7 Common Errors Made by WordPress Beginners and How to Avoid Them

It is well-known that WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the internet. It is a free, open source blogging and content management system (CMS) that is used by millions of websites of every kind for all sorts of reasons. As such, it is often the first & only platform that newbie bloggers and site owner’s come into contact with to start their websites, and this naturally results in many beginners making a lot of common errors.

This post walks you through 7 of the most common errors made by beginning WordPress users and how to avoid them.

Wordpress Blogging Mistakes

Seven Common Mistakes Made by WordPress Blogging Beginners

1. Sub-Folder Installation

File structure knowledge is not something one would expect a beginner to know. It is therefore a common error by newbies to install WordPress in a folder named “WordPress”. Hence, the default location of the site becomes “Yoursite.com/Wordpress” instead of “Yoursite.com”. This occurs because WordPress asks users to insert the name of the directory or leave blank to install in the Home or Root directory. Newbies often assume, quite understandably, that the script should be installed in a directory named WordPress. This is wrong, the directory field should be left blank unless you specifically want to install WordPress in a separate directory, for example, where your site runs on a different CMS platform but you want the blog to run on WordPress.

2. Failure to use Permalinks

You should know that permalinks are the WordPress URL structure and they are very important to set properly. Many beginners fail to use permalinks, thus, the default URL is set as “yoursite.com/?p=”, where postid is a number. This is not good for search engine optimization. Permalinks allow you to configure relevant and memorable URLs. Instead of having a number as the URL, you would have the article title as the URL. To configure this simply edit the post slug in the post editor to either use postname (/%postname%/), day and post name (/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) or category and post name (/%category%/%postname%/), depending on your preferences. I would recommend using post name in most cases.

3. Publishing While Still Incomplete

This is dead giveaway that you are a newbie and not ready to launch your site. Beginners often have the habit of publishing pages that are still drafts or going live with a site that is still in the process of building. The result is a bad browsing experience for site visitors. And, if you are using the blog to launch a business, publishing incomplete pages can do irreparable damage to your brand. There are a number of free plugins that can help you keep your site in “under construction” or “maintenance mode” until you are ready to go live.

4. Installing Unnecessary Plugins

In their excitement to experiment with the platform and check out all the cool things wordpress can do, newbies will often try out every plugin that appeals to them. In the process, they end up with dozens of plugins that they don’t really need. Plugins suck up site hosting resources and bloat your code, so you should only have the bare minimum that you need. Also, remember to deactivate any plugins that you aren’t using.

5. Failure to Install Updates

The WordPress platform, themes and plugin developers often release updates to improve functionality and patch security holes. Failure to install an update once it is available not only makes you lose out on new features but also exposes your site to hackers. For example, in 2007, a study found that the majority WordPress blogs were running on outdated versions exposing them to hackers.

In 2013, another study also found that 50 of the most popular plugins were vulnerable to XSS and SQL injection attacks. Therefore, anytime you see a plugin update notification, do so immediately. Luckily, updates on WordPress 3.7 and higher are done automatically so you no longer need to worry about updates to the WordPress core, but it is still a good idea to check just in case.

6. Using a Weak Password

Forget everything you have seen in hacking movies. The most common way to gain unauthorized access into an online property is by guessing the username and password. It is shocking that the vast majority of people stil use usernames and passwords that are easily guessable. A common password is “123456” and “password”. It is also common for newbies to use “Admin” or their first name as the WordPress admin username. When it comes to usernames and passwords, you have to make them complicated. Choose a username that you can remember easily but one which cannot easily be guessed by even the people who are closest to you. A good password should have a minimum of eight characters and should be a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

If you are afraid you might create a password that may be too complex for you to remember, there are many free password management tools that store all your passwords securely. You can also write it down and save it in multiple locations.

