The new year celebrations have come and gone, many people are realising the truth that they will most likely be returning to work on January 5th (for the UK atleast) and teenagers are facing the grim realisation that school will once again beckon them. Whilst all this is happening I am predicting the future of Internet Marketing and what 2009 has in store for all of the current and future Internet Marketing enthusiasts.

In this article I am going to talk about my own personal feelings as to where I believe Internet Marketing is going to move throughout this year. Taking some of the current movements that have been in the media over the past few months I shall be predicting where I think most of the Internet Marketers attention is going to be focused on and what is going to be the main way of promoting your website in 2009. As well as this I am also going to include the research I have done in to what others feel is going to happen in 2009 for Internet Marketing.

It is clear that with in 2008 many things have happened on the Internet and especially to do with increased attention towards social media marketing and other new areas of Internet Marketing that seem to be opening up. The attention that social media marketing has had in 2008 has lead to blogging platforms creating plugins for social media buttons to be easily added to yours and my blog. Blogging platforms continue to grow trying to keep ahead of the latest trends and fashions on the Internet. They continue to push on the simplicity of  creating a blog so much so that it now takes less than 5 minuntes to create where as in the past it has taken knowledge and experience. We are already at the stage where every man and his dog has a blog so what is next for the Internet and in more relation to this article what is in store for Internet Marketing?

It is easy to see that the current yearly increase in Internet users will keep going in 2009 and whilst this keeps increasing the amount of businesses trying to take advantage of this through Internet Advertising will continue to increase also. 2009 is going to see more people developing their own Internet Marketing service sites as well as more people being employed to take on the tasks of marketing businesses across the web. It is now a common strategy to use the Internet as a method of communicating with your customers. The Internet has not only opened up space for thousands of new jobs and services but it has cut costs for many of the high street retail stores, insurance companies, travel companies and many more.

What movements are we going to see in 2009?

I have been wondering how I can lay my predictions out so they are not too confusing to read so to hopefully make it easier for readers I ve decided to catergorise my predictions related to Internet Marketing fields as well as having a general outlook at Internet Marketing for 2009.

SEO in 2009

Starting with SEO we have already seen Google’s Algorithm change continually over 2008 we have heard that Matt Cutts and his team are working on personalising the Google search engine and making the results more relevant. Well I feel that 2009 is going to see big changes for Google, the pagerank update has already changed from what was once regarded as an update that occured generally every 3 months to one that has surpised many with its most recent update. Not only this but Pagerank updates used to take days to complete and I think its safe to say that Google used to update websites through the server destination targeting specific areas in the world one by one. In the most recent update it was all completed in 24 hours.

Another major change in Google has already started with the introduction of Google Search Wiki a very brave way to go in my eyes. However I trust Google are going to stick at it until they either realise its useless and it will never work or that they have adapted it enough to meet the needs of the average user as well as those of the Internet Marketers. 2009 is going to see Google tweaking Search Wiki and continually tweaking their algorithm. I also think that SEO in general has a large misty future ahead of it. With the introduction of web 2.0, Search Wiki and linking being a thing of the past, Google are definitely going to need to put some sort of new order in place to entice people to link to other websites through their own blog with out sticking a big fat no follow tag in front of it like many of the major sites seem to be doing these days.

Overall SEO has got a long life ahead of it I just hope Google realises that SEO is not going to die and whilst they focus on becoming the dominator of the world us SEO enthusiasts and Internet marketers in general need strategies and tactics that are useful enough and effective enough to pull our sites up to the number one ranking.

Social Media Marketing

This is one internal field of Internet marketing which has had a lot of media attention over the last year as well as an influx in people starting to learn how to take advantage of sites such as Facebook and Stumbleupon.

Social media marketing in 2009 is going to see a massive increase in the amount of people using these sites as tools to increase traffic to their blogs. With this there is going to be many more plugins for Internet Explorer, Firefox and the other web browsers to make things more simple for Internet Marketers.

These sites are not only being used to pull traffic from but they are also being used to network and communicate with other fellow bloggers. This in turn is having an effect on the amount of links that are being dished around, through communicating and becoming friends you will generally see more links being passed your way, word of mouth is also high on the list of benefits as well as friendships that lead to partnerships and guest posting. Social media sites really do have so many advantages that its a mystery why some people still are not using this as a tool to make their sites more popular.

In 2009 we are going to see social media marketing turn more niche, with the growth of the internet in terms of both users and websites you will see what once was seen as a niche turn in to its own mainstream market. With this social media sites will turn to these niches which may once of been unprofitable or not large enough and many others will follow. We are going to see a new wave of social media sites as I spoke about in a previous article Social media Vs Niche Social media.

Overall Social media marketing is going to grow rapidly, it is going to become much more natural to promote your site through social media marketing and we are going to see the creation of hundreds of new niche social media sites which will grasp markets on their own.

Article Marketing

Article marketing has lost the spark it used to have I am not too sure why myself but I feel it is an old tool that many don’t use anymore (I still do). Perhaps its because of the effort involved in building up traffic and external links however I still find it is a useful source of traffic and links which can have a great effect on my blogs.

In all honesty 2009 seems a little unclear for Article Marketing I am going to say that the strength that you receive per link is going to be weakened due to search engines finding the links more “spammy” so to speak. I do believe that Article Marketing has had its time in the spotlight but this is not to say its a dead strategy which is not worth using anymore. I am still able to pull thousands of views each month through Article marketing whilst building up backlinks to one of my blogs.

