Determine Feasibility of Your Blogs Success
Determine Feasibility of Your Blogs Success
As an Engineer I deal with handful of project everyday and for all of our projects, we start working on project with the “Feasibility” study. And anyone who is planning on being a professional blogger or already is, should conduct a feasibility study. A Feasibility study is the time where we/anyone can project the success/failure rate of a work based on collected data. This feasibility study is not from holding from doing what you like rather to guide you to come up with a niche topic which is practical and will bring your some money some day. I have tried to make the process simplified as much as possible but hey; sometimes it is just that technical.
Getting a viable Business Idea
This is the first phase of the process where you solidify your blogs niche idea. If you haven’t decided the topic of your blog then you should fall back on your past experience. Is this something you enjoy? Do you have unique knowledge about a topic? Do you have a special talent or skill? Sometime, it is helpful to get feedback from other that you know. You need to start to rainstorm ideas that seem to fit with your background and interests. It is very important that you blogging idea be something that you will know and enjoy. After all you will be spending an awful amount of time blogging and doing other stuff, you would better enjoy it.
Researching the Market
Market research involves finding out what web searchers want/need and determining how you can satisfy that want/need through you blog. You need to find out your competitions successes and failure in the market place. And finally, based on your research you can project your blogs success or failure probability.
Finding the Target Market
The goal in this phase is to narrow down you search even more to find your best customers. You need to target those people who are looking for the information that you will offer. In this phase of market research you will develop a profile for you customers. You will gather your information through demographics (looks into where visitors come from: US, non US etc) and psychographics (look at lifestyle, age, lifestyle etc)
Competition
Before you go into a game you need to know each and everything about your opponents that you will be playing against. In this phase you will find out the direct and indirect competitions for you targeted niche. Make a list of 5/6 major players, in this case websites in that market and find out their market share, resources, focus, strengths and weakness. Once you have gathers all the above, you can now plan you attack to win that niche market share.
Money Making Strategy
By this time you should already know about your niche topic and your competitions along with the market share. And now you need outline a money making strategy. It is very easy to copy others but if you do that then you will a follower for rest your life. Instead you need find out what your competitors use to make money and make that better by using your thoughts into that. If the #1 site in you niche google adsense then you should think about google adsense and chitika at the same time. Think outside the box.
You might have fantastic contents in your blog that you take time to write. You might have the best layout for your blog. But if you don’t have the traffic then your probability of making money or being successful will be lower dramatically. And if you wanted to know the success feasibility for you current blog and/or your next project then go ahead do the homework now than later after committing your time. And for those who have the home work and ready to build their next blog/website you might find my “ Create Website & Blog Like a Project Manager” pretty interesting.
Free WP Theme Verses Paid WP Theme: Missing Components of Free WP Themes
Free WP Theme Verses Paid WP Theme: Missing Components of Free WP Themes
I was using Free WP Theme for a long time for all of my blogs. Then I switched into paid themes and currently I am enjoying the benefits of that decision. So, I decided to share my experience with free wp themes, and how I decided to buy those paid premium themes that I have bought and finally the benefits of paid Wp themes.
Today I will share the major and typical problems that I encountered with Free WP Themes. I will try not to get into too much detailed much here rather I will just give you some high level overview and hopefully you will be able to relate to those typical problems.
Lack of customization on the theme
I bet that you always wanted to have a unique a look in your blog. And you can do that with Free WP themes but then two things has to be true: you know how to code and you have a whole lot of time in your hand. And in that case you are not using your time effectively.
Lack of concentrated support for that theme:
I always had an issue with this. It is always easier to ask someone about something than reading about that and learning it. It will be very rare that you will meet a group of folks who are using the same free WP theme that you are using and you can ask for help.
Lack of updates with the evergreen WP versions
I have experienced this bunch of time. I update the WP version the free theme is not compatible to work with new WP version resulting my site the crash.
Plugin compatibility issue with Free WP themes
This is a fun one. Imagine your site was working perfectly but as days go by it gets slower and weirder. By the time you figure it’s a plugin and your Free WP theme compatibility issue (posting questions to forums, using google and calling hosting tech support) you have already spend a good chunk of time that you can use to improve you blog. I truly hated every time that I went through this particular issue.
Time spend on customizing is too much
After I went through all the above and at the end I had to switch to a different theme for whatever reason, I went through everything one more time. If I think about it now, it was simple a paid.
