I came across a great post today about coming up with new things to blog about when you get stuck or run out of ideas, and I really wanted to share it with you. Check out 11 Fail-Proof Blog Post Ideas.
You can also check out this slideshow about What to blog about when you've run out of ideas HERE.
I'd also like to add the following idea generation techniques to the list:
1) Read other blogs in your niche to see what they're writing about. Of course you should never plagiarize, but reading other blogs might spark an idea you haven't thought about before, or you may be able to expand on an idea another blogger has already written about, but perhaps hasn't covered as thoroughly as they could have.
2) Write about any relevant news in your niche. Back to the time tested dog blog: If you're writing a blog about dogs, then go to Yahoo News or MSN news and search out news about dogs. You might find that you enjoy writing about that latest dog show, the latest dog food recall, or about that dog with a fifth leg that was just born. It will be interesting to readers, and it's a great fail-safe for when you've run out of ideas.
Don't forget to check out our other helpful post on this topic HERE.
What do you think? Are there techniques you use when you run out of ideas? Shout them out in a comment below to help others who need a little inspiration!
So I'll bet you're wondering why you'd want to scare away all of your visitors, right? Well, no, you probably aren't, and there's no good reason to want to. You want them to come in, relax, and stay a while. Let's have a gander at some things we shouldn't do then if we want to keep our readers.
1) Pop-ups
Pop up ads are like shoving a blood-sucking vampire into the face of someone who's just walked in your door. Even if the pop-up is just asking visitors to subscribe, they are an irritation that will make visitors not want to come back. Who wants to close out a popup every time they visit your blog?
2) Ad Viruses
For this one lets think back to websites like surfthechannel (if you ever went there). Surfthechannel was a website that let you watch TV and movies for free. The issue: they sold advertising space to people who were lacing their ads with viruses. So every time a visitor went into the site and the advertisement loaded, a virus was downloaded to the user's computer. Lesson for bloggers: Be careful of who your ad space goes to. Google Adsense and Chikita are two good advertising companies you can trust, but you will need to be wary if you sell ad space to individuals.
3) Linking to Questionable Sites
This is almost the same as point number two. Be sure that if you link to another website or article in a post that you thoroughly check the site out to make sure that a) they aren't fraudulent, b) their site doesn't have any viruses c) the ads on their site don't have any viruses. If you send people to sites that are fraudulent or give them viruses, they're not going to come back to see where else you might send them.
4) Lack of Content
We've talked about what a lack of content can do to your site before... it can kill it, and let's face it, who wants to walk in on a murder scene? People are visiting your site looking for good content, and probably lots of it. If they come in and see only a few posts, they're going to hit the back button.
5) Trying to Sell Something That Looks Fraudulent
How many of you have stumbled across a site that looks crisp and clean, but the only thing on the site is an attempt to sell you somebody's secret way to make millions of dollars? People are generally very quick to back away from anything that looks too good to be true. Lesson: If you're selling something legitimate, then don't oversell your product, and sell it through a legitimate selling platform like Amazon or Zazzle.
6) Websites That Aren't User-Friendly
The basic concept of web design is that your website needs to be user friendly and be easy to navigate. People should be able to find what they need in just a few clicks. If you frustrate your visitors by writing information they can't even navigate to, then they won't be coming back.
7) Music
Back in the early days of the internet, somebody somewhere thought it would be a cute idea to put music on their website so that people could listen to that cute little song that made you think of kittens while you browsed their page. And then someone thought that they should put heavy metal on their goth site, and another person wanted music on their site too. But what if your visitors don't want to hear the type of music you stuck on your site? What if they're sitting in bed in the middle of the night next to a sleeping spouse, and your page starts blaring death metal at top volume unexpectedly? Music on your site: don't do it!
8) Profane Content
Ok, so maybe you have a site dedicated to obscene photos or language. If so, then ignore this point. But if you're a regular blogger like most of us are, then keep in mind that the average user doesn't want to see obscene pictures or bad language (and neither do most advertising companies like Adsense or Chikita). Be careful, you may not be cursing or posting bad pictures, but what about your advertisers? This is the same as advertisers putting viruses in their ads. You have to be wary of what ads are going on your site, or you may come in one day to see a naked pic of some guy or girl there in your sidebar or between your posts.
9) Loud Advertisements
It seems that somehow we keep coming back around to advertisements on your blog. Some of the ads I hate the most are the ones that are a video that starts playing a few seconds after you enter a site. This goes right with point 7. If visitors don't want automatic music on a site, they don't want noisy ads either.
While I'm sure there are a lot more things that webmasters can do to scare away all of their visitors, these are some of the top ways to get the job done. What do you think? What are some things that chase you away from a website? Let us know in a comment below, and don't forget to subscribe for more great tips on building your blog!
So, your blog is set up, you have some great content, the tags are set on your posts, and now you want to start making some money? What an excellent idea!