I do feel though that Article Marketing is a much longer task than many Internet Marketers want to do, it takes more time than they want to invest in one particular task. Now I am speaking out generally here, its just the feeling I get. The Internet and many areas of Internet Marketing seem to be being continually developed and updated so that it is more simplistic, less time consuming and more effective. Take blogging for example with the introduction of Wordpress and Blogger several years ago we are now about to create over 100,000 blogs a day. With Facebook and Myspace we are able to speak with other friends throughout the world in seconds but not only this you are able to add your favourite bands, play games, send e-cards for celebrations such as birthdays or christmas, you can create your own games, make money and much more.

Tell me what has been the movement of Article Marketing in the past year except for the latest software that can submit your article to 1 billion other article directories in a matter of seconds (that wont get Google’s attention).

Overall I think Article Marketing is one of the Grandads of Internet Marketing it has now settled down and is awaiting its inevitable death in years to come. However for the time that it keeps ticking I will keep reaping the benefits I receive from Article Marketing.

Internet Marketing is a continously moving field of strategies which webmasters are able to reap the benefits of for their sites and clients sites. In 2009 I think we are going to see one of the major movements in Internet Marketing since Social media marketing was created.

What did the others say about Internet Marketing in 2009?

I opened up a discussion on a particular forum I am a member of to see what their opinions were about 2009 and the future of the Internet in general and Internet Marketing these are the general responses I received.

We will see more niche/local sites where the Internet will become more and more local

2009 Will see more sites offering paid memberships where customers will pay weekly or monthly. The business where offering everything for free with ads is over and it will become more pay for products/information.

Huge spends on Internet Marketing is to be seen by large companies who have neglected the Internet for too long. Internet Marketing is going to open up in to a world wide strategy used by some of the biggest Multi National Coorporations.

Advertising companies are going to expand rapidly in the next few years with the increase in internet users and businesses targeting the Internet.

Internet Marketing will keep rising because of the increase in people moving on to the Internet and businesses.

As unemployment rises the amount of people stuck at home will rise and most probably the amount of home businesses will rise with it.

The Internet will become saturated with newbies beginning to start their Internet careers, the lower levels of the making money online business will be saturated by low quality sites where as the mid level will open to the idea of quality content and quality custom equals growth.

Online gaming, social networking and online retail will expand whilst other areas with start to slow down.

Social media marketing will be the main focus of many Internet Marketers this year.

Pay Per Click will increase this year with more search results meaning its harder to get ranked organically in the search engines.

In conclusion I think 2009 is going to see a massive increase in online spenditure for big businesses spending money on advertising and marketing whilst consumers decide to spend more online through the comfort of their own chair. Internet marketing is going to see a rise in the amount of people taking an interest to making money online and with this new strategies will be uncovered some of which have been appearing throughout the past few weeks in terms of grasping the best rank in Google.

Thank you for reading I hope you enjoyed the article, sorry for its length I don’t know whats up with me at the moment, I just can’t stop writing. I am very interested in knowing your own predictions for Internet marketing and the Internet in general for this year.

Download your free All in one eBooks

The amount of forums that are being created throughout the Internet are growing rapidly day by day with the creation of new software both open sourced and not it is becoming much easier and cheaper to create your own forum. Whether your planning on creating a forum for a small village or for mothers to discuss methods of child care (strange example). It is a natural occurance to find forums being created each and every day.

Today I am going to share with you my personal top 5 Internet Marketing Forums. These are forums which I have been a member of for quite sometime and in the time I am now able to reflect on the forums and what they have to offer. This is in no particular order or rank merely as they have been laid out in my article’s draft.

Digital Point Forums

Spoken about only yesterday where I wrote a 2,000 word article on the decline of Digital Point forums I am today talking about its good points and why Digital Point is one of my top Internet Marketing forums.

Digital Point forum has over 50,000 active members and an overall 239,000 registered since the day it was established. They have over 1,000,000 threads and 9,000,000 posts as well as this Digital point covers every catergory that you can think of with in the Internet Marketing field, including SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Google, General Business and General Marketing. Each section is filled with years of useful information written and carried on down through generations of Digital Point members some of which were experts in their own field.

For beginners Digital Point can be one of the best places to go because the forum is so active you are bound to get an answer to a question within an hour. One caution I do bring attention to is to not rely on the first answer you may receive to a question and to watch out for incorrect information. With a forum as large as Digital Point you often are given incorrect information or information that may not be 100% factual.

Another large bonus with Digital Point forums is its extremely popular Buy, Sell and Trade section where you will always find hundreds of people browsing the several sections that are sub catergories to this. These include Sites, Domains, Freebies, Services, Link Exchanges and more.

Digital point has a mass gravity throughout the Internet and till this day pulls in several hundred new members each week. If you have not already browsed through Digital Points abundant amount of information and injected the forum with your own advice and information I do advise that you take a look now.

Niche Choppers

This is a fairly new forum to the Internet however this is not to say it hasn’t already made its mark with in the Internet Marketing field. With over 1200 members 10,000 posts and 1,000 threads in under a year, this forum just keeps on growing.

