When your ultimate goal is to make money blogging and make a sustainable profit from it in the long term, you’re going to have to place a high premium on the quality of your blog posts from the moment your blog is ready to be seen by your targeted readers.
The truth is that every successful blogger who has carved out his own esteemed place on the Internet wouldn’t have come so far if he just used cheap marketing gimmicks. What lies at the core of a good blog is its content, as well as its ability to satisfy its visitors’ demand for credible information and fresh insights.
But remember, your content shouldn’t just please your readers — it should also entice potential visitors to go straight to your blog. After all, wouldn’t it be a shame if your best blog entries don’t reach a wider audience?
The best way to get to more people is by optimizing your posts in such a way that your blog pages will be picked up more efficiently by search engines like Google. The more you pop up in search results for your targeted keywords, the higher the chances of people accessing your work and becoming loyal readers.
The great thing about SOLOBIS.net is that it doesn’t just let you put up a free blog that helps you make money online. It also makes certain tasks — like posting new entries — easier and more hassle-free for you, especially if you’re a beginner.
Remember how our blogs are already pre-installed with the best money-making plugins that should make blogging a more enjoyable and profitable experience for you? Well, when we were choosing these plugins, we didn’t forget that posting your entries isn’t just the simple affair it seems to be; every time you put up a new blog entry, you’re giving search engines a reason to take note of your blog, and you give your visitors a reason to come back to your site.
Here are some plugins and functions that you’ll find on your SOLOBIS.net WordPress dashboard that will help you put up posts more efficiently. These plugins ensure that your blog posts promote themselves tirelessly, and, in the process, help your blog make more money for you:
1. Keyword Linking Configuration:
The keyword linking configuration tool automatically takes care of your most common keywords and anchor text, and is especially useful if you have multiple websites that you would like to create backlinks for, from your blog posts. You can also use it to link to your other blog posts to provide them with backlinks from your own posts.
However, there will be times when you don’t want the global settings to apply to a certain post of yours. Or there might be a set of keywords that you can’t put up on the global setting, but which you will have to use for a single entry.
In circumstances like this, you can still customize your hyperlinks when you compose a new entry. Once you’re in the text editor, scroll to the very bottom of the page. You should see a box like this:
Anything that you enter in this particular box will apply only to the post you’re currently composing, overriding the global settings in the main keyword configuration tool. In this case, the keywords are “caring for corn snakes”, which in turn goes to a specified URL.
2. Title:
Although this isn’t a plugin in the text editor page, this is still a point we would like to emphasize for your benefit: as much as possible, insert your targeted keywords in the title of your blog post.
Remember how the keyword for this particular entry was “caring for corn snakes”? You’ll see that the keywords have made their way to the title, as well. This improves the blog post’s chances of being picked up by search engines and being associated with that particular set of keywords.
3. Permalink:
Now let’s go to the permalink tool in the SOLOBIS.net text editor. A permalink is essentially the fixed URL that corresponds to a particular blog post of yours, so that if anyone wants to link to it, they only have to copy the permalink.
To optimize your post further, try to insert your keywords as part of your permalink. In this case, the blog entry has the permalink, “http://blog.solobis.net/caring-for-corn-snakes” (see below).
Remember, however, that each permalink has to be unique, so feel free to play with other variations of your targeted keywords when you have other posts that deal with the same topic.
4. Headspace
Whenever you post a new entry, you can put up a page title for it that may or may not be the same with your actual blog post title. There’s also a box in which you can type out the description for your blog entry.
This is useful when you want your blog title to appeal to your human readers and yet you want important keywords in it for search engine users searching for them – so HeadSpace allows you to put a different page title and description of the post which will be listed by the search engines instead of snippets from your actual post title and your actual blog post.
You can insert a maximum of 64 characters for the page title (any more and they won’t show in the search results), while the description can up to 25 words. Make the most of the space allotted to you here, and increase your chances at ranking higher in search engine results!
5. Categories:
You’re also going to have to put up your blog post with the appropriate categories. As you can see in this example, the boxes for “snakes”, “corn snakes”, and “exotic pets” are all checked.
