This is a Guest Post by Sarah Harris from Adiamor. Read how you too can guest post at dkspeaks, here.

With each passing year, more and more people have come to count on the internet to provide them with things in which to keep them occupied. But despite the growing number of visitors, many websites, be they blogs or business sites have a difficult time keeping and maintaining a steady readership. Thankfully, there are steps that can be taken in order to engage your readers or customers.

1. If room allows, consider making a discussion forum for any and all who come across the website. Forums are a popular way of keeping in touch with people of similar interests, engaging in daily discussions ranging from the newest update of the host site to their favorite movie. Use this to your advantage; get to know the people who come and the information could prove to be quite valuable. If nothing else, having a forum will pull in those who would not otherwise visit the website, leaving the potential to sell your wares in the future.

2. Another way to keep them coming back is by posting polls for people to partake in. The subject is not set in stone; you can create the polls about anything you like, as long as they are appealing. Readers and customers will be happy to know that you are concerned about their opinion and care about what they think. As an additional bonus, people are naturally curious to see the results of a poll, and by putting them up on a frequent enough basis, the interest will continue.

3. Keep a steady communication with your visitors. If somebody were to click on the link to your site, and see that you have yet to respond to the comments in your blog, it will no doubt leave a bad impression. Therefore, any time you receive a message from somebody, be sure to respond to it as soon as you are able. When you do this, you will be perceived as a business that makes an effort to stay current and keep in touch who those who would desire to exchange dialogue. This is a method of engaging readers that definitely has its benefits.

Guest post by Sarah Harris of Adiamor Diamond Engagement Rings. Adiamor offers a large selection of loose diamonds and engagement ring settings at affordable prices.

Photograph Courtesy Gilbert Rondilla

Do you find yourselves in a situation where you do not get enough time to blog? Does it happen that you create a schedule for your entire day, and find that have most of the things that you planned went untouched, the entire day.

This is a normal phenomenon and every internet marketer and Blogger comes across this situation a lot of times. How would you arrest this situation?

Time is of utmost importance in blogging and Internet Marketing. The 80-20 principle, about which a lot of bloggers have written and talked about, is something that has proven to hold true in Internet Marketing.

What is the 80-20 rule?

The 80-20 rule is also called as the “Pareto Principle”, “law of vital few” and the “principle of factor sparsity”. It is defined as follows -

Pareto principle is a theory that states that 80% of the effects are the result of 20% of the source(s) or participants, of any given event. A few items contribute the most; these are the vital few, as opposed to the trivial majority.

This means that 80% of the result is influenced by 20% of what you do. This holds good in anything that you do and and that is where this rule carries value.

In blogging too, it is true that 20% of the things that you do is what determines 80% of the results. Put it in a different perspective, it means that only a few things amongst everything that you do in your blogging and Internet marketing business is important. But what are these few things?

It is not a difficult task to do, but at the same time it is also not that easy to identify the real activities that influence the majority of your results. In order to do that it is extremely important that you identify your prime activities. In other words, it is important for you to prioritize everything that you do in a day.

As an affiliate marketer, I always faced this problem of “too much to do with too little time”. Even after planning the entire day, I found that I could only do 10% of what I had planned. I often wondered as to what could be the reason for this.

Look at this statistics about what newbie internet marketers felt they did in an average day -

When I saw these statistics, I felt as if it was a survey done on me. This is was indeed, my story. I realized that I was spending time on un-important things and lost focus of the more important things that I should have been doing.

How to be more productive?

In order to be more productive, you will have to start concentrating on activities that are more important for your internet marketing business. The following tips can help you in identifying the activities that are un-important and thus eliminate them. This will in turn, help you focus on things that are important.

Unsubscribe from those newsletters – It is a tendency with all ‘not-so-famous internet marketers’ to subscribe to the newsletters and other such mailing lists from those so-called marketing Gurus. We do it with an intention of getting something that they offer for free, and to be aware about what they are promoting and how they are promoting. Good intention and valuable indeed!!

But,…. either unsubscribe from those newsletters or, create a separate mailbox or, mail ID, that you will only visit once in a week and provide that email address to all such subscriptions. Don’t waste your time browsing through their offers and signing up for more offers.

