Should You Use Adwords To Promote Your Blog?

I have not been blogging so much here because I have been learning about Adwords and creating a new site called Adwords Marketing . This is a subdomain of one of my first sites where I used a character called Genie rather than my own name because I was still shy and unsure of myself and I thought it was cool. I understand now, thanks to the advice of Andy Baird – who took time from his busy schedule to answer several emails I sent him, that branding of your own personal name is an essential part of the overall success formula.

Genie is still fun though, I enjoy having these two lovely Jinn at my beck and call! The idea that Google Adwords is a powerful Jinni who can conjure your hearts desire out of thin air if you are just clever enough to word your wishes correctly, also appeals to me as a relevant Adwords analogy.

So is it worth spending money on Adwords to promote your blog?

This is the question I asked. So lets go through a few scenarios.

If you have a personal blog that you share with friends with no monetization then probably not. You have to learn a great deal about Adwords to be able to use it effectively.

If you do have some form of opt in and monetization on your site, then you need to consider whether  getting fast traffic to your site is worth the time and effort you will spend on learning how to make Adwords work for you to get more traffic to yourblog.

Adwords is not free and simply setting up an account and creating an ad – when you don’t know what you are doing – will cost you more than it may be worth.

If you are prepared to leap in and try your luck with Adwords then you need to start learning about what they call their quality score. This is basically to ensure that even their advertisers provide Google searchers with quality content. You may already have an Adwords account. If so you will have seen the phrase “keywords inactive for search”

A new tool that has recently been released (last Friday) is going to help you immensely with this, especially if you have sites as well as blogs. It’s called

Put On Your Google Goggles,

and its a desktop appiclation that you can use by entering in an ad and an url to see the likely quality score of your landing page. A short PDF report is generated to explain what factors need improving to get your keywords showing great scores. Couldn’t be easier!

For a short time, during the launch of this new nifty gadget, the creators of it, Larry and Amish, are offering a special deal on their main product, an ad spying and ad tracking tool. This deal is so special its almost worth getting it even if you are not sure Adwords is right for you but you are doing affiliate marketing! You can easily find new niches with it, you can check affiliate conversion rates and so much more. So if you have ever been tempted to try this kind of thing, get over and check out the deal, it’s awesome.

Even if you are not yet ready to use Adwords, a peek at the videos on the sales page will explain a lot of info about Adwords quality score and what the Google slap was and why people are still talking about it. It’s a worth a look just for that! You can also use such information to improve your knowledge about SEO.

Here’s a report you can download (no email or money required)
Google Goggles Report .

Or if you opt in at the following page you can also get a resale audio/pdf interview with Google expert Simon Leung about the quality score and how to overcome it. Click here to get that bonus with your report. Also no cost, just the email so I can send you the link.
Nice Guys Don’t Get Slapped

OK. So that’s when not to use Adwords and something new about how to use Adwords -

What about when to use Adwords to advertise your blog.

I guess the time is when you have a professional site that is fully monetized and, especially so, when you are perhaps selling advertising on it, whether that is banner advertising, text links or Adsense. You may need to use different urls rather than just a home page, so using pages for these landing urls may be better. Treat these pages as landing pages and optimize each one for your ad text and specific keyword combinations.

If your blog is appearing for seo terms then you may not need to advertise with those keywords just to get traffic, but aim for a wider variety of keyword search terms than you can seo for. The content network can be good for this as using a lot of keywords for one ad is less of a problem with the content network.

Part of Adwords marketing is working out your visitor value. This basically means that the profit you make from your site is divided by the number of visitors to your site. Those visitors who sign up for your list or perhaps buy from you immediately.

If you make a profit each month of $1,000 from 1,000 visitors a month – your visitor value is $1. This is how you can start to judge whether you can afford to send more visitors using Adwords and how much you can afford to spend to use it. There’s not much point in spending $2 to earn $1. But if you can spend $2 to earn $4 then it’s probably worth it.

So think and plan before you spend and don’t forget to check those Google Goggles out!

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Popularity: 36% [?]

Chances are you’ve heard of trackbacks but probably you don’t know what these are and what they have to do with your blog. Many bloggers don’t quite understand how trackbacks work and why they are useful for their blogs. So we’re going to go over
trackbacks—what they are, how they work, why they are important to blog traffic, and how to get more trackbacks. After you’ve read this, you’ll know practically everything there is to know about trackbacks.

What are trackbacks?

The concept of trackbacks is a bit hard to explain. So we’ll use an example to explain it in the best way possible.

OK, say you see a great blog post on another person’s blog and want to link to it on your blog. You could do this the old-fashioned way by manually placing a link in a post to
that blog. However, if you do it this way, the person whose blog post you are linking to may not pick up that you are linking to them unless you tell them.

