Blogging Tips: 10 Ways To Increase Your Page Rank

If you have a website or blog, you eventually want people to visit your site. Otherwise, what is the purpose of writing posts and articles if people aren't stopping by to read them right? Additionally, if you are trying to generate revenue from your site, traffic is an important part of the equation. If people aren't coming to your site, they won't visit your advertisers, and in turn your advertisers won't pay you. That's not hard to figure out. In the early part of your blog or website's life, a lot of your traffic will come from direct promotion, such as forum posts, emails, social networking sites, etc. Eventually, as your site builds more content, your traffic will shift from direct traffic to web search traffic. If you are going to drive traffic to your site, you will need to increase your Page Rank. Before we discuss ways to increase your page rank, let's first briefly discuss what page rank is.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. Specifically, Google uses links from other websites to determine what your page rank is. This is done through the algorithm which balances your back links compared to other back links of websites of a similar type. Google assigns a number (or rank) to each website which ranges from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Your goal is to increase the number over time to achieve a higher page rank.

Now that you have a brief (that was a very brief) understanding of what page rank is, let's discuss some ways to increase your page rank. These methods are in no particular order, but you should utilize each method in conjunction with the rest. No one method works alone, you must try to use them all together. The methods below will be explained briefly in this post. I may provide more elaborate explanations in other posts.

1. Forum Posts - This is pretty simple in concept. Find forums that are similar to your search topic, create accounts and make posts. Most forums will allow you to add a link to your website or blog in your signature. Be mindful here. Some sites have rules that prohibit spam. If you disobey the rules, you could get your account deleted and all your links (and hard work) will be erased. The correct way to do this is to also visit other peoples posts, read them and respond. Eventually you will create relationships and friendships with these people and they will support you. Here is a great link to a website where you can find forums specific to your topic Forums List

2. Search Engine Directory Submission - Submit your website to all the major search engines. The best way to do this is manually, although this will take a great deal of time. There are some sites that will do this for you for either free, or a fee. A site like Submit Express will submit your site to about 20 search engines for free, and an additional 300 or so for a small fee.

3. Social Networking Sites - Sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Myspace are all the rage on the Internet today. In fact those 4 sites account for approximately 45% of all the web traffic over the last week. Creating accounts, making friends and building links through those sites is a great way to increase your traffic.

4. Link Directories - Link Directories are another quick way to build backlinks to your site. Many of them require a reciprocial link from you to their site, but others do not. Here is a great list of a couple hundred different link directories to submit to Link Directories. TIP: Create a Site Description and save it in a TXT file, so that you can copy and paste it to each directory you submit to. Most of them have the same format.

5. Visit Similar Sites or Blogs - Do a web search for similar sites or blogs to yours. Some of them may be forums, others might just be blogs just like your own. Check them out, if you like them, post a link to them on your site. Your readers may like them as well. Then contact them and let them know that you like them and have linked to them. Most of them will appreciate it and probably link back.

6. Ezine Articles - Ezine Articles are a great way to get people to visit your site. Once you have developed some decent content, submit a few articles to Ezine Articles After they approve your article, they will create a back link to your site for each article you submit. If you find a topic that is getting a lot of traffic to your site, you may want to write a few more articles along those lines. If you have a diverse blog, you may want to submit articles of different topics within your scope. For instance if your blog is about Cars, you may want to submit 1 article on engines, another one on hybrids, another one on the best miles per gallon, and another one on Nascar (assuming you have already written posts along those lines.)

7. Google Adwords - Now, I don't know for sure that Google Adwords links counts towards page rank, but it will definitely bring more traffic to your site. As the traffic comes, so will people that will revisit your site, and even willingly link to it. So in a round about way, this will help your PR, even if the adwords link does not. I will eventually write another post about Adwords, because it is a gamble. You need to becareful of how much you invest and how much you stand to gain. This is best for sites that sell a product or service, and not just a standard blog.

8. Email Signature - An email signature won't count directly to your page rank either, but it will directly bring traffic to your site and thus indirectly effect your page rank.

