Before I go about telling you guys some tips to increase RSS readers, let me first explain what RSS is first. As defined by Wikipedia

“RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.”

So why do some blogger focus so much on RSS readers? Well for one common reason they want more readers on their blog and people can subscribe to their blogs to get more readership for your blog.

How does RSS make you money?

If your RSS readership is really big, you can actually sell ad spaces within your RSS by using text-link-ads and there are bloggers who make quite a lot just from selling ad space in the RSS itself.

Also there is a rumor around the internet that search engine are also beginning to take into account the number of rss readers you have on your blog to give you some ranking power on search engine. How truth is this I am not too sure but I read it on a forum.

So how do you increase your RSS Readers? Here’s are 3 evil tips you can implement today.

1. Run A Contest And Give Away Stuff

One great example how I did this was at this post. I was giving away a free ipood shirt and ever since I started this giveaway contest, my RSS subscription has jumped from 240 to over 430! That’s a huge improvement I must say.

2. Tell Your Readers You Need Their Help To Get Subscribers

Most often if you want to get something you just have to ask, it’s that simple. But it’s strange and common that many people would be shy to ask about what they want and end up disappointed. You may want to try telling your readers reasons why you need people to subscribe to your rss, for example you can say like ” I need to increase my advertising fee at website ABC so I need all the help I can get to get more subscribers. ”

And that example is really truth because in some advertising networks your price for an ad online is determine sometimes by your rss readership count.

3. Make Your RSS Button Accessible On The Top

A key factor to increase RSS readership is to show people right at the front where they can subscribe to your rss feed. Also you would also want to show your readers the number of subscribers you have on your blog. However if you only have about 50 readers, you would not want to show it until you reach about 100 readers. A faster way to cheat the system, you can submit your RSS feed to a few RSS announcers and you will get some extra readers but actually they are just spiders and robots =P

In fact the truth is that what number you see on the readers is not the actual amount of readers on the blog, most often it’s just 50% of what the number you see there, the rest of it are just spiders or robots from search engine who subscribe to your blog. So next time you see a blog with 5,000 readers, most often only half of them are real people reading the blog.

If you find this tips useful and would like to receive more FREE updates just click here to subscribe to this blog and if you have some experiences on RSS and like to share it with everyone just post your comment below with your example =)

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Now that you have decided that you want to make money with a blog, it is time to tell you how to set one up. There are few simple guidelines that need to be followed so that you are giving your readers that right impression. That impression is that you know what you are talking about and that you are reliable and dependable. Here we go with part two in the series of Make Money Blogging, the how to set up the blog.

First thing first, you need to have a blog. There are many people out there that will tell you the only successful way to make money with your blog means you have to pay to build one. That is really not the case. There are many free blog sites; these sites let you build a blog on their network. You have your own url and you can create the name to be whatever you want, and they are free. Not all blog sites are created equal whether you pay for them or not. I highly recommend that you use Wordpress.

Your second step is to know decide on your topics. Topics are important because you want to build a reader base. Picking a topic that you are comfortable with and knowledgeable about is important. Knowing what you are talking about goes along with building a reader base. You need the reader base in order to make money with your blog.

The third step is to create the content for your blog. This does not mean that you sit and write about absolutely anything in the world. Go by the topics that you have picked. Write about what you know and what you have researched. The way you write is important as well. Making sure that you are using the correct grammar and proper spelling is crucial. Remember not only are you trying to build the reader base you are looking for customers. Not many intelligent people are going to trust what you are recommending if you don’t even spell the words on your page correctly.

Step four for building your blog is that you keep it updated. You will be hard pressed to find anyone that makes money with their blog from one or two postings that they did months ago. Make sure that you are posting daily or at least every other day. My recommendation is that you spend a few days writing posts and saving them as Word documents and each day you copy and paste an article into your blog. This helps save time so that you do not have to write everyday and this will keep your blog updated. One post per day is adequate.

The next step is to set up a ping time. The purpose of the ping is that it updates all the search engines every time you update your blog. There are free pinging services available. All you have to do is go to the site and enter your blog url and hit ping, whenever you update your blog. Blogger.com has an automatic ping service and so does Wordpress.

The final step is to make sure that your blog is personable. In order to gain a good reader base the people reading your blog need to feel a connection to you. Make sure that you have completed your profile area; offer the readers the option to leave comments and maybe even a link exchange.

