Now, you should have a blog full with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless factsheet.

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information. Simple enough.

However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com, to name a few more popular ones. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, but that doesn’t stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”, but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let’s determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so.

Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That’s more manageable, but you’d like to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadget” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML!

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the <h1> and </h1> tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the <h1> </h1> tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic.

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and drop your ranking further down into oblivion… So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!

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Face the fact – your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Hence, you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we’re going to discuss how to do just that in this article.

We have discussed how to write attractively, so now we are going to discuss what we are going to write on. The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate and interested in. You’ve chosen to make blogging your career because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about something that you’re not interested in is as torturous as as your mundane job!

The other reason I ask you to write about something you’re passionate about is because your feelings and emotion shows through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it’s only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally reach your full speed. Then, it’ll take a lot of effort to stop you instead!

However, no matter how well you know your topic, your brain is bound to get exhausted over some time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

1) The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

2) Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you’ll have quite an unexhaustible “conversation” ongoing, so you’ll not need to actively search for content to write about. However, if you’re still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.

3) You can also have conversations with people with the same interest as you in the particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don’t join every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day (or more if you have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you extra traffic.

Don’t worry about the paragraph above about generating traffic and search engines, because we’re going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like that of a locomotive!

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Today, we’re going to discuss the type of content that is suitable for your blog in order to make it profitable. First off, I want you to understand that there is no fixed scope that your blog should have, which means you can write about whatever you’re interested in.

However, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable blog is the way the blog is written. Just imagine, would you prefer to read your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by your favourite author?

You may prefer to read the novel because it appeals more to your interest, or because it is not as mind-numbing as the lecture notes by your professor. However, the most important point is people like to read “light” stuff most of the time. You see, when people log on to your blog, they are not only looking for information – they are also looking for information they can obtain easily, and better still in a relaxed manner.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current visitors coming back for more, it is very important to add a human touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining you’re talking about a certain topic with your personal friend. An extra bonus for your readers would be a great sense of humour, so try to add funny comments in your articles where they are suitable.

Another important key point is to avoid addressing your reader as a plural unit. What I really mean is you should not write as if you’re preparing a speech. Instead, you should write as if you’re having a conversation to a single person because this will make your visitor think of you more as a personal friend rather than a person of higher authority.

Besides that, it is also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. Human beings are very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog would make a world’s difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need to find out information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

So, the lesson for today is to simply write as an equal friend to your visitors, write to them as if you’re talking to a single person and establish your own personality on your blog.

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Day 5: Purchasing Traffic

There is a right way, and a wrong way to purchase traffic. You can use a service that guarantees you traffic (wrong way) or you can use a pay-per-click service (right way). Whatever you do, don’t fall for those websites that promise to deliver you thousands of hits in a twenty four hour period.

Let’s take a look at those services. First, you don’t know where or how they are generating the traffic. In most cases, the traffic is not targeted, meaning that it is possible that not a single one of those thousands of visitors has any interest in the topic of your niche. Finally, you can’t really be sure that the traffic is ‘real.’

But, there is a way to purchase real, targeted traffic. You can use Pay-Per-Click advertising, through a service such as Google AdWords. When you purchase traffic using this method, the traffic is targeted - and real. You don’t pay for a certain number of traffic, you pay for each click, as the name, pay-per-click, indicates.

Now, if you don’t know what you are doing, Pay-Per-Click can be expensive, and ineffective. It is important that you make sure that you write a targeted ad, first and foremost. It is also essential that you select the right keywords, and that you bid the right amount on those keywords.

Google AdWords really makes this very easy. You can type in your main keyword, and they will give you a list of other related keywords that apply as well. Next, when you set the amount you are willing to pay, per click, for each keyword, you can use the traffic analysis tools in Google AdWords to see where your ad will be listed, based on what you are paying per click, and how much traffic you can expect from it.

Raise your bid price until you see that you will be listed where you want to be (preferably the first page of search results). Again, PPC can be very expensive. Make sure that you know how much you can afford to spend on these ads each week, divide it by seven, and set a daily budget up in your AdWords account. Also specify how you want those funds spread out through the day.

There are entire courses written on the topic of Google AdWords. I advise that you take one, because there are a lot of elements and tricks that need to be learned to make AdWords work out well for you.

Again, don’t waste your traffic! Make sure that you are capturing first names and email addresses from the people that arrive at your website through PPC advertising!

Homework Assignment: Determine whether or not you want to purchase traffic or not, and if you do, find a good pay-per-click service, such as Google AdWords, and get set up.

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Day 4: Social Bookmarking

Today, we are going to look at something that is still relatively new in the Internet Marketing arena: Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking is essentially using a social bookmarking service to bookmark your webpages or blog posts, so that other users of the bookmarking site can visit. When you bookmark a site, you tag it with keywords, and people can search for the keywords that reflect their interests at the social bookmarking site.

Does it work? Absolutely! In fact, this is a very fast way to generate really good traffic to your site - for free. Again, you will want to try to get them on your opt-in list, once they arrive at your site, so that you can bring them back again and again. Notice that I said ‘really good traffic.’ This is good traffic because the visitor finds your site by searching for the keywords that you’ve used when you bookmarked it. They are essentially looking for you. For this reason, it is important to use keyword tags, for each page, that are absolutely relevant to the content on that page. Don’t try to use unrelated keywords, this tactic simply won’t work.

There are numerous social bookmarking sites out there, and hitting them all, to bookmark each page of your website, could literally take days, if not weeks. Fortunately, there are social bookmarking services that will send your bookmarks and tags to numerous social bookmarking sites in one fell swoop.

You want a service that targets the best social bookmarking sites, and that service is Only Wire, at http://www.onlywire.com. Only Wire is free to use (another bonus). Getting set up with Only Wire takes a couple of hours, because you will need to go to each of the social bookmarking sites that it lists, register, and then put your username and password for each site into the list at Only Wire.

Once that is done, you will add the Only Wire icon to your browser toolbar (very easy to do - you just click, hold the mouse button down, and drag and drop it up there). Now, you are all set up. When you are ready to bookmark your pages, first go to the Only Wire site and login. Leave that window open. Open another window (tabbed browsers work great for this), go to your site, go to a page that you want to bookmark, and hit the icon.

You will be taken to the Only Wire add a bookmark page. Here, everything is filled in, except your keyword tags. List the keywords that are associated with the page you are bookmarking, and hit submit. You’re done with that page - move on to the next one. Nothing could be easier, and again, it is very effective.

Homework Assignment: Join Only Wire at http://www.onlywire.com . Register for each site on the list, and get Only Wire all set up. Add the bookmark icon to your browser toolbar, and go to each page of your website, click the icon, and add it to the social bookmarks and tag each page with keywords.

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