I do want to understand couple of things. It is beneficial to have free themes at the very beginning for your blog, just like having your first car and then you should work your way up. Using free themes will also allow you to look around more for the type of themes that you are looking for. And best of all its FREE. But think again when you really decided to get into blogging long term. And just in case you want to know, I have used the some magazine style free themes for the longest and then moved forward with Solostream Theme. Any other thoughts??
Blog Optimizing Using Chris Garrett’s Blog Critique Session
Blog Optimizing Using Chris Garrett's Blog Critique Session
I have been following Chris Garrett, a professional blogger from UK for a long time now. This summer he took over a project of reviewing or critiquing other blogs from his point of view. So far he has reviewed three blogs and after reading all those I was asking myself the following questions:
- What will be the interpretation from those critiquing sessions for anyone who reads those reviews? OR
- What should be the take away from those reading? OR
- What essential parts that a blog need to stand out from the crowd from Chris’s eyes?
So, I took some of the notes and compiled the following list what everyone blogger should look into if they want to stand out from the crowd. One thing that I wanted to add that, this is a broad and general blog optimization ideas that should be used as a guiding tool and instead of looking at as the only way, use this template to add your own thoughts and personality into your blog.
Topic Selection Optimization:
- Find an underserved topic. This way you should be able to target a niche audience rather everyone. Use google trends for your use.
- Target “specific” topic versus everything or everyone.
Blog structure optimization:
- Simplify you blog’s Layout. Cut down the mumbo jumbo and make it simple and easy to follow.
- Play with the brightness of color. Use bright colors to draw attention not for layouts.
- Use images with a link instead of using too many words. Use images for “subscribe me” and/or for “share this” etc.
Landing Page Optimization:
- Blog visitors need to know where they are. Having a “meta tag” in you title or “site description” should get you there.
- Personalize your blog as much as you can. Add an about page with details about you and your thought behind your blogs. Add a picture into your profile is possible.
- Engage the reader in a conversation by ending your blog posts with questions rather comments or statements. Start making your reading think and also use action words to push a bit into commenting and thus interacting with you and others.
- Spark conversations by asking others to engage. Use open-ended questions (Questions that don’t have any right or wrong answer) ..
Reading Experience Optimization:
- Use subheads, bullets and quotes in you blog posts
- Highlight some of the portions is needed.
- Use your real name as the author the offer a more personalized feeling to your readers.
Engaging Optimization:
- Use subscribe, social media buttons at the end of the post
- Use them on your sidebars as well.
Moneymaking channels Optimization:
- Consider Affiliate ads.
- Look into selling your won product.
- Approach advertisers who want to target your audiences.
I really want you to understand the power Chris’s reviews. Just in case you didn’t know, that any problogger will charge you somewhere $500/hr for a blog consulting over the phone and here you are getting those advices for FREE. I have also emailed this post link to Chris and I will keep you guys updated if I hear back from him. So, stay tuned for more and feel free you add your 2 cents.
SEO Ethics: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO
Our entire life revolves around ethics. Any one with a solid work ethic is always be the winner, some might argue that but it is what is it. I have talked a lot about SEO through my Blogging Ideas blog. To refresh your memory, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. In general SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
- White Hat SEO: web promotion techniques following search engine guidelines
- Black Hat SEO: web promotion techniques not following any guidelines
First I will share my knowledge about the history for the term White Hat SEO or Black Hat SEO, and then I will get into details about them.
The terms, “White Hat” and “Black Hat” were actually talked form old school cowboy aka western movies, where good guys always wore “white hat” and bad guys wore “Black hat”. In western history, White is symbol of goodness and purity and black always has been depicted as dark, and evil. In the cyber crime, (yes, breaking the rules in a crime) the term “Black Hat” was first used for hacking. The bad hackers are called “Black Hat” who always exploited the holes in the system and “white hat” hackers always notified the authority even though they have/had the opportunity to exploits the security loop holes. And then it gradually came into the SEO department keeping “hacking” the SEO rules in mind.
White Hat SEO
White hat implies that the company uses best practice methods to achieve high search engine rankings. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White Hat SEO requires time to research, analyze and subsequently re-write meta tags, content and may offer a slight redesign of the website and page names. As a result White hat SEO tends to produce results that last a long time and are steady and ongoing.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, and/or involve deception. Black Hat methods tend to achieve rankings quickly, but the results are not long lasting. Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Once caught, both companies quickly apologized and fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list. Black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.
