1. Use lots of meta keyword tags

Use it WITH Commas. Make sure you don’t repeat the same word more than 3 times in a row. Google only indexes the first 101K of the document – so don’t use TOO many.

2. Make sure you include at least one link to Google

They need quality traffic as well. Don’t be greedy and hog it all to yourself. This can do wonders for your pages. Remember – Google may be going public soon – so the more traffic you send them the better.

3. Use invisible text but make it close

Colors like 00FF33 & 00FF66 are both browser safe, but are so close most humans can’t tell the difference. Even though Google has over 50 PhDs on staff – none of them probably know this – so use it – the bottom of the page is a good place – right above what you will learn in number 4.

4. Dots, Dots, and More Dots

Put them at the bottom of your document like this:
………….
Then link each one to your pages – make sure you link one to Google and for good measure another to Yahoo. Don’t link to other sites (other than your own) that aren’t search engines. Don’t even link to sites that used to be search engines – like AltaVista.

5. This tip is probably the most powerful one on here

Make at least three pages on your site and link them as follows:

• Page 1 >>>>>> Page 2
• Page 2 >>>>>> Page 3

And this is the kicker

• Page 3 >>>>>> Page 1

Google will give points to page 2 from page 1, then to page 3 from page 2, and then – if you link it back to page 1 – it starts all over again. I can’t even count how many points this will end up giving you. Just don’t abuse it too much – or the big sites will complain you are taking too much PR from them.

6. Use H1 Tags for your entire page (except the title and other header information)

You can use CSS Style sheets to make them look smaller and Google will give you bookoo points for having everything so big on the page (even though it doesn’t look big to the user).

7. Submit early and submit often

I prefer to submit on a Sunday. That way – on Monday morning – the Googleplex will be swamped with so much to do – my submits will slip by. See the Googleplex hard at work. Would you work to ban submits if you could get FREE goat cheese (especially after doing two days without). Wouldn’t you rather play "chopsticks" on a grand piano while getting a massage? Or look at pages all day of Britney Spears? NUMBER 8

8. Link back too other people linking to your page using link:www.example.org.

This is similar to the technique in #5, but not as powerful.

9. Be careful spelling

Words like "PENS" and "ANGINA" can easily be misspelled to be words of the male and female anatomy respectively. This will cause Google to mistake your site for an ADUL† Site – and get it banned. Noticed how I used a special character to look like the letter "T" in the word before site. Use clever tricks like this throughout your documents.

10. If all else fails

mail a 10 spot wrapped inside a number 10 envelope (make sure you wrap one layer of aluminum foil around it). Write your URL above the serial number on the front. If it won’t fit, then that’s THE problem – as Google hates long URLs.

1. Have an “Advertise with Us” Banner on your site

This is the single most important issue. It should click to an Advertising information page and have an easy way to contact you for more information and rates. Key points: Make it a graphical image or a tab. Keep it above the fold.

2. Keep the ads on your site specific to your site

Don’t have smiley ads and wallpaper ads if your site is site is about mobile phones.

3. Show them the banners

If you currently have no paid placements on your site, put up house ads or partner ads in the same spot you would run a paid spot. (A house ad refers to banners for other products or sites that you or your company own)

4. Throw up a free bonus ad

By putting a free advertisement on your site, you may not only encourage similar ads or competitors to that product, but the company you added for free may decide to advertise with you. Ask for full disclosure of the performance of the campaign in return. (Total clicks, total purchases etc. ) Key points. Put the free bonus up with a direct URL without tracking tags or affiliate tags.

5. Show your site stats

You need to show at least the basics for site statistical information: Monthly unique visitors and total number of impressions are the 2 key ones. Other less important can be Google PR & Alexa rank.

6. User demographic information. Know your audience

The bare minimum is Male/Female % and average age of your readers. Other potentially useful information includes geographic, HHI, single/married, number of kids. etc. How do you get this info? You can do site polls, survey’s, or get more detailed stats from ComScore or Quantcast.com

7. Have an ‘About Us’ section

Clearly explain who you are and what your site is about. And also why you are an ‘authority’ on what you are writing about, and why anyone should care about what you have to say.

