The most common Internet marketing mistake new bloggers make is trying to copy other successful bloggers and work on single aspect of marketing of those successful bloggers. There is no harm in copying the formula of success from successful bloggers but looking at only one aspect of it may not give you the right picture.

People try to reverse engineer the links and keywords of the successful blogger in the niche using Google and then try to get rank for those keywords using those links. Soon they realize that those links are not very easy to get and those keywords are not the kind of keywords they can rank for and conclude that blogging is not right for them. I have seen this happen time and again for so many bloggers especially Indian bloggers.

I have seen many people try to copy Problogger or CopyBlogger or any other such great bloggers and fail miserably because they try to reverse engineer those blogs based on Google only. They try to find number of back links or the keywords that drive traffic for those blogs or may be article count those blogs have and tend to forget the most important thing which is the amount of time those bloggers have spent building relationships and helping others.

Next time you think about becoming like an authority blogger in your niche, try to focus on all aspects of marketing and not only Google. Focus on building relationship with your readers and help them.

More Related Posts:

1. Biggest Mistake Freelancer’s Make and How to Avoid it?
2. 5 Most Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
3. MLM – An Unethical Way of Marketing. How to Avoid it?

New Bloggers aren’t sure if they can blog. So it is important to have a step by step guide that can make new bloggers understand blogging and let them decide if blogging is the right choice for them or not. So I will share the basic of blogging and detailed step by step guide to getting started blogging with WordPress.

The Mindset of New Bloggers

Getting started to blogging by getting a domain and hosting does not work especially with new Indian webmasters when they are not sure if they can blog or not. So it is important to get your feet wet with blogging. When you are trying to blog you are actually not trying to be a blogger but you want to see if blogging can work for you or not and test the blogging model yourself.

If you are into the same mindset read below or else you can directly jump to the next level.

Getting Started with WordPress.com

Self-hosted WordPress blog is the way forward for money making blogs but we need a domain name and hosting for self hosted blog. I recommend Bluehost but if you are not comfortable getting yourself a domain and hosting, you can get started with WordPress.com blog that will be on WordPress.com subdomain like http://shabbirbhimani.wordpress.com/

WordPress.com blogs are difficult to monetize (can see why here) but the idea is to get the feeling of WordPress and blogging before you move to self hosted WordPress blog. Your risk is only the time you invested learning WordPress and nothing financially which I think should be very much an option for anybody who is trying to be a blogger or webmaster.

Your effort of WordPress.com blog will not be wasted at all and it will help you build links to your self hosted WordPress blog that you get in the future.

This article has lot of steps and so I will recommend you book mark this page for coming back to the article.

As you have bookmarked this page I would suggest go and get your WordPress.com blog NOW.

Finding the Right Niche for your Blog

Let us now find the right niche for your blog. Finding Niche is very tough task but finding niche of your first blog is simple and let me help you get that done.

Take paper and pen and write down all your hobbies. At least make a list of 3-5 hobbies and don’t worry it can be anything like cricket, bikes, gyms, reading books or even playing games.

Sort the hobbies in decreasing order of your liking.

The niche of your blog is the one right at the top of your list. Find 10 topics that you would search in Google for finding information about the niche. Those ten topics will become your first ten posts in WordPress later.

Why don’t you promote your blog in my comments before proceeding further? Share your blog and niche with me in comments below.

Blog Themes

You have your WordPress blog and have selected the right niche for your blog and its time to find Good theme for your Blog that suits your niche.

If you have started with WordPress.com blog you have the option to choose the themes in your WordPress admin interface. Select the theme that is best suitable to your niche. If you have a self hosted WordPress blog you can either opt for thesis (I use thesis on IMTips because it is the best WordPress theme) or you can choose from thousands of free WordPress themes.

Once you have your blog, the right niche and the needed design, its time for the first few articles to go live on your blog.

The First Few Posts

Time to go blogging. While choosing the niche for the blog I suggested you to have ten topics and so the first step is to get those articles online.

Once you have your first set of topics as posts in your blog you can have hard time finding new topics (and every blogger can have that issue) and so I will share with you one very important tip about finding topics for blogging. Make blogging part of your day and soon you will notice things from a blogging perspective. You will find lot of things that would tell yourself, “Hey, I can write about this.”

You are passionate about the topic and it is your hobby as well and so it should not be very difficult for you to read and learn more about it.