Out of all the forums I will write about in this article this has to be my favourite, now I am not saying this because I own the forum (I don’t) neither am I saying this because I am in a competition where the top referall receives a prize (this explains the referall links). I am saying this because the forum has a great bunch of people, the guy who owns the forum has an exceptional personality and business mind where he definitely abides the “treat others how you would like to be treated” phrase. As well as this the forum is in its early days and I have always wanted to be part of something that is obviously going to be big from the start, with this forum I can be and so can you.

Unlike Digital Point forums, Niche choppers has a smaller aray of forum catergories mainly because it focuses more on being an Affiliate marketing forum rather than a general Internet Marketing forum however it does cover some of the main Internet marketing fields whilst leaving a general section for other Internet marketed related threads.

Niche choppers is definitely a place I advise any beginner, novice or expert to join not only because it will boost my referalls but because you will become part of a community well more like a family.

You can join Niche Choppers here.

SitePoint Forums

Again this is not specifically an Internet Marketing forum however it has all the ingredients and more to be regarded as a place to talk, advise and educate your self about Internet Marketing.

Sitepoint has over 300,000 members over 500,000 threads and 4,000,000 posts although Sitepoint isn’t primarily a forum they have been able to draw a lot of traffic to their forum and have been able to make it a large success as with their marketplace and other diversifications the site has made.

I have been a member at Sitepoint nearly as long as I have been a member of Digital Point and although I havn’t been half as active as I have been at Digital Point I have found so many useful threads that have been written by true experts. I have bookmarked many threads at Sitepoint and learnt a lot through their forum.

Sitepoint has a lot to offer anyone who may not only be interested in Internet Marketing but also the design and coding aspects of creating a website. Its definitely worth checking out.

SEO Chat

Similar to Sitepoint, SEO chat is not primarily a forum and instead is spread out in to several different catergories all based around SEO and Internet Marketing as a whole.

SEO Chat has over 60,000 members, 200,000 threads and 600,000 posts and it is quite obvious from the name that they focus mainly on SEO rather than the more broad Internet Marketing field however they do digress to talk about the general Internet Marketing outlook.

I joined SEO Chat early in 2008 after I had been using one of the tools on their website as soon as I joined the forum I was able to learn a lot more about SEO. Mainly because back then I was a little less intelligent when it came to SEO and I definitely didn’t know as much as I do now. Its probably safe to say that I was merely a beginner in my early stages of learning about SEO and although Digital Point was one of the main forums that helped me in my SEO education I was also able to pull a lot of quality information out from this forum.

If your interested mainly in SEO or if your wanting to learn more about SEO to boost your own sites rankings then I definitely recommend taking a look at this forum. With a large amount of resources and information already there for you it will surely help any beginner in their SEO journey.

Warrior Forum

With over 100,000 members, 33,000 threads and 300,000 posts this forum has a lot to offer anyone interested in Internet Marketing.

This is a forum I was recommended to by a few people mainly for its quick response to questions and quality of members, by this I mean experience of members or amount of knowledge. Now obviously I dont speak for everyone who is a member of Warrior forum saying that they have a large amount of knowledge on Internet Marketing but when you go from Digital Point to this forum you do sense that many of the members have a larger amount of experience, perhaps there just all old (jokes :).

Warrior forum has plenty to offer the beginner, novice and expert your guaranteed to get an answer to a question you may ask within an hour. Although the forum has a much lower amount of members compared to Digital Point forums it does seem to have more active members on at anyone time this helps to ensure you not only receive an answer to a question but a variety of answers which helps to strengthen the quality of your answer and ensure it is the correct answer.

Each forum here has something to offer and although they all touch upon the same subject your going to find different people with different opinions, experiences and amounts of knowledge at each forum you join.

Overall I would advise you to take a look at each of these forums and perhaps join them all. You don’t have to be active at every forum but by joining them when ever your in need of an answer quickly you can always count on one of the forums being able to respond in a matter of minutes.

I hope you enjoyed this article and found it interesting, I am intrigued to know which forum is your favourite? (Don’t forget to join Niche Choppers

Download your free All in one eBooks

Digital Point is one of the most popular Internet Marketing forums on the internet. With over 230,000 members it has grown rapidly over the past several years. However with such a large forum it is hard to keep everyone happy and within the past year I would say that Digital Points respect and authority over the Internet Marketing field has shrunk. If your not a member at Digital Point you may be wondering why such a large forum seems to be in decline and if you are a member you may already have some sort of idea, either way in this article I shall be explaning my own thoughts about Digital Point Forums and why it is declining.

I joined Digital Point back in November 2007 which may not seem like a very long time when you compare it to Digital Points overall lifespan but it has been enough time for me to realise that Digital Point is not what it used to be.

When I first joined Digital Point I was merely a beginner in the Internet Marketing field, I had little knowledge on any aspect of Internet Marketing but I was ready to read and learn. I was very interested in SEO and the concept of increasing traffic to your website through good search engine rankings and therefore I spent a lot of my time in the SEO section of Digital Point. From the moment I started reading threads within this section it appeared that there were several known experts of the SEO section so obviously I made more effort to read their threads and posts.

After I had spent more time exploring the rather large Internet Marketing forum I discovered the “Proxy Discussion Thread” which has grown over the last year and a half in to a thread which now has over 13,000 replies and 400,000 views an exeptional amount. I quickly became very interested in proxy sites and the well known yet very unrealistic idea of making a decent amount of cash daily with very little effort. With this in mind I set upon creating my first ever website this was to be a proxy site which quickly developed in to a proxy network. Long story short (it isn’t supposed to be my digital point life story) I learnt a lot from Digital Point throughout my first 6 very active months of reading, posting and replying. I had recognised that Digital Point had several visible experts in the sections where I was most active and a lot of the information back then was backed up by several members, it would be well explained and many of the members were exceptionally helpful.