8. Don’t use Google AdSense on your site

OK, this could be the most painful one for most people especially if you are generating a few hundred bucks a month from it already. But Google ad sense devalues your site and makes it look unprofessional. You have to ask yourself, “Do I want some real revenue from my site or Google’s table scraps.”

9. Keep your blog on topic

If you are all over the map in regards to topics about which you talk about, advertisers won’t know if they are a good fit for your site.

10. Keep your blog professional

If you are talking about your cat, (Matt Cutts), ranting about your drive to work, swearing or bashing every product you can think about, it will scare away advertisers.

If your site takes an age to load, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, that’s not good. You don’t want to wear on your reader’s patience before they’ve even started reading. In this post we’ll explore ten ways to speed up your site, with tricks ranging from easy to even easier; none of the stuff in this post is difficult, so there’s no excuse for a slow-loading blog after reading this!

1. Delete Any Unwanted Plugins

If your site is loading slowly, look at how many plugins you’re using. If the answer is more than ten, look at the plugins you’re using and ask yourself whether you can integrate them directly into your theme. 

While you’re at it, also ask yourself whether you really need the plugin. If you can do without it, do.

2. Remove Unnecessary PHP Tags

If you’re using a theme that you didn’t make yourself, then chances are it’s full of php that doesn’t need to be there. For example, your header could have something like this:

This is telling WordPress to get the stylesheet url every single time someone loads your page. You can very easily replace this with something like this: (Remember to replace yoursite.com with your address).

This is just one example – there are many many more times you can do this – have a hunt round your header.php and other theme files and you’ll be amazed at the number of unnecessary queries you can eliminate.

3. Use WP Super Cache

One of the better known techniques for speeding up WordPress is to install the WP Super Cache plugin. It caches your site for super-quick loading. It’s as simple as that. Install it and forget about it (and then promptly remember it when you wonder why your design changes aren’t showing next time you edit your theme files!).

4. Optimize Your Database

You’d be surprised how much you can increase your load time simply by optimizing your database. As always, you could do it manually or just get a plugin that does it for you!

The manual way. Login to cPanel, find phpMyAdmin, select your database, click ‘check all’ at the bottom of the page and then in the drop down box in the middle of the page (see the image below), select ‘Optimize database’. And you’re done. 

The other option is to use a plugin: the Optimize DB plugin from yoast.com does what it says on the box.

5. Optimize Your Images

If images aren’t optimised, both your blog’s bandwidth and load time will be affected. Both are bad. The solution? Optimize your images. It’s easier than you may think; in Photoshop click ’save for web’ under the file menu or in the free GIMP, save the file as a .jpg and you’ll automatically be given the option to compress your image.

As a benchmark, although obviously depending on what the image is, on my blog I aim for in-post images to be 40kb or less (although don’t sacrifice quality too much!). If for whatever reason you can’t use an image editor, all is not lost! Yahoo have a free service called smush.it that you can point at a web page and it’ll optimize the images.

6. Compress your CSS and JavaScript

Again, something that is very easy to do: compress your CSS and put your JavaScript into a single file.

To compress your CSS, you can use an online tool, such as styleneat.com, which will get rid of the white spacing and neaten everything up. You might not notice any difference to start off with , but it will make a difference to your blog’s load speed; these things all add up.

Something else do is to put all of your JavaScript into a single file and then load it at the bottom of the page (in the footer.php file). This ensures that the styling is loaded first, then any fancy JavaScript you’ve got loads last.

7. Disable Hotlinking

As I said earlier, if your images aren’t optimised then your using up bandwidth unnecessarily. It’s bad enough having to keep images optimised for your own server’s sake, but say someone else copied and pasted the url of the image, putting your images on their site?!

That’s called hotlinking, and via the .htaccess file (which you’ll find in your root directory), disabling hotlinking is easy.

