Keith Dougherty Unleashed

No matter whether you’re new to blogging or an experienced veteran, there are plenty of traps you can fall into while running your blog, and these mistakes are like cyanide. They might act slowly or quickly, but either way, you can make these mistakes without even knowing you shouldn’t do it.

Before you know it, your audience disappears, and you’re left staring at your stats counter that’s falling faster than a guy who steps on a banana peel in a cartoon. (You probably feel like that guy, too.) Here are just three of the mistakes you need to avoid if you want to keep your blog alive and thriving.

1. Assuming people care.
It sounds harsh, but if you assume that people will care about you the moment you start your blog or because you’ve been around for a while, you’re dead wrong. Newbies often start out with inflated expectations of having a few thousand readers by the end of their first year and wind up depressed.

Another mistake in this vein is failing to make posts scannable, thinking people will care enough to read the whole post. Not everyone does!

Remember to interact with others and promote your blog constantly. Readers won’t just magically appear out of nowhere and fall in love with you, your blog, and whatever you’re saying.

2. Advertising too much.

Why did you start your blog? For many people, the answer has to do with promoting something. You might be trying to sell affiliate products, push your own personal brand, or market your own services.

This doesn’t mean you should advertise constantly! Readers are often turned off by seeing too many ads that look like they’re crammed into a page and just turn it into spam. If your posts are always “affiliate reviews” of products, you won’t be trusted by the majority of your audience. Only promote stuff that’s good, you’ve personally tried and liked, and you really feel would benefit your audience. That’s the best way to ensure you’re not advertising too much.

3. Using bad content.
There is plenty of disagreement in the blogging world about exactly what constitutes bad content and what’s really good content. It’s pretty well-known that if you use bad content, your blog will suffer, and some types of content are almost universally agreed upon as being bad content.
For starters, any plagiarized content, or stuff you don’t have permission to use, is a bad idea. It can land you in court and in debt, destroy your reputation, and cause your blog to be deleted. Just don’t do it!

Content that’s too long or too short is also bad content. Few people really read fifty-word summaries of news, and an essay of two thousand words on the same topic will probably get even less attention. A happy medium is best.

Finally, avoid useless, badly written, and infrequent content. All of these types of content will kill your blog as your readers won’t glean anything important from your blog, won’t take you seriously, or simply won’t remember you.

Don’t let yourself experience the agony of watching your blog in its death throes… simply avoid these three mistakes and you’re a step closer to success!

The time to pick a domain name is after you have chosen the niche you will build your site on.  In the excitement of starting a new business you may be tempted to find a “cute” domain name or use a phrase that has “personal meaning”.

Don’t do it.

This is very important:

• First you choose your general niche.
• Then you narrow in to a sub-niche.
• Then you choose your main keyword phrases
• THEN you find a domain name

Your domain name should contain your keywords and .com is best if available.  It may take some time to find a domain that will work for you and this searching can expose you to a little known problem. Some domain registrars allow companies to access “domains searched”.  Here is how it works.

You check to see if a domain is available by using the search on the domain registrar’s site.  The domain is available and you check several others because you haven’t decided which is best to use. You leave the registrar’s site and think about the domains for a while You log back into the site ready to buy a domain and it’s been registered by someone else. You feel cheated; you’ve been had.  You try another potential domain you checked just an hour ago and it’s been registered, too!  Bummer!

What’s going on?   There are businesses that temporarily buy domain names.   This ties up the domain for 5-7 days and many who don’t understand what has happened end up buying the domain for more money.  It’s a sleazy practice but it is widespread.

It doesn’t have to affect you.   Go to nameboy.com and enter your key words – you can search as many keyword combinations as you like and nameboy will show you what domains are available for those keywords.   You don’t have to choose one so you aren’t risking having it claimed by someone else.  From the options, chose three domain names that will work for you.  You choose more than one because though nameboy is very accurate you will occasionally find the domain previously registered so it’s good to have at least one alternative.

NOW you go to the site where you register your domains and ask if that domain is available and if it is BUY IT IMMEDIATELY.

Always register a domain on one site and host on another site. Take my word for it – you are safer keeping your domains and your hosting with separate companies.  Why take a chance on a problem in the future when you don’t have to?

Should you have a .com domain or another extension?

.com all the wa

Brainstorming domain names is fun.  Once you are familiar with using gameboy (very easy) you’ll find yourself coming up with one keyword after another just to see what domains are available.  Use a hyphen in the domain is not all important.  Try for non-hyphenated versions but if the keywords are not available, consider adding a hyphen and trying again.  Consider how the words appear is no hyphen is used. A plural word combined with a word that begins with “ex” (lots of possibilities there) is an example of unintended consequences that may lead to your site showing up for odd searches.  Don’t get it?   Think about it.

After you register your domain it will be one or two days before it’s ready to use.   At that time, you will re-point the DNS to your hosting account. You can’t transfer the domain to another register for 60 days after it is first registered.

