This is a guest post by Adam on improving blogging efficiency. You can check out the guidelines for guest posting on our write for us page.

You can’t escape it.

No matter how passionate you are about your blog, if you’re looking to drive traffic and actually make money from the process, there will be things that feel like “work”.

Probably because it is.

But fear not, because you’re about to discover seven tools which free up your time to do what you love: create more quality content and thus improve overall blogging efficiency.

Ready? Then let’s roll…

Link Assistant

Link Assistant is a God-send. It lets you quickly compile a list of authoritative sites in your market. Then, you can send an email to each website (Link Assistant automatically stores contact info). It even tracks responses, and lets you track your status with each.

Which sites responded? Who is interested in your offer? Who requires followup? Link Assistant lets you know all these detail in its simple interface.

I routinely use Link Assistant for blogger outreach, hiring contractors (developers, designers, writers, etc.) and offering strategic alliances. In other words, I use Link Assistant for everything but link prospecting (which it’s designed for).

Here’s an example: let’s say you’ve created a DYNAMITE eBook for your subscribers. Using Link Assistant, you can contact authoritative websites in your market and let them give it away to their subscribers, too. This helps build your brand, and will drive tons of free traffic to your site.

And speaking of traffic…

Rank Tracker

Sure, Google Analytics will show you what keywords are sending you traffic. But what about keywords which could send you traffic – and lots of it – if your site moved from page 3 to page 1 in Google?

Enter Rank Tracker. Simply enter keywords into the program, and it routinely checks the search engines to see where your site appears. It even graphs your progress over time.

And if you’re not certain about which keywords to enter, go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter your website URL. It then spits out 300 (or more) keywords related to your site. Then download them into Excel and paste them into Rank Tracker. Boom. Instant overview of your site’s performance in the search engines.

The next step is to build links to those pages that already appear high in the search engines, but not quite high enough.

SENuke

SENuke is an incredibly powerful, misunderstood and abused piece of software. Powerful, because it automates many link building tasks; misunderstood and abused because people use it to spam the Internet.

Here’s how it works: you write a piece of content. Then, using SENuke, you can quickly distribute it to dozens of article directories and social network sites like Blogger and Hubpages. It even submits videos to 30+ video sharing sites like YouTube.

But that’s just the beginning. Because once that content is distributed, SENuke lets you bookmark each of those pages, then take the RSS feeds from each bookmark and submit those to over 30 RSS feed directories.

Whew. That’s a lot of links!

Now you can see why people use it to create spam. But here’s the thing: used properly , it’s a very powerful tool. The key is to create valuable content, and use SENuke as a launchpad for getting it noticed.
Used this way, you can quickly build your site’s authority.

My Blog Guest – Unique Blogging Efficiency tool

MyBlogGuest is a brilliant idea for bloggers. Basically, you upload a post, and website owners request exclusive rights to publish it on their site. It’s a win-win: they get free, unique content, and you get links and traffic to your site.

But how do you decide which website to give your content to? For that, you need the…

SEOMoz Toolbar

The SEOMoz Toolbar lets you tell at a glance how authoritative a website is based on a scale of 1 – 100. It’s logarithmic, which means going from 20 to 30 is much easier than going from 70 to 80.

Authority counts for a lot in SEO. Higher authority links will increase your own authority, which in turn increases your rankings for keywords.

Aweber

Aweber is an autoresponder. It lets you capture visitors email address, and send them unlimited follow up messages at pre-determined intervals. For example, you could create a 7 day training course, where subscribers receive one lesson each day for seven days.

There’s another feature called “broadcasting”, which allows you to send an email to everyone on your list, no matter when they signed up. This is usually reserved for product launches or special time-sensitive announcements (e.g. 48 hour discounts, live events, webinars, etc.)

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is my favorite analytics tool. It records people visiting your site, then displays their interaction via heatmaps.

This is essential for optimizing your website’s use experience, sales funnel and other conversion factors.

For example, how many people even see your opt-in form? Crazy Egg shows you where people are focused on your site, which lets you put premium content, ads or buy now buttons right in front of them.

If you use WordPress, this heat map plugin is a cheaper, limited alternative (but still worth it; I own this plugin myself).

So there you have it: seven simple tools to improve blogging efficiency and make your blogging life easier. Now get to work!

This is a guest post by Megan. You can read the guidelines to guest posting at our write for us page.

It seems that getting in touch with people is much harder than it used to be. It used to be that a business could place an ad on TV or radio and business would be booming. But today, advertisement exists as a different world entirely. The world of consumers being nudged by ads during their favorite show has shrunk considerably since the advent of Netflix and iPods.

