Make money online blogging.

I am finally feeling like a real blogger. I have a nice looking site, some good content posts, and now I can stop stressing over the design and code of my site. I can finally start focusing on writing posts and getting more traffic. I do still have some things to do to my theme, but this is my third post I have written tonight. The first one was posted, and I have 2 in queue counting down to liftoff.

I believe it was John Chow who said to “have posts in the bank”. What he means is to have multiple posts already written and in line to be shown on your site. You could only write posts one day out of the week, and use the rest of the week to work on your site, play golf, whatever. It will look like you never left.

I suggest deciding on an interval. Most people will probably want to post once a day. Posting once a day keeps the Google Gods happy by fresh, updated often content. People like John Chow have a lot going on, so they may want to have 2 posts a day or so. It would probably be helpful to ensure your post is shown before peak times of your blog. Say your site picks up traffic at 6PM, then maybe at 4PM you want your post to show up. Once you get some frequent visitors, they may come back once a day (or check the RSS). You want to have your new content shown before they get to the computer. Kind of like gas stations. Right before a holiday they jack up the gas prices to get the most out of the high traffic.

Whip out the old notepad and think of the next few post topics. Under each topic list what you want to include. This is kind of like an outline you probably did in speech class. Go and write a new post. If you haven’t written a post for that day, then have it publish right away (or in a few hours if you want to space it out better). Then go ahead and start writing the next topic on your list. (Yes now, you are probably in a writing mode now and this post will probably be better than the first). Do everything like normal, but DO NOT HIT PUBLISH YET!

You need to tell Wordpress when to display this post. If you are using version 2.5 you will see “Publish Immediately Edit“. Click on edit, then select the time and date for when you want it to become active. The times are in military time, so 1PM is 13 and 24 would be midnight. Once you have this set, you can now hit Publish. If you hit Save, it will save the post as a draft and never post it!

I have a couple posts lined up right now. The next one is scheduled for 11am tomorrow. This is very helpful, and allows you to take some time away from your site, or work on things you need to (like design/code) without sacrificing potential visitors. Now there are no more excuses for not having posts regularly.

Probably 99% of my readers are using a free Wordpress theme. The truth is, almost all pre-made themes are horrible for targeting search engines! I know of some premium companies that charge a few hundred to a thousand dollars for a theme, and they are not following the SEO rules!

What can I do about this?

There are a few things you could do, it depends on your skill level with computers. You could insist your theme be SEO friendly and follow the rules I am about to tell you. Any theme design company shouldn’t have any issues with this. You could pay and have your theme made, then edit the code yourself to make it SEO friendly. Last, you could just create your whole theme from the ground up.

Do It Yourself:

If you choose to take care of the SEO yourself, then read on my friend. This is the best way to make sure the job was done right! CAUTION: You may see a dramatic increase in traffic!

H1 Tags:

The H1 Header tag should target you site’s main keyword. Mine is “Make Money Online Blogging”, so every H1 tag is wrapped around that keyword.

H2 Tags:

The biggest misuse of this tag is to use it in your sidebar. This should never be done, but MOST pre-made themes use it. The proper way to use the H2 tag is by wrapping your post titles with it. The title of this post, “SEO Your Site”, is wrapped with the H2 tag. The pages that you want to double check are index.php, single.php, and page.php. In the php code, it should be presented this way: <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>. If it isn’t, then you want to fix that now.

once you have your post titles using H2 tags, view the source of all your pages and search for H2. Look for it being misused in weird places. If it is, then you want to adjust accordingly. If you notice your sidebar is using H2 tags, then you can replace them with H3 or div tags. You may have to edit your style sheet. You could create a new entry like: #sidebar-titles. Copy the settings for h2 to the new class, and call it by: <div class="sidebar-titles">Categories</div>. That should take care of it.

Keyword Authority:

Having keyword authority can help you rank better. If many sites link to you as “Make Money Online Blogging”, then Google will think that other sites agree, and rank you higher in SERPS rankings. You can help this by creating a link, usually in the footer, to your homepage using your sites main keyword. If you look at my footer for example, I have “Make Money Online Blogging” and it links to my homepage. This is a keyword you want to use if you comment spam. I use “Make Money Online Blogging” for my name on many blogs while commenting. I still use my real name on the sites I highly respect, like John Chow. Another way is create a sidebar section that points to pages on your site about your keyword. I could have it titled “Make Money Online Blogging”, and point to popular posts I wrote on my site related to it.