Watch for part three of the series, this where we will tell you how to get products and post them on your site so that you an start making money. To get further updates just click here to subscribe to this blog.

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Just recently I just managed to upgrade my computer again with some extra new gadgets - I am a nerd freak when it comes to gadgets. Blogging is not a easy occupation to start with. Many people who have met me in person before most often would relate me as a full time blogging making money online.

Making money from blogging is really fun but I thought I share just some insiders and things you may require when you start your journey into blogging.

Here Are The 5 Blogging Standard Operating Procedures To Make Money Online

Step 1 - Do A Survey On What Your Readers Like To Read About

It is always very important to know what your customers or readers like to know more about. You can find out easily by just asking your audience. An example I did was at this post where I ask them what are their top 3 problems that people face online.

What you can do with that information is you can gather the information and create a product or service around it. In that way your readers will love more about what you want to write about and in return help to solve their problems.

Step 2 - Open Your Creative Mindset

There is no right or wrong in blogging but what you need to do after you found out what your readers want, you would want to start to think of ideas or articles you can write to cater to your audience. Do not worry if you feel the information is really simple because trust me there are still hundreds of people online who will not know what you know.

Keep your articles short and sweet and to the point but also remember to be honest and speak from your heart as readers will be able to tell if you are trying to lie.

Step 3 - Promote Your Blog Post

Many people who blog online always fail to do this important step and expect traffic to automatically just appear out of no where. The thing is you WILL NEVER get traffic if you do not promote your blog post. So what you should do is start telling your friends about your blog post or go to forums and post your content in there.

For more tips of promotion, I would recommend this guide book I created which shares more in depth about getting traffic.

Step 4 - Post The Same Article Into Article Directories

Since you have already spend the time to write the blog post, you would want to leverage on the articles you have and post them on article directories to drive more traffic to your main blog. Just remember the focus is to promote your blog in return to collect leads for your business.

Step 5 - Collecting And Built Leads

Building a strong readership on a blog is important but what is more important is you have to collect leads from your blog too. Without collecting people’s contact details there will be no way you can communicate with them later on if you like to do so. How much you want to make from your blog or business will most likely determine by the number of leads and readership you have a blog. So start building leads today if you have not done so. You can start by clicking here to sign up for a FREE auto responder =)

Summary

Well that’s it for my own Blogging SOP when ever I do a blog post, normally takes me about 2 hours to complete all 5 steps. If you find this post useful do remember to click here to subscribe to our feed and drop some comments below.

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In blogging the most tiring thing anyone really hates doing is posting new articles on a blog. I believe many people have this problem and have no clue what to write to their readers.

Here’s 4 Valuable Tips To Help You Get Started On Writing

1. Do A Keyword Research At DigitalPoint To Find Ideas

If you are new to Internet Marketing, you should go to DigitalPoint Tool at this link and type in a keyword phrase that you are looking for online.

These tools which we call them keyword research tools will generally help you find out what people type online related to our niches.

For instance if you type in “blogging”, here are the top 5 results shown.

- blogging money thebillivard.com - 1,329.6/day
- blogging - 1,127.2/day
- band blog blogging cl finding forum friend friend group join journal journaling music networking photo pic rate sharing - 519.1/day
- 101 advice blogging blogosphere ever ever from leverage life no no one one people podcasting power real successfully tells tells who - 179.6/day
- blogging church - 77.2/day

What you see above is the number of search terms you can find in digitalpoint, however these results shown above some of the keywords are kind of weird especially for the 3th and 4th keyword which is super long. But from the first keyword which is “blogging money thebillivard.com”, I would safely say that there are about 1,329.6 people everyday viewing that website.

Normally we would totally ignore keyword that look weird as some how digitalpoint which generate these keyword you would not be able to find real accurate data from. The best bet to still get solid research is from your Adwords Campaign.

So why must you do a keyword research before you post? Most often when you try to write on your post you want to use keyword you have research on and optimized your keyword with your keyword you have type, which in return will help you generate some ideas for your articles.

2. Read Other People’s Blog For Ideas

My favorite resource to looking for ideas to write on my blog is to look at Technorati. Type in your keyword or topic you like to write on and read what others are talking in your niche that would surly help you generate more ideas and topics to talk on.

However never copy the words directly from your competitors or blogs as it’s not nice to do that.

3. Express All Your Problems You Faced Online And Share It With Your Readers

One key pointer I love about blogging is the ability to share your thoughts with no restrictions or what so ever. I realized the best type of post to post on your blog is the problems you faced on your blog.