7. Failure to Backup Often

Many newbies fail to see the dangers of not backing up. They only realize the importance of backups when their site is hacked or something goes wrong with their hosting account and they lose all their content. This is despite the fact that backing up a WordPress site only takes a click or two. You can backup to your computer, use a free backup service or a commercial service. Trust me, there is nothing worse than waking up one day to find out your entire site has been lost! I’ve had it happen and I don’t wish it upon anyone. This can be avoided by backing up often.

Conclusion

WordPress is undoubtedly the easiest CMS and blogging platform to use. With its large developer community, there are plugins and themes to do just about anything, so you need not worry about learning how to code. Adhering to the points laid out above will ensure you get the most out of an excellent blogging platform without giving yourself any unnecessary headaches.

Local Blogging: Make $25k This Year With A Local Niche Blog. I Challenge You!

Hello my GR1Innovations.com friends, today my question for you is… would you like to make an extra $25,000 this year? Yeah I think that’s a pretty obvious “YES” for the vast majority of people in the world! And I must assume it’s definitely something you are interested in considering you are on a site about how to make money online right now.

You have undoubtedly learned enough from the posts on this blog to start a successful home business this year, but I know that sometimes you can get information overload, which can lead to paralysis by analysis, and hinder your efforts to make money online. It happens to us all at some point.

However, I have a blogging strategy for you that you can use right now to start making money quite fast and turn it into an easy $25k yearly income (or more) by the end of the year if you actually take action now and keep at it! No need to do much thinking or analyzing before jumping on this idea because it’s pretty simple and straightforward. Now, I’m not guaranteeing you will make that much money because results will vary depending on numerous factors from person-to-person and place-to-place, but I do know this is a solid strategy that can be replicated with a higher probability of success for many people than most other online business models. Nothing works 100% of the time for everyone, but I would bet on this working more often than not; especially when compared against even the best home business ideas being touted on the internet today. That is if you actually take my challenge and do it!

You will notice that I did not say you will “make serious cash” as I do not find $25k to be a huge amount of money, especially with the cost of living today. This isn’t money you will be able to live on but I know that many of you are barely making $100 per month from your websites right now, if you are making anything at all, so an extra $25,000 per year should be a welcome amount. Or if you are just getting started at internet marketing or blogging then I’m sure you would be ecstatic with that much extra money in your bank account in such a short amount of time. And even better if you are only needing some extra cash to get yourself out of a debt hole, buy a car, save for family vacations, build up a retirement nest egg, or pay your monthly bills. Adding another $25,000 per year to your bank account can go a long way in helping to take care of your financial future.

By now, you are probably asking yourself, what the hell do I have to do to make this extra $25k per year? Luckily enough for you, it’s really not a huge pain in the ass to make this money like it is with so many other ideas and opportunities.

So, let’s get to it…

Your local niche should be a MUST in your online home business portfolio. Local blogging is not utilized nearly enough, so it’s still largely an untapped opportunity in most areas, as well as in the vast majority of niches within a local area. So I am challenging you to start your local niche blog today, and I will tell you the type to start and why.

First, I want to tell you my view on blogging so you understand me a bit better. I believe blogging is still in its infancy, even though it seems just about everyone has a blog these days, and many people think the blogging craze might have hit its peak. I think it still has a long way to go. Think about the 10 people you know the most – your closest friends and family. How many of them have their own blogs? I bet the answer is zero, or one, maybe two, at the most. Everyone has a hobby, passion, or expertise in something that they could blog about.

The fact is that the power of bloggers has been lost on people who keep starting blogs about blogging or making money online. I know this might sound a bit ironic coming from a make money online blog but bear with me on this. Now, imagine if all those blogs instead were local niche blogs with an audience covering a specific geographical location.

I truly think local bloggers could be the most powerful media out there. A local blogger could go to a local event with his/her laptop and phone, and in a matter of hours have full description online of exactly what happened from a first-person perspective with no corporate control of the information. Imagine being a local blogger at a protest of some sort and now you are the voice that the large media outlets do not want out there. Folks, the power the blogger has is unimaginable, but for quite some time it has been wasted on trying to get to the first page of the search engines for huge topics, or trying to become social media famous.