Cut Out Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content is a no no! The only time the full text should be shown is on your main page, and the actual page of the post. Your archives page should only show an excerpt. When search engines index your site, it will see your index, the posts page itself, archives, and so on. If you have the rest of your site showing only an excerpt, you cut back drastically on duplicate content. It may not matter now, but if you don’t, you will have at least three times the amount of duplicate content!

Don’t use no index. If you don’t index the pages, just so you can show the full post, then you are limiting the amount of chances your site shows up in a search. For example, if someone searches for “SEO Your Site”, and it is no longer on my main page because I have made many new posts, then my site will not show up (at least where it should). If you index the page, then they will find http://www.shudogg.com/seo-your-site/.

To show excerpts instead of full text (useful on your Archives page), make sure your code uses this: <?php the_excerpt(); ?> instead of <?php the_content(); ?>.

SEO AIO Plugin:

I highly recommend using this plugin. You can add keywords to each one of your pages and posts! By using more keywords, and specific to each page/post, you could post off topic and get traffic from people you never would have found. The best thing about this plugin is that it rewrites the titles of your pages. It puts the title of the page/post before the title of your site. Without this plugin, all of your page titles would be the same. This has a HUGE affect on the traffic to your site from search engines!

One Last Thing:

Most plugins have to inject code into your site’s code. If you have noticed that AIO SEO Pack didn’t rewrite your titles, Brians Threaded Comments didn’t inject into your site, or your ShareThis isn’t showing up and giving a Java Script error, then your theme may be missing one very important code! Go to your site’s dashboard, Design, Theme Editor, and click on header.php on the right side. You need to make sure you have <?php wp_head(); ?> in there before the </head> tag. Plugins that need to inject information into your header look for that code. If it can’t find it, then it doesn’t know where to inject.

I hope you learned something from this post. If you did, or you just like what I have to say, then please sign up for my Full Feed RSS!

This is a free review, the owner did not contact me. I recently found out about this service and am sharing it with you.

Are you addicted to StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, delicious, and the many other social networks? If so then you might as well just up for Site Hoppin. This service looks to be really great, though I just started not too long ago. I haven’t yet seen my stats for today to see if I got any traffic through Site Hoppin though.

What is Site Hoppin?

Site Hoppin is kind of the new Entrecard in my opinion. You submit your site, and it will be put in to the rotation of sites displayed. You hop from site to site by clicking the Hop button that randomly presents a web page that has been submitted to the database. Right now there are 141 thousand sites and climbing. When you are view a site, you have the option to tag, rate, or comment on the site. This is similar to the way StumbleUpon works.

The point of this program is to earn beer credits. These credits in turn, increase the hits back to your website. Every 10 credits = 1 hop to your site. 1,000 credits = 100 hops to your site, 100,000 credits = 10,000 hops to your site. These hops are their term for hit. So you get 100 hits if you earn 1,000 credits. Let me brake down the ways to get credits:

• Clicking the “Hop” button to view a random site = 1 credit
• Tagging or Commenting on a site while “hopping” = 20 credits
• A new site submission = 30 credits
• A click from your own site through the “Site Hoppin Widget” = 50 credits

Sounds like a lot of work.

Manually clicking the hop button and viewing a site each time requires some dedicated time in front of the computer. Fortunately there is a “Slide Show Mode” that will keep loading page after page. You can set the time between hops. I suggest 20 or 30 seconds. This gives the page time to load, and it is possible they will come up with a method to prevent this abuse. Set the timing to 20 seconds and go to bed, go watch tv, or write a new post on your blog like chose to do. At 20 seconds, that should roughly get you 3 credits per minute, and 180 per hour. 8 hours of sleep will get you about 1440. This will be 144 hits to your site. This equals a little over 4 thousand hits to your site in one month at that rate. You could probably triple that if you use 5 second intervals instead of 20 seconds.

This sounds great!

Getting an extra 4,000 hits per month does sound like a great deal for free. It is kind of like the Bux.to autoclicker. You load it up and let it run in the background while it makes money. The one thing to remember is that not all of the hits/hops are worth anything to you. It may make your stats look better, but there are many people who are doing the same thing. You may be getting a hit, but the person may not even look at your site.