These venues have replaced traditional TV and radio. It makes sense. With Netflix and iPod there aren’t any interruptions, which eliminates commercial airtime. When a commercial comes on during that defining moment in a person’s favorite TV drama, they get angry. The best thing for businesses to do is to find a more passive venue to interact with their customers.

Social media is huge. If a business doesn’t have a personal Facebook page, it might as well hang itself. So many people log onto Facebook and Twitter every day, and those who do tend to go back multiple times per day. What are they doing? They are checking on things that matter to them. They are updating statuses and tweeting about their experiences.

Experiences are key. Today’s people are experience-oriented individuals. It’s why traditional advertising is met with such contempt. Facebook and Twitter create an experience without pushing it upon people.

It’s actually so passive that it’s almost dismissible. For instance, Facebook has recently added a feature where when an individual mentions a business in their status update, they are able to “like” it. This is the newest way for businesses to track people who like their products or services.

Twitter is the same way. When a person chooses to follow a company’s Twitter page, they are signifying that they like that company. How can businesses market to these individuals? By tweeting and updating their statuses. These updates appear in news feeds for all those who are following them, for Facebook and Twitter alike.

Another way for businesses to interact with their customers is to hold special events. People like going to events, especially young people. When businesses tweet and update and announce their special events, more often than not their customers will come. If the event is extra special, like a sale or maybe a grand opening, they are likely to come with friends. These friends could be potential customers if they aren’t already. And if these potentials have a good experience, they are more likely to join the tribe and follow the business.

Another way for a business to reach more people is to update their education. Online universities offer everything from business degrees to criminal justice degree; they nearly have every degree that a traditional school offers. And they are also becoming more popular amongst the younger generation. So if more businesses were to interact with these institutions, they would have a better chance at reaching them.

Because the world has changed so much since the creation of the personal computer, businesses need to change too. That means using un-traditional methods to reach old and new customers. Innovating with social media, sponsored events and education are three ideas that businesses could and should use. Because when they finally catch up with the youth, the youth will already be on to the next thing—whatever that may be.

Would you like to get a FREE Blog Installation?

No article this time round. Just an announcement. There are lots of similar offers available out there on the internet. But I thought I will offer a little more to my readers and “make an offer you cannot refuse”.

My team is anyways involved in website designing and development. I also have a team that does blog installation on payment. I thought why not use this team and make a special offer for you all.

I am giving away a FREE blog installation to anyone who is interested.

This Blog Installation comes with many features like installation of 10 free plugins and a free theme etc. In addition to this you also get a limited period offer on hosting plans as well.

In case you are really interested, you can check out the details in the offer page. Check it out right now.

If you have any questions, you can write to me using my contact form.

What’s special about this FREE Blog Installation?

In this free installation, I will be installing a blog for you absolutely free – i.e. without any installation charge. In addition to this I will also install 10 free plugins for you. These are assorted plugins that are extremely critical to the success of a blog. This includes search engine optimization plugins, link building plugins, Google webmaster plugins etc. You can read more about these here.

Check out the offer page to find more about this offer and about how you can avail this.

Auto blogs are a very simple way of making easy money online. Till about an year back, auto blogs were seen as spam blogs, which got no respect from Google or, any other search engines because of the reused content. They were seen as if they were the spoilt child of the same parent who has set out to destroy the world of blogging.

Fast forward to today and you find there are thousands of auto blogging software all over the internet, making promises galore. None of these seem to be doing a bad business. WP-Robot, Auto Blog Samurai and BlogHatter are the most prominent of these.

Let me not get into an article writing mode and straightaway get onto the review of this tool.

It is about 15 days that I bought BlogHatter. I have been using Auto Blog Samurai for almost 7-8 months now and the results have been pretty fine.

Let me get onto the results of Auto Blog Samurai first. In the past 8 months I have set up about 71 blogs using Auto Blog Samurai. 47 of these were on Blogger and the rest 24 were on WordPress. The results were as follows -

• $2,119 from Adsense
• $3,447 from sale of 8 blogs
• $231 from Ad sales
• $1,976 from Affiliate revenues

That was incredible for 70 auto blogs. It came out to about $112.00 per blog. The success of Auto Blog Samurai led me to think again on auto blogs and the kind of income it can generate.

This is what led me to take a look at BlogHatter. My first opinion about BlogHatter is that it is superb.

