers and this way, and split the profits from the sales generated. This is another way to make money blogging.

4. Make Money Blogging from using the Membership model
Over time, if your blog has lots of postings and provide good quality content, you can consider turning it into a membership site and charge access for it, again giving you another avenu

5. Make Money Blogging by turning your products into
Another way in which you can make money blogging is to repackage your Blog contents into an e-book or an audio product and sell it. For example, if you run your own Podcasting show or an ‘online radio show’, you can easily compile your podcast recordings into a CD compiliation and sell it.

6. Earn Money Blogging by Swapping blogs
You’ve heard of ad swapping when it comes to e-zine publishing, where publishers publish each other’s ads in their own e-zines. This way, you save on adveritising costs.
You can repeat the same model to Blogs, as swap ads on Blogs as well. So instead of paying up front, you get to save, which means more money for you to spend!

7. Earn Money Blogging by turning your Blog content into RSS feeds and sell it as premium feeds
Your blog contents can be turned into an RSS feed. If the content is good, you can look for web businesses that are looking for good content for related topics and sell their feed to them.

8. Make Money Blogging by well, asking!
Hey, who’s stopping you from putting a PayPal donation jar or button on your Blog? After all, there are lots of generous people out there you know.

9. Make Money Blogging as an Affiliate Marketer
Another way you can make money blogging is by promoting other people’s products on your Blog. This is also known as affiliate marketing.

In affiliate marketing, you get paid a commission when someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase. Depending on the subject of your Blog, you can recommend products that solve people’s problems.

For example, I had a subscriber who asked me how she can blog about cats and make money from blogging about cats.
I shared with her that firstly, perhaps she might want to go niche instead of targeting the broad category of “cats”, and using the example of a Persian cat, which is a niche by itself, she can start a blog on Persian cats, providing valuable information as well as recommended solutions and products to the upkeep and maintenance of Persian cats.

Several small & mid size businesses contact us daily for SEO consultation and helping their websites rank well on search engines. One common question we always hear is:

“Where and how do I start my SEO Campaign from?”

A couple of points to note before we start -
We are assuming that you already have the domain name because finding a good domain name would be a separate topic.

Here are some of the most important steps that you can yourself take care of before going to any SEO company to manage your search engine marketing campaign.

1. Find your targeted keywords

The first and most important step is to determine what are the most important keywords for which you want your website to appear on search engines? You know your business more than anyone else. You know your target audience. So find out 10 phrases which you think that your prospective customers will search for.

2. Set the title of your website pages right

After you have decided on your keywords, the next step is to set them up properly. The title of your web page is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank your website. Your homepage title should contain your targeted keyword. All the other pages of your website should have title related to the content of that respective page. For e.g., the title of the registration page should be “Registration”. Keep in mind that you are not promoting your “registration” page. The idea is to “set things right”.

3. Set up meta keywords and description

Though Google has said they do not read meta tags content we still advise to put your targeted keywords in meta name=”keywords”/ field and one line description of your website in meta name=”description”/ field in your header tags. Many other search engines will still read them and Google won’t give you negative marks for that.

4. Unique content for the home page

Your website’s homepage should have a unique content describing your business. This introductory text should have the phrases that are in the title of the page. Experts say that you should use your targeted keyword 2-3 times in every 200 words so as to not get caught up for keyword stuffing. If possible, put your local business address and phone number on home page & contact us page to get noticed on “local business results” on Google.

5. Business Blog

Google loves a blog and so do the other search engines. Having a business blog pays – and this is something you should always remember. Whatever business you have, you must write 1-2 posts every week about your business. The articles can be about an industry news, a website update, a new recruit in your company – anything that relates in some way or the other to your business.
We recommend using wordpress because they are easy to set up and the come up with various SEO Plugins that help in optimizing your blog for search engine rankings.

6. Install Web Analytics

Once your website is up, you would definitely want to monitor your traffic. Any analytics software will show you how many visitors come to your website daily, where are they coming from and which keywords do they use on search engines to get on to your website. These are the most important metrics.
We suggest using Google Analytics!

7. Monitor your website rankings

Of course you are just starting your campaign. You might not be in top 100 on Google but sooner or later if you do the right things at the right time, you will find yourself in top 10 for that elite group of your targeted keywords.
We, at KPMRS, offer this service for free. You can register your website with your targeted keywords and we will monitor your rankings on daily basis. You can be rest assure to get notified by email as soon as your rank has changed for Google, Yahoo or Bing. This will even help you track the work done by whichever SEO company you have chosen for your campaign.