This means that whenever your visitors click on the category for snakes, corn snakes, or exotic pets, this particular blog post will show up along with other posts of the same category.
Categorizing your posts is useful for visitors who go through your blog by looking at categories instead of chronologically.
6. Tags
The last thing you have to do before you publish your post is to tag your post with your targeted keywords that are relevant to your post. To start tagging, take a look at the right sidebar; the Tags box is sandwiched between the boxes for Publish and Categories.
Unlike Categories, your tags are more specific and serve the purpose of identifying a specific post with its appropriate keywords. In the above example, the post is tagged with the keywords, “caring for cornsnakes”. Feel free to add as many relevant tags as you can. In the above example, you can use other keywords like “corn snakes”, “exotic pets”, “snakes”, “care sheets”, etc.
Tagging helps make it easier for your visitors to find more specific posts within a category by associating your posts with keywords related to them.
In WordPress blogs, for example, a search bar is frequently found on the sidebar of a blog. If any of your visitors want to search for something within your blog and enter a keyword, WordPress will immediately match the search terms with your tags to provide results.
Don’t forget to include as many tags per post as possible. Try to imagine all the possible keywords that can be associated with your blog post, so that if one of your visitors uses your search function and enters a particular set of keywords, your blog can provide some very relevant results.
With these tools, we’re sure that you’ll have a much smoother time publishing your blog posts and optimizing them for search engines.
Remember, however, that these plugins will work for you only if you fulfill your end of the bargain. Write killer posts, prop them up with these tools, and you’ve got a knockout combination that will eventually push your blog higher up the search engine rankings AND provide tons of value to your readers. They will then tell their friends to check your blog out, or better yet, link to it directly from their own sites.
Most people who want to make money blogging often have to make a crucial first decision about where they can put up their blog. And what looks like an easy question is actually one of the most important elements to blogging success. In fact, some blog service providers make blogging for money an easier task, while other providers do nothing towards that direction.
But which blog hosting services are perfect for your money-making blog, and which ones don’t cut muster? Below, we’re giving you a short list of the biggest names in blogging so that you can decide which service is best for your blog:
1. Blogger.com
The charm of Blogger.com is the fact that it’s easy to use. All you need to do is choose a username and password, fill in a few small details, and voila! Your blog is ready. There aren’t any costs, and Blogger.com assures you that you don’t need to know a single thing about blogging to put up a site with them. Unfortunately, Blogger ultimately isn’t very customizable, and is unable to support a lot of elements often found in professional blogs (e.g., static pages, plugins, and other add-ons and tools).
If you’re into blogging only as a hobby, for personal reasons, or just for kicks, Blogger’s simplicity will definitely fit your purposes, If you want to make money, however, Blogger probably can’t support your site very well, as opposed to other hosting services.
2. WordPress.com
With WordPress, bloggers have all the freedom to pick between the free blogs at WordPress.com and the self-hosted, fully-customizable blogs from WordPress.org. Basically, WordPress.com echoes the services that Blogger.com already offers, but with a few more goodies in the package. WordPress.com blogs cost nothing, are easy to set up, and don’t require a lot of hardcore internet know-how for you to maintain your blog.
WordPress.org, on the other hand, supports monetization much better than WordPress.com can. The downloadable blogging software doesn’t cost a thing, and, unlike WordPress.com, will let you add thousands of free templates and money-making plugins to enhance your blog’s functionality. The problem with this is that you’ll have to find and pay for web hosting to your own blog. WordPress.org also tends to be very confusing to newbie bloggers, and will actually require at least some technical skills before you can finally put up your blog.
3. SOLOBIS.net
Our exciting new service provides free SOLOBIS.net WordPress Blogs, which gives bloggers the best of both the WordPress.com and WordPress.org worlds. Throw in our focus on helping our users make money with their blogs, and you have an unbeatable combination for those who want to blog for a living (or earn a fortune with it).
Upon signing up for a free SOLOBIS account with us, you will immediately receive a blog that has a SOLOBIS.net subdomain (e.g., www.jacksmith.solobis.net). SOLOBIS.net blogs are run on the WordPress engine, which is good news for WordPress enthusiasts, since you’ll already be familiar with the controls.
