How Digg and Stumbleupon can Boost your Rankings

Digg, Stumbleupon...what??..

I've already mentioned a few times about social media marketing in my last posts. Well, Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com are one of the more popular voting directories on the net right now. By 'voting', I mean you share articles, photos, blogs (whatever you darn well want) and people would vote (digg or stumble) for it to go up the search engine ranks.

A good thing about this voting thing is that whatever you share can be popular (dugg/stumbled) for months or even years as long as there are people digg-ing them. And since all votes comes from actual people, the very humanly nature is preferred by robots and can boost your rankings up search engines.

How you make it work..

Well back to the word 'social media', that means you have to be social. The more friends you have or the more people subscribe to you, the bigger the chance they will like and digg what you're sharing. I find it really helpful to join in discussions and leave comments on the stuff that I dugg/stumbled. Create a point that you can discuss so that other commenters can relate and reply.

So always remember to:

1. Make friends.
2. Share stuff with friends.
3. Digg/stumble stuff share by friends.
4. Leave comments.
5. Make more friends.

and the sequence repeats itself.

If you don't have a Digg or Stumbleupon account yet, you should start one. Something like this you can see the results in a couple of months or so. But if done right you can see the difference in less than a month.

Boost Rankings by Blog Directory Submissions

Blog directory submissions is another fast way to boost your blog rankings. Apart from getting your backlinks to your blog, you get to promote your blog and socialize with other bloggers. Besides that, commenting on other blogs are made easy and you can get free targeted web traffic to your blog. 

Here's 5 popular blog directories that you should definitely be a part of

• OnTopList.com - Very popular and free directory that reviews your blog for free. It's human-edited which is always preferred by search engines and can help your blog rank better faster.
• Blog Explosion - Very popular. Can bring you a lot of web traffic and build your blog rankings.
• BlogCatalog - Very popular. Can easily be used to build free targeted web traffic and blog rankings. A perfect networking tool to socialize with other bloggers.
• Blog Flux - Free and very popular directory. It is neatly ordered and used by a lot of bloggers.
• Bloggernity - Another free and popular directory which has been used by a lot of bloggers all around the world and is a great blogging tool that could help you boost you blog rankings.

There blog directories are worth to trying out. Blog directory submissions are definitely a great way to get yourself recognized in the blogging world. Try it out for yourself and see the results for yourself. :)

Easy Tips to Boost Your Blog Indexing

This post is a short one on how to boost indexing for your blog. One of the many important things you need to do if you wanna have your blog making the greens for you is to have a good ranking on search engines. It's great to be making money online and not have to work 9-5 to get it. Doesn't it? :) So here's a few tips on how to boost your indexing.

So one of the many things you can do is pinging your your blog after every post, meaning you promote your blog telling search engines that your have updated your blog. There are a number of pinging sites that you can easily find on Google and a number of ways you can ping, either manually or setting it automatically for your blog.

For bloggers on Blogger.com however that's not the case. Only manual for you guys (unfortunately for me too) But hey it's not that hard. Like me, I have to open another site to ping after every post. Like I said earlier there are a number of sites providing you this service. I personally like to use Pingates.com, 'coz it's easy. I only have to put my blog address in and tick a number of search engines I wanna ping and I'm all set. I never had the chance to use other pinging sites but I bet they all work the same way.

Also, make your blog public. I remember writing this in my previous post but no harm reminding everyone again. What you do is Go to settings tab and you can find items like 'Add your blog to our listings' and 'let search engines find your blog'. Apply 'yes' for both these items ok.

For Wordpress users, you guys get to set your ping automatically. Lucky you! What you do is you go to 'Settings', then you go to 'Writing' and then copy and paste this list.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

To make you blogs public for wordpress, just go to 'Privacy' tab under 'Settings' and choose to make your blog available to everyone.

If you're using Joomla 1.5, (I got this tip from my good friend Faiz Suberi) I don't use Joomla but he does and he shows an easy way on how you guys can do pinging. Check out his cool website by clicking his name there. First you would need to install an 'Easy Ping' plugin here. Then under 'Extensions' tab, clcik on 'Install/Uninstall' button. Then upload and install the plugin. You done?

then go to 'Extensions' again and this time go to the 'Plugins Manager'. Look for a 'System-Easy Ping' in your list and click on it. And then you just need to copy the list of of pins services above and paste it in the 'ping services' space. After that, don't forget to enable the plugin.