First, backup your .htaccess file. I can’t stress how important that is! Next, add the lines of code below, changing the appropriate lines to suit your blog. The last line is an image that will display instead – how about an advert for your site?

• #disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
• RewriteEngine on
• RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
• RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
• #RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ – [F]
• RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/stealingisbad.gif [R,L]

8. Keep Spammers Away

The .htaccess file is a very useful tool. It won’t just stop hotlinking, but it can also be used to keep spammers away by blocking referrers from certain sites. At this point, you’re probably thinking “great, pity it’d be impractical to implement this.”

Well, yes, it would be. The good news is that over at Perishable Press, Jeff has complied a list of over 8000 of the web’s spammiest referrers, which you can download here and just copy and paste into your .htaccess file.

How will this help your site load faster? If spammers aren’t getting onto your site then they aren’t using up your resources, freeing them up for everyone else to use, so the site loads faster. It will stop spammers from barraging your server with hundreds of requests. You can read the full explanation on the post at Perishable Press.

9. Turn Off Post Revisions

Post revisions, introduced in WordPress 2.6, haven’t been a big hit with everyone, especially those with single-author blogs. Why do they slow down your site?

Every single time you save a post, a new row is created in your wp_posts table, so if you save your post ten times, that’s ten new rows created.

Is the 10th one missing? Why don’t you use some of your skill and complete the list?

The beauty of creating a blog is that you can add it to your current web site or use it as a standalone website. If you don’t constantly market your blog you won’t attract many visitors or make many sales.

Here are the top 10 ways to attract web traffic to your blog:

If you consistently add new content you will not only attract regular readers but also the search engines. Try to add new content to your blog at least 3 times a week.

2. Optimize your content

Make sure you optimize the titles, paragraphs and links within your content. This means you must first do keyword research to incorporate keywords related to your content.

3. Include keywords in your tags

WordPress allows you to include tags below each post. Place your most popular keywords in these tags separated by commas.

4. Add meta tags

Use the headspace or seopack plugin to add title and description meta tags to each post. Search engines place great emphasis on title tags that contain your keyword at the beginning.

The description meta tag is what visitors read about your site when they find it in the search engines. Make sure the description of your page will get the reader to click to your content.

An individual post won’t get much traction in the search engines unless you get links pointing to it. If you have related content from other areas of your blog create a text link (anchor text) within that post that links to your current content.

Your blog post ranking will increase in proportion to the number of links pointing to it.

6. Encourage commenting

Include questions within your content and encourage readers to leave a comment. This increases blog interactivity. Readers will see it’s an active blog and will want to read the comments and provide their own feedback.

Find blogs that have content related to your own and write a comment that compliments their post or is in response to others’ comments. With each comment include a link back to your own blog.

8. Use trackbacks

A trackback is a procedure for notifying the original blog poster that you have linked to their blog post from your blog. Create lots of trackbacks to popular blog posts from your own blog. This will encourage those you trackback to do the same for you and will increase traffic to your site.

9. Submit to blog directories

Google "top directories to submit your blog" to get a free list of the top 100+ blog directories you can submit your blog to.

10. Submit RSS Feed to RSS Directories

To submit your blog or RSS feed to a list of RSS and blog directories, Google "top rank RSS blog directories."

Blog marketing is a process that must be done consistently to reap great benefits. By employing the strategies mentioned above you’ll see a steady flow of web traffic that will increase over time.

Need help driving traffic to your blog or web site? Please visit Search Engine Optimization Services

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com Affordable Web Site Design, Web Hosting and SEO.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Herman_Drost 

StumbleUpon is a new free service where internet surfers can discovers new website according to their interest. StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. This helps you find interesting WebPages you wouldn’t think to search for. For webmaster, StumbleUpon is another great way to get traffic to their site which might bring more subscribers and sells.

Bringing a huge traffic to your site from StumbleUpon is achievable if you follow these 10 steps. Stumblers are often tend to get a Digg and other social-bookmaking sites so never not underestimate the traffic that you got from them. Just make sure that you sign up and submit your website there first. Now here are the tips.

