The Importance of Updating Your Blog Often

What is the importance of updating your blog often? Some might see no value in it; and might instead create multiple blogs, each of which they attend to for only minutes each week. Other blog owners see the importance of updating your blog often—and will spend 3-4 hours each day updating their blogs with news and ideas.

From both a technical marketing viewpoint and a social marketing viewpoint, updating your blog often is one of the best ways to maintain a constant stream of traffic.

From a technical viewpoint, new and unique content makes your blog look better to search engine spiders; this, in turn, gets your blog ranked higher. Additionally, from a technical viewpoint, updating your blog more frequently will allow you to get pings accepted more frequently, which means your blog will spend more time on the front page of blog directories.

The importance of updating your blog often also comes into play if you wish to integrate extensive social marketing into your overall blog marketing plan. Most people don’t realize this, but marketing is often all about the human connections.

You don’t need to be a technical wizard if you forget about profits for a few minutes and instead concentrate on making human connections with other blog owners who share similar interests. One of the best ways to achieve this is by keeping an updated blog, which will give other bloggers the incentive to drop by each day, post new comments on your blog, and refer their own blog readers to your blog. The importance of updating your blog often is crucial.

And there you have it: the importance of updating your blog often is paramount to success. Whether your goal is to use your blog for social marketing or technical marketing, you will have to update it often with unique and interesting content if you want to build an atmosphere that encourages return visits.

What is RSS?

What is RSS? RSS stands for more than one thing. Usually, RSS stands for “really simply syndication,” but it can also mean “rich site summary,” or “RDF site summary” — RDF standing for “resource description framework.” That answers the question of what is RSS, but what can it do?

What is RSS in the context of really simple syndication? It is a tool that allows sites to give a quick summary of important links and descriptions in XML format. This essentially allows them to syndicate their content by allowing other blog owners and webmasters to use this summary as part of a list of summaries on a specific topic.

Blogmasters and webmasters collect these various summaries with something called a feed aggregator or a feed reader. Rather than asking “what is RSS?” this tool will ask “where is RSS” — and then find it. An aggregator finds RSS feeds to aggregate from selected large sites – such as Yahoo and MSN – and selected smaller sites, such as hand-picked personal blogs and news sites.

The blogmasters and webmasters then take the script generated from the aggregator and insert it into their blogs. This then creates an RSS feed that automatically pulls news items and blog posts whenever they appear. Whenever the blog or site page is refreshed, it will display the latest items.

This is good for two reasons. If you use your own RSS feed, you can get your content syndicated across the Internet without actually paying to submit dozens of press releases and contact dozens of blog owners and webmasters.

Additionally, using RSS feeds is good if you own a blog and want to add fresh content. This will allow you to constantly put new content links and summaries on your blog without spending the time to hunt around for related information. All you will have to do is select a feed aggregator and select a potential feeds from a list of news sites and authority blogs. Additionally, you will be able to input your own selections, allowing you to create custom feeds.

So what is RSS? RSS is a simple way in which to drive traffic to your blog and to display summaries of other blogs.

How to Create Your Own Blog Account

Creating your own blog account is relatively easy, especially when compared to building a website. Even if you’re using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor to build a simple website, you will still have to design every page, purchase a domain and hosting, and figure out how to upload your work to your site. This is not so with a blog. If you create your own blog account with with a large blog network, you will actually be able to do it for free and without worry that you wont be able to figure out how to upload new pages.

So how do you go about creating your own blog account? You should start by selecting the type of blog you wish to create. For instance, are you using blogs to promote your business or for to chronicle your daily life? This will affect how you go about creating your own blog account.

If you’re using a blog to chronicle your daily life, you may want to create an account with a network such as Myspace. Myspace will give you a simple means to design your blog, to update it, and to communicate with other network users. Creating your own blog account with Myspace is actually completely free; and you wont actually have to host the blog yourself. Instead, Myspace will host it on their own network and will also provide you with all the tools you need to update it.