You can also visit related forums and read queries from members to find topics for your blogs. Apart from that you can also read other authority blogs to learn more about the topic as well as read comments on the authority blog and see what questions people have and answer them on your blog.

Things to Avoid As New Blogger

Don’t focus on traffic stats – Don’t focus on traffic stats and even if you do, don’t feel depressed if no one visits your site for the first few months. It will take some time for your blog to get noticed and readership and so you should focus on getting good quality articles before trying to get people to read them. If people land on blog with only handful of posts, they may not consider you seriously.

Avoid Social Media Marketing – Social network sites are good but they do eat up lot of your valuable time that you can dedicate to writing posts.

Avoid too many options in the sidebar – New bloggers tend to add lot of distractions like twitter and Facebook streams. These things never work and make your blog slower. Apart from that it gives lot of options to your users to click away from your blog.

Why Blog?

The most important question is why you should blog? It is not always the money that drives people to blogging and there is much more than just money which is

• Create great relationships with people you may never meet.
• Learn lot of technical stuff – I was not taught PHP or WordPress in my Bachelor’s degree but now I can say I know them because of blogging.
• Learn lot of non-technical stuff – I am not a marketing guy and yet I do lot of experiment with online marketing for my websites. The credit of learning of internet marketing goes to blogging.

What to Expect from your New Blog?

Many people expect immediate results from blogging and are deeply disappointed when things don’t go their way. I prefer building a blog before expecting anything from it.

Do you think you can blog? Do you understand WordPress better now? What all queries you have that you want me to answer? Share in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Power of Blogging. Are you Blogging Yet?
2. Which is Better – Blogger or WordPress?
3. Blogspot Vs WordPress

Reviews are the core of blogging and any successful blog would write about things they have liked and disliked in the niche. So you should expect reviews on almost every blog. As a blogger, if you are writing review for some product you not only want your existing readers to read them but you also want new readers to come to your site when they are looking for reviews of the product you have already written.

At times it has happened that I read a review and when I purchased the product I shared my views of the same product and managed to outrank those reviews that are online for few years. So I will share with you some key things you should focus on when writing a review and not write a review just for the sake of writing one.

So let us begin…

1. Reviews From A View Point

The difference between a “Review” and a “Great Review” is when you write the review for users who have not used the product you are reviewing and give them the feeling of what to expect when they get the product. This means you need to get detailed picture about the product features and try to explain each feature in detail and how to use those features in a better way.

My vBSEO Review where I showed how vBSEO could improve site traffic with facts and figures or TribalFusion review where I showed how I tripled my eCPM for.

Coming back to the original point of making review detailed would mean reviews becomes longer and don’t hesitate to split the reviews in multiple articles. My reviews are pretty long explaining insider information about the product.

iPage Review, Aweber Review Or PowerYourTrade Review on Technical Analysis blog where I had to cut on the images just to make sure it just does not become too long.

2. Unbiased Reviews

Always try to review with only one thing in mind that is facts and not make your views biased. Everything positive about a product would mean there is something fishy about your review. Either the writer has been paid for the review or is some way or the other related to the product.

For positive facts about the product, show samples and screenshots of you using (or used) the product to make sure you let your readers know that you are reviewing product only for your readers and not for making quick buck out of it.

vBulletin has been my first choice for all my online forums and I shared the same in my comparison of phpBB and vBulletin but I was brutally honest to share why you should not be buying vBulletin 4 as well.

3. No Copy Paste

When someone is searching for review chances are high that they have been reading reviews from lot of other blogs as well and so if you copy content from them, users will soon detect and realize that your review is not a real one and would not be interesting in reading it. Apart from that copied content is punished very badly in Google.

If you had to copy something from somewhere you should only copy the snippet and make it as quote and link to the original article and this happens when you want to share what others are saying about the same product or you take some content from the original author of the product you are reviewing and things like those.

4. Search Forums For Questions About The Product

If you take few minutes to search forums about the product, you will find what users are asking about the product and you can answer those questions in your review as well. It has an added benefit that other people would link to your reviews as and when people post more question about the product in the forum. Make sure you understand that other people will link to your review and not you who do that because if you do, it may be termed as spamming.

