Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

Now, I know I didn’t post yesterday, my apologies, but you know, with my therapy, shoulder, and other things, it’s tough! But rest assured, I’m here. Also, I think for the time being, while my shoulder finishes healing, I’ll be posting every other day, just until I’m back up to 100%. So bear with me.

Now, onto our topic for today.

Should I bribe my readers?

When I say this I mean, do you need to give incentives for every little thing just to get some action on your blog? Do you need to offer a prize to the comment king every month? Do you need to run a contest 6 times a year?

Now, don’t get me wrong, contests and prizes are great, and they do increase activity on blogs, which is always a good thing. But what I’m driving at is this: If you stop bribing your readers, will you have any readers?

A lot of blogs are big and popular only because the people who run them are rich and invest 1000’s a month just promoting it and giving out prizes. This is false readership, in my opinion. Why? Because try and see how many readers stay for the content, which is supposed to be the most important thing. If you run contests constantly, and award readers for everything, chances are things are going to fall apart without those “bribes”, if you will.

So that’s my challenge to you. Yes, I’m talking to all you contest crazy bloggers. Try and take one, maybe two months, and focus on producing the best contests and incentives you can. Then let three months go by with non of that, and see what happens. Then, take one month and produce the best possible content that you could write, or that money can buy, and then take three months normal with non of the fluff or contest, and see how your readership benefits much much more from  the content, than the prizes.

Now, do not take this the wrong way, I love contests, and will run one here soon. But just don’t make it a habit that the only thing you do to keep readers is run contests.

Does it seem like there is always a “thorn” in your side?

By thorn, I mean obstacle. Pain in the rear end. Something that holds you back from what you want or need.

In life, you’ll always have these “thorns” in your “side”. It’s quite inevitable.

You see, let’s take this blog for example. I start it, it grows, it’s doing great, and “Bam!”, shoulder is broken, and my blog is neglected. Now, you may say to yourself at times like these, “It’s just me, I’m an unfortunate person. Nothing will ever go right for me.” Don’t think this way! Why?

Unforeseen Occurrence Befall us All

Yes, I just made a reference to The Bible. It’s so true. If something bad happens to you don’t think God, or someone else has it out for you, that’s just life.

Ok ok, why do I bring this up you say.

Well, when I had this shoulder problem, I was very discouraged. I thought to myself, “Everything always goes wrong! My blog starts to grow, does well and then it’s gone.

But don’t be discouraged. If you give up, like I almost did, you’ll never succeed, be it online, offline, inline, ( had to throw that in there, sorry. ) and you’ll never have a business or blog that means anything.

This is just a little word of advice to all those discouraged ones out there, that you CAN succeed, just never, ever, and I mean never give up!

In other news, I’m back! Regular content will start being pumped out starting tomorrow. So stick around, we’re gonna go places.

Hey guys, I know I’ve neglected you too long, but this collerbone thing is a real pain in the behind.

I cannot type with two hands, (of course) so I only have one hand to use. Also, I spend time in physical therapy which is tough.

But, I will make an effort starting next week. I will return to posting. Even if I have to dictate my posts while  I’m in physical therapy, I’ll do it. I value this blog way too much to let it die like that, so I’ll be sure to make sure that doesn’t happen.

We have some great things coming up, you’ll be following some new projects of mine, which will be very beneficial for you, and we will also be kicking off the big contest soon! If you’d like to sponsor something, email me at mark@monkeyblogger.com

I guess that’s it for now, but stay tuned for sure, things are going to pick up real soon, and it’s going to be an exciting blog to be around.

Hey all, this is not Mark, but this is Nathaniel from green-flamingo.com. I am filling in for Mark, for as you should know he was injured. I said I would write a guest post about a week ago, but I forgot what I was going to talk about. Now I will tell you how to blog like a monkey and stand out.

Collect bananas - Well, monkeys are associated with bananas right? You have to collect them and then you can eat them. To collect bananas you must stay focused and on the job. Maybe you could have a few of your fellow banana collectors help you out, or you can join programs to help you monkeys get bananas.

