Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

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John Chow www.johnchow.com gives tips on how to write a better blog as well as making money while doing so.

I seem to be on running across blog posts either giving advice on how to blog or how to make money from your blog. I think I’d better smell the coffee and start paying attention.

First, about getting paid for your blog. I’ve never explored that route because everything I came across the issue said it was too much work for too little cash back.

Then I read a recent article in our local newspaper about John Chow’s blog. I did a double-take so fast my neck hurt.

The newspaper article quotes Mr. Chow made $3,440.66 in ad revenue last month from his blog.

Yet, he says he only spends a couple of hours a day working on it.

You might think he’d be tight-lipped about his success. On the contrary, he quite willingly shares information on how to make money blogging but also how to write a better blog (which in turn helps you to make money from your blog if that’s an objective.)

Because he gets so many inquiries about making money from his blog, he’s conveniently added a sidebar category so you can quickly locate all the posts he’s written on the topic.

Alongside the money-making posts, he provides info on how to improve your blog. Recently, he wrote about anchor text and search results.

While the jargon at first appears daunting, Mr. Chow gives his readers a plain language explanation. Using “click me links do nothing for your search rank” may seem like a simple tip but it is an important one.

He’s also written the Ten Blogging Mistakes to Avoid. Another informative article for both new and seasoned bloggers.

After having blogged for almost three years now, I blush to think how naive I was. I jumped into the blogsphere without any understanding of blog etiquette let alone the mysteries of pings, trackbacks, traffic, ranking or linking to other blogs.

In my pea-brain, it was exciting enough just to write and publish my blog and hope someone, anyone, would read my yadda yadda. Again, hit the gong, push the razzing buzzer — was I wrong.

My advice to new bloggers: take some time to search out as many articles you can for tips about blogging. Make sure you understand why you are blogging and who you expect to read your blog. If your intent at the outset is to make money from blogging, save your time and go learn how to play golf instead.

Here’s three blogging friend’s articles you might want to check out.

• Rose Desrocher’s recent blog post blogging glossary and terminology.
• Samantha Burns discusses some basic ways to increase traffic to your blog.
• Samantha Burns’ Ten Commandments of Blogging also provides some good advice.

There are thousands of valuable resources from bloggers providing tips and tricks. Take the time. Do some research. Make you blog one readers want to return to rather than click right on through.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 7:36:20 AM and is filed under WEBSTUFF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.