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Regular readers of John Chow dot Com will know that there is more to the dot com lifestyle than making money online. That certainly plays a major role, but it’s also important to have a supportive significant other and a loving family. You should also pay a little more attention to your health.

Over the course of this review, we’ll learn a thing or two from a blog called Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free. You can probably guess the main focus of that site.

Fabulous Healthy Food?

The blogger behind Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free is Amy Green. Almost six years ago, she decided to remove all refined sugars and glutens from her diet. The net result is a 60+ pound weight loss that she has managed to maintain to this day.

It is far too easy to indulge in fast food, oversized portions, and unhealthy ingredients. By reading along at Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free, you may find a way to prepare healthier food at home that is both nutritious and delicious.

The Healthy Recipe for Success

With a new post going up just about every day, Amy Green has managed to maintain quite the healthy publishing schedule. There, you’ll find a wide range of healthy recipes that you can try at home. These are free of refined sugars and gluten.

One of the more recent recipes is perfect for these colder months. Roasted winter vegetables are both hearty and healthy. In the post, you get a picture of the final product, a brief discussion from Amy’s point of view, and the complete recipe itself.

The recipe is adapted from Everyday Food, but Amy has made it her own. She describes the ingredients you need, how to prepare them, and what you need to do if you want ot make them ahead of time. You’re also granted quick access to a print friendly version of the recipe.

More Food for You to Enjoy

At the end of each recipe, you are also offered three related recipes. In this instance, we look at how to peel a butternut squash, how to oven roast a squash, and how to make an apple and walnut stuffed acorn squash.

You could say that this is the same as the “related posts” plug-in that many bloggers use, but the LinkWithin feature adds in a thumbnail preview too. I am personally not a fan of its use within the main index; I’d prefer if the “related posts” were only shown within the individual articles.

It’s very unlikely that you’ll find a recipe for a foie gras burger on Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free, but there is no shortage of nice treats. Sip on some chocolate coffee martinis, munch on some fresh cookies, and even feed Fido with pumpkin dog biscuits. The variety is certainly impressive.

Regarding the Site Design

The soft pastel color scheme used by Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free is pleasing to the eye, but it clearly has a more feminine slant to it. This is understandable, given that the main blogger is female and the primary audience is likely female as well.

The three-column template seems to work quite well too. I like the placement of the icons in the top right, giving readers fast access to the Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and email subscription features offered by the blog.

It’s good to see the brief “About Amy” blurb near the top too, but there are at least two things that I would like to see changed. First, it may be useful to have a link to the main about page beneath the brief bio. Second, it is a little confusing to see a second about page for the site. Rewording the first “about” to be a “bio” instead may make more sense.

Third, Amy currently lists her Gmail account as her point of contact on the site. It is much better to use an email address that uses her own domain. Better still, she should institute a simple contact form so that her email address can be better protected.

A Delicious Treat for Health-Conscious Foodies

Overall, I’d say that Amy had done a good job with Simply Sugar and Gluten Free. The domain is certainly longer than I would have liked, but the content is reasonably powerful and the range of recipes will certainly be useful to people who want to eat this kind of food. If you want some good eats while staying healthy, Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free is worth adding to your reading list.

CLICK HERE TO READ SIMPLY SUGAR & GLUTEN-FREE

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Cut Refined Sugar and Gluten from Your Diet

Last night I was chatting with a blogger who was feeling completely overwhelmed with their goal of making a living from blogging.

I asked them how much they wanted to make from blogging.

They responded that they wanted to be a full time blogger.

I pushed them for a figure – what does ‘full time’ mean for you?

They thought for a moment and said that they could live off $30,000 USD a year (note: they wouldn’t have minded earning more but would be able to quit their current job at this kind of rate).

$30,000 a year sounds like a lot to make from a blog – especially when you’re starting out and are yet to make a dollar. To this blogger it seemed so overwhelming that she had almost convinced herself that it was not possible.

Advice for Becoming a Full Time Blogger

My response was threefold:

1. Don’t Give Up Your Day Job…. Yet

It is possible to make $30,000 a year blogging, but it’s unlikely to happen over night. Keep your feet on the ground and your expectations reasonable. IF it happens (and there are no guarantees) it is almost certainly going to take some time.

