Are You Commenting on Blogs? | PalTip Blogging Tips

Posted on June 11, 2012 by shari

English: Comment icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Commenting on Blogs Drives Traffic

Driving traffic to your new blog is hard work. Are you commenting on blogs? Commenting on blogs is a great way to introduce yourself, share your expert knowledge, and drive traffic to your blog. Most bloggers, when they read the comments on their posts, will click on your link to see who is behind the comment. If you are commenting on numerous blogs every day, think of how much traffic you can generate from commenting.

Engagement and Relationships

Driving traffic to your blog by commenting on other blogs should be part of your strategy. The goal should be to form relationships, and commenting is one of the tactics. So comment on other blogs, tweet links to blogs that you have read and enjoyed, post links to other blogs on Facebook. Most importantly,be nice. Being nice gets you real traffic.

The Dos and Don’ts When Commenting

Make sure that your signature includes a link to your own blog. Use your real

name, and your avatar (profile picture) should be you. People want to know with whom they are engaging.
Be nice. If commenting is part of your strategy for building your community, remember that if you are not nice, people are not going to come visit your blog/site!
Get to know the blogger, read a few posts, not only the one you want to comment on.
The length of your comment is also very important. If your comment is too long, it might be considered a rant, and possibly be ignored. If your comment

is too short, the blogger might think you’re just a spammer trying to get a link.If you want to speak, speak!
Once you have commented, you have created another link in the Google love chain. The more links the merrier, but remember this only applies to relevant content! Don’t think that if you just write, “Have a good day,” someone is going to click on your link. Make your comments worthy of someone’s click.

Where To Comment

Part and parcel to writing your own blog is finding other blogs that complement yours, that share a similar voice, and that would appreciate your expertise. Once you have found them add them to your Google Reader or your RSS feed. Check them regularly and when you have something to add, share, and comment on…comment.

I recently read a great post on commenting by Annabel Candy (and I suggest that you all read it). I love tip #3 in her post, where she says:

3. If you leave a comment for another blogger, you’ll probably make their day and you might even make a friend for life.

The Comment Debate: On or Off

While writing this post, I must be completely honest and say that there is a huge debate amongst leading bloggers, whether to turn off, or leave on the ability to comment on one’s blog.

I recommend reading the following posts about in regards to this debate:

DEBATE! SHOULD YOU ALLOW COMMENTS ON YOUR BLOG? FIND OUT WHAT TWO REMARKABLY POPULAR BLOGGERS THINK

YES, BLOG COMMENTS ARE STILL WORTH THE EFFORT

Until you have decided whether to remove the commenting on your own blog, you should continue to comment on other blogs. The following is from the link above. I agree!

“A blog without comments is a soap-box, plain and simple. Not having comments says you are only interested in passing on your wisdom, without testing it against any external source (at least not where others can watch you do so) or leaving open the opportunity to actually learn something from those who don’t have their own blogs, or aren’t on Twitter or Google+.”

Do you comment on other peoples blogs? Have you seen traffic on your blog from commenting?

Blogging Tools: How to Find What to Write About

Posted on June 11, 2012 by shari

Before we go into the details on how to find what to write about, let’s just jump back to another post, and remember that you should be using an editorial calendar. Using an editorial calendar makes blogging so much easier. Even with a calendar set up with topics and dates, bloggers often fall into bloggers block! Here are some tools to help you find what to blog about.

Image source: http://socialmediaillumination.wordpress.com

Scheduling your posts

Your editorial calendar should not only be about titles, and dates, it should represent a certain pattern too. Your readers should come to expect and look for your posts on certain days about certain topics. For example, Monday’s could be How-to’s, Tuesday’s industry news, Wednesday’s Tips and Tools, Thursday’s book/product reviews or interviews, and Fridays something light and funny right before the weekend. Following this repetitive scheduling makes it easier for you to find what to write about.

What are other bloggers writing?

Do you have a feed set up so that you can see what other influential bloggers are writing about in you niche? You should. Setting up a feed is simple. You can use Google reader, or rss feeds. Go over what they are writing, look to see if you can debate one of them or find what they have missed on a particular idea or product.

How to Find What to Write About: Curate

A huge trend in media today is curated content. I don’t know if curating your blog posts everyday is something that I would suggest, but once a week it works. Great places to look for curated information are:

Content Generator Google Doc

I am not sure where I found this or who introduced me to it (sorry I can’t give credit), but this is a great tool to use. Just copy the document and save it with a new name. Here is the link to the content generator document. In the B3 field, just add in your search query or keyword.

Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com.”

Wondering where to find inspiration? Find out what is trending!

