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Link Popularity is becoming the determining factor for successful blogs because most of the top monetisation programs consider link popularity as an important ranking factor and it is also a dominant factor used by search engines in determining a site’s position in search results. Therefore, it is imperative to make sure that your blog get a good link popularity to achieve higher search engine ranking and PR value.

As explained in my previous post, Link Popularity is the measure of inbound links to your blog and the link text (anchor text) itself. Generally, a site with more sites linking to it will have a higher position as compared to another site with fewer links to it. Link popularity not only gives you improved rankings, it also benefits you through increased traffic.

Basically, to increase link popularity every blog or website needs inbound links by placing a clickable anchor text link on other websites. So, how to increase or improve link popularity? Let’s discuss some methods and techniques for link popularity development which you can use for your blog.

1. Write good content on your blog
This is a passive yet most effective method of improving link popularity. Articles are a valuable way to get recognition and gain reputation while increasing your link popularity. Writing good articles or providing useful information/tools will give you natural linkbacks leading you to a wealth of link popularity.

2. Submit your articles to article directories
After completing your article, submit it to major article directories to get more traffic and linkbacks. One link from an article directory can do much to increase link popularity. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. SEOresearcher has a very nice and complete list of article directories.

3. Submit your blog to blog directories
Getting listed in blog directories will also help to build the link popularity for your blog. There’s a giant list of blog directories available here. You will need some time to add your blog to each of them manually, but remember to add your blog to a relevant category, this helps targeted readers and visitors locate you easily.

4. Exchange links (reciprocal link exchange)
The next step after you have attained directory listings is to exchange links with other bloggers, which is known as reciprocal link exchange. You can email or leave a message to ask if other bloggers or webmasters are willing to exchange links with you. Make sure you get more relevant links of your niche because link popularity is also based on the relevance of incoming links and the number of good quality sites linked to yours. In other words, it’s not just link popularity, but also link relevancy and link reputation. Reciprocal link exchange is time consuming but when it’s done properly, it can be an effective way to increase link popularity and traffic.

5. Comment on other related blogs
One easy way you can start attracting linkbacks is by leaving comments on other related blogs, but make sure you post useful or at least related comments. People often will click links of others that have left comments and this way it’s likely that they’ll also be interested in your blog and might link up to you.

6. Participate actively in forums
You can improve your link popularity rapidly by aggressively participating in quality forums, if you include your blog’s URL in your signature. This way, your signature will be tagged along with every post that you submit in forums, and your incoming links will grow dramatically if you continue contributing to forums. 65% of my incoming links are from forums.

7. Join social bookmarking networks
Many online bookmarking or voting websites like StumbleUpon and Digg can give you a huge number of linkbacks and traffic. Integrate the social bookmarkers into your blog and let your readers submit and vote for your posts. Personally, I like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and Technorati.

8. Write testimonials or reviews
Write a positive testimonial about a product or service that you recently purchased or used, and include your blog link. Sometimes, the product owner or service provider will post the testimonial on their website and you gain a linkback already. You can even write a review about other blogs, email the blog owner and they might just link you back for the favor.

9. Get reviewed by other blogs
Invite other bloggers to review your blog and include a link to your blog. Blog like BlogsReview offers free review for your blog but does not guarantee a positive review. If you rather prefer a positive review, you can pay a blogger to write the review through websites like PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews.

10. Giveaways
Give away prizes to other bloggers if they link to you. The prizes should be something that other bloggers find valuable enough to want to link to you, but doesn’t cost you too much. You can even combine method 11 with this method – give away prizes to bloggers who write the best review for your blog. For example, JohnChow always gives away sponsored prizes for bloggers to write reviews about his blog and include a link in the reviews. JohnChow does this continuously and effectively increases his link popularity.

11. Press release
Press release distribution is also one of the most effective ways to increase link popularity as it gives excellent permanent inbound links. You can easily write a press release yourself and distribute it for free. Some of the popular press release sites that you can post your press release on are PRWeb, PRLeap and FPRC.

