Understand Your Audience
This blog has been written for almost a month now and it ranks 6 millions for Alexa traffic rank. I just read an article from Darren Rowse about the reason why he does not use Adsense anymore in his Problogger blog. There is one important thing that I learn today is understanding your blog’s audience. Installing tracker in your blog is a must so that you know the origin of your audience, the pages they visit and how long they spend their time in certain pages. I have Google Analytics installed in this blog because it seems to give a detail report rather than other trackers.
When I login to my Google Analytics account, I read a very bad report. Most of the visitors are coming from Singapore and Indonesia while what is not really good is the visited page. There are no significant visit to my articles than the salary guides. Singapore Salary Guide takes the highest place for the most visited page. Then I wonder, so it means no one has read my thoughts then? The Salary Guide articles are only showing a list to the salary survey from many human resource companies.
Darren mentioned that we need to have a specific niche website rather than a mixed one. Problogger is about blogging and make money from blogging. I am not sure what Redfeeds is about because basically I just want to give many kinds of information that are needed by people. Frankly speaking, this idea comes to me from HubPages where I wrote many different articles and there are quite many visitors to my certain hubs which earn me some dollars from Adsense.
I will just keep blogging for any information I would like to share here and I will make other niche websites and blogs where I can get more money from Adsense and other affiliates. I plan to make the niche sites as specific as it would be and hopefully the audience will be from specific country too.
Go Success Now
Anyone wants to be success in their career but not anyone knows how to get success. Humans are creatures who adapt a pattern in their daily life. It is what physiologists call as human behavior. Human behavior determines how successful the person will be and this is not a biological heritage from parents but a result from human mind. Success begins with winning our mind first.
I remember a story about a village girl who was being educated of how to be just like the king’s daughter and when she went to the castle, the kings’ family thought that this girl was really one of the royal family members from another kingdom. If you want to be successful like somebody you know, analyze his behavior and feed your mind so that you act just like what your success friend does.
There are lots of blogs and websites now which talk about tips of getting success. There is no wrong if you read them and try them out. Take a look at one of my friend’s blog GoSuccessNow which has good advices about managing your career, negotiation, and leadership from his perspective and experiences. To be success now comes from your effort, regardless of how long have you worked; it’s about modifying your behavior to achieve your success.
Be A Professional Blogger or Not?
Bloggers who are striving to be professional will write original content with niche category in which they are familiar or expert in. They are not in a rush to make $ 100 dollars a day only in two or three months. They maintain quality rather than quantity but also post articles regulary as what all professional bloggers should do. Professional bloggers will draw the opprotunity to be high paid online writer as well as copy writer. Your blog is your reputation and if people find it very useful and informative, a good reputation will be given onto your name.
On the other hand, you can blog only for money where usually people will not display the About page on this kind of blog as it is a fully monetized blog. You emphasize on the quantity of the articles so that copy paste might be done occasionally. There are also many referral links on the sidebar and even in the footer of the page. Different from a professional blog as I mention above, a fully monetized blog does not put weight on the quality so there might be new 4-5 postings everyday.
There are also blogs which are combination of both of them or so we call it semi professional blog. There are some referral links inside the sidebar and posts but the articles are not a work of copy paste work as they show deep thought and genuine opinion from the writer. Is it true if I say like this? Not really, it means that I consider professional bloggers such as Darren Rowse and Bryan Clark as semi professional bloggers then? So, what is a professional blogger then?
Make your blog professional is different to monetize your blog. Professional bloggers can choose either to monetize their blog or not. Being a professional blogger is more about how you create your writings and the quality and originality of its own content. Of course having too many advertisement will make your blog looks unprofessional, so professional bloggers would also ensure that their blog looks nice to read on. Unprofessional bloggers are those who copy paste content, display so many advertisement and usually have no About page - because they don’t want to get sued of stealing content.
However, to tell you the truth, both can make money. It’s just both are working in different ways. It might take up a long time to be professional bloggers and make lots of money, but unprofessional bloggers who seem to be very easy to make much money quickly are in the risk of being banned by advertisers, mocked by other bloggers or even sued by the court. Just remember, don’t put your eggs in one basket, is that mean that we need to do both ways?
Link Exchange Relevancy
I got a message from the owner of www.klikkarir.com who was asking me whether I am interested to put a link in this blog to his website. I am curious why someone wants to put a link on my blog which has zero Page Rank and 6,000,000 Alexa traffic rank. Then I checked his website and guess what, it’s a job vacancy site written in Indonesian. Soon I contacted the man through Yahoo Messsenger, and told him that most of the visitors to this blog are not coming from Indonesia. I have not told him yet that it’s not really relevant to have a backlink from different theme website or blog. Done!
What I did then was helping this guy - previously I called him sir but I found out that he is just at the same age as me - by giving him an URL after I looked up in Google blog search with the keyword “lowongan kerja” which means job vacancy. I told him that he could ask for link exchange with the owners of the listed blogs that wrote about job vacancy or career. He told me that he never knew that feature before. His website was really great as it is not running on free CMS like Joomla, WordPress or Drupal.
Link exchange relevancy is really important and it should not be done merely for boosting Page Rank or Alexa Rank. A website link on the sidebar of your blog or website should be relevant with your blog or website. If your site is about health, then find in Google any websites or blogs about health and ask the owners whether they are interested to exchange link with you. Don’t exchange link with sites about clothes because it is outside the context of your site. Beware also so that you are not considered as a spammer - read SEO Mistakes: link exchange emails
I don’t want to discuss about whether link exchange can increase your rank or not as Google has the answer for this Link Schemes. Some blogs now even has one full page for a link exchange though the links are hidden in another page which may not be visible by readers. I myself has only one link to a blog which I never read before. I am not sure whether the link in my Blogroll on the sidebar will be useful for you or not because it is written in Indonesian - yet another irrelevant link of mine I guess.
Download Chrome Browser
Google is releasing its own web browser in anticipation to the new Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft which “includes more tools for Web surfers to cloak their on-line preferences, creating a shield that could make it more difficult for Google and other marketing networks to figure out which ads are most likely to appeal to which individuals” as written on the CNN article titled Google Unveils Free Browser Chrome. Google Chrome, which is still in Beta, is explained in a cartoon book which not many people I think will understand.
When I am writing this post, Google Chrome took the second place of the most keywords searched in the United States for “download chrome browser” using Google Trends. Google has announced that they will launch Google Chrome on 2 September as written on Google Official Blog with title A fresh take on the browser. Google Chrome is built on the components of Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla Firefox in collaboration with open source community. I will put the download link here as soon as I get the update. Download Google Chrome or find out more about Google Chrome. See the screenshot of Google Chrome from PC World