However within the first 6 months of me registering to Digital Point forums I had received several infractions some which I agree with some which I dont. As well as Admins having made some big mistakes in trying to reduce the amount of threads in certain areas of the buy, sell and trade section by introducing the “Below $5 services or products belong in the freebies section” rule. Obviously this would seem a little strange considering the Freebies section is obviously for Freebies not something which you may pay for, however I was mature enough to let this go. Although with the introduction of this new rule my proxy advertising business dried up as fast as you can say “Stupid Fools” from what was making me $400-$500 per month it shrunk to a measely $5-$10 per month. The main annoyance from this was that to be able to get my business back Digital Point Authorities were basically telling me that I had to increase the prices of my services in order to gain my custom back although things would obviously not work this way.

To conclude this section, within the first 6 months of me registering to Digital Point I had realised that although Digital Point was a well established forum the Authorities were still making new rules to handle the rapid growth, the owner of Digital Point seemed to not take much control in their forum, a large amount of “newbies” were registering to the forum, questions would be repeated several times a week and lastly if you ever had a problem or were annoyed with a decision an Authority figure had made it was difficult for you to discuss this with the Authorities or to find out why such a decision was made.

Now I don’t want people to think this article is all about me having a rant as this is not what the article is supposed to be about and to be frank I don’t want to bring down the quality of my blog with an article which may seem like this. The previous couple of paragraphs explain quite common and assumable problems which you may find with a forum which has grown so rapidly as Digital Point has but its definitely the next 6-8 months which has brought on the decline of Digital Point. The previous paragraphs merely explain problems which could of been controlled and eradicated.

After a year or so of me having registered to Digital Point I started to notice that other members were getting annoyed with increasing numbers of newbies asking the same questions, threads which should of been stickied not being, Admins being “power possessed” and perhaps being a little to harsh on people, thread after thread being removed or locked, members trying to take advantage of newbies, scamming, cheating, insulting, general immature behaviour, spamming, the annoying database error and so much more (I could seriously go on for hours). There is so much that is wrong with Digital Point forums that it would take a lot to correct and with out the actual person who owns the forum (Shawn something or other) taking notice and charge of the situation it will keep on declining.

So why do you think Digital Point is declining?

So you may be wondering why I think Digital Point is declining well the previous paragraphs explained briefly some of the issues that Digital Point currently has other than this though I have been taking note of the amount of active members Digital Point has over the past month and I have noticed that it has started to decline.

I started recording the amount of active members in late November and noticed that although the forum had an overall 225,000 members there were only 60,000 members active. Now you maybe thinking well 60,000 members is still a very large amount and I agree but if you take that as a percentage compared to the amount of overall members its almost 33%. Obviously for a forum that has been established for as long as Digital Point has there are going to be the few who lose interest in Internet Marketing and let their account expire and there are going to be others who are stupid and get banned but I wouldn’t expect 66% of those members becoming inactive. So there has to be a problem.

Well in the last 6 weeks I have been analysing the amount of overall members compared to the amount of active members and I have found although the amount of overall members has increased from 225,000 to 239,000 the amount of active members have decreased from 60,600 to 59,500. Although this is only over a 6 week period it is still evidence to show that Digital Point is shrinking. You maybe thinking that its only shrunk by 500 members in the last 6 weeks but if you think about it more you will realise that although 14,000 more people have registering to Digital Point forums they have a growth of -500 members.

Now you maybe wondering well how can this be, whats the cause of this well I think I have a couple of explantions for the lack of growth or well minus growth that Digital Point has been experiencing.

What are the reasons for the minus growth of Digital Point?

The factors that I consider to be influencing the lack of growth in Digital Point are as follows

1. Members are becoming annoyed and are deleting or allowing their accounts to become inactive (now there are too many reasons they could become annoyed for me to list here (Digital Points famous Database error and slow loading speed)).
2. Digital Point Authorities (some of which seem to be power crazy) are banning too many people for stupid little nit picky things. Although the Authorities may only be using 7 day bans or 14 day bans the members that are banned may move on to a different forum. Remember its not like the old days where Digital Point was a breed of its own there are hundreds more Internet Marketing forums some which easily live up to Digital Point.
3. Accounts being suspended pretty similiar to the last point but instead of Authorities banning people they may suspend them instead.
4. Lastly and it probably doesn’t account for that many account deletions but members forget their details or the forum through real life problems or lack of interest.

There are probably several other factors which also help to cause the decline of Digital Point forums but these are the main factors I can think of. However I think the main reason for the decline of Digital Point is the current heirachy so to speak. Admins seem to have full control currently and although I cannot say this with 100% guarantee I don’t think Digital Point’s owner has much interest over the forum as it stands. This creates a big problem if anyone actually wants to ensure Digital Point does not become just a place full of newbies which it is currently on its way towards.

The problem is internal

It is obvious through the research that I have done that the problem is internal because although 13,000 new members had arrived in the last 6 weeks the forum was still 500 members down from 6 weeks previous. So the Internet is still drawn to Digital Point forums and people are still interested in joining the forum to learn however it seems that the more newbies that arrive the more experienced Internet Marketers leave either through their own choice or being forced.

