The Best of Daily Blog Tips in 2009

As you probably know we are running a group writing project called “2009 in Review“, and I figured that I should participate as well. My entry is a compilation of the most popular posts on Daily Blog Tips over the course of 2009.

The deadline to submit your entry for the project is tomorrow, so you still have time if you want to participate.

Blogging Tips

Make Money Blogging Free eBook: I am glad to finally release the “Make Money Blogging” ebook. I started writing it around two months ago, and the content is completely unique.

The Godfather Approach to Internet Marketing: The Godfather is one of my favorite movies ever. I own the trilogy set in DVD, and I probably already watched it more than 10 times. The last time I tried, I could also recite the first 5 minutes of the movie by heart….

The Asset Value Factor of Working Online: One mistake that most people make when trying to find this answer is to neglect the asset value factor. That is, when you build a blog or website, apart from the monthly revenues, you will also be gaining asset value, because your blog or website is an asset that can be sold later on.

Want To Interview Someone? Polish the Questions and Make Them Interesting: Many people send me interview requests every month. Usually I agree to answer them, but I confess that sometimes I won’t spend too much time on the task. When? When I notice that the interviewer himself wrote the questions in 30 seconds, and didn’t even care to proofread them or to make them interesting.

Grab Your Free Backlink on Google Profiles: I am in a hurry today, but I will leave you guys with a quick and juicy tip. As far as linkbuilding goes, every small bit helps, right? If that is the case, there is one Google service that you can use to grab an easy backlink: Google Profiles.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Ways of Getting Traffic to Your Blog: Experience really counts! I’ve been blogging for a while on many different blogs. Before turning into a partial-pro blogger, I did some research on ways to get traffic my blog, and I would like to share my points of view with you. What is the good, what is the bad and what is the ugly way of generating traffic.

Six Rules of Blogging (That Also Apply to Twitter): I’ve been blogging for around 4 years now and despite all the changes we see in technology and software, the ‘rules’ to a successful blog tend to have remained the same. Yet, while the rules haven’t changed much, a lot of our traffic generation methods have. Gone are the days where 50 votes would guarantee a Digg homepage or you could place some technorati tags in your post and get thousands of visitors.

5 Things You SHOULDN’T Do When Approaching Bloggers: That is quite a pertinent question. Networking with other bloggers is certainly essential, but I see many people doing it the wrong way. Below you will find 5 things that you shouldn’t do when approaching bloggers for your networking efforts (with a bonus tip in the end).

Google Changed How It Handles Nofollow (And How It Might Affect Blogs): In reality this change happened over one year ago, but only recently it surfaced. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam team, talked about it in the latest SMX event, and soon afterward the whole SEO sphere was commenting. He also wrote a post explaining the whole issue, titled PageRank Sculpting.

4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic: One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

Tweetmeme Button Increased My Retweests by 100%: Around one month ago I wrote the post Experimenting with the Tweetmeme Button. It marked the day when I introduced the Tweetmeme button on this blog, to evaluate what kind of results it would produce.

3 Tactics to Get Comments on Your New Blog: This looks like a chicken-egg conundrum huh? When you have a new blog, you won’t get comments because you don’t have visitors. But you will also not get visitors because you have no comments (and thus no social proof).

Get Real About Your Traffic: You would be surprised with the amount of bloggers and webmasters out there who believe that their sites get way more traffic than what they really do. And I am not pointing fingers here, as I have been there myself.

Linking Out Will NOT Reduce The Google PageRank of Your Pages: It is a Google’s world, and as webmasters we live and die by our search rankings, right? One of the factors that both influences search rankings and that most people seem to care about is the Google PageRank. More specifically, we want as much PageRank as possible!

101 Ways to Promote a New Blog: Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small, actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s attention.

Questions & Answers

Should I Buy Text Links For SEO?: First of all I don’t recommend purchasing text links for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. While this practice was widespread and reasonably secure until some years ago, in 2008 Google made a special effort to combat it.

Is PageRank Based Only on The Number of Backlinks?: The first thing that you need to keep in mind is that there are two PageRanks. The nominal one, which is the one that shows on your Google toolbar, and which gets updated once every three months or so, and the real one, which gets updated constantly and is used inside Googles search algorithm.

How Do I Choose A Web Hosting Company?: The first thing you need to avoid are the oversellers. Who are those? They are basically the companies that offer miraculous server specs (e.g., huge disk space and monthly bandwitdh) while charging a modest monthly price.

What is the Nofollow Link Attribute?: You are confusing “noindex” with “nofollow.” In order for your comments to not show on the results page of Google, the owner of that blog would need to use a meta robots tag with the “noindex” attribute, which looks like this…

How Much is My Site Worth?: I am not sure if people really regard the number of subscribers as a good indicator of the monetary value of a site or blog. At least they shouldn’t.