Stop Browsing – You need to stop browsing the internet immediately. You might have seen from the above statistics that this is the most un-productive activity of all. We have a tendency of checking out every other website that we see and browsing the internet and Google to find more such websites. But what is it that this activity yields? Nothing..

I would recommend that you install Firefox and close all unnecessary windows and keep open only the ones that are important to you, like your blog administration page, before you exit or, close your browser. So the next time you open your browser, there will be just that one window that will open and you will be reminded on what you should focus more on.

Limit reading emails – Do not share your email address with anyone except the ones that you think is really important and vital for your business. This way you will be able to reduce the number of emails that you get and thus will be able to reduce the time that you spend reading emails.

Get rid of your Statisticophobia – After about 2 months that I started my Internet Marketing business, I was making about $2-$3 per day from Adsense and I used to get about 25-30 visitors to my blog. I would check the statistics at my blog and at Adsense as soon as I login to my computer and then would keep checking it as if the statistics would have gone out of the roof. It was as if I had something to do with that visitor coming to my blog and as if I was waiting, so that I can catch him.

Check your statistics once in 2 days. That is enough. The statistics will improve when you do the right things and at the right time. But if you keep checking your statistics only, then there is nothing that is going to improve and the numbers will remain the same.

Enough of Blog Tweaking – It is not uncommon for us to keep designing and re-designing our blog or, website till we get that perfect design. But the fact remains that, the perfect design just doesn’t come. You are browsing through a few blogs and you find about some tweak that some guy is talking about and set out to implement that on your blog. Was it required? Was that important?

Blog designs are something that you can change once you are done with all your priority-1 tasks. even if you don’t tweak it today it will not stop functioning. Similar is the case with wordpress plugins. That jazzy plugin that you saw at the other blog is not going to get you new visitors or, money.

Stop focussing on the designing and tweaking of your blog. Leave it to the professionals if at all you think that it is that important. Find a blog management service that can help you do it for you, while you focus on other important things.

Order only what is required – The internet is full of courses and ebooks that promise you a millionaire lifestyle in a few days. Let’s face the truth. There is nothing that can make you rich quick unless you are a character from “Ocean’s Eleven”. Don’t fall for all that stuff out there on the internet, even if it is free.

Find a mentor – We as newbie internet marketers keep doing things the wrong way multiple times until we find the right way of doing it. This, in a way is wastage of precious time and money. But the question here is, why should you be re-inventing the wheel? Get a mentor who has seen through the difficulties and who know how to do it right. That ways you will not waste time on un-necessary activities and in turn and utilize that time in other productive activities.

These are just a few things that you could do to be more productive in your Internet marketing business. There could be many other such things that you might have to share. Share them by commenting here in this post.

But where will you get these backlinks from?

Most of the blogs these days prefer to be “nofollow”, thanks to the Spammers. What this has done is that it is put a full-stop to the association in terms of backlinking and traffic referring that used to be there some time back between bloggers from the same niche. So now backlinks are being sold at the price of gold. Would you want to buy one? Is it preferable? These are questions that are not worthy a discussion as the answers are pretty much everywhere on the internet.

A backlink is not just important in term of SEO and getting your blog ranked in the search engines, instead it also brings in some traffic. This is because a link to your post or, your blog is in a way a reference to it and a reference will bring in readers, just because they expect something more to be read on your blog.

Now that blog commenting does not give you a backlink, how is it that you can get a backlink from the big boys in the blogging world. The big blogs are established ones and they wouldn’t mind exchanging links with your or, referencing to your post in case you have a credible standing in the blogosphere. But if you are one who is just staring out, it could look like and impossible task.

The answer to this is – “Guest Posting”.

What is Guest Posting?

Guest Posting is writing for a blog that is not yours. Guest contributions have always been a way of helping others or, making part time money, since long. Guest lecturers, Visiting practitioners etc. are all forms of guest contributions.

Guest posting is a voluntary approach from a blogger to write for another blog that he is not an owner of, in an attempt to put forth his viewpoint and thus gain links and readers from it.

Most of the blogs, these days have an option of guest posting. They clearly mention that in their front page. Bloggers who have been contributing content that is worthy of reading and that are interesting take take this option of writing for them. The details of how to write, what to write etc. are blog specific and will be available only on the individual blogs. Some blogs might ask you to register yourself on their blogs, and yet others may ask you to mail them.

