Blogging Tips

This is a guest post by Timo Kiander.

Many people live their lives without understanding, that there is a giant potential inside them. In fact, if they would realize this, they would achieve so much more in their lives.

This is where the personal development comes into play. Once you get involved with different self-improvement topics, your mind starts to change and you’ll start seeing everything differently (the people, the world, the events).

What I love about personal development is that it can be applied to many areas in one’s life. When you improve yourself first, you can have better results in whatever you do.

1. Build Confidence

Having a strong self-confidence is essential for any successful blogger. If you don’t own this trait, you are building invisible obstacles of your path to success.

To build your confidence, you need to take action and go outside your comfort zone – constantly. I know, this may not be very easy to accept for some people, but this is the only way to do it.

However, it is relieving to know, that you don’t have to make a huge leaps at once, when you are testing the boundaries of your comfort zone.

For example, if you want to start guest posting, but are afraid to give it a shot, start by submitting your posts to smaller blogs first. As your blog posts get accepted, move on to the bigger blogs. Finally, you have enough confidence to submit your guest post to big blogs too.

Once you have stretched your comfort zone a bit, you will feel more confident to take even bigger steps outside the zone. Finally, you realize that you have a rock-solid confidence and you are not limiting yourself from success.

Continue 6 Ways Personal Development Can Make You a Better Blogger

As many of you know, I love writing about Google Analytics. I’m a data junkie, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than learning more about the visitors coming to my blog. One of the best ways to get actionable data out of your Google Analytics is to set up goals.

Setting up a goal in Google Analytics tells it that someone has completed something important on your website, such as buying product, signing up to your email list, or similar. For those who aren’t interested in selling products or capturing mailing list subscribers, is there anything else you can count as a goal on your blog? Absolutely – you can start with your comments!

What You Can Learn from Setting Up Blog Comments as Goals

Here are a few things you can learn from setting up comment form submissions as goals in Google Analytics.

• Discover what referral sites are sending the most commenters. This will let you know what social media sites, guest blog posts, or other referrers are sending traffic that not only reads your posts, but also gets engaged. On the flip side, if you are getting a lot of spam, you might discover the sites sending spam traffic to your blog. This could lead you to finding lists that are sending you nothing but spam and, if that is the case, you can ask them to remove your blog from their list.
• Learn the difference between commenters and regular traffic. On my blog, one interesting tidbit is the average time on site for regular visitors is 1:23 vs the average time on site for commenters is 10:31! A good reason to encourage comments!
• Find out what content on your blog your most engaged audience enjoys so you can produce more of it.
• See what part of the world your commenters are coming from. If you are targeting a specific region, but your commenters are coming from somewhere else, you might want to look into the reasons why.

So now that you know just a few reasons to set up comments as goals, let’s look at the ways you can set up your WordPress and Google Analytics to track your blog comments as goals.

Continue How to Set Up Blog Comments as Goals in Google Analytics Using WordPress Hacks

This is a guest post by Richard Adams.

There are literally tens of millions of blogs online and yet only the tiniest fraction of them really make their owners any significant income. While there’s nothing wrong with simply starting a blog for pleasure or as a networking tool, for those people considering trying to make money blogging there are a few home truths you need to be aware of which you might not have considered before.

In this article then we’re going to “devils advocate” and look at five reasons why it can be harder to make money blogging than with some other Internet business models.

1. Constantly Changing Front Page

When it comes to getting free traffic from the search engines arguably the most important page of any website (whether that’s a static website or a blog) is the homepage. After all, the homepage receives the vast majority of the links that point to a site and furthermore is typically built around a specific keyword phrase which the owner hopes to rank well for in the search engines.

With a static website it’s easy to constantly test and tweak your homepage – adding or removing text, images, videos and links until you find the combination that gets you the highest search engine ranking possible.

However by definition the average blog’s homepage displays the latest posts that have been added to the site. This has two effects. The first is that it becomes impossible to “tweak” your homepage because it’s content changes constantly. Secondly you are likely to find your rankings for the primary keyword phrase you have chosen going up and down over time as the content on your homepage changes unless you have invested serious time and money into an effective link building campaign that makes you “untouchable” for your keyword.

This means getting predictable, reliable, long-term traffic for your main keyword phrase can be far more difficult than if you were creating a static website.

Continue 5 Reasons Why It is Hard to Make Money Blogging