2008 April | Work From Home Business Blog

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How Much Is Your Blog Worth?

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How much is your blog worth? to your Legitimate Home Internet Business. I am sure all of us would like to think that our blogs are priceless. What with all the sweat and toil that goes into whipping it into a blog that you are now proud of. But have you ever wondered if there was a price tag to your blog, just how much would your blog worth?

I stumbled upon this neat little tool to compute how much your blog is worth from Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog. The tool computes a dollar value for your blog using the same link-to-dollar ratio as the 2005 sale of Weblogs, Inc. to America Online:

How Much Is Your Blog Worth?

Here is my result for: www.peterleehc.com/blog

My blog is worth $19,194.36.
How much is your blog worth?

When Weblogs Inc. was bought by AOL in October 2005, Tristan Louis did the math. He figured out how much each blog in the Weblogs Inc. stable was worth, based on their Technorati rank.

Inspired, Dane Carlson whipped up a handy little calculator with the Technorati API. Just enter your blog URL to see how much it’s “worth” using the Weblogs/AOL math. Give it a try!

Oh, and if your worth boils down to less than the cost of a cup of coffee, don’t feel bad. Just take it as a motivation to work harder on your link building strategy.

If you have a question for me, do send it to me and I will be most happy to answer you. My contact details can be found on the right at ‘peter answers’ or you can also use this link to contact me

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Tags: Blogging Techniques, Link Management, Work From Home by admin
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How To Get Repeat Visitors To Your Blog

As a legitimate home internet business owner, getting a person to visit your blog for the very first time is hard enough work, but what do you need to do to get this same reader to visit your blog again and again. How do you get repeat visitors to your blog? It certainly is not rocket science, but it does require a conscious effort to learn a few effective yet simple blogging techniques to achieve this. One of the best advices I can share with you is to make your new blog visitors feel really at home so that he gets won over not just to subscribe but will return to contribute to your blog as well.

Make First impressions Count
You don’t need to be an expert in human behaviour to know that the first impression of an event, a person, or an activity is a lasting one. In the world of internet marketing, it still is true when your reader visits your blog. Make sure that your blog’s font size is large enough with a good and nice design. A unique design may lead to a certain branding that people can identity as yours. Remember always that your blog is reaching out to all your readers, not yourself, so how you personally like your blog to look like may not necessarily be the main deciding factor.

Be Creative
It’s true that content is king, but creativity could be queen. I’m really not suggesting that you engage a creative designer to modify you blog. I am suggesting to make small but interesting changes to its design periodically. I have seen some bloggers explore this idea well by putting pictures including even celebrities. Take a look at mine towards the page bottom - I have a beer man giving out…oops, sorry you’ll have to click the link to check it out.

Don’t Over Focus On Keyword Phrases
Many of us have learned and understood the importance of SEO techniques in your blog if you wish to get top search engine ranking for your internet home business site. It becomes a natural thing to do whenever you write your blog post to repeat your keyword or keyword phrases and sprinkling them throughout the article. Although generally, this is a good practice to follow and eventually your search engine ranking does improve due to this blogging technique, there is unfortunately a downside to it. Your readers who have been your loyal visitor may now get a little bored with your posts and stop visiting your blog. To avoid this from happening, try to focus on a narrower topic but mix it with other content to keep your blog visitors satisfied. An example I can give you in this blog is that I recently wrote a blog post called ” Taking The Long Money View” which is about pay day loan, offering a refreshing change of topic to my readers. You should also consider content swap in which you exchange blog posts with other bloggers. This offers your readers more variety and a different style of writing too. You may be unaware that you are actually contributing to getting your repeat visitors to your blog in this way. Well after reading this post you can consciously make this happen for the benefit of serving your loyal blog visitors and ultimately your online business opportunity.