You can build your site up and use the domain – just can’t move it.   If you are building a site to sell (site flipping) you can transfer the domain to a new owner as long as they open an account where you registered the domain. You can then “push” the domain to them but they will need to wait out the 60 day period before moving it to another registrar’s site.

Most domain registrars offer “auto-renew”.   That means one year after registering your domain you will be charged again for the next year.   You can opt to cancel the domain before it renews but this does prevent losing domains by those who might forget to register for another year.   If you forget to renew your domain you might be able to get it back in the 60 days following its cancellation but there will be significant fees to do so.  Many people have seemed frightened at the idea of “auto renewal” but it’s a good thing to have.

Private registration is up to you.   Some people feel registering in their own name or company name is proof they have nothing to hide.   Others prefer to keep their registration details private. Most registrars charge a fee for private registration.  This protects you from others finding out who owns the domain but it also makes it difficult for people to contact you about your domain.   If you use private registration have a link on your site where questions can be addressed.

One of the most confusing aspects of internet marketing and making money at home seems to be related to finding a niche to work in.  There are many complicated equations for how to run the numbers to identify a niche but it doesn’t have to be so hard.

The best way to find niches is to pay attention to what is going on around you.  When you are in a store what product displays make people stop and look?  What are your friends and family telling you about their shopping habits? If you are active on twitter – what are people there tweeting about?  What headlines feature on the magazines in niches you are considering?  Chances are you’ll see the same subjects repeated over and over in those issues.

Keep a small notebook with you at all times and as you think of a possible niche, write it down.  Be specific – diet is a huge and overcrowded niche but in that niche may be sub-niches of specific diets that could be great niches for a website.  The get your ex back niche is heavily populated by marketers (thought I’ve never understood why you would want him back) but there might be a niche about learning to live alone, getting over relationships or other related topics you could use.

Look around your home.  If you have a pet you might think of “dog training” but you’ll find that niche very crowded.  Narrow it down to basic obedience commands, walking on a leash, no-pull harnesses or other smaller topics that feature specific products.  Cat health is too broad – cat skin problems might work well.

Don’t over think your list of niches but add in anything that comes to mind.   You’ll find when you do your keyword research you will be able to be more specific about the potential of a niche and find topics that relate to the topic that you’ve not yet considered.  Establishing a list of potential niches should be the first step of any internet market targeting affiliate product sales or using adsense to monetize sites.

Don’t become emotionally attached to your niche ideas.  When on your list, the niche is only a possibility.  The keyword research and looking at the competition is what will separate good niche potential.  For every 20 niche ideas you do keyword research on, it’s likely 18 of those possible topics will be discarded.

No matter how excited you are to have thought of a particular niche to work in, if the numbers don’t work it’s not worth pursuing.

One of the hottest debates in the blogosphere rages on at this very moment. One side declares that free content is good enough, while the other insists that paid content is crucial to your blogging success. While it’s impossible to settle this once and for all, here are the pros and cons of each option to help you choose wisely. After all, your choice could decide the fate of your blog.

Pros of free content

There are plenty of reasons for you to use free content. If you’re crunched for time or hate to put in too much effort, free content is easy to obtain, as there are plenty of article directories out there. Hundreds of thousands of articles can be had for free, and all you have to do in exchange is post a link.

The sheer volume of free articles available is a big plus – you can get lots of it and almost never run out. No matter what you write on, there are probably free articles on a related topic.

Cons of free content

There are a lot of free articles, but there are also a lot of people using them, too. You can’t get content on absolutely every topic; if you cover a specific topic like dachshund puppy clothing, good luck finding free articles! There could be plagiarism or bad writing lurking in those articles. You have to provide the links back to authors’ sites, meaning you could lose visitors to their sites instead of yours.  Plus, search engines and readers don’t like free content as much as something that’s never been published anywhere else before.

Pros of paid content

Well-written content that you bought is almost guaranteed to attract and hold readers’ and search engines’ interest much better than free content. If it’s new, fresh, and hitherto unknown, people will gobble it up like Grandma’s apple pie… and share with their friends, unlike Grandma’s apple pie.

You can get paid content on any topic under the sun. If you have a highly technical or specialized topic and can’t find a writer with experience writing in the field, many professional writers can, anyway. The chances of unintentional plagiarism often decrease with the amount you pay for the article, and the quality usually goes up. If the native language of your writer isn’t English, native English speakers will most likely be able to tell, so native English writers command a higher price for their quality.

Cons of paid content

This isn’t to say paid content is for everyone, however. Like free content, it can also be plagiarized or badly written, and if you don’t check first with a plagiarism checker and a native English editor, you can’t tell the difference. A cheap article is often worse than a free article. If you want quality writing, you have to pay for it. It’s nearly impossible to get the best of both worlds and find a great writer who’s willing to write for dirt cheap prices for very long. Finally, you may already know that finding a good writer in the first place can be tricky.

Which to choose

So, which option is best: paid or free content? That all depends on your needs, budget, and experience. If you’re a blogging newbie and need content to experiment with, you might not want to pay for it. If you have money to invest in your business and are serious about trying to impress readers, get traffic, and sell whatever you’re trying to sell, paid content might be the way to go.

