20+ Must Know pro-blogging Tips
By Partho, Gaea News NetworkThursday, July 2, 2009
Blogging as a profession or professional blogging is still a very fresh concept in most part of the world. Literally there is rarely any difference between blogging or problogging that makes it important to get over the word professional associated with problogging. If you are looking to make blogging a possible professional engagement and an revenue stream you need to grasp the tricks of the trade thoroughly. It’s hard to typically pinpioint what works perfectly for your content management system, it’s not something to do with the color of your background, but a number of factors that are deeply responsible for your blog’s quality, style, feel and appearance. So we decided to bring an extensive coverage of tips that would assist you in running a web site or blog successfully.
1. Right Communication
To begin with you must have a great passion for writing and a talent of words. You can simply take an idea and turn it into an inferno. Blogs have become independent platforms for voicing your thoughts on almost any topic politics, mainstream media, popular culture or finance, etc. The trick is to hyper-accelerate the information and ideas.
2.Create a strong niche
It’s no use diversifying the interest, stick to the area over which you have strong command. Develop knowledge about the area of your own interest.The more niche, the more specific, the better.
3. Master the art of writing online content
Remember those who set and define topics for their commercial blog or news site at a table, while considering the cost per keyword on the Google AdWords would never achieve what they desire. Master what it requires to write, format, optimize and publish your future online contents, before transferring your building up a team. This would help you to scale, delegate and extract good quality from your team. Develop internal and always updated policies and operational manuals.
4. Exploring revenue channels
Well, the current revenues are no longer dependent on traditional, interrupting promotional messages. So let’s get into the real deal.
One of the oldest revenue generators for sites is Google’s free AdSense service. The AdSense allows the bloggers to display up to three contents-specific ad-units (boxes that can hold up to four ads each) per page. Suppose you are writing about sports cars there will be ads on sports car. Each time a visitor clicks on the page you are paid. Google won’t disclose it’s share but you can have your own share.
Other sources of revenue are
Amazon
Adbrite
5. Content Sponsorship without interrupting ads
Often independent publisher sell sponsored space for revenue.This was mostly done with flashy banner ads, but it has changed and expanded over the years. At present, that successful strategy would be to use relevant sponsors for introducing, providing access or extending the value offered by premium content. More specifically, a relevant product or service could sponsor a RSS feed or news channel. Further, the sponsors can also sponsor a particular section of additional related content to a standard article.
Podcasts, X-events, online interviews, live and recorded web conferences offer an inconspicuous channel for sponsorship.
6. Ad sales executives
In case you are looking for more control over your blog, you can go for BlogAds. It allows you to join its database for free an set your own ad prices. Search for suitable blogs and purchase ad space for a set period. In BlogAds your earnings don’t depend on reader’s clicks on the ad. You just need to pay 20 percent of your net revenue to Mr. BlogAd and the rest is yours.
7. Affiliate sales
This is an easy-to-do monetization channel that involves signing up with a company to become an affiliate reseller of specific products. Two of the largest affiliate program brokers are LinkShare and Commission Junction. You must check out the catalogs to check the prices.
It’s important for you to scrutinize the credibility of the product, so that it doesn’t affect your repute.
8. Donations
People like to support those who can make a good stand for the people whom they think can make a difference, so why not use this strategy for your effective communication campaigns. PayPal Donations, Amazon’s Honor system and BitPass.
9. Beautifying your Blogging
To succeed in blogging you must start furnishing your Pro Blog Design. A unique and eye-grabbing design is bound to turn heads. Here are certain tips on design that’ll help you offer your visitors better surfing experience on your site. For more you can check into out top 20 wordpress theme.
10. Don’t use under construction signs
If you add an under construction sign to your site it looks disgusting and even worse if the words are animated. That would make you look like an amateur. Moreover, directories such as Yahoo would not accept sites with such notices on the home page.
11. Never use different fonts on the same page
Using different fonts on the same page gives rise to different kind of problems on the internet. Well, there are compatibility issues with different operating systems(Unix, Mac and Windows) and browsers. Use simple fonts which are common, since if your visitor doesn’t have the font installed, you page would appear funny to him/her. At best, you may use two different fonts on your page.
12. Good HTML
You shouldn’t write your HTML to a particular browser, as the browsers change frequently. The ones in trend today might be out of vogue after a certain time. So don’t try to fit your HTML to Internet Explorer or Netscape or Opera. Make sure that you use a good HTML and allow browser to do the it’s job.
13. Use CSS
The Style sheets offer an excellent way to control the layout of your page. For better you can create a style sheet documents and reference it from all over your web. You can create one style document and reference it from all over your
14. Include right meta tags
The meta tags are used to highlight your pages before the search engines. Each and every page on your site must have an appropriate meta tag. These tags are required to provide a description, copyright notice, author name, language and search keywords. For more, you can include the RSAC rating for content filters.
15. Avoid changing your visitor setting
Don’t modify your browser controls, window size or the cursor. Most of your visitors would be uncomfortable with such changes and this might increase the bounce rate on your blog. Most importantly, never change the back function.
16. Include height and width on images
Providing the height and width would allows the browser to pre-allocate the space for the graphic on the display, making it appear better.
17. Never use the pop-up ads
Several pro bloggers use Popup advertisements in their site. It’s one of the worst ideas, which could annoy your visitors .If you want that visitors to reel back to your site never throw up an ad in front to upset them.
18. Keep down the size of your pages
Connectivity is a problem with many surfers as they use low bandwidth connections such as dial-up. Keep the pages small so that they are light, say thirty to fifty kbytes per page would be the right size to access even with low internet speed.
19. Keep it simple, Keep it small
Blogging is a small and independent publishing venture, so you must keep it simple and small. Don’t start with a mid to large-sized team as it is more difficult to train, coordinate and leverage quality standard content consistently.
20. Avoid using ActiveX controls
Safety comes first for your blog. It’s important that you don’t allow your third-party to misuse ActiveX againt your visitors. Most of the surfers leave the sites that asks for ActiveX download. For ActiveX the user has to rely on the person who created the control. How will a surfer know, whether that is safe.
21. Design your blog for Global viewer
Keep in mind that you are communicating with a global audience on the world wide web and your blog would be accessed by people across the world. Make sure your dates make sense like for instance 02/03/09 signify February 3, 2009 in U.S, but not all other countries. It’s better to put the dates in format 3 February, 2009.
22. Cross Browser Testing
It would be better to check each page in the major browsers - Netscape, Internet Explorer and Opera. The pages will not always look the same, but try to ensure they at least look decent.
Tags: Earnings, Leverage, Professional blogging tips, tips for pro-blogging