Squidoo Lens, RSS Feed and Blog
You can say that a squidoo lens is a cross between your internet home business website and your blog. With squidoo, you can create a free page which is called a lens. This lens consists of various modules which you can choose from. Every module contains a different category such as text, eBay products, Reader Feedback, RSS Feed, Your Tube videos etc. However, there are many people who seem to neglect the RSS module. Simply put your blog RSS Feed address into this module allows your latest blog posts to appear in your squidoo lens. It is important to create your lens using a topic that is related to what your blog offers to your readers. The creating of your lens is easy, so it is important to do it well to generate free targeted traffic and repeat visitors to your blog.

Blog Frequency

If you want to see repeat visitors to your blog, you’ve got to blog frequently. The more often you blog the better it is, but I would say at a minimum this should be written weekly. You can also consider blog posts from other bloggers, which can be a good way to provide some variety and a different perspective to your work at home business ideas, or topics that you have written.

Also remember that your visitors subscribe to your blog because they like what you have written, the service you provide or the legitimate home business ideas your blog offers. So if you don’t blog frequently they may just unsubscribe. Your subscribers contribute to your free targeted traffic to your blog, so not only do you need to bring in new visitors, but it is important also to keep those in your subscription list happy as well.

Value Readers’ Comments
Your readers’ comments on your blog posts are important and you should review them and reply them as and when they are received. A comment posted by your reader may arise as a result of his agreeing, disputing with you or seeking clarification on what’s been written.

Athough this may become another blog post, there are some very good blogging techniques that you can and should use to encourage more comments from your readers. A good blogging technique that I have learned is to engage your readers’ responses or feedback deliberately. You can do this by asking a question in your post. Take a look at the end of this post and you will understand just what I mean. You must remember that writing a blog post is a lot different than say writing for a newspaper article, in which you present all possible scenarios of the topic to a passive audience. In a blog, you should engage the reader to provide feedback, comment, describe his experience on what works and what doesn’t. Inviting participation like this is good for getting your traffic. The reader may be interested to find out more about the topic and like to read up on the new responses that are received. Getting high traffic and repeat visitors to your blog in this way is not uncommon, if the topic is interesting and the right blogging technique is used.

You may have visited many blogs with substantially big subscriber lists. While it is not impossible to get to where they are now, these successful bloggers often have their own trump card perhaps having written a ‘Blogging for Beginners series’, a sensational Blog contest and others. If you are a new blogger I suggest that you focus on the basics of blogging technique first which will eventually get you a respectable number of subscribers. I would say achieving 100 visitors to your blog should be your first real challenge.

What’s Your Opinion?
What methods do you use to increase your reach? Are there any interesting ideas on how you can get repeat visitors to your blog? What have you found to be effective or ineffective? Do share it here by leaving a comment. This will greatly benefit our readers and provide some fresh work at home business ideas to them. After all, getting ongoing traffic to your blog will help your online business opportunity and is a vital component of a successful legitimate home internet business.

Blogging Techniques home based business internet home business traffic work from home

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Tags: Blogging Techniques, Traffic, Work From Home by admin
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Taking the Long Money View

Many people are starting a home business just to make some spare change in these tough times. Starting a home business can be a way to start to feel your way towards more economic and lifestyle independence, but it does require good money management to make them work. If you end up going solo all the way, you will need to not only budget your monthly cash flow, but also take steps to secure your future with your own health and retirement plans.

Health Plans

When you work for someone else, the health plan is easy to sign up for and generally affordable. When you work for yourself, you will find things are a bit more complicated and expensive. You will have a wide choice of plans to choose from, but understanding them is now your sole responsibility, not Human Resources. You may also find that a Health Savings Account works best for you, but again, it will take some research to see which plan best fits your lifestyle, your future goals, and your finances.

Retirement

As with health planning, retirement planning is not optional. It doesn’t matter if you have a great business and never save a dime for retirement. You don’t want to be in the position to have to work, even when you no longer are able to do it comfortably. So, you will have to check out your own retirement plans and sit with a banker to understand your options. That money should be there for you when you need it later and it can be harder to avoid dipping into it when it’s right at your fingertips, unlike an employer’s plan. You will need discipline and a whole lot of foresight to get your retirement planning done right. In the end, your money should work for you for long-term goals as well as short-term wealth.

