Fromtheold

The other day I had a post on HOW TO START BLOGGING and i thought it would be great to ad this post to that one.

Today I would like to show you some blogging essentials.

Blogging is fun but at the same time blogging can teach you a lot of great stuff. One of those things is management. A blog has to be managed, almost like a business. If you dont do certain things a blog will just go dry. And soon the blog that is left to survive on its own will just become more search engine clutter with no real humans behind the box.

The Blogging essentials that I am writing about today are not all needed but they are great tools to have. And if you dont know about them all you might find a treasure between all these things. If you know of everything that is listed here, feel free to add something I have missed.

Rank

Rank is important both for advertisers and for your blog to grow. While you or I dont really care much about rank, it still is a factor when trying to get your blog to the point where you can make a living from blogging. As some of you might of notice, its not a as you imagined before you started blogging. Blogging is tough. At least that is what I think. Ranking also enables you to make more money. For instance: People with a Pagerank of 6 could easily ask a nice price for advertisers whereas blogs that have a pr1 or 2 would not make that much money. Ranks reflect your blog’s community and traffic. Most of the time.

One thing about blogging is that the better your rank the more traffic you get and the more traffic you get the better you will rank.

Here are some places to check your rank or status:

Alexa

Old, belongs to Amazon if I am correct. Alexa is not as accurate as some would claim, nevertheless people still use it and if you rate very high (low) on Alexa you can get more money for advertising space. Some companies use Alexa ranks to choose if they want to buy or sell domains. Alexa rank is important for your blog even with it’s inaccuracy.

Pagerank

Pagerank used to be the biggest way people would rank a site. But in recent months no one really cares about Pagerank, or at least know one I know including me. That is because they have changed the old realiable way it worked. I am guess it was a good thing since they are improving their search, but for me, watching my PR go up and down every month is just to annoying.

Technorati

Technorati is also a great ranking tool. Technorati is also well known, they trace a few million blogs all over the internet. If you make it to the top 100, you’ve basically made it as a blogger. I would’nt mind.

But recently technorati removed all Wordpress 2.3.3 blog. Maybe not removed but they stopped indexing them because of the vulnerability in Wordpress 2.3.3. I think I lost my technorati rank as well. But they did it so people’s blogs wont get hacked.

Amatomu

The reason I am putting in Amatomu is because I am a South African. Amatomu matters for South African bloggers because it shows you where and how you rate between South African bloggers.

Compete

Another ranking system.

Wordpress

Adman

Adman is a great plugin for Wordpress. Adman enables you to insert Google Adsense or other code generated by PPC or affiliates into your blog posts and on the frontpage. Adman has three options, paste it in on the top of your posts in the middle and below. There is also a setting that enables you to have a ad in the first post of your blog on the front page as well. Adman works great with Wordpress 2.5

Related Posts

The related Posts plugin is great to enable your readers to explore your blog more. Using it underneath your post or below the comments where they can see it will also increase your pageviews because they might just read more posts. Related Posts works great in Wordpress 2.5

Popularity Contest

Many Wordpress themes need this plugin to display the popular posts on the right hand side of the blog. It enables your readers to see which posts are nice and those that other people have liked.

Money

Adsense

Adsense is well known. You can make a lot of money using Adsense if you use it correctly. Adsense was started a few years ago by another guy and got bought by Google. That is why we now know it as Google Adsense. Just a bit of info.

The most famous adsense format is the 300×250, it is said that is the adsense format people make the most money with. I have to agree. Although many bloggers do not like seeing Adsense on other blogs, it is still widely used. Some people might disagree.

Chitika

Chtiika is one of my favourite ways to make money online. They offer a lot of formats and things that you can use to make money. I think the most famous one is the linx code. Linx code is the one I like the most. They also have a referral program where you can refer people and friends to them. You get paid for everyone you refer to them.

Smorty

Smorty offers a lot of different affiliate banners to choose from. Smorty is another way of blogging and posting payed blog posts. A nice way to make some more money.