The time has arrived for niche bloggers to show their strength, and prove to the world that the little guy can be just as powerful as the big brands and famous rich people, but the question is… Are you willing to do this? Why not make money while also making a difference in your community at the same time? Why not scream instead of just whisper? The combination of how Google (and other search engines) looks at blogs and the need for new relevant information gives us an advantage compared to every other media out there, but again, I ask you… Do you want to waste this power writing about a bunch of shit that has been beaten to death by thousands of other bloggers, or do you want to be the lone Tiger in your own jungle?

This is what I propose…

Start A Local Blog

I’m sure most people reading this have never even thought about buying a local niche domain, and blogging about your local city/area topics. But this is exactly what I’m talking about – starting a local blog. I’ve done the math and making $25,000 per year should be a breeze with your local niche blog. Now, obviously the larger your city and potential core base of readers, the easier it will be and the more opportunity you will have to increase the income, but even in a small community of 20k to 50k people it is certainly doable — In a smaller population it might not be feasible to bring in $25k but you can still earn a nice sized extra income.

So this is what you will do. Go buy a local niche domain that incorporates your city name and an obvious local news word like:

News
Times
Post
Register
Chronicle
Courier
Tribune
Journal
Herald
Sentinel
Gazette

So, for example, if the city you live in is named Urbandale then you could be “The Urbandale Post” and your domain could be UrbandalePost.com or something like that. You get the idea. Basically you are mimicking a local newspaper.

Once you have your domain registered, hosting purchased, and wordpress installed, you need to get a theme. I highly suggest getting a news or magazine theme. I feel it is very important to go with a news type of theme from the start because they will best fit with what you are trying to accomplish here and they tend to look very professional. The two I recommend are the News Pro and Magazine Pro Genesis themes from Studiopress.

You can cover all different kinds of local topics in your blog posts. Some of these could include:

General News
Nightlife
Entertainment
Businesses
Attractions
Events
Clubs
Jobs
Real Estate
Sports
Schools
Tourism
Culture
Opinion
Weather
Local Politics

…And SO MUCH more! Basically anything you want about your city or area. The topics are practically endless and there will always be something new to write about every day. You won’t ever run out of material or ideas. This is the perfect situation for a blogger and almost nobody is doing it.

Make sure you do enough research to find the perfect market to start with in your area for searches. Depending on where you live, you might want to start with a smaller sector of your city and eventually expand all the way to the entire city, add suburbs, county, and so on. If you are in a huge city then you might need to shrink it down into a smaller subset of the metro area, or just the opposite if you are in a small city. Or maybe you live close enough to a different city that would be better to do this in than your own. A little research is all you need.

Do not worry if you see a few blogs/sites covering similar topics in the same area. Look at their authority, backlinks, social profiles, followers, subscribers, and other stats/metrics, along with what they talk about. If they are a generic subject and don’t have badass stats, which will be the vast majority of them, you will still kick their asses. Even if they do have great metrics, you can still compete with them, or just blog about different topics from your local area than they do. There will always be a way to win, you just may have to switch up your strategy a bit to do it.

Therefore, don’t worry about competition in these targeted communities. Think about how many people (probably you included) are currently blogging in niches that have 100k searches a month and thousands upon thousands of sites competing against them. Look at me, I am writing about how to make money online and other topics about online business, which have insane competition! The stuff you will be writing about now will have maybe 5-20 blogs/sites for competition, so it should be a joke compared to what you are doing now.

You will not use Google Adsense or any other similar pay per click (PPC) program to monetize this blog because the cost per click (CPC) will likely be super low on average. Instead, you will make your money from local business advertising and/or generic ads from online businesses related to the topics you are discussing. You will be very focused on the advertising opportunities and selective on what you will be accepting, so you will be setting yourself up from the beginning to sell ad space on your site. This should be in the back of your mind from day one. There are almost certainly a ton of businesses in your local area, as well websites that target audiences in your area, that will be happy to pay you to advertise on your site once it starts gaining popularity.