2. Be Specific

Saying that you want to be full time as a blogger is a great goal – but it’s not really specific enough. This is why I wanted the blogger I was chatting with to name a figure. For her full time was $30,000 – for others it could be more or less – the amount is not the point, the point is that you need something more concrete to work towards so that you’re able to measure where you’re at.

For me when I decided I want to go full time as a blogger I decided that I wanted to aim for $50,000 (Aussie Dollars) in a year as the bench mark (at that time $50,000 was around 36,000 USD). That’s around what I would have been earning in my current main job if I had been doing that full time (I was actually working a number of part time jobs at the time as well as studying part time).

Knowing what I was aiming for helped me in a number of ways when it came to getting to that goal.

3. Break it down into something more Achievable

$30,000 USD still sounds big when you’re a new blogger – and in some ways it is. However there are different ways of thinking about that figure. Lets break it down in the way that I used to look at my target.

• $30,000 a year = $576.92 per week
• $30,000 a year = $82.19 a day
• $30,000 a year = $3.42 an hour

We could break it down on a monthly or on a minute by minute basis if we wanted to (in fact I did do it by minute from time to time for fun) – but the exercise is really about helping you to see that perhaps your big goal is a little more achievable if you are to break it down. Making $82.19 somehow seems a little bit easier to me than making $30,000 (or is that just me?).

OK – the other way that I used to break down my goal that I found really helpful to me was to do it based upon what I need to achieve to meet that target. For me I would usually look at the daily figure – in this case $82.19.

What do I need to do to make $82.19 a day ($30,000 a year)?

Well there’s a number of ways that much. Lets look at a few:

• CPC Ads – lets say we’re running mainly AdSense on our blog and that the average click is paying 5 cents. That equates to 1643 clicks on AdSense ads (note: AdSense also runs CPM ads so it’s not quite as simple as saying you need 1643 clicks… but to keep this simple lets just go with that).
• CPM Ads – lets say that we’re running CPM ads on our blog and we’re being paid $2 CPM per ad unit and we had 3 ads on each page (which is effectively $6 CPM per page). This would mean we’d need 13,000 page impressions.
• Monthly Sponsorships – one way to sell ads directly to advertisers is to sell ads on a month by month basis as a sponsorship. To make $30k in a year you need to sell $2500 a month in ads. You might have 6 ad spots on your blog so this is 6 advertisers at $416.66 per advertiser per month.
• Low Commission Affiliate Products – Lets say we were promoting affiliate products from a site like Amazon and your commissions were on average about 40 cents per sale. To earn $82.19 you’d need to sell $205 products.
• High Commission Affiliate Products – In this case you might be promoting ebooks and earning $8 a copy (that’s what you’d earn selling my 31DBBB ebook per commission). The math is simple on this one – you’d had to sell around 10 e-books a day.
• Really Big Commission Affiliate Products – of course e-books are not the biggest product out there to promote – there are products like training courses where you can earn hundreds per sale. Lets take one that might pay out $300 for a yearly membership on a bigger product. In this case you need to sell 8 of these per month.
• Selling Your Own E-book – got your own product, perhaps an e-book, to sell from your blog? At $19.95 a sale you need to sell just over 4 of these a day. You can do the sums on cheaper or more expensive products.

Of course there are many many other ways to make money from blogs. Subscriptions, donations, paid reviews, selling yourself as a consultant….. etc. You can do the sums for yourself on your own model.

I know that some of the above figures still sound out of reach for bloggers – 1643 clicks on your AdSense ads sounds massive to a new blogger…. and it is – but do keep in mind that you can combine some of the above (in fact I’d recommend you diversify your income).

You might run 2 ad networks on your site, promote Amazon affiliates, sell your own e-book and promote someone’s membership course.

Looking back on my own figures for around the time when I hit my $50,000 AUD (around $100 USD a day) goal and for me at that time my income mix looked a like this (going from memory here):

• AdSense: $35
• Chitika: $20
• Private Ad Sales: $20
• Amazon: $15
• Other Affiliate Commissions: $10

Note: I didn’t achieve this milestone until I’d been blogging for over 2 years (I blogged for the first year without trying to make money).