There are many ways to make money from your blog, and we will cover several of them in other posts, but for now we'll start with Google Adsense, the most basic and easy way to start making money from your blog.
Why is adsense the best and easiest when using blogger? Well, for starters Google and Blogger are basically the same company now, so Google adsense is already integrated into blogger and ready to use. All you have to do is make an adsense account, and enable it on your blog.
Check out this quick video to get a brief overview of what Adsense is and how it works:
1) Log into your blogger dashboard. Go to the link or tab labeled "Monetize." You will see a button that says, 'Sign up for Adsense'. Click it and follow the instructions to sign up for Google Adsense.
Google Adsense may seem complicated at first, but Adsense has a lot of great tutorials and information for you to read through that would be pointless for me to reproduce here. I will tell you some things that might be harder to find however.
2) After you make about $10 you'll need to verify your phone number. There's a place on the google adsense site where you can click and google will call you and an automated voice will give you a number to punch in. If you don't do this all of your ads will mysteriously disappear from your blog. This is one of those things I had to figure out the hard way.
3) Google adsense will not pay you until your balance reaches $100 or more. That may seem like a lot, especially if you're only making a few dollars a month (if that, which is normal for the first few months you put adsense on your blog). But once you get decent traffic and have 100 or more articles, you'll be making some decent money. Some bloggers make enough to quit their jobs, but keep in mind they devote their work day to their blog instead of going to a day job, so they put a lot of work into their blogs.
4) In order to get paid by Adsense you have to give them your tax information, select a payment method (check or direct deposit into a verified bank account), and input a pin # they will send you in the mail (which verifies that you live at the address you gave them). No worries though, Google is a trustworthy site and will not use or sell your information to anyone.
5) Something very important you must do on every single blog you intend to use adsense on is put up a privacy policy. I usually do this in a post and then link to the post in a widget (see the Build Your Blog page). Widgets appear on every single page, therefor the privacy policy link will appear on every single page. Ads will only display on pages you have a link to your privacy policy on.
Click HERE to view the generic adsense friendly privacy policy used on this site. Feel free to copy and paste the policy for your site from THIS PAGE HERE. Be sure to change all the url's to your own site's url.
6) Google Adsense has a pretty extensive list of rules for what types of sites they will allow their ads to appear on, as well as how you're allowed to use the ads on your site. It would be wise to take a look at those rules on the Google Adsense page, or you could find yourself with money in your account that they take away because you violated their terms of service. It's very important to know the rules and follow them.
For instance, you cannot click on your own ads, and you cannot solicit clicks. This means you can't ask people to click, and you can't ask people to 'visit the sponsors' on your site, because these would be clicks that are worth nothing to the people who purchased the ads in the first place. Google wants to direct people who are genuinely interested in the products to the correct ads so that the ad purchasers get the most for their money. Asking people to click ads so you can get money would be wrong because it would mean the ad purchaser will have wasted money because they paid for clicks that didn't result in purchases etc.
7) You can only place three adsense units on your blog. Generally a good placement is one in the sidebar, one in between posts, and one somewhere else like up by the blog title. Some people put all three units in the sidebar or between posts. A good thing to remember is that you don't want to overwhelm your visitors with ads or they probably won't come back. Your visitors aren't coming to your site looking for ads, they're coming looking for real content that you're providing them, so don't overwhelm them with ads.
8) You may want to try placing ads in certain positions for a few months, and then moving the ads to new positions for a few months to see which positions generate more revenue for you. It's a test and retest process that will take some time to get just right. It's good to take a critical look at your site or have a friend do it and see where the eyes go to first. If the eyes are immediately drawn to the left, then you may not want to put ads on the right, at least not at the top of the page. There are numerous websites out there explaining good ad placement technique, and I won't go into it here more than I already have.
9) You can keep track of your earnings by day, week, month, or all time by going back to your 'Monetize' page on your blog. It's always nice to log in and see you've made a few cents, or a few dollars. Money is money, and it will build up until you have enough to cash out.
Be sure to check out our Build Your Blog and Get Traffic sections to learn more about getting traffic to your site so that you can get eyes viewing those ads on your site and get some revenue!
Also don't forget to subscribe for more great information on monetizing your blog!
Once your blog is set up, you can begin posting articles on it and build up your content (see the section on this site titled 'Build Your Blog.' In this post we will just be covering the basics of the Posting editor and how to use it.
The following is an image from Google images that shows the posting editor in use on a blog.
As you can see you access it from logging into your blogger dashboard, and clicking 'Posting' or 'New Post'.
Setting up the basic blog and blog settings can be a bore. Here's where we start to get into the fun part, or at least I think so.
In this post we're going to discuss the basic way that your blog looks. We'll get into layout in a later post.
1) Log into your blogger dashboard if you're not already logged in. Click your blog. Look in the top right hand corner of your blog. There should be a link that says, "Design". Click on it. Now you're in your blog design area.