12. Purchase inbound links
The easiest way to improve your link popularity is to buy inbound links. You can buy one-way and targeted text links from established advertising websites like Text Link Ads, AdBrite and AdVolcano. This way you can establish your link popularity shortest time possible.

13. Start a referral or affiliate program
You can give other bloggers or webmasters the incentive to link to you. This way, you can get more valuable relevant links in your target niche. However, the affiliate program must be administered from your site because affiliates are going to link to the third-party’s site if it’s outsourced.

14. Spread your blog link
Just leave your blog address everywhere you can think of, like guestbook, your email signature etc. At the end of the day, you will be surprised with some unexpected linkbacks. However, do it with ethics and professionalism, do not spam or abuse it. Everyone hates spam.

15. Online link popularity service
If you prefer outsourcing the link building work instead of doing the hard work on your own, you can also hire internet marketing experts like AndyHagans and IntraPromote.

The results of your link popularity campaign usually don’t show until after many months. It is always advisable to set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved.

Building link popularity is not an easy task, it is both time consuming and laborious but it does bring its rewards. There are no easy ways to build link popularity, thus, be prepared to keep building links until you achieve link popularity stardom. Don’t expect to grow your link popularity overnight. Since link building takes time, the sooner you start the better, why not start building your link popularity today?

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Monetizing your blog simply means converting your blog into money or income. The only way you can earn from your blog is to monetize it, and the common way to monetize your blog is by joining blog monetization programs. There are many blog monetization programs available you can join, however, you should work on the following 5 elements that I’ve concluded before monetizing your blog. Most blog monetization programs will rate and rank your blog before your blog is accepted. The following 5 elements are the common factors used to determine your blog’s ratings and ranking. The better the 5 elements of your blog are, the higher your blog ranking is, and the more money your blog is going to earn.

Content
I always emphasize “Content is King”, content is the key to the success of blog monetization. The content of your blog decides the destiny and earning potential of your blog. Most bloggers tend to make mistake turning visitors off by giving contentless content with no substance. Visitors therefore never return. Your content must be valuable and of its specific niche, it should attract and retain readers. Always give your visitors good content and strong material that they want and they will automatically stay on. Bear in mind that you only get one chance to make a first impression, so make sure you show what you have to offer. Place stronger visual and mental emphasis on your content, which ultimately determines the size of your readership. By demonstrating emphasis of adding value to a quality content, it increases the objectivity, importance and weight of your blog. In the long run, you will receive a substantial level of traffic to your blog from new and repeat readers, allowing you to get the most out of your blog monetization. Always bear in mind, “Content drives Traffic, Traffic brings Profit”. Therefore, quality content is the first element that you should spend most of your time on before even thinking about monetizing your blog. “What do people expect when visiting a blog?” My answer is: current news, worthy content, valuable information, and at the same time also a space for writers to highlight their personal perspectives.”

Link Popularity
What is Link Popularity? Link popularity simply means how popular and visible your blog is in the online world. It is a measure of the total number of inbound links to your blog that most search engines have found and it has become the determining factor for a successful blog. Link popularity is relatively important as it is a major element used by most search engines in determining a site’s position in search results. Generally, a site with more inbound links will be positioned higher than a similar site with fewer links. And therefore, most blog monetization programs use link popularity as one of the factors to rank your blog. The more links to your blog, the higher your link popularity is, and the better blog ranking you will get.

How do you check your blog’s link popularity?
Websolucing.com has a handy tool on which you can check your blog’s link popularity.

PageRank
What is PageRank? PageRank is Google’s measure of search engine link popularity. Google ranks websites by the links and the quality from the links that point to a website. The PageRank provides a value between 0 and 10, meaning that the most popular websites have a PageRank of “10” and the least have a “0” PageRank. PageRank is one of the important measures of site’s importance and significance but Google only updates the PageRank once in every 3 months.

How do you check your Page Rank?
Google offers a wonderful toolbar for Internet Explorer users, you can download it here if you haven’t got one. For Firefox users, you can either choose to download the Google toolbar or there’s also a PageRank checker extension that you can download and install. After installing the plugin or toolbar, you will see a small green bar which displays the current URL’s PageRank level. Hover your mouse over it and you can see the numerical value, and that’s the PageRank.