Lets be realistic, there’s a lot of competition to be ranked high, and sometimes you the high competition may push your to think about utilizing those not so honest SEO technology choices. After all, if you cannot get ranked, you will not get traffic and all of your time and energy will be wasted. But you need to realize that while White Hat SEO may not work as quickly as you expected but following the rules and using White Hat SEO will get your site further in the long run. There is no place for short cuts in life thus DO NOT use Black Hat SEO. Think right, think smart and be a BloNgineer.
9 Google Adwords Golden Rules to Save You From Being Broke
Last 2 weeks were just crazy. Fighting with my project cost engineers to cut the cost of my projects along with the issues with wordpress 2.8 for my other websites and my family, it was fun. Last couple of posts, I have talked about Google Quality Score, and how to improve Google Quality Score. So, by now you already know behind the stories of Google Adwords and it’s time to execute. Today I will share some of my learning form my first round of beating from google adwords in 2006. I remember that it took me a quite a while and loosing a bunch of money (come one, I was a student back then and every single dollar was counted for). This a set of very basic, simple and my golden rules that works and keeps me out of trouble during my initial phase of learning about google adwords. So, lets take a look at the following 9 golden rules for google adwords.
Budget Allocation:
Determine the amount that you will spend for you Google Adwords campaign and for how long. Then in the name of God, stick to it for the allocated time. Also find out what’s the rate of return that you are looking for (ex: if I spend 200/week then I am looking to get back $400/week with $200 profit and $200 expense).
No Automation:
Never allow a Google Adwords account to run itself. Automation is good but not in this case.
Haste is Waste:
Applies with your Google Adwords account as well. Never make too many changes at a time. If you do then it will not give good enough information for you to make right decision. Allocate 5-7 days with different time setting for each group and stick with it.
It’s Your Money:
Never let Google control your budget. Google is not your personal finance advisor; she is a sales woman who will rip you off every chance she gets.
It’s Your Business:
Never let Google decide what’s best for you. It’s your business and you should make all the executive decision.
Too Quick is Too Bad:
Always allow time for changes to take effect. Keep in mind that gathering information is key to find out a trend. And those trends will help your Google Adwords campaign a success.
Set a Time and Stick with it:
Initially work in time intervals of seven days. Usually a 5-7 days window is enough for an ad to give you enough information whether you should move forward with that is not.
Control, control and control:
Always keep control. Micromanaging and being control freak by check your campaign every house and tweaking it will make you relax later.
Promptness =$$$
A neglected Adwords account is a dangerous. Don’t believe it, then go ahead and give it a shot. You will be amazed how quickly you will overspend your budget.
Now you already know the golden rules for your Google Adwords, if you dont have any account yet. Go ahead and do so. Remember, practice makes perfect.
How to Write Post Title By the Book
How to Write Post Title By the Book
Imagine you are at your job where you have to outperform everyone and you are overwhelmed with works and all of a sudden some “Billy Bob” comes to you and tells you that your working style is not the best way and you need to change it to his way. What would you do?? Seriously!! And you are right; you don’t have to listen to that person without any validation. Now relate that with your writing style, where blogosphere is the competitive workplace, and you are busy with everything in your life and on top of that your trying to write. And all of sudden you stumbled into a blog post by an unknown blogger when you goggled “How to Write headlines”. I give him/her kudos to rank well in Google but my question is “Are they reliable”?? Keep in mind that I have said “Unknown Blogger” not Problogger, or Copy Blogger or Shoemoney and/or other well known bloggers.
So as a typical engineer, I have looked into some books which are mostly written by well know authors in their respective area. One of the books that I enjoyed was Business writing By Wilma Davidson and I will quote the following simple, short and sweet methods of writing electrifying headline that can hypnotize readers to Entice, Invite and Encourage to Read More”
- Explain:
Why to outsourcing your project - Use Numbers:
10 steps of writing blogs - Use and ‘ing’ verb :
Increasing Your Google Ad sense earnings - Create a Need:
The Need to outsource your Blogging - Use a whole sentence:
Declarative, Increasing Selective Traffic Increases Conversions
Imperative, Rank higher in Google Before your Competition Does
Interrogative, How can you Rank Higher in Google Searches Substantially - Use verbs: Follow me to the Moon and I will give you Gold
Now, these are “by the book” methods and of course you can find out more about other methods of writing effective headlines as well. Hopefully your take away from this post should be couple of things. First of you now know a very simple of writing post headline and title. And secondly, you need to make a habit of validating your sources from where you get the information from. And if you already know how to write post titles then check out my post about how to optimize your post title.