This didn’t happen over night but I really found that breaking things down into more bite sized pieces helped me to stay motivated but also helped me to identify what I needed to work on in order to reach my goals (and for me to quite my day job).

Again – don’t quit your day job yet (in fact you may not want to quit it even when you reach your goal – it can be good to have a back up plan) but do work hard at being specific about your blogging goals and attempt to break it down in a way that helps you move towards them.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging

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How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging

A guest post by Kevin from BeginnerBloggerTips.com (with some comments from me below too). Image by Shawnson.

My journey into affiliate marketing.

Before I start, I’d like to make two disclaimers:

1. I don’t hate google or AdSense—this article isn’t a rant against either.
2. I recognize that every blog is different—what I’m about to say may not apply to your blog. Regardless, I think you should ask yourself the question I’m presenting here.

Disclaimers finished; let’s get to the point:

The Parable of the Lemonade Stand

Imagine a lemonade stand. The entrepreneurs get the ingredients, start up their business, and have dozens of customers per day. It earns twenty dollars a day. Not bad for a humble lemonade stand, right?

Now, let me throw in a twist: imagine the before-mentioned entrepreneurs are in their 30’s. They own the lot on which the lemonade stand is located. The lot is located along a major highway in a rapidly growing suburban area. All adjacent lots have businesses making thousands of dollars per day. Suddenly our lemonade stand seems rather silly.

This concept is called opportunity cost—the economic consequences of choosing one thing over another. I’m learning about this the hard way — I’ve been making pennies per click when I could have been making dollars per click.

Let me explain in a little more detail. As I’ve mentioned before, strongandfit.net is the first profitable blog I’ve ever had. As my traffic increased, so did my AdSense earnings. A few dollars a day ads up, so I was finally seeing checks come in at the end of every month (I’m new to making money online, so I’m easily amused).

But I started noticing something: a few products in particular kept showing up over and over on my blog (in the AdSense widget). “Wait a minute,” I thought to myself, “these products obviously convert well if someone is willing to spend money promoting them.” I realized I had inadvertently put myself at the bottom of the economic food chain: I was getting paid a few cents per click while someone else was earning commissions on sales produced by these clicks.

I did a little research and started directly advertising these products with affiliate marketing. So far it seems to be paying off—my blog is making more money.

But there’s another benefit: I have complete control over what gets advertised on my blog. It’s turning into a win-win situation: my readers are referred to high quality products, and I earn more in commissions.

I still use AdSense, but I’m devoting more of my prime “real estate” on my blog to affiliate marketing. Maybe you should also consider doing this.

A Note from Darren

Like Kevin says, I don’t have anything against AdSense either. In fact I find that it works quite well on some of my sites. For me the idea of ‘Opportunity Cost’ is a powerful one. For every decision you make to use ANY type ad unit on your blog (whether it is AdSense, some other ad network, an Affiliate product, an ad sold directly to an advertiser, an ad for a product of your own there is a potential opportunity cost of that decision.

The key is to test different options. Kevin has had success in substituting affiliate ads in the place of AdSense, for others affiliate products might not work, but an ad for your own product might. For others it might be about swapping ads to Chitika or another ad network. For others it could monetize better by selling ads directly. For others still it could be better to not have ads at all but to sell yourself on your blog as a consultant.

The key is to test and experiment with different models.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The Parable of the Lemonade Stand: Is AdSense Costing you Money?

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The Parable of the Lemonade Stand: Is AdSense Costing you Money?

I have absolutely no witty commentary to take us into this one so instead I’ll introduce our stars.

Our moderator is Ken Miller, Anchor Intelligence. The speakers are Stephen Scarr, Info.com; Bill Leake, Apogee Search; Ted West, LookSmart; and Craig Greenfield, Performics. Looking at that line up, I think I might be in over my head on this one. Why do I always pick the sessions that melt my brains?

Craig Greenfield starts off this session, which is rather under-attended.

In 1998, GoTo/Overture was really the start of this quest for perfect info. Then Google’s launch of AdWords and Yahoo!’s purchase of Overture continued to move it forward. The ability to value display and impression the way we do paid search is the next step toward figuring out ROI.

