How would you like to wash your keyboard? Although it sounds a bit absurd, it is possible, thanks to Seal Shield. The company produces a line of dishwasher safe products consisting of keyboards, mice, and remote controls.

The company came from the medical industry and wanted to create a product line that would prevent the spread of bacteria and infections.  According to Seal Shield, around 90,000 people die every year in the U.S. as a result of transmitted bacteria and infections.

With Seal Shield’s products, consumers are able to put the devices in the dishwasher, soapy water, and more to ensure that they are disinfected often. Most of the company’s products include its Silver Seal protection, which is an antimicrobial protection that helps prevent microbial growth and other bacteria.

With the one exception of the ability to be submerged in water, the keyboards, mice, and remote controls look and feel just like normal ones would. Incidentally, the company also revealed a Seal Cell waterproof cell phone at CES that is yet to be available.

Guest post by Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips.

I have been using Google AdSense to monetize my blogs and websites for as long as I remember. In fact it was the first method I ever tried (I made a whooping $15 on my first month… back in 2005). Over the years I migrated to other methods (e.g., direct sponsors and affiliate marketing), which made AdSense become merely an inventory filler. I was still making around $1,000 monthly from it, but whenever I could I would use other methods over it.

Then some months ago I started noticing an upward trend on the CPC of my sites, and I figured that I should give AdSense another try. I started applying some tricks here and there, and the next month I made over $3,000 with it (that is combining all my sites). I was pleasantly surprised, and I decided to keep using it actively on some sites.

In this article I want to share with you the tips and tricks I used to triple my AdSense earnings in one month.

1. I added units to my Big Websites

Daily Blog Tips and Daily Writing Tips are my largest websites in terms of traffic. They are getting close to one million monthly page views (combined). Despite that I was not using AdSense on them, mainly because the direct sponsorship model was working relatively well.

Some months ago I decided to load some AdSense units on the sites, however, and the results were very positive. Around 70% of the boost I generated to my earnings came from these two sites. At the same time I managed to keep the other monetization methods working fine, and no reader ever complained about the new ads (more on that later).

Even if your blog is already making money with direct sponsors and affiliate marketing, therefore, you could still manage to increment your earnings by strategically adding some AdSense units.

2. I added units to my Small Websites

As many webmasters do, I have a bunch of small websites scattered around the web. Some are on free hosted platforms like Blogger, and others are self hosted sites that I abandoned along the way. Most of these sites still get traffic, however. Not much, but combined the numbers get decent.

I figured that adding AdSense units to all these sites could yield some money, and I was right. The main reason is that, since these are abandoned sites and don’t have loyal visitors, I can place the units very aggressively. The result was a very high CTR (Click-through rate), which compensates the small traffic levels.

Don’t underestimate the earning potential of small websites, especially if you are willing to place AdSense units aggressively.

3. I used the Large Units

If you want to make money with AdSense you’ll inevitably need to use one of these units: the 336×280 large rectangle, the 300×250 rectangle, the 120×600 large skyscraper or the 728×90 leaderboard.

Whenever I tried to use smaller units the results were disappointing. Even if I positioned them aggressively the CTR was just too low.

All four units mentioned above can produce good results, but the best performing one is by far the 336×280 large rectangle, and that is the one I used to boost my earnings.

4. I placed the Units above the Fold

My first trial was to place the 336×280 large rectangle between the post and the comments section of my blogs. The results were OK. I then decided to try placing them below the post titles for one week, and the CTR skyrocketed. In fact I still need to find a placement/unit combination that will beat placing a 336×280 unit below post titles.

I knew this rule, but I guess I needed to test and get confirmation. The rule is: if you want to make money with Google AdSense, you must place your units above the fold.

5. I Focused on Organic Traffic

My main concern with adding a large AdSense unit right below my post titles was that some of the loyal readers could get annoyed with it. At the same time I knew that loyal readers become ad blind quite fast, and that the bulk of my money would come from organic visitors (i.e., people coming via search engines to my posts).