If you’re creating your own blog account simply to promote your business, you may want to open an account with Google Blogger—especially if you do not own a website. Upon creating your own blog account, Blogger will allow you to customize the template and the subdomain you use to display your blog. If you’re trying to target a specific keyphrase with your blog, you may want to use that exact keyphrase as the subdomain.

Once you have completed this process, you will want to spend some time searching through Blogger’s various options. For instance, to optimize your blog completely, you will want to consider how many posts you display on each page and whether or not you will allow comments.

What You Need to Start a Blog

Many people ask what you need to get started in order to make a profitable blog. The answer is nothing, provided that your only goal is to spend no money at all. Now, if you want higher returns and if you have the money to spend, the answer to “what you need to get started” might several hundred dollars to invest in tools that could make your climb to the top faster and smoother.

One of the most important things you will need to get started is some form of keyword research tool or database. Currently, there are dozens of these products on the market, which range in price from free to around $500. The most popular tool on the market is probably WordTracker, which offers a limited trial version for free—or a fully-functional version for $7.50/day or $45/mo. This will allow you to find out which keywords are most profitable and have a reasonable demand (aggregate search)/supply (aggregate site) rating.

Other than a keyphrase tool, the answers to the “what you need to get started” question will usually depend on the project. For instance, if you’re hosting a blog and you want to monetize it with Adsense, you may want to add a thumnail generator to your “what you need to get started” list. A thumnail generator will create code that, when inserted in your blog, will generate scraped-thumnail pictures from related searches on Google images—and will place them next to your contextual ads, increasing the click-thru rate.

In contrast, if you’re planning to sell your own products, you may want to add an autoresponder to your “what you need to get started” list. An autoresponder will allow you to greatly improve your conversion rate by allow you to put all follow-up emails on autopilot, rather than doing them personally or strictly using your salespage.

So what exactly do you need to to get started? Nothing. You can create a profitable blog without paying a cent, but if you want to take advantage of automating tools to further improve your profitability and efficiency, you will have to purchase at least a few tools.

Choosing a Popular and Profitable Theme For Your Blog

Choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog will determine whether or not you are able to stay in business for an extended period of time. While narrowing down the theme from a list of themes can be a fairly scientific process, choosing the themes on that list to begin with is considerably more experential.

If you’re planning to market your own products, you may want to start by finding a need, rather than looking at data. For instance, do you know of a pressing need that many people have? Could you provide some sort of substantive solution to that need? If so, would a blog be the appropriate means though which to provide that solution? Something might come to mind immediately, but if it doesn’t, you can proceed with data-analysis as a means of choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog.

You can start by using a program like WordTracker to begin choosing a popular and profitable theme. WordTracker will allow you to view a list of the 100 or 1000 most searched topics on the Internet.

You can then break this list down into smaller pieces. For instance, if number 10 on the list is “cars” and you have some sort of an interest in cars, you can then take the keyphrase “cars” and search for it on Wordtracker using overture pay-per-click results and demand/supply analysis called “KEI.”

This will tell you two things: it will tell you approximately how hard it is to penetrate your niche; and it will tell you roughly how much money people are making in your niche. For instance, if pay-per-click amounts are high and have a lot of bid competition, that means that people are making a lot of money in your niche, which is why they are purchasing advertising for large sums of money per click. It also means that you can potentially make a lot of money for serving ads for these advertisers via Adsense and YPN.

And there you have it: through data-analysis and need-analysis, you can begin the process of choosing a popular and profitable theme for your blog. If the topic you select is popular, has a good KEI rating, and has a high PPC rating, you know you have a winner.

Planning Your Blogging Profit Plan

Planning your blogging profit plan is crucial part of the construction of any monetized blog. But what does it usually involve? Generally, planning your blogging profit plan consists of two things: working on a traffic generation plan and improving conversion rates.