I remember there was once I spent over US$400 on a review which did not really made much money for me. But I took that big failure and decided to write a report on it at this post here.

From that experience, I got over 500+ people downloading the report itself and the interesting part I even had people buy my product because of that report.

4. Write From Your Heart And Be Humble

Although it may sound strange to you but before you even start typing on your blog post, you want to ensure you have a very humble mindset before you start writing. For some strange reason, the thoughts you have in your mind will impact your writing style when you type on your blog. What I learn recently was that every time I had a humble mindset before I begin writing my CTR and sales per blog post actually increases! Which means more sales and profits for me =)

Summary

So that’s the 4 valuable tips I like to share with you guys if you currently facing problems getting ideas to post on your blog but what is having ideas if they are not profitable?

I have been blogging for nearly 15 months plus with other 818 pages of content which I think can be a book by now… did I make any money from all my efforts? Well here is some proof which you can click on the image to see what I earn just last month =)

Yep what you see above is what we called a money cheque which was sent to me by Clickbank and that is just a small potion of what I am currently earning online. I have not include my earnings from ADs on this blog, paid reviews and so much more… If you are interested to learn how I started I would recommend you get this step by step guide here.

I really have to thank god that he gave me a really solid foundation when I started my journey in Internet Marketing and blogging and I would not be where I am today without him. So if you have any comments feel free to comment below.

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As I am writing this article I am actually on my way to my friend’s place I thought why not make use of the 30 minutes I have on the train and type an article. Here’s some proof I am really writing in the train as you can see I took a photo with my laptop webcam.

The opposite girls in the train are quite pretty looking too bad I cannot take a photo of them, haha that would be really wrong but everyone is staring at me as I open my laptop on the train to type.

I was scanning through my emails today I realized I got lots of emails coming in lately asking me for help on how to get started on blogging. Well if you are really new to blogging I strongly recommend you get my beginner’s guide here or you can also read these few pointers to help you out.

The focus behind the next few things I like to share to aim towards to get more loyal readers for your blog so that in the near future you can promote stuff to your readers by doing recommendations.

1. Introduce Paid Advertising Into Your Traffic Plan

If you have not tried it yet, you can consider going to networks like Adbrite or Adwords and set a side about US$50 to advertise your blog. So why would anyone want to advertise a blog? For one very good reason a blog is not a sales page. Most often what I learnt is when people click on advertisements and landed on this blog there would be people who like what they read and bookmark the blog naturally.

Here’s An Example How My Ad Will Look Like

Grab Your FREE Blogging Guide
Detailed Steps To Start Your Blog Going
Download It Today! Worth US$47
http://www.GatherSuccess.com

Destination URL: http://hyperlink.to/trafficbook

So what you will noticed when the link above I actually advertise a blog squeeze page and I can tell you not many bloggers are currently using this. But I can tell you this is a very effective way to generate leads from your blogs.

2. Massive Post Your Blog Articles To Article Directories

Do you know that article marketing is one of the top 10 marketing methods that many marketers are using online? For one simple reason why is because article marketing provides a great platform for anyone to soft sell or pre sell anything you like to promote.

People who read stuff online normally do not like to be pitch online and so do I unless I find the product is a good product. So what you can today is just use your existing blog post you have and post them all up on article directories too!

That will strongly leverage on your efforts on writing on your blog and give you more targeted traffic from article directories which they can read your valuable content and click on your resource box which will be promoting your blog.

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Just recently about 6 days ago, two major incidents happen to me lately and I was really puzzled as to why it happened. I got lots of emails and quick messages from friends online asking me what happen so I decided to share it out in here in this post.

I got hit really badly from two major sites recently. One of them was my page rank was ranked zero by Google & the other worst cast was my account at Hostgator got suspended.

1. How My Page Rank Became Zero

Firstly I do not use any black hat (illegal) methods to drive traffic to my websites so when I got page rank zero I was truly suprised I got ranked so low. From research these are some of the possible reasons.

- I had a widget on my blog at that time showing a page rank 4 but during this month I got a mini slammed and it became 3 but I forgot to update the widget and it still shows 4. Because of THAT Google flagged me for showing a fake ranking and it valids Google’s TOS that is why my rank now is zero.

- Another possible reason some rumors said was there were text links sold on my blog which cause the rank drop. But from experience it should not drop so low until zero, normally just a drop about minus 1.