Remember, you will be looking at your income from this local niche blog on a yearly basis, not on a daily basis. This is one of the biggest factors why people get frustrated and quit on an online business, they get too hung up on the daily stats and income. Sometimes several days or even weeks go by without me even looking at my stats or looking at my affiliate accounts to see if I made any money. I do not concentrate on making money, I concentrate on building my sites and the money comes automatically as a natural side-effect. It might take months to build a profitable site, and once you do, there may still be days where you don’t make any money from it. So, focus on the big picture and long term results, rather than what it is doing on a daily basis. Once your blog gains momentum and people start taking notice, you could go from ZERO to THOUSANDS of dollars in advertising income virtually overnight.

You will need to focus on many subjects on your local niche blog, but as I said before, it won’t be very difficult to do. You’ve got local sports, weather, entertainment, events, politics, attractions, night life, restaurants, businesses, breaking news, and MANY other topics at your disposal. I can tell you that if you write about local school sports, local weather, and local politics for example; you can get national readership just from that. Not to mention, you will become a celebrity of sorts in your local niche market. It’s not very difficult to compete with even the biggest newspapers in your city when you come equipped with internet marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing skills! They rely on their name and reputation from the old days, but you are battling them with modern digital marketing strategies, so you can win.

You won’t find many other online business ideas that you can jump into so easily and start earning money so quickly. This is about as simple as it gets! I’ve been around the internet marketing scene for a very long time and I would say this has to be one of the easiest ways to make money blogging, or any other way on the internet, so I challenge you to leave the excuses behind and get started on it right now! You could be pulling in an extra $25k by the end of the year.

How to Become a Profitable Blogger

Blogging has become a popular and highly effective way to make money online, and/or provide information to people on a subject that you are passionate about discussing. Starting a blog is a fairly easy process; however, making money from your blog takes some planning, patience, and hard work. There are a lot of broke bloggers out there and I assume you don’t want to be one of them. Making money with a blog is not nearly as easy as most people think.

So, what does it take to actually build a profitable blog?

The first thing needed to become a profitable blogger is a good subject matter, also known as a good niche. Blogs that do not have a single theme of topics tend to fail because they do not often attract a loyal following of like-minded individuals or high search engine rankings for various keywords within a niche. The best subject matter to start a blog with is something you are experienced with and have some knowledge about. Everyone has a talent so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a blog topic. The blog subject can be a hobby you have, you could start a local blog, write about something you love to do, share your expertise on a popular topic, or even blog about something you are learning about currently. For example, a new mom could write about her experiences learning how to be a parent (although this particular subject has already been done to death, it’s still a good example of a blogging niche).

Once you have your subject then you need to find a good domain and blog host. Get your domain from NameCheap. It’s far better than GoDaddy and pretty much every other registrar I’ve ever come across, and I’ve use a LOT of them. As for hosts, there are a lot of them out there but I normally use either HostGator or Bluehost. They are very popular, relatively cheap, reliable, and give you everything you will need to get your blog going.

For beginners, a free blog may be tempting, but I do NOT recommend them as your main site. There are many reasons for this and one of them is because you don’t actually own the site/blog so it can be taken away from you at any time, and it limits your options for what you can do with it. However, if you insist on taking the free route then three popular options that are easy to use and start with are blogger.com, wordpress.com and tumblr.com – although I personally prefer blogger because it’s run by Google, super easy to use, can be easily dropped if your niche doesn’t work out, and many internet marketers like to use it.

Once you are set up with a domain and host, and you have your niche picked, it is time to start writing. For a popular blog, it is recommend that you post a minimum of at least once a week, but that isn’t set in stone. You can do more or less. Quality is far more important than quantity! Also, the most important thing you can do is build up your social networks and promote your blog in various ways to get lots of inbound links to it. This will increase rankings, traffic, followers, and eventually earnings.