BlogHatter Reviewed

BlogHatter creates both Blogger and WordPress blogs. It searches a few of the best article directories and gets you blogs based on your keywords. It also has the option of uploading PLR articles and auto posting them to the blogs.

The interface is extremely user friendly and even a newbie can easily use it to create auto blogs. Uploading content and posting them to the blogs is an easy task at the interface. You can add tags and assign categories also on the primary interface itself.

BlogHatter has 3 plugins which Donato calls as the black hat plugins. These are a Yahoo tagging plugin, a Youtube plugin and an ezine plugin.

You will need the ezine plugin if you wish to extract content from ezines. The Yahoo tagging plugin can create tags automatically based on your content and the Youtube plugin inserts Youtube videos into your content.

Using the plugins were very easy and so was installing it.

I will be recording a brief video comparing both Auto Blog Samurai and BlogHatter and reviewing the softwares, in some time which should give you a better idea of what I am talking about.

Conclusion:

BlogHatter is a very useful tool, if you are interested in auto blogging. Auto blogging can be a source of passive income and that too on auto-pilot.

I would recommend BlogHatter to anyone who has loads of PLR articles resting there in your Computer’s hard drive. You can create hundreds of blogs out of it and create an income stream.

Both Auto Blog Samurai and BlogHatter are extremely useful and serves the purpose very well. If you are interested in venturing into auto-blogging, which I recommend you should, then go for one of these and you will not regret. Don’t even think of buying WP-Robot, if you are new to the whole concept. You will be lost in their documentation.

You can check out Auto Blog Samurai here. Check out BlogHatter here.

There were thousands of things that were new to the Internet Marketing world in the year 2010. While we saw a sudden surge of traffic generation products based on Facebook marketing, we also saw a decline in products that were based on Twitter. Blame it on the overuse and abuse of Twitter or, the growing popularity of Facebook, whichever way a few Internet marketers made a lot of money and a lot others lost a fortune of money on these products.

In the year 2010 we also saw a new kind of Copycat marketing where there were numerous Internet Marketers who were following a simple tried and tested formula to make a killing out of IM products. Almost all these products were rated extremely high on gravity at Clickbank, which meant that they were successful. Is the method, ethical or, unethical is for you to decide. This was precisely the subject of one of the best blogposts (Me-too Copycat Marketers on Clickbank) of the year listed below.

The year 2010 will disappoint anyone who was waiting for a shortcut to making money online because no such way was discovered. May be the next year would, so I advice you to wait and watch the coming year as it goes.

For others who put in that extra effort to dream big and work towards it, the change would have been obvious. Also there was a lot of excellent products that were launched and people made money out of it.

There were thousands of new blogs that cropped up on the internet, a lot of these were success stories and a lot others faded into oblivion. Having said that I should also say that there were a lot of informative posts that I saw in the year 2010. I had marked a lot of posts but for the sake of keeping it short and informative, I have made a list of the best 15 posts according to me. You might like them -

• Me-Too Copycat Marketers on ClickBank
• 20 Web Design Resources To Help You Build a Great Website
• 8 Principles for Effective Affiliate Marketing on a Blog
• Are You Making These Blogging Mistakes?
• 4 Foundations of a Successful Blog
• 7 Quick-Start Techniques for Fighting the Fear to Write
• Actually, Blogging *is* Dead
• 5 Easy Blog Improvements in under 5 Minutes
• Keyword Research for Blogging
• What After One Year of Blogging
• Why aren’t you hosting your own blog yet?
• 5 Reasons to stop trying to be happy
• Making money from a website – is advertising the only solution?
• Blogging – How to increase traffic?
• Top 5 Goals for a Successful Social Media Campaign

The first thing that attracts any visitor to your blog and keeps him engaged in your website is its design. There is no doubt to the fact that “Content is the King”. But at the same time, in order for your readers to stay at your blog, your blog’s design has to be reader friendly.

What is the definition of “reader friendly”? How can you make it reader friendly? I am sure these are normal questions, if you are new to blogging. Read on as I talk about essential elements in any design. At the same time, I would also recommend that you keep noting down things that you found attractive and user-friendly while you were browsing other websites.

Essentials of a website design

Almost all successful websites have these elements in them. This is one of the main reasons why these websites have so many readers. They are successful in keeping their visitors glued to their sites, thus pushing them to become permanent readers to their blogs.

