Community Tips for New Bloggers

Blogging is like building a community. In a community you have these guys that cheers you up, they believe you and respect every opinion you put on your blog. Those bloggers who try to ignore their community will have no success in blogosphere. Because blogging is about creating a connection.

Creating a fans club and connecting with them is a sure way for a successful blog. So, I have here tips on how new bloggers can get the most of their community.

1. Know your Fans. One of the most important thing you should do in creating a successful blogging community, is knowing the people around you. At first they could be just a few, but for a long time they could be thousands. You may not remember them all, but atleast try to say "hi" or visit and comment their blogs sometime. Use Twitter to get more updates on your community

2. Reply to Comments. When I started blogging, I don't get much comments, so, I get used to it, and when someone posts their comments, I usually ignores them. And for newbies, you should not ignore them. Comments are important, it shows how alive a blog is. Exchanging comments creates a community, where author and reader can connect each other. When someone says "hi" or gives compliments to your site, compliment them back and so on.

3. Mention them in some of your blog posts. People love to feel special. When someone writes an especially good comment on your blog or a social network, use it as a jumping off point for a blog post of your own, linking back to the original inspiration of course. When you highlight community members, you’ll telling them that you’re happy they’re invested in the success of your site.

4. Ask for Advice. Let the community join you, ask advice or opinions. Create a poll on something they might be interested in. Give your blog community a way to get vocal.

5. Stay Active.  Posting regularly is very important for new bloggers. It is a way to know your readers that you have a serious blog and you plan on doing it for a long time. Interact every day via social media, answer all of your emails is also important. Make them not forget you. Just be active in blogging and you will be successful.  

Ping your blog posts

Search engine spiders usually crawl into your blog posts, but there is a faster way. Sharing to social networking sites like facebook, and twitter can do the thing, and another way is pinging them.

What is pinging

Pinging is telling search engines directly that you have a new content on your site. And most  of these pinging websites will update others like Google blog search, feedburner My yahoo, Weblogalot and many more.

Where to ping

These sites are famous for their pinging services

- http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/
- http://pingomatic.com/
- http://www.pingfarm.com/
- http://www.mypagerank.net/service_pingservice_index

- http://blogsearch.google.com/ping?hl=en

How to Ping

When visiting these ping service sites, all you have to do is put the URL of your blog, sometimes they require you to put post title and some allows to submit multiple URL'. Remember to ping only when you have a new content, if you ping and nothing new was in there, it will be seen as a spam.

Pinging alone can't increase search engine ranks, however it will help for your content to get found by big search engines faster.

Make a professional looking Blog site

In this topic I will teach what you need to know for you to have a professional looking website or blog site. We all know from my past articles that content is the key for success in blogging. But, your blogs' design also plays a major part on having a successful blog.

The design of a blog often affects how a blog site can attract visitors and readers. It also has the power to repel or make them stay, thus how you customize your blog design can directly affect the success of your blogging career.

When we see a blogs design we can easily distinguish the beginner and the professional. But even for a beginner, you can make a professional looking blog.

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1. Make your site look and feel very important.

The look of your site makes the first impression on the readers and visitors. Make it nice, simple and clean. Use templates that has the right color combination or blends with its widgets and not something that hurts the eye. 

Most of us blog for money, right? I suggest wait for the right time putting advertisements, do not put any ads on your blog site. Let the readers read your articles without ads, sometimes, when a reader sees too much ads they instantly leave your blog site.

2. Put social Media Buttons.

Social media buttons are those icons of famous social networking sites. They are very useful in promoting your blog site. Users can easily Like or share your blogs content using those widgets. But, do not put all of those media buttons, I suggest you put only those famous social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, Google+ so it won't take so much space.

3. About and Contact page
Have a proper About page – write about the site, yourself, the team, etc. Having a good About page lets you connect with your users and blogging is all about creating relationships. It also shows how serious you are about the site/blog you are running.

Instead of mentioning mailto links, have a contact page where users can fill a form and submit to send an e-mail. Doesn’t it sound nice and easy.

4. Edit your template
For beginners, customizing your template is a headache. But, based in my experience when I was a newbie, Blogger was the best for first timers because you can learn all by yourself. In blogger you can add and move widgets easily, and chose templates that will fit your style.

You can also customize a bloggers template by editing its html codes. But only for those who knows html. Make sure you backup or save your template regularly. If you really suck at designing you could always seek professional help. These are the pros, and they can give you a really good blog design just the way you want them.

