Bondox's Ramblings

Twitter is a social networking site that network people through status updates called tweets and direct messages. Twitter is a good marketing tool to promote a product and also to drive traffic to your website or blog.

The network is people you follow and the ones that follow you. Any status update (tweets) you post will be visible to all your followers who will see it in their tweets feeds page. With this, you can build a large followership and market anything to them.

You can be among those who criticise twitter as you might not see any reasonable thing in sharing status updates. But since the emergence of twitter, different applications have been developed to make it more interactive and fun to use and ultimately profitable. Just like Facebook.

What interests me in twitter is that you can determine the popular topics and join the buzz. But aside that, twitter is good for marketing. If you are yet to be on twitter, my sincere advice is that you should register for an account now.

As to making money from twitter, I got a mail from John Chow long ago about the easiest way to make money on twitter and I followed the instruction set in the mail. I once put up a review article on twittad on my previous blog (I will rerun it here), but this standalone platform that uses your tweets with your twitter account to make you money is wonderful and different.

Sponsored Tweets is a social media marketing tool that utilizes your twitter account with your tweets to fetch you money per tweets created by IZEA. They link you up with advertisers that are ready to pay you for your tweets. Do you get that? Advertisers are ready to pay you any amount you specify to have you post just a tweet about their product or service in your twitter account.

Sounds easy? I thought the same way when I got the message. Now, let’s do this together. I’ve signed up for Sponsored tweets and I want you to do that too now.

Joining Sponsored Tweets is free, only your twitter account is required. They require your twitter account to be around 120days old and with a minimum of 200 followers. Advertisers will not want to advertise on new accounts, only existing and valued ones are marketable.

If you know you fall into this category, i.e. your twitter account is up to 120days old (4 months) and you have more than 200 followers, then, let’s roll together into this new platform. This is an opportunity, start today.

If you’ve joined sponsored tweets already and you are familiar with their platform, please share your opinion through comment, so we can all learn from it. If you know more about them, let us know.

Sign up with Sponsoredtweets

To a blogger, traffic means money and links to your blog is free traffic. This in turn results in free links to your blog and also means more and more money for you as a blogger. The more links to your blog, the more visitors you get and the more activities on your blog. Moreover, search engine like Google love blogs with high inbound links.

See the progression like this: get more sites or blog to link to your blog; this will increase your page rank on search engines which will also in turn give you free traffic and in the end, make you more money.

You can now see the importance of having links coming into one’s blog. Here, I will discuss top linking strategies that will push up your blog’s page rank and also increase your traffic in no time.

Write Great Content
To start with, this point is the most important point in any blog’s success journey. Content is the soul of a blog. It has a lot of benefits. I can’t mention all here as I wrote in the 5 steps to creating a successful blog, but I am interested in using my great content to get free links back to my blog.

Not just any content, but a good content that will compel anyone to want to link to it from their blogs. Good contents like pillar articles, how-to articles are nice ones to write to get free links back to your blog. Try it today and see the amazing return you will see.

Link Out and They will Link Back
The adage; give and you shall receive is a strategy to follow to get top blog to link to you. After strategy no1 is out of way i.e. you’ve been writing good contents on your blog, try sending out free links through any means from your blog to other blogs and owner of those blog will want to link back to you even if you did not ask for it because they believe they owe you. That is how life is, you sometimes help people out without expecting a return and they will want to return that favour for they believe they owe you a lot.

Visit Other Blogs
Visiting other blogs is to know more about the blog and the blog owner. Knowing more about them will give you a sense of belonging to them. Try to join their community and comment on their blog, that is when they know you came to visit their blog. Great bloggers do visit their readers’ blog and if they find any good article, they’ll link to it. Or even mention about your blog on their blog.

I got a free video review of my previous blog on shoemoney.com and this gave me a boost in traffic. Jeremy has a plugin on his blog that shows the recent comment in the post on the homepage. It is a free way to shout out yourself and your blog to his blog’s readers.

Make a Broadcast
This has nothing to do with the media; it is not a jingle you broadcast on air on TV or radio. This is another way to notify blogs that you’ve got a new article on your blog. Make a list of blogs in your niche and send out news broadcast to them that you have an article on your blog. If they come and notice that the article is worth linking to, they’ll do it without hesitation.