Guest posting is a win-win situation for both the bloggers. If you are wondering how, then read on..

Advantages to the blog owner -

Blogs are craving for attention these days. The competition in any niche is so fierce that the one with the constantly updated content and the best content wins the race and this race starts every day all over again. In such a situation, it is important for every blogger to have the best content on their blogs and also to maintain the freshness of the content on their blog. Is is practically possible to write new posts almost everyday, let alone writing more that one post a day?

It is not!!

This is where guest posting comes in handy. This way, the blog owners keep getting fresh content and their blog is constantly updated. Most importantly the content is unique and valuable.

Advantages to guest blogger -

We already discussed the advantages that you as a guest blogger will get. Quality backlinks without having to pay for it or, bribe people and best of all, traffic overflow from that blog to your blog. If the blog that your are contributing to is a well established blog, the traffic flow can be huge. A guest post at established blogs like problogger and such other blogs have helped people gain as much as a 400% increase in traffic.

But there is just one hurdle in getting to do a guest blog on an established blog like that of Problogger – getting them to accept your guest post. Taking care of a few basic things can do that for you. Let us keep this topic for a discussion in another post.

My Guest Posts:

You can read my guest posts here -

• At CarlOcab – 3 Simple Tips To Make The Most Of Unproductive Days In Blogging
• At SiteSketch101 – Getting Rid of Procrastination…Today

Let me know your thoughts on guest posting by commenting. You can write a guest post for us. Read the guidelines.

Photograph courtesy Peter Huys

I knew there were quite a few people out there who start off like I did – with very less money and little information about the internet. Consequently they fall prey to the scams and start buying everything that the so-called GURUS of the internet promote. Eventually they find that they have exhausted all their money and have nothing to invest in important things like an auto-responder or, a hosting plan.

Who am I? Where do I stand in who’s who of the internet? Does that really matter till the time the advice that I give is free of cost and does not involve investments. For the ones who think that this still matters, you can read my “about” page. For the others, let me tell you that I am not a celebrity blogger. Neither am I an internet  multi-millionaire, showing off huge mansions and beautiful cars. I am just an ordinary man like you. I earn well from the internet to live well. I do a bit of charity, have a nice house and a good car. But what really matters is the fact that I am not in debt and I am not afraid of the future. I know I have a sustainable income for life from my internet marketing business.

The objective of this blog was to give information – pure information to my readers, who I assume were newbie internet marketers. Hence I did not limit myself just to blogging. I know there is much more that I can share with you all. All of that will come in the days ahead.

Meanwhile, here are 33 posts on blogging, that I think is informative and that I personally think were my best in 2009.

1. The Start – Blogger or, WordPress
2. What do I blog on?
3. Using Google Insight
4. Staying on top for the same content!
5. The First Visitor to your blog
6. Is tagging your post important?
7. Titles for your blog post!
8. Content – Maintaining Continuity
9. Affiliate Theme for WordPress
10. Using Twitter to promote your blog
11. When will I start making money from my blog?
12. 6 Most required Plugins for your WordPress blog
13. Niche research for your blog posts
14. Learning to walk in the blogosphere – BlogMastermind
15. 6 under-rated useful WordPress Plugins
16. Your Blog Monetization strategy-part 1
17. The Secret of a successful WordPress Installation
18. Creating an identity for your blog – The Logo
19. Why should Twitter be amongst your blog promotion strategies?
20. The only All-in-One plugin required for WordPress Blogs
21. Should you write paid posts in your blogs?
22. Success with Niche Blogging
23. 4 ways to get new ideas to blog about
24. Blog promotion techniques – Getting a backlink
25. Building backlinks – Dofollow commenting at blogs
26. Tips on selecting a hosting service provider
27. 5 Plugins to secure your WordPress Installation
28. How to get quality content for your blog?
29. The Affiliate Theme for WordPress
30. 5 Steps to being more productive in blogging
31. Performancing Metrics – Knowing your stats
32. Are the big bloggers loosing focus of the topic?
33. Why blog commenting does not get you any traffic?

Do tell me your opinion on these posts by commenting here.

Photograph courtesy Zsuzsanna Kilian

When I started blogging and I entered the world of WordPress, I was overwhelmed with the options that WordPress offered. There was so much that I could do. Everyday I would login to my blog with the intention of writing a few blog posts. But by the time I logged out I found that all I did was upgrade a few plugins, add a few codes to the wordpress theme, in order to customize something, create a backup of my blog and check my blog stats.