5. Update Regularly
If you want your blog to grow and make money from it, you need to develop a consistent publishing schedule. Readers will visit your blog on a daily basis, looking for fresh and interesting content. If you don't publish regularly, visitors will take your blog lightly, and you must make them feel that this blog is really important. Consistent publishing is one way for readers to know that you are serious about your blog

6. Easy to navigate
Design your blog to have proper widgets, and make sure they are working properly. Put your popular posts and any other widgets that might help for easy navigation. Most readers are lazy, they wan't shortcuts. so give them shortcuts, put a sitemap or table of contents on your blog site, so that they can see all of your articles.

Make sure you use a font style that is easy to read and a font color easy to the eyes. We use our eyes for reading, so we must make our blog appealing to our eyes.

7. Annoying Pop-ups
This is one I hate the most, Pop-ups! they just appear out of nowhere, whenever you refresh your page, they appear again. Pop-ups ruin the professional image of your blog. Readers are there for your content and not for those pop-ups. Let the readers enjoy reading without distractions

What you need to know first before you start blogging

Blogging is the new trend in recent years, and people are so into it, using blogs for personal and business use. Through blogging we can do just about anything, from creating a company blog site to just a simple blog diary for ourselves. Millions of people has been blogging this past decade.

While it is fun to blog, there are some people who wan't to make a living for it. In blogging you can actually earn money, and I know some people who actually become rich for doing it. 

But, before you wan't to make this a career or you simply just want to become famous in the blogosphere, I have here tips on What you need to know first before you start blogging. And I want you to keep these tips in mind if you want to be a successful blogger.

1. Blogging is not a get rich scheme! You probably heard from other people, especially those successful bloggers that they make a fortune blogging. But unfortunately blogging is not a get rich scheme, you won't become rich after blogging for one week.

To become successful you need to be persistent, and you must prepare more than 1 year of hard work and learning without pay. That's right, no income for your first year or maybe more. Some new bloggers won't earn a cent during their first year as blogger. In my situation I only earn about $20 dollars in 1 year, and its kinda frustrating, but it didn't stop me from doing this.

If you want to have a reasonable income,you got to work hard, and it is the same as any profession. To be on top, you need a lot of hard working to do. 

2. Lazy people are not allowed. Successful bloggers are enjoying the benefits of passive income. They own their time and will only work if they want to. Sounds lazy right, but these people who are successful blogging has experienced sleepless nights working.

They made blogging a priority and even set a time when to post an article. If you are lazy and don't have the time to go to your computer and start writing killer articles, then blogging is not for you. You are better off with your day job.

3. Content, content, content! Blogging is about content, and content means writing, writing means hard work, hard work means success! For me, writing is hard, since I was in grade school to college I am one of those students who are lazy picking up the pen and write something in your notebook. And since I am a Filipino, I will have a hard time expressing my writing skills in English, that is why sometimes, I am having a hard time writing.

Content is your blogs life, if your content sucks, your blog sucks too, even if you have the best designed blog in the world but, with crappy articles, you won't become successful.

Just remember "content is the life of blog" and if you are having a hard time writing, there is always a way to learn, there are websites that teaches proffesional writing

4. It is not about you.Blogging is not about you, except if you own a personal blog where you just talk about yourself and your favorite things. If you are not running a personal blog, you need to put a certain limit to your personal stories that you share on your blog.

I am not saying you should not share your personal experience with your readers, but make sure you share only that personal experience that adds value, inspiration and enthusiasm to your blog readers. No one wants to be reading a post on your favorite nail color or what food you like to eat when it is raining, those are non sense article and will have no significance to your reader.

What readers want from you is to learn and entertain. So focus on those articles that readers really want and stop posting unnecessary articles.

Treat your readers like a customer, and you are the owner of a restaurant. You listen to your customers opinion and will do anything to give them contentment and satisfaction. 

And if a customer is satisfied they will come back for more and become loyal readers and followers. And these loyal followers will refer you to some of their friends and family, then, the rest are history... 

Finding and fixing broken links

In this lesson I will teach you about broken links. A broken link is a hyperlink which does not take you to the required page when you click it. Sometimes these links produces errors in your browser.

Why do we need to fix our blogs broken links? 

One of the main reasons why we fix it is to improve our page rank and improve our SEO. If a blog or website has no broken links, chances are for an improvement in pagerank.

Locating your blogs broken links

Locating our blogs broken links could be a pain in the butt, in the old days you got to click each and every one of your links to know if they are properly working and it will take you a lot of time. But now we have tools to search and find these broken links.

http://www.iwebtool.com/ and http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com are websites that lets you find those broken links in your website.

How to fix broken links

Most broken links can be found on links to other websites, guest comments, and images links. And all you have to do is to go to any of those two link checker websites and put your blogs' URL (ex. www.yourblog.com) and you will see lists of URL's that are broken. Now you can repair them or delete them.

