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There are literally millions of fantastic ways to improve a blog. Narrowing that list down to 9 or even 90 for that matter is an impossible feat. So instead, allow me to share some of my favorite blog techniques that can keep working for you again and again.

1. Comment at related blogs. This technique is not only the social norm when blogging, but it draws more interest to your blog than you might imagine. As you comment on a post or even on another person’s comment — whatever it may be — be sure to leave your blog’s URL in the right field if possible. Comment wisely (and appropriately, don’t spam) and I bet you’ll be surprised at how many visitors navigate their way to your blog. Of course, the owner of the blog will also probably check in, so have your affairs in order and be ready to make a good impression!
2. Write a weekly “best of” post. This sure fire tip is something I don’t do on DerekBeau.com, but want to start doing very soon. It works again and again to draw important visitors to your blog and help increase readership and the amount of subscribers. The theory is simple: not just for greed, but as an actual service, do a weekly post covering the best blog posts of the week across the ’sphere for your niche. Link directly to the posts and summarize each with your own two cents. It takes less time than a detailed blog post, your readers will love it, plus the blogs you link to will often show trackback links to your blog, attracting plenty of attention.
3. Try the very latest gadgets. There are so many tools or widgets designed for bloggers to help get the word out and bring in the traffic by the droves. Of course, many of them don’t work or create more problems than they’re worth. But every once in awhile, something comes along that takes the blogosphere by storm. For example, a little while ago, BlogRush was introduced and now it’s practically everywhere, helping cross-connect readers and bloggers to like-themed content. I tested BlogRush initially and then took it down due to their growing pains, but have been considering giving it another try. Keep your eyes peeled for similar phenomenon as they take hold and be ready to implement them if they look like they might work for you.
4. Improve your blog’s identity. While it might be a no-brainer, so many bloggers just stick with the most basic design themes available for their platform. Now, sometimes simpler is indeed better, but there’s a definite difference between that and being downright generic. Starting with a plain Jane template is just fine, but look for little improvements you can make. For example, hire someone to create a memorable and fitting logo that can replace nondescript straight text headers. No need to get completely carried away, but the little touches do make a big difference!
5. Get to know your readers. Personally, that is. Blogging is so much more than just preaching to the choir from a lofty platform. Chat with your visitors and get to know them. Don’t hide behind an anonymous persona, but instead, just be yourself. Create an accurate “About Me” page pointing out your real life interests. In return, readers will be more likely to share also — you’ll learn a lot from them and your network will continue to expand professionally. Make friends… it’s what blogging should be all about.
6. Develop continuing themes for your blog. Have a certain theme scheduled on an ongoing basis for each day of the week — think of it sort of as an ongoing series of posts, but just spread out by 7 days. Schedule your more lighthearted topics for Fridays and the weekend and get down to business during the traditional work days. Not only does this idea help create sort of a blog within a blog atmosphere, but it also gives readers something to look forward to. As a bonus, it also allows subscribers with limited time to choose what they really like best about your blog and stay current with just that aspect.
7. Keep on linking on. I think sometimes it’s easy to get in a rut of not taking the time to add relevant hyperlinks to blog posts (I’m guilty of this laziness), even when attribution is due. The world of blogging is all about sharing, so be sure to do your part and pay if forward. While one view says that more outward pointing links just lead visitors away from your blog, another take leads us to believe that a reader perceives posts that are adequately linked out as being more valuable and more authoritative — therefore giving it more in depth attention. The power of links should never be underestimated.
8. Write reader friendly content. This was explained in detail in my last post, but it deserves another mention. If your content is hard to read, not interesting, not entertaining, or not valuable in one way or another, people aren’t going to share it. The ultimate goal of content creation is for it to be shared by others and spread virally. You can increase your chances of this by creating content that has wide appeal and is scannable. Instructional posts or list posts like this one here work great and can be applied to virtually any niche.
9. Always seek out new readers. There are tons of places to gain new links, visitors, readers, and subscribers one by one. All you have to do is take the time to find and take advantage of them. Spam has become a big issue on the internet over the years, and it has put a lot of fear into the minds of people wanting to promote their websites — they don’t want to be viewed as common spammers. Instead of worrying about that, concentrate on creating an awesome resource that people can’t help but enjoy. No one will condemn you for “spamming” your links if you are promoting a great resources in a respectful way.