Linkworth

Linkworth has many, many options and ad formats to choose from. you can also do payed posts for Linkworth to earn extra cash from your blog.

Seo

Headspace2

Traffic

Entrecard

Entrecard is a great way to get people to come to your site. You will just have to use more methods of attraction than the Entrecard widget itself. Entrecard is great for sites that first start out. But one thing you have to keep in mind if you are using entrecard is Adsense. Adsense and Entrecard does not work well together. That is because a lot of people come to your site just to click, but that brings your revenue from Adsense down.

Feedburner

The reason this is under traffic is because I first wrote it. I guess feedburner can go under tools or community. Feedburner is a way to keep track of your feed statisctics and helps you optimize your content. You can also make money with your feed by embedding Adsense in your feed through Feedburner.

Community

Blogcatalog

Blogcataglog is the bussiest blog community site I have found so far. On Blogcatalog you can get a widget to embed in your blog. You can also get a lot of traffic from Blogcatalog if used correctly.

Mybloglog

Mybloglog is also a blogging community site.

Theme

Getting a unique theme or making your own theme unique is very important for branding purposes. A great theme will help you make more money while giving your viewers some eye candy. This is obvious. Your blog has to stand out from the crowd and be unique. It should reflect the blogger’s taste.

Firefox

Scribefire

or

Deepest Sender

Stragedy

Having a blogging stragedy (plan or whatever its called) will enable you to work towards a certain goal. Here are some stragedies in blogging:

Linking and networking with other bloggers

This is really important. Since most people reading blogs are bloggers themselves. We as bloggers need to network and help each other. Networking is the most important thing that will keep your blog going. After all, remember when you did your first blog, it felt so stupid because it felt like you were speaking to yourself. That’s how I felt. Not networking would mean you basically blog on your own.

Commenting

Commenting to show others that you actually read their blogs and participate is actually part of networking. Commenting is participating in the blogging community. Commenting should be done with caution. You can delete a crap post but you cant delete a crap comment. Comment on as many blogs as you can BUT do it sincere and not just to get people over to your blog.

Competition

Running competitions on your blog is a great idea to get your blog out there.

Read more here

Learn

Wikipedia

You can learn a lot of blogging terms at wikipedia. Although you cant trust everything you read its still worth something.

Problogger.net

I guess everyone knows problogger but I have learned a few things on his site and its worth including.

So there it is. A few things that could help you start with blogging or further your blogging career / hobby.

If you liked this post please consider bookmarking this on Sphinn / Stumbleupon / Digg or any other site you use.

There are thousands of ways to make money on the internet but it comes down to what you’re good at, or the purpose of your blog. The purpose of a blog will determine if or how much you can make from that blog.

For instance one might make much more money with a niche blog than with a personal blog. So before you start monetizing your blog you have to know what the blog is for, if you dont know this part yet you really cant start blogging.

So when you know for instance you have a blog about cars. Now you can go and search what ads works the best with cars, certain ads will work and others wont.

The most used way of making money on the internet is Adsense but there are probably thousands of other ways to make money. The point is, you have to keep on exploring the new was.

There are so many place to do photography between Somerset West and Stellenbosch. This was taken up in Somerset West if you go up the road at the Lord Charles Hotel in Somerset West and you go under the bridge on the top. There is a mysterious road right next to these trees but I have not driven up there.

I am a explorer as well so if there is a road with no signs I explore.

I would say the best way to travel South Africa is in your own form of accommodation like a motorhome or a land rover. Especially a land rover because then you would get to see places in South Africa you cant see with a normal car.

For instance a few days ago we went to the Drakensberge and also Cathedral Peak. As you go in the entrance to Cathedral Peak you will see a road which leads somewhere, That somewhere we could not explore because of the limit ways of travel we have, hence a car. If we have a land rover or 4×4 we might of seen something out of the ordinary.

Also accommodation in South Africa can be expensive as well as the petrol but if you have a nice 4×4 or motorhome you could sleep in there and that would make up for the money you spend on the petrol. So the best way to travel South Africa is in something you can sleep like a motorhome.