When planning your blogging profit plan, you may want to work on the conversion side first. If you begin sending traffic to your blog before it is monetized properly, your conversion rates could be too low to earn a significant return on your investment; this is especially true if you are paying for traffic from pay-per-click sources, such as Adwords.

One important thing you must consider when planning your blogging profit plan is how you can improve the quality of your copywriting. If you do not feel that you have the expertise or writing skills to convince someone to buy your product, you may want to hire someone to write your salespage for you.

With the recent boom in freelancing markets, you should be able to find a talented copywriter on elance.com or guru.com for a relatively low price per word or page. If your copy is bad, your conversion rate will also be bad, which means you are wasting traffic.

Additionally, you should consider including pre-selling tactics while planning your blog profit plan. You may want to include such pre-selling methods as giveaways, cash prizes, or some other form of interaction for visitors.

The other important part to consider while planning your blog profit plan is your traffic generation methods. No matter what the topic of your blog, you generally have five basic traffic generation methods: pay-per-click programs, which allow you to pay for targeted traffic; natural search engine traffic, which you can build by optimizing onpage and offpage factors; link-based traffic, which you can build by purchasing links from link brokers; list marketing traffic, which you can build by purchasing solo ads from list-owners; and repeat traffic, which you can build by giving visitors a reason to return and by persuading them to bookmark your site.

All things being equal, you must concentrate on traffic generation and conversion rates while planning your blogging profit plan.

How to Monetize Your Blogs

Other than direct sales and adsense, are there any other methods you can make money from using your blog? Yes, there are several, but three are usually used more often than others: 1) lead generation; 2) affiliate marketing; and 3) newsletter subscriptions.

Of all the other methods you can make money from with your blog, lead generation may be the most promising. This is an especially true if the market your blog is in is related to anything financial. Mortage and refinance leads are especially good, as they bring in tiered commissions. Your first commission will come when you generate the initial lead – which will simple entail getting someone to fill out a completely free form; this lead will earn you anywhere from $3 to $12. If this lead then goes on to refinance her home with the company in question, you could earn a windfall of several hundreds or several thousands of dollars.

The other methods you can make money from with your blog include affiliate marketing and newsletter subscriptions. Affiliate marketing generally consists of either directly signing up as an affiliate through someone’s website – or signing up as an affiliate through a third party. You will then use your blog to market this person’s products for a share of the total price. If you sell information products from Click Bank or Commission Junction, you can earn as much as 75% per sale; however, if you sell physical products, such as chairs and tables from Link Share retailers, such as Wal Mart, you will earn a 7-15% commission at best.

If these other methods you can make money from don’t sound appealing, you can always consider newsletter subscriptions. You can create an opt-in page or a “squeeze page” on your blog and offer a trial subscription to your newsletter. If you provide quality content and promote your blog, you could end up with hundreds of subscribers over time.

Other methods you can make money from on your blog include selling advertising space directly and selling site memberships that allow visitors to access certain server-side tools.

The Popularity of Blogs Today

In recent studies by the American Life Project and The Guardian (UK), researchers asked whether or not the popularity of blogs today was growing in the two countries; and if so, why? The results on the popularity of blogs today were not exactly what most members of the blogosphere might expect.

Researchers working on the American Life Project found that the popularity of blogs today in terms of readerships in the United States was absolutely exploding; however, they also found that the amount of blogs available was increasing slowly in comparison. In the last six months of 2004, for instance, blog readers grew from a mere 17% of the population to a robust 37%–a significant increase. However, blog writers only increased from 5% and 7%; and largely maintained their homogeneous composition, which is predominantly male, young, and wealthy. The ALP attributed this explosion in readerships to the Presidential race, where both candidates employed blogging in some form to attract campaign donors.

The Guardian, which performed their study more recently, also found similar results in the United Kingdom on the popularity of blogs today. While they also found that readerships had increased dramatically, they did not find the same issue of slow blog growth; however, they did find out that a fairly astonishing 30% of frequent Internet users had never even heard of a blog.