This is where trackbacks come in. Under the post while you are writing it is a trackback box. So as well as placing the link in the post also place the url into the box. If you are using several urls, leave a space between them so the program will know they are separate urls. The trackback program will then notify the owner of a blog when one of their posts has been linked to at another blog.

How do trackbacks work?

Wordpress has a system incorporated in a new install but an older install may not and you may need a plugin. A blog that has a trackback system set up will have a link at the bottom of every blog post but you may need to actually open the single post to see it.

What I mean by this is to click on permalink or the title of the post (if that is a link) so that you can see the whole post with comments. Then to enable trackBacks in WordPress , go to Options > Discussion.

Check the checkbox “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article”(for sending a trackback) and also check the checkbox under it ”Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) “ (for receiving a trackback)

When these are enabled the person who posted the original blog will then be notified that their blog posting has been linked to. From that point forward, the “Trackbacks” link will keep track of how many people have chosen to blog about that particular post. So after the first trackback, it may say “Trackbacks: 1”. The number of trackbacks recorded will be updated as they occur. Or it may place a trackback excerpt in the comments field.

If that all sounds a little complicated watch Jack Humphreys Video Tutorial on Trackbacks in the library for more clarity.

Why are trackbacks important to blog traffic?

The easy answer is that trackbacks are important because they increase awareness of your blog. Trackbacks also make a blog seem more credible. After all, people have to think your posts are good enough to be trackbacked.

When a person makes a trackback on your blog, they have made a post on their own blog about your blog. This, in turn, lets their readers know about your blog. Chances are, their readers will want to visit your blog to see what else you have and you’ll have a whole new fanbase of readers. That means more traffic for your blog.

Imagine what would happen if 5 different bloggers trackbacked a post on your blog? Depending on how popular their blog is, that’s potentially as much as hundreds of new readers for your blog! So it’s worth doing, right?

Also, every trackback made, assuming it is a legitimate one(and some trackbacks are spam, especially if they are there only to link to another site) adds credibility to your blog. Blogs with high amounts of trackbacks look credible because lots of people like the posts enough to trackback them.

How can I increase the number of trackbacks I get?

The easiest and best way to increase trackbacks is to frequently post(2-3 times a week), good quality content.Quality blog posts are those that people can relate to and are easy to read. If you post a decent sized article or rant that is entertaining (and that people are likely to agree with), and you get a bit of traffic, eventually you’ll get trackbacked.

The number of trackbacks you get is totally dependent on the number of visitors your blog receives and how frequently you are able to make quality posts. Trackbacks are a wonderful thing for every blog. You are able to know when your blog posting has been posted about at another blog, plus you potentially gain more visitors.

It’s a win-win situation for both you and the other blogger! In fact if you have friends blogging, try to exchange trackbacks regularly, it will help both (or all) of you a great deal.

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Popularity: 67% [?]

SEO Blogging software can be used in one of two ways. You can simply download a free plugin and upload it to your plugins folder in your hosted Wordpress blog. Or you can buy a professional template. Semiologic Pro is probably the most well known solution of this type. This package has Wordpress, a range of plugins (including seo) and a very adaptable template and range of themes all in one package.

If professional blogging is something you are aiming for, using Semiologic Pro will make many functions of your blogging far easier. People who use it, swear that the convenience is worth the cost, but at around $300, it is not an option for everyone.

Alternatively, downloading and activating the all in one seo word press plugin and the google sitemap generator may take a bit longer to initially manage your seo blogging software needs, but it’s your time, and you know what it’s worth compared to the outflow of cold cash. Neither are especially difficult to use or configure, its a fill in the boxes on the page affair. The site links you may need to get more information are listed on the pages in the back office. All pretty simple and well worth doing if you have something to put there.

SEO is a strategy and for most bloggers its probably not one they consider is worth the bother. Unless you take it seriously, and are actually aiming to rank for a well researched key phrase, then tagging is sufficient. Meta tags are only half of the seo strategy. Unless you work at getting inbound links as well, the seo you are doing is not a strategy but just a waste of time.

Tagging your blog posts will help you out with blog search engines but you should really also want to rank your blog pages in the ‘real’ search engines. For this article though, we are not pushing the whole strategy, but just letting you know the bit about how …

META TAGS ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR WEB PAGE

Meta tags are something that you can never afford to overlook if you are seriously doing search engine optimization. Following are the three most common and the most important meta tags that are used in SEO. All seo blogging software will include these three tag areas.

Meta Page Title Tag

The text that you see in your browser’s window bar (at the top of internet explorer or firefox) is the most important thing that doesn’t appear to be on your page! You may not have realized it was even there at all. You can see your title right at the top of the page in the browser . This is the title that becomes the all-important clickable link in the listings on the major search engine pages.