9. Submit To Google - This is a fairly obvious one, but if you have to submit your site to Google, so that it is indexed and eventually ranked within Google. There are some key things you have to do with this. Signing up for Google Webmaster Tools helps a lot. They will analyze your site and let you know what changes you need to make in order to achieve the best rank. Some things you need to do is include a Site Map and a robots.txt file. I will discuss these in another post, for now you just need to know that they exist and you must do this to achieve PR.

10. Link Exchange Forums/Sites - There are plenty of sites you can sign up for that will be centered around link exchanges. Some sites like Submit Express have forums where you can search for exchanges with similar minded sites. Another site I use sparringly is Link Market.net With them, you will get plenty of link requests each day simply by submitting. I do not suggest you link to each site that requests you. Check the other sites PR first. If the site either has a high PR or is along the same topic as yours, it is worth exchanging a link.

Bonus: Create Internal Links - This is one that I don't do often enough. If someone likes the article they just read, they may want to know if you have a similar article on your same site. You can help them out by placing a link at the bottom of your article. If they like it, they may click to the next one, and will thus stay on your site longer, and possibly revisit, or even link to you. Here's an example of a post that I created which discusses a couple methods of link swapping and has a nifty PR checking tool: Link Swapping and PR Checking Tool

If you found this post helpful, please feel free to link to my site, read other posts, or make any comments below. Thanks.

Dan

20 Link Directories To Submit Your Site

Hey Folks,

If you have a blog or website and want some extra traffic or additional Page Rank, here is a list of some high PR web directories that you can submit your site to. It's a good list. I have submitted to many of these and they help get some new traffic and readers. Best of luck.

Dan

1. NationalDirectory - Search Engine PR7
2. WorldHot.com - World Hottest Web Sites - Search The Web as easy as 1-2-3! PR7
3. Web site promotion directory , Professional web design services - All the websites PR6
4. CANLink Directories - Canadian and Worldwide Links PR6
5. Information Directory PR6
6. Jayde.com - The B2B Search Engine PR6
7. Com.org - Only the best links ... PR6
8. VXbox.com - Search Engine and Web Directory - Submit Your Website for FREE PR6
9. Web World Directory Free Submissions and Paid Submissions PR6
10. 4ppl Directory PR5
11. Add URL-Free.com - A free good directory, Add your URL now! PR5
12. Add Your Site Free Submit Link Directory PR5
13. Consultant Directory - Free Directory of Consultants, Experts, Consulting Companies, and Professionals PR5
14. Cipinet Web Directory PR5
15. Link Centre Internet Directory and Search Engine PR5
16. Megri Portal, Web Directory Free Listing PR5
17. Website Directory : Pedsters Planet PR5
18. Please Retrieve.com search engine PR5
19. The Poddys Directory - something different from your average directory - come on in and take a look PR5
20. Search4i.com :: Directory of Global Information. Your source for world wide information PR5
BONUS: Search-o-rama.com! PR5
BONUS 2: Flaves Link DirectoryPR1 But Accepts ALL LINKS.

Free Direct Marketing Resources

I wanted to take a moment to tell you guys about some inexpensive direct marketing resources that you can use to promote your blog. First of all, some of you may be asking “What is direct marketing?” Direct marketing attempts to send messages directly to consumers, without the use of intervening media such as flyers, business cards, mailers, etc.

Over the years I have done a lot of research on different means of affordable marketing resources. Today I am going to talk about a nice color postcard type flyer that is affordable as well as affordable business cards. How affordable you may ask? Well how about FREE? Can you get any more affordable than that?

Club Flyers.com
Club Flyers.com offers two unique essentially free marketing reources for you to promote your website off line. The first one is a very nice sized 4×6 color one sided postcard. You will place your full color ad on one side of the card, and allow Club Flyers to place their ad on the backside. They will give you 1000 flyers for only the cost of the shipping, which can ended up being between $18 - $40 USD. Here is some details on their free postcard offer:

The best way to advertise your business or event is with the premium UV Coated postcards and flyers.
Printed on 14 POINT C2S Cardstock, 4/4 (Full Color Both Sides), and UV Coated. One side has their advertisement and the other side is yours to promote your business. You must pay for shipping (no shipping on your own account). Production time is 10 to 14 business days. The shipping method you choose does not influence the production time.