Because they want to hold their readers with good content, linking to yours will even make their readers trust them more.

Harness the power of Social Networks
I don’t need to scream this into your ears. You should know how valuable this can be if you add it to your linking strategies arsenal. Tap into the power of the social networks to send out your content through the networks so as to get links back from the networks. We have a number of them, just try to get your content to the first page of any of them lets say Digg or StumbleUpon and see the number of sites that will link back to you.

Grab the opportunity of my Blog-roll
This might not be new to you but still you can have it done for you. I want to give out free links to blogs and hopefully if they’ll return it.

Now that you understand the importance of link exchange; a better way to get me link to you is to contact me requesting for a free blog listing on my blog and I'll do just that.

Work out these strategies and you will experience a massive boost in your blog page rank on Google and a boost in traffic that leads to a boost in income.

These are not all strategies available on the internet, there are much more of them that are useful for bloggers to implement. Don’t hesitate to contribute by leaving a comment. Leaving a comment itself is another way to get a free link back to your blog.

The task of creating a new blog can be daunting sometimes for a newbie. If you are new to the internet, probably you are only interested in checking your email and nothing else concerns you about the internet, then creating a blog might be a serious challenge to you. Reasons for creating a blog are numerous.

There are hundreds of tutorial articles, blog posts and even websites dedicated to teaching newbie how to create their own blog themselves. No need to hire anyone to this for you because they will charge you exorbitant fees. Learn how you can create your own blog within 5 minutes by watching video tutorials on Youtube.

This post is to give you insight about the steps you should follow if you plan to have a successful blog with full authority online. As all blogging coaches will say, your success in blogging depends solely on your passion which means that this post is about creating a blog around what you love doing.

Following the steps below will help you in your quest of building a successful blog.

Step 1: Choose your specific topic to blog about

This step has been the major step all new blogger should understand very well. Before you can start a blog, you need to have something to blog about. What your blog is created for is your blog topic. All articles you post on your blog should be around this main topic.

Choosing a blog topic can look so difficult at start but if you get down with it by doing a research around your passion, your interests, your life and even your environment, you’ll discover a niche (topic) you can write multiple articles on. Choosing a topic to blog about is a separate tutorial on its own.

Step 2: Choose your desired blogging tool

There’s not much to discuss here, I just added this step for you to know that choosing a blogging platform too has a lot to do with your success as a blogger. If you choose a platform you are not familiar with, you might find it difficult to develop yourself at the pace you need to.

There are 2 major blogging platforms; Blogger and Wordpress. Some other platforms we have are Joomla, Livejournal, Moving Type, and on like that. The number of blogging platforms should amount into hundreds. The two widely used platforms (Blogger and Wordpress) are popular because of the functionality, universal acceptability and also because of the simplicity they offer their users.

I was using Wordpress before I moved to blogger after so many issues with my hosting company. I used the self hosted wordpress because of its ability to accept 3rd party plugins to increase its functionality. Whatever function you want with Wordpress that is not available on the platform will definitely be available as a plugin. On the other hand, Google owns Blogger so its users use it because of its easy implementation of their Ad revenue sharing program (Adsense).

So the platform you choose depends on what you want. You can explore the two platforms or even other ones listed above and see if they suites your purpose for creating a blog.

Step 3: Write informative content around your blog topic

You should know this for sure that only a blog with information will gain authority in its chosen niche. Once you are through with step 1 and 2, the next thing to do is to write informative articles tagged around your blog topic. The more informative your articles are, the more trust your readers will have in you and the more authority you command in your niche.

Informative articles are also called pillar articles. Articles that educate or ones that solve problems for your readers are wonderful. Like the one you are reading, it is a pillar article. How-To articles, bulleted articles, important news that will interest your readers are what you should write about. And note that, the articles must have one or two things related to your blog niche so as not to feed your readers with what they do not want.

Step 4: Do the Dos

Do the Dos of blogging

Step 5: Avoid the Don’ts

And lastly avoid the Don'ts of blogging

Having said all these, the next step has to do with your passion for success. Go on and build something you’ll always be remembered for. A successful blog is a result of endless effort of the blogger to build an authority. Blogging is fun, exciting and educative. And lastly it’s a business that gives dividends for an active blogger.