To solve this problem I decided to display the large rectangle only on posts older than seven days (using the Why Do Work WordPress plugin). It worked like a charm, as loyal readers don’t even notice the ad units when they are browsing through my recent posts, and organic visitors almost always see the ads because they usually land on posts older than seven days.

6. I started using AdSense for Search

I was not sure how much money I would be able to make with AdSense for Search, but I was not happy with the search results provided by WordPress, so I decided to give it a shot anyway.

Currently I am making around $60 monthly with AdSense for Search. It is not much, but if you sum it over one year we are talking about $720. On top of that the search results are as relevant as you’ll get, so it is a win win situation.

7. I started using AdSense for Feeds

Another AdSense product I decided to try was the AdSense for Feeds one. I opted to display the ads below my feed items (you can also place them on top, but this would be too intrusive in my opinion). The results here were pretty good, both in terms of CTR and earnings.

You obviously need a large RSS subscriber base to make this work, but I am guessing that even with a couple thousand subscribers you could already make $100 monthly from feed ads.

8. I played around with section targeting

Section targeting is an AdSense feature that allows you to suggest specific sections of your site that should be used when matching ads. You can read more about it here.

I found that on niche and small websites section targeting can help a lot. Often times Google was displaying unrelated ads on these sites because there weren’t enough pages. After using section targeting I managed to increase the relevancy of the ads and consequently the CTRs.

9. I tested with Different Colors and Fonts

If you enabled both image and text ads on your units you should be able to customize the colors and fonts. I did some testing with both of these factors, and it helped to increase the numbers. Nothing dramatic, but it was definitely worth my time.

You just need to track your CTR for a couple of weeks. Then change the color or font and track it for another week, seeing if you can beat the original CTR. If you can, keep the new format. If you the performance decreased, try a new color or font and track the CTR for another week, until you find the optimal combination.

On my sites the best results came from making the ad units merge with the look of the site, but on some sites contrasting colors perform better, so testing is a must.

Daniel is the owner of Daily Blog Tips. He is also the author of the Make Money Blogging ebook, which you can download for free by signing up to his newsletter.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

9 Tricks I Used To Triple My AdSense Earnings In 30 Days

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A guest post by Josh Hanagarne.

World’s Strongest Librarian was about four months old when I got interested in sponsors. I’d read the articles about how to do it, and none of them sounded that plausible for me and my situation.

For one, my traffic wasn’t impressive, certainly not to the point where sponsors were approaching me. And, while my blog has become slightly more focused in its first ten months, it wasn’t targeted at any group of readers in particular, so I wasn’t sure how confident niche advertisers would be. It’s a little more focused now, but I can’t really think of a better term for my readers than “The Loyal Weird.”

So I tried a little sponsorship experiment. My expectations were virtually non-existent. I did it more out of curiosity than anything, hoping that it would engage readers and foster some good will.

Here’s what happened.

Auditions and criteria

I decided to hold “tryouts” for anyone who was interested in a sponsorship slot on World’s Strongest Librarian. If you like, you can read my initial post here. If you’re terrified of leaving this page because there’s so much wisdom in the air, here’s the summary of what I asked interested readers to do:

Dear potential sponsor, please give me:

• One paragraph on something you did in the last year that you are proud of
• Your URL
• A description of your blog/business
• Why you’re interested in running an ad on World’s Strongest Librarian
• Your pitch: Why you? Just how cool are you?

And I made it very clear that I did not care about the size or look of the blog. As long as a blogger wasn’t peddling anything heinous, illegal, or spammy, they had as good a chance as anyone.

I would run auditions for the rest of August and then make my decisions.

The plan at that point

I figured that I’d get a small response and run ads for the four people who responded out of pity. Then I’d run their ads for the month of September. When September was winding down, I would thank each blogger, ask them if they wanted to pay for another month or more to stick around, or part ways while remaining friends.

I figured I’d repeat this cycle for a few months until all of the ads were paid for. Then I’d end the auditions.

What I didn’t expect

I got a lot of responses. In fact, I got close to 100 auditions. Some were lengthy and hilarious. Others were half-hearted and poorly written. Some came very close to flat-out begging, and others were so standoffish that I couldn’t tell if they were actually interested or not.