When I wrote AWeber review I saw people are looking for Slideup form for subscription and so I created the WordPress plugin for AWeber Footer Slideup. Similar I saw people have lot of questions on Payoneer India Operation Issues when I reviewed Payoneer from an Indian perspective and answered those questions and it was the most linked post at that time from various forums including DigitalPoint Forum.

5. Negative Reviews

You paid for a completely crap product, you can share the review with proof and they can become the talking point in the community and forums because negative review about a product does guarantee that you are being brutally honest about the product and so people tend to link to such reviews quite often.

• Sharekhan PMS Service Review
• iPage Review
• ibibo ads Review
• And many many other …

Many bloggers like to share more negative reviews about bad product than positive reviews about good products to make sure those review drive links and traffic to their blogs. In SEO terms it is known as link baiting.

Negative reviews like Sharekhan PMS Review and others worked really well for my Technical Analysis Blog but positive reviews work more on IMTips. vWorker Review is linked from Official Wiki page of vWorker or BuySellAds review is linked from the official BuySellAds blog but that does not mean that negative reviews just did not work on IMTips. I have seen lot of my issues get solved once I blog about the issues like my Ozone Media Review where I got phone calls from Ozone Media team to solve my issues after the review.

6. The End of Review : Summary

Summary of review is very very important because reviews tend to become longer (like this one with lots) and many readers tend to skip many sections after just reading the headlines or looking at images and so if you can summarize your review in few lines, it help those readers immensely.

Positive or negative, write a review from the point of view of the customers who is looking to get more information about the product. Do you share product reviews on your blog? Share your reviews in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Have your own product
2. What to Write in Blog’s About Page
3. HEMA’s Very Creative Product Display Page?

Every blogger wants to be read but have you ever wondered what can make you a better blogger. I am talking about being a better blogger and not about having a better blog. For a better blog you always need to write valuable content with clean layout etc etc but there is one of the most overlooked elements about blogs that is the blogger itself.

So let me share with you few tips about how to become a better blogger?

1. Read your own blog

Just because you have blogged about it does not mean you can forget about it. I refer few of my blog posts quite often. Posts like WordPress SEO Tips or Link Building Strategies or vBulletin Optimization and the list continues…

2. Always reply to blog comments

One of the reason people comment on your posts is because they want to interact with you, the blogger. If you do not reply, they feel ignored, and will not comment again. I always reply to each comment including thanks that readers leave on my blog.

3. Read and comment on your readers’ blogs

I visit my readers’ blog and try to comment where I can make sense. Yet another way to encourage your reader’s to keep coming back to your blog.

I recent incident which I remember is where Deepak of BikeAdvice.in left a comment here and this led me to discover his blog. I say discover because I would never have landed on his blog because it is about bikes’ and I am not bike enthusiast to an extent that I search in Google about it.

I left a comment on the post where he shared how the blog Breaks Previous Traffic Records and now we both are connected to each other in more than one social networks and are interacting on many other front apart from blogging.

Remember it is not about dropping your link in comments in other people’s blog but it is more about interacting with your readers and other fellow blogger. I could have easily commented using blog comment form on the page that would allow me to leave my link on that blog but I preferred Facebook comment.

4. Repost excerpts from other blogs

When you read other blogger’s good blog post you can re-post an excerpt of it or your own views about the same on your own blog, providing a link back to the author’s blog. Occasionally, they will even make a post on their own blog and refer to your content.

I shared my views to one of the article of Manshu here and Manshu did the same on his blog here.

Remember don’t post an entire article because that is illegal but posting a brief excerpt and linking back to the original is the right way.

Final thoughts

It is just not enough to write a great blog post but you also need to be a good reader to other great blogs and interact with other bloggers.

How do you make yourself a better blogger – Share your views in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Which is Better – Blogger or WordPress?
2. Getting out of Recession for Blogger
3. Online Entrepreneur or Spare Time Blogger?

Thesis, Genesis or WooThemes, all are premium WordPress themes. I use Thesis theme for my blog but the most popular option for new bloggers is to use free WordPress themes. Actually there are thousands of free WordPress themes available and this can make newbie bloggers think they don’t need a premium WordPress theme at all.

According to me, you can use the free WordPress themes for personal leisure blogs. All other type of blogs definitely need a premium WordPress theme unless you can do all of the following yourself.