1. Tag your site to the related category

so that the visitor can expect what they will find in your website. Build a good, unique, and informative content.

2. Use an eye-catching headline

like “secret” or “shock”. The visitor will curious to know what is inside your website.

3. Put the StumbleUpon integration code

to every page in your site but do not stumble all your pages by yourself.

4. Be a part of the stumble community

so that you will know what they are mostly interested with.

5. Prepare your site with “viral marketing technique”

so that the number of traffic will double from the Stumblers.

6. Ask your friend to “thumbs up” your site

and you did the same to his/her website.

7. Suggest your reader to try StumbleUpon

and install the toolbar to increase the number of your pages got “thumbs up”.

8. Add as many “StumbleUpon” friends as possible

(the result is same as above).

9. If you got many websites, link them together

If one of your website got stumbled well, the other site might receive the effect too.

10. Optimize your website loading time

If can, avoid flash since not all browser can support the latest flash version.

When explaining SEO to a potential client I usually break it down into 3 key areas.

• Technical SEO, being all those on-site things they don’t understand such as duplicate content and fixing ugly URLs etc.
• On-page SEO being the process of choosing the best words for your pages and using them in the right places and,
• Link building, the process of getting people to link to you. Clients often confuse this one with linking out to other people, thinking it’s helping them somehow.

Technical SEO is not really a matter of improving your rankings, it’s more about making sure you don’t make some colossal cock-up that will stop your site from being indexed. This post covers 10 common mistakes people make with their technical SEO.

1. Brand new website, completely flash

I had the privilege of explaining to someone recently that the 5k he had just spend on his new website recently was not money well spent. The whole site was one flash file, and had no text content, making it invisible to search engines. The sad part was that the site didn’t need flash – animation effects were limited to mouseovers on buttons, easily replicated using javascript.

Just because Google says they can read content within swf files doesn’t make it a good idea. If search engine rankings are important, make sure there is plenty of text content for spiders to find.

2. Forgetting to redirect old pages

When you replace that old FrontPage site with your swanky new CMS and completely change all URLs on the site, make sure you setup 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages.
If you don’t, all the links you have naturally been accumulating will now be broken, meaning Google is likely to ignore them for ranking purposes, and webmasters are likely to remove them from their sites.

Anyone who has gone through the process of building links naturally will know how precious these are, so 301ing the old pages to the new pages is critical.

It takes only a few minutes to do, pay someone to do it if you have to.

3. A robots.txt blunder

Putting a bad line into your robots.txt file is a pretty fast way to axe your site from the search results. If you don’t know what robots.txt is all about, then perhaps it’s worth thinking twice about playing with it?

Google has a tool for checking your robots file, so take the time that any changes are done correctly.

4. <p class="big-heading">No H1 headings</p>

I hate this one so much. Who really knows if the H1 is weighted heavily or not in Google’s algorithm, but my gut feeling is that it is important. I so often see websites where the major heading on the page is not a H1, it’s a styled paragraph or simply a div.

CSS can be used to redefine the styles for existing page elements, such as H1 headings, so it just makes sense to use a H1 tag for your major heading.

5. Site wide meta description

It’s really easy to stick a meta description into your website template and see it used on every page of your site. Unfortunately, this can axe your site from the search results pretty quickly. If you have a site wide meta description, then all it takes is a more powerful site to steal your meta description and suddenly they will be ranking instead of you (your site will be lost in the duplicate content filter).

Take the time to use a unique meta description on every page, or leave it blank.

6. Splash pages

The splash page or flash intro page is essentially an empty page (as far as the search engines see it) with a single link to your homepage.
What this means is that your navigation structure is now one level deeper. The page that would have beena PR5 is now a PR4, and Google visits your "homepage" less often (because the splash page is actually the homepage).

If you really really must use a flash intro or splash page, do the right thing and add a little paragraph of text at the bottom for the search engines to see. Also place links to your other top-level pages, not just the homepage, so the link juice spreads around the site properly.