The good things about this

Any reader response and engagement can feel like a huge win for the new blogger. So of course it was gratifying to see that there were people paying attention.

I also learned just how eclectic my reader base was. I got emails from bloggers covering every topic and angle imaginable. I got emails from foundations. I got emails from businesses. Word spread, and suddenly I had a bunch of new readers, and some readers I’d never engaged with came forth out of hiding.

The bad things about this

There’s really only one: because I had underestimated the response, I hadn’t really thought through my judging criteria. And suddenly I had a mountain of auditions to sift through. It was really, really hard to decide. And in a couple of cases, I wound up choosing in a more arbitrary manner than I was happy with, but I couldn’t figure out a better way at that point.

Here is my post announcing the winners.

This caused some hurt feelings, a lot of negative emails from disappointed applicants, demands for explanations of how I chose…and so on.

“Okay,” I thought. “Next round, I’ve got to do this better.”

There wasn’t going to be a next round.

The best things about this

A couple of the winners left after one month with no hard feelings between us. But several of them stayed…and paid. When I was able to show them their click-through rates and they told me how “sticky” the traffic from my blog had been, I didn’t need to convince them at all. And suddenly I had a very, very modest income from sponsors—but I had sponsors!

I was also spared the difficulty of going through another round of auditions and making people mad.

It also got a lot of people blogging about the experiment, and of course, the traffic was its own reward.

Suggestions for anyone interested in trying this

• Overestimate the response you’ll get, this way you (hopefully) won’t get overwhelmed
• Explain your judging criteria. You may still have some sore losers, but having a prior explanation to fall back on may be helpful
• Give it your own spin
• Decide which system you’re going to use to display ads with, and figure it out earlier than the night before you’re supposed to run the ads. I can be a real dunce. This was one prime example of my duncery.

Your own variant of this experiment could be a way to grab some sponsors and figure out how some things work before your numbers are commanding sponsors on their own.

Above all: enjoy it, have fun, and use this experiment opportunity to make connections, spark some creativity, and do your own thing.

Don’t try too hard to be like anyone else. You are not anyone else. This is a good thing, whether you believe it or not.

About the Author: Josh Hanagarne is the twitchy giant behind World’s Strongest Librarian, a blog about living with Tourette’s Syndrome, kettlebells, book recommendations, buying pants when you’re 6’8”, old-time strongman training, and much more. Please subscribe to Josh’s RSS Updates to stay in touch.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How I Got Some Paying Sponsors Without Really Meaning To

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Powermat wowed consumers last year at CES with its products and this year’s CES was no different. Although the company launched in October of 2009 with just 3 position mats, it is already adding new products to its line.

One of the new products unveiled at CES 2010 was the Powermat Portable.  This device charges up to 3 devices without any cords. The unique thing about this mat is that it folds up in a compact way that can easily fit into any bag. The Powermat Portable will be available in Q3 and range from $39-$79.

The company also introduced a single position mat and a double position mat, which are perfect for charging iPhones, iPods, and more. These smaller mats also make it easier to charge wherever you want, such as by your bed. These mats will be available in April with a price range of $69-$99.

Another new innovation from Powermat included a Powerpack, which is a replacement battery for your mobile device.  This replacement battery eliminates the need for a separate case and does not change the look or feel of the device for the consumer. It will be available in June and will run between $30-$40.

Visit www.Powermat.com to learn more about the company’s products.

Although Case-Mate began as a company that created leather products for mobile devices, the company quickly expanded its product line. At CES 2010, Case-Mate had several new products on display and WebProNews stopped by their booth for a closer look at their innovations.

First on the list was a case with a battery inside of it.  This case can give a mobile device up to 2 times extra charge.  There is also a lighter version of this type of case that is less bulky.

Secondly, Case-Mate showcased a case that users can customize on their own.  Called “I Make My Case,” the program also provides users with the option of using designs from some of the top digital artists in the world.  To protect the customization, Case-Mate uses technology to embed the design into each case to ensure that it doesn’t scratch or fade.

