Posted Friday, July 4, 2008 by momscashblog |
You better think twice about Digging your own posts or encouraging others to Digg your posts. The editors at Digg are cracking down on bloggers who are abusing the system to promote their own blogs. They won’t give any notice, they’ll just ban the site and YOU from using Digg for an indefinite period of time.
What they don’t like is bloggers who keep Digging their own posts and encouraging others to Digg with promotions or “trade offs” (saying, I’ll Digg yours if you Digg mine.) They don’t want posts about blogs going too high up in the Digg Community. They say the system was made for current events and intellectual content, and for people to share their interests. The regular users of Digg are getting irritated and complaing to the editors about posts like “How to Make Money With Your Blog” or “How to Get Traffic to Your Blog”. They said “the average reader does not like to see posts about blogs or how to make money with blogs going up in the Digg rank”. (more…)
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by momscashblog |
One big lesson I’ve learned about blogging is that you can’t worry too much about what other’s think. It’s just like life, you have to row your own boat and not let anyone else get in your way. Blogging can be kind of scary at first because you could be talking to the whole world… but then again, you could be talking to no one but yourself. (and you will be in the beginning!) You have to just do your own thing. Remember, it’s YOUR blog and no one else has the right to tell you what to do with it.
Over the past 2 months, I’ve had some e-mails from many people who’ve used the Free Blog Tutorial and now have blogs. Some don’t quite dare to take that first step and go public with thier blogs… and some have stopped altogether. I know there’s a lot of pressure for beginner bloggers because I’m going thru it myself. All I can do is give you a sisterly “pep talk” and tell you don’t give up, and don’t put too much pressure on yourself. (more…)
Posted Monday, June 16, 2008 by momscashblog |
I find working from home on a computer makes it easy to spend too much time reading and searching. Every day we can find hundreds of posts telling us how to make money with our blogs. It’s wonderful to have this information but it can also eat up your whole day just reading things that don’t really matter.
If you always read How to Make Money blogs it can mess with your head. Some posts are designed to make you feel like a failure if you don’t make $20,000 a day, while other more humble bloggers’s say be reasonable and don’t expect too much. You want to believe the $20,000 a day, but you know the humble blogger is probably the “real deal”. Reading conflicting reports like these can cause anxiety in your subconscious mind and keep you searching for the answer without knowing exactly why your stuck on that one topic. It’s your brain’s own little SEO at work and you don’t even know it!
Then there’s the technical stuff we’re all expected to keep up with. Every day there’s a new tech term some kid made up just to throw me off and I spend half the day trying to find the definition. Sometimes when I do find out what it means, I still don’t know what to do with it. More times than not, I end up on a scavenger hunt going from one blog to another and never learning what I needed to know. There goes a whole day sitting behind my laptop more frustrated than when I started. You may think it’s the classic case of “information overload” and it is, but it’s also your brain’s own SEO hard at work again.
The Zeigarnik Effect
There’s a good reason that we feel anxious and unsettled when we overload our brains with useless information. Ironically, the reason we feel that anxiety is the same reason that we continue to read that useless information in the first place! It’s a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect, named after the Gestalt theorist who studied the mind’s behavorial patterns. It explains the mental tension and unbalance a person feels when a task has not been completed. Our minds have a need for linear path thinking… which means “seeing one task all the way thru to the end”. It doesn’t matter what that information is, you asked yourself a question once and your mind will try to conduct a search until it finds the answer. Your brain has the best SEO available to you, but it needs guidance.
Most bloggers are stuck on the question: “How much money can I make with my blog?” That sends your subconsicous mind on a scavenger hunt for something that you have no conscious control over. If your brain had its own way, it would search day and night for little things it never got the answers to. So if you read useless information, the brain will seek the answers to useless information for as long as you let it. Your brain is doing it’s own computer search but YOU might have little control over the keyword search your mind is conducting.
Trick Your Brain’s SEO With a List of Your Own
You can trick this behavior pattern by becoming “aware” of the Z-effect and using it to your advantage. Make linear thinking work for you, not against you. Here’s a few ways to do this:
1. Make a list of what you want to know before your start reading blogs. The mind loves lists. If you don’t make a list, it will make it’s own list and do it’s own searches on what it THINKS you want to know. Making a list gives your subconscious mind something useful to look for.