1. Customization

Most free WordPress themes, do not allow very high level of customization without editing the theme PHP files. If you are looking for high level of flexibility with widgets, columns – Premium themes is the right choice. Almost all premium themes provide lots of customization to suite your personal needs.

Thesis theme offers hundreds of Design and Site Options to choose from including how many columns you want in your blog, what font you prefer, how you want the Navigation at the top, What is the preferred width for your sidebars, how you want to display posts on the homepage … etc … etc …

2. Search Engine Optimization

Free WordPress themes are done with SEO in mind but the prime objective of those themes is not SEO. In some free themes, the HTML coding may not be completely SEO-friendly which means you are taking a huge risk at the cost of a premium theme.

Check out my article on How to Make WordPress More SEO Friendly.

3. Professionalism

Many free themes don’t allow you to edit (not remove) footer link or text. Normally this is done by encrypting the content of footer.php in the themes file and if you edit the file, themes becomes unusable. Because free themes fear the removal of the developer links from footer, they don’t allow editing footer part of the theme which can make your entire blog design look unprofessional.

My Thesis license does not compel me to have a link to Thesis in footer yet I have copyright notice because I could edit the link as per my needs aka IMTips.co Runs on Thesis WordPress Theme.

Do you use a premium WordPress theme or prefer the free one? What is the best thing you like about your theme? Share your views in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Which is The Best WordPress Theme for SEO?
2. Which is Better – Blogger or WordPress?
3. Thesis Theme Affiliates Move to ShareASale

I have seen lot of blog fail in front of me and as I talk to the blogger’s I find some of the most common mistakes these bloggers make that leads to nothing but failure. I prefer to phrase it as blog fail and not Blogger fail because it is not the blogger who has failed but it is actually the blog that failed to meet blogger’s expectation.

So let us see what the common mistakes by new bloggers are.

Blogging for Money

No matter what business you start, you should focus on building the business first and then worry about the finances of the company and blogging is no different. If you read books on blogging, you can accumulate lot of knowledge about blogging but that does not mean you have became an expert. You have the bookish knowledge but then applying the same to your blog practically in your niche can take some time to learn. Try to gain the experience and knowledge before thinking about making money out of it.

My Technical Analysis Blog never started it with the intention of making money but to help retail investor understand the market in India. I myself evolved as trader, investor as well as blogger and so did my blog and today I have my eBook that is selling very well in India.

Dead Blogs or Copy Paste Blogs or Automated Blogs

In many discussions on various forums I see people feel proud on the number of blogs they own. I read such threads and I don’t feel like sharing the number of blogs I own i.e. two of them because some members own few hundred blogs.

Having more blogs is not bad provided you can create content for each of those blogs on a regular basis but if you have too many blogs few of them are bound to become dead over time. To make it alive you may either need to copy paste content from other blogs or make it an automated blog i.e. a blog which fetches content from other related blogs and forums, spins the content using some software to make look unique for search engines.

Instead of trying to make such blogs it is better to have one or two blogs where you can actually BLOG.

Worry too much about SEO

There are very few people who start their first blog and know about Real SEO. Majority of the people I have met have read about SEO in forums and think they are expert in SEO and can do wonders with WordPress and start blogging. They don’t focus on blog but their focus is SEO.

Let me just give you a very simple example of how forum information in SEO can be misleading.

jhon786 asked my opinion on one of his query on blog commenting Commenting on blog is beneficial or not?

In forums anybody can share his views and opinions about any question and that helps knowing different views and opinion. Things that work and things that don’t but that can lead to lot of information that may not always be very correct and so you have to grasp that information like views and not as information.

As an example the first reply to the thread says that blog commenting is very useful and can lead to lot of traffic. If some one searching in Google lands on that thread, reads the question and if this is the only answer to the thread or if there are few such answer to the thread he may start thinking blog commenting can do wonders which can lead him to think about blog commenting as part of SEO. The reality is I am yet to see any site that can rank higher in Google only based on blog comments.

When starting you should focus on blogging and over time get your SEO and marketing plans executed.

Not Investing Money

What would you prefer if you plan to be a cricketer?

1. Build a cricket bat yourself from raw wood.
2. Purchase a good quality bat from a shop.

I am sure nobody will be opting for the first choice. Now what would you prefer if you plan to be a blogger.

1. Build the complete blog yourself from scratch.
2. Get it done by a professional. (I am offering blog setup for free)

Many will agree that everyone will not opt for the second option and that says it all.

