Making Money Online With AnotherMMOBlog.com

Commenting on Contest Posts Will Increase Pagerank Juice

If you’re like me, you probably don’t comment that much on posts. Now I’m not saying that I don’t want to but when I read a great post and don’t have two cents to add, usually I won’t say anything. But on the other hand, you should almost always comment on contest posts. It can help you in more ways than one.

Contest posts are loved by search engines, especially Google. Think about it, your standard contest will probably have an option for people to blog about the contest and link back to the contest post, right? Because a lot of people are doing this, the post is getting a lot of one-way links and search engines love to see that.

And although most blogs have the “no-follow” attribute for the comments, you are still getting some link juices. Just not as much as if they were “do-follow.” But don’t worry, either way it helps with your pagerank and if you’re not one of those linking to the post but just commenting, you should increase the benefits as well (one-way linking).

If you notice, most contest posts for specific blogs are shown on the first page of the search results.

Don’t believe me? Just type in “AnotherMMOblog.com” in Google and you should see a bunch of contest-related posts showing up, especially the two simple contests I have/had here.

What I’m saying is the fact that even if you choose not to participate in the contest, you should still at the very least comment on the post to get some of the backlink juices.

I tried out this technique on one of my newer blogs and the only thing I did to build links was commenting on contest posts (I probably did like 50 or so) and my blog ended up ranking as PR3 from the last Google update.

So if you’re a die hard pagerank fan, then you should at the very least try this method out.

It worked for me so it should definitely work for you guys!

Building Backlinks Is The Most Important Factor in Making Money With Blogs

If you guys are struggling somewhat in making money online with your blog then more than likely it’s because you are not getting enough organic/search engine traffic. And it’s probably because either a) you don’t have any keywords people are searching for (which I doubt), or b) you don’t have enough backlinks for your site. I think I’ll choose “b” if you ask me.

Now, when someone mentions building backlinks for their sites so many people automatically assume it has to do with strictly commenting on blogs, particularly “do-follow” ones. Honestly, that may work for both traffic and building links but that is pretty time consuming and since money is time then you might be losing out a little bit.

People tend to overlook the easy ways of building backlinks to their site and honestly, if you get enough one-way backlinks, Google will love you for it. Matter of fact, I know someone that built so many backlinks for their site as a whole that whenever they blog about just about anything with a popular keyword it ends up being on the frontpage of Google.

Now, don’t you want that to happen to you too? Well, let’s get into the various methods of building backlinks, shall we?

Different Ways of Building Backlinks

Footer link on blog templates - If you are a designer then you should have absolutely no problem building backlinks, especially the fact if people like your blog templates. I know a quite a few blog template designers and they give them away for free. In return, they get added exposure PLUS a one-way backlinks to their site on the footer.

So, how does that help you guys that aren’t designers? Well, it doesn’t… unless you’re willing to pay a little bit.

You can either hire someone to build a custom blog template for you and pay them for the rights to it. Once you have done so, give that template away for free and then you should pour in with thousands of backlinks without doing much work after.

Of course, that can be pricey. But for a cheaper price, there are many designers that will charge you a small fee and they will add your link to their free templates footer. That way whenever people download that template, you also get a backlink.

Forums - If you aren’t part of a forum yet then you are definitely missing out. Not only is it a good way of building links and traffic but you get to network, learn and ask questions.

Most forums allow you to add your link as a signature and that appears on every post you have ever made on there. So let’s say you have 700 total posts on a forum and you have “Making Money Online” on your signature, well, you just gave yourself 700 more backlinks to your site.

Make sure you also post some of your article links in the threads as well, though, do NOT spam. When you do add a link of yours in a thread, make sure it’s useful to everyone and try to add other helpful links within the thread from other sites so it doesn’t look to suspicious.

Social Bookmarking sites - So many people try to use Digg, SU and all these other for traffic but unfortunately, the traffic isn’t that great when it comes to actually making money online. But using it for backlinks are always helpful.

The easiest way I have seen to submit to social bookmarking sites is going to socialmarker.com and you can submit to tons of sites within minutes.