Do you have any other important step to creating a successful blog that are not listed here? Then you can contribute by posting them in the comment section. The post is opened to comments.

As we have Dos in Blogging, so we have Don’ts. There are couple of them you have to avoid in order to build a successful blog no matter what. Being a professional blogger need discipline. You have to keep a list of what you need to do frequently on your blog and also what you need to avoid no matter what.

I have compiled these Don'ts so that you need to avoid them:

Don’t 1. Don’t Spam other Blogs: When commenting on other blogs, don’t spam their blogs with URLS. One URL is fine, two is too much, three is spamming. You’ll easily lose your reputation if you engage in spamming. No one in the blogosphere will take you serious.

Don’t 2. Don’t be Abusive: Some readers can post a provocative comment, shake them off and handle such smartly. Don’t insult or abuse any reader whatsoever. No one will forgive you if you make this mistake.

Don’t 3. Don’t be neutral: Before posting a comment on a blog, you should read the main blog post and comment based on your own opinion. Don’t leave a neutral comment under a blog post that needs your contribution. Participate actively on blogs, don’t just be a “no opinion” type. Also, don’t leave a thoughtless comment. Nobody will visit your blog from such comment.

Don’t 4. Don’t lift blogs’ content: Getting fresh content for your blog can be a huge task for you. You might sometime want to reference an article from another blogger’s blog when you have nothing to right about, when doing that, try as much as possible not to edit the article to avoid violating the copyright law and also leave a link back to the author’s article as compensation for the article (it is compulsory). Plagiarism is a serious offence in blogging. You dare not do it if you don’t want to lose your credibility.

Don’t 5. Don’t write your content for Engines: Search engines (SEs) don’t fetch you money, they fetch you traffic and if you write for SEs and not your readers, you’ll lose all traffic they sent you. This means that, write interesting articles that readers will enjoy reading. You should not satisfy search engines at the expense of your readers. Write more for your readers than search engines.

Don’t 6. Don’t blog for Money: You are surprised at this last don’t, isn’t it? Well to be honest, don’t blog for money, if you do, you’ll get discouraged along the line if the money never come. If you blog for authority, certainly the money (revenue) will come in. If gaining authority is your main purpose of blogging, you’ll never be discouraged. For your success’ sake, just don’t blog for money, blog to build a brand, an authority.

With all the aforementioned, I think we can all review how we blog. We need to look into how we blog so as not to loose in the long run. Not all bloggers follow this strictly but if you do, you will reap the fruit handsomely.

Lastly do the dos... Avoid the donts. Do you have any other thing bloggers need to avoid? Post them in your comments

There are couple of things a blogger need to watch out for to become a successful blogger. Blogging has its own tricks as any other thing in life and I have taken my time to highlight few of the things you, as a blogger, need to monitor to be a successful blogger.

The Dos need to be done with enough passion; so you will see blogging more as fun than business. Here is the list of Dos:

Do 1. Follow other bloggers:
Since you are still new and fresh in the blogosphere, you need to follow other established bloggers so as to count on their popularity to have your own voice heard in the blogosphere. There’s one unique thing about the top bloggers. If you follow them, they’ll check out your blog to know more about you.

Do 2. Join Bloggers Community:
Don’t isolate yourself. No man is an island of knowledge. Associate yourself with other bloggers in your niche and even outside your niche and build good relationship with them. If you have good reputation, they’ll easily recommend you to their readers and even give you free links.

Do 3. Give informative comment on other blogs:
If you do this consistently, you’ll end up generating free traffic from other blogs and also increase your ranking based on the number of blogs linking to you. If your comment is informative and not just too simple like “Hi, nice post”. Then, you should receive a considerable number of visitors from that blog.

Do 4. Link to other Blogs:
This is based on the philosophy of "what you give you get". If you link to other blogs, they’ll link back to you (not always the case) thereby increasing the number of links to your blog. This process will definitely increase your search engine ranking.

Do 5. Post Frequently:
If you want to turn your visitors into regular readers, then you need to post fresh, genuine and informative articles frequently. If they see fresh articles each time they visit your blog, they’ll return some other day to read your articles. They will turn to regular readers and not just visitors.