I think the solution to Digital Point’s problems lies in the Internal Structure of its Authority as well as the structure of the overall forum. They need people controlling each section and they need people in control of reading people’s suggestions and writing feedback on the suggestions not just saying there is nothing they can do.

Where else can you go?

Throughout the last year and a half I have seen a lot of people losing interest in Digital Point forums many through annoyance and anger who have decided to retreat some where else, to smaller less clustered forums. I for one have become less active at Digital Point forums and much more active at the new forum I read and post on quite freqeuntly where I feel more comfortable. Without this turning in to an advertisement for a new forum I would recommend Niche Choppers to anyone who is registered at Digital Point or is interested in Internet Marketing and mainly Affiliate Marketing. By the way the link to Niche Choppers does contain my member referall because I am a part of a current competition but thats nothing to do with why I recommend it or why I have just spent the last hour writing a 2,000 word article on Digital Point.

In conclusion to the article I feel Digital Point has declined some what, however it is definintely not the end for Digital Point. It has so much energy through out the Internet Marketing field still that it continues to pull in new members it has its own gravity so to speak and with this it is able to expand. However with the continuation of problems and situations arising that have not yet been dealt with it is hard to say where Digital Point will be in the future years. As many people who read this blog know, I am a believer that things on the Internet are becoming much more focused and specific and I am not sure if Digital Point fits in to this new wave of niche sites.

I hope you enjoyed this article and I encourage anyone that has read this article to comment and express their own opinion on this topic, whether they are a member of Digital Point or just an avid reader. Thank you and a happy new year.

Download your free All in one eBooks

I was expecting the pagerank update to be seen in the early days of January but instead it seems Google just couldn’t wait. If yours has not yet updated then perhaps give it a little longer, new websites may not of been covered by the update either.

All in all I am happy with the update, although back-links used to be a pagerank 3 because of the change in design and changes in the link structure it has hit the sites pagerank pretty hard with the home page now being at 2. However internal pages have started to see there page rank reappear with many pages being 2’s and 1’s.

How about you, are you pleased with the update?

Download your free All in one eBooks

This is the sixth part of 11 things to consider before you start blogging and in today’s chapter we will be looking at the choice that bloggers have to make when they start blogging. Whether they will write their articles for their readers or for the search engines. This is an extremely important topic to cover and the choice you make will affect your blog’s growth in terms of readership, search engine rankings and the overall life span of your blog.

You might be wondering what the difference between writing for the reader and writing for the search engines is, well I am going to explain that now.

What is writing for the reader?

To write for the reader you incorporate several important points which should be combined in each and every article that you write.

These being

• Make the article entertaining
• Add some personality to the article (Include your own opinion or past experiences)
• Keep the article flowing (add structure to the article)
• Make the article scannable (allow the reader to scan over and still pick up the main points)
• Ensure the main point is not lost within the article (keep it focused)
• Take advantage of customisable texts (bold, italics, underlining, quotations)

Now these are not the only things you can do to make sure its reader friendly but these are the six main points that I try and add to each of my own articles. The fourth point and the last point are two that I am currently working on. With my switch over to Wordpress it has been made much easier, hopefully I am growing more succesfull with making my articles less boring, more entertaining and easy to scan.

Anyways the idea is that writing an article should be more about entertaining the reader whilst giving them the information they were looking for just not in a boring manner. If your not used to writing or you are but your not very good at writing then don’t worry with time and practice comes perfection (well not perfection but as close as you can get). Believe me this time last year my articles were far worse than this, I rambled on about nonsense for half of the article and then the last part I may of added what the readers wanted to know. Through time your articles will increase in quality and its likely that your readers will notice this and they may even respect you more for this.

Now at this point you may be wondering, well OK Will I understand what writing for the reader is but what the heck is writing for the Search engines, well I shall explain this to you now.

What is writing for the Search Engines?

To write for the search engines you will have the keywords your targeting for the article in mind. You will write the Title with nothing but the search engines in mind and you will ensure in each and every sentence or near enough you have placed your keyword, even if it doesn’t make complete sense.

Take this parapgraph below for example; Where I shall use red car as the main keyword.

So I received my red car today, the red car is amazing it has all the features you would dream about getting in a red car and on top of all that it is a convertible red car. You may be wondering where I got the money for the red car from, well I won a competition and the prize was the red car. I could of had a different colour but red is my favourite so I chose the red car instead of the rest. I shall update you soon with more news on my red car and I will also take some pictures of the red car for you.

This peice of text is a classic example of a person writing for the search engines and not for their readers. After reading that you was probably getting annoyed at the amount of times red car was used and to think if the writer was talking about his red car for the length of this article no one would read it. Now this isn’t just because its a daft example and no one would ever want to read an article about a red car anyways. Its because readers will get annoyed at being reminded what the article is obviously about. Instead of getting to the point the writer will circle around the main point for several sentences so that they can include six or seven more main keywords.

Now writing for the search engines is about more than just stuffing your article with keywords (known as Keyword Stuffing) its about over optimising your title tags, meta tags and adding too many links. By doing all this you are not satisfying both your reader and the search engines. Instead your going to make your reader click away from your blog and the search engine is not going to respect you for over optimising your blog.