Case-Mate also had an ID case that holds credit cards, identification, and more. This case is ideal if someone wants to go out for the night and not carry a purse or wallet.

Fourthly, the company displayed a Hug device that is a wireless charging pad and case. This device eliminates cords and wires. Case-Mate’s Marty Gareau told WPN he believes this type of innovation will quickly become part of everyone’s daily life.

Lastly, the company featured a go-Bare product that is a clear film. It is an invisible solution-free case that acts as a protector.

For more information on all Case-Mate’s products, visit their site.

Posted by mgalecki

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A SHORT INTRODUCTION…

We all know that the search engine robots more frequently visit popular pages, i.e. those that have the largest number of incoming links, both internal and external ones. The architecture of a website is usually correlated with the popularity of these pages expressed by number of backlinks:

• Home page has the most backlinks,
• 1st (e.g. product categories), 2nd & 3rd level pages obtain less links,
• finally the least important are deep pages (with articles, classified ads, product pages, etc).

The above mentioned “importance” of web pages versus the web site architecture has been illustrated in one of the Rand’s posts titled "Diagrams for Solving Crawl Priority & Indexation Issues":

Important pages tend to have a different priority of indexation, and this was also presented very nicely by Rand:

Purple spots are those with the highest number of external links. As it can be seen, the pages which are close, take some of the popularity and they pass part of it further (pink spots). All the other spots stand for pages that are too far from the entrance points of search engine robots, which means that the chance of their indexation is much smaller.

In case of classified websites, which contain a lot of content, the above diagram should include subsequent category listing or search results pages. They are obviously less important than the main category pages, but their indexing additionally influences the indexation of their components – ad details pages. This is particularly important when the listing starts with so called premium ads, which change less often than standard classifieds.

BEFORE THE TEST…

Having this theoretical information, we have decided to see how it is like in practice. We have analyzed a website of http://www.morusek.pl (with animals and pets related classifieds from Poland) which has a total number of indexed pages exceeding 100,000. Using the combination of "site" and "inurl" queries we checked what is the number of indexed pages with a list of classifieds (in Polish “ogloszenia”): http://www.google.pl/search?q=site%3Awww.morusek.pl+inurl%3A%22%2F0%2F%22+inurl%3Aogloszenia

The initial results were the following:

To continue the analysis, we excluded the first pages, as the numbers here are influenced by existence of some category pages with no classifieds at the moment, but which are indexable (there are crawlable links in the menu). In addition, to verify the effectiveness of the "site" query, we took into account a number of pages reported by Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) under "Internal Links". The results were as follows:

WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO KNOW?

The first conclusion is obviously that the higher the page number is, the less probability that the page will be indexed. Secondly, while the actual numbers of GWT and “site” queries vary a lot, the trends (slopes) are almost the same. On average, the chance that the robot will crawl to the next page of search results decreases by 1,2-1,3% per page.

It is also interesting that, according to Google Webmaster Tools, pages from 2 to 4 have a good indexation ratio which later decreases dramatically at the fifth position. For example, for sites with number 4 the level of indexation is 60%, while for pages number 15 it falls below 30% (according to Google Webmaster Tools), or 40% (for the command “site” in Google). This is due to the fact that Googlebots have a much longer way to reach the appropriate link in case of the latter (a link to page 15 first appears on page 12), while there are direct links to pages 2, 3 and 4 on the first pages of search listings (see below):

THE SUBJECT OF THE TEST: INTRODUCING MORE LINKS

We decided to test what would be the changes in indexation ratios if we introduced more links to subsequent ad listings pages. On the first page of each category we added links to the 5th, 10th and 15th pages as show on the picture below:

After a month we tested the changes. Due to inaccurate results returned by the command “site” in Google (number of indexed pages seemed to be greater than the actual number of them) we present data from Google Webmaster Tools (internal links) only:

THE RESULTS

The graph clearly shows us that indexation of pages that were added to the listing on the first page is much higher after the change (pages: 5th, 10th and 15th), and actually equals the indexation of pages 2, 3 and 4.