7. 404s with content

I have seen some interesting ways of rewriting URLs, and my favorite had to be the 404 method. Basically, every page returns a 404 header, and a custom 404 handler (a PHP script) was used to deliver the page content to the browser.

Unfortunately, Google ignores the content and just sees the 404 error, so this site had no show of appearing in search results.

This is uncommon, but it’s worth using a little extra caution when delivering a 404 to the browser. 404s can spell bad things for your site when you get them wrong.

8. Ads, ads, ads

While not strictly a technical issue, nothing screams "don’t link to me" like an affiliate thin content site crawling with Adsense. If you expect to do well in the search engines, you need links, and it’s not worth losing links for the sake of a few dollars a month in Adsense revenue.

Advertising is something that should be added to an established website with established traffic, it’s unlikely you will get rich from advertising revenue on a brand new domain with no links.

9. Black hat that doesn’t need to be black hat

Har har, I’ll write this paragraph of really crap content with some useful keywords and make it white on a white background so people can’t see it.

Thing is, it doesn’t take much more effort to create good content with useful keywords in it and make it visible to your users. People spend time creating dodgy doorway pages when they should be optimizing their content pages. Adding crap hidden content to the homepage when they should be writing good sales copy.

Black hat tricks like this are an invitation for other webmasters to burn you (Google never finds out on it’s own). Before going ahead with a black hat scheme, look for white or grey hat alternatives first.

10. Multiple domains and dupe content

I once brought a site from top 60 rankings to top 20 by doing nothing other than removing 14 out of 15 versions of their homepage.
They had…

• www.domain.co.nz
• domain.co.nz
  
• www.domain.co.nz/default.asp
  
• www.domain.co.nz/default.asp?pageid=1
  
• www.domain.com
  
• www.otherdomain.co.nz
  
• otherdomain.co.nz
  
• secure.domain.co.nz
  
• secure.domain.co.nz/default.asp
  

etc.

Each version of the homepage had a certain amount of link authority, and the version with the most power showed up in the search results. I redirected all that link power into the main page, and all of a sudden, the rankings jumped, having changed nothing else.

Is your site wasting precious link juice on duplicate versions of your homepage?

Facebook’s fan pages are easy to set up, but not so easy to master. Unfortunately, Facebook’s system for setting up and maintaining pages is needlessly complicated and sometimes buggy. It can be a little frustrating, but that’s the price of reaching a network of 300 million people. It’s worth the effort to put Facebook to work for your business. We can help:

1. Setting up Your Page

Take your time while setting up a Facebook fan page. The category you choose at the very beginning is something you can’t change—unless you want to dump all your fans and start over. Different categories let you display different information (hours, parking and public transit options for a restaurant, mission and products for a website), so choose wisely. This site explains the differences.

Once you’ve picked your category and set up your page you can start adding basic info (most of this information will be in the “Info” tab that isn’t visible until a user clicks on it). You can also add a short bit of copy to the sidebar on your wall, which is an important place to give a basic overview of your business.

Like every other social networking site, your profile photo is an important branding opportunity. Facebook does zoom and crop images when it displays thumbnails, so it can be helpful to properly size your image so any important details aren’t cut out in thumbnails.

Take a look at the settings before you finish and make sure you’re comfortable with the default settings. By default Facebook fan pages are designed to be interactive, which means fans can post content on your wall. This is a great opportunity to hear from your customers, but you’ll probably want to keep an eye on it.

Don’t forget to publish your page when you’re ready to go live.

2. Status Updates

Status updates could be called the heart and soul of Facebook. Much like Twitter, these are the constant stream of updates that show up on the “wall” of a profile. Each user’s homepage shows a flood of status updates from their friends—so you can see what a vital opportunity these updates are to communicate and connect. Each status update can be commented on and “liked,” which gives ample opportunity for feedback.