What you want to do is put something catchy at the top portion (above the fold). If you notice the italics at the very beginning of this post, that may be where you want to add something catchy. You could put something in bold/italics, or put an image to grab the viewers attention. Maybe refer back to an old post that is popular. I could say “I am still offering FREE ADVERTISING. Sign up now!“

What is did was use a mesh of tactics. Odds are your first post will show a few lines. Use these few lines to your advantage! I used italics, bolded FREE ADVERTISING (everyone loves free!), and linked to the article. I told wordpress to open that link in a new window because of people using programs like Site Hoppin. They can click that link real fast and not lose it. Hopefully this tactic will bring you more useful hits.

What is Beer Stock?

Beer stock is the Affiliate side of Site Hoppin. This part does cost a little bit of money. I recommend using money from your site, and not out of pocket money. Buy a stock that looks promising, but not too expensive for your budget. Once payment is received, you then have an affiliate link you can give out. Toss this link around in posts, and they even give you a widget with your affiliate code in it once you sign up for a Beer Stock.

Why would I buy Beer Stock?

There are several reasons why you would do this instead of generating credits. When you buy into a stock, you become co-owner and start receiving a percentage of the traffic from Site Hoppin. Beer Stock pages get 33% of Site Hoppin’s traffic. If the site gets 100,000 views per day and there are 100 Beer Stock pages, each page gets 333 page views per day. This is a great addition to doing beer credits.

Two Tier Affiliate Program:

Beer Stock is a two-tier affiliate program. This means that if you refer someone and they make a purchase, you get 25% of the sale. If that person sells, you get 15% commission off the sale of their stock. So in the end, if you refer a few people that actually will buy and sell, you get money for doing nothing.

Site Hoppin is another way to generate more hits. It can act as a social network, or an affiliate program. The way you use it is up to you. If you have some extra site money to play around with, I suggest buying some decent stock. With this classifying as an Affiliate Program, this is another way to make money online.

Most bloggers at least start out with Google’s Adsense. It is one of the easiest methods to make money quickly. The downside to it is that more traffic = more money, so sites just starting out with not make much until they start getting more traffic. Your ads are targeted by the content of your website.

There has been only one downside I have found with Adsense. Since you are limited to 3 ads on a page, the rest of the spots are dead white space. If you look at the bottom of my top three posts you see an Adsense ad, keep scrolling down and you notice there is no whitespace where the ad would be at. Before there used to be an ugly white gap. I could just show the recent 3 posts, but I prefer 5. I shouldn’t have to change my site around Google, or any other program for that matter.

Here is an example from my main index page (index.php) from my theme:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id=”main”>
<?php $postcount = 1; ?>
 <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
  <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
   <div class=”post”>
    <h2 id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
     <span class=”comm”>
      <?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments…’, ‘1 Comment…’, ‘(%) Comments…’); ?></span>
     <span class=”time”>
      <?php the_time(’F jS, Y’) ?>
     </span>
    </div>
    <div class=”body”>
     <?php the_content(’Read the rest of this entry &raquo;’); ?>
<p><strong><?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments Yet…’, ‘1 Comment…’, ‘% Comments Already…’); ?></strong>
<?php if($postcount < 4): ?>
<!– YOUR ADSENSE CODE HERE –>
<?php endif; ?>
</p>
    </div>
    <div class=”foot”>
     <span class=”left”><a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShudoggComputers”>Enjoy this post? Subscribe to my Full Feed RSS</a></span>
     <span class=”right”><?php if (function_exists(’sharethis_button’)) { sharethis_button(); } ?></span>
    </div><!– ENDS FOOT –>
   </div><!– ENDS POST –>
<?php $postcount++; ?>
<hr>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Now lets break the code down.

<?php $postcount = 1; ?> must go right before <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php if($postcount < 4): ?>
<!– YOUR ADSENSE CODE HERE –>
<?php endif; ?>
Replace with your code, and it can go anywhere within the loop. It is saying if the post count is less than 4, then show the ad.

<?php $postcount++; ?>
This goes at the end of the loop, right before <?php endwhile; ?>. It is saying to add 1 to the current post count.