However, the increase in indexation of pages directly linked from the home page did not affect the indexation of the neighbouring pages. For example, we can see a huge increase for page 10, but there is no change for pages 9 and 11. The conclusion is that for Googlebots these pages are too far from the points of entry. Only category pages for main region have incoming links. To index page 9 of the intersection of categories and regions, the robots would have to go the following path:

1. main category page (entry point),
2. category page + region (first page of results),
3. category page + region (tenth page of results),
4. category page + region (page 9  of the results).

What makes it even worse, not all the category pages have incoming links.

THE CONCLUSIONS

For classifieds or e-commerce websites, the conclusion is that the more pages linked in the listing, the greater the chance that they will be indexed. In general, it is clear that the farther from the point of entry (external link), the less chance that the page will be indexed. Therefore, it is advisable not to create sites with a very deep structure and to remember that the pages far from the points of entry should be additionally linked to (for example as "similar products", "see also", "related categories", etc.).

Looking at the chart we can see yet another change – a slight decrease in indexation of pages 2, 3 and 4. This can be either because there are new pages added recently and they have not been indexed yet (when the number of ads in a certain category has started to exceed the space on the first page), or due to increase in the number of outcoming links on the first page. I would rather bet the first explanation, because in fact the new links were added to a small percentage of pages. There are only 400 fifth pages (so the links to fifth pages were placed on 0,5% of all the first pages). Pages 10 and 15 are even less numerous.

Introduction of additional links has not increased the level of indexation of classifieds, however I suppose that the rate of change was simply too small to affect their indexation. Moreover, the indexation of ads of Morusek.pl exceeded already 80% when the experiment started. Such changes can produce a visible increase in the number of indexed pages in case of sites where the rate of change is much higher and the level of indexation of classifieds or products – lower.

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Posted by great scott!

Will Critchlow of Distilled (who recently took over SEOmoz’s consulting business) is back in Whiteboard studios to help Rand discuss how to Choose an SEO consultant–or any consultant for that matter.

Whether you’re a consultant yourself, you frequently work with consultants, or you’re thinking of outsourcing some work for the very first time, you’ll find this week’s video worthwhile.  Knowing beforehand how the engagement needs to be structured, what you expect to get, where to find good recommendations and/or sources of consultants, and how to determine whether they have the skills and expertise you require are all critical steps to a successful and relationship (and making sure you get what you paid for). Join Rand and Will as they help you figure out how to get the best results for your consulting dollar.

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

The New York Times, CNN, and Yahoo News each get more traffic than Google News, but in a given month Google News sends almost a billion clicks to publishers worldwide, which makes it an incredibly compelling syndication platform for sites with newsworthy content.

But how do you get articles indexed and ranking in Google News? And how can you get your article snippets to appear in the SERPs for Google web search?

In an attempt to answer some of the basic questions around getting started, this post builds off the information provided in the Google News publisher help center and in Maile Ohye’s awesome video on Google News to provide publishers with a basic primer of factors to consider before submitting to Google News.

 

Google News SERPs

One of the best parts of Google News is that news snippets are not just included among the news results on Google News. They also often appear amidst the organic search results for Google web search in the form of a Google News one box.

Getting Articles Discovered

Indexation: Google News’ bot discovers content in one of two ways: through a discovery crawl where it sees new URLs and crawls them, or through a news sitemap. Discovery crawls are often broad and deep, but just as XML sitemaps are a great way to help Googlebot discover new website content, news sitemaps are a great way to ensure content gets crawled and to push meta information. To create a news Sitemap read the Google News’ sitemap documentation. Or, if you run WordPress, you can run the Google News Sitemap Generator plugin.

Re-Crawl: Typically the initial discovery process is fast and it takes just a few minutes for your content to be crawled. But it’s important to note that if you make changes to your article, Google News will come back. Generally Googlebot-News re-crawls for new content within about 12 hours.

Exclusion: For content you do not want indexed by Google News, you can employ the robots exclusion protocol, you can create either a robots.txt file or you can use META tags to identify the documents you want excluded from search results. As Google News’ robots tips explains, either method is effective (however, at SEOmoz, we recommend against blocking with robots.txt whenever possible).  