It’s important to understand the place of status updates. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which means quite a few status updates will come and go on their home page in any given day. The bottom line is that one or two status updates won’t change the world. You need to have consistent and quality updates to connect with people. And it doesn’t hurt to repeat an important update—don’t assume because you posted it once that people saw it (just don’t go overboard either).

Feel free to double up on your status updates. Facebook can automatically publish your updates to Twitter, and a number of applications can import Twitter updates to Facebook (though sorting out the best method can be complicated).

3. Applications

There’s an unending supply of applications to give more utility to your Facebook page. You can add extra tabs that contain unique content and post extra information in the sidebar of your wall. The applications can do things like post your Twitter feed, hold contests, conduct polls, play music and more. Not all of these will tie into your status updates, which means you’ll need to find ways to make sure your fans find them.

One of the standard applications you’ll want is Static FBML, which lets you add basic HTML. It’s very basic (javascript and iframes aren’t allowed), but you can add images and other extras to customize your page.

4. Importing Blog Content

You also have the option of importing blog content to your Facebook page. The easiest approach is to import the RSS feed of your blog using Facebook’s Notes. The upside is that it’s simple and easy, plus users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook. The downside is that users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook without ever visiting your blog. Depending on your end goals that may be a problem.

There are also a number of third party applications that will import blogs. Some will display them in boxes on your page, which is less helpful because you’re relying on users to go looking for those boxes. Other applications (like RSS Graffiti) will import the blog content and post it as a status update, which delivers the content directly to your users.

5. Choose Where People Land

One thing you’ll notice is that each fan page has multiple tabs for content. You can add as many as you like and there is an option to change the default tab people first see when they view your page (Edit Page: Wall Settings: Edit). So you could build a custom tab introducing people to your brand instead of just sending them to your wall. Some folks have even experimented with using this functionality to show unique content to non-fans.

6. Communicate

One of the bonuses of the fan page is that you can send updates directly to all your fans (personal profiles can only send a message to a maximum of 20 friends at a time). These updates appear in a special tab in a user’s inbox, which mean they can be easy to miss. But these updates can also be targeted by location, age and gender. That’s a huge bit of demographic targeting courtesy of social networking.

7. Share More Content

Just like a personal profile, a fan page can add all sorts of extra content, like photos, videos, events and more. Default fan pages also come with a discussion board built in. Be sure to take advantage of these extra goodies and post some content, even if it’s just something fun. Make sure something appears on those extra tabs—if you don’t want any content there, consider removing the tabs so users won’t wonder why they’re empty.

8. Get a Custom URL

The first challenge when you launch your Facebook fan page is to secure a custom url. By default the link to each Facebook fan page is pretty ugly. But once you get 100 fans you can add your own custom url (http://www.facebook.com/yournamehere). You just need to cross that magic threshold.

9. Spread the Word

And the best way to cross that threshold to 100 fans is to spread the word. One quick way is to become a fan of your own page. That update will show up in your profile and other folks might see it and check it out. You can also suggest your page to friends and add the page to your favorites. From there you can go beyond Facebook and add a ‘fan box’ to your website that promotes your Facebook page. Consider promoting your Facebook page in other channels like a blog, e-mail newsletter, link on your website, etc. People can’t become a fan on Facebook if they don’t know you’re there.

10. Examples

Finally, it’s always worth checking out a few examples to see how some of the best are doing it. Take a look at some of these major Facebook pages to see what’s working for them:

• U2
• TOMS Shoes
• Apple Students
• Ford
• Mashable

You can also search for your competition and see if they have a presence on Facebook and if so what they’re doing. Also check out these five inspiring examples for more.

So, you’ve got a blog and you have money to spend on it. You are either one of the well-off bloggers who is entering the blogosphere with a budget, or you managed to make a handsome profit last month and are looking to re-invest

These are the options available to you:

1. Get a professional blog redesign

You only get 1 chance to make a first impression and having a unique professional design is a fantastic way to go. It also helps with branding, usability, monetization and being viewed as an authority. If you don’t have enough for that you could always have a “blog makeover” and have parts of the blog redesigned.