So in which direction is the popularity of blogs today moving?–To greater profusion or to obscurity?

Given that blogs are the best intermediary between websites and forums, it is hard to imagine that they will decrease in the popularity of blogs today; conversely, however, it isn’t hard to imagine that they will improve significantly in continuation with how they have changed since their inception in the mid-1990s.

In the short term, it is fairly safe to imagine that larger blogs will experiment with video technology while older blogs stick with easy, faster-loading models. It is also fairly safe to image that blog indexing methods will continue to improve and may even break away from the traditional algorithm method.

Types of Blogs You Can Build

The types of blogs you can build are limited only by your imagination and by your willingness to conduct research. For instance, while some bloggers focus on general topics, such as cars, other bloggers narrow the scope of their blogs even further to sub-topics, such as luxury cars or antique cars. From an optimization standpoint, a blog with a narrower scope would likely outperform a blog with a broader scope in terms of conversions or clicks-per-visitor. So, if your goal is to make money, the types of blogs you can build are somewhat limited.

In terms of actual topics for the types of blogs you can build, there are about 9 major areas that are popular for current blogs: business, culture, community, politics, religion, science, travel, online diaries, and gossip. Most blog directories use similar topical categories to order blogs.

In addition to the topic for the types of blogs you can build, you will also want to consider the program used to generate it. This is another way that directories categorize blogs. For instance, blogs can fall under the category of the tool or software that was used to create them. Some blogs are created using Google’s Blogger. These blogs are often lumped together in directories as the same “type” of blog. They actually have an auto-surfing system that allows you to jump randomly from one Blogger blog to the another.

Other types of blogs you can build include social networking blogs, which allow members of the same network to interact with each other using various blog functions. Two examples are Livejournal–which was one of the original social networking blog systems–and Myspace, which is currently the largest, boasting a base of around 80,000,000 users. In recent months, marketers and business persons have begun using Myspace to introduce their product to potential customers.

Another type of blog you can build is a video blog or “vlog.” These usually contain videos and allow other posts to attach media in comments.

The last types of blogs you can build are geographical blogs. With such a robust blogging atmosphere–with users weighing in from all over the globe–directories, such as Blog Wise will allow users to search for blogs by geographic location. If you believe you have some information you can contribute about your specific region, you may want to start a regional geographic blog.

Blogging Defined

With the recent rise in advanced social networking sites and the subsequent attention they have received from media outlets, people commonly perceive weblogs–which are the staple of social networking–as a new invention; however, this isn’t entirely true. Adding information to web-logs or “blogs”–blogging defined today–has been around for over ten years–and has gradually gained strength on the Internet as means of communication.

While people blogging in the early 1990s generally limited their blogs to personal information, such as chronicles and diaries, bloggers defined today includes blogging on a wide variety of different topics–from politics to cheese-tasting; however, blogging defined today is very much the same: a simple means to better facilitate communication.

Blogging defined is one of the most effective means of Internet-based communication because it is relatively easy and requires little time investment. Using a blogging interface like WordPress or Google’s Blogger, a blog owner can add a new entries to his blog while he sits in a meeting at work or watches events unfold on TV. Rather than fooling around with messy code, he can simply enter his message textually in his blog; and then update it in a matter of seconds.

Another crucial aspect of blogging that makes it such an effective medium for communication is that it allows for rapid-response comments. A political debate could literally unfold over the course of the afternoon in the form of comments on a blog.

Conversely, blogging defined by the media is often “controversial,” but it doesn’t have to be that way. Many blogs are used to simply say “hello” to friends who are blog owners. This is quite common with social networking sites, such as Myspace and Livejournal–both of which use a form of blog to facilitate communication.

Whether blogging defined is a form spurring debate between political opponents or blogging defined is a means of increasing bonds between friends, they have the ability to rapidly increase the speed of communication by acting as a sort of intermediary between a full-featured website and a forum.