1. Appropriate Navigation – The biggest flaw that I find in quite a lot of website is inappropriate navigation options. Website do not have a “Home” navigation button and if you want to return to the homepage, you will have to keep clicking on the back button or, if the option exists, click on the LOGO to go back to the home page. The lack of appropriate navigation buttons on a website breaks the flow of a visitor, normally called as visitor journey. So one of the most essential aspects of any website design is to have a proper page navigation in the form of buttons.
2. Faster Page Loading – This needs no explanation. I have browsed through to numerous websites which has a loading problem. These sites have almost everything in place yet the reader experience is destroyed because the pages take too much of time to load. I do not have the patience to wait until the page loads and would normally choose browse away. There are numerous ways to resolve slow page load problems especially if you are on WordPress. One such way is to cache old pages by using a plugin like hypercache.
3. Search Option – Your site should have a search option which is an integral part of any website design. I might not want to browse through the hundreds of pages on your website to find that one thing that I am looking for. I would instead prefer to search for it and move away in case I do not find it. If the search option is unavailable, I might just choose to browse away. It is here that a search option comes in handy. Place it somewhere it is clearly visible.
4. A Contact Form – Your visitors might need to contact you. There could be numerous reasons for it. Feedback, suggestions, ad requests etc. are just a few such reasons. You would not want your visitors to be searching all over your website to find an email address to contact you. The easiest way to facilitate this is by using a contact form on you blog. There are a lot of plugins that can do the job for you in WordPress. Since there are loads of customization features available, you can create any kind of form. What ever you create, just ensure that you have a “contact” tab in your navigation menu which could lead your visitors to the contact form.
5. Bookmarking  buttons – Social media is the order of the day. There are thousands of social media and bookmarking websites which help you get more exposure to your blog or, website. When networking is what is in vogue, why shouldn’t your website have bookmarking buttons. Every visitor coming to your blog will be associated with some or, the other social media service and would want to share what he saw and read on you blog, with his friends. Bookmarking buttons help them do this. Hence it is essential that you have bookmarking buttons prominently showing up in each and every posts in your blog.
6. Link Management – There are a lot of websites out there where you find a link on some useful aspect and when you click on it, you find that it is either broken or, leads to some irrelevant site. It is important to manage your links properly. I recommend installing something like a “Broken Link Checker” which can find broken links and help you fix it. It is also important that you link to correct webpages. While linking is extremely important, ensuring that these are relevant links are also essential.

In addition to the above, there are quite a few other aspects, like categorization of pages, ensuring that there are no obstructing ads, proper color combination for your website etc. that are to be kept in mind while designing your website.

What are your views? Do you think there is anything else that you might have noticed on some website or, blogs that leads to a poor visitor experience? Then, let us know of these by adding your comments below.

If you are surprised as to why your comments are not getting any traffic to your blogs, then the tough truth is that it won’t.

I know you are one of the very frequent visitors to those established blogs from an established blogger. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever read through the comments in the posts that you last read at one of these blogs? Did you click on any of the links to check out what the commentator has on his blog?

Hardly, right?

That is the truth. You do not do that. I even wonder if you have actually spent some time reading the post that you visited. If you didn’t, then you know the reason why your comments are not getting any traffic to your blogs.

The reason for this decline in traffic from comments has to do with the attitude with which a blogger frequents well know blogs. These days, there are very few genuinely interested readers. People come to a blog only with a view to get a backlink or, to post a comment, in the hope that they will get some traffic from it.

No Traffic from Comments -

If you have ever taken the time out to read a few comments in one of those posts at problogger or, entrepreneurs journey, you will see a lot of comments saying, “Nice post, I enjoyed it”, “Good thought, You made my day”, “Well written, what a post?” etc. Are these comments relevant and adding to the post-value? I do not have a reason to think so.

Commenting on blogs is about adding value to the already valuable post. Most of the blogs these days are “No-Follow”. Hence expecting a backlink with comments like the above ones is utter foolishness and if you are one such blogger, then I would suggest that it is time you quit. But if your expectation is that you will get some traffic with a comment like the one above, then I will have no words to describe you.

What is the essence of commenting? When a reader reads through a blog post he will be looking for additional information on the topic or, some experts comments which could further build on the post. This is where comments come into play. It also helps the blogger to know what is good and what is not about the post he had written and also if he needs to improve on his writing. At times these comments also serve as a topic for a new post for the author of the blog. For a reader the comments provide additional value and it is then that he would be interested in knowing the details of the commentator. He would click through the link on the comment and visit the author’s page. Will a comment like the above do this?

Comment count explosion –

These days the number of comments in a really good post is countless. There are numerous people commenting on blogs in an attempt to get a backlink or, a trickle of traffic (which does not happen) and most of these comments lack value and relevance. I as a reader to a blog would have wanted to read through the valuable comments to gather further information, but this comment count explosion restricts me. I would not want to spend time scanning through the numerous comments in an attempt to find a valuable comment. It is here that commenting has lost its charm.