Well there you have it. A few tips on how to boost your blog indexing. These are just one of the many ways you can do. There are other ways to get your rankings up but I'll discuss that at another time. Ok. What do you think on these tips?
Before i sign off, I just wanna say stay strong and keep your head up. At times, this making money online thing will be hard to push off. Don't stress yourself out. If you find it hard, take a break and return back to your work once you're relaxed and can think staright. :)

To Tweet or Not To Tweet?: WHY you should make Twitter work for you and HOW

I'm sure you've heard of it. Twitter is the hottest social media networking service right now. If you don't have one, click here open up an account now! As we speak, millions upon millions of Twitter users are sending out tweets from something as big as current events, new gadgets, hot spots, latest gossips to even as ordinary as what you're up to right now. Either way, the end result is viral. You tweet, then your friend re-tweets your tweet if she likes it and her friends do the same thing and it goes on and on. In just a couple of years (Twitter was established in 2006) Twitter has it's own Twictionary (twitter dictionary)! and it's just mind-boggling.

The power of sharing is really optimized with Twitter. It's gotten so popular that even other social networking services are integrating their services with it. So applying this service to the max can help you make money blogging by getting the web traffic you need to your blog. With Twitter, you can easily update your followers with your latest blog post/articles that you would like to share via RSS services like Twitterfeed with a small appended bit.ly URL. So that means the more followers you have, the more exposure you get, and more people will end up checking out your blog.

So here's how to increase your Twitter followers:

• Set up your profile: Put up a brief but thorough profile about you and what you like so that people will know what you're into. Put in a link to your blog so people can visit your blog. Make it interesting by having your own Twitter background.
• Start following and follow-back: Start following your friends or people with the same interest. Follow your friends' friends and see how many follows back. The more people you follow, the more people will follow you back. But be careful of robot and spammers, though. It's just no fun following people who's just interested in selling stuff. Then you'll end up with a page full of ads and junk. It's just plain annoying.
• Tweet and re-tweet regularly: Tweet about whatever your heart desires. What you up to, how's your day, in the end you will get the hang of tweeting. Share fun-facts, hot gossip or whatever Justin Bieber's up to (apparently he's a hot topic right now). Whatever it is, remember to tweet humanly. No one likes their page filled with ads and spam and you won't like it too. So share something interesting that you think might be interesting to your friends too. If they re-tweet, more followers. Yay! Also, do your share of re-tweeting. Do a little reading of what your friends are tweeting about and share with others. 
• When it gets too many: Auto-follow and auto-find followers. When you reached the point that you have too many followers and a it's a bit hard for you to follow them back one by one, something like 'Social Oomph' can help you follow-back automatically. Or if you think that you would want to find more followers automatically, there are many services that offer auto-find for a small fee. Like 'Tweetomatic Profiteer' which automatically find people of the same niche without violating Twitter's follow policy.
• Make it viral: This is also something free you can try out to get more twitter followers. Although it might get you a handful of followers in a short period of time, it may not be 'targeted' but would still work in giving your blog more exposure.You can try it out here.
• Maximize exposure of your Twitter account: Put links to your twitter account on your Facebook, Myspace and also your blog to increase your exposure for your twitter account. 

I think that's pretty much it. For those of you who haven't tried this out, start your Twitter account now and get instant web traffic to your blog by building a base of followers. :)

Get web traffic without spending a cent

Getting web traffic is very important if you wanna make it big in the blogging scene. How would you make money from blogging if no one ever comes over to read your stuff? So getting your targeted web traffic to your blog is something that you have to do besides putting content on your blog. There are a number of ways to get web traffic to your blog. But let's admit it, if you have the option to do it for free, you would definitely prefer that rather than paying for it, right? So here's how you get web traffic for free.