Club Flyers also offers free business cards. You can get 500 business cards for once again only the price of shipping. Club Flyers will print a much smaller ad on the back of the business card. All Business Cards are printed on 14 POINT C2S Cardstock, 4/0 (Full color on your front side), and UV Coated. There is a limit of one time a month for both of these services.

Vista Print.com
Another service that I have used from time to time is Vista Print.com. Vista Print will allow you 250 color business cards on durable, premium grade card stock with a matte finish. You pay only for shipping and processing. They have 42 different design templates for you to choose from. Once again, shipping can cost between $20 - $35 dollars. It varies almost each time I make a purchase.

Any direct marketing like this can be a great resource if you have a powerful ad and ciruculate it well. Placing them on bulletin boards, in local shops and municipalites, and handing out to friends and new people you meet are all great ways to help promote your product, which is your website. A lot of these times, because you have made a personal connection with the person, these people will be return vistors to your site, as opposed to someone who randomly clicks a message board link and never returns to your site.

I hope you found this information helpful and informative. Please feel free to comment below.

Dan

Blogging: Pay Per Post Sites

Another popular traveling job is blogging. This job requires little more than a computer and Internet connection. Other than that, you can do this job almost anywhere. There are 3 main ways you can make money with your blog: 1) Pay Per Post 2) Advertising 3) Affiliate Programs

Instead of making this one long post which you will get bored of reading and give up, I am going to break this down into seperate posts. This one will cover Pay Per Post sites.

The two most notable sites that will Pay Per Post are www.today.com and www.payperpost.com. Let's take a quick look at each. By the way, if you are going to sign up to blog on www.today.com please click one of the links in this post as I am set up with their referral program.

Today.com

I stumbled accross this site and I must say it's pretty cool. Here is the way it works. You sign up on Today.com to create a blog in almost any category from Sports, to Television to Technology. Once you are approved for a blog, you will be paid 3 different ways. The way this program works is you sign up for an account and they pay you $1 per post per day, with a maximum of 1 post per day. You are set up this way for the first 30 days, and if your blog becomes popular in that time, they will continue it on a trial basis for another 30 days. There is a requirement of a minimum of 100 words per post.

The second way you are paid from today.com is per unique visits. They will end up paying you $2 per every 1000 unique visits for your blog. You make very little money via this method unless you end up with a big following.

The final way that Today.com pays you is via their referral program. With Today.com, if you refer someone to them, and they sign up for a blog, you will receive $5. There are a couple ways that you can promote this, but you have to be careful, because you can't just spam message boards and emails to people, as that will get you disqualified from the program. If you have some savy at promoting, you can end making an extra $20 to $50 dollars a month via referrals.


Pay Per Post.com

Pay Per Post.com is a pretty good site, but it's a little tricky. When you do a search for pay per post blogging on Google or any other Search Engine, this tends to come up with the top 5 or 10 spots. Basically, you sign up for an account, and submit your blog for approval. If you are approved, you will be a blogger for hire, and advertisers can hire you to write a post about any subject, related or unlrelated to your blog. You set the price for your pay per post amount. Typcially, you will be hired by an advertiser to blog positiviely about their product or service. You can make money this way, but you will have to work at it, and it will take a lot of time networking with advertisers, and increasing your way up the ranks as a blogger via their site.

I recommend reviewing both and seeing which one works for you. My later posts will include ways to make money if you already have a blog set up with a service like wordpress or some other blog site.

Blogging - Making Money With Google Adsense

OK, so this is part 2 to my travel jobs - blogging post. In the previous post, I listed 3 ways that you could make money while posting a blog, which is a great travel job. Once again, the three ways are via Pay Per Post, Advertising and Affiliate Programs. In this post, we will discuss Advertising. Specifically, Google Ads.

There are many ways to make money via advertising programs with your website other than Google, such as Widget Bucks, Adify, Feedburner, etc. but since I only have experience with Google Adsense, I will only dicuss that in this post.