In the end, just remember that blogging is absolutely tons of fun. However, taking it to the next level requires a bit more time and thought. Keep on having fun as you continue to learn the ropes and build your blog!

I don’t know the perception of all my readers, but I’ve received many compliments that my writing style is easy to read, understand, and digest. Throughout grade school and high school, I never really had the impeccable writing skills of a novelist, they were just slightly above average. This, however, turned out to be a good thing when I started learning about business writing.

Using long paragraphs and big words doesn’t really work in business conversation, and the same can be said for blogging. Most of your readers aren’t sitting down next to a fireplace with a cup of coffee to read your words as if they were a novel. Instead, they are trying to extract the usable information from what you have to say.

Writing and developing a reader friendly blog does not need to be a painful task. In fact, the guidelines are simple and actually make blogging easier than most other formats of writing if they’re just practiced. Unfortunately, sometimes we all get carried away and forget how simple it should be. This article will give you some tips to get back in touch with the secrets of a reader friendly blog.

1. Create Catchy Headlines - The first thing a reader sees, often even before they make the decision to click that mouse button and proceed to your blog, is the headline. Write them descriptively, but keep them just alluring enough to draw the reader’s curiosity and the click that follows.
2. Explain Above the Fold - Tell your readers right upfront what you plan to elaborate upon in the rest of the post. Don’t make them have to scroll down just to figure out what they’re going to read.
3. Save The Eyes - Our eyes are sensitive, especially when reading from an electronic screen. Keep your blog eye friendly by using a large enough font (or at least one that the reader can scale up), proper contrast, and lots of white space - no more than 4 brief sentences per paragraph.
4. Establish Scannablity - Help guide readers to what they really want to see. Use bold headlines to break up a post at the transition points throughout. Think of this tactic like an ongoing table of contents.
5. Paint the Picture - I don’t mean you have to actually use your own artwork (even though it’d be cool if you’re good at it), but sometimes illustrations help the reader understand what’s going on. A picture might not always be worth a thousand words, but I bet it’s usually worth at least half of that!
6. Chat Up Your Readers - Whether writing for a blog or the web in general, it’s accepted practice to write in a chatty, friendly, and conversational tone. When writing, just picture your target audience and begin talking to them through your keyboard. Blogging shouldn’t be stuffy.
7. Don’t Create Distractions - If there is just one caveat to the tactic above, it would be that it is easy to get carried away while ignoring traditional rules of grammar. Use your blogging liberty where you’d like, but try to revert back to what you learned in school the rest of the time.
8. Spell It Out - And for goodness sakes, with spell check and a quick proofreading, there’s just no excuse for incorrect spelling unless it’s for expressive purposes. And even that’s a stretch…
9. Break It Up With Bullets - Use bullet points and lists whenever possible. A blog reader is much more likely to finish an article that cuts straight to the point and just presents the meat rather than struggling through paragraphs upon paragraphs of fluff.
10. Use Even More Whitespace – When in doubt, space it out! If you’re using bullets or a numeric list style format, make sure there’s enough space between the lines so it doesn’t all just blur together in the viewer’s browser. Plus, it makes it easier to read between the lines. Also, try increasing your line height to increase the space between each line of text.
11. Let Your Readers Share - There’s nothing worse as a reader than reading to the completion of a great blog post and wanting to share a few thoughts, then finding out that the blog doesn’t allow comments. Let the reader share their piece!
12. Punctuate For Readers - Don’t be afraid of the … or the — They help web readers understand tone that is usually lost when translating spoken word to written text. Also, put some emphasis on your words with question marks and exclamation points… using nothing but periods can get boring.

Writing your blog for your readers is more than just telling them what they want to hear. It’s also about writing so they can read it easily!

If you’re reading this blog, or a number of other blogs about making money online, with the hopes that they will tell you exactly how to do it, you’re looking for something that isn’t there. There’s nothing wrong with reading blogs, forums, and ebooks for entertainment, to keep up with the latest news, or to get some ideas, but relying on it alone will not help you to make money online. You just need to get out there and do it.