Trending topics might just be that boost that your blog is looking for. To find out what is trending now, live, in real-time, check out http://www.google.com/trends/ and http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/insights/ which is an amazing new tool (free)!

After watching this video, I am sure that you will be inspired to find great new leads on post topics for your blog. Don’t forget to then blast your blog post on FB and Twitter using trending relevant hashtags.

If you have any tips on how to find what to write about, please share them with us.

Monetizing Your Blog | PalTip Blog Series: How To Blog

Posted on June 5, 2012 by shari

Monetizing a blog is one of today’s hottest trends, but many bloggers are worried about the technical side of it. Read on to see when and how you can monetize your blog even if you’re not interested in investing hours on your monetization.

When should you start thinking about monetizing your blog?

Some people suggest monetizing your blog when you’ve written 30-50 posts. When deciding on how to monetize your blog, you have to keep your audience in mind. Your readers come back to your blog because you are feeding them great, relevant content. They will not continue to read your blog if you suddenly put up flashy banner ads all over your site.

One other important note; don’t expect to make lots money on your blog right away. It takes time to build a converting readership! However, you have to start somewhere, so let’s start!

Disclosure

Remember that as soon as you start monetizing your blog, regardless of the types of compensation, you must include a disclosure statement on your blog – and you can’t hide it.

Test the waters

Test your market. Check how other bloggers in your niche are monetizing their blogs.

Adsense

This might be one of the easiest ways to put ads on to your blog, but ask yourself; when was the last time you clicked on a Google ad on the sidebar of a blog? With that in mind, Google is always coming up with new ideas and formatting to make it easier to use their ads system and to get more people to click on their ads. For more information on AdSense, check out Googleadchoices.org

There are alternatives to Adsense. Here is a great list of alternatives ad programs.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. (Read more on Wikipedia.)

If your readers look forward to your recommendations and reviews of products and services, affiliate marketing is for you. Many studies have shown that you get more clicks and purchases from a link that is inside your content than from a sidebar advertisement.

You can join numerous affiliate-marketing programs.

There are benefits of using affiliate marketing and there are downsides, too. The biggest challenge with affiliate marketing is the back-office of most affiliate programs. The signup, the product search, the input of information into the feed, can all be very complicated, time consuming, and not user friendly. Now you can save hours spent in affiliate program back offices by using one WordPress Plugin.

In the first blog of this series, we suggested that WordPress is one of the best, if not the best platforms to use for your blog. PalTip has created a WordPress plugin that cuts out all of the back office horror and makes affiliate marketing as easy as one click!

All you have to do is download the plugin and install it. When writing your blog, make sure you include the link to the product,** (in more than one location) and when you click to publish the post the plugin goes to work and changes your link to a personalized PalTip affiliate link.

Here is an example of how it works, from a blog on coffee:

“My favorite beverage, as you all know, is coffee! Coffee, good good coffee. ……..

Recently I was introduced to a private barista. He knew exactly how I like my coffee throughout the day. In the morning, I enjoy a full Arabica in the morning, and later, I enjoy a smooth Kona, and in the evening, a decaf chocolaty pleasure. It was love at first sight. Let me introduce you to my personal barista, and my new favorite coffee maker, the The Keurig B60.

All I had to do was copy and paste the original link into the blog post and when I published it, the link was transformed into an affiliate link automatically.

(In both places; in the picture and the coffee maker link)

This is an easy, fast, and profitable way to use affiliate marketing in your blog.

Banner Space

Selling banners on a website or blog has always been a good way to monetize. There are several possibilities for doing this. Probably the easiest is to join a banner ad network. The systems will keep track of your earnings and placement of the ad. If you sign up for a pay-per-click agreement you can make between 0.5 -.80 cents a click. To make money this way, you must have heavy traffic on your site.

If you are selling the banner space on your own, you can sell it per impression, per click, or per time period. You have control over this! When deciding on the costs of these spaces, the following should be taken into consideration.

The position of the ad – if it is “above the fold,” it is worth more.
Horizontal banners are easier to read so they should be priced higher.
If you’re in a certain niche – your advertising space is more valuable to advertisers than if you were an “all about everything” site.
In addition, remember size! Big banners are more expensive than smaller ones.

Final Tip

Don’t overdo it! Don’t fill up your pages and posts with so many banner ads and affiliate ads that your visitors can’t find the real content that you have worked so hard on. You will lose traffic and probably won’t make very much money.

Be subtle. Be creative!

If you have any tips on monetizing your blog, please share them with us.

**the link must be from one of the over 2500 PalTip partner sites.