The search advertiser has four decisions to make:

1. Which keyword to target
2. Which landing page to use
3. Who to target
4. And what to pay

He runs through a case study where they were looking toward bringing up the long tail. This is very definitely over my head.

Here, have a slide showing various tasks on a grid of energy versus impact.

I’m so lost right now. I don’t even know what a Bayesian statistic is. I believe his point is that as you become more expert, you will need to expend more energy to see gains but the impact will be correspondingly greater.

You can’t just gather the data — you have to do something with it.

Key takeaways:

• Crawl, walk, run
• Test, test, test
• Scale matters

The quest for perfect information is really an iterative journey.

Up next to blow my tiny mind is Steven Scarr. He’s going to do so with an excellent English accent, so that’s a bonus.

They focus their SEM on the long tail, which he believes is going mainstream. He thinks it’s odd that Google still limits ad titles to 25 characters despite the fact that search terms are getting longer. As a result, he sees that people are also wasting the opportunity to build longer titles for Yahoo and Bing which offer 40 characters.

People usually click on longer Titles. So, for example, in the slide above the longer Yahoo! results would get more clicks than the Google ones.

Bidding on broad match will negatively affect your campaign because longer terms will often be over the 25 characters limit.

They’ve built tools to try to reduce those errors, fixing the longer terms, shortening them with abbreviations and removing extraneous words so that the titles will fit. It enabled them to “rescue” 32 percent of long-tail keywords that they could actually then bid on, which had previously triggered an error.

Their proprietary tool is Zenya and it’s due to launch summer 2010. It’ll be a subscription model.

Ted West is next.

What’s a search advertising network?

• Keyword-based PPC auction
• Non-proprietary search traffic
  • Syndicated network, no owned and operated search traffic

• Diverse search traffic type, media, performance, and value
  • Intentional: search boxes, toolbars, domain navigation
  • Contextual: in-text Web pages, e-mail messages and social media

The key to efficient market performance on search ad networks is the right keywords matched to the right traffic at the right price.

Selecting the right keywords is built the same way as other sources: Hitwise, Wordtracker, Google Keyword Tool, plus their own internal data.

Delivering the right traffic is where they feel they’re set apart. They have match traffic types, use third-party research and they monitor and optimize traffic sources to meet performance objectives.

They set the right price dynamically. They can segment by type, source, quality and expected performance.

[Is this a sponsored session? These presentations are basically infomercials. There's not a whole lot of meat for someone to optimize their campaign or understand more about search networks.]

Here’s a grab of the most useful slide in Ted’s presentation. It went by fast thus the lack of transcription.

Next up is Bill Leake. He has Tim the Enchanter AND “To Dream the Impossible Dream” on his cover slide. It’s wicked awesome. He encourages the room to tweet more and to mock the panelists if they need to. Bill Leake is my favorite person on this panel.

General fundamentals:

• We will NEVER get perfect
• Last time he checked:
  • rooms are full of humans, not machines
  • most of us want more than a Web form
  • datasets are dirty, dirty, dirty
  • datasets are owned by different corporate functions (and they don’t share)

[Holy cow, he's zipping through his slides. Slow down, Bill, this is good stuff!]

It’s hard to calculate the value of a number one search because it’s a dynamic environment. Blended search changes by geographic regions. Compare Houston SEO company to Chicago SEO Company to San Diego SEO company. There are major differences.

And it’s just as bad going down the funnel as it is going between geographic regions. Natural is a little more research oriented and paid is a little more action oriented, but only a little.

What else dirties the data? Alternate conversion types.

Conversions don’t have to occur on your site:

• You can track calls from search
• Integrating chat to drive conversions
• For B2C retail, add coupons for in-store tracking
• Maintain SEO and PPC traffic codes in your marketing
• A “click” is an early conversion even if it’s not a final conversion

Most people end up buying something eventually. They just don’t necessarily buy it from you. People don’t look for “time sheet software” for fun unless they’re seriously wacked in the head. They’re going to buy something from someone.

It’s easy to be misled on the Web by “Shallow successes” — e.g., cheap clicks or cheap leads.

True ROAS usually varies widely, even with a constant CPL target.