I would regret having done all that because none of these activities were productive and I knew I was wasting time doing all this. But all these were still essential. How could I get rid of these? Was there an alternative solution to doing all this?

I thought there was none and that I had to live with it. But that was not the case.

Outsourcing! Yes, indeed outsourcing was the solution.

I learnt it from the successful bloggers on the internet. In order for you to be productive, it was essential that you categorized all of your activities into productive and unproductive.

But will only categorizing solve the purpose?

Absolutely not. There is a need to plan your activities and your day in addition to categorizing and outsourcing.

5 step to being more productive -

There are 5 very simple steps to be more productive on any given day. Follow them and you can ensure that you don’t regret not having done anything productive at the end of the day.

1. Identify the productive – You will first need to identify the productive activities that you do in a day. If you are a blogger, writing a few posts, commenting on other blogs and forum, might be the productive activities for you. Evaluate every associated activity to check if it is important and productive. For an affiliate marketer, blogging could be a non-productive activity, but researching affiliate products might be. He would want to spend more time on this rather than attending to his blogs.
2. Write down 5 productive to-do activities – Once you have identified your productive activities, write down about five of them that you wish to do everyday in order of priority and allocate a time duration for it.
3. Outsource – Everything can be outsourced today. You will be able to find a good quote for outsourcing every non-productive activity. Pick the best quote and outsource. Even blog management can be outsourced these days. Keep reviewing every once in a month.
4. Time-Check – Keep a time check on your productive activity list. Don’t overdo anything such that it become non-productive for you. The best way to keep a time check is to write down the expected start time and the end time of each activity and set up the word document as a wallpaper on your computer. This way you will be able to keep a check  the actual time.
5. Review – Review each of the activity on the list every month to see if anything has fallen off your productive list and can be outsourced in order for you to spend some more quality time on something else that is more productive.

None of these techniques is new. All of these are simple steps that every business unit that is production oriented does. Follow them and you will see a change in your productivity.

Blogging solutions is a service that can help you with your blog management in case you are blogger. Blogging involves writing quality posts. If you blog is not constantly updated and lacks quality posts, you will struggle to get visitors to your blogs. Hence it is imperative that you spend most of your time on productive activities like that of writing posts and commenting. So the easiest solution to this is outsourcing your blog management.

Blogging solutions does a good job is managing your WordPress blogs. It is affordable and easy to complete. In case you wish to try, check them out here.

No GURUS stress the importance of quality content for your blogs, less. Any blog your read, Problogger, Yaro Starak’s blogs or, the daily blog tips, the stress on quality content is the material for one of the posts. Read any marketing ebook and the you will find the mention of “Quality content” there as well.
But the question remains as to what will be defined as quality content? What will your readers consider as quality content. The content quality starts from the quality of the design of your blog. Let’s see each of these aspects in detail:

1. Blog Design – When you design the blog keep in mind that you are not making it too complex. Keep the design of the blog as simple as possible so that the readers are able to naturally interact with your blog. The links and ads that put up on your blog should be in line with your blogs design. It should naturally integrate with your blog design. WordPress gives you an so many choices of doing this that you will not have to run after your blog designers to get this done.
2. Keyword density – Your blog content must be made around high-in-demand keywords that people normally use while searching for content. You would want your blog to appear in the first page of any search engine so that people find it. This is determined by the amount of keywords in each of the posts in your blog. This is called as “keyword density”. Keyword density is normally misunderstood as stuffing keywords into your content. Unlike this mis-conception, your content should naturally contain about 3-4% keywords that your have researched and that is the base of your content.
3. Presentation – The content has to be neatly presented in order for anybody to enjoy reading it. The paragraphs should not be too long, but concise and neatly flowing into the next paragraph. The language can be kept as simple as possible and if possible refrain from using “jargons”. This is done keeping in mind the not so savvy readers that will come to your blogs from the search engines.



4. Using media – Isn’t it natural for you to enjoy the pictures and presentations that you see while you are reading an article. This is the essence of a magazine and that is why you enjoy it. Hence use media wherever possible throughout your blog. Integrate pictures, videos and presentations into the content of your blog.
5. Usage of links – You would want to integrate links to affiliate products and other related information in your posts. It has been observed that people enjoy reading articles that have link embedded throughout the content much more than articles that have the links mentioned towards the base or, the end of the content.