2. Search for the topics on your list one at a time. Keep your mind on a ”linear path” of your choosing and finish the task. Your mind likes to finish tasks.
3. Write down a certain time to turn your computer off. By doing this you give your mind another task to finish which takes it away from the task of searching useless information. The mind’s new task is to turn the computer off at a certain time. (Hey, it’s a lot better than searching useless info all day and night, isn’t it?)
4. Write a list of things to do in the real world. This is very important. You need to remind your mind (and yourself) that you have a life other than your blog and the computer. Be specific with tasks with lists like: “play with the kids, “go swimming today”, “take a walk”, “read your mail and do the bills”, etc.
Use the Z-effect In Your Blog
Knowing everyone experiences the Z-effect and has a need to finish a task to its end can work to your advantage on your blog. When a visitor is on your site you want them to feel the need to finish a task. One effective way to do this is by having “related topics” at the end of your posts. (It works for me every time I see it. I always feel the need to check out the other posts listed at the bottom.. the Z-effect in action!)
Many great online marketers who work with big companies know it is the Z-effect that compels people to buy a product. Try to craft your site, and/or your posts in a way that makes your visitors feel a need to finish a task on your site. (for most bloggers, the task is to click on your ads, of course!) Be careful though, because by doing this you are causing some conflict in the person’s mind by making them feel a little uncomfortable… like they are not done until they complete everything asked. If you create too much conflict or anxiety it can backfire on you and make them leave your site upset. So experiment a little with the Z-effect and see what happens.
Posted Monday, June 9, 2008 by momscashblog |
For some new bloggers and blogger’s to be, the issue about WordPress.com and WordPress.org can be quite confusing. Many people have started a blog using WordPress only to find they cannot monetize their blogs with ads because they are using WordPress.com and not WordPress.org. I’ve gotten some e-mails from a few bloggers who used MCB’s tutorial and went to WordPress.com for help and received the wrong information. Luckily I knew what the problem was because I did the same thing when I first started. So I’ll explain the two versions as best I can.
WordPress is an open source blogging software that is used by most blogs and a lot of websites on the internet. Open source means the software is “open” or free to anyone who wants to use it to run a blog or website. It’s a blogging software that is easy to use because it takes care of the HTML coding for you. However, if you’re into coding, that’s even better because you can use coding as little or as much as you like. There are two versions of WordPress (three, if you count the MultiUser version but that’s used by the larger websites who host blogs under them). The software works pretty much the same in both versions, but there are some differences in how you use your blog.
WordPress.com is “hosted by WordPress” and it is completely free. You do not need to find hosting. If you sign up with WordPress.com you will be in a WordPress Blog Community under the umbrella of WordPress.com. This is mainly used by serious “web loggers” and you can make your blog private to only your friends and family if you wish. (more…)
Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2008 by momscashblog |
Technology is very important and without it we wouldn’t be here on the internet. It can also be very helpful in steering traffic our way… but technology can only take us so far with our blogs. We’re dealing with “people” and unless we turn into robots, it takes the human touch to connect with others. The thing about technology is the better it gets, the less you need to know about it! All you have to do is let those smart programmers do the work, while you sit back and worry about sales and marketing.
Those who work in marketing say most of the same basic principals used in “offline marketing” apply to “onlne marketing”. Whether marketing offline or online, the most important marketing tool is appealing to the emotions of your viewers. Emotions are strong… they motivate us to want certain things, and to do whatever it takes to get them. If you have a blog, these offline/online marketing tips can be very useful to you. The internet has more potential for selling an emotion than offline marketing ever had for three basic reasons:
1. it is practically free!! All you need to invest is the cost of a site. (pennies a day)
2. it is text driven… and the easiest, quickest way to appeal to a person’s emotions is thru words.
3. it is easy for people to find what they want, they search for the words.