Of course, the downfall to that is the fact that you have to spend time signing up for all of those sites if you haven’t already done so. But after you get past that, you should have no problem!

Blog Commenting - I’m not going into too much detail on this one but let’s say you should be commenting a lot on blogs. And if you can manage to find “do-follow” blogs with PR on those individual pages then that’s golden.

Put links of your site ON your site - Believe it or not but adding links within your site FOR your site is great and often overlooked. Have you ever seen blogs linking to themselves within their post with specific keywords? Or maybe adding their own site to their blogroll or something like that? Well, they are doing it for SEO purposes, not for decorations.

Have others link to you - If people like your blog or your posts enough, you should have no problem getting backlinks. Personally, I would try to aim for blogroll links because those are typically sitewide. So, let’s say if someone has about 200 posts and you are on their blogroll, well my friend, you just got yourself 200 more backlinks to your site.

You can also try different methods such as holding blog contests and have people write a post about it linking back to you. Those usually work pretty good and you get plenty of one-way backlinks as well.

Conclusion

There are limitless ways of building backlinks and I’m sure if you are creative, you should have no problem doing anything. I only mentioned a few but there are still tons of If you have the money and you’re willing to spend it, I would go with the blog template technique. A lot of people start link building services but honestly, you can’t fully rely on those, plus, some people I talk to complain about those services.

Personally, I have never used those services before and I don’t plan on it. But what backlink building techniques do you use?

Best Ways to Instantly Increase Your Search Engine Traffic

If you think traffic is just traffic, well, you are wrong. The most important traffic are organic and I will go over some of the best ways to instantly increase your search engine traffic.

I’m not that type to live off of social bookmarking and networking sites’ traffic because quite frankly, those are the visitors that will be clicking on your ads, signing up through your referral and affiliate links or in simple terms - they will not help you make money online.

On the other hand, organic (or search engine) traffic are visitors looking for something specific and that is why they end up on your site. And if they don’t happen to find what they are looking for, they may consider clicking on your ads to bring them to another site which may help them on their way. That equals money in your pockets.

Now, let’s get to some of the best ways that have helped me instantly increase search engine traffic.

Find a popular keyword and use it

There are various ways of finding popular keywords but it’s all up to you. (I will cover how to do keyword research in a later post). Once you find the keyword that people are actually searching for, you want to include it within your title and your first sentence in your post.

Tips: Make sure you have your permalink set that your post title show up, that way your keyword appears in the URL. Also, try bolding the keyword you want to target in your post.

Build Links

This is probably the most important part that people overlook, you have to build links in order for your site to appear in search engines. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better. Plus, it’ll help with your pagerank, if that’s important to you guys.

Now, if your site doesn’t have many links, I would suggest building as soon as possible. (Again, I will write a future post about link building)

Also, if you’re trying to target a specific keyword that doesn’t go with your site, you can just build links specifically for that keyword post. So, rather than sending links to yoursite.com, you would send it to yoursite.com/yourpostgoeshere. Again, stay tuned for the link building aspects in a future post. And it’s not only blog commenting… don’t know why everyone thinks that is the only way.

Linkbait/come up with a killer title and introduction to your post

Once your keyword post shows up in the search engines, hopefully you made it on the first page (if so, congratulations) now you have to actually entice people to click through to your site. And how do you do it? Come up with a killer title post, of course!

If you’re trying to rank for a keyword like “Venomous snakes”, you might want to come up with a title like “Don’t Let These Venomous Snakes Kill You!” Eh, I hope you can come up with better ones. But you want them to click through and read your post.

Let people link to you

Now that you have done all of that, you want to try to build even more links. And how would you do such a thing? Try getting others to link to you as well. Trust me, if you write a killer post that is interesting or extremely helpful, people will reward you with backlinks. You just have to a) write the killer post b) make sure they find your article c) put some links at the bottom of your post with options of different ways to link to you. And it can simply be by having them submit to social bookmarking and networking sites for you.