Categorizing Articles

For any given article Google News tries to classify both topic and location in order to populate the most appropriate sections of the editions in the most appropriate country. This is done through recognition of words and word combinations. For example, if an article contained words such as "democratic," "political party," "congressman," and "voter" it would indicate that the article should be categorized under politics. Similarly, if the same article contained "Chicago," "Illinois," and "United States," this combination of words would indicate the article has greatest relevance in the US, and specifically in Chicago.  

Keyword stuffing is definitely something you want to avoid. Two additional recommendations to help categorize your articles are – #1 put your articles into relevant categories or sub-folders on your own site and – #2 open the article with an explicit "city, state", the way the above article does. Each are great ways to help categorize without compromising user experience. You can also use the keywords field of your news sitemap.

Ranking Factors

Google News ranks stories in two distinct ways. An oversimplification of this process is that a story rank is first applied which identifies the story topics that are most talked about across the web. Then, once the most popular story topics are identified, each cluster is displayed in descending order based on relevance and interest in the topic. After cluster positions are set, Google News then tries to figure out which articles on each story topic should be included within each cluster.

Story Ranking

Determines which stories rank atop news results based on editorial interest and the amount of coverage the story is getting. Does the article have local interest that appeals only to a niche audience? Or is it a massively popular story with global interest, such as the death of Michael Jackson? Based on the amount of editorial interest, the top story topic will either appear at the top or bottom of the cluster.

Article Ranking

Once Google News has identified the top story clusters, they try to sift through the hundreds or thousands of stories on the topic and surface the most important articles to lead the cluster. Then, they prioritize the additional article links to display within the cluster. Some of the key factors that are looked at when ranking articles include:

• Freshness: Recent, important, and objective articles are what Google News is looking for. So no matter how great your comic strip, op-ed or press release is, it’s not going to be lead a Google News cluster. 

• Citation Rank: For any given story topic, Google News will look at who is citing whom as the original source. For example, if the Seattle Times breaks a story about SEOmoz focusing on building awesome SEO software, then 10 other blogs reference that article, it’s a good indicator that the Seattle Times’ article is the original, most authoritative source on the topic.

• Local Relevance: For geo-targeted stories, greater authority is given to hyper-local publishers. So if there was an important local event such as a shooting in Spokane, Washington, a smaller publication with local trust like the Spokesman-Review might have greater relevance than a bigger publication in a different location.

• Trustworthiness: Click through data over time is something Google News uses as an indicator of trust. This is done less on an individual article basis or on a total click number basis (which would be fairly easy to game), but more on a by category and by country basis. In other words, if the same personal finance blog repeatedly got high click through rates within the business category or in France, it will develop high trust as being a high quality resource for the business category in that particular country.

Optimizing Multi-Media

To maximize traffic from the SERPs in both news and web search, articles need to include images that adhere to Google News’ desired specifications. Additionally, though less imperative, using video can also provide high click through rates and significant traffic.

Images: Articles with images to do better than articles without images. To optimize your article’s images you should:

• Save images as JPEGs – PNG, GIF, and other formats are less optimal.
• Use large images with good aspect ratio.
• Give images descriptive captions and keyword targeted alt text.
• Place good images at the top near the title to help associate the image with the subject matter.
• Put image inline and make it non-clickable.

Video: YouTube is a trusted video hosting platform for Google News. So for best results, setting up a YouTube channel and submitting it to Google News is likely going to be more effective than using other platforms. One thing to be aware of with video is that video can be hard to categorize. So to ensure correct categorization, textual descriptions and transcripts are each great ways to associate videos with subject matter.

Additional Recommendations

• URLs: Create permanent unique URLs with at least 3 digits. Reason being, publishers have historically used article ID=number in their URL strings and this helps show it’s an article and not just a static HTML page. Of course, we’d recommend against dynamic parameters in your URLs (you could rewrite these as static URLs like newssite.com/story/345). If your news publishing system does not have at least 3 digits, you can submit a news sitemap and identify which URLs you want included as news. In general though, you don’t want your URLs to be too long, too short or non-permanent.