Commenting, no more gets any traffic because nobody is interested in reading a comment or, clicking on one the links of a commentator to visit his site in an attempt to know more about him.

Spam Comments –

The internet has gained its notoriety, thanks to its users – not the genuine ones, but the ones with a destructive mind. Such people are there everywhere. You will find them in the commentators as well. There are numerous spammers out there who spam your comment box with comments that are irrelevant, useless and are stuffed with links. The expectation is to get a few backlinks. There are numerous tools today to stop these spammers, but one drastic step that bloggers took to stop them was to put a “no-follow” on their comments. This means you have lost valuable backlinks that you could have got.

In spite of the fact that the tools stop spammers, there are quite a few spam comments that get approved in many of the blogs and the more valuable comments gets lost in these spam comments.

Commenting is no more a way of getting traffic to your website. At least that is what I feel. What is your opinion? Don’t forget to let me know about it.

So you are one of them who has just decided that you want to start a blog to make money online, then let us start by answering the obvious question.

Types of Blogging platforms -

There are numerous blogging platforms out there and a few of them are Typepad, Mashable, Blogger, and WordPress. The first 2 platforms only let you host a blog at their hosting but the other two have multiple options.

Wordpress

WordPress gives you 2 options. You can either use the WordPress hosted option or, a Self-hosted option. At the WordPress hosted option or, for that matter all blogs that are hosted at their own hosting servers, your blog name would be something similar to http://yourblogname.wordpress.com or, http://yourblogname.typepad.com etc. You can read more about this option or, start a blog at http://www.wordpress.com.

At the self hosted option that WordPress offers, you will have to buy a hosting account, and a domain name. You should also know a bit about hosting servers and ftp publishing, though these days all hosting plans come with control panels that give you an easy option to install WordPress.

Blogger

At Blogger, you can host the blog at their servers and yet have a domain name of your own. So that means that you would not have to live with the blog name like the one that we discussed above. You can choose to have a blog like http://www.yourblogname.com. They also give you an option of hosting your blog on your own server. The best thing about this is the fact that you don’t need to fiddle with your hosting server a lot in case you go for this option, because Blogger provides an easy ftp publishing option.

There are 2 situations that we would assume which would be the prime considerations in deciding where to start -

1. You want to start making some money soon.
2. You want to make money only after some time – about 2-3 months down the line

You want to start making some money soon -

This is how I am and I can go to any extent to learn and research in order to do that. So if you are one of them, then we assume the following -

• You have a bit of knowledge about html and websites – If this is so, then you should start off by using self-hosted WordPress. This is because WordPress has a lot of enhancements available through the numerous plug-ins and you can give your blog a personal touch and feel. Also advertising on your blogs would be in your absolute control and after some time when you become a successful blogger you don’t have to change servers and domains. (This is the worst thing to do ever). You can download the WordPress installation files here at http://www.wordpress.org.
• You have no knowledge of html and websites – In this case the best place to start is “Blogger”. You don’t have to worry about html and hosting servers. They allow advertisement even on their hosted blog and advertising is very easy at Blogger if you know how to drag and drop and copy and paste. Later when you are successful at blogging you don’t need to shift the entire server also. You can run the same blog from your own server with you own domain name. Check out Blogger at http://www.blogger.com

You want to make money only after some time -

If you want to start a blog to get the feel of it and have set a target of making money only after some time, once you get acquainted with it, then the best option for you is WordPress hosted blogs. It is easy to start, configure and run and you can take your own time to get used to all the features of WordPress. Later on when you are ready for your money making blog, you can choose any of the other options.

But why would you not want to make some money while you get acquainted with “Blogging”. My advice would hence be to start off with a Self-hosted WordPress blog right away.

I should tell you that WordPress is amazing. I started on WordPress about 2 years ago and today am running almost 11 blogs successfully.

In case you want help in installing a blog for you on any of the above platforms, my friend can do that for you while you sit and relax. The charges are nominal -

You get a free “Complete manage your blog” guide with all of these.

Blogger hosted blogs – $20.00
Wordpress hosted blogs – $30.00
Self-hosted WordPress blog – $50.00 (You get your hosting space for life, a domain name of your choice paid for the first year and the blog management guide)
Other blogs – $35.00 (No guide available)

Just comment on this blog in case you would like to opt for one and we will get in touch with you at your email address.