[Seriously why couldn't Bill have done this whole thing?]

Case study: Yahoo! was not generating leads as well as Google. However, looking down the funnel, they discovered that Google cost 151 percent MORE per conversion. Don’t just turn it off until you dig deeper.

Don’t discount re-buy behavior. Make sure your email campaigns are integrated.

Coupon users aren’t loyal.

Key takeaways:

• Perfection is a journey, not a destination. As Mike Moran says, “Do it wrong, quickly.”
• Think down funnel.
• Try to integrate where you can.

The Quest for Perfect Information: How Network Intelligence is Transforming Search — Search on the Edge Track was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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The Quest for Perfect Information: How Network Intelligence is Transforming Search — Search on the Edge Track

Want to know the secrets of making money with WordPress sites, but don’t know where to begin? You could certainly ask for advice from moguls, but wouldn’t it be more interesting to enlist the services of someone with mythical powers.

That isn’t quite the case with WordPress Mage, but you’ll find over the course of this review that there may be more than just smoke and mirrors to this system. Instead, it promises to offer you the “forbidden science of click and profit.”

It Starts with the Spellbook

When you think about a mage, you probably think of some elaborate cloak and maybe a mighty staff of some kind. Since a mage is a practitioner of magic, it makes sense that he could be the proud owner of a powerful spellbook too. The same can be said about WordPress Mage.

In short, WordPress Mage is designed to be a comprehensive package that will guide you toward making money online. Hitting up the spellbook, you’ll find a series of PDF files with lessons, downloadable content, tutorial videos, and a number of online resources.

Beyond this, you’ll find a series of other “mages” along the top of the page. These can help you with finding the right domains, targeting the right keywords, populating your sites with the right ads, acquiring the right content, getting indexed in the right places, and so on.

Domain Tools, PLR Articles, and More

The training material, in the form of videos and PDF documents, are a good place to start, but you want to get started with some real money making tools, right? WordPress Mage is broken into two types. With Adept Mage status, you have access to the online tools like the Domain Mage.

From the Domain Mage, you can look up a series of $5 expiring domains. These can be valuable to you, because they may already have PageRank, age, backlinks, DMOZ listing, and so forth. For a little more money, you can look into the domain auctions. There is also a backlink checker to give you more information about any given domain.

A blog is worthless if it doesn’t have any content, so WordPress Mage also includes what it calls the Articles Mage. This seems to be a massive collection of articles on a huge range of topics, including everything from business to food, recreational sports to travel and leisure.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that these are all PLR articles, so they’re not exactly unique and there’s a good chance that someone else is republishing them elsewhere too. It’s up to you to decide whether using PLR content is a good idea or night.

Upgrading to Master Mage Status with Three Paths

The developers of WordPress Mage will tell you that there are three possible paths that you can take with the product. However, in order to make use of any of these paths, you’ll probably need to upgrade from Adept Mage to Master Mage status.

After that, you can choose to:

• Download the plugins and add them to an existing site.
• Use a fresh install of WordPress Mage on a standalone domain.
• Use CP Mage to create several new websites in minutes.

It is likely with the third path that you’ll have the most to profit from WordPress Mage. That path creates websites that come pre-populated with content (via the Content mage and Posting Mage) and monetization (via the Affiliate Mage), so you can make as many as you’d like. You can literally have hundreds of monetized sites in a very short amount of time. The Affiliate Mage makes money by inserting keyword targeted ads from Overstock, eBay, and other similar sources.

So, Is WordPress Mage Really Free?

When you go to the main page for WordPress Mage, you’ll be told by Gregory Jacobs that he believes information should be free. He says that he could easily sell the Mage Blueprint (and seven training videos) for $497, but he wants to give it to you for free.

That much is true. However, you are only given a $60 free trial of Adept Mage, after which you’ll be on the hook for a $27 monthly charge. And Master Mage? I couldn’t find the pricing information, but I did learn two things: it consists of a one-time charge and it is only available in limited quantities periodically. The next opening sounds like it’ll be on November 23.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WORDPRESS MAGE

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Click and Profit with WordPress Mage

If you hang out here on Copyblogger, you’re probably trying to figure out how to expand your readership and make your blog popular.