In a nutshell, Google Adsense is a ad program that places strategic ads on your website based on the content of your site and or page. The idea is that Google scans your web page, and places ads based on the content of that page, via your keywords, that will hopefully attract your traffic to click through to one of the ads. There are 2 requirements in order for you to get paid via Google Adsense: Traffic and Clicks.

First of all, if your website doesn't have traffic, you are not going to get clicks. It's a general rule of thumb that people have to visit your site, before they can click an ad. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but they won't be covered in the scope of this post.

On each page, you can place as many as 3 Google Adsense ads, to maximize the amount of views on each page. I place 3 google ads on each page, which ends up being about 8 - 10 different links, or ad views. In addition, you can place 3 Link Units on each page, like the one located on the top of this post. This will then give you up to 6 total units per page/post. In order to make a couple dollars a day, you need to have between 100 - 300 ad views each day. On average about 1-2% of your traffic will click a link on your website.

That leads to the second part of the equation, which is clicks. If 1000 people visit your site in one day, and none of them click, you make $0 dollars (well, you might make like $0.10). People need to click on your ads in order for you to get paid. The best way to get people to click on your ads is through strategic placement of the ads. The best places to place your ads are on the right hand side of each page, the top of each post.

To give you an idea, in the last week (at the time of this post) I have had a little over 4500 ad views, and only 48 click throughs, which is a little over 1%, which equates to just about $2 a day on average. Now, let's look at the math of it. As I stated above, I place about 8 ads on each page. That means if 1 person views 1 post on my blog, that 8 ads are viewed. If you take my total of 4500 ad views and divide it by 8 ads per page, that means I have only had about 563 visitors in the last week. That may seem like a lot, but compared to a site such as www.today.com who gets over 10,000,000 ad views a day, it's not a lot at all. Ad remember, only 48 of those page views resulted in a click through, which means that about 1 out of every 12 people who visit my site actually click on an ad. Once again, that doesn't seem like a lot, does it?

So remember, if you take the time to develop a site (hopefully with a niche), build content, place ads, promote it, drive traffic to the site, and get clicks you may actually be able to make as much as $20 a week. This isn't enough to live off of, however if you are living in a country like Thailand, that's about 600 baht, which could be enough to pay for meals for a week. Not bad. :)

When I originally wrote this post, I was only making about $8 bucks a week, but in a matter of 1 months time, I am up to making over $30 a week. It took a lot of hard work and promotion, as well as having a lot of content on my site to allow people to click through my pages and stay there for a while.

This is not a get rich quick make money over night scheme, but if you continue to build content and gain a following with your site, eventually you can actually see dividends, and hopefully some cash. Top earners claim to make $5000 a week, but I think $100 a week is more reasonable for the average person after 6 months to a year of working at it.

Blogging - Affiliate Programs

Another way you can make money with your website is through affiliate programs. Affiliate programs are simple. You place ads/banners on your site to specific websites that you have an affiliate/referral account with. Here is an example of an affiliate banner ad:



The way it works is as follows. In this particular case, I have set up an affiliate account with Muay Thai Stuff.com by visiting their website and enrolling in the program. Typically the website will reserve the right to approve or deny you for an affiliate account, but in most cases they approve you. After that, you list your banner or ad links in your posts, or on varies places on your site or blog. You can also usually attach them in emails, as long as it is not a spam email.

IF people click on those ads, and then end up purchasing something during that visit, you will receive a percentage of that sale (typically 10%). In some cases you can earn higher percentages based on your overall sales for the month or year. This can add up to be a lot of money if you have a popular site and people are purchasing items directly from the click through.

A lot depends on the average price point of the items on the affiliate site as well. If the website has an average price point of $200, then 10% of that is $20, which is a nice amount for a one time purchase. A website like Rosetta Stone, which sells language learning CDs, has a high price point. However, if you are an affiliate for a website that sells widgets for $10 a piece, then 10% of that is only $1. It will take you a long time to make solid money through that site.

Now, you may be asking yourself, how you can find out which websites have affiliate programs? Well, I want to tell you about a site called Commission Junction. The link is here: Commission Junction. Commission Junction is a website were all the seperate affiliate program sites list there affiliate programs. In addition to the website address, they will also list certain specifics about the site, such as what they sell, what percentage you receive, and what the average price point is.

