Why Bloggers Need a Personality

By know most people have heard the phrase 'content is king' and all that jargon about the importance of creating original and unique content. The 'business' reason for this is that content forms the basis of SEO. In short it does this by providing material for the search engines spiders to crawl and a way to categorise and rank a site. Secondly good content creates linkbacks; this sort of content has become known as 'linkbait' and is a productive and honest to make your site popular. My example of this is Maki from DoshDosh who has been cranking out post after quality post, which has created numerous linkbacks and brought popularity to DoshDosh.

So what does having a personality have to do with it?
In this day and age it is very hard to find a totally unique original topic that has a demand for it. This means bloggers have to develop new ways to make their site stand out from the competition. One of the easiest way to do this is to be honest and speak your mind. You don't have to follow down this line of thought very far to see why it works. Whatever your beliefs about life, the universe and blogging, everyone has experienced something different in their lives which makes their views unique.

Everyone has clicked on different pages on the internet and read different articles about blogging (well at least all bloggers have). This means all our views are going to be slightly different! My example of this is Kumiko from Kumiko's Cash Quest. She is gradually becoming known for writing quirky posts that are never quite what people expect. It is important to remember at this stage that repeatedly writing controversial posts isn't going to get you anywhere. Providing you have read enough about any given subject you will have formed a view of your own and there will be no reason to exaggerate your views.

A wise blogger (I can't remember who) once said that there are two paths to becoming a successful blogger. Either, by becoming an expert in your niche, or by becoming a well-known personality. My example of this is John Chow. The chances are that if you read this blog you also read JohnChow.com. This is because he has become both and expert in his niche (making money online - ish) and he is a bit of a celebrity. He shows what happens in the rare occasion someone manages both.

There are other added bonuses of 'having a personality'. These include the worship and fan mail of readers as well as hate mail and devastating spam attacks. Hate mail is a bonus simply because it ads some excitement to what at times can be a (dare it say it) boring profession of blogging. Perhaps I am being naive having never experienced hate mail, buy you know what they say, don't knock it till you've tried it.

Blog Review: Earners blog

Stuart, over at Earners blog has offered a John Chow style 'Review my blog and get a 'free' linkback'; but this time there’s a twist. The best review of Earners Blog will also receive $25 via Paypal & an SEO Audit of their website with recommendations & thoughts.

I'm in!

Earners blog is one of the many sites (like this one) about making money online. It's also similar to this blog because it is also a top blog in it's niche :p. Earners blog has some great down-to-earth posts that we can all learn a little from. Stewart has been in the Online Marketing Industry for over 4 years currently works for one of the Fastest Growing SEO Companies in the World. This means he has knoweldge!.

Before writing this review I thought I should really get stuck into Earners blog so I browsed around and read a lot of the articles. These are the three most useful ones in my opinion, so if you read anything today, read these.

- Walkthough Affiliate Marketing
- Good Internal Linking Increases SE Rankings
- Do You Squidoo? (I will be checking out Squidoo myself soon).

Earners blog has quite a casual feel to it. Each post is summarised and you decide whether to 'continue reading' or not. I find my self 'picking and choosing' which posts I want to read more freely, because normally I would just read the title and make a decision 'to read or not to read - that is the question. With this layout however I can have a dabble in the post and make a more informed decision.


All in all, Earners blog has numerous posts about Affiliate marketing, Social Networking and AdSense that we all want to know about. A couple of the posts seem like they end without teaching me what I was expecting to learn, but generally this is a great site, so check out those links in list above.

Coming up: - Squidoo Stuff and a look at the pros and cons of traffic exchange programs.

8 Simple Rules for...Successful Blogging!

They are in order of importance, 1 being the most important.

1. - - --Create good content to act as what everyone has been calling 'linkbait'. This can be done a number of ways:

a) By saying something controversial. This can only be 'used' a few times as it gets old after a while. This is a way of grabbing the attention you deserve and is especially effective if it is the Title of the post. Of course the main content must stand up to the expectations that the controversial title brings.

b) Say something Useful. Your readers are human beings and they want to experience pleasure, be it through reading an entertaining/controversial article, or by learning a valuable lesson. You can think of learning is an investment in future pleasure. I.E. preparation. If your content is so useful that they cannot stop themselves using it then you have succeeded. They may reciprocate with an encouraging comment, a digg/vote or maybe even a link back if they refer to your article.

c) Say something inspiring and LEAD BY EXAMPLE. People don't want to hear that they are 'never going to make it'. People like to hear success stores and they need role models. I have mentioned John Chow as mine and Darren Rowse. This does not mean lie to people about your earnings, but you need to be genuinely ambitious and believe in yourself.

As a rule of thumb, be specific, original, get the grit and use keywords in your articles to make Google smile on you.

I often find it useful to think about content this way:

Thousands of people are going to read what your write (over time). Imagine reading out your article aloud to all of them (if you are shy then use the old trick of imagining them being naked). Would you be proud of what you said? Would they applaud you? Of course you would write in a slightly different style if reading aloud, but otherwise that analogy is sound.

What good content achieves:
- A sense of pride in your blog.
- Keeps readers coming back
- Acts as 'linkbait' to generate inbound links
- Is good for SEO (from the keywords and the linkbacks
- Trust from your readers.

I.E. Good content creates traffic.

2. Submit your site to the major Search engines, such as Google, MSN, DMOZ. They are free but can take some time to list your site so submit it early on. (Especially DMOZ which can take FOR EVER!). The benefits of this are obvious, Google organic searches provides over half of this blogs traffic. Organic Google is also more likely to click on ads unlike Digg traffic which is ‘trained’ not to.

3. Exchange links with sites relevant to your niche and that have more inbound links than your own. This is especially important in the early stages, just to get your blog of the ground. It helps SEO, traffic and all that, because each inbound link is viewed as a 'vote of confidence' in the eyes of the search engines.

4. Submit your blog to ranking systems such as Technorati and Spicypage.

Benefits:
- Useful for your own knowledge about the number of inbound links your blog has.
- Useful for advertising your blog, I.e. gives you the ability to state your blogs rank.
- Great for networking. I used the Technorati searches to find blogs in my own niche which were also slightly more popular. Then I had a look at those blogs, learnt from them myself and requested a link exchange. Spicypage is a great place to do much the same thing, only it is much smaller. Note: Social Networking sites like Mylot can be used in a similar way to make contacts online and promote your blog.

5. Monetise your blog with Ads. These could be with Google AdSense ads orText Link Ads among others. People often make the mistake of doing this first in the desperate hope of getting a couple of clicks. This is pointless. Unless you have a decent amount of quality content your blog will appear to be a sleazy MFA site (made for AdSense) which will have a negative effect on traffic.

6. Join a few trustworthy affiliate programs such as AGLOCO and Bestcashrewards. These will earn you extra income and they give you something else to blog about, although you shouldn’t write about your affiliate programs too often.

7. Submit your better posts to article directories like Digg, and Go Articles and isnare. Don't forget to leave information about yourself and a link to your blog where allowed. Digg is a little different; it is focuses on news about technology, politics, business and gaming so there is not point in going through your old posts and submitting a news post that you write a year ago to digg.

8. Submit your site to niche/smaller directories. This brings traffic directly from the directory as well as giving a helping hand in SEO for the major search engines.

That was an abnormally long post for me. If you made it this far I succeeded!