You’re here because Brian Clark is a pretty cool guy, and he seems to know what’s up.

He has this shiny blog, a rockin’ team, billions of subscribers, good hair, a nice car and a pretty wife.

So maybe you’re hoping that if you hang out with Brian long enough, listen to what he has to say, read his blog’s posts and become one of his inner circle, that some of his coolness will rub off on you and your blog.

You’re hoping that your blog becomes cool by association.

You’ve done this before. We all did. In high school, we all worshiped the popular kids, the cool kids that could help us be cool too.

And just like back then, you’re probably going about it the wrong way.

The popular kid

High school movies try to show the popular guy and gal as a cookie-cutter ideal. They’re the head cheerleader and the head jock — always surrounded by a huge crowd of other cheerleaders and jocks in identical uniforms, who all talk, walk, look, dress, and mock any outsiders in the exact same way.

In the movies, the popular kid is just like all the other kids, but a little more perfect.

You might easily be fooled into thinking that hanging out with someone popular makes you the popular kid you want to be.

But you don’t want to be the popular kid. You want to be the cool kid.

The cool kid

The cool kid didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about him. He had a wacky hobby that he was pretty good at, maybe motorbike racing or painting or staring off into nothingness in an alluring way. He might be a jock, but he could take his sport or leave it. He didn’t play high school politics. He didn’t have obvious crushes. He never created drama.

And everyone liked him.

Even the popular kids liked the cool guy. He wasn’t a part of their crowd, but he was still cool, you know? They never made fun of him. They respected him.

This is the guy you want to be in the blogging world. Think of every uber-popular blog you know of, and then think of the person who writes that blog.

Guy or gal, they’re cool.They know their own niche inside and out, they don’t give a damn, and they get along with everybody, even if they don’t hang out with those people regularly.

Chris B and Darren are cool. So are Chris G and Naomi and Dave.

Note that not one of the people I just mentioned could be mistaken for any other person. This brings me to the other important point you need to remember about the cool kid when you’re trying to blog like one.

The cool kid wasn’t like anyone else — and didn’t want to be

This is the most important element to remember as a blogger.

Differentiate yourself. Have a unique voice. Be special in your own way. There are so many blogs out there nowadays that it’s near impossible to start blogging on a topic that hasn’t been discussed a hundred times already.

But that’s okay. The cool kid didn’t have a hobby that no one had ever heard of before. He just did what he liked to do in a way that made it seem really awesome — and made you kind of wish you’d thought of doing it first.

Even if you did think of doing it first. The cool kid just did it way cooler than you did it. He was the one who made martial arts or playing the saxophone or climbing trees original and cool and worthwhile.

Here’s something else that made the cool kid cool — he didn’t make a point of showing off how cool he was. He just did what he did, and it was fantastic.

Likewise, don’t keep pointing to your unique coolness. Just let it show up in your blog naturally. Be cool about it.

And suddenly you’ll be that guy, that really cool guy who happens to blog about penguins or marketing or economics.

The topic isn’t important. Being yourself, being cool about your topic, is.

About the Author: For more great posts from one of the coolest kids in town helping you have a better blog and business, check out James’ awesomeness at Men with Pens. You won’t regret it.

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How to Be the Cool Kid (Even if You Weren’t One in High School)

A blogger’s greatest asset is his or her credibility. It is a blog’s credibility which results in readers and eventually regular subscribers. There are millions of blogs out there and unless you can brand yourself as an authority in your niche, your blog will never live up to its full potential.

So, how does one go about building credibility?

It is a long process that requires a great deal of time and effort. You need to be able to show what you know and demonstrate why others should listen. However, it is more than just great content that you need. To build credibility, you need a platform on which you can demonstrate your expertise to the masses. The practice of guest posting in the blogosphere gives aspiring bloggers this platform.

For those of you who don’t know, the practice of guest posting is when one makes a post on another blog. No blogger alone can provide expertise on every subject matter so they recruit guest posters to provide new perspectives and insights. This is a guest post on John Chow. In exchange for writing the post, the author gets a byline with a short bio and a link back to his/her website.