Now, as soon as the content is flowing and you are starting to get a good following, it is time to monetize your blog. Making money blogging entails a variety of things. The three most popular revenue streams are Adsense, affiliate marketing, and selling advertising.

Affiliate links are a form of advertising within your blog. This is typically done in two ways, through a banner ad or direct links from words in the text of your blog. Adsense is a Google advertising product that is code inserted into your blog allowing Google to link websites into your blog based upon the content and theme of the blog. Clickbank and Commission Junction are two of the most popular affiliate companies on the web today. Their client lists include many popular retailers. Selling advertising spots is pretty self-explanatory. Basically you just allow other website owners and businesses in related niches to pay you for ads on your blog.

Making money blogging is easy in terms of the technology used and income streams available. Anyone who feels comfortable in front of a computer writing about a certain topic should have no problem developing a good blog. The keys to making money blogging are picking a profitable niche, providing high quality content, building a following, and getting enough backlinks to attain high search engine rankings.

Put it all together an you will have yourself a profitable blog. You can then collect the money monthly or flip your blog for a large one time profit.

Blog, Blog, Blog, All Day Long…

…Blog, Blog, Blog while I sing this song… I’m gonna write this post, I’m gonna publish it online… Then I’ll start another, but I don’t know why! (read that as if you were singing it)

Does that pretty much sum up your daily blogging habits? Are you one of those bloggers who thinks you need to be constantly updating your blog as much as humanly possible? If so, I want you to sit back in your chair right now and really think about why you feel the need to write 10 blog posts every day, even if you really don’t have anything worthwhile to say.

Contrary to what you may have been told before, there really is no need to update your blog numerous times per day. In fact, you don’t even need to update your blog once per day! It is much better to write one or two long, informative, useful posts each month than it is to write a bunch of worthless posts every day just for the sake of doing it.

Just think about how much less stressful your life would be if you weren’t constantly thinking about how you need to write a new blog post or trying to think of something to say. Write higher quality posts less often and you will actually be doing yourself and your readers a favor. Heck, you will probably even gain more readers by doing this.

Remember quality is always better than quantity!

Happy blogging ;)

Three Easy Ways to Make Money Blogging

It’s no secret that blogging has become one of the best ways to make money online in recent years, and will probably continue that way for a very long time. Blogs are free or cheap to start, fairly simple to set up, easy to maintain, and offer a great platform for sharing information with the world. Many people blog just for fun but most people these days want at least some profit from their blogging efforts. You can create multiple streams of income with your blog and doing so is probably easier than you might think.

Here are three simple ways to make money blogging:

1) Contextual Advertising

Your blog is probably already filled with links leading to other sites, blogs, forums, social media, and wherever else — right? What if you could earn money every time someone clicked on a link on your blog? That’s what contextual advertising programs can offer you.

You would have to sign up to the program (almost always free) and install some code on the pages of your blog where you want the ad blocks to appear. When visitors click on one of those links, you earn anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars per click.

Some of the more popular contextual ad programs are Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Kontera, and Text Link Ads — but there are many more for you to choose from. Just do some searching if you want more options.

2) Affiliate Marketing

There are thousands upon thousands of affiliate programs on the internet for just about any topic you can imagine and you can make money blogging by promoting them in your sidebar, header, footer, or within your posts. No matter the subject of your blog, there are probably several affiliate products that you can promote for profit. Think about ebooks, online courses, products, downloads, memberships, and services that your visitors may find valuable. Then search for affiliate programs that offer them for you to promote.

Make sure you choose targeted products and services that related to the topics of your blog – don’t plaster a bunch of unrelated ads all over your blog because if you do chances are you won’t earn any money from them. Instead, offer products and services that you know your visitors would be interested in. That will boost your conversion rate and greatly increase your earnings.

Search for compatible digital goods on Clickbank, Amazon, PayDotCom, Shareasale, Commission Junction, and numerous other affiliate networks.