Alexa Rank
What is Alexa Rank? Alexa Rank, a powerful and accurate measure of website statistics, is offered by Alexa Internet Inc. - a subsidiary company of Amazon.com. Alexa provides traffic statistics as well as page views of a website based on the information collected by their toolbar installed by several millions of users around the world. The lower the Alexa Rank number, the more heavily visited your website is. Many people dispute Alexa Rank is not accurate and that it should not be used as a tool to determine the value of a website because the tracking is only collected by browser with Alexa toolbar installed. However, as long as Alexa Rank is still taken into consideration by most blog monetization programs, we shouldn’t neglect it.

How do you check your Alexa Rank?
You can check your Alexa Rank directly on Alexa’s website at here, alternatively you can also install the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer or SearchStatus extension for Firefox that displays Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking at the same time.

Technorati Authority and Rank
What is Technorati Authority and Technorati Rank? Technorati Authority and Rank, offered by Technorati, are also the measures of how important and popular a website is in the blogosphere. Basically, Technorati Authority calculates the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months and the higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the website has. On the other hand, Technorati Rank’s calculation is based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the highest Technorati Authority is the number 1 ranked blog, and the smaller your Technorati Rank is, the closer you are to the top 100 blogs.

How do you check your Technorati Authority and Rank?
You can find it out on Technorati’s website itself, but before you can check your blog’s Technorati Authority and Rank, you are required to claim your blog – submit your blog to Technorati index. Upon claiming your blog, you will be able to see the Technorati Authority and Rank immediately.

Next, 15 Ways to Build Link Popularity

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In my previous post “5 things to consider before starting your blog”, I suggested you to start off a free blog with Blogger, learn how blogging works, then only switch to a paid-posting blog running Wordpress. Therefore, I’m assuming you to have already created a free blog with Blogger and had some experience on blogging. Right now, I’m assuming that you already feel comfortable with blogging and ready to move on to the next level ie getting a domain name for your blog hosted with a web host company. In this post, I’m going to show you how you can create a blog using Wordpress and host it on your own domain, and you will also learn how to create a self-hosted blog with Blogger and host it on your own domain for as little as $8.88 per year.

Before showing you the steps, there are two things that you will need to do prior to creating the blog:

1. Purchase a domain. First of all, you will need to purchase a domain before getting a web host. I know most web hosts offer free domain if you purchase their web host package, but it’s always advisable to purchase your own domain from a domain registrar, and then only host it with your preferred web host. Why? Because, you need to plan for the future. If you get the free domain given by any web hosts, the web host company will be the registrant of the domain, not YOU. If your domain becomes hot and popular one day, your web host can simply sell off your domain and make billions, you won’t get a single cent from it, because they are the legal registrant of the domain. Or, maybe one day, if Google is interested in acquiring your blog or website, you are not gonna get the million or billion dollars from Google, because you’re not the registered owner. Therefore, it is imperative to make sure that you are the legal registrant of your domain name, and the only way to do it is to buy it from a domain registrar. There are many established domain registrars on the market, but personally I prefer NameCheap. Not because they are selling cheap domains, but their service is satisfactory, and the user interface is brilliant. NameCheap offers a yearly rate of $8.88 for a .com or .net domain, I’m having more than 8 domains with them. So, go to a domain registrar of your choice, or simply go to NameCheap to purchase your preferred domain name, I’m not going into details about how to purchase a domain, as I believe you will be able to figure it out by following the instructions on the domain registrar’s web page, it’s pretty straightforward.