In a way you can understand - Making money online is associated with blogging right? You have to make the money and then you can spend it. You have to stay focused, seeing ahead and making sure you are doing things right. You may consider visiting some of these friends which will help you to make the best of your blogging. You might have a few fellow bloggers help you out, and that would help. You can also join affiliate programs to increase and most likely start (unless you have a product or services to sell) you making money online. Some good affiliate programs:

-Google Adsense-

Google Adsense is well known by most, and well recommended. If you want to get the most out of adsense, visit robinhaney.com, maximizing your adsense earnings part one, part two, and recently part three.

-PepperJam-

I myself to not know much about pepperjam, but I hear it is good, and according to the site, they have been ranked one of the top 10 SEO firms in the United States. They are also honored to be recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held business in the US.

-OIO Publisher-

Here you find the tree with millions of bananas, too bad it is not free. You can get discounts though, which is good. OIO publisher is regarded very highly and it would be a good program to join, but make sure you want it before you buy it. What it really does is automate your monetization so you can do what really needs to be done: writing content!

Those are only a very few of some worthwhile affiliate programs, just browse around those trees and you will find many more.

Sell your banana collectors - Now it is time to promote and sell your products. Market well, but don’t be too spammy otherwise people won’t go for it. Carl Ocab can sometimes be a spam seller and spam promoter, which is really annoying. So find the right way to promote and sell your product and done!

Write like a monkey - Stand out, be creative, swing from vines, and from that writing get some bananas. Go ahead and be your fuzzy or fat self. Just be you in your blogging. Write not just in an ordinary way, but write with character and use of the force you must.

After you have those bananas, keep going for more until you have dominated the monkey world. Just to blog like a monkey, work hard, stay focused, be creative and be yourself.

This post was guest blogged by Shannon Lilly of Infected by Bugs, a blog that teaches you how to make money online. If you would like to guest blog for MonkeyBlogger, I am still looking for more and you can email your posts to mark[at]monkeyblogger[dot]com. Thanks!

I often wonder why more people don’t take advantage of adding a blog to their websites. I know a blog can be tough to upkeep but it really only take 1-2 posts per week to do that. Only a few of us phycos make posts every day (me of course).

However I believe if business owners as well as personal site owners understood the importance of a blog they would get one up post haste. I am guilty of not putting

blogs on several of my sites or I have put a blog up but never update it. This is what you call (over worked and under paid blogging) but its really no excuse at all!

Today I want to talk a little bit about how to add some pizazz to your blog and get people interested in reading it, subscribing to it and even buying ads from you!

- Get Them To Actually Read Your Posts: Sometimes its difficult to determine why visitors don’t actually read your blog, however there are some things we can do to intrigue visitors to read more. You can place images, video and other forms of media further down in your posts to excite your readers and hopefully they will stick around to read the whole post if not then just the highlighted areas where video and images are appearing.

So far I haven’t had much trouble or complaints about my posts being boring or anything of that nature and I get lots of page views which tells me people are reading. That brings me to another tip we can do to each post to get readers more involved. Basically whenever you can without it looking spammy link to other posts from your new posts, this allows the search engines to find older posts easier and I guarantee your page views per month will jump if not double just by doing this.

- Get Them To Subscribe Already: When you think about subscribing to a blog multiple thoughts may come to mind, however one important factor is (why would they need to sign up?). What are you offering your visitors who actually subscribe, anything at all?

If you look at some of the bigger bloggers in the MMO niche you will see nearly all of them offer a free ebook of some kind from the blog owner on how to make money online, improve seo or other related topics. These ebooks are highly wanted because you are after all reading a ebook written by the pro blogger himself.

My suggestion is that you go ahead and offer a similar ebook or free product to everyone who signs up to your rss feed. Don’t be afraid to put a nice image and small text description about the ebook in your subscribe section on the front page of your blog (I hope you have it their). I can pretty much guarantee people will sign up and possibly tell their friends about you and your blog / ebook if its of good quality and worth reading.

- Start With The End In Mind: Well there you have it, a couple tips to wet your soda appetite. Each of these techniques have worked for me and I am confident they will work for you to. Be sure and share your experiences / opinions with us by commenting below!