SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Blogs have become very successful and popular of late. They can be very profitable if they are managed and marketed the right way. Generating profits from a blog doesn’t require selling of anything. You can monetize with ad placements, banners, or contextual advertising. The best blogs draw the attention of a large audience and keep them coming back for more.

There are many types of blogs. The most common types are:

• Professional blogs: These blogs are focused on discussions about professions, job aspects and career building
• Personal blogs: These blogs take the form of an online diary and contains thoughts, poems, experiences, and other personal matters
• Topical blogs: These blogs focus on a certain topic or niche, discussing specific aspects of the chosen subject
• Business blogs: As its name suggests, these are discussions about business and/or stock market
• Other types of blogs include but are not limited to science blogs, cultural blogs, educational blogs, and photo blogs.

In order to have a successful blog that attracts a lot of visitors and keep them coming back, you need to follow some simple rules.

Here are some tips:

Before you begin blogging, carefully consider what you are going to write about in your blog as there are lots of interesting topics out there, waiting to be discussed. You can find them in every day life, in the media, in the news – anything that attracts attention and a loyal following is good. You can look for blog subjects in many places, the most important being the Internet of course.

Put quality content in your blog. If you have quality content people like to read, they will return to your blog and tell other people about it as well. Posting articles containing useful information on your blog is very beneficial for attracting more traffic. Make sure you add your URL address below your posted article! If other web site owners find your articles useful and decide to include them within the content of their web pages, the added link will contribute to increasing your popularity every time it is hyperlinked.

Update the blog on a regular basis. If you don’t do this, visitors will not return and they will move on to reading another blog that is updated more often. You should try to update your blog daily. Many newcomers have blogging fear, fearing their inability to update it daily. If your blog is interesting enough, offer your readers the ability to keep it updated by posting their own personal thoughts and share stories so you won’t have to do all the updating work yourself.

Listen to what your readers have to say. Always pay attention to the readers’ suggestions and try to find out what people were actually searching for when they found your blog. Try to focus on that theme and even consider developing it by encouraging the visitors to discuss new aspects of that particular theme.

Keep it short and concise. You don’t need material that takes hours to read, people usually like to quickly skim a blog for quick tidbits of useful information and if you post materials that are difficult or take a long time to read, you will most likely drive them away.

You can also include some artistic work or pictures in the blog, to make it more visually appealing. Blog picture managers such as Picasa are freely available on the Internet to accomplish this.

If your blog has interesting, original content, bloggers might decide to add links to it on their web sites and comment on your suggested topic. By gaining back-links to your blog from other web sites, your web site will place higher within search engine queries, thus boosting your link popularity.

Announce the launch of any new blog with press releases. Free publicity through press releases are powerful tools for increasing incoming traffic. Search engines love press releases and it gives them a good reason to spider and to index your site quickly.

Include free downloadable viral reports on your blog to turbo-charge visitor traffic and build a subscriber/viewer base quickly.

In order to simplify the creating and updating process of a blog, take advantage of the many blogging tools and software readily available, a number of them are free. Blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type helps you update a blog easily. There are even free blog generators such as Blogger which allow you to host your content on Google’s servers without having to install any software or obtain a domain and host content.

Offer to inform readers of your blog with free email management services like Feedblitz (if you don’t have an email list management solution) in addition to offering RSS feeds for subscription. Readers and visitors can be kept updated of any new information being added to your blog without having to check the site constantly.

Utilize blog and ping to get sites indexed quickly by the search engines. By notifying popular ping servers monitored by blog search services such as Google Blog Search, you attract search engine spiders to a blog. A blog can automatically be setup to ping certain web sites. An easy method of doing this is by adding the Pingomatic service which pings many popular ping servers at once.

Finally, remember to submit to popular, high quality blog directories such as Feedster, Technorati, Blogstreet, and Best of the Web Blog Directory to boost your web traffic and link popularity!

If you respect these rules you will most likely have a successful blog, and you will be rewarded in the process.

This article was written by Anthony Yap of http://www.anthony-yap.com/. Anthony Yap is a SEO Expert and internet entrepreneur. He works with businesses to maximize their profit potential through cost-effective search engine optimization. All reprints of this article must include a link back to http://www.anthony-yap.com/.

Getting penalized by the search engines. For marketers who invest a significant amount of money and time in generating revenue online, this can be a nagging concern.

Here are some questions I get frequently:

Will the search engines know I bought links?

For the unsophisticated link buyer outsourcing this task, this is probably a yes. I’ve seen link building done on sites where the link builder used their link exchange networks to build link popularity. These networks are hosted on same class C IP addresses (not just unique sites). Other low quality links include poor placement on webpages, lack of randomization in surrounding text, or lack of text link variation. With links just as with many other products, you get what you pay for.

So, how do I avoid detection from the search engines that I’m buying links?

A smart link builder will build links on different class C IPs, with placement of links within content-rich, theme-relevant pages and not links pages, randomize surrounding descriptive text, and vary text links. With all these measures in place, it makes it extremely difficult for the search engine to isolate bought links.

Should I buy links where the webmaster places links in a sponsored section?

Some webmasters prefer to place paid links in a sponsored section for fear of getting penalized for selling links. The truth of the matter is, the site belongs to the webmaster and he/she can do whatever he/she chooses. Text links were not invented by Google, Yahoo, or MSN. They’ve been around long before then. Links if purchased on relevant sites, can be thought of as good advertising and drive qualified visitors to the site being linked to. A smart link builder would get the benefit of search engine credit and qualified click-through traffic.

If a link is placed in a sponsored section, it’s possible that the search engines devalue the link somewhat. Still, search engine credit is being passed to the site. The proof is in the pudding. Sites with links placed in a sponsored links section still rank well.

I’d like to buy 1000 links at one go to rank high quickly, is this a good idea? How many links is too many?

We live in a gotta-have-it-now society. Unfortunately, this isn’t a very healthy way to grow a site. In fact, it could work against you in new ranking algorithms. Search engines like Google prefer a natural progression of links. Growth where spikes and dips in inbound links happen on a irregular basis show an unnatural pattern of link growth. Like the links themselves, anything that looks unnatural should be avoided.

For someone looking to buy links, it’s advisable to build links on a monthly basis. So, the 1000 links can be spread out over 12 months and each month would have about 83 links.

In general, a site should not gain more than a 50-100 links a month. The newer and less established a site is, the lower the starting numbers. With established sites having thousands of natural looking backlinks already, the number can possible increase beyond 100. Still, building that many paid links should be avoided if possible.

In summary, here are the criteria to establish if a link is good:

Trackbacks are typically used by blogs and commenting bloggers can notify another blog with a “trackback ping”. The blog receiving the trackback ping will then display short summaries of and links to all the commenting entries below the original blog entry. This is a great way to let others know you’ve commented about something they wrote and allows you to network with other bloggers. This also means…

Lots of potential backlinks. Search engine optimizers love them. Search engines hate it when it is consciously used to manipulate the search results.

PR Web now allows trackbacks in their press releases. These trackbacks don’t carry the “no follow” tag that Matt Cutts encourages.

The spam cops complain that this will just add more spam to the search results. The reality is: Press releases can, by themselves be spammy content designed to inflate a site’s link popularity. The news media has been bombarded with press releases for years now. Many turn out to be junk and never get published while some others slip through.

As long as there is something to gain from being in the top results, search engines will have to contend with spam. There are savvy marketers who use press releases as one of their primary methods of generating higher link popularity. With some research and creativity, anyone can churn out a press release on a regular basis to promote their site.