2. Subscribe a web hosting plan. Next, after purchasing the domain, you need a web host for your domain. Again, there are hundreds of web hosts out there offering different web hosting packages at different prices. Established web hosts like BlueHost, HostGator, Lunarpages, DreamHost, HostMonster, Globat, StartLogic and IXWebHosting are highly recommended. I’ve been using BlueHost, and they are offering a standard one-year web host package at $7.95/month (about $95.40 a year). The server’s uptime is 100% so far, I am certainly a happy BlueHost’s customer. Frankly speaking, BlueHost is one of the best web hosts on the market and I will definitely recommend it to everyone. Of course, you can choose other web hosts too as long as they support Wordpress or Blogger blogging platform. Besides, make sure you are getting a Linux server if you are planning to use Wordpress, and Blogger can ride on both Windows and Linux server. Finding a web host is like finding your new house, you will need to choose carefully, don’t simply grab a web host, always buy from a well-known web host, you can Host Unlimited Domains on 1 BlueHost Account $6.95 Per Month. If you can’t afford that, then I will suggest you get one from IXWebHosting, the Top Rated Web Hosting - $3.95/mo.

By now, I believe you should have gotten yourself a domain and a web host. Now, let me show you how to create your blog using Wordpress and Blogger on your own domain.

For Wordpress users:

How to create a Wordpress blog on your own domain with paid hosting

Step One - Point your domain to your web host
After purchasing the web hosting service, you will need to point your domain to the web host. For BlueHost and NameCheap user,
1. Login to your NameCheap account, select Manage domains and click on your domain
2. From the navigation bar on the left, select Transfer DNS to Webhost
3. Enter ns1.bluehost.com into the first field and ns2.bluehost.com into the 2nd field, and click Save Changes. *Note* (For non-BlueHost users, you can use your preferred web host’s ns1 & ns2 addresses, please check with your web host to get the correct ns1 & ns2 addresses)

Now your domain is pointed to your BlueHost web hosting account. It may take up to 24 hours for the domain to be hooked up to your BlueHost hosting, but normally the changes take effect within minutes. The longest that I experienced was only for 15 minutes.

Step Two - Install Wordpress on your domain
While waiting for the changes to take effect, you can take your sweet time to install Wordpress on your domain, follow the steps below:
1. Log into your BlueHost control panel
2. Select Fantastico De Luxe from Software / Services section
3. Select WordPress under Blogs — a WordPress info screen will load
4. Place your mouse over the bold text New Installation and click the link
5. Follow the prompts given by Fantastico, then complete the installation

Fantastico will populate the default files and databases for a brand new installation of WordPress in whatever location on any domain attached to your account which you specify. You can choose to install wordpress on http://yourblogname.com or http://www.yourblogname.com or http://www.yourblogname.com/blog etc whichever you like. But I will advise you to install it right on http://www.yourblogname.com , you will know why in my future posts.

You are done! Go to your blog at your domain http://www.yourblogname.com, and you can see your blog is up and running on Wordpress platform. Now you can start your blogging career by logging into your Wordpress account at http://www.yourblogname.com/wp-admin. Enjoy Wordpress’ing.

For Blogger users:

How to create a Blogger blog on your own domain for as little as $8.88 a year

For those who have limited funds or simply not willing to fork out a hundred bucks for web hosting service, you may choose to use Blogger on your own domain. As promised in my previous post, I’m going to show you how you can create a Blogger blog on your domain that you just purchased for $8.88 without paying additional charges for the web hosting.

Step One (The only step) - Point your domain to Blogger
Yes, instead of pointing your domain to a web host, you can point your domain to Blogger and Blogger will host your domain for FREE. For NameCheap user,
1. Login to your NameCheap account
2. Select Manage domains and click on your domain
3. From the navigation bar on the left, select All Host Records under Host Management
4. Enter ghs.google.com into the “www” field and change your “Record Type” to CNAME (Alias). This step is to point your blog url (with www) to your Blogger blog.
5. Enter http://yourblogname.com/ into the “@” field and change the “Record Type” to URL Redirect. This step is to redirect your blog url (without www) to http://www.yourblogname.com when people key in http://yourblogname.com.
6. Click Save Changes. It may take up to 24 hours for the domain to be hooked up to your Blogger blog, but normally the changes take effect within minutes. The longest that I experienced was only for 10 minutes.

*Note* For those who purchased domain from other domain registrars, you may refer to this self-explanatory instructions by Blogger.

Congratulations, you’re done! From now on, you can continue logging into your Blogger account via Blogger website as usual, but all your posts will be published to your domain, meaning that, your blog is now live on your own domain hosted by Blogger for FREE. You only pay $8.88 for the domain, and Blogger host it for you at no additional cost to you. Now go to your blog at http://www.yourblogname.com and check out the wonder.