1. From the link URL you can see the subject of the link within the body of the link.

2. Go to the page of your blog that you think or know the broken link is from. 

3. Click on the link and see if it is broken just in case you have not identified it correctly. 

4. Then you can either delete it completely or correct it by deleting the link and replacing it by a new working link. 

5. Once you have worked your way through the broken links on your blog, enter your blog name into Broken Link Checker again and re-check. 

6. The list of broken links should now all be marked with a tick, or if you have missed a few broken links repeat the fixing process as described above.

Once all the links has been fully repaired, you will notice and improvement in your ranking.

I suggest you do broken links checking and repairing once every month or every 2 weeks. If you miss maintaining it for a long time, you will probably have a lot of repairing to do. Just like in my first blog, I never checked its link for more than one year and now it has 55 broken links.

Importance of meta tags

Websites mostly rely on big search engines like google and yahoo for good traffic. And when search spiders come to your website for archiving, they may not pick those keywords, phrases, information from your website if you don't have meta description tags.

A meta description tag is supposed to be a brief and concise summary of your page's content. A meta keyword tag is supposed to be a summary list of the most important words on your page

In other words meta tags will help search spiders guide what to be indexed and what should not.

Meta tags are optional, you may add them and you may not. But, to get better traffic from search engines I advice you put them on your website or blog site

Follow these steps on adding them to your website.

Log in to blogger

1.Go to>> Template >> Edit html ( If you are having a hard time editing your html codes I suggest you back up your template in case you get lost or have a mistake, you can do that by going to Template>> backup/restore.)

2. Find this code on your template <head> (you can look for those tags easier using cntrl+F)

3. After the <head> code, place the following 

<title>TITLE_OR_NAME_OF_YOUR_WEBSITE</title>
<link href="mailto:YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS_HERE" rev="made"/>
<meta content="ALL_KEYWORDS_HERE_SEPARATED_BY_COMMAS" name="keywords"/>
<meta content="YOUR_NAME_HERE" name="author"/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content="GENERAL_DESCRIPTION_HERE" name="description"/>
</b:if>
<meta content="CHOOSE BELOW" name="ROBOTS"/>

Change the words colored in yellow to your site description

For the words colored in red choose any of the 4 below.

(ex. <meta content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" name="ROBOTS"/>)

INDEX,FOLLOW Index this page and follow all links.
INDEX,NOFOLLOW Index this page but do not follow or index links on this page.
NOINDEX,FOLLOW Do not index this page but follow all links.
NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW Do not index this page. Do not follow or index links on this page.

4. Save template.

Its done, now search spiders can index those important keywords on your website.

What is a blog

You have probably heard from other people or on other websites about success on blogging. Many has become rich by blogging. They say they earn as much as $1200 a day, and all you have to do is blog 30 minutes a day.

Many People though online blogging is a get rich scheme. Well, its kinda true, there are people who finds success in blogging., and they become rich fast. But those people are very persistent.

Because of the hype, many people have tried blogging. When we see what they have like cars, mansions, wives, we always think " I want that, I want those". And they get rich by just being online like 30 minutes a day.

But first what is a blog?

What is a blog?
A blog (a blend of the term web log) is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.

Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; yet still others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (video blogging or vlogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

As of 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence.

for more go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog


I got some advice for new bloggers, so you won't get lost.

You Can't Make a Fortune Overnight. While some claims they did become rich overnight. As far as I know there is no business anywhere that could make you a millionaire the next day. Like I said before this is not a get rich scheme you have to be persistent to achieve success.


You Have to Work Without Income. Yes this is true, developing a blog takes time, effort and you have to sacrifice without pay for almost a year some takes longer. I know someone that takes 3 years before he receive his first pay check online. I did work on my blog for about 7 months without pay, now I have only $2 in my paycheck balance, isn't that frustrating. I did blog for 7 months but only get 2 dollars.

Be Persistent. You need this kind of attitude for you to achieve success. Quitting due to frustrations will not get you to the goal you always wanted. If you fail always try again, continue learning, absorb what you learn and never quit.

Have Fun Blogging. Actually blogging is fun, you design your own site, you can put any posts as you like, make friends, you can do anything and its quite challenging and fun. When you start blogging keep in mind that you do it for the love of blogging and it is fun, don't mind how much you will earn, because it frustrates us sometimes. Treat your blog like your online game character, that you always visit everyday, learn new things, and make friends online. Do it for fun and you won't be frustrated.

Have Something Original. Today there are millions of websites and blogs and having something original is kinda hard. And you will say its all been done before. Well, for me it is not true. Even if you know your field is saturated you can always put some twists in your own, that your competitor doesn't have.

Remember back in the day, when Myspace and Friendster ruled the Social Networking business. Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook has found a way that those two sites doesn't have, that makes Facebook unique. In the end FB has put those two out of business and forced to sell it.

