Insider Marketing Tips

OK you’ve got your nice shiny new blog and you’re all ready to make some money on the internet. All you’re missing now is some people. No people, no cash, simple as that. Assuming you’d like to be as profitable as possible we’d like that to be free blog traffic, not the paid stuff.

Anybody can invest a few hundred dollars in pay-per-click advertising to get people to their blog. Pure dumb luck will do some of it, tweaking and tuning will improve your figures.

Trouble is most people either haven’t got the budget or are plain stubborn and don’t want to put their hand in their pocket. Hey, I can dig that - me either! Why pay if you don’t have too, right?

So we’ve got our target, free blog traffic, but how are we going to achieve it?

Probably the single most successful way is article marketing. Write an article like this, submit it to the right websites, people read it and visit your blog. Voila! Lots of lovely blog traffic at zero cost.

That’s the principle, and done properly it works very well. There are a few tricks of the trade, like there are with anything else, but you don’t need to be an English professor to make this work for your blog. Look at this article. Anything special about the writing? Nope, I’m just an ordinary Joe with an average education. A few hundred words (hopefully well chosen) and it should trundle off into the depths of the internet and do its work.

There are no big secrets about making article marketing work but it’ll probably take a while to get good at it. The good news is that even of you’re not so hot to start off with it costs you nothing so any free blog traffic you get is better than none!

Actually there is one “secret”, you have to keep doing it. If you write and submit ten articles you’ll certainly get some traffic to your blog, but then you’ll see how it follows that to get more traffic you need to write more articles. A hundred articles is going to bring you many more people than ten.

So do you have to be tied to the keyboard eight hours a day? Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me!

No, you don’t. I actually know one guy who spends about four hours a day at his computer and writes ten articles a day, pretty much every day. He just loves writing articles and he has a six-figure income as a result. A hundred grand a year plus, for four hours work a day isn’t bad, but it’s only one approach. There are plenty of others.

If you can only write two or three articles a week you’ll still get that important free blog traffic, it’ll just take you a bit longer. If you’re smart, you’ll do other things as well to make the most of that traffic and increase your blog profits.

Building free blog traffic isn’t difficult once you know a few pro tips and tricks. Once you can drive traffic into your blogs, you’ll get money out! More free info here: Free Blog Traffic.

Blogging is fun, easy and profitable. Leading software like Wordpress is “open source” so anybody can write bits for it and there’s a whole army of people writing superb add-ons (plug-ins and themes) to make you blog do all kinds of useful things. Unfortunately that openness is also the big weakness in your blog security.

Blogs get hacked all the time. It doesn’t matter if you’re famous, rich or just starting out, the hackers don’t care. Some of them write nasty little robots that just go round knocking on a blog’s back door until some blogs let them in. These robots can hit thousands of blogs a minute so protection is vital.

It’s also near impossible to do unless you’re a full-time code geek and you watch your blog like a hawk 24/7. Not practical.

So what can you do? Well the first thing is to be aware of it. Don’t think it won’t happen to you, take steps to protect yourself. When you choose a password, don’t make it your name, for example, and don’t share it. You’d be surprised how many people email passwords around or post them on forums when they’re asking for help. If you absolutely have to do that to fix a problem, change it to a new one right after it’s sorted out.

Sadly that won’t stop them all. Something else you can do is always make sure your Wordpress version and all it’s plug-ins are up to date. It won’t take you many minutes and it’s worth it. Sometimes an update is for function but sometimes it’s to fix a security flaw. Have a glance every time you log in. If there’s an update, just do it.

After all that some hackers will still get through. To be brutally honest, protection for blogs could be seen as a bit of a myth. An impossible goal. If someone really wants in, bang, you’ll be hacked.

The blog security tips above will help. Then, if you’re unfortunate enough to have it happen, you need to be able to recover quickly. To do that you need to make sure your blog is regularly backed up. That way you can simply strip out the hacked files and replace it with a recent copy of your blog. Automated plug-ins can back up certain files for you and you can probably get access to your hosting to do a full back up there as well.

A couple of things. Just check to make sure your blog is working properly before you back up, and in case you accidentally back up a hacked version, always keep several archived back-ups. Finally, do it regularly. You can have auto back-ups as frequently as every hour - which is probably overkill, but at least once a week is good.

Protection for blogs is a question of taking simple, sensible precautions. I hope it doesn’t happen but your blog security may be compromised one day. Make sure you can recover quickly and carry on your business.

Taking care of your blog isn’t really difficult. Get free tips here: Blog Security plus.