2. Upgrade to a dedicated server

Bluehost has always served me very well but if traffic is going to substantially increase or come in big spikes (e.g. a page 1 on digg.com) a dedicated server will be needed to handle it.

3. Spend the money on advertising

Perhaps you already have a sleek design and are ready for all the traffic the Internet can throw at you. Buying advertising may be the option for you. You could attain better rankings in the SERPS by buying text links or go for brand building banner ads.

4. Buy a review for your blog

This overlaps with advertising somewhat but when choosing a review it is the blogger who you pick combined with the type/level of traffic their blog receives (for a limited time only you get a free sitewide link with a review on Blogging Fingers!)

5. Pay a programmer to make a plugin for you to release

Of course this is assuming you are not a programmer yourself and that you have an idea for a plugin. This builds your authority and providing the plugin is a good it can attract many 1000s of links. You don’t have to have a massive blog for this to be a success; it works the other way around. E.g. the Shylock Blogging Adsense plugin.

6. Pay a programmer to make a Wordpress theme for you to release

This has many of the same benefits as releasing a plugin only there are money making opportunities here by finding multiple sponsors for your new theme.

7. Use the money to develop another sort of product

For example releasing an e-Book/PDF. In many cases this can be free but it’s often a good idea to buy some exposure for this to ensure it gets the attention it deserves.

8. Hire coauthors

Blogging Tips did this fairly recently and they have experienced nothing but growth. If your blog is popular enough you may hardly have to pay the coauthors anything because it will be worth it for them just for the exposure they gain. This is a serious expansion option and once coauthors are found gives you more time to work on other projects.

9. Add new features to your blog

This could be in the form of a forum, a social network or even a voting section akin to 45n5s Moneylinks.

10. Invest in new money making techniques and then educate your readers about them

Readers like to know the actual numbers about an online money making method, not some vague estimations. In this niche running an experiment and then sharing the information freely with your blogs readership is a great way to gain respect as someone of knowledge. For example running a PPC campaign or getting started in domaining (buying and selling domain names) involves spending some money. The useful articles you could write about your campaign (not to mention the knowledge you would have gained) make expanding your horizons a sound investment.

Conclusion

Those are just 10 ways to spend money improving your blog. If you are not quite making that sort of money, those things can be a goal to work towards. Think of it this way; if you can make just $50 in a month from a blog with 0 advertising budget, think what you can do with $50 to spend on any of the above.

If you have any more thoughts about spending money to develop a blog I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Do you want to enter the blogosphere like a quiet librarian enters a classroom, or do you want to rock the stage? I am definitely one to rock stuff out and in this article I will share a few tips to help you make an attention grabbing launch. If you want to give your blog an exciting launch, your blog needs to be valuable to your target audience, otherwise your hard work will be in vain. Ask yourself this simple question “Does my blog provide something that a thousand other blogs don’t?” If you don’t have something special to offer, no one will care when you launch or how you launch. There will always be a certain category of blogs that will not qualify for a special launch and it is up to you to determine if your blog fits that category. Now let’s look at 10 ways that you can launch your new blog with a ‘bang’.

1. Prepare amazing content in advance

Do you want a guaranteed way to launch with a bang? Prepare amazing content before you launch. I am not talking about a quick general post, I want you to take the time of your life to create the most astounding post you have ever come across. Get some early feedback on the first article and if you don’t get a positive enthusiastic reply, store your article for later and work on something that would give your audience the ‘wow’ factor. If your message is not worth spreading then millions in advertising will also fail you. The most true and tried method of creating hype surrounding your blog is by creating some really good content and letting the users do the talking. If you can successfully amaze ten people and get them excited about your blog, you can expect them to share your blog with a 100 more people and this process would go on until the hype expires. The idea is to convince your first visitors that they have come across a truly great new blog and they absolutely have to share it. No one will share a blog that has poor content or no content at all. If you want a real head start, you will need some truly refreshing content that urges your readers to share it. 

2. Run a viral twitter campaign

@yourblogname is giving away a free iPod Nano at http://is.gd/lvxv – RT this message to participate!