3) Physical Products

You don’t have to stop at digital products; people buy plenty of physical products online too. You could join programs to promote everything from household goods, herbal supplements, beauty products, electronics, DVD movies, music CDs – and much more. Again, it’s important to target these offers to your visitors; promote things you know they already have an interest in because they are reading your blog.

Keep in mind that the amount of traffic your blog gets will likely determine the amount of money you can generate from it. When your blog is brand new you may not have the traffic needed to generate a lot of income, but that should keep increasing the more established your blog gets over time through your marketing efforts. Then, you should be able to earn money from your blog using the methods above and many others.

Blogging Smartly To Make Money On The Internet

There are 2 ways to gain popularity in the blogosphere. One way is being social, and the other is having high SERPs. The social way requires you to spend time socializing with other bloggers (mostly A-list bloggers wannabes). To be social with other bloggers, you have to have a social network profile such as facebook or twitter. There is also digg, stumbleupon and other social bookmarking networks. I don’t really regard them as a social media. I see them as a media to game the search engines mostly Google. It is social because you have to contact other people to digg or stumble your articles, blog or post. And those people would likely want a reciprocal digg or stumble. The other way of being social is commenting on blogs. From my post on how to increase your page rank, commenting on other blogs help to increase your backlinks. It also helps to get you traffic if you make a thoughtful comment.

If you are not on the social media group, then you are probably trying to use SEO to gain popularity. The SEO bloggers just care about their backlinks. They just want their backlinks to have their desired keywords. For this to be possible, they do mostly article marketing and personal bookmarking. I said personal because they don’t contact other people to bookmark their article. They also do blog commenting, but the blog must be dofollow blog.

In my opinion, I prefer using SEO to gain popularity. My main goal online is to make money on the internet. The only thing I like doing as other social bloggers is reading other blogs. I love reading blogs that contains blogging tips. I read other blogs to get ideas on what to write about when I ask bloggers if I can guest post on their blogs. When I read the blogging tips blogs, I try to think about how I can incorporate make money into the guest article, so that it can be relevant to this blog. Also, as I read other blogs, I usually come across blogs that are dofollow. When I see that I make sure that I leave a comment on that blog with my anchor text, and I either bookmark the blog or save the link in my list of dofollow blogs. I prefer building my own dofollow list because most of the list on forums or on blogs are popular, meaning that the blog will be well moderated to prevent spam.

I also like commenting on the unpopular dofollow blog so that I can be on the top commenter list. This is possible because not many people know a lot about the blog. So if I drop 2 comments and the comments are approved, I would be on the list.

I also like reading other blogs to know what is going on such as how much this blogger made last month or who has found a new way to increase their search engine ranking. I know that the group of bloggers that are focused on search engine ranking would say that I am wasting my time on other blogs because it doesn’t help me to make money on the internet. I would tell them, it is not really true. I am reading other blogs to get ideas about how to get backlinks to my blog, and that would increase my SERPS, thereby making me money. I am not looking to become popular. And moreover, I usually a reader and doer and not just a reader.

Optimize Your Comments On Blogs

Leaving comments on other blogs is one way of getting backlinks and traffic to your own blog, and it’s super easy to do, which is why it is often exploited by spammers and other deceitful people. So you have to be careful to closely moderate the comments on your blog(s) and when you are leaving comments on other blogs make sure you are leaving something that is well thought out, useful, and relevant to the topic.

If you leave useful comments, you would not only get backlinks, but you can even get targeted traffic to your blog. It is important to leave relevant comments on blogs that add something legitimate to the discussion so that your comments will be approved on the blog to achieve the backlinks and traffic. If you just post comments like “nice tips” or “This is an interesting article” or you just try to leave your links — the blog owner will probably not approve your comments.

I have when someone leaves misleading or vague comments because it is annoying and adds nothing of value to my posts. I once had a commenter that left a comment that said that I have an interesting blog and he just subscribed to my feed. I was happy with that comment because someone just subscribed to my feed without me telling the person to subscribe. The next day, I saw the same exact comment on another one of my blogs. I don’t know how he found that blog, but I assume he probably uses some sort of automated tool so post comments on hundreds of blogs that he ever actually reads. When I saw that comment, I knew that I was deceived. I always moderate the comments on my blog posts, so I deleted his comment on this blog and on the other blog.

