PostOnFire - Blog

Do your blog posts have to be perfect to get more blog traffic & readers

Do Small Things matter when it comes to blogging?

Some people think that you cannot get away with spelling mistakes and grammar errors and expect to build a reputation as a great blogger online. Do you think people appreciate or care about those little things? and if you make too many spelling mistakes, will this make your readers move away from your blog?

I agree that little things do matter offline especially with professional businesses but for personal platform such as your blog I have seen many examples that bypass these rules of perfection! And personally I really don’t care if there are a lots of grammar & mispelling mistakes as long as the blog posts are informative, entertaining and above all personal. If I need perfect grammar & spelling, there are lots of newspapers online and offline that provide this, but for the personal experience and personal opinion you can only find them at personal blogs.

I am managing PostOnFire.com & because it’s a social bookmarking for bloggers, I had the opportunity to check & discover lots of blogs in many different themes. Most of the blogs that I discovered are personal blogs that are run by average people and everyone has a unique style and personality you can feel it in the design and writing. When reading these blogs you can feel the personal touch that is not available in public news. It has the opinion and experience of people like you and me but not the editor.

Shoemoney.com is one of my favorite blogs about Internet technology and blogging tools, even Jeremey Schoemaker the owner of the blog admits few times that he doesn’t have that perfect grammar or spelling in his posts…but who cares I love reading what he writes like lots of other readers too…

So, my point is to focus more on the informative and entertaining part of your blog posts more than the grammar part.

Writing daily good posts is not an easy task, and waiting to make the posts perfect will make matters more difficult. So if you think that you have a good post, just publish it and let your readers decide. I think it’s Ok to use slang language and make errors in spelling as if in a chat room as long as you don’t write for a company blog or you’re a professional writer and you are blogging for a purpose, you need to take care of those tiny things that can sabotage your efforts.

You can just use the spelling checker in most blogging platform and run them before you upload those posts onto the World Wide Web.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Posted in Blogging Tips | 3 Comments »

Why Should You Join Any Online Community or a Social Bookmarking Site?

Online communities are everywhere and in every shape. There are online social communities for teens, for college students, for business people, for bloggers and lots more… With all these places online competing for users & traffic, the question is why should you join one rather than the rest. Whether you wanna build an online community or you just wanna join one, you should read this checklist.

-Benefits for members & readers
The first question to ask is does the e-community offers enough benefits for anyone to join? For example, some users wanna read more content, others wanna have more messaging features. What if you are a web designer that needs opinion from others who have similar interest. Or may be you have content that you wanna show to as many people as you can that target your niche.

Online users become loyal to a community when they receive good benefits. Every group has his own benefits, so an online community must make a good research to find & offer the right benefits for its group. For instance with PostOnFire.com the focus is on bloggers & blog readers. PostOnFire accepts blog post submissions from many types of blog but the focus is on the blogosphere. There are other social networking or bookmarking sites that focus on article publishers or news publishers.

- Improvement and more features.
Sometimes you don’t really need all the features in an online community and usually there are small percentage of users that fully use all the features. But this doesn’t mean a community shouldn’t improve or innovate, in contrast, users move to other communities if their community stay the same. The Internet is always changing, there are new technologies that come and old ones that fad.

The Internet or Web 1.0 was static and then came the Web 2.0 which gives users more control and interaction and I believe we are in the Web 3.0 where there are web sites that give users an almost complete control. An online community has to keep an eye on new technology, new designs and features that can benefit users.

- Members Rewards.
There is no doubt users are the blood of a social networking site. Without users there is no community. So users should be rewarded somehow. Rewards can be in the form of contest that let users engage in more conversation or activity towards the community.

There are communities that offer recognition in the form of link in their frontpage for their top users, other offer free gifts or cash. Rewards also benefit the community itself by letting users and outsiders talk about the contest and bring more traffic and new members. Sometimes rewards make users more active, in every community you’ll find only smaller percentage of users who are active members and the bigger percentage are users who are quite and just watching or waiting for the right moment to become more active (may be a contest is the right moment).