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Top 7 Mistakes Newbie Bloggers Make

Most legitimate home internet business owners have long found the use of blogs and blogging to be instrumental in their new internet business start-up as well as leveraging it to maintain a successful work at home business. The benefits are pretty obvious. It helps to promote your online business opportunity but more importantly lets you show a personal side of yourself when you communicate with your readers using your blog . It can also be used effectively when you are promoting some good internet affiliate marketing program that you have joined. An example of how your readers can get a better idea of your affiliate products that you promote is through communication and interaction when they post comments or questions in your blog comments section.

Use no follow on links when necessary
If you link out to other sites in which you really cannot be sure of its creditability or authority, you should then use a no follow on the link. This is important if you rely a lot on Google search traffic and do not want to get into any trouble with Google. You’ve probably read many ugly stories about sites being penalized after being identified as having sold links. Using no follow can therefore help prevent such problems which you may encounter in the course of your work at home business journey.

Check That Your Blog RSS Feed Is Not Invalid
One of the most important reasons why you should have a blog RSS feed is so you can build a big subscriber base for your online business opportunity. It’s this reason why blogs are known to be more powerful than regular websites. If someone bookmarks your regular website, he will have to go back to visit your site again and again, assuming that you have something that interests this visitor. However if this visitor subscribes to your blog’s RSS feed, he can get updates without actually having to visit your blog. It is therefore vital that you ensure that your blog RSS feed does not become invalid at any time.

The most common problem seems to be that you copy and paste a post from MS Word or another website into your blog posts. There are certain characters in the html codes which may cause this. To find out what are these offending characters, take a look at this: Here is one possible cause:
http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=79005

Quick Fix or take preventive measure (e.g. for feedburner):
Login to FeedBurner click your feed then the Troubleshootize tab and start reading to find the ‘bad’ html characters. Remove them and it’s fixed.

Add Search Box
Add a search box in your blog to help your readers find what they are looking for. If you have a new blog, this may become more useful, if you have used too broad categories or if you have too many posts for your readers to find a specific post they are interested in.

Don’t Use Big Banners
When publishing a blog post, banner size does matter. Unless you know what you are doing, do not use long banners freely in your blog. This is because depending on how your blog is structured, they may cause some problems with other widgets found in your blog. For example the use of banner size of 515 px in this blog will cause problems with the sidebar widgets. As a result it creates loading problems and all the blog images will not be displayed if I use Internet Explorer as my browser.

Bold Your Keywords and Keyword Phrases
Although this seems pretty obvious, there are still many newbies who forget to do this. Remember that bolded keyword phrases give more weight with Google and other search engines.

Blog Posts Before Article Directories
If you are using your blog post to also publish to article directories, there are 2 important things to remember. You should always post to your blog first. Then make at least 30% changes on what you have written before publishing at your favorite article directories. By doing this you maintain unique content and you do not risk getting penalized by Google for duplicate content submission.

Reciprocate Comments To Your Blog Commentators
When someone visits your blog and give a comment, you should reciprocate by visiting this reader’s blog and leave a comment. This is a good practice not just as a show of appreciation but more importantly to build a name for yourself , your blog and your legitimate online business. It also encourages repeat visitors to your blog over time. Many successful internet marketers not only practices this but make such reciprocal commenting visible to others by placing in his signature e.g. ‘leave a comment and get a comment from me’ It is also an excellent way for link building for better search engine ranking.

These are some of the blog techniques I have been using and what I felt are important things to remember when you do blogging. It is by no means exhaustive but if you conscientiously make the effort they will benefit your online business opportunity, your legitimate home internet business startup and other work at home business activities.

Affiliate Programs Blogging Techniques Newbies Starting Out traffic work from home

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Tags: Blogging Techniques, Traffic, Affiliate Programs, Newbies Starting Out, Work From Home by admin
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Some Myths About Linking To Lower Page Rank Websites

Link management is a key component of a successful online internet home business. There are many different ways that you can accomplish this not just getting quality links but very relevant links to your work at home business. Getting such links do take time although with the present pace in which new technology has been dishing out more advanced software, people have grown smarter in getting this job done. Learning and mastering SEO, buying links, 3-way linking, reciprocal linking, getting backlinks from quality sites like .edu and .gov sites are just some routine jobs in which the average internet marketer goes about doing today. All for the sake of improving their current search engine ranking.