• Article Titles: There are a handful of best practices for news article titles, but titles are incredibly important, especially as a way to ensure good categorization. Ideal titles are ones that are keyword rich, indicative of story topics, yet still catchy and compelling to click on.

• Between Title & Body: Putting publication date between the title and body helps the date extractor identify the correct publication date and include it in the snippet. Similarly, you want to make sure there’s no extra text between the article’s title and body in your article’s source. Doing so will make it difficult for Googlebot-News to extract the appropriate snippet to display in the SERPs.

• Article Body: There are a number of article text considerations, but among the most important is that you don’t want to break up your article body. You want sequential paragraphs. This means you should not have elements such as user comments, advertisements, or links to related posts breaking up your content.  

• Inbound Links: Inbound links matter a great deal for web search, but news is fundamentally different in this respect. As Google News’ Josh Cohen said in his interview with Eric Enge, "to be able to build up links over time is just something that isn’t really all that applicable on the news side of things."

Google News is not a platform for every website or blog, but you also don’t have to be a mega-publisher churning out 10 articles a week to be Google News-worthy. It will help for rankings if you are, but it is not necessary for indexation. So your website or blog is probably more newsworthy than you think. For example, in the tech category you will find the big sites you might expect like TechCrunch, Huffington Post or ZDNet, but amidst the articles from these mega-publishers, you will also find articles from lesser known sites such as gadgetsteria or ithinkdiff, both of which are included in the news results even though you might not think of either as the "most newsworthy" technology sources.

So if your blog is a good fit with one of Google News’ categories, odds are submitting to Google News or submitting to Yahoo News would each be effective methods of distributing content and increasing traffic.

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Do you want a formula to guarantee the success of your blog?

Yesterday I was interviewed by a journalist about blogging and half way though the interview he asked me what the formula for successful blogging was.

His question was innocent enough and asked without agenda but as I pondered it and pondered the many successful blogs that we see in our medium it became very clear to me that while it might be simpler to have a formula to follow to make our blogs succeed that there are many many different approaches to success in this field.

One of the things that I love about blogging is that there really is no wrong or right way to do what we do and for every ‘rule’ us people who blog about blogging might write – there is always an exception of a blog that has done the opposite and still had good results.

Yes there are some principles that we might see in many successful blogs – but even as I’ve been recently exploring some of these I see examples of blogs that buck the system and succeed despite doing so.

Last year I came up with a list of ‘debates’ in blogging to illustrate some of the diversity of approaches in blogging. Recently – after being accused of being too narrow in my focus – I revisited the list and added a number of ‘debates’ to illustrate the variety of approaches that bloggers take.

All in all I’ve come up with 29 areas that bloggers take different approaches in – yet there would be many many more.

Some of them are debates that might come down to a bloggers ethics, although most are simply different approaches that might be based more upon a bloggers goals, the niche that they’re in and the type of audience that they’re attempting to connect with.

