Increase Page Views for Your Blog Posts

Here are some hints to increase the amount of hits that your blog posts will get:

1. SEO optimization. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, you want to optimize the chances that your post will be picked up by search engines. Pick a few key words to highlight your post. Work them into the title and first paragraph. But do not use the words to many, or your post will be tossed out by the search crawler. Just a few times is sufficient.

2. Determine whether the topic is even being searched on the web. Just because you have your post SEO'd, it does not mean you will get hits if people are not interested in the topic. Google Trends is a good place to see if your topic is being searched for. You can also try different combinations of searches and compare them. Perhaps you can find a search with higher statistics.

3. Promotion. This is either through you or others. Use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites to advantage. Stumble Upon also works quite well.

4. How active are you are as a write?. If you continually write articles, readers may be interested in reading some of your older material and may check it out.

5. Back Links from popular sites. This ties in to SEO. If your content is good, you may get lucky and start to earn backlinks from popular sites. Some higher ranked sites will take payment for backlinks. Would I pay for backlinks? Uh, no. But that is up to you!

There probably is a few other reasons that folks with more experience than I could bring up. Feel free to drop them in the comments.

Pay attention to these and you will start to see more and more traffic to your site.

Writing Efficiently

If you are serious about making money the internet, then you will need to do a lot of writing. If you want to make money blogging, then you will need to create a lot of content. A LOT of content. Decent and focused content will get your site noticed by search engines and earn the respect of your readers.

You will need an efficient program to generate all of that great content that is easy to use. Most people start out simple going to the online editor offered by their blogging program at blogger.com or within their wordpress program and type away. But are these editors the best ones to use? Are they efficient? For me, no they are not. So where do you turn? Write the article in MS word and cut and past it into the blog editor? Well this is not so good because MS word uses its own formatting and adds a lot of cruft to the HTML code. I generally avoid using MS Word.

There are a couple of offline word processors that offer good stability and allow you to cut and paste without messing up your written content.

The most well known and popular by far is Open Office. This program comes pretty close to doing everything that MS Word does. The best part is that it is free! Since Microsoft has tightened the availability of MS Word with Windows 7, Open Office is seen a jump in usage over the past year. It is available for download here.

Another lesser know free and open source program is known as Abiword. Abiword is much lighter than Open Office or MS Word. It can run on Windows or Linux. The feature that I like most about Abiword is that it will calculate your document statistics in real time. I do not like writing anymore words that I have to for some writing assignments, and once I hit that word limit, I cut the post or article off and wrap it up.

Google Docs offers another way to write your posts. Simple sign up for an account at Google.com and add it as a part of your Google applications. Google Docs is nice because you can access your documents from anywhere. I have found that it will add a little bit of HTML cruft when cutting and pasting.

So think about how you write your content, and how you can become a more efficient writer when it comes to creating content. Fell free to add any of your ideas as a comment. I would love to here them!

Make the Most of your Vacation

Christmas and New Year's vacation provide a great chance to create some content for your make money blogs and websites. Your real job takes a considerable amount of time, and time is a commodity you need most if you want to make money on the Internet.

Once vacation starts, you suddenly have tons of time on your hands. In addition, if you travel to new and exotic locations, you can dig up plenty of new ideas to help populate your site. Be sure to bring along a notebook, or small computer that will allow you to jot down a few ideas as you travel.

Make Money with Search Engines

Keep posting! The search engines will eventually find you. Your blog post will have a better chance of getting a higher page rank if you keep the posts in line with the overall content on your blog. Make money bloggers usually write about every thing under the sun, and there site ranking suffers. It is bust to concentrate on one topic and stay on track. Once you get 100 posts or so under your belt you will start to see some search engine traffic.

How do you know if you are getting search engine traffic? That's easy, sign up for Google Analytics! Once your account is set up, you will need to install a small piece of code as a widget on your blog. It is an easy process. Google Analytics will create daily reports of who is visiting your blog, and where they are coming from. After a while, you will start to see trends in the data. For example, the most popular keywords that are used for searches will begin to pop out.

I have noticed that even though this little make money blog has just a few posts, it is starting to see a little bit of search engine traffic. All with less then 30 posts! Not too shabby. It is not easy being a penny blogger! For now, this penny blogging site is not really my main money maker. I actually have more visitors coming to some of my other sites that cover topics that have nothing to do with making money on the Internet

When I I started out, I had a ton if different blogs, covering all kinds of topics. I had a hard time keeping them up to date. I have cut down the number of sites I maintain dramatically, and devote my time to just a few posts per week to a few sites. The sites center on more current events, so most of what ends up there, will show up in a search engine or two.