I’m sure you have heard the saying “success breeds success,” but you probably aren’t taking advantage of it. If you commit to doing something towards making money online, and really take action, even the smallest successes will give you a boost in confidence. This, in turn, will lead to more ideas, more trials and errors, and more successes. You will eventually get to the point where you know what you are doing and are able to adapt on your own to the rapidly changing internet.

And being able to adapt and form your own conclusions is one of the biggest advantages you can have. Many people aren’t going to be sharing what is working for them right now. They might be sharing principles that are tried and true or exact strategies that worked in the past, but to really get an advantage, you need to have the ability to think for yourself.

Now, when I say get out there and do it, I’m not just talking about affiliate marketing. It’s ridiculous how many things you can do on the internet to make money. Some of them might be beyond your skill set, but what is stopping you from learning those new skills and applying them to multiple areas of your internet business? So here is what I propose that you do today to ensure that you are making money online in the immediate future.

1. Choose One or Two Strategies

You don’t want to spread yourself too thin by working on too many ventures at once. You can always automate and outsource them once you get them up and running, but for the crucial times when they need your attention, you must stay focused. However, just choosing one may not be enough for some people. There will usually be periods of waiting or burnout, so being able to concentrate on two ventures will add some variety.

Some viable online business strategies would be blogging (obviously), PPC affiliate marketing, user-generated content sites, free service-based sites, paid service-based sites, resources sites, communities/forums, e-commerce stores, paid membership sites, product development (ebooks or software), freelancing (writing, design, programming, etc), eBay selling, consulting, and probably many more.

Choose one or two strategies that seem appealing to you and commit yourself to making them work. Depending on your own motivational factors, you could set high goals that are just beyond reach to really push yourself or you could set small goals that are constantly achieved to boost confidence.

2. Get Something Up and Running

Even if you don’t quite know what you are doing yet, it is important to just get started. Think of it as a learning process. One of the great things about the internet is that the cost of business is extremely low and everything is very flexible. There is nothing stopping your from rapidly changing your business plans and structure.

If the task at hand is too far beyond your skills, you could hire someone to do it for you, or you could consider taking on a partner that compliments your skills. Whatever you do, you can’t let anything stop you from moving forward. Make sure you are always making progress, even if that progress is simply learning new skills.

3. Always Continue Your Education

We focused on getting something started before learning how to do it because education can paralyze you. Books, training courses, and classes are great for gaining new knowledge and learning how to do new things, but they themselves do not help you make any money. I have seen countless people get stuck in the trap of learning, learning, learning, and while they are gaining a ton of knowledge, they aren’t making any real world progress.

But, you should always be learning, just do it as a supplement to the things that grow your business. If there are particular tasks within your ventures that you are having trouble with, spend a lot of time on, or have to outsource, consider learning them yourself. You will gain a better understand of the requirements, which will help you when delegating the task, and you might even gain the ability to do it faster.

Outsourcing is great, but it takes time. You have to submit a project, get bids, choose a bid, communicate, wait for delivery, go over revisions, and repeat those last two step. It can be much faster if you or a partner can do the work on your own. I only outsource things that I don’t have the time to do or simply don’t want to do, I never outsource something that I can do quickly and effectively for myself.

4. Monitor What Works and Keep Doing It

Continuing with “success breeds success,” when you have an online venture in progress, you are continually trying new things and getting your own feedback on what you did right and what you did wrong. Use this information to train yourself how to be successful. This concept is very simply but is often ignored. When something does not work, ask yourself why it didn’t work and figure out how to adjust it. When something does work, ask yourself why it worked and figure out how to repeat and apply to other avenues.

This is where the real learning occurs. This type of learning is on a very personal level because you are analyzing tings that you yourself have done, not things that other people are saying they have done. With enough experiences, you will develop a very strong sense for success and will be able to explode your growth. You can’t properly tell other people (contractors and employees) what to do until you know exactly what works. If you don’t know for yourself what works, and are spending money based on what you have heard, there is a good chance you won’t recover your costs.

5. Never Stop Working Hard

This last step is the most important but is also the most difficult. It is way too easy to start a business on the internet. These days, with software like Wordpress, anyone can have a new business (website) online in 15-30 minutes. The hard part is sticking with it for the long run.

As you probably know, the beginning growth stages are usually very slow and mentally tough. This applies to all of the make money online strategies above. It takes time to build brand awareness, authority, market confidence, contacts, traffic, and ultimately, revenue. However, if you consistently work hard on your business, you will see incremental results in the beginning which snowball into exponential results with time.