Instead of making the choice between writing for the reader or the search engine you need to find the balance. This article wasn’t about making a choice between the two it was about informing the bloggers on the two extremes. One extreme is writing too much for your reader and forgetting about the search engines and the second is writing your article with your keywords in mind instead of having your readers in mind.

The balance should be considering both when writing your article and the way you do this is by considering both as your writing it. This is much easier said than done however it can be achieved through practice as well as re-reading content over and over again before you click publish.

Before I publish this article I will re-read the article then try and make it a little more scannable, make sure it all makes sense and the points I wanted to get across have been established. Then I will move on to editing the title so its eye catching to the reader and ensuring it contains my main keyword. Even after I click publish I will view the page and check that everything lines up OK and that the bold is not too overpowering in places.

Overall you need to find the balance, in some cases its hard to find keywords to optimise your page for and in other cases its hard to select add your own experiences or personality, it might be hard to make an article entertaining if your talking about a difficult or uncomfortable topic but there are always ways to make an article easier to read and take in. Remember by writing a great article for your readers they will reward you by linking to your article, telling friends, stumbling, sphinning and increasing traffic to your article.

I hope you enjoyed the sixth part of 11 things to consider before you start blogging the seventh part will be published next week. Thanks.

The third and last part of Back up Blogging looks at what you can do if your computer breaks an annoyance which could happen to anyone at any time in their blogging career. I’ve had it happen to me once or twice however I was lucky enough to have a back up computer which I was selling at the time.

Your computer can breakfor hundreds of reasons, some which you can pick up straight away such as the PSU dying but others are much harder to uncover and could take weeks to be repaired. The plan you need to have just in case this happens to you is what you can do in this situation so that your online businesses are not affected.

Firstly lets compile a list of things you won’t be able to do if your computer breaks

1. Access the Internet I will go in to more detail for reasons you will find out later on.
   
2. Access E-mails or E-mail accounts
3. Access Admin Panels
4. Access Forums, Message Boards or any other various social networking, social media websites
5. Access your server or hosting/cPanel
6. Upload/Edit web files
7. Access to information such as saved passwords, usernames for all of the above.

The last one is a very important point to make because although you, your girlfriend, family member or friend may have a laptop or another computer you can use will they have your log in details or will you be able to remember them.

This is something I came across when my computer broke although I had access to my old computer this had all my old previous passwords and usernames it took days to figure out some of my passwords and in some cases I never ended up logging on. Now you maybe thinking well why didn’t you just do password recovery you dummy?! This is because password recovery usually requires access to an E-mail account which again requires a login username and password which I had also inconveniently forgotten so I  had no way to recover my passwords.

The lesson I learn here was to use either a password which you would not forgot or to have your login details for each of your accounts written down or in your mobile phone, just so you have access to them apart from on the computer. Now this may not sound safe so however you store these details is up to you just make sure you have access to your details without having to use your computer (which would be broken at this point).

The second very important point on this list is having access to your website files now if you have forgotten your log in details to your hosting account or you can’t remember your FTP server information which is quite common for myself. Then you won’t be able to retrieve your webfiles even if you have computer access. Instead it is a good idea to make a hard copy of your webfiles external to your computer. Like I was suggesting in the first part of the back up blogging series where I urged people to back up their blogs there are more than just the internal reasons related to your blog. It is always good to have your web files stored somewhere else in the event that your computer breaks. Again like I suggested in the first part of the series a good way of backing up your files is via tape or CD this means you have an external copy of your web files which you can access through any computer.

So now we have talked about the problems you may incur from having no computer access if your computer breaks lets now talk about strategies you can take if this happens. Really we are not just talking about if your computer breaks, although the article is focused on this in particular. We are also talking about if your computer/laptop is stolen or you are on holiday or at your girlfriends, mothers, friends or anyone elses house where you have no access to your computer and you urgently need to access the internet.

There are some strategies you can when your computer breaks, the suggestions are quite similiar to those of the second chapter where we looked at what to do if you have no Internet access

1. Ask a friend or family member if you can use their computer.
2. Go down to your nearest Internet Cafe and use their computer.
3. Use your laptop if you have one or spare computer.

The difference between your computer breaking and having no Internet access like I talked about in the second article is that all those web files, software and everything else you use in your day to day blogging life are not at your disposal. To play it safe I would back up your whole computer incase your hardrive dies or is destroyed. This guarantees that you will have access to your computer’s files even in the event that your computer breaks and if your hardrive is faulty.

The main points to take away from this article are:

• Make sure you have access to your login information with out having to access your computer. On a peice of paper, second computer or laptop, mobile phone, your hand anywhere.
• Make backups of all your computers files including all of your web files and blogging files, articles, images, videos.

I hope you enjoyed this article, it makes a change from the usual articles. However we will be back on track tomorrow with the sixth part of 11 things to consider before you start blogging

If you think I have missed any other really useful strategies for ensuring your blog is not affected if your computer breaks then please post them in the comment section or E-mail me them.

Download your free All in one eBooks

The first chapter in this three part series looked at why you should back up your blog and I used my own experiences to try and make it clear that backing up your blog should be an essential part of blogging not just a chore.

The second part of Back up Blogging will be looking at what you should do if you lose your internet connection. If blogging is an important perhaps vital part of your every day life then you shouldn’t just be relying on that one internet connection to connect you to your blog. You should have a back up plan and perhaps a third back up plan to back up the first back up plan (I am sure this is getting confusing). Basically you need to make sure you have a strategy which will allow you to connect to the internet if your own personal internet connection fails. Luckily I have never yet been in this situation however with me now being at University and using a connection that I have absolutely no control over I think its about time I devised a plan.