However one thing that really puzzles me is that many legitimate home internet business owners do not wish to link to websites which have a lower page rank status. I have personally experienced this myself on a few occasions in the process of completing reciprocal link exchanges with other marketers. I was politely told ‘ we only exchange links with PR3 sites.’ Thankfully I didn’t suffer any disappointment as my site met this requirement for those link exchanges. I have always wanted to find out why people would not want to link to sites with lower page rank and whether their fears were well founded. That led to my mini survey.

I posted this question “Would You Link To A Lower Page Rank Website?” to two of my favorite forums - Warrior Forum and Conquer Your Niche Forum. I wanted to get as many views as I can from internet marketers, veterans as well as newbies to get a sense of how they felt about this topic. Well here is what some of them have to say about this.

I asked ….“Would You Link To A Lower Page Rank Website?”

They answered….

“I would if it was something that was useful and relevant to my visitors. I don’t really exchange links anymore though as I prefer to get one way links e.g. through article writing etc as these are more valuable and in my opinion are easier to get.

The most natural thing is linking to sites in the body of your content rather than in a separate directory, which nobody ever visits unless they want to exchange links anyway.

I wouldn’t personally link to completely unrelated sites though e.g. a site on dog care from my legitimate home internet business site, or a site on work at home business from my wedding site.”

Suzanne Morrison
homebiz-direct.com

“I say stick to sites that are at least somewhat relevant to yours and are quality sites. I know quality is hard to really judge but you can usually tell if a site is complete crap or if it is a good site. If you do that then I wouldn’t worry about PR too much. If it’s a quality site and they are actually trying to grow it then it will eventually have PR.

But after having said that, I usually don’t link to a site unless it has at least a PR1 because that way I know Google at least somewhat likes them, they have been around long enough to get some PR, and they will probably keep going up.One more thing to add…

You have probably heard this a million times before but the PR you see on your toolbar doesn’t mean anything.

To give an example…

I have a website that ranks highly on Google for just about every internet home based business and work at home business related search you can think of. It only has a PR3. It used to have a PR5 a couple years ago but it didn’t have even close to the rankings back then that it has now. It dropped to a PR4 for some reason but the rankings got better. Now it’s only a PR3 but it has not lost any rankings. If anything it has gained them.

That just shows you that a sites quality and rankings can’t be judged simply by looking at the PR.”

Trent Brownrigg
home-business-team.com

“Don’t worry that much on PR. I would look at it at another angle - “would the users of my site benefit from this link?”

This is one good reason why I would certainly link to a lower PR site that has good, useful and unique quality content.”

MrCat
submit.mixcat.com

“There are a lot of myths about SEO. I read the other day at Jonathan Leger’s blog a simple statement: Backlinks are backlinks...period.

I don’t think that backlinks from sites with a lower PR can hurt. Until Google releases an SEO guide for online marketers, we can’t be sure.”

Josip Barbaric
heaven4affiliates.com

“PR is only a number. If you got high PR and traffic is not so good daily, then why have the PR? it’s a showoff number. I’d link to a lower PR site if it was somewhat related to the niche i am in. We can’t stop thousands of folks putting our website links on there site now can’t we?

If the site in question, has a decent design, looks like the owner updates the site weekly then I’ll be happy to link to them. The lower PR site is most likely still newish and still improving. Could be a great idea to link them early.”

Snakeair
freetoadvertise.biz

I like to think I have uncovered some myths of linking to lower page rank work at home business websites. To me these fears are totally unfounded. It is based on hearsay and not factual statements from Google or other reputable sources. If people follow good linking and seo techniques, refrain from any black hat techniques and follow good practices of successful marketers, nothing can possibly go wrong. But what do you think. Perhaps there is something some of my forum buddies may have missed out? Or you may have had some experiences which differ from what have been said here. We like to hear them. Do share with us so that we can learn from you too. Your comments are very much appreciated