Guest posting is by far the easiest way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. It is a free marketing tactic which associates yourself with well-respected individuals in your niche, instantly building credibility. It also gives you the platform you need to share what you have to offer. An insightful guest post, backed up with well developed posts on your own blog is one of the most effective ways to find new readers.

To illustrate my point, lets look at my personal case study. I started AMBeat.com as a blog about entrepreneurship and business opportunities a little more than a month ago. For this blog, I have exclusively been promoting it through the use of guest posts. I have written posts on various blogs in this niche including ProBlogger, Shoemoney, JohnChow, and others. These posts have driven hundreds of targeted visitors to my website. However, more than just raw traffic that resulted from these posts, it is important to analyze visitor engagement with the blog. I saw that these visitors were spending more time on my site and browsing more pages. Within days of the first few guest posts going live, the average visit length increased from less than 20 seconds to over two minutes a day. Page views per visit increased from one to about three and bounce rate decreased to about 42%, significantly less than those of my competitors. (Statistics from Alexa and Statcounter)

Guest posting results in visitors who interact with the site; reading multiple articles, commenting, subscribing, and most importantly coming back for future posts. This tactic will never drive as many visitors as a popular article on Digg or StumbleUpon will, but it will drive targeted traffic that will help in building an initial reader base.

To get started with guest posting, make a list of reputable blogs in your niche, large and small. Once you have made your list start contacting bloggers with ideas for posts you think would be a good fit for their blogs. Your messages will not always be replied, but of you e-mail enough bloggers, some guest posting opportunities will come. I recommend starting with smaller blogs in your niche and working your way up. The most authoritative blogs in any niche will be the most selective and showing past guest posting experience is a good way to get one foot in the door.

When pitching a blog, make sure to take the time to search through the archives to ensure no similar posts have previously been published. Analyze the writing style so that you can craft your post in a similar manner. Encourage discussion through the use of comments and make sure to interact with any responses on your post.

Guest posting is an art that requires patience and persistence. Large amounts of traffic may not come immediately; however with time targeted quality guest posts can result in regular readers and a vibrant active blog community.

This post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat.com, a complete resource for entrepreneurs complete with advice articles, start-up profiles, interviews, news analysis, and more.

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The Secret to Building Blog Credibility: The Practice of Guest Posting

Ok, first off I gave this tip away at the Budapest Affiliate Conference (BAC) a few weeks ago and was going to use it again at A4UExpo London, but I have been toying with a paid members area on DavidNaylor for a while so would you have paid for this information ? ..

At the moment it’s quite easy to rank in Bing.com if you are aggressive ( I actually explained a little more at BAC ) :

if you get the idea , so my suggestion was if you can take one of the top three slots in Bing for Bingo :

and then pop over here ( http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761560813/bingo.html ) you can see what Bing has done. They have included the top 3 results on the Bingo Encarta page :

This way you get a nice clean link from a trusted domain and a Pagerank 3, of course you could link build to that page as well :0

I’ve got plenty more where that came from .. so would you subscribe to Dave’s top tips and secrets?

Dave

Continued here:
Why Ranking Top 3 in Bing is Important for Link Building

Today has not been a good for me after Google updated their webmastertools blog post with this :

Update on August 11, 2009: [ If you have language or country specific feedback on our new system's search results, we're happy to hear from you. It's a little more difficult to obtain these results from the sandbox URL, though, because you'll need manually alter the query parameters. You can change these two values appropriately: hl = language gl = country code Examples: German language in Germany: &hl=de&gl=de http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=de&gl=de&q=alle+meine+entchen Spanish language in Mexico: &hl=es&gl=mx http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=es&gl=mx&q=de+colores And please don't forget to add the word "caffeine" in the feedback text box. ]

I thought I would test it on “UK SEO” something I have ranked for forever http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=uk&q=uk+seo But it gets a little bit better I guess ;)  when I tested ES, US, DE … from Spain : From the US : from Germany : So if I’m getting this right, if you’re in any country and Looking for a UK SEO you can find me but if you are in my Core Marketplace, the country I live and work, the country that My TLD is from, the country my IP is from, and when looking for a UK Seo you can’t find me… Google Caffeine more Google Beered Up Dave Naylor  Born and Bred UK SEO

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UK Seo goes missing in the UK