Do 6. Reply your readers’ comment:
Each time a reader post a comment that needs your attention or reply, do reply them. It builds relationship between you and your readers. They tend to trust you more on what you blog about.

Why not start a couple of them here on this blog, comment on this post to start building a reputable relationship with fellow bloggers. Also remember to link to this blog, notify me and I'll link back to you. :)

I read a book titled “You Can Win” by Shiv Khera some months ago and the first chapter was about attitude. How our attitude determine our altitude. And from this same chapter I got the below excerpt. It is what WINNERS do. It makes me believe that I'm also a WINNER since I possess most of the following qualities:

What WINNERS do:

Winners:

• are always part of an answer not part of the problem;
• always have a program not an excuse;
• always say “Let me do it for you” not “That is not my job”;
• always see an answer for every problem not a problem for every answer;
• always say “It may be difficult but it is possible” not “It may be possible but too difficult”;
  
• always admit he was wrong when he makes mistake not to deny it wasn’t his fault;
  
• always make commitments not promises;
  
• always have dreams not schemes;
  
• always believe he must do something not that something must be done;
  
• are always part of the team, not apart from the team;
  
• always see the gain not the pain;
  
• always see possibilities and not problems;
  
• always believe in win-win, not that for them to win someone has to lose;
  
• see the potential, not the past;
  
• are like a thermostat, not thermometers;
  
• choose what they say rather than saying what they choose;
  
• use hard arguments with soft words and not soft argument with hard words;
  
• don’t do unto others what they would not want others to do to them, not like losers that do it to others before others do it to them
  
• make it happen, not to wait till it happen
  
• plan and prepare to win.

These are the qualities of winners that distinguish them from losers. Do you have any other quality of a winner not listed here? please leave it in the comment section. We are all WINNERS

Whenever the issue of owning a blog online comes, different opinions were expressed. Most people do not know why they should run a blog or who should run a blog. This post is to shed more light on the issue. Should you have your own blog? May be because you can have a blog if:

• You’re a Business Owner
• You want to increase your income online
• You have passion for something
• You want to make a name for yourself on the internet
• You want to have your voice heard

If you fall into any of the above categories, then you need a blog. As a business owner you can make use of a blog to promote your business. Want to make money online? A blog is a good means to get that done. If you’ve got a passion for anything, you can create a blog around it and let people know how much you love it.

If you want to make a name online and also have your opinion heard by people creating a blog will make this easy for you.

A blog as defined by the blogger’s bible is like putting a publishing firm, TV studio, radio station, art or photography gallery, retail store, wholesale product distributor, news outlet, living room and community hall into one tiny box that you control with your mind and fingers. It’s like controlling everything in just a webpage; that exactly what a blog is.

A blog can be anyhting you want it to be, in short, it’s an outlet for you to self-publish your own thoughts and interests to world and let people comment on them.

Why You Should Blog

To stay connected: You can blog to stay connected with family and friends. You can create a community of friends and family to stay connected with each other.

To document your life: Since a blog can be said to be an online diary that never fade or get lost. you can use it to document your daily activities

To speak your mind and share your passion: You need a blog if you want to share your opinion about anything you have passion for. It is in the past that you may have excuse that your passion is such a narro niche that no one is insterested. But now blogging communities exist for evry topic and purpose.

To make money: If you want to make money now online, another option is to create a blog as a hobby and simply monetize it. People are actually quitting their day job to blog full-time. Nothing holds you back from making a living off your blog.

To make a difference: Create a blog to make a difference in community, business, media, family, religion, politics and government. Successful people don’t do different things, they do things differently.

To drive traffic: You can create a blog to drive traffic to your companies website. Using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and blog advertising you can drive free traffic to your blog and hence generate traffic for your business.

With these you can see that blogging is one of the most powerful tools for thriving in this information age. It allows you to stay connected with people who matter most to you, document your life, establish trust and credibility, build relationships and community, speak your mind and share your passions, make money and drive traffic to your website.

Why should people run a blog? if you have any other view about running a blog that is different from the ones above, then post them in the comment. Your comment is highly appreciated.