In conclusion, an online community or a social networking site will be successful if it offers the right benefits for their user, always innovate and improve and rewards its users generously.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Posted in Online Communities | 5 Comments »

How to make over 180,000$ from blogging

If you really need inspiration about making a full time income from blogging, you should study how John Chow went from 3k to 180k in just 12 months.

JohnChow.com is a blog about making money and John posts regularly about his monthly income. His 2008 first blog post is about his blog income distribution for the whole year. So, I think it’s a good opportunity for a newbie blogger to know exactly what is working when it comes to blog monetization. There is an art on picking quality affiliate programs, adding website sponsors and organizing the blog in general. And you can learn this art from studying other people results.

Update : JohnChow break his own record again on Jan 2008…

Popularity: 13% [?]

Posted in Blogging Tips | 3 Comments »

The Perfect Internet Browser For Bloggers

Most bloggers migrate to FireFox because of many good things specially the extensions you can add to make your browsing life easier and more fun.
But most of you don’t know about the new flavor of Firefox that is called Flock. Flock is an open source Internet browser based on Mozilla.

Flock is a social web browser and I think it’s the perfect Internet browser for bloggers…Why?
Because most bloggers are advanced internet users and love the online social networking life. Well…doing all the social networking things and blog posting with Flock is so easy and ready out of the box.

Adding feed is so easy… Here I added the feeds for PostOnFire Hot Post & PostOnFire Just submitted posts

Publishing to your blog is easy with flock - When you view your favorite feeds you can just click the blog link and blog about the story in seconds…

And here is the window that opens and connects you directly to your blog…
The first time using this you have to setup your blog first…And you can setup as many blogs as you want.

So basically the 2 main features of flock that even newbie bloggers will benefit from are:
1) Social networking Sites integration.
You can add as many social networking & bookmarking site as you want to flock.
For example, you can add PostOnFire and submit your top blog posts to be added to the social bookmarking service.

2) Easy Blog posts publishing
You can easily blog about other news & stories without logging to your blogging software.

To learn more about flock - Here is their main page: Flock

If you have a blog and you need more targeted traffic, don’t forget to submit your top blog posts Here

Popularity: 10% [?]

Posted in Blogging Tips | 2 Comments »

Increase Blog Traffic Using YouTube

One great way to channel traffic to your blog is to use YouTube. You may have been aware that people have been tapping into this popular site to drive traffic to their own blog or website including medium & big companies.

This is also a good opportunity for bloggers to get their videos in front of millions of online surfers. Like any social networking site, if you don’t deliver the right message to users, than your blog or site won’t benefit much from the traffic.

“But I don’t know how to record, edit and add videos online!! “

Well, …Even if you know nothing about video production and editing, you can get started easily by converting a PowerPoint presentation to a video using a default video editing that comes with your Operating System. As another option you can use a free screen recording program like CamStudio. You just have to start some where…

A HUGE source of traffic…

YouTube has a huge stream of traffic… According to Alexa, YouTube is the #4 most visited site on the Internet. Lots of people also got famous just by submitting their personal videos.

Create useful videos with your links embedded on them and upload them on YouTube. Tag them using popular keywords and you have a chance of getting to the first page of Google!

With high page ranks, and million pageviews, you have a good way to drive traffic to your blog. People have been using YouTube to channel traffic to their own sites and so you should seize this opportunity to drive visitors to your own blog.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted in Traffic ideas | 1 Comment »

Banner Ads For Massive Traffic

Many bloggers believe that online banner ads are dead or just not an effective way of advertising online. I used to agree with this and many people believe that this kind of advertising was one of the elements of the first Internet bubble. At that time, Internet entrepreneur were paying tens of thousands of dollars to create a website and other thousands of dollars spent in banner advertising. After the Internet bubble burst smart Internet marketers knew that text links advertising is 100x more effective than banners.

Today I believe in the effectiveness of online banners again for few reasons.