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As explained in my previous post “5 Things to Consider Before Starting Your Blog”, you can choose to create a blog with free or paid hosting. I also mentioned that it’s advisable for newbies to start with a free blog before getting a paid hosting account. In this post, I’m going to show you how to create your new blog with free hosting by Blogger and Wordpress.

Create a free blog using Blogger

1. Go to Blogger.com and click on “Create Your Blog Now”.
2. Create a Google account by entering the information required. For those who already have a Google account, for example, a Gmail account, you can sign in first and you will be using your existing Google account to access your new Blogger account after the registration.
3. Give your new blog a title as well as a blog subdomain address as you wish, subject to availability.
4. Choose a template for your new blog. Blogger comes with 12 default templates that you can choose from. Always choose a template that suits your blog topic.

Done, you blog has been created and you can now start posting by writing the content and giving it a title. Try making a test post and when you click “Publish”, your post immediately goes live and you can always go to your blog address (http://yourblogname.blogspot.com) to see how it looks like. Do also go around and explore your Blogger dashboard and familiarize yourself with the features, functions and commands.

Create a free blog using Wordpress

1. Go to Wordpress.com and click on “Start Your Wordpress Blog”.
2. Create a username of your choice, enter your email address, read and check the Terms of Service and choose “Gimme a Blog!”.
3. You may choose to change the default blog domain to a more suitable domain address, name your blog title, choose your primary language and and check the privacy box if you would like your blog to be picked up by search engines.
4. An email will be sent to your account to confirm your registration. Activate your account by clicking on the link in the email. Once that is done, login using the provided password and update your profile.
5. I will suggest you to change your password immediately to a password that you can remember. Go to Dashboard -> Update your profile or password -> Update Your Password and key in your new password, click “Update Profile”.

Your new blog is now created, and your blog address is something like this http://yourblogname.wordpress.com. You can now start posting by going to “Write”, title and write your blog post, and publish. Your post will immediately go live and you can always go to your blog address to see how it looks like. Make sure you go around and explore your Wordpress dashboard and familiarize yourself with the features, functions and commands.

*TIPS* The next time you want to login to your Wordpress blog account, just go straight to http://yourblogname.wordpress.com/wp-admin

In next post, I’m going to show “How to Create a Self-Hosted Blog“.

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I think you are getting excited and eager to jump into the blogging world. Do not jumpstart just yet. There are many factors that you will need to consider before starting a blog. I’ve concluded the 5 most important factors that require careful consideration.

Traffic
You will need to consider whether your traffic matters. If you are only planning to create a personal blog ranting about your day-to-day life and thoughts, traffic is not essential. However, I assume you are planning to monetize your blog, that’s why you’re here, you will then require traffic. Your blog’s traffic gains you popularity and popularity earns you money. A successful blog depends a lot on its traffic, thus, you will not only need a lot of traffic, you will need quality and targeted traffic too. How do we bring in more traffic? The topic of your blog, is the core fundamental of successful traffic building, thus, you will need to spend some time on deciding your blog topic. (Well, there are hundreds of ways to bring in traffic, but we’re not going to talk about it in this post today, I will share you the in-depth tips to attract traffic in later posts.)

Topic
What are you going to blog about? Starting a blog is way too easy, but finding appropriate topics to blog about takes a little more thought and effort. Many people seem to blog about something that they’re not familiar with, for the sake of reaping money from it, that is wrong. After a while, or after a couple of posts, you will get bored with it, trust me, I made the mistake, so I don’t want you to repeat that. Try to blog about a narrow topic with informative write-up that helps people, that way you will have a better chance of bringing in traffic, ‘cause the reason why most people go to the internet is because they’re seeking information, tips, advices or even opinions. Two new blogs are created every second, you will need to stand out from the crowd in order to gain a larger portion of the traffic, thus, try to find out others in your same niche and see why they are different from others. If you are planning to monetize your blog, you will need to focus on a niche topic or demographic. Well, there’s no specific subject that you’re required to blog about, in fact, you can blog about anything that you like, any topics of your interests, or anything that you’re good at. For example, if you enjoy cooking and making your own recipes, you can blog about cooking and your personal recipes. Or if you are good at computers, why not blog about computer tips or even programming? Therefore, always go with what you’re good at and the traffic will follow.

