This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the best posts of the week in blogging, making money online, SEO, and social media on kikolani.com.
The Resources Mashup
Here are some of the best articles I have seen on Google+, retweeted on @kikolani, and read in RSS subscriptions this week.
Blogging / Writing
This is a guest post by Kevin Lau.
It’s still the early days for Google+ and plenty of people are getting to grips with the various tools this social platform has. This is even truer for business users, who have only recently been able to set up business pages to help promote their work.
One of the main features Google+ has to offer is Google+ Hangouts. Google+ Hangouts enable you to initiate video chats with other Google+ users who are in your Circles who also have access to a video camera.
So how can you use Google+ Hangouts to benefit your business?
Let’s face it most business users with Google+ business pages are looking to drive more traffic to these pages. Hangouts can certainly help you do this, and there are a number of methods you can use.
Today, Kikolani is joining in the SOPA Blackout and will go dark from 8am to 8pm EST. This is in protest against SOPA / PIPA legislation proposed by the U.S. Congress. Others joining the protest include Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, WordPress, Greenpeace International, and many more listed at SOPA Strike.
Learn more about these bills by clicking the above links or viewing the following infographic (provided by Stop American Censorship) & video (by Fight for the Future). Also, be sure to keep scrolling to find ways you can take action (for US and international visitors).
This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the best posts of the week in blogging, making money online, SEO, and social media on kikolani.com.
The Resources Mashup
Here are some of the best articles I have seen on Google+, retweeted on @kikolani, and read in RSS subscriptions this week.
Blogging / Writing
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.