We usually think of “love” as the strongest emotion and it is a very powerful one that can be used in marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to make people love you to buy from you, but that would work also !(lol) It means you could sell the idea of “love”, or the idea that one will feel loved if they do what you say, or have what you’re selling. It’s done every day on the internet with matchmaking sites, relationship sites, social networking sites, relationship advice columns, relationship E-books, or “How to Catch a Man or Woman” E-books, even astrology and psychic sites are all catering to the emotion of love. And it’s a HUGE moneymaker on the internet (one of the biggest), because they are selling love and that speaks to a human’s most basic emotion of happiness, or “pleasure”. (more…)
Posted Monday, May 19, 2008 by momscashblog |
I’m sure established bloggers have received the e-mail from Entrecard today announcing their exciting new “add a blog” feature allowing blog hosts to add multiple blogs to one account. They also have a new free Official E-book that explains this new feature and other tips for using Entrecard. I know there are new blog hosts here, so if you didn’t get the e-mail you can download the Free Official E-book and get more info at www.entrecard.com.
Not everyone knows about Entrecard. But all bloggers should participate IF they want to be searchable on the net. For newbies like myself, it can be a little difficult to understand why Entrecards are so important to bloggers, but I’ve figured out the concept and it all makes sense. Think of Entrecard as business cards sent from site to site via the internet. It’s a form of networking and getting your name out there, just as you would do with a brick and mortar business.
But Entrecard is soooo much more than just polite networking! Entrecard gets you linked to other sites, and that gets you better PageRanking which gets you noticed in searches on the internet. (If you are blogging for profit, or if you want to be high in the search engines, you must have a good PageRank!)
Here’s Why the Google PageRank and Entrecard are so important for Blogs
When anyone uses Google searches, they are not really searching the WWW as it is at that time. That would take way too long, with the billions of sites out there. So Google does a search by indexing and software called “spiders”. These spiders crawl the internet like a web, going from link to link. They search important sites first. PageRank decides who is of “importance” by how many other sites link to that site. So if you don’t have any links to your site, the spiders will not find it. In other words, your site will NOT show up in a search unless it’s linked to other sites. The more the better!
Entrecards are a great way to link your site to other blogs and get your blog into searches. The more Entrecards you drop… the more your site is linked and noticed by the spiders… the better the effect on your PageRank… the more searchable your site becomes!
Here is the link to Entrecard new free E-books http://entrecard.com/static/entrecard_official_ebook.pdf with the “add new blog” features. I’m downloading mine tonight to learn about all the new features that they have.
On that note, I’d like to say that I will be getting around to dropping my Entrecards soon… hopefully this week. We still have a few accounts that have not been changed into my name yet, and I can’t seem to replace K.s Entrecard with mine in the MCB account if anyone knows how to replace an image in Entrecard,please email me at jj@momscashblog.com. I have received around 20 cards and have accepted them all (well, all but one!). I can’t wait to get into the game.
Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 by momscashblog |
Never underestimate the power of FREE! I partnered a successful retail business so I know what that one 4- letter word that starts with “F” can do. Using the word “free” can bring people out of the woodwork…and that’s what blogging’s about isn’t is? We all want new blog traffic, because let’s face it, they are the ones who will potentially use your services, buy your goods, push those buttons…whatever it is you want from them.
I bought MCB knowing how valuable the Free Blog Tutorial would be to the newbies in the blogging world. I have new people coming, using the tutorial, and loving it, and they are using the other resources that MomsCashBlog has to offer too.
Some day I will try just posting a big headline “Free Blog Tutorial” with a link and nothing else, since that’s essentially how I’m getting new peeps to my site. I’m going to give that a try and watch my traffic…and mostly my accounts, to see what happens. Should be an interesting experiment in blogging for me.
The New MomsCashBlog is for people who want a blog and want to make money with it, but don’t know where to start…so that’s why the Free Blog Tutorial is so valuable to me. The new traffic YOU want might be different from mine, so tailor your “free thing” to whatever your own niche is. I’m sure you have some information that people would pay for. Of course, just using the word FREE won’t make viewers stay long enough to matter. That “free thing” you give them must have some value or it could backfire and aggravate your customer or viewer. Just as happens in retail, if you give it away free and it’s good, they will take it, and they might even want everything else you have to offer!!
