An email came in last few days with the header 10,658 visitors in 6 days which looked rather interesting and aroused my curiosity.  I didn’t have time to take a look then.  So today I got through my bookmark and take a serious look at it.  Here it says:

That really arouse my curiosity.  After I bought the e-book and read the 27 pages, I believe that the author has the right to make his claim.  Prior to this, I have never heard of Hubpages.com.  Here I would like to tout about Hubpages and their credibility.  The Hubpages team consist of three guys out of Microsoft that were part of the successful startup of MongoMusic.  The team consists of Paul Edmundson, Jay Reitz and Paul Deeds.  The exciting thing about hubpages is that their share revenues with the content providers (that is us, the publishers).  And that’s not the main exciting thing.  Hubpages are now considered authority by google search engine!  Not only that, Yahoo and MSN are the other 2 gaint search engines treating hubpages are relevant and given authority status.  Moving into web 2.0 technology, hubpages should be the portal or platform we, as bloggers need to look into, with the important result being able to bring traffics to our blogs through their links.

See an example of a hub page appearing in the first page of google search here.  And if you like to get started on creating your hubpage, this is the link.

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How productive is your day as a blogger?  If you measure the productivity of your day by whether you have been updating your posts, then I guess most of us, including myself, will fall far short of what a productive day should be.  In fact it is true that some of my days are spent reading other blogs or researching some topics, and I could have just used those materials to write my posts.  Yet I was just too lazy to collect my thoughts and write.  Well, there are other days when I spent some precious time trying to fix a problem which could have been prevented if I have done the most important thing that all bloggers must do.  If I would ask the question: “What is the most important thing any blogger should do periodically?” the answer is found actually in the title of this post.  So there will be no prize for guessing.

Two days ago, a good friend of mine sought my help to set up his wordpress in his main domain after failing to do so for a while. Being a little more techie savvy, I took up the challenge.  After trying a few time to set up his wordpress by smartftp to his hostingbay without success, I resort to use the fantastico wizard provided by the hostingbay to do so.  And hooray, it was done!  I was feeling proud of myself for being “techie savvy”.   But my euphoria was short-lived!  Somehow in the process I must have acidentally deleted some database which belongs to his addon domain, www.alistairlihai.com belonging to his son.  This is an upcoming young blogger, currently already acquired some followers.  His posts are usually read and commented by no less than 20 readers.  So you can imagined our shock and despair when we could not load his main page!  For a couple of hours into the wee hour of the Friday night, I tried all my resources to restore to no avail.  The last resort was to appeal to the hostingbay to retrieve the lost database, and the wallet thinner by AUD75.00.  Fortunately, after they sent me the backup files, I was able to help restore the database at the server.  Now everything is back to normal. 

That was some good hours spent trying to restore the blog.  If only I have done a backup for him to begin with, I would have been able to get it running in a short time, and the AUD75 will be still intact in the wallet.  So the question to all of you now is, when was the last time you did your back up of your precious blog or blogs?  Stop reading this post and start your backup if you have not done so, a friendly reminder from a fellow blogger.

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If I am asked to give one most important advice to blogging beginners, I would shout from the top of the mountain, “Get Started Now!“. Many a time we tend to get our hands onto too many things, read too many articles, swerve from one topic to another and procrastinate on blogging! The advice is to stay focus on one topic (you can always leave the rest of the topics for the next blog). No wonder there is only a small fraction of bloggers who are making money online. To be successful bloggers, (my definition of success = making money online although some may differ) stay focus, don’t be dissuaded, devote your time, effort and talents onto your blog.
Here are the 3 important tips for blogging beginners:

CONTENT IS KING

Write on something that you are passionate about, expert in and valuable to your readers. Remember to write on something interesting for them and not something that interest you.

Interesting blog post should have pictures and video if they are related to your blog. Remember, the old adage “a picture speaks a thousand word”.

Content should written in colourful and descriptive language, witty and entertaining and be creative.

VISITORS ARE IMPORTANT

If there is no visitor to your site, it is as if you open a store in the mall and nobody even walk into your shop!

Visitors come and go, the reasons why they stay or come back later is your contents, which have to be constantly updated with quality input!