The quality of a content is determined by the way it is perceived by the reader. Though it is difficult to know how exactly a reader perceives content, there are some simple basics that can be followed to ensure that what you are offering is of quality.

What is that one thing that stands in between you and your goals?

It’s not a difficult question to answer, right?

Procrastination, it is! It is probably the simplest things to get rid off, yet we are unable to. Even today, there are days when I do this. At the end of the day when I sit down to review my entire days activity, I find that there was nothing worthwhile that I did except procrastinating. This is where I thought I would guest post on this topic at a very good blog.

I received a few very good comments on the post, but there were certain others where people felt that the topic was not that important and I was surprised at it.

Nevertheless, I thought I would write a follow-up post here for the ones who felt that this topic was worth discussing.

When I first started my Internet Marketing business, it took me about 2 months to build my first mini site. I had the knowledge and the skill, still I couldn’t do it. I kept postponing it for some or, the other things. I would spend most of my time surfing the internet for unnecessary things, or, clicking on the links that were there in the mails that I received from countless other marketers whose optin pages I subscribed to.

At the end of the day, when I reviewed my activities for the day, I found that there was nothing worthy that I did the entire day.

Have your experienced this?

This is procrastination. Procrastination induces you to put off somethings for a later time, for something else. You do this primarily because of faulty prioritization.

Faulty Prioritization:-

What is more important for your in your life? Determining this could be very difficult. There could be 25 different things that you want to achieve in your life. But which one to achieve the first?

Your success depends on how well you prioritize things. But how will you prioritize things?

Start by mapping each of your priorities to what your dream or, goal in life is. What is more important of the following two – Spending an evening with your family in a restaurant of your choice, where you could order food without looking at the right hand side of the menu-card first or, watching the Ashes live on television this week.

Can you afford to postpone the dream of that evening by another month? Or is it convenient to decide that you will watch the Ashes the next time round and instead spend that time on working on something that can lead you to the fulfillment of your dream?

It is often difficult to convince ourselves of postponing certain things – mostly that are immediate fulfillment of a desire. It is so, because you are not able to visualize the actual result of that dream that you have. The visualization that you have is incomplete and is not as beautiful as your actual dream. You are probably unable to convince yourselves that it would one day be a reality.

This is why getting rid of procrastination requires only two things to be done -

1. Put up a picture of your dream in front of your eyes always. Keep it up on everything that you frequently interact with.
2. Stop visualizing in your minds. Set your priorities right based on your goal and not your visualizations.

Get rid of procrastination…today, if you want to build a successful future for yourselves.

Read my guest post at Sitesketch and don’t forget to tell me your ideas of getting rid of procrastination.

Are you feeling as if your ideas have drained out?

Are you finding it hard to come up with topics to blog about?

You are probably a victim of the “Power-Cut” syndrome. Don’t worry, it is not the name of a disease and you do not have to go and consult your physician about it. It is something that all bloggers at some point face.

Before finding out a cure for this syndrome, let’s first check the topic that you are blogging about.

1. Is it a topic that has a bit of competition?
2. Is it something that other bloggers are also writing about?
3. Are there articles being written on the topic?

If the answer to all the above questions were “YES”, then you have a cure that is easy. But if you answered in “NO”, then I am afraid that the cure will take quite  a bit of time and is still not a guarantee.

If you answered in “No”, then let me ask you another question. Why on earth did you choose a topic that had nobody even bothering to write about? It seems you wanted to get into a market that had no competition. I can understand your point of view because that is what is preached all over the blogs of the internet marketing gurus. But I have a different opinion. A bit of competition is always good.

The Importance of competition :-

Competition shows that there are people who are interested in the market. It means that there are prospective buyers in the market which is what the core of the competition is all about. You know that there is huge scope in the market because there are buyers. Zero competition means that no one wants to enter the market, because there are no buyers.

Would you be interested in re-inventing the wheel? I am absolutely not. I would suggest you shouldn’t either. Get into a market that has some competition so that you at least know that there is scope to succeed, if you are different.