This is just a outline on how to instantly increase your search engine traffic but make sure you subscribe to the RSS Feeds as I will be going into more details on how to build links, do keyword research, turning those visitors into money and subscribers and so on.

Stay tuned!

How to Hold a Successful Blog Contest

Blog contests have become such a huge part of the Blogosphere that it might as well be a requirement. Though, anyone can hold a blog contest, not all of them can be successful.

So, how do you determine if a blog contest is successful or not?

Well, you have to ask yourself what your main object was when you thought about hosting a blog contest in the first place. There is a reason why you were holding the contest, you wanted to benefit your blog while rewarding your readers, right? But did you fulfill your objectives?

That is the question you should be asking yourself to determine if it was successful or not. Most people hold blog contests to boost their traffic, increase their RSS Feed subscribers, get your name out there, etc. If you met your objectives and/or exceeded, then I’d definitely say it was successful.

In my case, I held my contest with the intent to increase my RSS Feed subscribers above 50… done! I wanted to increase my traffic and start building a reputation in the MMO niche… done! I wanted to increase backlinks to my blog… done!

I had my mind set on what I wanted to do to have the contest benefit this blog as well as my readers and I did just that. And that is my first point on how to hold a successful contest; set your objectives before you start a blog contest.

You don’t want to go into hosting a blog contest if you’re not going to have objects that will benefit yourself. If that was the case, you might as well just donate to charity if you wanted to just give away prizes.

What kind of prize should you give away?

A lot of people don’t have the luxury of just giving away random prizes to people so coming up with something decent to give away can be hard. There are a couple of options for you here: 1.) You can contact other people to become a sponsor of your blog or 2.) Give away something that doesn’t cost you anything.

Read more »

Commenting Will Take You a Long Way

For those who do not comment, well, you’re definitely missing out. See, commenting will help you in more ways than one, though, there seems to be tons of people that tend to forget about how powerful a simple comment will do.

How commenting on other blogs will benefit you:

Traffic – The more you comment, the more traffic you can get to your site. If you didn’t know this before, let me try to break it down for you.

First, a popular blog has tons of readers reading their posts daily. Of course, everyone who finishes reading the post will see at least the first couple of comments. Now, if you contribute something thoughtful to the post, most of those readers will think “well, this person definitely knows what they’re talking about. Let me see what they’re all about.” And then they end up on your blog for you to impress them.

I think the key is to be one of the first commentators on those popular blogs. Now, you can always just wait around their blog if you know when they update or you can simply use Comment Sniper which basically send a quick update to you right when a new article is posted.

Now, you don’t always need to be the first commentator to get traffic (though, it would help) because a lot of blogs have plugins such as Top Commentator and Commentluv. Believe it or not, you’ll get people checking out your blog if you’re a top commentator on a popular blog and if you have a catchy post title, I’m sure you’ll attract a lot of attention through Commentluv.

Win Prizes and get rewarded – A lot of blog owners reward their top commentators with some link love or possibly some sort of prize. For instance, Shoemoney gives away one of his t-shirts to a random top commentator. And not to mention, there are blog contests everywhere and many of their just require a simple comment; just like my current contest to win $50 Paypal.

I’ll probably be implementing something similar on my blog but I haven’t decided what I’m going to do just yet. I might do something similar to giving away FREE advertising to my e-mail subscribers but I’ll probably do something with some link juice.

Networking – Commenting helps with networking, definitely more than you know. Not only will you get noticed by A-listers but some of them might go out of the way to help you out. I’m not an A-lister (on this blog) yet but I’m definitely open to help at anytime.

I have been networking with bloggers for quite sometime and people are always willing to help each other out. Whether it’s a simple shout out on a particular post they want mentioned, maybe a social media vote needed or simply advice, networking goes a very long way.

Lastly, make money while you comment! - I know you’re asking how you can make money from commenting, well, it’s simple and I know people who have made hundreds if not thousands within a few weeks by doing so. I’ve made some decent money as well but moved on from that aspect.

With that said, I’ll leave that as a teaser for my next post so check back or you can simply subscribe to my RSS Feeds so you don’t miss out.