• Article marketing is one of the best ways to get your traffic. It helps you to build back-links to your blog. You only have to write an article every other day or so. It may sound like a hassle, but it will be beneficial for you in the long run. Experts like this idea because it helps show that what they're offering is genuine. The more useful articles you put out, the more people will like you and keep coming back. 
• Social media marketing is another all time favorite way to build traffic. Something like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Digg etc is not foreign to you and I bet you already have one of them. Not only that you get to find and stay in touch with friends and viewers of your blog, but you can also use it to inform them of new posts or products that you'd like to share. This sort of networking if done right can bring you a lot of web traffic.
• Make videos. People like something easy. Reading can only get you so far but adding videos can be more helpful and make your viewers understand the topic a lot better. 
• Comment on other relevant articles. When you leave a comment in other blogs, robots that crawl on that blog would end up crawling yours too.There is a right way to comment, though. There's no point leaving a "nice post" for every article you go through. Leave something helpful that you can add to that particular topic. Commenting can help create back-links to your blog. Even though you might not agree with the writer, have your say. This will also make curious ones to check you out. 

These are a few tips on how to get web traffic for free. However, these methods aren't exactly an overnight result kind of thing. You have to put a lot of effort and patience in all these areas and the results that you want will come in time.  

How to start a blog with Blogger

Blogging is easy to start. I prefer blogging using Blogger because it's easy to start and it's not as complicated as other blogging platforms. Blogger is a blogging platform provided by Google and the best part of it is that you can start your own blog for free. There are other free blogging platforms like Wordpress for example but let's just focus on Blogger in this post. For begginners, I do find Blogger being less complicated that the others. So, it's a good place to start.

So here's how you start a blog with Blogger.

• Go and register with Blogger. For those of you who already have a Google account (Gmail, Adsence, etc.) you can use your Google account ID. If not you can open up a Google account by creating a Gmail account here. 
• Choose an address for your blog. After logging in, you get to choose a name for your blog. Although some people prefer to use their own names (which you can too), it is advisable to have an address that is related to your niche. For example, if your niche is about pet care, it should be "alicepetcare.blogspot.com" or if you're into car maintainance, it should be "car-care-with-tony.blogspot.com". The idea is to make it easy for people to remember and at the same time it helps your blog ranking and indexing in search engines.
• Pick a blog theme. A simple theme should do. Whatever your theme is, make sure it's readable and friendly to the eyes. It helps to have you content (actual blog posts) on your left and your gadgets should be on your right. Because this is an age-old trick that I've learnt from how search engine robots crawl your blog. As most of the keyword are found within the content itself (i.e. your blog posts).
• Make your post. After that comes the fun part of making your first post. In your first post, introduce yourself and the nature of your blog and what you intent to share. A short one will do, just remember to be casual and not forgetting your keywords. 
• Set your blog settings. After publishing your post. You can now set your blog setting according to your preference. Make sure that your blog is set to public. This is done by selecting 'yes' for items like "Add your blog to our listings?" and "Let search engines find your blog?" under the settings tab. 

You're blog is all set. All that's left is for you to keep your blog updated with content from time to time. It can be as often as everyday or twice a week. The main idea is to be consistent about it. There you have it. Your first blog at Blogger! I will be discussing more blogging tips you can follow soon. Till then, Happy Blogging!  

Be an affiliate blogger and make money while blogging

One way to earn money by blogging is by becoming an affiliate. If you spend hours on the internet blogging, why not be an affiliate blogger and get money out of it. The concept is simple. You, as the affiliate blogger would blog as always and in addition promote a publisher's product that is related to what your blogging about. It's not like one of those MLM programs or quick-rich schemes where you have to pull out your own money and sell it out again. NO. The best thing about it is that IT'S FREE! Isn't that the best way to make money online? Plus, you don't even have to write a long sales pitch for it. That part is already done by the publisher himself.

So what do you have to do to be an affiliate?

1. Register yourself as an affiliate with the publisher. There are a lot of affiliate programs out there. Pick one that is related to your blog. Malaysian publishers usually have their own affiliate programs that you can join. But most blogger, especially from the United States put their products on Clickbank which is the largest affiliate program in the world.
2. You would be given an affiliate ID which is a link that you can put on your blog. 
3. Put this link on your blog for your readers and you're done. After that, all you have to do is wait for someone to click on it and buy.

If someone is interested in the product, the link will take him or her to the publisher's sales page and buy it from there. Once a sale is made, the publisher would track back the sale and find that it came from your blog. So, that how you get paid. Simple right?

However, the toughest part of all this is getting your readers to click on YOUR link which has YOUR ID on it. You won't get paid if they buy it from another source. Affiliate blogging is very popular so you will have a lot of competition out there. But if you know how to do it right, I believe it wouldn't be a problem for you. So it's worth a try. :)