Visitors are human being, treat them with respect and always respond to their comments with sincerity.

(How would like to have traffic jam into your blog? I would love it!)

METHODS IN GETTING TRAFFIC

It is imperative to drive traffic to your site by getting listed in blog listing directories: one such directory is TopRank Online Marketing.

Submit articles is a great way of getting your blog known to lots of readers who are subscribers to articles web sites.

It will be good to join forums and chat groups to promote your blog. Leaving comments on other bloggers blogs will in the long run create lots of reciprocal links, good for traffic generating.

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Hi internet business group,

Congratulations to you Justin and James for contributing to the content in this blog. There are a lot of useful things on making money in your blog. That is what most blogs are doing. But we want to make our blog different right? Justin, your concept of CTPM formula is the right one. Content is king and unique content is the Bigger king of all. I can see that the content is building up in this blog. Up to a certain point, driving traffic to this blog is important. Once the content is sufficient to be of interest, this blog can be announced to the whole world through articles. Writing is the key skill here. I try that with my site Sabah Scuba Diving and submitted some articles to ezinearticles and a few others. It does generate in traffic.

Another suggestion is pictures. Blogs need pictures and if there are lots of pictures, you get traffic. People just loves pictures. So some investment in pictures taking skills is a must. I have just invested in my Canon system. Of course, an SLR Camera system is better than the pocket size although there are some trade offs in these two. The SLR is more expensive, very much more expense than the pocket type. The other disadvantages are that it is more bulky, especially for travelling but they take great pictures, as good as the professional. Check out the pics at this site (an interesting site on guides to Kuching in Malaysia) to see what I mean.

The smaller one such as the Canon Ixus is compact, very convenient to use and to handle. I always have it in my pocket, just in case, there are some great shots to be taken. You never know. But then of course, your mobile phone with its in-built camera can do just that, although the pixs are not that great as your pocket camera but will do.

Until next time, this is Prof. signing off.

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Now that I have gotten your attention and interest to start blogging, I believe I need to at least give you a few basic tips on how to have a good weblog. I learned these also from some experienced pro-bloggers. So actually I have gone through the same journey as you have, not knowing how to even start a blogging web site! Here are the tips which are acronymed by C.T.P.M. In the word of the experts, “Get in front of your potential clients by providing Content. Surfers find you, generating targeted Traffic. Win them over (”PREsell”). How? Give them what they want… quality solutions, answers, information!

C = Content

Let face it, we must have good content for people to come visit us and are willing to bookmark it to come back another time. So in order to have good content, it must be something that we feel passionate about that we like others to know. Questions we need to ask ourselves would be:

• What am I interested in?
• What am I passionate about?
• What subjects or topics do I know a lot about?
• What are people always coming to me for advice about?

Organize your thoughts around these and start to writing some articles or posting as in the case of blogging. Don’t worry about making mistakes, because you can always edit later. Just let your thought flow through, very much like you are talking to your friends as if they are right there listening to you, eager to learn something from you. Shall I say they are waiting to listen from the “horse’s mouth”

T = Traffic

So you have your website up, you want people to come and browse. I believe we have to get beyond our close friends and relatives, and get other people to visit our sites. Traffic, trafftic and more traffic to our website. Here are some good tips:

• Blogging for dollar - Traffics Secrets to your websites by Derek Gehl
• Steve Pavline - How To Build A High Traffic Web Site (or Blog)
• John Chow - Driving Traffic With Free Articles Services
• I would like to act one of my methods - join as many online communities, forums and chat groups as possible ( with your limited time off course). Let them know of your site or weblog and have them comment on your postings. One of my favourites is bluepulse, a mobile software on 3G phones so that I can communicate with friends online and let them know all my web sites. Of course I have to do it with tact and discretion (Well that will be topic for another posting).

P = Pre-Sale Your Site

As you posts more and more contents providing information, quality solutions and answers, your visitors will come back often to visit. They will eventually by persuaded by what you have to offer that can help them with their questions and problems. So update your site often with good quality info and solutions.

M = Monetaze Your Site

Monetization is the final result of doing everything else (C to T to P) correctly.

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