Not focusing on right Stats

Alexa ranking or Google Toolbar PageRank are some of the stats many new blogger’s tend to focus more on and these are the stats you should never focus on. Apart from those stats you should not even focus on your Google Analytics stats when starting out. Does it matter if you get 1100 or 1500 visits to your blog in last 30 days? Isn’t that just a number to satisfy you?

For blogger the most important part is content t start with and once you have good solid content on your blog you can work on links to your content. So you should focus on only one number which is how many good quality articles you have on your blog and how you can increase such good quality article count.

Final Thoughts

I am not saying that these methods are wrong but what I mean is these methods are not good if you are just starting out as blogger because I have seen these mistakes enough times to judge that they are the most common reasons on why new blog fails.

What are your reasons on why do most new blog fails?

Image Credit: Hans Gerwitz

More Related Posts:

1. How to Make Money From New Blogs

You may have heard this – Starting a business is risky quite often but the important question is do you believe in it?

I don’t give a damn to statements like

Starting an online business is risky. Trading in Market is risky.

But can you find a situation in life without risk? Even crossing the street is super risky.

Job Risks

Let me tell you a story I read couple of years back in some magazine and so I will not be able to quote any reference. The story is related to the economical crisis in 2008 where many people have committed suicide.

It was about a couple who both were working in a leading software company in US (or probably UK) and they committed suicide. Both husband and wife were drawing more than 100k monthly salary jointly six months before they committed suicide. In few months’ 100k monthly income put them in so much financial crisis that they opted to commit suicide.

Getting on the lighter note I also remember a joke from India.

An Indian visits a girl’s place for marriage proposal. Typical Indian arrange marriage scenario. Girl’s father inquired about the profession of the guy. He was an owner of a software company. The marriage proposal was rejected by parents because the guy was not doing a job.

Few days later the girl is married to some other guy. This second guy is actually doing a job in the same company as the first person who was rejected because he was not doing a job.

Misconception about Jobs

The misconception is if you are doing a business you are taking risk but if you are doing a job you are more secured but the reality in the misconception is if you are not making the decision you assume it to be always right. As an employee

• You are betting on somebody else’s decision each time, every time and assume he will make the right decision.
• You have all your eggs in one basket. What if your boss fires you on any given day? It is quite unlikely that you can loose all of the clients at once.

What if my greatest money maker is gone? I will still be making 66% of what I am making today. See here if you want to know why I will still make 66%.

Yes Jobs are less risky if you can get a Government job in India where you waste your time doing nothing for others and still get paid for.

All these is not to influence you to quit job but the idea is make a move by preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.

You don’t need to quit your job today because you want to be a business person but what you should be doing is probably what I did and the way I did.

Challenges Change Over Time

I started online in 2004 but I took lot of time to learn things because information was not that readily available at that time. I had to learn the hard way of experimenting things and understand what works and what not. I have tried things like ad typing jobs and data entry jobs to see if they worked. As of today we have lot more information readily available to understand what works and what not. Yes there are different challenges these days i.e. overload of information and that is the biggest challenge these days.

Time when I started there was very little trust worthy information available related to creating blogs/forums. Even Darren Rowse aka Problogger.net was very new to blogging but today you can find few great eBooks on Blogging only from Darren Rowse and he is one among the many few geniuses who can teach you about how to make a living online blogging.

Understanding Blogging Risks as of Today

Let us understand with an example how risky an online blogging business actually is?

Let us say you are passionate about Gadgets and you can write high quality articles on gadgets. So let us calculate the risk for your passion assuming you are doing a job and so you can only dedicate 10 hours per week only to your passion i.e. blog.

So you will need domain and a host. I recommend BlueHost to start with which costs $60 per year.

AWeber is $19 per month but you can opt for GetResponse which is only $9.95 per month.

ScribeSEO is $17 per month

You want the best theme for your blog and Thesis (the one that I use) costs $87 one time fee.

So, for next couple of years, your outflow would be (assuming you pay yearly to reduce cost) -

• Domain and Hosting with BlueHost – 95 USD
• GetResponse $98USD per year - 196 USD
• ScribeSEO $46 every quarter - 368 USD
• Thesis Theme for WordPress $87 – 87 USD one time
• You can get your blog installed for free.