You may be thinking well it will never happen to me I pay so much per month for my internet that they guarantee that it will work 24 hours a day. This maybe so but you can never guarantee something as fragile as an internet connection there could be various reasons why an internet connection could be disrupted which are both server side and client side too.

Why your Internet Connection might go down?

1. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) could make a mistake and cancel your service
2. The ISP could have technical problems resorting in shutting down their servers temporarily.
3. Your router may break or become faulty.
4. Your telephone connection or wireless connection could be disrupted.
5. The software installed on your computer could be sabotaged or not work.
6. Your computer could be hacked.

There are various reasons as to why your Internet connection may be disrupted it is how you act at these times which is vital though. Obviously blogging for some people may not be that important but I am talking more generally than just blogging even though the title suggest I am talking only about bloggers this is something that could affect everyone in different ways. You could have an item on eBay that you really want to buy ending that day. You could have an eBay item your selling ending that day and you might be needed to answer questions. You might have one day left to renew a domain or hosting or anything else which may expire that day or charge you that day if you don’t pay them. There are thousands of things that people feel they desperately need to do on the Internet but without the Internet they can’t. So what can we do?

What can you do if you lose your Internet Connection?

If your Internet connection is disrupted for what ever reason with out trying to fix it or phone someone up in a different country and spend hours trying to understand each other why not go to Starbucks or Costa. Yes, this is my first solution most Coffee houses provide free Internet to its customers. OK you might have to buy a Coffee first but just think you can get on the Internet and secondly your helping people in the third world countries, perhaps not by much but you are still helping.

If you don’t have a Coffee house close by why not try Apple shops, they always have free Internet access. This is so people can test out their latest Apple mac’s and Iphone’s e.t.c You don’t have to buy one though just “pretend” and instead go in their to use the Internet.

Internet Cafe’s there primary use is to provide the Internet so your almost guaranteed to be able to use the Internet here. You usually have to pay a cheap rate per minute or hour of useage but at least you will be able to get on to the Internet.

Go and bug your friends, yes that favour they owe you well why not ask to lend their computer so you can use the Internet. Better still use your own laptop if you have one so they don’t feel as reluctant to say yes.

Lastly why not just go to your closest city centre if you have a laptop their is bound to be some sort of Internet connection. If thats not the case you have always got the first four suggestions.

In this day and age there is always some way you can connect to the Internet even if your own Internet connection is not working. This is the world we live in its crazy I know.

Anyways have fun, hope you enjoyed this article. A little of topic from our usual stuff but hey its still information you could do with knowing about. Thanks.

Considering I’ve had a very stressful and quite shockingly realistic week I’ve decided that I would use the experience that I gained and the lessons I learnt during the last couple of days to write an article on why it is important to back up your blog. This article will be a three part series the first one is looking at why you should back up your blog’s web files. The second will be looking at what to do if you lose your internet connection and the third will look at what to do if your computer breaks.

Backing up your blog, why you should do it?

If you are one of those people who only have a copy of their website on the server that your site is hosted on you should really think carefully whether you should really take such a major risk.

Backing up your website should be a chore that you complete each and every week especially if your posting new information on your site daily. Your taking a major risk if you have not got another copy of your web files saved to either a remote site or on your computer. The reason for this is because most hosting companies do not guarantee that your website will be backed up every week, even every month or even once! It is not regarded as a part of their job or service that they should provide. It is usually regarded as being the web owners responsibility which I agree with. Why should the web host take responsilbity for keeping a backup of your website. Obviously if I owned a web hosting company I would try and back up all of my clients web files just incase their was a major incident which was actually my (the web hosts) fault. However this isn’t always the case most web hosting companies say in their terms and coniditions whether they will back up your website or not so make sure to read your web hosts terms and conditions.

Last week I had a shocking suprise to find that my hosting account had been suspended (most of you probably saw this when trying to enter my site). The first thing I did was contacted my hosting provider and my friend who I have an agreement with for free hosting. However whilst awaiting a reply what was running through my head was the fact that I had no recent back up of my website including no copy of my unique wordpress theme or back up of my website’s content. It was a nasty reality to consider that if the web hosting company had not replied to me or had told me that my site had been totally deleted from their server that I would have to start all over again after a years work.

Not only this but whilst my web host had suspended my account my blogs traffic, all my readers and the potential new subscribers were coming to my site and being told that my account had been suspended which is both unprofessional and a waste of time for me and the reader.

Luckily after two days of no sleep and stressing instead of concentrating on University work my friend contacted me and now its been all sorted. I have now backed up my website with a brand new back up and all is good. However the point I am trying to make is because I hadnt planned for an event like this I was not prepared and it could of been much worse.

I want to make sure my readers are not put through the stress that I went through last week, I want my readers to be prepared for any unplanned event that could take place so they don’t loose out on time, money or potential subscribers.

Please remember to backup your blog!

There are two main ways you can backup your blog the first being

Remote backup this is a backup which runs from a completely different server than the one your site is hosted on. The advantage with making a back up of your website on a completely different server and preferably a different hosting company is that if the current hosting provider you are with has a fire or the building is destroyed or the servers are destroyed or anything else that you will always have another backup saved some where else.