This would be a smart campaign, extremely effective and easy to deploy. Just ensure that the prize you offer is exciting enough for someone to re-tweet your message. You might think that an iPod is just way too much to give away for a Twitter contest but what you want to create is a viral tweet and an iPod Nano will be enough to grab the attention of a lot of Twitter users. If you don’t have the budget to give away an iPod, don’t despair. Some cold calling and email and you’d usually be able to find a sponsor who is willing to give something away in exchange for some exposure. 

3. Provide incentives to early subscribers

I have seen this work very well on many blogs where bloggers usually give away a digital product like an e-Book or an icon set to all the users who subscribe to their blog. This will give your visitor the push needed for them to subscribe. If you can offer a valuable freebie that is related to your target audience, it can radically improve your subscriber count in a very short time. If you don’t have something worthy to offer your subscribers you might as well not offer anything at all. Make it worthwhile. 

4. Hold a contest

Holding a contest gives your blog an interactive element rather than being a one way conversation, you can challenge your users and allow them to be part of your community. Your contest should challenge a user into participating rather than bribing them into participating. A contest should be exciting to your target audience, it shouldn’t be complicated, but don’t make it too easy either. If you have a design blog for example, you might consider hosting some sort of design competition and give away a brand new Macbook to the winning entry. This will surely turn some heads and help your branding efforts. 

5. Run a brute-force ad campaign

What’s better than one ad on one blog? A lot of ads on a lot of blogs at the same time! A lot of new blogs are coming in with investor backing and have the money to start big. If you are one of them and want a head start, then an advertisement campaign will do just that. Instead of buying one advertisement for one year on a single blog, buy 10 adverts on several related blogs for the month that you launch. You cannot expect a surge of visitors just like Gucci doesn’t expect a surge of customers after advertising in a magazine, but you can expect your blog to slowly turn into a brand. 

6. Host an event or a party

Show the world that you are not one to sit idle. Call up your friends and take them out for a fancy meal, order a cake and celebrate the birth of your blog. Depending on the scale of your blog, you might want to take this to the next level and invite anyone in your area to your launch party. Blog about your party, as this shows your readers that you are a real person in the real world establishing a connection with them. It gives your blog a face and makes it easier than ever to create a community around it. 

7. Give away prizes

Who doesn’t like giveaways? You’ve probably seen many food companies offering free tasting of their new product at supermarkets. They usually give you a sample of their product, or offer you a freebie of some sort when you visit their stand. This is a very efficient way of reaching out to customers who might not try their product on their own. In our case, a blog could give away prizes for commenting, subscribing or becoming a Twitter follower. This is a very common strategy among established blogs and works like a charm.

If you only have a limited amount of prizes and a lot of participants, simply choose a few winners at random to keep things fair. You can use random.org to select a random number. 

8. Promote your posts on social media

This should be done from the day you start your blog and for every new post you make. Once you get the first few visitors, it is up to your visitors to take the next step. If your post is capable of convincing the reader that it’s worth sharing, you can expect it to get ‘dugg’, bookmarked in Delicious or retweeted. 

9. Guest post on other blogs

Not everyone can afford to purchase an advert on a leading blog to get major exposure. A great alternative is spending some time and create great content for other well known blogs and get paid for it. Guest posting is a great way to make some money and get some exposure. Write an article for a high profile blog and ask them to publish it in the first week of your launch if possible. You can now introduce your new blog at the end of your guest post. 

10. Interact with your user base

Bloggers can get so engulfed in getting new readers that they forget about the readers that they already have. Interacting with your user base is an excellent way to expand your community as users who like your blog are already on it and these are the same users who will tell their friends about you. So take some time off of analyzing your stats and counting your diggs and simply reply to the comments left and emails received. In addition to replying to their comments, ask your readers what they want and expect from you. If you are a tutorial website, you might want to ask your users what tutorials they want to see next. This makes users feel that they have a say in what you do and makes them feel attached to your website.