The great thing about SOLOBIS.net is that we’ve done most of the work for you, having pre-installed the best templates and money-making WordPress plugins in every blog. You don’t have to go hunting for good plugins anymore, since our blogs already have the best that the WordPress community has to offer.
This is a blessing for beginner bloggers, since it’s simple and profitable, but it also benefits more experienced bloggers, who can only stand to earn more as they make money blogging.
Although Blogger.com and WordPress.com are great for beginners, they fail to provide adequate support for blogs that exist to make money for their owners. And while WordPress.org definitely provides top-notch service and a lot of customization legroom, turning up a profit can take a long while, since you’ll have to do all the testing work on your own.
With SOLOBIS.net, however, a blogger doesn’t have to be an expert to start making money right away – all the tools are already there, waiting to be used on your journey to your online fortune. You can’t find a better combination of convenience, versatility, and profitability as the one that we are already offering to you, our users.
How to Activate the Defensio Plugin to Fight Spam
If there’s one huge inconvenience that you could do without, it’s all the spam that ends up pouring into your comments box. Ever since blogs became a phenomenal online force, spam was no longer just restricted to your e-mail Inbox and Junk folders. Instead, it has wormed its way into blog comment boxes everywhere, ultimately becoming a nuisance to bloggers who can’t afford to waste time deleting one bogus comment after another.
Fortunately, most WordPress bloggers manage to keep spam at bay by protecting their blogs with plugins – such as Defensio — that filter out the spam from their comment boxes.
One of Defensio’s primary features is its ability to rate the “spaminess” of your comments, and highlighting those that are “obviously spam” so you don’t have to read every single comment in your spam list.
Why is this important for you? With a tool that detects “obvious spam” for you, you can have them deleted right away without having to go through the trouble of checking on them. Instead, you can focus your energy on checking comments that have “low spaminess”.
When you identify genuine messages from spam, you’re also tweaking with Defensio’s settings so that you end up with an anti-spam solution that’s unique to your blog’s needs. In other words, Defensio doesn’t work uniformly for every blog, since no two blogs attract the same kind of comments and spam.
With Defensio, what you get is a highly personalized and customized solution for combating spam, which is exactly what your SOLOBIS.net WordPress blog needs.
The good news? It’s already pre-installed in your blog. All you have to do is register your blog in Defensio, retrieve your API key to activate your plugin, and save that key in your SOLOBIS.net blog.
Here’s how to do it:
Once you’ve clicked through this link, you will be directed to another page where you will be instructed to get an API key to activate Defensio in your SOLOBIS.net blog.
You will then be asked to sign up for a free account.
Once you’ve accomplished and submitted the form, you will finally receive your API key with further instructions for installing Defensio into your SOLOBIS.net blog.
Go back to the Defensio Configuration page in your SOLOBIS.net admin area. You’ll see an empty field for you to enter your API key in. Paste the key onto it, and click on “Save settings”.
Right under the Defensio API Key field are your settings for your “Obvious Spam Threshold” and “Automatic Removal of Spam”. Obvious Spam Threshold determines the “spaminess” of your comments, and will automatically quarantine comments that achieve a certain spaminess percentage.
The default setting for Obvious Spam Threshold is at 80% for optimum performance.
Don’t forget to check the option for the Automatic Removal of Spam, so that you won’t have tons of annoying spam to deal with at the end of each month.
The moment you have Defensio activated, you’ll have to wait for a couple of days for the plugin to acquaint itself with the kind of comments you receive. At around this time, you’re going to have to tweak with Defensio and correct it if it mislabels some messages as spam, or if it lets certain bogus comments slip through.
In time, Defensio’s functionalities will shape themselves according to your blog’s needs, so that you can finally channel your efforts at blogging for money instead of picking out those spam comments!
Written by admin July 6th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Posted in WordPress plugins, blogging, Tagged with akismet, anti-spam, anti-spam plugin, blogging, comment spam, Defensio, fight comment spam, how-to, plugins, spam, spam plugin, WordPress plugins.