Free or paid content? The choice can sink your blog or help it rise like an invincible helium balloon.

The old saying has been around since before computers… apparently, a picture is worth a thousand words. The expression is silent about what type of words this refers to (written or spoken, for starters?),  but in this era, there are plenty of media that can use pictures.

If you’re running a blog, a thousand words is probably the equivalent of two or three blog posts. So the question stands: is one picture really worth that many words?

There are plenty of reasons to use pictures on your blog. With alt tags, they are accessible even to users with disabilities, and they can generate traffic through people searching for images with Google or other search engines. Pictures can attract and holds readers’ attention far better than a wall of text, if they are properly selected and placed.

You have options as far as the source of these pictures. Some people prefer finding free pictures, while others like paying a few cents or dollars and using paid ones. With some searching, you can likely find a free image that is at least somewhat related to the blog topic, and if you don’t have that much time to search, you can simply pay for an image and get on with your blogging.

In some cases, pictures on your blog are very valuable. If you run a cooking blog, for example, people will quickly grow bored of reading walls of text and dry recipes, and will likely move on. But if you have a well-selected picture of the dish you provide the recipe for, or perhaps an artistic picture of the ingredient you’re talking about in your post, it catches people’s eye.

Pictures illustrate concepts, help guide people through how-to’s one step at a time, and hold the reader’s attention by breaking up the monotony of reading text. This is why so many blog layouts incorporate pictures. Simply putting one related picture in each post can really help attract and retain readers.

At the same time, you want to avoid making mistakes related to pictures. Some people use too many pictures and go crazy with them. They can be valuable, but generally not when used in excess. You also want to ensure that your pictures look clear, well-lit and professional, as having badly taken pictures that your toddler took with his first digital camera will probably be irritating, rather than endearing. Finally, make sure your pictures are actually related to the post, or you run the risk of simply including pictures for no reason at all.

So, how many pictures should you use, and should you use them at all? It’s entirely your call. Some people place one picture in each post, while others use a certain number of them to correspond to each item in a list post. Try to keep your style, picture sizes, and justification (left, right, or center) consistent so you don’t confuse your reader, whatever you choose.

Nothing says you have to use pictures, and a minimalist blog without them can still look great, but carefully consider whether a well-chosen picture might reduce the text you have to provide, illustrate a point you’re making, or catch a reader’s eye.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping your blog looking pretty as well as functional!

What’s the furthest you’ve gone to get traffic? If you’re like most blog owners, the most you’ve done is some article marketing, link building, and maybe attempts to stir up some social media interest in your work.

But this isn’t always enough. In a virtual space crammed full of blogs, all of whom have owners who want traffic as much as you do, you have to stand out a little if you want to be recognized. Here are seven things you can try if you want to attract a flood of visitors to your blog.

1. Unusual Youtube videos
Make videos with your own face. You can hide behind a slideshow and provide text notes with cheesy music for the background… or you could record a video with your own face and let your passion for the subject show through in your body language. Shoot videos in weird places,  or with unusual concepts.

2. Play with keyword optimization
Many blog owners simply write about what they like. This is in no way guaranteed to bring in readers, however. Often, it ends up being a very “hit and miss” technique. Instead, look up information on keyword optimization. Write two posts on similar topics, but optimize one and not the other. This will allow you to test whether the results justify the extra effort (which isn’t much).

3. Swap ad services

There’s one free thing you always have if you’re a blog owner: you have space. Use a little space and get a little space in return by swapping ad placements or links with blogs in your niche. Create an eye-catching, controversial banner or hire a graphic designer to do it for you, or agree with the other owner to link to each other’s posts. It takes guts to contact people out of the blue, but it can really pay off.

4. Write a guest post every week

Be sure you correctly choose the site to guest post on. Don’t stick with your own niche; if you run a vegetarian blog, but a lot of vegetarians are interested in self-improvement, try writing a guest post for a self-improvement blog and see if you can attract “overlapping” audiences.

5. Advertise in the real world

The sky is the limit here. Hand out free stuff on college campuses with your blog address on it, put posters around the community, sponsor a kids’ soccer team… do whatever you like and don’t hold back. Something may just make it all worth it.

6. Be controversial

To attract readers, try this: don’t be bland. Make statements, speak your mind, and invite comments and responses. This doesn’t mean to use personal attacks as link bait, however. Be civilized and polite, and don’t call out people by name unless you really want to encourage drama.

7. Be free and open with information

A growing number of people believe in the open source principles of free access to information. By freely giving away information, you may lose out in short-term profits, but you can attract a flood of readers who stick around and spend money and trust you over the long term.

These are all ways to attract traffic that differ just a little (or a lot) from the ordinary blog promotion tactics. Not all of them may work well for you, but if one does, you can reap huge benefits.

Keyword Research – Video 1 of 2

Keyword Research – Video 2 of 2