-First, if you take a look at all the popular websites and online portals, you’ll find lots of banner ads everywhere. (with many shapes and sizes)

-Popular online ad networks (like Google AdWords) offer banner advertising in the form of image ads.

-With the advancement of graphic editing software an image can deliver your message clearer and quicker than text. (People scan web pages and don’t read every word.)

If you really want to create an impact with your advertising campaign, why not go for large size advertising banners?

You can purchase them off high traffic sites and use them to channel traffic to your own blog. Banner ads can be costly for a newbie blogger but they have an uncanny ability to attract the eyes of the readers more powerfully than any other methods known online.

If you have some extra cash on your hand, and you are really committed to promote your blog, this is a good way to promote your blog and get massive traffic in a relatively short amount of time. As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, that you’ve to make sure that your site is well monetized first before getting into any paid advertising.

So…do you still think that online banners are dead? … what do you think?…

Popularity: 6% [?]

Posted in Traffic ideas | 2 Comments »

More ways to drive traffic to your blog

Today we will explore another way to drive traffic to your blog. You may think that your blog doesn’t need any monetary investments to make it work. In reality there are over 70 millions blogs out there in the blogosphere promoting various different themes and so, the competition is very tough.

Also, narrow niches & long tail subjects are not hidden anymore. Small niches used to be the way to go few years ago, but with thousands of blogs created every day, the chance of having an un-discovered narrow niche, that ranks high in all search engines, is very small. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to invest a little in promotion of your blogs, ain’t it?
Yes… and one effective way to do this is by using PPC (pay per click) Ads. Somehow, most new bloggers think that PPC is expensive and the idea of paying 5cent-10cents or more per click is scary. Well, that’s no
t true, PPC advertising with Google, Yahoo and MSN let you reach very targeted readers who would be likely, most interested in your blogging niche. Using a complex algorithm, PPC companies like Google AdWords lets you tap into new markets not possible before.

The good thing about PPC is you do not pay a single cent until someone clicks on those links! That means you will be paying for a visitor and not the ads. This a great and effective way to get even more visitors to your blog.

Before getting into PPC, it’s smart to make sure that your blog is well monetized, because ROI (return on investment) is the measurement of success when it comes to PPC advertising. In another words, if your blog doesn’t make any income with your current readers, then PPC could be risky. But, if your blog is well monetized then PPC can increase your income by increasing your targeted visitors.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Posted in Searh Engine | No Comments »

How to Attract Visitors to Your Blog

If you had done a good job creating those time-consuming blog posts, full of informative contents, then you would surely wish to find a way to channel traffic to it. There are many ways this can be done. In this blog post, we will look at two effective ways you can use successfully to generate traffic to your blog.

Method 1:

“Blog Comments”

Commenting on other people’s blog is a great way to drive traffic to your blog. The key to success in this technique is to use good, useful and relevant posts instead of merely “I agree”. You must spark enough curiosity in the minds of the audience reading those comments and hope to inspire enough of them to click the link back to your own blog.

Don’t confuse this method with spamming. I’ve discovered many valuable blogs from this way. Even popular bloggers recommend this way to let other bloggers and readers know about your blog. Commenting also benefiting the blog owner himself, because it shows that at least somebody reads his blog. Don’t leave several links to your site, this is considering a spam and even the blog software will flag your post as spam automatically. The only way I leave my website URL is when the comment form has a field for it, otherwise I never leave the URL in the comment text.

Method 2:

“Forum Posting”

It seems that this method is similar like the blog comments, but no, it’s completely different. This is a good way to channel traffic to your blog. A forum is a place where group of people share the same interest. In a forum people actually need your help. As a registered forum users you’ll have the opportunity to add a signature to every forum post you make. So even if you change your website or business you can easily change the information in your forum signature. Again, don’t confuse this with a spamming. If you try to promote anything in your post then this consider spamming. The only place you should do this is in your signature and you should keep also simple, just few words describing what you do.

Find forums that are relevant to your niche, join them and participate in the discussions. Most forums allow you to add a signature link. Use that to place the link back to your blog.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted in Blogging Tips | 3 Comments »