When Do You Stop Commenting on Other Blogs?: First of all let me clarify that I will answer the question as if it was referring to using blog comments as a promotional technique. Obviously there is also a social factor there (i.e. blogs are conversations, and people like to interact with other people), but I will not take it into consideration here.

When and How Will Google Index My Website?: Most of the times Google will index a new website gradually, yes. That is at least what I have observed with most of my websites. The speed at which Google will index all your internal pages will depend on different factors though.

How Do Your Come Up, Store and Organize Ideas for Blog Posts?: Most of the times ideas will come to me naturally. Sometimes I am surfing the web, other times I am taking a shower, and the idea will just pop in my head.

How Do I Get Others to Guest Blog on My Blog?: The first thing to understand is that guest blogging only works when it is a win-win-win situation. That is: the blog owner wins because he gets quality content written for his blog, the guest blogger wins because he gets a chance to expose his work to a new audience, and the readers win because they get to read fresh content with different perspectives.

Polls

Poll: Is Reading Books Still Necessary?: First of all let me clarify my question: I am wondering if reading books is still necessary for personal and professional success. We are not taking into consideration other factors like the entertainment one here.

Poll: Does Having a Business Partner Improve Your Chances of Success?: Many people defend that if you want to build a successful business, you should have a partner (or more than one). The arguments used to back up this view are the following…

Poll: Do You Auto-Follow Everyone Back on Twitter?: When it comes to auto-following people on Twitter (either manually or with third party applications), there are basically two camps: those who claim it is a bad idea, and those who claim it is a good idea.

Poll: Do You Work Full Time on the Internet?: One of the common complaints that I hear from bloggers is that they don’t have enough time to work on their blogs. People who say that obviously work a regular 9 to 5 job, and they end up blogging at night or over the weekends.

Poll: Do You Prefer to Use Paypal or Credit Card to Buy Online?: I believe pretty much all of you have purchased at least one thing online in the past, right? And most of you probably purchase online regularly, be it goods on eBay, ebooks and courses or web hosting.

Poll: How Many Hours Per Week Do You Work on Your Blog?: If you have been blogging for a while, you probably noticed that it is a time consuming activity. Writing the content alone will take a lot of work. If you want to make your blog popular, though, you will also need to promote the blog, work on the design, interact with your readers to build your community and the like.

Poll: How Many Blogs Do You Own?: Anyway today’s poll is about the number of blogs that each of us own. At one point in time I was running six blogs actively. This year I sold some of them, so right now I am running three blogs actively.

General Posts

Dear Reader, Who Are You?: Daily Blog Tips will be three years old soon, but that is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable bloggers (you). I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve

Most Expensive Domain Names Ever: You probably know that top domain names sell for big bucks, right? But exactly how much money are we talking about, and what are those top domains? Well, I just came across a list that has over 50 of the most expensive domains ever sold.

You MUST Love Mondays: A couple of Sundays ago I was having dinner in a restaurant with my girlfriend. We were having a good time, and the at one point she said: “Hmm… such a nice weekend. Too bad tomorrow is already Monday.”

How Many Users Does Twitter Have?: Twitter is without a doubt one of, if not the fastest growing web application that we have seen. Just one year ago very few people were using or talking about it, and now it is all over the place, with mainstream celebrities joining it every day.

6 Mistakes to Avoid on Email Subject Lines: If you are a blogger, website owner or online worker, you probably need to contact people via email all the time. On some occasions you will also be the one starting the conversation and looking for a reply.

How Far Can We Go to Build Buzz?: Last week the UK press was in a buzz around a 104 year old woman who was using Twitter. This is obviously a world record, and it says a lot about the penetration of the 140-character messaging service. But was it real?

Is Twitter the New Digg?: April 28, Darren Rowse publishes a guest post on his Twitip blog titled “11 Useful Twitter Tools That Don’t Require Your Password.” One of the readers submits the post to a social network, and suddenly other users of that social network start “voting” on it. The story receives over 1,200 “votes,” and an avalanche of 50,000 visitors end up on Darren’s website.

Google PageRank Updates Becoming More Frequent?: It looks like we had another PageRank update yesterday. I noticed a couple of small fluctuations within my sites, and some readers also told me that their PageRank moved.

26 T-Shirts for Internet Geeks and Web Workers: Over the years I came across some cool t-shirts for Internet geeks and web workers, and today I decided to compile a collection of them. All the images are linked to where you can buy the t-shirt (no affiliate links, don’t worry). Enjoy!

A Productivity Experiment: Limiting My Online Hours: I don’t know about you, but every time my access to the Internet is limited, I become more productive. For example, currently I need to write 50 pages of content for a small project, and I had been procrastinating on it for over a week.

How I Doubled My Productivity Overnight: It would be hard to find a person who has never heard about a to-do list, right? Yet I bet that many of you do not use it, or do not use it effectively.

• You will also receive tips to improve your blog, strategies to make money and useful resources from around the web.