You gotta have a long term Strategy.  If you want to make it online, you have to be focused to stay on the competition. With the technology, trends changes so fast you gotta keep it up and don't be left behind.

You don't have to be an expert about the internet. Actually anyone can do it, even our grandpa's can blog. You don't need to put animations in blog, make it simple and very easy for visitors to read. Just make your site user friendly and easy to navigate.

How to Approve Your Adsense Account

Google adsense is one of the most reliable money making PTC program in the Internet. Bloggers earn money when a visitor clicks on the ads provided by Google. But many publishers have their Google adsense account disabled or banned for some reasons of not following their policy.
In my experience, I was frustrated , Google adsense  denied my application many times, but that didn't stop me. For new bloggers it is a challenge, because Google adsense would not accept blogs that are poorly made. I did have a hard time researching on how to get my account approved, instead I found websites that are too busy on how much money they earn with Adsense, I did't found what I am looking for. So I did some trial and error I even quit for 5 months because of the frustration.

If you want your account to be approved you just have to follow all of their policy and continue resubmitting your application.

Before applying for Google adsense I got some tips based on my experience. As a new blogger I really have a hard time repairing redesigning my blog for it to be adsense ready, here are some of my tips.

Be accurate about you Blog
Before applying, you must think first about a specific niche on you blog so that the ads will be relevant depending on your blog content. Make sure you are on a right path and not messing your blog content or else Google would not recognize your blog niche and ads would have a hard time determining which ads to put on your blog.

If you don't know what niche you like you can search the internet. Just make sure you are good at it so you won't ran out of topic

Design your Blog to be user friendly
Now that you have a blog, you must make things easier for visitors to navigate your blog site. Don't put too much graphics that will confuse readers. You must put enough information about your blog, like what is your blog about, where to contact you.

Links must perfectly work for easy navigation. You must have enough sentence on your posts. Do not put short sentences.

Make it look Professional
Just as I said before don't make it messy, make it simple and use light colors. Make sure it is very easy to navigate


Add Gadgets for easy navigation
Gadgets are very useful in blogging, there are many gadgets you can use for your blog to be Adsense ready.
Put a sitemap page on you blog. A site map will reveal all of your blogs content, so readers can see all of your posts.
Also put a "you might also like this" gadget, so readers will see more of your blogs related posts.

Good traffic is also need
You will also need a lot of visitors per day, make sure you promote your blog. Social Networks and Traffic exchange website will be very helpful.


Just remember, be specific and simple about your blog and adsense will approve you application.

Btw, be specific also with your Address on your Adsense account. I have a case my adsense was dissapproved just because my address wasn't accurate. Just make sure you put a real address or Google will not pay for your service. Also do not put your nickname on you account, use your real name instead.

Once approved just follow their policy, like you only have to put 3 ads on 1 page, don't tamper your adsense code and this is very important DON'T EVER CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS or Google will terminate your account and you will loose all of your earnings.

If you already have an approved Adsense account you won't need to apply again on your other blogs.

How to Blog

Blogging is the new trend on the internet, it is fun and  you can even earn money from it. Blogging is not journalism, so you can do anything you wan't from it as long as you don't violate any legal issues. You can also have friends and share ideas with other bloggers.

I wasn't a blogger until last year, just for curiosity i build my first blog http://dustent.blogspot.com/, it is not very professional but at least I created one and enjoyed while designing it. It took me months to add and understand how tags and widgets work. And even quit for about 5 months because I am running out of Idea.

But I have returned, because I won't fail my fans club, hehehe.

Anyway I will share you my first step on how to blog. Being a blogger doesn't need expertise on the field of website design, you just have to read more and understand how it works. And it is very easy, even grandpa can do it. Some of the most successful bloggers are oldies, although they are not very familiar with the internet, they became successful because of their experience and wisdom and they are willing to share it to the world.

These are the first step on how to blog

1. Go to blogger.com if you have a google account already, you won't need to sign up
2. Think, decide what you want to blog about. there are many blogs already, so if you wanna be noticed and successful, you gotta create something that you are very good at. If you are an architect, go create an architect type of blogs and show your design, don't blog about medicine  or agriculture.
3. Host or not to host. When you want to blog decide if you wanna host or use free domain names. Domain names are like from blogger (your domain name.blogspot.com) or weebly (your domain name. weebly.com), or you can choose wordpress free software because it is cheap, as low as $30 per year or get it for free.
4. Create your domain name. Domain names are your blog name.

Choose some of these where you want to create your blog:

Blogger.com
Wordpress.com
Weebly.com
Dreamhost.com
Godaddy.com

Now you have it the the first step on how to blog.