How to get an idea for your blog :-

Setting up alerts -
There is nothing as informative as Google Alerts. In one of my previous posts, I had mentioned about setting up Google Alerts on topics of your interest. I keep getting alerts on my niches everyday and many of them are worth reading. Some of these alerts become topics for my blog posts. The mails that you receive as a part of these alerts are knowledge banks and can form the basis of your posts.

Reading other blogs -
I have a list of about 8 blogs that I read frequently and that are from my niche, on my favorite feed reader. I visit these blogs almost every second day and read their posts. I then jot down interesting points that I felt can form ideas for my next posts.

I write a precis on the topics that I have collected and save them as a draft in my blog, which I can later elaborate on. I add a few meaningful pictures to it and my post is ready. If you are serious about blogging, you need to respect other bloggers the way you will expect them to respect you, and that is by reading their posts.

Reading comments on other blogs -
This sounds very funny, but it indeed works. People use the commenting box on any blog just to get a link back or, to get some traffic and for this, they write stupid things like, “Nice post”, “Interesting topic” etc. But there are some wise men who ensure that they contribute to the discussion in the post by writing valuable comments. These comments at times result in a debate or, a further elaborate discussion on the topic.

Such comments form source of interesting posts for your blogs. In addition to that, if you add a permalink to the original post on the original blog, you might get some serious traffic and there is also a possibility that the owner of the original blog just link to you.

Forum discussions -
These are by far the easiest place to get new ideas for your posts. Register at a few good forums in your niche and contribute to the discussions. You might find people asking interesting questions on “How to”, “Where to” etc. and these can form excellent ideas for your blog posts.

Blogging is not difficult. All that is required is a bit of innovation and you can do well in any market.

Don’t forget to add your comments below.

I have tried to show one of its uses in this video. This is the first video I am doing for this blog. I would do a series of videos with such free tools that are easy to use in Internet Marketing.

Membership sites are one the biggest money spinners. But the success of a membership sites depends upon a lot of factors which if not kept in mind could lead to a disaster. You might be wondering as to where this topic of “Membership sites” came in from, when the topic in discussion is “making money blogging”.

Blogging cannot be a standalone money-maker. If you have a blog and your monetization strategy is “Adsense”, then there are lot many things that you need to focus upon if you are to earn something worth a mention from your blog. What monetization strategy you adopt for you blog would decide the level and depth of your success.

When we are talking about making money online I believe we should be referring to sources that would be a long term income provider to us rather than looking at short term sources. I presume anyone reading this post is reading it just because you have a dream of leading an independent life. So the monetization strategy that we adopt should be such that provides us with a dependable, continuous and good income.

One of the main strategies that satisfy all of the above conditions is affiliate marketing through your blog. But there is an even better one. This strategy helps in building an authority for you in the blogosphere in addition to winning satisfied and dedicated readers. This strategy involves developing a product of your own and promoting that through your blog.

Most of the successful blogs on the internet do this. Check out Caroline Middlebrook’s blog, Carl Ocab’s blog or, Yaro Starak’s blog. But for a newbie, absolutely new on the blogging horizon, developing a product could be a herculean task and you might be wondering as to what is it that I am saying. Don’t start to get de-motivated. As of now all that you need to do is learn even the minutest things in making money from your blog. Product development can easily be outsourced and that should take care of your problem there.

One of the best products to promote through you blog is an e-course by setting up a membership site. This is a long term monetization strategy and can help you in your objective of making money from your blog. But is setting up a membership site easy? Good question!

There are lots of things that you might want to keep in mind when you start a membership site – Domain name, hosting plans, Membership site content management system, Payment processor, content delivery system etc. The minutest of errors in any of these could spell disaster.

Yaro Starak is a blogger whom I admire. His blog mastermind is a course that has helped a lot of people make lots of money from their blogs. He is successfully running a membership site for this course. So who better than the master himself to teach us setting up a membership site?

Check out his Membership Mastermind course here.

Yaro is not a blogger who is only money-oriented, rather he believes in providing pure useful content to his readers. That is why he guides his readers with good and valuable insights.

For people interested in building and launching membership site he has launched the Membership Site Masterplan which is a free downloadable e-book and has extremely valuable content in it. You can download it here.

You can read about the Membership Site Masterplan report and the Membership Site Mastermind course here.

Photograph courtesy Sam Fox used under Creatives Common License