Blog name
Naming your blog is as crucial as naming your baby, so name it wisely. You can only do this well after settling on a niche topic for your blog. A blog name is its first impression to your readers, thus, it should easily come to your readers’ minds. Your blog name should be easy to type and spell without too many letters. A good blog name should also say something about the topic, so that when your readers see your blog name, they already know what your blog is about. Take the recipe blog as an example again, if you see “Chris’s Secret Recipe”, I’m sure you can tell it is a blog about Chris’s personal recipes. In simpler words, choose a unique, suitable, readable, spellable and memorable name. Again, if you’re only planning to have a personal blog, your blog name isn’t that important ‘cause you can always choose the topic after naming your blog.

Blogging platform
There are many blogging platforms available on the internet, big names like Blogger(Blogspot), Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad, Live Journal and many other competing blogging platforms, not forgetting recently emerged MySpace. However, different blogging platforms offer different levels of service. Personally I only tried Blogger and Wordpress, so I can only comment on these two blogging platforms. Both Blogger and Wordpress offer the blogging platform, the subdomain name and free hosting, but there are some restrictions and limitations on customization if you host your blog with them despite both of them are by far the most easy-to-use platforms.

• Blogger. Also known as Blogspot, is owned by Google. Everyone loves Google, ‘cause Google constantly improves and upgrades its products and services, which makes Blogger stand out from the competition. With its promising drag-and-drop feature and recently released new Blogger application, creating a blog using Blogger is a breeze, it is one of the fastest ways to start blogging. It would be so much easier for newbies to learn and practise blogging on a simple and user-friendly platform like Blogger. Blogger provides hosting and you provide the content, without costing you a dime.

• Wordpress. I came across a lot of clean, beautiful and successful blogs using Wordpress platform, so I finally made the decision to move all my Blogger blogs to Wordpress recently, and it’s worthwhile taking time to learn and understand Wordpress. WiseBlogging.com is proudly using Wordpress platform. I really enjoy the outstanding features and powerful tools of Wordpress, its user interface is remarkably simple to use and undeniably it is one of the most versatile blogging platforms, which is why most top bloggers are using Wordpress exclusively. However, if you are just starting out as a beginner, I’ll suggest you to start with Blogger. Why? Because Wordpress requires perhaps the most sophisticated level of technical knowledge for implementation despite it is open source software. Therefore, it can be a little time consuming for a non-technical beginning blogger to figure out Wordpress.

You can always switch over to Wordpress when you see fit, it only requires a few clicks to switch and export your content to Wordpress.

Free hosting or paid hosting
Before starting your blog, you will also need to decide on whether or not you want a free hosting blog or a paid hosting blog. Free hosting blog simply means that Blogger or Wordpress hosts your blog, and your blog’s domain name will be a subdomain like “yourblogname.blogspot.com” or “yourblogname.wordpress.com”. However, if you are willing to fork out a little money for a paid hosting, you can host your blog using your own domain name, for example, “www.yourblogname.com” . So which one should you choose? Here is some advice to you:

• For those of you who don’t mind the subdomain concept, go get a free hosting blog account with Blogger, and host it with them. Get yourself familiarised with blogging and its techniques, then only switch to Wordpress and a paid hosting account which give you full control over your blog.

• For those who insist on getting your own domain, but can’t afford the domain and hosting, I can show you how you get a FREE hosting blog account with Blogger while using your own domain costing you ONLY $0.74 a month!!! Yes, there’s a way, I’m not joking. This is going to be covered in later posts, meanwhile, you can start deciding on the other four factors while waiting for this one.

Last but not least, do go through this post over and over again if you haven’t gotten the answers to these 5 factors. If you have carefully considered all these 5 factors, Congratulations, it is already half of the battle.

Next post, “How to Create a Free Blog“.

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