So financially in the next 2 years you can only loose $750.

Yes if you have been dedicated to your work for 10 hours per week you may even loose the hard work you put in for 2 years. I am saying you loose 10 hours of hard work but actually you are not loosing 10 hours of work but gaining 10 hours of work experience per week. I know many college students in India are more than happy to pay 35,000 INR for industry exposure and experience of 2 years but no one would prefer setting up a business with the same money.

Strange isn’t it?

You ask anybody here in India – join XYZ course which will teach you blah blah blah and pay $750 and they will think about it but you tell them to setup an online business for the same amount and the answer would be NO I don’t have time for it. I know many people personally who have preferred coaching classes over a blog.

Now coming back to the blog we setup with an investment of $750.

You are working 10 hours per week. It means you can easily write 3-4 articles per week but let us only assume 2 articles per week because when starting out you may not be as good as getting the articles out as when you become experience.

If you start with 2 articles per week you can easily add 10-25 readers on an average per day to your blog and this means 10,000 blog readers in 2 years of your blogging experimentation. Now this blog can actually generate lot of money because you have added value to your readers for 2 long years and in the process learnt the art of blogging the practical way. The amount of money you will make depends on the niche but for our example of Gadgets it will be lot higher than many other niches.

So now coming back to the original question from where we started - Is starting a business is risky? But now you know how to answer this weird question and may be you don’t believe in the question any more.

So let me ask you a new question. Can you now afford this risk to experiment a business online?

My answer would be – If you cannot afford to take this risk you don’t deserve to be doing business online.

Share your thoughts in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. How to Earn From Blogging In India?
2. Power of Blogging. Are you Blogging Yet?
3. The 5 Best Ever Business Models for Blogging

Very detail comparison to understand which is better – Blogger or WordPress.

WordPress Blog as wordpress.com sub-domain

Your blog URL will be on sub-domain of WordPress.com aka shabbirbhimani.wordpress.com and you can get such blog for free at WordPress.com

Advantages

1. Free.
2. The most powerful blogging engine aka WordPress.

Disadvantages

Making money from a wordpress.com blog can be tough because

1. WordPress.com blog don’t allow you to execute any external JavaScript’s in Sidebar or in post content. This means you will not be allowed to put any ad network like Adsense on the blog. Yes you can use direct banners from affiliate advertising for monetizing the blog.
2. WordPress.com blog don’t allow you to add other plugins of your choice and you can use only those that they offer in the admin interface.
3. WordPress.com blog neither allow editing of themes nor allow you to use a custom theme of your choice. I prefer and use Thesis theme and you cannot use such premium themes for your wordpress.com blogs.

Blogger Blog on blogspot.com sub-domain

Your blog URL will be on sub-domain of blogspot.com aka shabbirbhimani.blogspot.com and you can get such blog for free at blogger.com

Having Blogspot blog overcomes one disadvantage of Adsense or external JavaScript we had for wordpress.com Blog but then it adds few other disadvantages. Many Ad networks require that you own the top level domain and not a sub domain. So a Blogspot blog will be eligible for Adsense but you may have tough time to get approved by other premium ad networks especially CPM Ad networks.

Blogger blog on self hosted domain

Having a Blogspot blog on your a self hosted domain is also possible but I have not tried that myself. You can see the instruction on how to move blogger blog to your own domain here. But blogger blog on a self hosted domain has quite a few disadvantages

1. There are no good plugins available for blogger blog even if you host your blog on your own server.
2. There are very few premium themes available for you to use. I am yet to see a theme even close to what Thesis for WordPress.
3. Comments are mainly handled by blogger and you have very little control over them.
4. No control over the permalinks. I don’t prefer the date in the url for my posts and you cannot have a blogger blog without year and month in the url.
5. Blogger can only be used as blog. This means you cannot use it as a complete content management system like WordPress.

WordPress Blog on self hosted domain aka imtips.co

WordPress is undoubtedly the best blogging platforms available and is very easy to use from multiple view point like SEO, plugins, themes… Apart from that it has all the needed stuff to make your site look professional website and not just blog (if you want it that way).

The question which is better Blogger or WordPress is answered and it is all WordPress show. So now check out my step by step guide to getting started blogging with WordPress

Update Nov 29 2011: Now you can make money from your WordPress.com blog. See http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/

More Related Posts:

1. Blogspot Vs WordPress
2. Create your own URL Shorten-er for WordPress
3. 5 Most Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

Offering blog reader’s Free WordPress Installation Service. Yes you heard it right totally free WordPress installation service.