Holiday Drop in Traffic

Holiday traffic is something we all have to deal with when want to go out and get Christmas gifts for our loved ones. Cars cutting each other off, angry words and shaking fists. Ahh, the joys of Christmas.

Traffic is also something we have to deal with as Christmas approaches if we want to make money on the Internet. As Christmas approaches there is a definite drop in Internet traffic. This is because the online shopping is done. No time ship, so instead of online shopping, most people are hitting the pavement to actual stores to do their shopping to fill in any last minute Christmas requests.

If you are suddenly noticing a drop in traffic to your site, take it in stride. It is most likely because most people are not shopping online and are using the search engines much less. This is especially true during the evening hours. I have observed a modest drop in traffic to my sites over the last week. This was quite different from the weekend after Thanksgiving when my traffic stats went sky high (well at least for me!)

I suspect that traffic will pick up once again when the holidays are over.

There are a couple of things you can do to get around the traffic loss during the holidays. If you still have the writing bug, go ahead and write away! If you focus on current news events to drive traffic to your site, then the hits will certainly take a hit. It may not be worth your time to try to catch the latest Google Trends.

Look to write about content that will last through the ages. Focus on writing what is called "Evergreen" topics. These are things that are popular throughout the year. You can hone your craft by taking the time to learn about something new and focus in on that topic.

Overcome Writers Block - Use Google News

Basically, all bloggers are freelance writers. If you want to make money blogging, then you must be ready to put a lot the things down on paper, and do so in an understandable manner. There are some make money bloggers out there there are actually pretty good writers and they have put together some pretty informative blogs. Do I consider myself a good writer? Who knows! Maybe, but then again maybe not. You can be the judge of that. One thing is for sure, I am going to keep trying, and posting about the different subject areas that I have selected to base my blogs around.

Sometimes I get it right, and write the perfect post with the right keywords that has hundreds of hits per month. But most of the time, I just post what's on my mind, and do not get the best hits. The key is to at least remember to sprinkle a keyword or two into the post to keep your SEO up.

So, what do I do when I can not think of anything to write? The first place I visit is Google News. Google News is a service that is slightly different than the standard Google search. Google News monitors over 4500 news outlets for the most current material and breaking news. I visit this sight and look for breaking news by searching with one of the keywords that I have a blog set up for.

For example, If I have a blog about Ford Mustangs, but can not thing I anything to write about, I try this search. The results returned will provide that latest and greatest out there on the web. I look for twists in the news, perhaps offering my perspective on certain new items and weave a blog post out of it. You can search just about anything on Google News and at least find something to write about.

Becoming a Consistent Money Maker

If you want to make money blogging, the fist core skill you will need to develop is writing. You do not have to be a good writer, just a consistent one. Ideas need to flow from your head and right into your post. It is kind of like spontaneous writing, although you will need to go back, do a little proofreading and fact checking. I think some spelling errors are OK though, more on that later.

The only way to develop this skill is to practice at it. The best way to practice your writing is to get on one of your blogs and start posting. Sounds easy right? Usually, it is not, because you want your post to have something to do with the topic area that your blog is centered around. You need to put a little though in your key search terms. Remember the search terms that you want to key in on and make a few links to previous posts or topics that are covered those terms.

I have a lot of blogs. On certain days, I came across something that hits one of my subject areas that I am interested and BAM! A post is born. Not every blog gets a post every day. I do try to hit them once or twice a week. A variety of blogs, helps keep your extemporaneous writing juices flowing.

I have a bunch of blogs, that cover a wide variety of topics that I have a little bit of knowledge in. These center around hobbies, or sports teams, and other things that I am interested in learning more about. Usually, I need to perform a little bit of research to fill in a little factoid, etc. because I want to get it right. Nothing turns away a reader faster than inaccuracies. I may not get it right all of the time, but I make an honest effort.

But, as I said before, an occasional spelling error is OK, I have gotten quite a number of hits on posts that I have that rank high for mis-spelled words. For example, in one blog entry I mis-spelled Plaxico as Plaxco, and got a tone of hits for Googlers looking for Plaxco. By the way, Plaxico Burress is a member of the New York Giants who recently made some headlines in the United States.

Anyway, to bottom line is you need to be consistent in your approach. Write something every single day and post it somewhere. If you do not have a place to post it, then simply start a new blog covering that subject area!