Start Now, Don’t Stop, and Keep Reading

I know I said in the opening paragraph that you shouldn’t be reading blogs, forums, and ebooks with the hopes of learning exactly how to make money online. I didn’t meant stop reading them all together. Getting inspiration from the experience of others is extremely valuable, it just isn’t as valuable as actually taking action and making your own experiences.

When reading tips and advice online, take them as just that, tips and advice. Don’t keep searching for a step by step strategy that will guarantee your online success because your are the only element that can guarantee that success. Read the words of others to gain ideas, strategies, and inspiration for your own, existing ventures. To do this, you must already have an existing venture in place, otherwise you are just wasting your time.

Continuing on from last months recap post, I would like to do another in order to share growth figures and poll results. I will also talk briefly about things that happened in October and my plans for the coming months.

Only 6 Posts In October?

I actually wrote 9 posts, but chose to remove three of them because their subject matter had also been removed. Much of my time in October was spent either working on a tool for linkbait or dealing with the repercussions of releasing it. I was also recovering from a month of extensive writing in August. Luckily, there was plenty of informative posts from the previous months for new readers to dig into without feeling like they had arrived at an empty blog.

But I must admit that 6 posts is pretty pathetic and there really aren’t any excuses for it. Hopefully I can get back on track in this new month and continue giving out solid information.

Blog Growth

The growth that occurred in October was very enjoyable and can largely be attributed to one thing… linkbait. I didn’t produce much article content, but I created a certain tool (which I will not discuss) that was generously linked to by many friends and acquaintances in the “make money online” blogging space. This resulted in a good amount of direct traffic, viral traffic, and new RSS subscribers. Here are the statistics from October:

• Technorati ranking dropped from about 30,000 to about 23,000
• 3-month Alexa ranking fell from 84,412 to about 50,000
• PageRank finally updated and DerekBeau.com was given a 4
• Yahoo! is now showing ~6,400 back links, up from ~4,000
• RSS feed subscribers increased by about 300, putting the total at over 600
• Visitors and pageviews increased by 2x over August to ~10,000 visits
• Search engine traffic is not growing, bringing in only 20-40 visits per day

The most notable (and most valuable) growth that occurred in October was in respect to the number of RSS feed subscribers. At the time of writing this, there are currently 616 people subscribing to the DerekBeau.com RSS feed.

I believe the reason so many new visitors decided to stick around and subscribe is the fact that I have spent a lot of time writing detailed and useful articles. New visitors that arrive at DerekBeau.com can see the kind of information that has been offered and subscribe with the hopes of getting more (which I intend to deliver). I am very pleased with the conversion rate of new visitors to subscribers.

Reader Poll Results & New Poll Introduction

The second DerekBeau.com reader poll has been online for quite some time now, and I think it has run its course. The results were interesting, but not too surprising:

• 39% are still trying to make money online (68)
• 30% take advantage of PPC marketing (53)
• 13% are most focused on blogging (23)
• 8% do freelancing work for online profits (14)
• 5% make money online in some other way (9)
• 3% develop their own products (5)
• 1% sell things through eBay (2)

A new poll has been released, this time asking how many blogs you own. The answers to this question wont really help me tailor the content to your needs, instead, it is just an interesting thing to learn. Head over to the sidebar and cast your vote!

Favorite Posts From Last Month

As I said in the beginning of this post, there are only a total of 6 articles that were published in October. Instead of choosing them all as favorites (which would be stupid), I will choose my one favorite post from October that I think you should read.

Autobiography: How I Became A Professional Affiliate Marketer - I wrote this post late one night and got kind of carried away with it, making it much longer than I originally intended. When it came time to publish, I actually hesitated because I was unsure if people would get any value out of it. As it turns out, the response was better than I had expected and many people told me that it was a great source of inspiration. So while it doesn’t contain any direct affiliate marketing tips, I guess it is an entertaining read and a possible source of inspiration.

Plans For November

I just started another blog (not make money online) that I plan to write to on a regular basis as well, so we’ll have to see how writing exclusively for two blogs works out. One thing I will say is that I am more dedicated to DerekBeau.com and therefore it will receive more of my time than the new blog.