Here is an example of an affiliate link that I got through Commission Junction:



Signing up for the program is a little complicated, and the website can be somewhat confusing, but it's a great resource to find affiliate programs that will fit in perfectly with the concept of your website. By the way, that is an important point that I haven't mentioned yet. Keep your affiliates specific to the topic of your website, that way your traffic will be more likely to visit the sites. If you have a website about Flowers, it is unlikely that someone that visits your site will visit a website about Cars & Trucks. So keep that in mind.

I hope that information helps. Good luck in your blogging efforts.

Blogging Tips: Submit A Site To Search Engines

If you have a blog and you are looking to make money through advertising, affiliates, or any other means, getting your site listed on Search Engines is a must. You will see the buzz words "Search Engine Optimization" or "SEO" around a lot, and often wonder what that means. Well, it means nothing more than getting listed on, and climbing up the rankings on any search engine. Many people nowadays use Google for their primary search engine, but there are many other search engines out there that people use quite frequently. I am going to give you two methods that I have successfully use, and as a result get daily traffic from.

One more important note, if you have people that are linking back to your site, it is also important that they have their sites submitted to search engines. Once those pages are tracked by the search engine, it will help you with your own rankings on the search engine. So make sure you tell your friends about these tips.

1. Google.com - As I stated before, Google is one of the most popular search engines, and as a result, it is extremely important to get listed on their site. Here is the page to do it: http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html. One tip I can give you here is that the keywords you use are extremely important. What I suggest is that you go to the home page of google.com and do a search for various keywords in your topic. You should try to use the keywords in your topic, which have the lower amount of results, as well as the ones that have high results. For example, if I do a search for "flowers" it lists about 214,000,000 results. On the other hands, if I do a search for "planting flowers in pots" it only yields 514,000 results. So make sure you use both keywords. Using just "Flowers" will get you burried in a list of millions, but using "planting flowers in pots" will put you in a pool with much less people. Now all you have to do is make sure your site actually contains some information about planting flowers in pots, or people who visit your site won't actually stay, and will not return either.

2. Submit Express - Submit Express is a great service that you can utilize for free. They will submit your website to over 20 different search engines including: Google (although I suggest doing Google yourself), AOL Search, Search.com, Jayde and many more. You will need to provide them with a vaild email address also, because many of the search engines will send you an email to validate the submission request. In addition, they will ask you to place a small button on your website that will promote their service. I have their button on the right hand column of this post. They have several other free services such as a PageRank Checker and a Keyword Suggestion Tool. I suggest you visit their site and take advantage of the free services, as well as consider some of their paid services.

Once again, I hope these tips help you. Best wishes on your efforts of making money by blogging.

If these tips helped you, please tell a friend about them, or link back to my site. Thanks.

Dan

Blogging Tips: Link Colors - Try Variations

When you post Google Ads on your website, you have the option of changing the colors of the ads to just about any color imaginable. The default for the Google Ads is typical Blue and Green which is pretty generic and you will see on most ads.

If you know some basic HTML you can find the Hexidecimal RGB code for almost any color, to match the theme of your website. This way the ads can tend to blend in a little more, and it will seem visually pleasing. If you are not sure of the color codes this site should help: Color Chart

You should experiement with different colors in your ads over a course in time. A month is a reasonable amount of time to make an honest evaulation. After a month, if you are not seeing the results you want, make a color change and then monitor it to see if your click % changes or not.

Recently, I went through a couple of weeks where I was seeing very high numbers in traffic, but extremely low numbers in converting that traffic to clicks. My numbers were about 1%, and in some cases less than 1%. Right after that, as my numbers started to decrease in traffic, I decide to change the color format of my ads to the Candy Cane theme that Google has as one of their defaults. After that change, I saw my percentages change from 1% to somewhere between 2-3%. That small change seemed to make my ads pop a lot more, and into more clicks. So my advice to you is to experiement with your colors to make your ads stand out.

Best of luck. If you found this ad helpful, drop me a comment, or stop back often. Thanks.

Dan