The second way you can backup your website is by downloading your website on to your computer this is a backup strategy most people seem to use and its one that I think works best. If the server your site is hosted on deletes your website’s files either by mistake or delibrately then at least you will have a backup of these files saved some where else.

A third way of backing up your website is through burning the files on to a disc or tape this way you have an external source for your website’s files. It is away from the threats of hackers or being sabotaged by other means.

Overall I think every website owner should backup your website in every way possible just in case. You never know when your hosting provider is going to make a mistake or when the server is going to delete your files or make an error along the way.

I hope this article motivated you enough to back up your blog or website. Thanks for reading.

Increasing your RSS numbers

These are several of the strategies I have been using over the past couple of weeks to increase my blogs readership for the blogging idol competition.

Strategies for increasing RSS readership

1. Ensuring that my RSS feed buttons are displayed correctly that they are working and that I offer both the option of subscribing via an RSS feed and via e-mail.
2. Submitting my RSS feed to RSS directories however I am not convinced this had any effect at all on the amount of subscribers I have.
3. Writing an article informing my readers that I had entered this competition and explaining what the competition is about.
4. Focusing more on social media marketing although many argue its highly untargeted I beg to differ considering the average amount of page views I receive from Stumbleupon is 3.59.
5. Not only have I been focusing on social media marketing but also on trying to get my articles to hit Sphinns front page something I was able to succeed with one of my latest articles.
6. Posting more frequently since my redesign I have been a lot more motivated to post as I can now do it with ease through wordpress. I am continuing to posting one post per day which in a month’s time I should be increasing to 9 posts per week.
7. Asking friends that I have made through social media marketing and other places to subscribe to my RSS feed. Not pressuring them instead just asking them if they liked the content why not subscribe.
8. I have also been very keen to start some more article series which involve posting a chapter each week. These help with gaining subscribers and also if you have trouble thinking of ideas for articles then it’s a great way of easing this pressure.

These are the main strategies I have been using to increase my subscriber count and although it seems to have had a positive effect on the amount of subscribers I have it is nothing compared to some of the competing blogs. However many factors should be considered when entering a competition which is based largely on increasing your readership. One of the most important being that your competition are not only in the field your in they can be in a totally different market with a larger target market and a larger potential for increasing readership. I won’t go in to this now instead I will write a whole article which will talk about the experiences I have had from entering blogging competitions.

As well as the strategies I have already put in place, I have several other strategies that I intend to use over the fourth coming weeks.

Strategies I intend to use to increase RSS readership

1. Blog commenting is something I used to do quite frequently however I have for some reason stopped commenting as much so this is something I want to increase again.
2. Guest posting is another form of marketing I have wanted to try out for a long time however I have never got round to it, instead I used all my good titles for my own blog. However I am going to try and test this out sometime before the end of the competition.
3. Extending the length of stay my visitors have on the blog. This is a goal which I am not only using to increase readership but also to increase page views. Before I changed my web design to this design and started using Wordpress I was lucky enough to have a 2.7% bounce rate which I have talked about in a previous article. Without actually focusing on decreasing my bounce rate I was able to get that bounce rate and I suggested a couple of different strategies which may of affected this. It is now clear to me that the major factor which effected the bounce rate was that I linked every single article to every single page on my site. Now I am not intending to do this again as it was a poor linking structure to use considering I had over 100 internal links on each page but instead I am planning on adding some wordpress plug ins to promote the best articles and most recent articles on my blog. This will hopefully in turn increase the amount of page views as well as enticing people to subscribe to my blog.

Blog commenting is something I have talked about before and the benefits of using such a strategy can be a rapid increase in traffic and growth as well as having a positive effect on your SERPs.

Guest posting is another great traffic booster, there are certain strategies you can use to maximise traffic from guest posting as well as maximising your publicity such as using a certain pattern for posting your articles on other people’s blogs to ensure people hear about your blog more than once over a short period of time.

I never enter blogging contests to win and although some people may find this strange and a little bit stupid but its not about winning for me. Its about being motivated to increase growth on my blog whilst having fun and competing with others. Blogging Idol always increase my blogs growth and even if I don’t win I will be happy with the results.

Stay tuned to here more about the blogging idol competition and subscribe to my blog.

Download your free All in one eBooks

Blogging Idol: Voting Session

As many of you probably read I am currently entered in the second edition of the Blogging Idol competition which is taking place on Daily Blog Tips.

The second edition of blogging idol is a little different from the first because this time there is three seperate functions of the competition. The first being the increase in RSS subscribers which is currently being led by one blog with an increase in readership of 800 plus. The second function is through the public voting session which is being held now until the Friday 28th November. I am asking you as my reader to please vote for my blog and help to increase the chances of this blog winning and increase growth.

The concept of the voting session is simple basically the three blogs which have the most votes by Friday the 28th November receives a point each which will be used in the final count of blogging idol to calculate who has won.

Backlinks needs YOU

You can vote for my blog by simply going to this vote page here and scrolling down to the 71st voting option where it says 71. http://www.back-links.org. Click the little circle and scroll down further to click vote. Its fast and simple, by doing that you are supporting my blog and increasing the chances that I am succesfull.

I hope for your vote and please tell friends, family, loved ones, cats, dogs, fish anyone and anything that can vote via a seperate IP address

Click this link to vote for the next blogging idol

Download your free All in one eBooks