What to expect in free WordPress Installation Service?

1. Install theme of your choice. I highly recommend Thesis for WordPress! This is what I use for my blog.
2. Blog is Search Engine Optimized with the right permalinks and plugins to get the most traffic from search engines with as little effort as possible.
3. Install and configure essential plug-ins like Facebook and Twitter share buttons, Google Analytics, SEO plugins and other cool plugins to make your blog more interactive.
4. Create an opt-in form through AWeber or GetResponse. I use AWeber for my blogs.
5. Setup custom email addresses (@yourdomain.com) so your blog looks more professional.
6. Setup contact form so your visitors can email you with questions or comments.
7. Personal consult for an hour - (Worth $20) After blog is finished I will make sure everything is in place and explain you how to use your blog along with ideas and blogging tips to help you succeed.

What’s The Catch?

You may be wondering what the catch is but actually there is no catch. Your blog installation service is being sponsored by BlueHost. They are paying me to get all these done for you. If you were to pay someone to install WordPress blog along with the plugins, it would cost you at least $100 and BlueHost is paying me for referring you to their hosting.

If you are not a regular reader of my blog you have the question that is BlueHost the right host for my blog? Let me clarify that I am using BlueHost for all my shared hosting needs for years. Apart from that it is one of the top recommended hosts on WordPress.org as well.

Update: BlueHost is offering a free domain for rest of your life if you place your hosting order using my affiliate link.

How to get the Free WordPress installation service?

To get the free WordPress installation service, all you have to do is order a web hosting plan from BlueHost using the link http://imtips.co/go/bluehost and forward me your BlueHost login information to shabbir [at] shabbir.in or shabbir [at] imtips.co and I’ll install WordPress blog for you. Afterwards, I’ll email you back the login information for your new WordPress blog and this is when you can change your BlueHost login information that you have given me. Once you are done with your login details changes you can start blogging!

What are you waiting for? Start your WordPress Blog on a self hosted domain NOW.

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I analyzed top individual bloggers (the one that I follow) and came up with list of best business models they use for their own blogs. Note that I am not talking about blogs promoting affiliate products or making money with advertising networks but those bloggers who have created product(s) to compliment blogging as a business.

1. Educational Course, Book or eBook

Paid course or and eBook is one of the most used business model for blogging and is implemented by various successful bloggers. Blog mastermind course by Yaro Starak or eBooks’ by ProBlogger to just name the few.

2. Jobs Board or Marketplace

Premium job listing is used by many bloggers like ProBlogger, FreelanceSwitch, Shoemoney and Go4Expert to enhance community experience among developers as well as allow employers to hire developers at a very affordable pricing. Job board is usually monetized in one of the two ways – Either Advertiser pays a fee to post their job listing, or job seekers pay a small subscription fee to have access to jobs.

Remember if you are trying to have a job board or marketplace, you will need users to post those jobs. So this business model may need to wait until your traffic level is decent.

3. Premium content

Many sites charge a fee for becoming a premium member of the site and gain access to premium features. Type of premium content varies from site to site. As an example Tutsplus offers premium articles for premium members and experts-exchange offers answer to the question for a membership fee. Forums like WebmasterWorld or ProBlogger Forum allow you to interact with other like minded people.

4. Services

I am very fond of providing freelancing services as an added method to cash in some decent money in my pocket along with blogging. If you have a new blog there are very few money making opportunities directly from your blog but you can make a lot of money from new blog providing services. People blog about things they love or are expert at and if you can use your blog to show your expertise, you can grab lot more freelancing job using your blog.

Let me tell you how I use my blog to get lot more freelancing work. I provide vBulletin and WordPress services. Depending on the client requirements I show them the best articles from my blog to show my expertise and this converts really well at a price I am comfortable doing things.

Apart from me there are many other bloggers who provide different type of services on their blogs like Yaro for personal coaching.

5. Premium products

Last but by no means the least – is to have product that solves your readers’ problem. Products like Thesis by Chris Pearson of peasonified.com or ScribeSeo by Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com are some must have products for any blogger.

What is the business model for your blog? Have I missed anything? Share your views in comments below.

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