Blogging Pointers

Good morning bloggers. As you can see below, BloggingPointers.com has been vacant since September. Well, I’m here to change that!

Here’s what I can offer you:

Daily Updates
Veteran Professional Blogger (see profile) WITH great tips
Open community (ie I don’t know everything so jump in!)
Great place for NEW and OLD bloggers alike
Make Some Money MONDAYS (ie a listing of PAID blog positions)

And last, but certainly not least, a chance to be in my blogroll! If you’ve got a blog about blogging, web writing, internet biz, internet apps, or internet publicity, I want to add you to my blogroll! Leave a comment or email me at gwpublications@gmail.com!

Let’s start today with TIP O’ the TUESDAY:

As I mentioned in one of my other blogs, Writers Unbound, always be very careful of what you publish in your blog. Things like short stories, personal essays and even exposes have the possibility of netting you some dollars, not to mention a great print credit, when published in another media. But, once they are up on your blog, some outlets will consider them already published, and you will not be able to sell them.

Of course, this turns into a careful balancing technique, as you need- need- excellent content in order to get your blog rolling.

Thanks for visiting Tip O’ the Tuesday, and again, give me some ideas for BLOGROLL!

I don’t normally link to two posts from one blog in a single post but these two posts really spoke to me today, as I was reviewing my feeds from the last few days. (I do not spend hours every day reading feeds, and I don’t recommend it as a productive practice to anyone. But more on that in a later post.)

DoshDosh is one of those blogs that just makes you wonder whether more than one person is really writing it. Except for the unique and consistent voice, it just seems impossible that one person could come up with so much good stuff, so consistently. And yet, there you are - Maki delivers, time and again.

The first post is “The ‘Free’ Business Model: A Strategy for Attention, Traffic, and Profits.” With very little effort, Maki could expand on this and produce an excellent e-book that would make him quite comfortable, I feel sure! Here, he speaks of one of the most confusing aspects of web-based money making - the concept of the business model. It trips up so many of us who don’t understand that “free” is great, but it has to GO somewhere in order to make it worth your while. Maki gets that, of course, and shows you how to go from “free” to “paid.” Excellent post. Particularly worthwhile: the last few paragraphs …

When it comes to blogging, you often want to grab hold of the first-time user who arrives at your site. You want him or her to track your blog by subscribing to it. You do this by giving quality information away for free. Don’t be afraid to share your ‘secret techniques‘. So what if you give it all away for free? Be generous with links and publicity. Make your readers feel grateful and happy. Grab them by the throat and never let them go. Build attention for your ventures consistently by progressively catering to your audience’s needs. The more you share useful content and appear to be genuine, the more loyal your readers you will be and the easier for you to acquire support for your future projects. Never forget that people are transferable assets and crucial factors in word of mouth marketing. Listen to them. Let them tell you how they feel. You don’t have to soft sell or hard sell anything to initially make some money from your blog. You don’t even have to put any ads up at all. It’s more about attention, loyalty, connections and leverage.

The second post is more “audience participation” if you will, and I’ve already raised my hand to participate. I hope a lot of my readers will as well! The post is titled “Creating a Definitive Blueprint for a Profitable Blog: A Community Ebook Idea,” and it’s picking up steam in the comments section. Maki’s idea is for a community-written (although individually-pieced) ebook that will be available for free download. Each author would of course be fully credited and retain all rights in his/her work. (Although there’s some talk about allowing affiliate links to permit the authors to make a little cash for their troubles.)

I hope you’ll go check out both posts and if the spirit moves you, sign up to participate in the ebook!

Founded in February 2005, YouTube’s popularity has been expanding at an astonishing rate ever since. Now days they have become one of the most popular and talked about sites on the internet. Millions of people are visiting monthly and downloading everything from whacky footage of some guy jumping out of a window to guitar lessons all on video and available to the public. Web searches for YouTube and specific videos are climbing steadily bringing significant traffic to anyone covering the topic.

If you are like me, you probably have no interest in putting your home videos on the web for anyone to see, but don’t let this stop you from cashing in on the YouTube craze. Not only are you allowed to use the videos on your blogs, they’ve made it easy by giving you the links to embed the video directly into your site. Also, when somebody comes to your blog and plays the video, it plays directly from YouTube so as not to consume your bandwidth as videos can often do.

The process of making money from these videos is actually quite simple and has been used with other media for some time. Lets say you write a post about “video x” which is rated as a popular video on YouTube therefor driving a fair amount of traffic. You embed the video in your post page and wrap it with your standard advertising, be it Google Adsense, AdBrite or whatever and your all set. You don’t make money from the video itself, the money comes from leveraging the already existing traffic for that particular video and bringing them to your blog. Now when they get there you not only give them the video they are in search of but also hit them with advertisements of other great YouTube videos, news, etc. in essence capturing their interests and turning them into (more…)