Make sure these titles are getting rewritten and relate to your post titles which always come next, before anything else. You can have a few words in here from your blog title if you want to do some branding but don’t overstuff the title. It should be accurate and concise, and include your important key words.

If your post titles don’t contain your most precious phrases that you want to rank for then tweak them. The title tag is best if its an interesting, eye-catching headline with all the important keywords used once. Leave the post title as it is (for the people) but optimize this meta title. The title tag is supported by all search engines and is the first thing visible to search engine spiders as well as your human visitors.

Meta Description Tag

Once your pages rank in the search engines, it’s your description that makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not. So if your catchy headline didn’t fit the seo, it is the job of the meta description, that some people have mourned for dead and moved on from, that can decide your site’s fate.

If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated. The preferred source for your post description is your post excerpt. Especially use this when you want to tweak your description. You can find this under the input box for the post, on the write page.

Most of the search engines support the meta description tag. Though it is somewhat less important than the Title Tag since a human visitor will not always be able to see it, the description is often included in the search listings beneath the title tag and hence should be a correct and keyword-rich description of everything the page stands for. Google normally uses a gist of the webpage content; it will only use the meta description tag when it is not able to find sufficient page content to create a page description.

Meta Keywords Tag

This tag is less useful again, however, you cannot do without this tag either. It should be used very carefully and with a lot of judgment. Include your main keywords here. Repeating them and/or using related keywords 4 or 5 times is ideal.

It is far more important to include your keywords in the page content, especially in the first paragraph, but defining them here may still have value for some search engines.

The all in one SEO Pack can generate keywords in three ways. It can use your categories (the original way of tagging posts in wordpress). It can use Ultimate Tag Warrior if you have been using this excellent word press plugins. Or, starting with Wordpress 2.3, it can use it’s inbuilt tagging system.

Using your categories is optional (meaning you have to tell it to), the rest is auto-detected and, if a tag is there – it’s used, so be careful what you are tagging with! WP 2.3.x tags are now the preferred keyword source. If you have updated, the new tagging system can import in old Ultimate Tag Warrior Data.

With the all-in-one-seo blogging software, you can also have “noindex” and the like generated for archive, category and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content (or can’t get your head around “noindex”, “nofollow” etc and where to put it). The semiologic pro template also allows you to change this.

I particularly liked the following quote from the all in one seo plugin page.

“That was about the 20% of effort needed by you to achieve 80% of results with on-page factors. Of course you also need incoming links, no plugin can do this for you in a safe manner”

On page seo is a lot of repetition. It may bore you stiff and you may feel inclined to toss in way more words just to have some variety, but remember it’s a strategy. It only works when you follow the plan.

HeadSpace
An alternative SEO blogging software option is HeadSpace. HeadSpace is another one of many powerful seo word press plugins to manage your meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With head space you can also meta tag your posts. You can create meta titles and descriptions, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more. This could be worth testing out against the all in one seo to see which you prefer.

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Popularity: 83% [?]

I’d like to invite you to join Qassia. We all need some link love and qassia is offering people lots of it in exchange for some intel!

Qassia is a new site in Beta at the moment that is similar and yet different to hubs. They are looking for intel from people which basically means intelligent content and they are offering dollars for it – but only qassia dollars at the moment.

In the future they will be offering 100% adsense revenue but right now, until they open,  they let you bank lots of virtual money that you’ll be able to redeem in the future.

You can visit my page here and see what it’s about.

http://unique.qassia.com/

Qassia is rather special because the more you share your “intelligence” the more credit you earn and the better your websites will rank. Why?Because you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add – unlimited quality backlinks. For every website or hub or blog or any other link you might want to add, and I don’t have to tell you what that means.

So give Qassia a spin. Signing up is free and takes less than a minute, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Any topic, any length – so long as it’s intelligent!

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Popularity: 15% [?]

The Skitch Site is a Quick Way to capture a screenshot and share it with the world with comments enabled so you can easily get a discussion happening. I discovered it following a link on twitter which led me to this picture from reshows. I had to laugh and I had to reply, getting first comments is always hard on a new blog.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

So then I had to find out a bit more about Skitch . It’s easy and quick to use, you can upload or capture a quick pick and then people can share it easily using email, a link or embed so it has a great viral element about it without the work intensive set up of video. With a pic like this, I reckon it’s easy to be humorous in any number of ways. We all need a little light relief from the hard slog.

What you can do with Skitch * Snap a website * Capture a chat moment * Screenshot an application * use Skitch with the iSight camera and drop into any application * Annotate with circles and gorgeous arrows * Add text that always stands out * Re-size and crop * * Share it by pasting your Skitch.com link into any blog, web-page, forum or chat *

So if you have something to share – share it easily with Skitch

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Popularity: 16% [?]