- Another possible reason, I noticed I accidentally put gambling links on my blog within me noticing them through comments by people who post on this blog which maybe another possible reason for this.

So if you currently have a blog make sure you check the following above and make sure you do not have them to prevent yourself from getting page rank zero.

However The SHOCKING THING Was This

My search engine traffic still remain the same and I still got many keywords ranked in the top 10 results that drive me lots of traffic. From what I am experiencing now I am guessing Google has a page rank for my website just that they masked it without me knowing. Those who are experience in SEO will know that page rank may play a part in search engine ranking but amazing I still have words ranked in the top 10 in Google and it driving more traffic now actually then before.

2. How My Hosting Account From Hostgator Got Suspended!

Hostgator has been around for many years, in fact there are one of the most reliable host I found online and that was the reason I use them. I have been with them for about 15 months and so far there were no down times but only this very unlucky suspension of account.

The only reason why I got suspended was because Hostgator had a very strict rule when it comes to spamming online. Just recently one of my domains which is part my Hostgator account was flagged spam. It was flagged because on last Saturday one of my domains accidentally sent out 200 emails to people in an hour which flagged Hostgator.

Because of that one reason, my account was suspended for 4 days! As an experience webmaster what they just did to me was good thing because it shows they really take care of their server from misused users who are sharing the same server in shared hosting. If your web host do not control spamming you will encounter lots of problem later on when trying to sent emails to your friend through your server so by control the shared resources within the server it will keep everyone’s account healthy.

After further research the main cause of this spam was because one of my websites was so popular during a peak hour that it actually sent out 200 emails at one time by a Tell A Friend script - A Tell A Friend script is basically a simple program I have on my website that allows others to tell their friends about what I do. So what happen that night, I got about 30 to 40 people online telling over 200 of their friends my web services and that caused Hostgator to suspend my account =P

So if you are currently using any form of Tell A Friend script I strongly recommend you stop it before you own host suspend you. I hope you find this article useful and feel free to leave your comments below with your thoughts.

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We as humans are not born perfect even sometimes I also do make mistakes. It’s great to make mistakes because it’s only when you made the mistake will you be able to learn how to solve them and do less of them. I thought of sharing some of my major top 5 mistakes I made when I blog online so that you are aware not to do them too.

1. When Blogging Do Not Use Your Own Symbols Readers Will Not Understand.

I think it’s because I love to chat on online chat messenger, I tend to always use symbols like =) or =P in my blogging articles. I discover that what I assume people may understand they see a smiling face to be a whole different thing to someone else on a foreign country. Do try to avoid you any symbols to express expression on your blogs.

2. Spell Check Your Blog Post

I am seriously very guilty when it comes to this, it is not because I do not know how to do it. But when you have spent an hour more or less on writing the content sometimes it is even more tiring to check the spelling. That is the major reason why you sometimes do see some spelling errors on this blog. I am really sorry on that.

3. Get Someone To Proof Read Your Content

Another major mistake I always do is my lack of grammar as my level of English is really poor and it is not because English is my 2nd language it is actually my first language. However since I was young, my English has always been very poor but that have not stop me from blogging and making money from it.

You can consider getting local people in your country to hire to do some proof reading on your blog. It will cost you money but I feel in the long run if your blog is able to generate some form of income. Getting a proof reader should be a good investment.

4. Do Not Hard Sell In Your Blog Post

I was monitoring my blog recently, and I realized when ever I did some form of pitching on my blog and do not give any valuable tips the subscription to the blog would drop. So if you want to avoid that to happen, you will require to give more value to your readers to learn more tips from you and have your products at the end of the post. To make it more effective try to make your affiliate links to look as if it’s just a recommendation.

5. Do Not Go Off Topic On Your Blog

Because what you are reading is a blog and you can virtually talk about almost anything on your blog, I would not recommend you talk too much on your personal stories but instead should be giving more valuable advice so that people can learn more from you. As you give more valuable advice to your readers the more they would want to come back for more.

Summary

I felt I am really guilty at always making all those same mistakes above and I am well aware of my mistakes but some how I cannot avoid them. It is because hiring people to avoid all those mistakes is not a really cheap option, it can cost as much as US$500 a month just to do all my proof reading. But I guess what more important is that every mistake made there is always lessons you can learn from it. But my best advice when you blog just speak from your heart and people will like who you are.

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