If you want to receive the benefits of commenting, you should leave useful comments. By useful comments, I mean that you should read the blog post and comment accordingly. I can tell by reading someone’s comment if the person read or did not read a blog post. Don’t let people call you a spammer because spammers don’t read blog posts. They just copy and paste the same words on every blog they come across. If you leave useful comments, you will attract other blog readers to your blog. The readers would be curious about what your blog is about and what type of posts do you have on your blog since you are leaving quality comments on other posts they read. If you have what they are looking for, they might become regular readers and might subscribe to your feed, or buy from you.

The Benefits of Spending Time In Forums

The forums I am specifying are webmaster forums. Forums is a place where you can learn a lot of things. I like forums because you would get immediate answer from people that are online in the forum and know the answer to your question. The benefits of spending time in forums are

1. Getting Knowledge – Every newbie should spend their time on forums because there would be a lot of people over there to help them out. Forums are better than blogs because it enables people to exchange ideas better than blogs. Blogs are personal, so the blog owner might not publish any contradicting ideas on his blog.

2. Blog Post Ideas – If you have a blog in the blogging niche and you run out of ideas, I would encourage you to visit forums to ideas from forums. Write blog posts that answer newbies questions.

3. Drive Traffic to Your Blog – After answering newbies questions in your blog post, you can post the URL of blog post on any thread telling newbies to visit this link if they want to learn more about that issue.

4. Make Money – You can make money by advertising your affiliate links or sell your ebook. If you are a programmer, you can build websites template to sell or assist others with their project for a fee. You can also be a freelancer by doing forum posting or blogs commenting.

5. Know Other Bloggers and Blogs – You can also make friends with other bloggers that you can share ideas with or they can help you in your link building campaign. You can also visit other blogs where you can learn more about blogging or what is going on in the blogosphere.

6. Exchange Links – Forums enable you to exchange links with other webmaster. Remember, to get to the top of the first page on Google, you need backlinks. Exchanging links would enable you to be on the top.

Tips On How You Can Increase Your Rankings

In my previous post about how to increase your page rank, I just wrote about using dofollow commenting and a little bit of directory submission. My purpose of that post was to write about how to do dofollow commenting to increase your page rank. In retrospect, that should have been the title of that post.

From my experience and questions I have asked other webmasters, you can increase your search engine rankings by:

1. Blog Commenting – You would comment on blogs that are related to yours. Some blogs require a certain amount of comments before the blog dofollow the commenter. Anytime, you drop a comment, go back to the blog and make sure your comment is do follow. If not, continue dropping comments till it is do follow.

2. Directories – Submit your site to directories that have a PR. Start submitting your site with the highest PR directories you know of. If you have money, it is better to do paid submission. This shows that the directory owner doesn’t allow spam sites in the directory.

3. Link Exchanges – Exchange links with sites that have a higher PR. As in biology, diffusion occurs from a region of concentration to a region of lower concentration. When you exchange with a higher PR site, the site would leak some page rank juice to you. Make sure your link is dofollow on the blog. But don’t too have hopes, the higher PR blog might lose its PR on the next update.

4. Internal Linking – If you link to your other post pages, you can pass some PR juice to the pages.

5. Guest Blogging – You can blog for other sites in your niche. You are helping them out by giving them unique content for their site and in exchange for your help, you will get a link back to your website in the post.

Another tip is if you can get other bloggers to link to you in their post page. There are 2 ways which this can happen. One is by your control and the other is not by your control. The one that is by your control, you can do it by looking for blogs that allow guest posts, holding a contest or exchanging articles with other bloggers. The one that is not by your control is by writing quality content, by being controversial, and by giving useful information and resources to other bloggers.