8. Setup business profiles on social media websites

Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious are some of the buzz words today in social media industry. Setting up your business profile on these & similar websites are must for a starter. Maintaining & optimizing them is again a different topic of discussion about which we will soon post here.
We hope that you found this list a good starting point to help you set up your SEO Campaign. We also advise our clients to educate themselves by spending 30 minutes daily in reading latest news in the SEO world. You may not be professionals but you sure don’t want to appear dumb when you talk to a SEO Company. Official blogs of Google, Bing, & Yahoo are good starting point but there are hundreds of freelance bloggers that can provide really valuable information as well a few ones that we love
http://www.addme.com (Highly Recommended)
http://www.dailyseoblog.com
http://www.seo-theory.com
http://www.seomoz.org
http://www.webmasterworld.com (Highly Recommended)
Well, we have finished our part. Time for you now to add more points which you think would be useful for a beginner in the SEO world.

About the Author Varun Bihan http://www.kpmrs.com is a website rank monitoring SEO tool for free. It tracks your website positions for keywords phrases for a specific URL on Google, Yahoo, Bing and provides a nice report of your site’s rankings over time

Product Overview

Traffic Travis is a software designed to help online businesses boost their website traffic. It is an all-in-one tool for search engine optimization, pay-per-click monitoring and general market research.

Traffic Travis is useful for both novice business owners with a web presence and more experienced internet marketers.

Novice users:

• Provides a page analysis tool which examines the important on-page SEO parts of a page and returns an SEO “score” for the page, as well as suggestions for improving the page from an SEO perspective.
• Shows where your site is ranking in the search engines for your important keywords, so you can see at a glance rather than trawling through pages of search engine listings. Traffic Travis will even keep track of your previous positions so you can see whether your site is moving up or down over time.
• See who is linking to you. Traffic Travis finds your backlinks and displays all sorts of interesting information about the sites that are linking to you, including the anchor text of the link. Traffic Travis then gives you some nice summaries so you can see all the important information at a glance. This is really useful for researching your competitors’ sites as well… by looking at their anchor text (and the anchor text summary) you can see where they’re focusing their backlink efforts.
• All tools are found in the one piece of software, so it’s no longer necessary to find and visit a multitude of websites to analyze a website.

More experienced users:

• Takes the tedium out of tasks like finding search engine positions, finding backlinks, analyzing keyword density etc. Most experienced users will have found these tools available online on various websites, but Traffic Travis brings these tools and others to the desktop, which saves time hopping around.
• The ability to store and analyze historical data shows you the bigger trends in a market over time. Is your competitor’s site going up or down in the search rankings? Do these keywords have a high turnover of PPC advertisers, indicating that they might not be very profitable? Which words are your competitors consistently bidding on, and which ones do they drop occasionally?
• Pulls a variety of statistics and pools them into the one screen so that you can see how they all interact. For instance, you might see that you have a large number of backlinks, but Traffic Travis might tell you that they’re all from the same IP address (and therefore they won’t give you as much benefit).
• Powerful PPC research tools. When you’re paying for your traffic you want to be sure that your campaigns are going to be profitable. Traffic Travis gives you an extremely comprehensive range of data to thoroughly examine a market. Using a keyword list you can see which sites are bidding on certain keywords; whether they continue to bid on these keywords over time; the movement of ads in the search engines over time; an analysis of keywords to see which words attract consistent, stable competition.
• Project graphs, reports and printing: For SEO and PPC professionals using Traffic Travis to perform analysis for clients, Traffic Travis offers reports and graphs which can be printed and given to clients.

The key benefit for more experienced users is providing a one-stop-shop for search engine optimization, rather than relying on multiple tools on multiple websites. Being able to easily cross-reference information is also a very important benefit, and allows users to save a considerable amount of time when researching their market and competitors.

The PPC tools are so comprehensive and useful that they could easily be released as a separate product (in fact there are already products on the market retailing for up to USD$200).

The difference between “Free” and “Professional”

The big difference in this version of Traffic Travis is the provision of a “Free” version of the software. This version is very functional and will usually be perfectly adequate for the casual website developer.

The key differences between the versions are:

• Number of projects: The free version is restricted to 5 projects.
• Data caps: The free version has lower data caps on some tools.
• Print and save reports: The free version doesn’t support this feature.

For a more comprehensive overview of the differences between the two versions, consult the comparison chart.