Blogging as a career

The fact is that it is absolutely possible to make a living with a career in blogging. Well-known expert bloggers like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net and Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com have had great success blogging, with some of these top bloggers making six figures a year.

Having said all of that, you also need to know that most bloggers fail to make blogging a career. If you are considering blogging as a career, there are three specific things that you need to do in order to be successful:

1) Be Patient. Successful blogging takes time. If you want to have a career in blogging, you have got to put in the time and energy needed to make your blog successful. Writing your blog posts is only a small portion of this endeavor. You need to spend time every day building channels of communication with other bloggers and other web sites. You need to spent time every day marketing your blog. You need to spend time every day looking at the various monetization options available to you. Beyond this, you have to realize that it takes many months for a blog to become successful, and that your blogging career will probably take as much as six months to a year to really get started.

2) Write good Content. Content is King. You’ve heard this a thousand times by now. Everybody tells you that the key to a successful blogging career is producing good content. The reason they tell you this is that it is TRUE. If you want to make blogging your career, you need to hone your writing skills so that you are really on top of your competition. Beyond this, you need to be creative in the way you approach content, and consider using unique methods, from video blogging to podcasting, to provide value to your readers. Without good content, all of the marketing in the world can’t save your blog, or give you a career in blogging.

3) Choose the right monetization techniques. For most bloggers, Google AdSense isn’t going to provide you with a full-time income. You need to have other forms of monetization, whether it is affiliate income, direct ad sales, or some other sort of monetization. The best forms of monetization are going to be those that are recursive – that pay you over and over again as time goes on. A good example of recursive income is selling an affiliate membership-type product that pays you a portion of the customer’s membership fees every month, long after they have signed up.

While doing these three things won’t guarantee you will be able to make a career from blogging, you can be certain that you won’t make it as a blogger if you don’t do them.

The Importance of Good Keywords

Keyword research, a required step if you want to maximize your blogs outreach and gain better ranking in the search engines. Keyword research however, isn’t always the most enjoyable aspect of blog marketing and for many, it’s something they completely ignore simply due to the fact they feel it’s just too much work.

Thankfully, keyword research really doesn’t have to be all that difficult, in fact, by using some of the free keyword research and compilation tools online, you can create a listing of keywords that are relevant to your blogs content in a matter of minutes. Best of all, once you have this list available, you don’t have to continuously research new keywords unless you change your blogs topic.

Once you have your keyword swipe file, simply get into the habit of incorporating a handful of keywords into each article or blog post that you create. Keywords should be specific and relevant to the website and should be used in each blog post to maintain visibility in the search engines. Use keywords that are popular, and that are entered into the search engines on a regular basis by people who would be seeking out the same type of content as you are showcasing on your site.

Also, consider using internal links, anchored to these keywords to link to another post where the reader can learn more information about a product or service spoken about n the article. This will increase traffic, by increasing search engine visibility while directing traffic to other pages within the blog.

Here are a few keyword research tools to help you get started:

Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

KeywordSpy

http://www.keywordspy.com

Word Butler

http://www.WordButler.com

Free SEO Book Keyword Tool:

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools

WordTracker:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Keyword Discovery:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

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SEO Plugins For Your Blog

If you have been trying to make your blog search engine friendly, you will want to install some of the better plugins focused on making your blog more user friendly as well as ranking higher within search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Here is a list of handy plugins that will help you with blog based SEO:

1) SEO Title Tag

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility. This plugin provides a simple solution.

2) Related Posts Plugin
Features a listing of related posts at the bottom of each page or post, keeping visitors on your site longer.

3) Ultimate Tag Warrior
You can easily use categories and the tag system within one blog making it easier to search through specific tags you have created for previous posts and pages.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like).

From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.Once you’ve got your tags entered; you enter a realm of interesting ways of doing things with your tags. At the complicated end, AJAXy search is included with the download (it may need some customisation to match your theme). At the simpler end, you can automagically have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes.

4) Head META Description Plugin
This plugin offers an automatic meta description tag for your blog by attaching a description depending on the request (query)

Head META Description provides four user-configurable variables.

These are:

$default_blog_desc
Setting this overrides the use of the tagline (Options > General in WordPress) for the default description on your blog. If you don’t use the tagline, edit this line. Default value is ” (empty).

$post_desc_length
Length of the description in words for post and Page descriptions (the first # words of the excerpt, or post content). Default value is 20.

$post_use_excerpt
This tells the plugin to use the excerpt for description on posts, if one exists. Set this to 0 (zero) to force post content as description. Default is 1.

$custom_desc_key

Name of the custom field key used to override post or Page excerpts for descriptions. Default is description.
You can change these variables by editing the plugin file online through the plugin editor (Plugins > Plugin Editor, then select the plugin file), or offline in a text editor.

5) Google Sitemaps
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Top Blog Plugins

In order to make your blog more interactive and dynamic, not to mention rank better in the search engines and gain additional exposure from within social groups and communities, there are a handful of blog plugins and modules that will improve your blog, and encourage visitors to return.

Here are a few of the top WordPress plugins available:

Akismet
http://akismet.com/
A spam filter that checks comments posted to your blog against the Akismet database to endusre that they are not spam related.  Will also check trackbacks for spam as well.

Google Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a Google compliant site map for your blog which helps in search engine optimization and ranking.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
A plugin designed to offer the ability to add keyword tags to pages, posts and categories. Great for SEO.

WP Contact Form
Provides a support form for your blog visitors to be able to contact you directly without displaying your email address.

Related Posts Plugin
Keep your visitors on your site longer by showcasing relevant topics relating to the original content they were reviewing.  You can customize this plugin to display a specific number of related posts, however you can not choose specific posts to show within this plugin, at this time.

WP Cache
Helps speed up your WordPress based blog by caching pages and storing them in a static file.

You can browse through a wide variety of additional plugins from the WordPress website itself, by visiting:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/