There are still a lot of topics that I want to cover through articles on this blog, but I would also like to start doing some more commentary posts in regards to what other people are writing about as well as some industry news posts. I’m not sure how often this will take place, it would have to be something that really gets my attention, but I feel that if it’s done right, it can provide some good value.

I’m also going to set another posting goal for November. It won’t be ambitious as my previous posting goal, but will help me stay on track and keep producing content that should help you out. So, my goal for November is to write 10 posts (not including this one) that are at least 1,000 words and are intended to be educational. Hopefully I will write some shorter posts too, but they won’t count towards this goal.

Selling Advertising Space

The last thing that I need to announce is that I have decided to start selling advertising for the month of December. On the 20th of December, DerekBeau.com will be 6 months old and will have gained a decent sized readership. I think that makes it appropriate enough to start monetizing.

I look at it as everyone will benefit from the deal. Advertisers can gain some more exposure and hopefully generate some profits, readers get the benefit of my increased motivation and possibly some giveaways, and I get to use the additional revenue exclusively on DerekBeau.com for things like promotion and contests.

The following spots are available for sale, at a very, very low introductory rate. I will increase prices in the following months based on the demand that I observe. Please reference the statistical recap above for site stats. If you would like to inquire about reserving a spot for December 1st-31st, please contact me.

• 468×60 banner (unavailable)
• (4) 125×125 sidebar buttons (3 available) - $8/month
• (3) RSS feed text ads to over 600 subscribers - $5/month
• (5) Nofollow sitewide text links - $3/month

That’s It

And that’s it for October’s recap. Thank you to everyone who has mentioned DerekBeau.com to someone else and thank you to all of you who continue to read!

I feel bad for not posting any new tips articles lately and for not conducting the drawing for this contest when it was supposed to be done, but I have had to take care of a slew of unexpected personal and business issues. I don’t like to talk about excuses, so that’s all I’ll say about that. Lets get into the contest details.

Because of the recent actions by Google (penalizing sites for “selling” text links) and due to administration reasons (I don’t have time to contact 50 people, place 50 text links, and remove 50 text links a month later) I am going to make some changes to the contest. I have chosen 10 winners rather than 50, and the prize text links will contain nofollow.

The drawing was performed by making a list of every single entry (as defined by the terms of the contest) and then mixing up that list. I then used the random integer generator from random.org to give me a list of numbers and simply matched those numbers to the list of entries. I was not allowing the same person to win twice, but surprisingly, that never happened anyways.

And The Winners Are

• 1st Place: DormEarning.com
• 2nd Place: Dave from RetiredPay.com
• 3rd Place: Jonathan from MacroKing.com
• 4th Place: David from DavidAirey.com
• 5th Place: Bjorgvin from StockVault.net
• 6th Place: CanIMakeBigMoneyOnline.com
• 7th Place: Hock from Marketing-Tools-Review.com
• 8th Place: Tim from eMonetized.com
• 9th Place: Vijay from TeachMeToMakeMoneyOnline.com
• 10th Place: LurksterAz.com

In addition to the link/ping above, I will also send an email to each of the winners to let them know they have won. Your prize ads will be effective until December 1st at 12:00 AM EST, so the faster you contact me, the longer they will be in place

I originally planned to let the winners choose what ad spots they wanted, but that would take too long because I would have to wait for a response from each winner before I could move on to the next. Instead, I will choose based on estimated value. So here are the prizes:

• 1st Place: 468×60 banner, 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link, post-level text ad, RSS feed text ad
• 2nd Place: 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link, post-level text ad, RSS feed text ad
• 3rd Place: 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link, RSS feed text ad
• 4th Place: 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link
• 5th Place: sidebar text link
• 6th-10th Place: one text ad on a post of your choice

What’s Going On With These Ad Spots Next Month

This contest did not get as much response as I had hoped, so next month I will simply be selling the ad spots. DerekBeau.com has been online for almost 5 months now and has experienced some great growth, so I think advertisers will be interested and will get plenty of bang for their buck.

I will start the prices pretty low and increase them based on demand. The revenue will most likely go towards promotion and more conventional contests. If you are interested in purchasing an ad on DerekBeau.com for December, please contact me.

Also, now that the personal and business issues mentioned above have been sorted out, you can be expecting a more normal posting schedule once again