29 Debates Bloggers Have about Blogging

1. RSS Feeds - Full vs Partial Feeds
2. Comment Sections – Comments vs No Comments
3. Post Frequency – Post More vs Post Less
4. How Many Blogs? – Focus upon One Single Blog vs Having Many Smaller Blogs
5. Domain Names – long vs short, hyphens vs non hypens, .com vs other extensions (like .net, .org), local vs global domain extensions
6. Hosting – hosted vs self hosted
7. Post Titles – descriptive vs keywords
8. Content – Link content vs Original content
9. Paid Reviews – Happy to Write Paid Reviews vs Not Doing Paid Reviews
10. Design – Professional Design vs Templates
11. Links to External Sources – Should Open in a New Page vs Should Open in the Same Page
12. Ownership – Use Social Media vs Build Your own properties
13. Post Length – Long in Depth Posts vs Short, Sharp Posts
14. Topic – Niche vs Broad Topics
15. Dating Posts – Dates on Posts vs Non Dated
16. Blogger Name – Anonymous blogging vs Using Your Name
17. Subscribers – RSS is Best vs Email is Best
18. SEO – Writing for Search Engines vs Writing for Humans
19. Personal Blogging – Sticking to Topic vs Injecting Personality and Personal details
20. Comment Moderation – Highly Regulated and Moderated vs Anything Goes
21. Social Media vs Search – focus upon social media rather than search engines as traffic sources
22. LinkBait – Anything goes (e.g.. Personal Attacks) vs Strong Boundaries Around What is and Isn’t Acceptable
23. Bloggers Participation in Comments – Respond to Every Single Comment vs Let Readers Talk to Each Other and Don’t Interact
24. Blog Platforms – WordPress vs ((Insert Other Platforms Here))
25. Monetization – Blogs Should Be Monetized vs Blogs Should Never Be Monetized
26. Affiliate Disclosure – Disclose every affiliate link vs Site Wide Disclosure vs No Disclosure
27. When To Start Monetizing – From Day 1 vs Once You Have an Audience
28. Text Links – To Sell them vs Not Selling Them
29. Outsourcing – Outsourcing content (or other aspects of blogging) vs producing your own.

Some of the above debates are over things that some bloggers feel quite strongly about (there are a few that I do) – but in almost every one there are blogs doing a full spectrum of things.

I wanted to share this updated list mainly to celebrate our diversity and variety as bloggers and in the hope that those who might be looking for ‘the formula’ might see that there’s a wonderful array of choice at our finger tips and with that comes a lot of freedom to forge our own paths as individuals.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

29 Debates Bloggers Have about Blogging

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Guest post by Mike CJ.

“Treat your blog like a business” is something we’re told all the time. It’s solid advice, assuming you want or plan to make an income from your blog, and adopting it as a mindset often leads to the successful transition from a blog into a business.

But what does it actually mean?

Have a proper accounts system

Record income and expenses as they happen. Monitor cashflow – every day if things are tight. There are so many tools out there to help you do this, and many of them are free to use. Outright is one of the easiest.

Set objectives

The blogosphere is full of objective-setting posts at this time of year. Most of them revolve around traffic and subscribers. And that’s fine, but if you do want to blog professionally, you need to have financials behind those. You need to know what you’re going to earn over the next year.

Set budgets

Once you know what’s coming in, set yourself some spending budgets. How much of your income are you going to re invest in the business? For training? Software? Marketing? By setting budgets, it makes buying decisions so much easier. Do you want to advertise your new book here on Problogger? Don’t waste hours wringing your hands trying to decide. If it’s in budget do it, if it isn’t, don’t.

Seek opinions and advice

Most “real” businesses, even small ones, don’t run in a vacuum with the proprietor making every decision. And yet many blogs do just that! Get as much advice as you can, from your partner, your bank, your accountant and from other bloggers.

Produce reports

Monthly or quarterly, produce a report showing how the business is performing against the various targets. Examine what went well, and what didn’t. Use the findings to inform your planning for the next period. The act of producing the report itself is effective, but it’s even better if you have to present it to someone else – even if it’s your partner.

Enter into collaborations

Working with other bloggers can really accelerate your success, as well as theirs. Seek out opportunities with like minded people you see around the web.

Use professional tools

It’s too easy to let yourself down with poor design, a tatty invoice or by not having a business card. None of the accoutrements of being in business cost a fortune – they’re a small expense compared to the loss of image when they aren’t right.

Invest in training

Every business should have a training budget – choose the right books, courses and memberships and you’ll get a far greater return than the initial cost.

Treat your readers like customers

Typically only a very small percentage of blog readers will ever become customers by buying something from you – most will simply enjoy the mass of free content you put out there. And that’s fine. But treat every one of them as a potential paying client, and that percentage will slowly increase over time.

Those are my thoughts about treating your blog like a business. What would you add?

Mike CJ is a full time professional blogger and author. He lives in the idyllic Canary Islands, just off the coast of Africa. You can find out more about Mike on his blog Mike’s Life and catch up with him on Twitter @mikecj

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What does treating your blog “Like a Business” really mean?

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